Literacy Blogs

Blast from the Past: First posted Janaury 12, 2019; re-posted April 19, 2022. So much has happened since this essay first appeared -- many students have missed large amounts of schooling and achievement results reflect that loss. Many teachers are seeking ways to supercharge achievement to try to make up for the decline This blog is an important reminder about why teachers need to curate the texts that are used for instruction. Teach reading with texts that have features students do not yet know how to negotiate and that expose students to the content they need to know. Choice is important. Encourage ...

  Question:          I am currently teaching workshops and courses on reading and the Common Core and have approached these with regard to disciplinary literacy.  So many of the teachers involved are seeing the value of creating discipline-specific reading experiences in their classrooms. This is especially true of secondary teachers but upper elementary as well.            Where we are having a question is how can this apply to kindergarten classrooms. We discussed using texts that focus on science and social studies topics, how the authors might get their information, and focusing on a text structure if one is ...

Teacher question: So the woman who runs my local children’s book store told me that more and more parents of young children are asking for “non-fiction beginning readers” because “that’s what Common Core wants.” Really? In kindergarten and first grade? Aren’t beginning readers supposed to develop their decoding and word recognition by reading simple stories (the ones populated by talking pigs).   I’ve seen “easy” nonfiction books that are full of difficult multisyllable words and proper names.  The publishers have made the books (supposedly) appropriate for beginning readers by reducing the number of words in the sentences (until the point they are almost incomprehensible), putting fewer words ...

Aren’t non-fiction and informational text the same thing? No, they are not. Informational text is factual, but that isn’t the point (or it isn’t the only point). CCSS is emphasizing the reading of literary and informational text to ensure that students are proficient with a wide variety of text. If the distinction was just fact vs. fiction, then text could be limited to narratives. Kids need to learn how to read exposition and argument as much as stories. Each of those types of text has different purposes, structures, graphic elements, text features, etc. And, that’s the point: exposing kids to all ...

Yesterday, I debated the literature-informational text mix recommended by Common Core with Diane Ravitch on Minnesota Public Radio. Not a bad discussion all in all. A few observations: (1) Press and media are starting to get wise to the fact that the common core does NOT require that we diminish literature in the curriculum, but they still want a contention hook as the price of admission for their attention to common core. (2) Many of the observers up in arms over this issue claim that literary interpretation transfers to all other life pursuits. Thus, if you can read Ulysses, you ...

For those of you upset about literature being dropped from the English curriculum, you might want to read this lovely piece written by my friend, Carol Jago. She knows something about the teaching of literature and I think you'll find her insights helpful. This is a must to distribute to middle school and high school English teachers (and their supervisors).  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/10/what-english-classes-should-look-like-in-common-core-era/

           Recently, I wrote here about the issues of informational text and literature. Since then, there seems to be even more controversy and teacher confusion.           In the past, most states required the teaching of literary and informational texts, though they were not very specific about this imperative. The National Assessment has long used a roughly equal mix of literary and informational texts in their testing, a feature replicated by many state tests. During the past decade, elementary reading textbooks have been rebalancing their selections, including more informational text all the time.           Nevertheless, there has long been an ...

          The National Endowment for the Arts report on reading habits in the U.S. continues to reverberate. This is a report that American journalists are fascinated by. As one reporter explained to me today, he was writing for an audience of literary writers (poets, novelists, and the like), and he indicated that the NEA report was discouraging to that audience. “They wonder if it is even worth writing a novel, if no one is going to read it.”            My skepticism about the NEA report is two-fold: first, I doubt that we are ...