What We Talk About When We Talk About Reading Curriculum

Erasmus wrote that “every definition is dangerous.” His abhorrence for the sharp definition was due to a fear of dogmatism.

I’m no Erasmus but I’d say, “let’s risk it.” Experience tells me that weak definitions can do even more damage.

Our vague defining leads to misunderstandings and undermines sound decision making. If you aren’t sure what “balanced literacy” or “science of reading” mean, how can you deliver –- or avoid delivering — the appropriate pedagogy?   

In education, we don’t define well.

Often we adopt nomenclature without definition (“balanced literacy” and “science of reading” are good exemples of that) and other times we subtly stretch or twist the meanings of long-used terms in idiosyncratic ways for ideological purposes (“word recognition” seems to be in that blender these days).

Of course, we’re not the only ones to play games with words. Recently, I was upbraided because I dared refer to autism as a disorder. These days it’s hip to refer to it as “neurodiversity” so no one will mistake it for something bad, even if it reduces the chances someone is going to learn to read well.

Yesterday, I read that, to improve their lives, we now should call the “homeless” the “unhoused.” Later I spoke with such a gentleman. He described himself as “homeless,” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that people would no longer shun him in the street if he would refer to himself more appropriately.

I admit that these last examples are evidence of well-meaning efforts to reduce the stigma that may be associated with certain terms. Unfortunately, experience suggests that such relabeling fools no one. Remember that it was just such an effort that gave us terms like “idiot” and “moron.”

The term “dyslexia” – with its neurological implications – has come in and out of fashion depending on whether one wants to relieve parents of one kind of guilt or another (behavioral or genetic).

Rebranding efforts require a lot of energy. They immerse a field in unnecessary semantic disputes (and arrogant disapproval), instead of addressing the real problems. One can only imagine if all this effort were devoted to solving the problems or alleviating the actual pain they cause.

These days my pet peeve is with the unfortunate explosion of the term “curriculum.” It used to mean only those things we wanted students to learn – that is, the curriculum detailed what we wanted kids to know or be able to do. That was it.   

These days curriculum include almost everything. Textbook programs are often referred to as “the curriculum.” So are educational standards. Such colloquial shortcuts may be excusable – though I suspect they are more due to sloppy thinking than verbal short cuts.

Even fine scholars treat curriculum as an almost borderless concept. It has become common to describe curriculum as including content, instruction, assessment, and evaluation (e.g., Prideaux, 2003). In other words, curriculum is pretty much everything that teachers do.

That kind of expansion has unfortunate consequences. There are benefits to distinguishing means from ends. A curriculum specifies what it is that students need to learn. Teaching or instruction refer to the actions that we take to try to make that learning happen.

While working on my book about the problems of leveled reading instruction I was struck by the lack of distinction between curricular solutions and instructional ones to educational problems.

During the first half of the last century, there was a nationwide search for a way to successfully differentiate reading instruction. What bugged me was that all the schemes that were proposed focused on altering the curriculum rather than adjusting the teaching.  

Instead of proposing different ways of teaching kids to read (instruction) so that more of them could accomplish the goals (the curriculum), they simply decided to establish different goals for everyone. That means some kids would be taught to read well enough to allow for their future success and some would not.

By design.

Teaching that intentionally reinforces early lags and minimizes the chances of kids ever catching up is a horrible approach. Once you decide to aim at the second-grade curriculum with third or fourth grade students – and that’s what you are doing when you decide to teach with those below grade texts – you guarantee a life of lost opportunity.  

One wonders what our reading proficiency would be if someone had suggested a teaching alternative rather than a curricular one – that is, if they had suggested ways to help kids to learn from the grade level texts rather than replacing them with easier books. Surely many more kids would have had a real opportunity to reach their potential.

Another example of the problem of confusing curriculum and instruction is when teachers focus on activities (instruction) without sufficient consideration of the potential outcomes of those activities (curriculum). Too often teachers schedule daily circle time, shared reading, small group instruction, guided reading, repeated reading, and so on without real consideration of the curricular reason for those activities.

Many elementary teachers read chapter books to their classes (an instructional activity). I know I always did.

But why? That is, what is the curricular purpose of it?

No one has found that reading to kids teaches reading, so it’s not a good idea to simply replace reading instruction with shared reading.

You might say, “Can’t kids learn vocabulary from shared reading?” Indeed, they can learn words from books that are read to them at least if it’s done right (e.g., Elley, 1989). However, I suspect that reply is raised more often as defense of an already chosen instructional activity rather than as a real curricular reason for why the activity was chosen in the first place.

Are the books being selected based on their vocabulary? Is there any kind of instructional follow up with those words as in the studies? Is there ever an assessment of them?[i]   

The failure to distinguish curriculum from instruction encourages too many teachers to choose activities they prefer, that they’re confident with, and that they think kids will like. These activities may not be the most powerful avenues to the learning goals, but they aren’t even thinking about that. For them, the activities have become the curriculum.

Sadly, curriculum is also confused with assessment. Assessments are valuable indicators of how well kids have mastered a curriculum. Too often, these days, assessments have become the curriculum, and this seems to be especially true with reading comprehension.

Students are supposed to learn to read and comprehend texts (that’s a curricular goal). Texts vary in difficulty, so each grade is assigned a range of text levels that they should be enabling.

To find out if kids are accomplishing this, we test their comprehension by having them read and answer questions about some sample texts. Our assessments may be imperfect, yet they provide a rough idea of whether students can usually read and understand such texts.

That we want kids to learn to comprehend texts should mean that we spend time guiding them to surmount the challenges that such texts pose. We should be making sure they can read the kinds of words these texts use – breaking the words down and sounding them out (instruction). Kids also should be developing fluency with these kinds of texts, practicing with various texts and receiving feedback and guidance (instruction). Likewise, they should be increasing their vocabularies from these instructional texts and learning how to figure out sentence meanings and how to connect ideas across the texts.

On top of that, we should be making sure kids know a lot about their world, getting them to read worthwhile texts during their instruction and on their own time. We shouldn’t neglect the value of social studies, science, music, art, and gym classes for building knowledge either, and we should ask parents to help too – getting their kids to read at home and involving them in knowledge building activities (yes, television can be a knowledge-building activity).

In other words, we should be teaching kids how to read texts and should be enabling their reading of texts!

Instead, what happens far too often is teachers and principals focus on having kids practice answering the kinds of questions they might see on an assessment – as if it were the questions that mattered, and not the texts. As ACT reported, when students can read texts well, they can answer any kind of questions about them; when they can’t read the texts well, they struggle with any question type (ACT, 2006).

We need to do a better job with definitions in our field, and I’d start with making sure that everyone is recognizing the distinctions among curriculum and instruction and assessment – in our discourse, but most importantly, in our pedagogical practices and educational policies.

References

ACT, Inc. (2006). Reading between the lines. Iowa City: ACT.

Elley, W. B. (1989). Vocabulary acquisition from listening to stories. Reading Research Quarterly, 24, 174-187. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/461836

Prideaux D. (2003). ABC of learning and teaching in medicine. Curriculum design. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 326(7383), 268–270. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.326.7383.268

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