Literacy Blogs
What is the Biggest Educational Change Promoted by Common Core?
What is the biggest educational change promoted by the Common Core? There are so many choices: kids will be reading more challenging texts; close reading will revolutionize the reading lessons; high school English, science, and social studies teachers will teach disciplinary literacy; there will be greater attention to argument, multiple text, informational text, and writing from sources, and so on? So which is the biggest change? Perhaps one that you haven’t even thought of… Past standards were long lists of skills, knowledge, and strategies; lists so endless that they were less standards than curriculum guides. Until CCSS, the typical standards looked like a ...
Who's Right on Text Complexity?
Teacher question: It seems that there is a lot of conflicting information coming out about accuracy and complex text. In the April edition of The Reading Teacher, Richard Allington wrote an article pertaining to struggling readers. In this article he says that there are studies showing the benefits to teaching children using text where their accuracy is high. Our district just raised the running record accuracy rate expectation to 95-98% accuracy based on the current research. Yet, your blog postings pull in the opposite direction. How do teachers know what is right and what is wrong? After all, teachers want to ...
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Which Second-Graders Are Going to Make a Lot of Money?
Since James Coleman’s landmark report about inequality in the 1960s, it has been common knowledge in education that there is a close relationship between parents’ socioeconomic status (SES) and and their children’s school achievement. The statistics have consistently shown the injustice of a system in which the children from the least advantaged economic circumstances attain the lowest levels of literacy. Let’s turn the world on its head. Recently, I came across a fascinating new investigation of the relationship between reading achievement and SES conducted by Stuart Ritchie and Timothy Bates and reported earlier this year in Psychological Sciences. They aren’t educators and they weren’t ...
How Much Time Should We Spend on Comprehension and Phonics?
Blast from the Past: This timely piece is about time and how to spend it during language arts instruction. Many teachers spend too little time on some components of literacy--because they get wrapped up in doing particular activities rather than teaching particular things. The most effective classrooms have clear goals and they make sure the kids know what those are. If you really want kids to be fluent, having them read only a page or practicing with something that they can already read fluently won't help you to that goal. Likewise, a phonics lesson in which kids spend two minutes ...
Is There a Place for Commercial Reading Programs in Common Core?
My district has decided not to purchase a core reading program since we are now teaching Common Core. Does CCSS really prohibit the use of commercial instructional materials? No, CCSS neither requires the use of commercial programs nor does it prohibit such use. That is strictly a local decision. So should we use a program? I’ve long argued that teachers need programs. The development of extensive lesson plans and tracking down appropriate materials each day is overwhelming for most teachers, and it introduces great variability into classroom instruction. One of the things I learned as director of reading in Chicago was that having ...
Why Should Close Reading Be Advantaged?
When writing about close reading, I have often mentioned that there are multiple approaches to reading. Most elementary teachers and many secondary English teachers don’t know much about these different approaches or why they have been controversial. Thus, when someone takes pot shots at close reading they are surprised and wonder what may be going on. Towards trying to clarify such disagreements, and to expose the limitations of close reading (and why we wouldn’t want to embrace it too tightly), I have sketched out three major approaches to reading touted by English Departments over the past century. I conclude with my ...
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Staying Warm During Cold Reads
Teacher Letter: I've heard you speak and think I know your position on Background Knowledge and Common Core "New Yorker" style book introductions. But was wondering if you could dedicate a post about the term "Cold Reads" as referred to in the Common Core and address the arguments made by the teacher author of this article on the topic. Shanahan Response: Thanks. I hadn’t seen this post by Jeremiah Chaffee, an English teacher. I've only focused on his “cold reading” remarks. First, Common Core doesn’t use the term, “cold read.” It appears to be meant as a pejorative for close reading, though it only characterizes ...
How Many Standards Should a Lesson Address?
This question came in from a reader asking specifically about some units proposed by the Education Department in Louisiana. I'm sharing my response with everyone because I think the confusion in Louisiana is general across the nation. Question: The Education Department in Louisiana (Louisiana Believes) has a scope and sequence that teachers can use to teach the CCSS in ELA. Teachers have informed me there are too many standards in each ELA unit to teach in order to effectively teach them. Of the 10 standards in each of the following: reading literature, reading information, and writing, most of them are listed in each ELA ...
To Theme or Not to Theme, That is the Question
Dear Dr. Shanahan, My colleagues have been debating the use of thematic units in the Common Core. Several of them argue that this practice does not fit a "standards based curriculum." They argue that essential questions and enduring understandings need to be specific to the ELA standards. So, for example, a unit with an essential question for a 3rd grade should look something like this: Unit Topic: Ask and Answer Questions Essential Question: How do readers ask and answers questions from the text? Why is it important to use evidence from the text to support your answer? The other side on this debate argues that there must be a ...
To Multi-Text or Not to Multi-Text in Close Reading
Teacher question: You say close reading requires students to rely solely on the text during reading. But many of the Common Core Standards (and the PARCC and Smarter Balanced prototypes) require that students compare texts. This seems contradictory. What’s up? Shanahan response: This is a bit confusing. The basic idea of close reading is, just as you say, that interpretation is to be based entirely on the text itself. Readers aren’t to turn to author biographies or other works in that author’s oeuvre. No Cliff’s Notes either. Even prefaces, blurbs, statements of context, and explanatory notes provided by the publisher are verboten. These interpretive ...