Closing the Achievement Gap: Teaching Content
We shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender.
A computerized program aimed at assessing student writing skills for English “A levels” deems passages by Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway and other titans of prose lacking. Churchill’s rousing WWII speech was too repetitive for the computer’s tastes.
(H/T: Will Fitzhugh, Concord Review)
In his 2007 book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Stanford business professor Chip Heath describes why some bad ideas such as urban legends and misleading bits of conventional wisdom are “sticky” and gain traction, while some very good ideas don’t make it through the clutter. Early in the book, Heath describes how the Army used to invest enormous time in planning military operations that turned out to be useless for an obvious reason: the enemy doesn’t follow the plan. The answer, developed in the 1980s, is a planning concept called Commander’s Intent (CI).
CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At high levels of the Army, the CI may be relatively abstract: ‘Break the will of the enemy in the Southeast region.’ At the tactical level, for colonels and captains, it is much more concrete…The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events.
“Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders,” Heath writes. “When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed in arriving there.” Right about now, you’re probably thinking, Hey! That’s just like those voluntary national standards they’re cooking up! Brilliant!
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
Standards might work just as well as “CI” if there was a shared understanding and deep experience with the tactics needed to achieve the desired results—if our understanding of how to teach reading were as simple and straightforward as determining the range of a piece of artillery. The problem in education is that it is possible – nearly certain, in fact – to follow “Commander’s Intent” yet still fail miserably. The draft reading standards put up for public comment this week by the Common Core State Standards Initiative can’t “stick” because they are built on a flawed model of reading as a transferable skill. By promoting even tacitly the idea the we can teach reading independent of content (decoding + reading strategies = the ability to comprehend everything), the standards offer little useful guidance for teachers, virtually ensuring that even these “fewer, clearer” directions will not be met. Only by describing specific texts and content across disciplines (making clear that comprehension equals background knowledge) with assessments aligned with those texts and content, can there be any hope of measuarable progress.
Let’s be blunt: Find one single teacher drawing breath that needed a secretive committee of two dozen experts to tell her that high school students ought to be able to “discern the most important ideas, events, or information, and summarize them accurately and concisely.” This is not a standard, it’s a platitude. As a goal or statement of purpose, it offers as much guidance and direction as military orders to “win the war.” We do not lack clarity on our goals. We lack clarity on how to achieve them. The draft of the voluntary standards promotes tacitly the same flawed concepts that have driven reading instruction for decades.
Worst of all, the standards movement as currently conceived threatens to make matters worse by sending the message that there is now absolute clarity on what is to be taught in the nation’s schools. That, of course, is not what standards do. That would require not national standards, but a national curriculum. They are the same thing in the public imagination. This predictable confusion between standards and curriculum, strategies and tactics, already colors everything from the political attractiveness of merit pay to the anger at teachers for our failing education system. Many education policies assume teachers know exactly how to teach every child to read well but fail to do so out of incompetence, laziness, or refusal to execute the Commander’s Intent. The reality is infinitely more complex.
As written, our vague, insubstantial voluntary national standards are not “made to stick.” In fact, they are virtually guaranteed to have exactly the unintended results. By refusing to specify content to be taught, they will perversely encourage bad practice—teaching reading as a skill rather than a function of background knowledge. In the absence of clear guidance, we will have more unnecessary and pointless reading strategy instruction, more test prep, more focus on reading as a transferrable skill. And less–much less–of what actually creates competent readers—a well-rounded, content-driven, robust core curriculum.
Only 3.5% of Arizona public school students got six or more questions correct on a version of the United States Citizenship Test. Matthew Ladner of Jay Greene’s blog thought that was pretty pathetic–new immigrants to the U.S. have to answer six or more correct–until they gave the same test to kids in Oklahoma. The results were not OK.
Perhaps I ought not to have been so hard on Arizona students. After all, they passed at a rate that was 25% higher than their peers in Oklahoma! That’s right: the passing rate for Oklahoma high school students was 2.8%. They somehow underperformed Arizona’s already abysmally pathetic performance.
“These kids wouldn’t do much worse if the pollster asked them questions in Sanskrit instead of English,” Ladner concludes. Over at Joanne Jacobs, guest blogger Diana Senechal says Ladner’s right. ”According to a binomial distribution calculator, the chances of getting at least 6 out of 10 questions correct (where each question has 4 options) is about 2 percent. So, no, they wouldn’t do much worse in Sanskrit,” she writes.
“I have an empty metal coffee pot in my office marked “Sweden Civics Survey Fund,” Ladner writes. “Please drop by a give what you can afford. Once it gets to a couple of thousand bucks, I’ll retain the pollster to give this exact same survey on AMERICAN civics to high school students in Sweden.”
Great idea. I’ve got a ten-spot in my hand, Matthew. What’s the address?
Try this experiment: Find a friend and tell him you’re going to tap out the rhythm of a famous song that everyone knows. Without telling him what the song is, tap out the notes for “God Bless America,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” or “Happy Birthday to You.” No singing or humming along; just taps. Before you begin make a prediction: Do you think he’ll guess the song correctly based on your ability to tap it out?
Nearly 20 years ago, a Stanford graduate student named Elizabeth Newton did her dissertation in psychology on this simple game and discovered something remarkable. Given a list of 25 well-known songs to tap out, the listeners’ success rate was only 2.5 percent—one out of 40 attempts. However the tappers were so sure the listener would know the song, they predicted a 50% success rate.
Why the disconnect? In the experiment, the tapper hears the song in his or her mind and thinks it’s so obvious that the listener can’t possibly fail to understand it. The tapper mentally sings the words and hears the melody to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” while the listener merely hears “tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.” The tapper can’t understand why the listener doesn’t get it; the listener gets frustrated that the tapper thinks he should. Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe the phenomenon in their book Made to Stick:
The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.
As a listener, the task is hard because even though you are getting valid information, it’s incomplete. You’re not getting the whole song. Newton’s experiment offers as good a model as you’re likely to find as to why background knowledge is the key to reading comprehension— for struggling readers, what’s on the page is useful, but it’s not enough.
This is also one of the most difficult concepts to wrap your mind around. When you read, your background knowledge is the melody playing in your head. Like the tapper in the experiment, it’s impossible to forget what you know and force your mind NOT to make the connections that create understanding. Proficient readers hear the music, the lyrics, even a full orchestra. Students, especially those from low-income families or households lacking in enrichment, hear only tap, tap, tap, tap, tap tap.
The tapping experiment also shows why reading strategies don’t help. Try to determine the author’s (tapper’s) purpose. Tap, tap, tap. Can you find the main idea (melody)? Tap, tap, tap. When meaning breaks down, reread (relisten) for clarity. No matter what “strategy” you employ, if you don’t know the song, it still sounds like tap, tap, tap. Seen through this lens, reading strategies are worse than useless, only compounding the listener’s frustration. You might as well instruct students “don’t just listen to the tapping, try to hear the song in your head!” They can’t.
We all know background knowledge matters. As teachers, even devotees of strategy instruction tell students to “activate your prior knowledge” to aid in comprehension. However, we are assuming that there is background knowledge to activate. If we don’t teach the explicit content needed to guarantee comprehension, we are hearing the melody in our heads and refusing to share it.
Our students, on the other hand, hear only “tap tap tap tap tap tap.”
The idea that it’s enough to simply ”find what works, adopt it, and spread it around,” notes scientist/blogger Allison over at Kitchen Table Math is an example of what physicist Richard Feynman called “Cargo Cult Science“:
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
“Cargo Cult education seems to be all the rage in lots of communities,” Allison notes. “Sure, districts could just start grabbing lessons from high performing schools but that won’t make the students suddenly read or write. Unless they understand what’s underneath the ‘lessons of the high performing school’ then it won’t matter.”
I had never heard this Feyman anecdote but I may have to start calling our reliance on “reading strategies” instruction “Cargo Cult Reading.” Its entire point is to teach children “what good readers do” and the habits of mind that are reflexive to able readers. It’s the exactly the same thing–you teach kids to mimic the behaviors that lead to comprehension–but without the background knowledge that actually makes it possible. Indeed, a staple of strategy instruction is to teach children that good readers ”activate their prior knowledge to create mental images, ask questions, and make inferences.” How exactly does that work in the absence of prior knowledge to activate?
One of the things that more advantaged students typically bring to school is a lifetime of background knowledge (or “schema” as reading strategy enthusiasts prefer to call it) that makes comprehension possible. Without it you’re sitting in the jungle waiting for the planes to land.
Dan Willingham’s latest over at Britannica Blog (”What Makes a Good Fourth-Grade Reader? Knowledge.”) highlights a new study showing that integrating material from other subjects in reading instruction boosts comprehension. Ten-year olds in Hong Kong rose to 2nd among 44 nations on the 2006 PIRLS international reading test. Researchers looked at dozens of variables, Willingham notes, ”to determine which instructional factors were associated with student reading achievement.” They found the most important factor in reading achievement was the frequency with which the teacher used materials from other subjects in reading instruction.
“The results are impressive in their clarity, and important because they dovetail so well with theories of reading comprehension, described here. Once students can decode, background knowledge is crucial to reading comprehension. Ensuring that students have wide-ranging knowledge of the world ideally begins at birth, through a rich home environment. Schools must do everything possible to support and expand that knowledge base, and integrating material from other subjects into the reading curriculum is an important step in the right direction.
Willingham has said it before, but too few people get it: Teaching content IS teaching reading:
Willingham is en fuego this week. USA Today catches up with Dan’s latest book, Why Don’t Students Like School? If you follow the Core Knowledge Blog, the interview by Greg Toppo plays like a Dan Willingham greatest hits album– our brains are not designed for thinking, good teachers find the sweet spot of mental challenge, “learning styles” are hooey–but it’s heartening to see Dan’s wisdom get the full national treatment, where it will be an epiphany to countless parents and more than a few teachers, too.
Richard Whitmire highlights the USA Today piece and get the headline just right: “If you don’t know Daniel Willingham, you should.”
This blog has long noted the strange indifference of the ed policy community to curriculum. In wonk world it’s all about structures, and all will be well as long as a child has a great teacher, held accountable by testing, incentivized by merit pay, and serving at the pleasure of a principal in a charter school (or variations on that theme). Curriculum? The invisible hand will presumably see to that.
The New America Foundation’s early ed specialist, Sara Mead, is a notable exception. Writing last week about the Administration’s proposed $300 million Early Literacy Grants, Mead praised the program, but registered concern that its “emphasis on reading comprehension could lead many schools to devote excessive time to teaching so-called ‘comprehension strategies.’
As we’ve written here before, and as Daniel Willingham compellingly argues here, the best way to strengthen children’s ability to comprehend what they read is to expose them to rich and diverse content across various domains, so that they have the general knowledge to easily understand written passages on a wide variety of topics. That requires less time spent drilling comprehension strategies, and more time reading a variety of texts (especially non-fiction), and studying science, social studies, music, and the arts. If this program can help school districts move in that direction—while also maintaining a focus on strengthening students’ decoding skills and helping them gain fluency and vocabulary—that could be a really good thing.
Mead, who has clearly invested considerable time on the mechanics of teaching and learning, was at it again yesterday on her Early Ed Watch blog. Commenting on last week’s Common Core report linking high academic achievement in other countries with a rich, broad curriculum, she highlighted Lynne Munson’s observation that the content of a student’s education has a greater influence on his level of achievement than does delivery or accountability systems.
As research by both the American Federation of Teachers and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has shown, the early elementary school years are home to some of the weakest areas in existing state standards, and the early grades curriculum — particularly for low-income students — is too often a “content-free zone.” What can we learn from other countries about improving children’s access to high-quality, rich content — in a full range of academic subjects, including music and the arts — in the early grades?
Perhaps there should be a conference of ed policy types who are as concerned as Sara Mead about early elementary curriculum. We can book the washroom of a 737 for the meeting.
A federal study on the effectiveness of different reading comprehension programs found three of the programs had no impact, while the fourth had a negative impact. None of the four—Project CRISS, ReadAbout, Read for Real, and Reading for Knowledge—was found to be effective.
It’s a dispiriting report, but Robert E. Slavin of the Success for All Foundation, makes an important point about it. He tells EdWeek’s Mary Ann Zehr that “IES-sponsored evaluations repeatedly evaluate programs by imposing them on teachers and school leaders who are not interested in them and are likely to implement them haphazardly, if at all, and then find, over and over again, that nothing works.”
There are is no shortage of bogus reading programs out there that overpromise and underdeliver. That said, fidelity of implementation is huge and nearly impossible to evaluate. There’s simply no effective way to tell if teachers believe in what they are teaching, simply going through the motions, or not using it at all. You can’t impose a curriculum on unwilling schools and teachers and expect it to work. High expectations matter for more than just students.
Neil Gaiman has won the 2009 Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book. The Caldecott Medal for illustrations was won by Beth Krommes for The House in the Night. Both awards were announced this morning at the American Library Association’s conference in Denver.
Publishers Weekly has a rundown of honorees, including four Newbery Honor Books: The Underneath by Kathi Appelt; The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom by Margarita Engle; Savvy by Ingrid Law; and After Tupac & D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson. Three Caldecott Honor Books were also cited: A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever by Marla Frazee; How I Learned Geography by Uri Shulevitz; and A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams, by Melissa Sweet and Jen Bryant.
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.
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