Tag Archive for 'reading strategies'

Whose Core Knowledge?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 8, 2009 in Core Knowledge. 11 Comments

The normally thoughtful and engaging Clay Burell swings and misses at E.D. Hirsch’s recent New York Times op-ed about reading tests, painting with an uncharacteristically broad brush.   Relying on the standard misperception of Hirsch and Core Knowledge as promoting ”the white male-privileged narrative of history,” Burell writes that such a curriculum is “unfair to those very disadvantaged students Hirsch claims will benefit from his model.”  This ignores the fact that the curriculum has had its greatest success with low-SES students.  Pay a visit to schools like the Carl Icahn Charter School in the South Bronx; P.S. 124 in Queens; Atlanta’s Capitol View Elementary; among others.  I don’t believe you’ll find much evidence of unfairness.

There are a couple of problems with Clay’s analysis of Hirsch’s piece.  First, the immediate benefit of teaching a broad, content-rich curriculum is not cultural (although no apologies need to be made for familiarizing students with the history and culture of their own country and the broader world) but structural.  Reading comprehension suffers in disadvantaged children exactly because they lack the background knowledge to make sense of what they read.  Indeed, Burell himself underscored the crucial role of content knowledge in creating strong readers in a post a few months ago praising Dan Willingham’s Teaching Content is Teaching Reading YouTube video.  Hirsch has been making the same argument for decades. 

Clay wants Hirsch’s essay to address critical thinking, but that wasn’t the point of the piece.  Hirsch’s singular service to education has been to attempt to define the broad body of background knowledge that speakers and writers assume their audience knows, and point out that literacy (as well as critical thinking and other so-called “21st Century” skills) depends on sharing it.  The curse of this contribution is that it is easy to dismiss it, as Alfie Kohn typically does (and I fear Burell does too) as “a bunch o’ facts” and “rote memorization” even though Hirsch has never even so much as hinted that kids should memorize lists of names and dates.  Clay wants the curriculum infused with critical thinking questions, but where is the disagreement?  There’s absolutely nothing in the Core Knowledge curriculum that suggests or implies it has come down from Mt. Sinai on stone tablets and must be taught, unquestioned, in a specific way.  Good teachers like Burell, an Apple Distinguished Educator, have always–will always–infuse their teaching with thoughtful perspectives and critical thinking.  How does a set curriculum prevent them from doing so?  How does defining what to teach determine how to teach it?  The answer is simple: it doesn’t.  

He also takes issue with Hirsch’s criticism of reading strategy instruction.  Allowing for Clay’s personal experience, I think he underestimates the damage done to children by a heavy over-reliance on such instruction in the elementary grades.  In many disadvantaged schools, strategy instruction IS reading instruction, at the expense of science, history, art and music.   The result is a vicious circle where kids robotically search for the main idea or “question the author.”  But their lack of content knowledge prevents them from meaningfully answering the ”metacognitive” questions they are trained (speaking of rote memorization) to pose. 

We’re never going to get away from the rhetorical questions with which Burell challenges Core Knowledge (”Knowledge of what? From whose perspective? In whose interests?”) nor should we.  But it’s dispiriting that smart educators like Burell are chary about a specific curriculum out of some misperception of balance, fairness or perpective.  If you want students to be critical thinkers–and to his credit Burell clearly does–what better way than to give them the background knowledge they need to grapple with precisely the questions he suggests?

Clay is on more solid ground, I think when he suggests “If we can talk leaving high school content under the control of local teachers, not dictated by national content tests, then maybe  - high school teachers could fill in the silences left by the national(istic) 3-8 standards, teach race, gender, and class-based perspectives in history that almost surely wouldn’t be covered earlier.”   Not a bad idea, that.  If every kid comes to high school with a shared body of knowledge that is both strong and subtle, then those high school classes could be rich in critical thinking and challenging perspectives.  Without it, we’re frozen forever at the starting line, searching for some shared subject or common ground to engage with and argue about. 

Email me your address, Clay (Seriously).  I’ve got a copy of the Core Knowledge Sequence with your name on it.  See what’s in it, and see how pedagogically prescriptive it’s not, and ask yourself which students would get the most out of your high school humanities class: those who walked in with a firm grasp of the content it describes?  Or those whose sense of history, science and the arts was left to chance?

What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 22, 2009 in Humor. 2 Comments

A government ministry in England has been called on the carpet for the “impenetrable language peppered with jargon” in its reports.  OK class, let’s use our reading strategies to make sense of this passage, shall we?

An overarching national improvement strategy will drive up quality and performance underpinned by specific plans for strategically significant areas of activity, such as workforce and technology. The capital investment strategy will continue to renew and modernise further education establishments to create state of the art facilities.”

Turn and talk to your neighbor and see if you can find the main idea.  No?  Hmmm.  Let’s use context clues, then.  The agency that wrote the passage in question is the “Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.” 

They’re responsible for courses in basic literacy for adults.

Reading War II: Content Knowledge vs. Reading Strategies

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 19, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Educational Policy, Literacy, Research and Reports and accountability. 11 Comments

If phonics vs. whole language was Round One of the reading wars, the new battle is shaping up to be reading strategies vs. content knowledge, says Dan Willingham at Britannica Blog.  “Like Round 1 of the battle, one side is mostly right (content knowledge) but there is some merit on the other side,” says Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.

Most of us think about reading in a way that is fundamentally incorrect. We think of it as transferable, meaning that once you acquire the ability to read, you can read anything. That is true for only part of what it takes to read. It’s true for decoding—the ability to translate written symbols into sounds….But being able to decode letter strings fluently is only half of reading. In order to understand what you’re reading, you need to know something about the subject matter. And that doesn’t just mean that you need to know the vocabulary—you need to have the right knowledge of the world.

Willingham produced a YouTube video that underscores the connections between content knowledge and comprehension.  His blog post points out what virtually every elementary school teacher knows: once children learn to decode, reading instruction is almost exclusively focused on comprehension “strategies”–asking students to find the main idea of passage, identify the author’s purpose, etc.  Reading strategies work “but it’s a one-time boost,” he notes.  “Fifty sessions of practice is no better than five sessions of practice” since strategies serve mainly to give students a better idea of what reading is for.

In early grades, there is tremendous emphasis on decoding, and there must be. But this emphasis leads kids to feel that if they’ve decoded a passage, then they have read it, whereas teachers want them to have the idea that they shouldn’t be satisfied with decoding—they need to understand. Reading strategies help drive home this new notion of reading—that it’s about communication. Small wonder that practicing reading strategies gives no added benefit. Reading strategies are an easily-learned trick, like checking your work in math. Useful, to be sure, but not something that needs to be practiced.  I’ve discussed this matter in more detail here.

This is important stuff, dimly appreciated inside schools and as a practical matter, not at all in the education policy and advocacy communities.  The message needs to be delivered early, often and loud: boosting class time spent on reading instruction is of little use, and could actively be damaging kids if that time is coming at the expense of a well-rounded curriculum.  The title of Dan’s video says it best:  teaching content IS teaching reading.

“The tragic irony is that schools desperately trying to meet AYP are reportedly cutting time from subjects like social studies and science to devote more and more time to reading. Unless they are using content-rich reading materials, that strategy not only won’t work, it will actually backfire,” Willingham writes.

Willingham is not sanguine about that “people will be persuaded by what is truly a mountain of data,” but if it takes Round Two of the reading wars to drive this point into the consciousness of parents, policymakers and educators, the fight will be well worth it.

Reading Strategies: A Little Goes a Long Way

Published by Dan Willingham on August 28, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Literacy. 10 Comments

Yesterday I argued that the knowledge readers bring to a text is essential to reading comprehension. But does even a knowledgeable reader comprehend automatically? Mustn’t the reader apply comprehension strategies to extract meaning from the text? The short answer is that teaching students comprehension strategies does help, but too much time is currently devoted to them.

Reading comprehension strategies include things like question generation (students are taught to generate questions about a text and then answer them) comprehension monitoring (students are taught to become aware of when they do not understand), and summarization (students are taught techniques to summarize meaning). Often, multiple strategies are taught.

The National Reading Panel  reviewed 205 studies examining the effectiveness of teaching students reading strategies, and there is little doubt that they help, and that the effect is sizable.

There are two aspects of the data which deserve special attention because they hold implications for classroom application. First, the effects of teaching students reading strategies are weak or absent before the third grade.  This finding is readily understandable—students are still learning to decode, and simply can’t juggle in mind the tasks of decoding, comprehending, and trying to implement a strategy. It’s only when decoding has become fluid so that the reader doesn’t need to think about it much that enough mental space is free to accommodate a strategy.

Second, when it comes to teaching students to use reading strategies, shorter programs seem just as effective as longer programs. This finding is crucial, because it ought to make us think differently about what reading strategies actually do. It’s natural to think that strategies improve the reader’s skill in extracting meaning from a text. But if that were true then more practice ought to make you better at it. Instead, comprehension strategies feel less like a skill and more like a trick—something like “check your work” in mathematics. It’s a very smart thing to do, and students should be explicitly taught to do it, but it doesn’t require extensive practice.

What might the trick of comprehension strategies be? A good guess is that they encourage students to think differently about reading. There is so much emphasis on decoding in early reading instruction (as there must be) that it is understandable that a student might think “If I’ve decoded, then I’ve read it.” But an adult knows that if you get to the bottom of a page and don’t know what you’ve read, you haven’t really read it, even if you’ve decoded everything. That conception of reading—that the point is communication—must click for students, and comprehension strategies may have most of their impact in getting students to think about reading as something they do to understand. Once they understand that, most of what comprehension strategies advise is something that students will do naturally: try to find the main idea, check your own comprehension, and so on.

The bottom line is that teaching comprehension strategies is a good idea, but it appears to be a one-time boost. There is no evidence that more practice yields more benefit. More information on this subject can be found here: http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter06-07/CogSci.pdf