Literacy Blogs

I visited schools yesterday that used to DIBEL. You know what I mean, the teachers used to give kids the DIBELS assessments to determine how they were doing in fluency, decoding, and phonemic awareness. DIBELS has been controversial among some reading experts, but I’ve always been supportive of such measures (including PALS, TPRI, Ames-web, etc.). I like that they can be given quickly to provide a snapshot of where kids are. I was disappointed that they dropped the tests and asked why. “Too much time,” they told me, and when I heard their story I could see why. This was a district that like the idea of such testing, but ...

Last week, I posted a blog that described how effective comprehension strategy instruction works. I said that students won’t use strategies forever and that I didn’t believe that strategies eventually morphed into skills (at least not skills that look anything like the strategy). I think strategies work more like true scaffolds; they operate as a temporary support that allows kids to read on their own more effectively, but not in the same way they will need to read on their own later. The problem is that strategies are cumbersome and no one will use them for long. Frankly, when a ...

There is no doubt research shows that reading comprehension strategy instruction works. The National Reading Panel said so. Although comprehension studies have been short-term, there are just so many of them (more than 200 such studies).   That doesn’t mean everybody agrees with strategy teaching. Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown have argued strenuously against such teaching. They claim teachers would be better off having kids read text and engaging in a deep discussion of the ideas.   I respect Isabel and Moddy, but how can you ignore so much research? I think the disagreement lies in a basic misconception about the purpose of strategy instruction.   There are three ways to ...

First posted May 11, 2009. Blast from the past July 20, 2017 Here we are at the height of summer... I just got back from the International Literacy Association conference and I was hearing about teachers already preparing to start back to school this month! Summers used to mean baseball--not the school year. This blog might remind everyone of a key characteristic of effective of reading teachers. Teaching should follow research, and teachers ought to use the kinds of tools and routines that have been found to be effective in the past. In the Chicago schools, I imposed time standards to make sure ...

The next version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is going to be quite different from “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB). That’s both good since real changes are needed, but it’s a little scary, too, because NCLB represented a remarkable and positive break with past federal education policy.   A quick pre-2000 history lesson: At the federal level, Republican and Democratic views of education had evolved into an unfortunate stalemate. Republicans usually opposed federal education spending for Constitutional and budgetary reasons. Their argument was that education was the responsibility of the states and that Uncle Sam should stay out of the ...