Literacy Blogs

Teacher question: I know you get a lot of pushback from teachers when you say that we should teach with complex text. But I agree with you. I don’t like all the testing and teaching kids in so many different books. This might surprise you, but I wonder why you don’t emphasize teaching complex text with children in kindergarten and first-grade? Shanahan responds: Many states have adopted educational standards that emphasize teaching students to read texts at particular levels of difficulty. This approach was long eschewed in fear that it would frustrate students. The claim has been that if kids were taught from texts beyond their instructional level (in other words ...

Teacher question:  I keep hearing that teachers don’t know the science of reading. But all the teachers that I talk to say that they teach phonics. What’s really going on?   Shanahan response:  I suspect that both the critics and the teachers are telling you the truth. Unfortunately, we don’t have a national education inspectorate that monitors classroom trends in the U.S. We all guess what may be happening based on our own narrow experiences. That means you could visit classrooms in your community, and I could in mine, and we might see very different patterns of teaching But there is more to it than that kind of variation. However, before we go there, ...

Blast from the Past: This entry first posted on April 28, 2018 and re-posted on November 23, 2019. I thought it a good idea to re-issue this posting now because of MIke Schmoker's recent column in Education Week (https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/11/20/how-to-make-reading-instruction-much-much.html). I know lots of educators love the idea of working with small groups in reading, but that is not always best practice (though under the right circumstances it can be useful). This blog explores the ins and outs (and ups and downs) of small group instruction in reading. Hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving). Teacher question: I was curious what your thoughts ...

 Dear Dr. Shanahan,     Currently, I am a Kindergarten Reading Interventionist at our K-2 school. My team is struggling with some philosophical differences about how students are placed in classrooms. Most of the kindergarten teachers feel we should be looking at the whole child (academic, emotional, social…) and find the best match for each individual child. But our school places students by guided reading level. Each class would have a certain range of guided reading levels in their class. The idea is to lessen the range of levels in each classroom so there is not a huge spread, making instruction more ...

Teacher letter: I am now a literacy specialist in a middle school and am hoping you can give me your opinion on the process of the guided reading method of reading instruction. I completely agree with you that the F&P levels are ludicrously low and it would be difficult to transition students to the end goal of CCSS using these levels. However, I’m curious what you think about the usefulness of listening to individuals read in a small group, using running records to track a struggling reader’s progress with CCSS grade-level text used in the classroom, and explicitly teaching strategies and vocabulary in ...