Literacy Blogs

Teacher question: I'm a fourth grade special education teacher in NYC. Our school has acquired a new reading/writing program and has discontinued a grammar program we've used for several years. In the new program the grammar component is virtually non-existent. On a gut level I feel that students are struggling with test questions, even math ones, due to lack of practice/knowledge of grammar. They simply don't understand what the questions are asking. I was wondering what your opinion/research shows as far as the relationship between grammar instruction and reading comprehension. Do you have any preference as far as grammar programs/teaching methodologies go?   Shanahan response:  Great ...

A colleague sent me this link from the Washington Post. He is especially interested in history and he wrote to me about this lesson plan. Needless to say, he was horrified, and wanted me to explain how Common Core could promote such anti-historical thinking (an instructional approach that seems like an affront to historians and history teachers everywhere).   http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/19/common-cores-odd-approach-to-teaching-gettysburg-address/   Here was my answer:   The problem here is that different disciplines conceptualize close reading differently. In literature/English, the idea is to give a close analysis of the language and rhetoric of this kind of text (and the lesson in the link you sent me ...

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 ...

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 ...

  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 ...

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 ...