Archive for the 'Literacy' Category

Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 11, 2009 in Education News, Educational Policy, Homeschooling, Literacy, No category, Research and Reports and Weekly Roundup. 4 Comments

A weekly roundup of the week’s most important news, information and blog posts about curriculum, teaching, education policy and other items of interest to the Core Knowledge community.

Core Knowledge

The Unbearable Whiteness of Newbery?
The last time a Newbery Medal winner featured a black protagonist was Christopher Paul Curtis’ depression-era historical novel Bud, Not Buddy in 2000.  The last Hispanic protagonist?  Maia Wojciechowska’s Shadow of a Bull in 1965.  A new study shows precious few nonwhite protagonists—or even secondary characters in Newbery winners

Why Nature (and Recess) Might Help Kids Learn
New research finds that interaction with nature is “restorative” — it provides a rest from the kind of directed that many people believe is important to schooling.  Dan Willingham notes this finding fits well with other data showing that recess provides a cognitive boost for students. ”

Class Discussion For Sale
You attended school in the bad old traditional days. Don’t deny it. Back then, the teacher lectured while you took notes, read dead authors, and regurgitated dry facts. There was no class discussion. Today, you would not have to suffer, writes teacher Diana Senechal Schools across the country have purchased and mandated an exciting new type of classroom conversation called Accountable Talk®.

Reclaiming the Value of Knowledge in Public Life
It’s time to reclaim the value of knowledge in our political and civic life, argues UCLA professor Mike Rose.  Not merely academic knowledge, but broad, practical know-how that enables people to solve problems.

Best of the Blogs

The conceit of “21st Century Skills” at Flypaper
21st Century Skills is “the latest incarnation of the ‘all kids need to learn is how to learn’ argument,” writes Mike Petrilli.  Call it the “life adjustment” movement, call it “outcomes-based education,” call it “21st Century Skills” or call it a “doomed pedagogical fad.” Or simply call it bunk, because that’s what it is.

The Boston Pilot/Charter School Study: Some Good News, and Some Cautions at Eduwonkette
“A study on the efficacy of charter and pilot schools is a well-done, careful study that provides us with a range of estimates of charter and pilot school performance. There is certainly enough positive evidence here to support the creation of more charter schools in Boston,” notes Eduwonkette, ”but I want to offer two cautions.”

Blaming Special Ed at Jay P. Greene’s Blog
“It’s all too common but also completely mistaken to blame special education for the shortcomings of the public k-12 system,” Jay Greene writes.  ”Most attempts to blame special ed don’t even bother presenting data or make the most crude use of data to support their claims.”

Curriculum and Teaching

Spelling Is an Integral Part of Learning the Language, Not a Matter of Memorization
American Educator
A common perception is that visual memory–taking a mental picture of the word–is the basis of spelling  skill. Teachers often teach spelling by encouraging whole-word memorization. More recent studies, however, do not support the notion that visual memory is the key to good spelling.

The Rush for ’21st-Century Skills’
Washington Post 
The phrase has inspired a flood of programs, notes Jay Mathews, including Lego engineering clubs for elementary schools, and the National Geographic’s science adventure Jason Project for middle schools.  But many teachers say it is just good teaching with a jazzy name.

Maryland schools rank 1st in nation in analysis by ‘Education Week’
Baltimore Sun
Maryland’s schools rank first in the nation in an analysis of factors such as high school graduation rates, student achievement, academic standards and accountability by Education Week.

Education Policy

Schwarzenegger proposes 5 fewer school days
Los Angeles Times
A proposal by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to shorten the school year by five days is creating panic among educators across California, who say they barely have enough time to fit the state’s academic standards into the existing 180-day calendar.

Rhee Plans Shake-Up of Teaching Staff, Training
Washington Post
At the heart of Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s vision for transforming D.C. schools is a dramatic overhaul of its 4,000-member teacher corps that would remove a “significant share” of instructors and launch an ambitious plan to foster professional growth for those who remain.

Are we testing kids too much?
Mlive.com (Michigan(
An increased reliance on assessment tests is a trend that some find unsettling but others see as one of the most positive recent developments in education. Advocates say assessment tests help school districts measure the quality of their curricula and instruction.  Still, for some, subjecting students to so many tests sums up what’s wrong with American education.

Homeschooling and Parenting

Homeschooling Grows
USA Today
The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007.

On the table
Boston Globe
Even as families feel the economic pinch, many eligible students don’t take advantage of free or low-cost breakfasts served at schools. Why?

Rhodes Scholar says parents rewarded achievements in the classroom over football field
Diverse Issues in Higher Education
FSU junior safety Myron Rolle has played his final college football game. But he’s not leaving to join the National Football League; Rolle is one of 32 U.S. students who have been awarded an all-expense paid scholarship for up to three years of study at Oxford University in England.

Politically correct parents ditch ‘offensive’ traditional fairy tales
Daily Mail (U.K.)
Two-thirds of British parents believe traditional fairytales have “stronger morality messages” than modern equivalents.  But some are ditching Cinderella and Rapunzel in favor of The Gruffalo or The Very Hungry Caterpillar, believing the older stories are politically incorrect or “too dark” to read to children.

Et Alia

Playing outside can prevent children becoming short-sighted
Daily Mail (U.K.)
Playing outdoors dramatically cuts a child’s risk of becoming short-sighted. Spending two or three hours outside each day halves the chance of developing the condition.  The finding by researchers in Australia challenges the belief that short-sightedness is caused by computer use, TV watching or reading in dim light.

Class Discussion For Sale

Published by Diana Senechal on January 4, 2009 in Literacy and Opinion. 19 Comments

I teach in New York City, ostensibly one of the most successful districts in the nation. Our reforms are second to none. Test scores soar year after year. We buy the best new products and quickly toss out the old. When I began teaching in Brooklyn, I thought I would teach literature and writing. I quickly learned that literature was outmoded and “accountable talk” all the rage. It was once a phrase in lowercase. How it has grown!

You attended school in the bad old traditional days. Don’t deny it. Back then, the teacher lectured while you took notes, read dead authors, and regurgitated dry facts. There was no class discussion. You were never encouraged to think for yourself. It’s a miracle that you read the paper now-or read at all, for that matter.

Today, you would not have to suffer. Schools across the country have purchased and mandated an exciting new type of classroom conversation called Accountable Talk®.

“Purchased classroom conversation?” you might gasp. Hold it! Your question doesn’t conform to Accountable Talk® format. You must phrase your question thus: “It seems to me that you said that schools have purchased their own classroom conversation. Is that what you meant?” Yes, that was my drift.

Coined in the 1990s by the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, the phrase “accountable talk” refers to a mode of classroom conversation that emphasizes (you guessed it) accountability: justifying one’s statements, responding to others, and staying within the boundaries of the topic. Beyond that, it is now a brand name and a product. In 2007, the Institute for Learning began displaying a service mark (SM) next to the phrase. In 2008, Accountable Talk® became a registered trademark. In other words, we must now purchase our own classroom conversation-or rather, our district purchases it for us and requires that we place it on our tongues.

What kind of talk have we purchased? Accountable Talk® embraces conventions of so-called academic conversation: starter phrases, social cues, and habits of referring to the text. The basic principle–that we must substantiate what we say-has generally been part of any good class discussion, but Accountable Talk® makes the conventions explicit and requires total compliance with its rules. It is intended especially for children who lack exposure to such conventions of speech. In moderation, it makes sense. But does it really reproduce academic conversation? Or does it require us to give up an element of intellectual freedom: our choice of wording and phrasing, within reason?

Suppose I decided to hold a class discussion without Accountable Talk®. If I admitted openly that it was not Accountable Talk®, I would be flouting district mandates. If I called it Accountable Talk® but didn’t conform to its protocol, I would break trademark law. In other words, teachers are now bound by both district regulations and trademark law to acknowledge and adhere to a particular kind of classroom talk. This should raise some concern and questions if not outright alarm. Our speech, of all things, should be protected from branding and marketing. The Founding Fathers did not foresee that someone might appropriate, sell, and mandate a style of speech.

Trademark concerns aside, I object to a mere three aspects of Accountable Talk®: the accountability, the talk, and the poor prose resulting from the two.

In education, “accountability” suggests a wrongdoing: we are made “accountable” so that we can no longer slip by with poor practice. Why, then, must a good class discussion be called “accountable”? Shouldn’t it be driven by something deeper, like desire for truth, curiosity about the subject, and respect for others? Accountability should not be our highest ideal; it has value and meaning only when higher principles are in place. Those principles present, a class discussion needs no special name. Accountable talk could help us out of a bog; but once we can breathe and walk, we should make full use of our faculties, using the words and phrases that seem best. One does not have to be “accountable” at every moment; there is room, in a good class discussion, for exclamations, tangents, and incomplete ideas.

As for talk, there is too much of it in our classrooms already. Students must constantly “turn and talk”; “peer-edit,” “engage in group work,” and “share out.” They sit facing each other, so that teachers won’t distract them. Students rarely learn how to listen, take in ideas and language, and think independently. Consider, for instance, the “turn and talk” technique. Instead of taking in a story that the teacher is reading aloud, students are instructed periodically to turn and talk about it with a partner. This breaks up their private thoughts and requires them to consult with someone else. One recalls David Riesman’s observation in The Lonely Crowd regarding “that rapid circulation of tastes which is a prelude to other-directed socialization.” Contemplation cedes to buzz. The buzz, in turn, creates a market for talk products, which require services, consultants, and a brand.   

Of course there should be some discussion in the classroom, but now it has risen to the status of a petty god. Teachers and students alike must be trained in this sort of talk so that they will practice it correctly. As a consequence, the emphasis is often on the talk itself. Administrators conducting spot-checks want to see evidence of it; they are pleased when they see students turning and talking to their partners. It matters little whether they can recite and interpret Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” or give a thoughtful definition of democracy. What matters is that they are talking. This makes careful, sustained thought difficult if not impossible.

Let’s be reasonable, though. If we disregard the accountability, talk, and trademark, Accountable Talk® is a fine idea-except that it isn’t. Its emphasis on process results in bad prose. In a typical Accountable Talk® discussion, students put great effort into their beginning and ending phrases. A student might comment: “I would like to add on to what Jeremy said by saying that the picture shows a covered wagon. Does anyone care to concur, challenge, or add on?” The student thus conveys: “the picture shows a covered wagon” but adds twenty-two extraneous words for the sake of compliance. No one notices; it all sounds good. Checklist conditions have been met. The sentences, replete with verbiage, sound “academic.” We can all go to sleep. But some of us stay up late remembering the fiery, pithy, lovely language we love. Such memory offers hope: it has no trademark yet.

Diana Senechal teaches theatre and ESL at P.S. 108, an official Core Knowledge school in New York City.  She has a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale. Her translations of the Lithuanian poetry of Tomas Venclova appeared this fall in a new volume, The Junction.

You’re Not Going to Read This Post

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 20, 2008 in Education Theory, Higher Education and Literacy. 4 Comments

Digital technology has become an imperial force in education, and it should meet more antagonists argues Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein.  Clearly he’s among those antagonists.  Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he makes a strong case for reading online as a lesser kind of literacy, with profound implications for teaching and learning.  

Pointing to the work of Web researcher Jakob Nielsen, who has studied the eye movements of readers, Bauerlein notes that people read online in a physically different pattern than text on a printed page.   Online, readers eyes move in a pattern resembling the upper case letter F.  ”At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page,” says Bauerlein.  ”Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored.” 

In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, “‘Reading’ is not even the right word.” The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the “nut” and nothing else.

In short, online literacy is simply not literacy as we conventionally understand it.  “Yes, it’s a kind of literacy,” Baurlein writes, ”but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention — in a word, slow reading. Fast scanning doesn’t foster flexible minds that can adapt to all kinds of texts, and it doesn’t translate into academic reading,” he writes.

Bauerlein is writing from the persepective of a college professor, and he concerns himself with higher education, but his arguments pertain to all classrooms where we are worshipping at the altar of technology.  “Given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces,” he concludes.  “Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores. That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitize learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students’ minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate, and they can’t do it by themselves.”

Good, smart stuff from an iconoclastic thinker.  Of course, you stopped reading two paragraphs ago.

If You Push Out Subject Matter, You Push Out Reading Comprehension

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 3, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Literacy. 0 Comments

Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch is interviewed by Claus von Zastrow of the Learning First Alliance over at the website Public School Insights.  While supporting the broad aims of accountability, Hirsch laments the narrowing of the curriculum that has occurred under NCLB, since broad general knowledge is critical to reading comprehension.  Thus ”if you push out subject matter, you’re also pushing out reading comprehension.” 

Discussing the new Core Knowledge Reading Program, which will be piloted in ten New York City schools this year, Hirsch notes that the “listening and learning” strand of the program is key, since when it comes to taking in information ”reading doesn’t catch up to listening until 7th grade on average.  You’re really handicapping yourself in the teaching of general knowledge that’s needed for reading comprehension if you insist on doing it through the decoding process.”

There’s lots more.  You can hear the entire interview here.

Reading Strategies: A Little Goes a Long Way

Published by Dan Willingham on August 28, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Literacy. 11 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

Reading About Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 27, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Literacy. 2 Comments

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli weighs in on the Core Knowledge reading program announcement.  So does Richard Whitmire.  Elissa Gootman’s longer piece in yesterday’s NY Times even manages to elicit warm words from Lucy Calkins.  But especially welcome is Richard Lee Colvin’s entry at Early Stories, which concludes

“Journalists might look into pre-kindergarten programs or elementary schools in their area that are using the Core Knowledge approach.  Are the kids bored? Do their heads hurt?” 

If anyone wishes to take up Colvin’s suggestion, a complete list of Core Knowledge Schools can be found here.  Such a visit would help counter the nonsense peddled for years by Alfie Kohn, for example, that Core Knowledge is merely a bunch o’ facts that “steal time from more meaningful objectives.”

Indeed, too many people in education still carry around the idea that reading is a content-neutral skill, and don’t appreciate the connection between background knowledge and reading comprehension.  There is an assumption on the part of many teachers that the ability to decode and to apply metacognitive “reading strategies” is enough to make any text comprehensible.  Isn’t it pretty to think so?

Over the next couple of days, UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham and Matt Davis, who heads the Core Knowledge Reading Program will weigh in here on reading.  Stay tuned.

Big Day in the Big Apple

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 25, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Literacy. 0 Comments

Richard Whitmire dropped a hint last week calling it “the biggest development in reading instruction that won’t make the front pages of any national newspaper. But it should.”  Today came the announcement: a three-year, $2.4 million pilot project to test a new Core Knowledge Reading Program in New York City Schools.  Chancellor Joel Klein made the announcement, along with Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and Amida Gentile of the UFT.  The DOE’s press release is here.

Lots to say about this initiative, but here’s coverage in the New York Times, Edweek, and New York’s WABC-TV.

Reading, Interrupted

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 18, 2008 in Literacy and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Here’s a shocker:  Students who send and receive text messages while completing a reading assignment take longer to complete their reading.  But counterintuitively, they still manage to understand what they’re reading, according to a study reported in Education Week. 

The students interrupted by messages during their reading performed just as well as uninterrupted readers on a comprehension test.  “Researchers theorized that one reason that the multitasking students did as well—but took longer—may be that they went back and reread passages after they paused to answer instant messages,” EdWeek reports.

Text, Yes, But Is It Reading?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 28, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Literacy. 3 Comments

Are the hours kids and teenagers spend prowling the Web a threat to literacy?  Or is it simply a new form of reading and writing?  A sprawling New York Times thumbsucker notes that “as teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.”

Clearly when kids go online instead of turning on the TV, they read and write instead of passively consuming video.  But critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,”  Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., tells the Times.  “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

“Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” adds Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.

According to the paper, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component to next year’s tests. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. “A spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, said an additional test would overburden schools,” the Times notes.

One Man Truth Squad

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 15, 2008 in Literacy. 0 Comments

New York’s DOE “truth squad” could learn a thing or two from Reid Lyon.  Find an article about the imminent demise of Reading First, scroll down to the reader comments, and there he is.  And here.  Over here too.  More?  Try this.

I have, however, found at least one stone that Reid and his brother-in-arms, Patrick Riccards (aka Eduflack) seem to have left unturned.  On Edweek’s Curriculum Matters blog, Kathleen Kennedy Manzo writes, “I’m no researcher, and I admit that I could use a bit of tutoring, or more coffee, to absorb the findings of many of the research studies I read, but I haven’t really seen any rigorous evidence that Reading First is working overall.”

Get busy, gentlemen.