Literacy Blogs

Blast from the Past: This blog was first posted on June 10, 2014; and reposted May 13, 2023. When it first appeared, it was the fourth in a sequence (just type “How to Organize Daily Literacy Instruction” into the search engine to find the others). A teacher had queried me about, Daily 5, a popular organizational plan. I was critical of it because it emphasized classroom activities rather than learning. I wrote about my own framework that had been successful in supporting efforts to improve reading achievement. That scheme calls for 2-3 hours per day of reading and writing instruction ...

Blast from the Past: This entry was first published on June 1, 2014, and is being re-posted on March 30, 2019. The reason for the re-posting? In the last two weeks I have received several questions and several requests for speaking engagements focused specifically on what the literacy school day should look like. This entry doesn't propose a particular schedule, but it does provide the key tenets on which to plan a day's lessons. Man, I hate to see so many frustrated teachers. For the past couple weeks, I’ve been hearing from teachers who use Daily 5. They’re mad because I criticized the idea of organizing their ...

  Last week I explained that it makes sense to organize instruction in ways that allots time to learning goals—rather than to instructional activities. It is not that teachers don’t need activities, just that activities don’t have a one-to-one relationship with instructional outcomes. That's why approaches like Daily 5 and CAFE are simplistic and don't have an especially powerful relationship with learning. Those approaches get teachers aimed at particular classroom activities, without sufficient attention to the outcomes.   How should teachers determine which activities to use towards these essential ends? Research.   For example, imagine you required 30 minutes per day for paired reading (an ...

Blast from the Past: First issued May 18, 2014 and reposted on September 24, 2022. These days I'm often asked how I would organize my reading instruction. In this blog entry I provided that kind of description (and I followed it with two more over the subsequent weeks to expand upon those ideas). You can find those blogs by typing How to Organize Daily Instruction into the search function of my site. I think these entries provide some valuable guidance in how to make sure that you are successfully addressing educational standards and meeting students needs in ways consistent with ...

  Pat Wingert has an article on Common Core in Atlantic this month that I figure in: Atlantic Magazine: When English Proficiency Isn't Enough   

I've been working (visiting research professor at Queens University, Belfast), and vacationing in Ireland for the past few weeks. From the Emerald Isle I've been keeping tabs on the ongoing embarrassing political mischief aimed at keeping America firmly entrenched in the middle educational ranks ("We're 25th, we're 25th!").   I certainly understand those who oppose the CCSS standards because of fears that they might cost some money to accomplish or that they might require us -- us the students, teachers, parents, political leaders -- to work harder, the way they have worked harder in all those countries that have sped past us ...

Blast from the Past: First posted April 12, 2014, re-posted on November 1, 2017. This issue of how much reading students should do in class continues to be a hot issue. Today, I'd go even further than I did then. I now counsel that 50% of reading comprehension time should be spent reading (and, similarly a big chunk of the time devoted to social studies and science text should be spent that way, too). I'd call for the same thing in phonics/decoding time (spending about half the time decoding and encoding words), fluency (about half the time reading aloud), and ...

Teacher question: I have a question that many teachers have asked and would like your help when thinking through the grading process for common core. How might the children receive grades for the many standards without giving a test? The teachers are doing a lot of processing text together as a class or in partners so they are wondering about the accountability for the students and how to get a grade to measure their knowledge.  Shanahan response: Good question.   Remember there are lots of parts of Common Core, so if you are an elementary teacher and you are teaching foundational skills (e.g., phonological awareness, phonics, oral ...