Literacy Blogs

There is an incredible yearning for specific information on the implementation of the common core standards. Everyone it seems is hurrying out common core materials, some of which are helpful, and some of which would best be kept in the drawer reserved for help that we can’t use.   An example of the first is some guidance recently released by the International Reading Association’s CommonCore State Standards Committee (of which I am a member). Nothing startling in this one, just accurate information clearly stated. I suspect this will be helpful to many educators.   A not-so-positive addition is the Aspen Institute’s recently issued “Primer on Close Reading.”   This ...

Blast from the Past: This was originally posted October 11, 2012, and was re-issued on October 5, 2017. These observations were relevant concerning Common Core originally, but it is relevant to most or all of the states' standards now. The CCSS model has been a persuasive one: it has led states to focus on fewer but bigger, well-organized standards. That means trying to pick the important ones is no longer a smart way to go. Recently, I received a note from an educator trying to develop “power standards” for the common core. Power standards is a concept developed by Doug Reeves ...

Okay, so you’re thinking: “This guy is even more nuts than I thought. How can he root for kids to write poorly?"   I hope I’m not nuts, but one of the major new tests to be used to monitor student performance against the common core state standards is well designed (truth in advertising: I serve on the English Language Arts Technical Work Groups for that test). However, those new designs are almost certain to lower student writing scores, which I hope will be good for kids—at least in the long run.   PARCC is a 23 state consortium that is designing new English ...

                  Recently, I've been fielding questions about guided reading (à la Fountas and Pinnell) and the Common Core; mainly about the differences in how they place students in texts. Before going there, let me point out that there is a lot of common ground between guided reading and Common Core, including a focus on high-quality text, the emphasis on connections between reading and writing, the concern for high-level questions and discussion, the idea that students learn from reading, and so on. Nary a hint of conflict between the two approaches on any of ...

Blast from the Past: This blog first posted June 22, 2012 and was re-posted on May 24, 2016. Earlier this week I posted a blog distinguishing comprehension skills and comprehension strategies. More to be written on these issues this weekend. However, when the Common Core State Standards did not include comprehension strategies this blog entry provided my reaction to that omission. It is still timely and I'll have more to say about this as well.  I’ve been fielding a lot of complaints recently about the lack of comprehension strategies in the common core state standards. And, in fact, no reading comprehension ...

Teacher question: What do you feel is "best practice" for middle school ELA instruction? Our district has a 6/7 middle school, and the subjects of reading and language arts are taught separately. The middle school principal will speak to how this is "best practice".   With the reciprocity of reading and writing, and the expectations of the CCSS, the current schedule seems counterintuitive to me. Shouldn't students be grouped for, say, a 90 minute ELA block that encompasses reading and language arts? Or am I off base on this? Shanahan reply: How schools are organized in terms of this kind of scheduling does not matter very ...

Blast from the Past: Re-issued March 22, 2021 and August 3, 2017. First published June 18, 2012; Of all of my blog entries, this one has been read, cited, and distributed most often. Obviously a lot of people have found it to be useful, so I have reposted it for those who might not have seen it before. However, I had another reason this time. These days the term "close reading" is increasingly being used by teachers as a synonym for reading comprehension. Teaching reading comprehension and teaching close reading overlap in important ways but they definitely are not the same ...

For years, I’ve told audiences that one of my biggest fantasies (not involving Heidi Klum) was that we would have a different kind of testing and accountability system. In my make-believe world, teachers and principals would never get to see the tests – under penalty of death.   They wouldn’t be allowed within miles of a school on testing days, and they would only be given general information about the results (e.g., “your class was in the bottom quintile of fourth grades in reading”). Telling a teacher the kinds of test questions or about the formatting would be punished severely, too.   In that ...

Recently, I commented on the pre-reading advice of David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, indicating that I would soon follow with practical advice. In this entry, I fulfill that promise. Thank you to David and Sue for instigating these ideas, and for reacting to them along the way. I take full responsibility for the ideas expressed here (especially for any bad ones), but I appreciate the encouragement and debate that they provided (I'm sure it sharpened up the good ideas).   Currently, I am a principal investigator on the National Title I Evaluation. In that role, I have had to watch lots of ...

Recently, there has been hubbub over whether we should spend time on pre-reading activities. Pre-reading refers to the stage setting that typically precedes shared and guided reading in elementary and secondary classrooms. David Coleman and Sue Pimentel who ably spearheaded the English language arts common core have been telling teachers not to engage in pre-reading activities and as a result some districts and states have already started banning the practice.   Why is this such a big deal? The background reviews and purpose setting of pre-reading are truly mainstays of American reading education, and many teachers wonder whether kids are going to ...