Literacy Blogs

Teacher question: Our reading program has us evaluating students on several strategies and reading skills (e.g., orienting, predicting, monitoring, story elements, identifying point of view, word solving, retelling, inferring character traits, determining theme). It provides grade level rubrics so that we can tell the difference between whether students are doing 4th grade or 5th grade work. We are also encouraged to have the students themselves self-assess their progress on these elements. The idea is that we are to use these evaluations to help students see where they are. Is this kind of thing useful or is it a waste of time? RELATED: A ...

Teacher question: I’m writing to you about high school progress monitoring for reading comprehension. Our school has learning goals for Reading Comprehension. Every two weeks, students read an on-grade level passage and answer 5 multiple-choice questions that assess literal comprehension and main idea. Our data are not matching well with other data that we have (such as course passing rates and state assessments). What might be a more effective progress monitoring process, that go beyond the literal level, and that would provide information the teachers could use to improve instruction. RELATED: Shared Reading in the Structured Literacy Era Shanahan response: I’m not surprised that approach ...

Teacher Question: I’m surprised that you don’t write about screening and monitoring tests. I’ve been a teacher for 24 years (first-grade) and I’m considering an early retirement. It seems like I’m supposed to test my students more than teach them. We just test and get ready for tests. I feel so sorry for the boys and girls. I want to teach reading, not FSF, ISF, PSF. NWF, WRF, ORF, LNF. Help me, Dr. Shanahan. Is this what’s best? Is this really a part of the “science of reading”? Shanahan response: I feel your pain. When I was a first-grade teacher, we didn’t have ...

Teacher questions: Over the past few weeks, I'e fielded many questions about testing – from policymakers and teachers. Here are a couple of examples:  1.     Should schools lower grade level benchmark reading expectations due to lost instructional time during the pandemic? Please advise ASAP. 2.     A question that keeps coming up is, if a student cannot read grade level text on their own, can they then listen to the text and answer the questions on an assessment in order to be considered "meeting" reading standards 1-9 in grades 2-5 since there is a specified Lexile band for those grades through standard 10? Shanahan response: Over ...