What might the new NAEP scores mean?

The "Nation's Report Card," otherwise known as the report on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP (I always thought it rhymed with "Jeep," but it may rhyme with "tape"), has just come out.  The NAEP is widely considered a good test, and since the NAEP is not high-stakes, there is little reason for schools or students to cheat, or for schools to attempt to teach directly to it.  I remember Mike Dukakis telling an auditorium full of Leafstrewn students that NCLB was unnecessary because we already had the NAEP.

The NAEP is a good test, and because it is such a good test, and because reading and math abilities change so extraordinarily slowly, there aren't the kinds of variations in the NAEP that there are in, say, the MCAS.  MCAS scores have gone up dramatically over the past fifteen years, while the NAEP scores are always more or less the same.  Therefore, the release of the NAEP scores is a little like a Rorschach  test.

Optimists who favor ed reform will point to little fluctuations and say, See, NAEP scores have risen over the past four years!  People who are against ed reform will say, Look, 17-year olds reading scores are below where they were in the nineties! Nerds will rightly point out that the demographics of the students taking the test have changed significantly over the years, and that breaking out subgroups can be interesting (for instance, black kids' scores have improved much more than those of white kids).  Contrarians might say, the scores haven't changed much, so school doesn't matter.

I'd like to point out an interesting feature of the new report and suggest a possible explanation for it.  I'm not sure I'm right, but my explanation goes along with some of what I have said in the past about the difference between short-term thinking and long-term thinking.

NAEP scores rise for 9 and 13 year-olds
The new "Nation's Report Card" has a very clear lede, and here it is:


Both 9- and 13-year-olds scored higher in reading and mathematics in 2012 than students their age in the early 1970s . Scores were 8 to 25 points higher in 2012 than in the first assessment year. Seventeen-year-olds, however, did not show similar gains. Average reading and mathematics scores in 2012 for 17-year-olds were not significantly different from scores in the first assessment year.


In other words, the most significant result coming out of this year's data is that over the past forty years, scores of nine and thirteen-year olds have gone up somewhat, but scores of seventeen-year olds are not significantly different than they were forty years ago.

One way to interpret this is to say, Well, we sure are doing a better job in the elementary schools; but high schools just aren't getting better.

This view--that elementary schools are improving but high schools are not--doesn't seem totally unreasonable, but there's an interesting problem with it that I have not seen anyone point out. The problem is that this result doesn't fit well with the standard theories of education, which would expect increased achievement by K-8 students to lead directly to increased achievement by 17-year-olds. The standard theories of education--that is, the views of people like Tim Shanahan, the ed reformers, and so on--see learning as essentially a step-by-step process of learning skills. According to this view, it is important to teach reading early, and to focus heavily on skills.  But if you have this view, then the higher scores of 9 and 13 year-olds would predict higher scores of 17-year-olds, and so the lower scores of 17-year-olds would seem to imply, not only that high schools were not getting any better, but that they were actually getting significantly worse.  For you would expect that if you took two 13-year-olds and put them through the same secondary education, the one who was a better reader as a 13-year-old would end up a better reader at 17. For a much better reader at 13 to end up the same as his less-skilled peer at 17 would seem to imply a much worse secondary education.

Have US high schools gotten worse over the past 40 years?
The NAEP scores are, if you follow the standard model, evidence that high schools have actually gotten worse over the past forty years.  This is certainly possible. It's also possible that there are demographic issues involved (changes in dropout rates could affect the scores of 17-year-olds).  But there is another possibility: it could be that the short-term thinking that has been increasingly prevalent over the past few decades has actually led to short-term success, but to a kind of short-term success that has not supported long-term improvement.

I can see two ways this could work.  One is a direct cost: the short-term teaching could be actively bad in the long run.  For instance, it might turn kids off to learning or reading.  If you drill kids for tests, the drilling might improve their scores but make them less creative thinkers.  Two, there might be an opportunity cost: by teaching skills or teaching to the test, you might do less of the kinds of things that prepare kids for learning later on.  For instance, you might read aloud to the kids less, or you might cut down on recess, or you might reduce the time allotted for free, creative play.  Any of these could be imagined to result in lower reading scores a decade later.

Evidence that this kind of short-term/long-term trade-off might be possible can be found in the studies on Waldorf schools that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.  Waldorf schools do not do any explicit teaching of reading skills until the second grade, and their reading scores are, not surprisingly, markedly below those of other schools in the early grades:



The Waldorf schools do, however, catch up.  I'd love to see data on where those students are at the age of 17.  It seems very possible that by the age of 17 the Waldorf kids, who while everyone else was drilling on phonics instead did a lot of listening to stories, singing songs, reciting poems, and observing nature, might be way ahead.  And that may be the same dynamic we see in the NAEP scores.


If our goals are long-term, why are we all thinking short-term?
As I have repeatedly argued, getting better at reading is a very long-term process, and yet far too much of our thinking as teachers, like far too much of the discourse about education, focuses on the short term.  Most discussion of lesson-planning, for instance, seems based on teaching students a discrete skill that they have never attempted before.  John Hattie, in the introduction to his magnum opus, Visible Learning, offers my favorite example of this short-term thinking: Hattie describes in loving detail the excitement of an initial lesson in rappelling down a building, and then says that this is "the heart of the model of successful teaching and learning."  This is absurd, since reading is neither dangerous nor novel to most of our students, and Hattie would find that teaching rappelling to people who'd already been rappelling for ten years would be very, very different. But Hattie's absurdity is just an extreme version of the kind of thinking we all do.  We are after all called "teachers," and just as it is natural to think to ourselves, "So, what particular skill am I going to teach today?", it is also natural to want to measure students' improvement over the relatively short time periods of a unit, a semester, or a year.  So, under MCAS and NCLB, we now give students high-stakes tests every year, and we are moving to a system by which teachers are evaluated by the results of these short-term assessments.

I doubt this is wise, but in the end it may not do too much harm. The remarkable stability of the NAEP scores is a healthy reminder that changes in educational regimes in the US have not made much difference to test scores. On the other hand, the NAEP may also mean that short-term thinking is ineffective: it may lead to short-term successes, but those short-term successes do not necessarily lead to longer-term success.

Waldorf Schools are an interesting natural experiment showing that explicit reading instruction in the very early grades may be unnecessary

We have some family friends whose kids used to go to a (private) Waldorf school nearby.  The kids were wonderful, but I didn't know much about the school or its methods.  A few days ago, when I was saying something about whether children needed to read "informational text" in the very early grades, my wife said, "That's silly. Waldorf schools don't teach ANY reading until second grade, and those kids end up just fine."

I looked this up, and, as usual, my wife was right: Waldorf schools generally don't teach reading until second grade, use a whole language approach and avoid much explicit strategy instruction when they do teach it, and their students apparently end up reading just fine.  This is an important result, because it would seem to show that explicit reading instruction in Kindergarten and first grade may not be necessary, and that students certainly don't need to read much informational text to themselves in kindergarten and first grade in order to learn to read well later on.

Recent Studies
Until recently, most Waldorf schools were private, so skeptics could argue that if Waldorf students ended up being good readers, the students and families at those schools were distinctly different from the norm, so no comparison was possible.  Over the past couple of decades, however, a number of public Waldorf schools have opened, most of them in California, and two recent studies in the U.S.(Oberman 2007(pdf); Larrison et al. 2012) compare the results at these schools with those at traditional schools with comparable student demographics. The two studies find the same result: when it comes to reading on their own, students in the early grades in Waldorf schools are dramatically worse than their peers in regular schools, but by the later grades, the Waldorf students have caught up or surpassed the regular-school students.

The graphic below shows some of the results obtained in the 2012 study. The scores of the Waldorf students start well below average, then catch up by fourth grade, then seem to pull ahead.

These results are striking. When the same researchers looked only at the California Waldorf schools, so as to avoid issues with cross-state comparisons, the same pattern was seen, though with less dramatic divergence in the upper grades. When Oberman did a similar comparison on a more limited scale and with data from two years earlier, she found a somewhat similar pattern--Waldorf students starting out behind and catching up, if not pulling ahead.  A New Zealand study comes to the same conclusion: Waldorf students do badly on reading tests when they are 6 and 7, but by the time they are entering adolescence, they have caught up or even pulled ahead.

Conclusions
Now, of course the students and families at these schools are self-selecting, and of course there may be other ways to explain away these results, and of course this is not a very large body of scholarly literature.  Nevertheless, I can't find any studies that contradict these three, and these results are consistent with thinking that what is important is not explicit instruction in discrete reading skills, and not reading a minimum proportion of informational text--but, instead, developing students minds by engaging their imaginations, creating a culture of engaged intellectual inquiry, doing lots of reading stories aloud and having them sing songs and repeat poems.

So these studies aren't definitive, but they are enough to call into further doubt the blithe assurances of people like Tim Shanahan and David Coleman that their preferred approach is consistent with the available empirical evidence.

Reading instruction without reading...

...is like growing up without eating.  Much of the reading instruction discussed in yesterday's New York Times article sounded like what I'm afraid a lot of the English curriculum is like in a lot of schools: classroom activities that mimic a test. Trying to raise scores leads to even more test-mimicking curriculum.  In the Times article, there was only one extended description of a classroom activity.  It went like this:

"...the teacher, guided the students in a close reading of a few paragraphs. But when she asked them to select which of two descriptions fit Terabithia, the magic kingdom created by the two main characters, the class stumbled to draw inferences from the text."

This is at what sounds like a successful school, with a thoughtful teacher.  But notice the two important things that are not happening here:

a) The students are not reading very much.  "A few paragraphs" is not much.  Now, of course it's possible that the kids are reading a lot at other times.  But none of the many teachers and experts quoted in the article ever mentions actually reading, so I think it's possible these kids may manage to do what a third of my ninth grade class did in middle school, and get through years without completing a single book.

b)  The students are not themselves describing Terabitihia; they are asked to "select" from two possible descriptions.  In other words, the students are answering multiple choice questions, not open-ended questions.

This is not reading; it is taking a test.  Taking a test can be educational--I always urge my Juniors to take the AP English test, because I think one day focused on a high-quality test can be a learning experience--but this is not what you need day in and day out.  It's as if, trying to get malnourished children to grow taller, we carefully measured their height every day, without ever letting them eat.

Why can't US experts remember that reading builds vocabulary?

An Edweek blog post (h/t SK) asks, "What are the best ways to help students -- mainstream and/or English Language Learners -- develop academic vocabulary?"  The author of the blog answers the question himself, then offers advice from a number of a number of other experts.  In the blog post proper, five experts offer advice; not one mentions reading. 

Instead, we get wisdom like "Select vocabulary strategically."  Hm.  There is also a wonderful Freudian slip in the author's step-by-step instructions in how to teach a word list.  He would have us first ask kids what they think the words mean, and then: "The following step is to illicit these student ideas and and guide them toward an accurate definition of each word, which they then write down."

Only in an appended group of reader-tweeted responses to the questions does someone finally remember that reading might be a good way to learn academic vocabulary: "Students develop their academic vocabulary best by reading academic texts on topics they are interested in."  Curious, I looked up the tweeter.  Who was this wise person who remembered reading?  Not a US expert, but "first and foremost a a family person: a mother of two wonderful boys, my husband’s wife, a daughter, a sister, an aunt…" She's also, in her professional capacity, a reading teacher in a college for tourism studies in Slovenia.

Why can't US experts remember that reading builds vocabulary?  Why is it only professors of tourism studies in Slovenia?!

Who knew: Singapore is a den of Dewey-eyed hippies!

On this snow day, I'm about to get down to the business of reading what my students have written about the books they're reading, but I just spent about ten minutes psyching myself up by reading a bit of Pasi Sahlberg's book about Finland.  I haven't looked much into Finland, because it seemed to me that a lot of people who hold it up as a model are ignoring the huge differences between Finland's relatively equal society and our relatively cutthroat one, but Sahlberg's book is interesting.  One thing I learned from it has nothing to do with Finland at all, but with a country I think of as dramatically different: Singapore.

I always thought Singapore was a super-conservative city state that kept its culture business-friendly by such illiberal practices as cracking down on freedom of speech, executing a lot of people, and caning schoolchildren.  It may be that way, but this morning I learned (maybe everyone else already knows this?) that its Ministry of Education has been, over the past fifteen years, promoting a vision of education that even A. S. Neill might have admired.  Singapore's initiative is called:

TEACH LESS, LEARN MORE

That is a beautiful slogan, and it's elaborated with a full-on liberalizing zeal that must be partly necessitated by Singapore's history of cane-wielding Gradgrindian severity but was still inspiring even to me.  We in Leafstrewn are, I think, with them in theory, but not always in practice.  So during this week in which Mother Nature seems to be offering her own critique of high-stakes testing, here are some Singaporean lessons (from the Ministry of Education's website):

Remember Why We Teach -

More… Less… For the Learner   To Rush through the Syllabus  To Excite Passion  Out of Fear of Failure  For Understanding  To Dispense Information Only  For the Test of Life  For a Life of Tests

Reflect on What We Teach - 

More… Less… The Whole Child The Subject Values-centric Grades-centric Process Product Searching Questions Textbook Answers

Reconsider How We Teach - 

More…	Less…
Engaged Learning	Drill and Practice
Differentiated Teaching	‘One-size-fits-all’ Instruction
Guiding, Facilitating, Modelling	Telling
Formative and Qualitative Assessing	Summative and Quantitative Testing
Spirit of innovation and enterprise	Set Formulae, Standard Answers

"English" class and language classes

Last summer I spent a few days with a childhood friend, Becca Lynch, who's now a Spanish teacher in Maine. I told her I'd been thinking a lot about how to teach reading, I'd been worrying that kids weren't reading enough, etc.--and she said, Oh, that sounds a lot like what I've been thinking about recently with my own Spanish teaching.

Becca told me that over the past few years she had modified her teaching approach to try to focus mainly on making sure her kids heard or read as much comprehensible Spanish as possible. Instead of explicitly teaching a grammar rule, or a verb tense, or whatever, she tried to create experiences in her classroom that would allow for these aspects of the language to be heard in a meaningful and understandable context. This "comprehension-based instruction" had radically improved her teaching practice, and she was enthusiastic about the conferences, books and blogs that had helped her figure out how to do it.

Becca often used the phrase "comprehensible input", a phrase I recognized, and we soon figured out that one of the gurus of her style of language teaching, Stephen Krashen, was also one of the proponents of independent reading in English class. I knew that Krashen had done most of his work on learning foreign languages, and I had read a lot of Krashen's articles (and his book, "The Power of Reading") about reading, but I didn't know anything about how these ideas were actually put into practice in, say, a high school Spanish class. My friend sent me a couple of links the week after we saw each other, but I was pressed for time and didn't really look at them.

Last week, Becca sent along another link, this time to a blog by a Spanish teacher. When I looked at it, I thought, wow--I have to talk to the World Languages people at Leafstrewn! And it renewed my desire to make my classroom full of meaningful reading and writing--comprehensible input.

I guess my questions are: what do World Language classrooms look like at Leafstrewn? (I need to come visit some!) Are my WL colleagues focused on this "Comprehensible Input" idea, or does it seem like old hat or like a new gimmick? How does teaching reading comprehension in English class relate to teaching comprehension of Spanish in Spanish class? What about "TPRS" (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling")--is anybody doing that? What about the "embedded reading" idea (http://embeddedreading.com/about/), in which students start with an easy version of a text, and then read gradually more complex versions--do any Leafstrewn WL teachers use that? Could "embedded reading" be done in an English class? And so on.

I haven't gotten any answers yet, but I need to start asking some colleagues.

For vocabulary, input volume matters

A recent issue of Edweek has another lame article purporting to connect research to the Common Core--again, most of the "research" is incredibly weak and the experts say silly things.  Nevertheless, the article does mention one classic piece of research, and looking back at that study leads, as usual, to the conclusion that reading volume matters a lot.

Unnecessary new research...
According to the first paragraph of the article:

     Children who enter kindergarten with a small vocabulary don't get taught enough words—
     particularly, sophisticated academic words—to close the gap, according to the latest in a
     series of studies by Michigan early-learning experts.

Well, duh.  Anyone who had looked carefully at the vocabulary research, or indeed simply thought logically about the matter, would know that no scientific studies are necessary to conclude that kids with small vocabularies can't possibly be "taught" enough words to close the gap, since the only truly significant way kids learn words is through reading them and hearing them used.  I have never yet read a study purporting to show that any class of students, anywhere, has been "taught" enough words to make a significant increase in their vocabularies.  The main study discussed in the article found limited vocabulary instruction across the board, and less instruction in "academically challenging words" at high-poverty-schools.  Neither of these findings is necessarily significant, because vocabulary instruction just doesn't make much of a difference.

...and humorless experts!
Throughout the article, ostensible experts are quoted saying silly things.  For instance, one scholar says that Kindergarteners should be taught academic words like "predict."  That might be reasonable, but then she goes on, "Why would you choose to emphasize the word 'platypus'? It makes no sense."  Hm.  What makes no sense to me is that someone who can't imagine a reason to emphasize a really interesting, cool, loveable word like "platypus" would have anything to do with children's education, let alone be on the faculty at the University of Michigan.

What we should be thinking about
The article spends a fair amount of space, and a cool decision tree sidebar graphic, on which words to teach.  Thinking a lot about this is probably a waste of time, since teaching words doesn't make much of a difference, except, perhaps, insofar as kids enjoy them.  What then should we be thinking about?  Well, the only decent piece of research cited by the article is the classic 1995 study by Hart and Risley that reveals the remarkable disparities in the numbers of words heard by kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds.  Upper-middle class kids hear 11 million words per year, while poor kids hear 3 million; by the age of three, upper-middle class kids know twice as many words.  The  two "key conclusions" of the Hart and Risley study are the following:

• The most important aspect of children’s language experience is quantity.
• The most important aspect to evaluate in child care settings for very young children is the amount of talk actually going on, moment by moment, between children and their caregivers.

These conclusions do NOT say that we should be spending our time deciding which words to "emphasize" or "prioritize" or teach; instead, what matters is how many words kids are hearing or reading.  In fact, I see no reason not to transfer the second conclusion of the Hart and Risley study to schools of older children, too, with only slight modifications. As children get older, we need to add reading to our model, since as we get older reading is essential for experiencing high volumes of sophisticated language, and the quality of the input may become more important, since you do want them to hear or read words thast they don't actually know, but the quantity is still much more important than the Edweek article acknowledges.  So I would extrapolate thus:

• The most important aspect to evaluate in child-care settings for older children (i.e., schools) is the amount of sophisticated language actually experienced by the children, whether from a caregiver (i.e. teacher) or by reading.

Of course, I suspect reading is probably more important than teacher-talk. The Hart and Risley study focused on talk among families, which is primarily one-on-one, and the best way to simulate that in a classroom with a student-teacher ratio of at least 20:1 is by having each child reading a book. So I'll conclude where I always do, with another form of my usual hypothesis:

• The most important aspect to evaluate in child-care settings for older children (i.e., schools) is the amount of reading actually going on.

My colleagues and I gave a common assessment!

Leafstrewn is renowned for its independent and distinctive teachers.  Or, some might say, we're notorious for our lack of consistency.  In any case, every teacher has her own way of doing things.  We can’t agree on common policies and practices, let alone enforce them. If ten people discuss an issue, there will be passionate defenses of twenty different opinions.  Our English department chair uses the phrase “herding cats” more frequently than she probably realizes.  So when the ninth grade teachers—all ten of us—decided to make half of our midyear exam a common assessment, I wasn’t sure if it would actually happen.

Amazingly enough, we did it.  Every freshman at Leafstrewn was given the same two-page passage from a Sherman Alexie story and the same prompt for an analytical paragraph, and every paragraph was graded with the same 5-category rubric.  To make the grading more objective, we graded the exams, not of our own students, but of our colleagues’.

We will eventually sit down and consider the numbers, but I have a few reactions now:

(1) reading a passage and writing an analysis of it is an extraordinarily complex task, which is great, but it’s pretty hard to assess in an objective way;

(2) the strength of rubrics is that they are specific and explicit, but this is also their weakness;

(3) everyone got a B;

(4) that’s okay!

(5) I could have done a much better job of preparing my students, and that preparation would have been better not just for this assessment, but in general.

(1) Reading a passage and writing an analysis of it is an extraordinarily complex task, which is great, but it’s pretty hard to assess in an objective way

There is an incredible amount to keep track of when you’re reading anything closely—emotions, connotations of particular words, figures of speech, intertextuality, patterns (like repetition and contrast) within the text, etc.  Writing, too, is really, really complicated—you have to master grammar, ideas, structure, logical arguments, relevant evidence, and so on.  Skilled readers and writers do all this unconsciously, and we sometimes forget that it is amazingly complicated, and our brains, even the most “limited” of them, are quite incredible.

This incredible  complexity becomes much more visible when you start talking about how to judge the quality of student reading and writing.  Different teachers have different ideas of which pieces of this incredible complexity to focus on.  It’s like the story of the elephant: I’m looking at the elephant’s legs, one colleague is looking at the trunk, another is bumping into the tusks, and so on.  Designing a rubric is tough, because there are always things that you’re leaving out, or looking at from only one side.

(2) The strength of rubrics is that they are specific and explicit, but this is also their weakness

Much of the trouble in grading the assessment came in using the rubric.  A rubric is intended to make the grading more transparent and clear, and, most crucially, more specific.  If a student is told, “Your essay is bad,” the student will want to know what in particular was bad about it.  A rubric is supposed to offer the kid that specificity.  What was interesting about the grading process was that the specificity of the rubric was usually exactly what caused trouble in the grading.

For example, if we judged that a conclusion is not good enough for the “Good” category, we had to circle the box on the rubric for a conclusion that “Needs Work.” That box reads: “Brings paragraph to a finish that repeats previous ideas.”  The problem is that there are many ways for a conclusion to be bad, and repeating previous ideas is only one of them. I ran into this problem of overly specific descriptors in every single category on this rubric.

(3) Everyone got a B

Either because our rubric was too easy at the low end, too tough at the high end, or because our students are all pretty good, or because we did a good job of preparing our students, most of the grades fell in the B range. 

(4) That’s okay!

I think one of the lessons here is that actually for all our hand-wringing, our kids are really quite competent.  They can read a passage and write a reasonable paragraph about it.  They are not illiterate.  Almost all of them managed to come up with identifiable topic sentences, evidence that more or less supported their main ideas, and a conclusion that in some way related to what they were saying.  This is no mean feat for a fourteen year old, and I wonder, I admit, if it has something to do with MCAS.  Maybe, as our department chair says, MCAS has really improved kids’ ability to write these kinds of paragraphs.

(5) I could have done a much better job of preparing my students, and that preparation would have been better not just for this assessment, but in general!

I think this common assessment was a great thing to do.  Having students read something and analyze it in a disciplined way is worthwhile, and doing it as a group certainly made my own teaching better.  I was more focused, my students were more motivated, and it took some of the dissonance out of the grading.  (Normally, when we grade our own students’ work, there is an uncomfortable dissonance.  It is as if Bela Karolyi were to judge his own gymnasts’ routines, or as if a soccer coach were training his team for a game against herself.)  In a fairly short and stress-free preparation, I think I did a reasonably good job.

Nevertheless, although my students' performance was fine, there was a lot of room for improvement. How could I have helped them more?  What could I have done better?  A bunch of things, but here's one: I didn’t train my students well enough in coming up with a good main idea.  They tended to say something like, “The impression the author creates in this impression is of a family that is struggling.”  That is pretty obvious, and I need to help my students learn how to go deeper. To take an obvious thought and push it deeper one may:

  * Explore the why of the obvious thought (e.g. the family struggles because they’re in denial).

  * Consider ways in which the opposite is true as well, and craft a semi-dialectical topic sentence of the "Although A, nevertheless B" type--and then by the end of their paper they may arrive at the synthesis of C.  Later in life they can worry, Mr. Ramsay-like, about getting to Q or Z.

  * Explore the how of the obvious thought (e.g. the family struggles ineffectually, trying the same things over and over again even though they produce no results (father looking in wallet over and over, son dreaming over and over, etc.))

* Are there other ways?  Applying a schema? Making a connection?  What else? 

Teaching my students to push their thinking further would be useful not merely for the exam, but in general.  This is something that would be useful to focus on explicitly, and that I somehow overlooked.  That is one of the virtues of this common assessment--it makes the whole process more conscious and transparent, and so lets us see things that we should have seen before.

In the end, though, we and our students did a fine job.  Now if we could just get them to like to read...

"Skills" vs. "Process"

A colleague's post
I don't often think about the fact that I didn't go to Ed. School, but once in a rare while I wonder if I maybe missed something important. Last week, one of my colleagues wrote, on an internal forum, a very interesting post about different approaches to teaching reading; when I got to the part about how she was "haunted" by "the skills versus process debate" from Ed. School, I thought: Huh?  What skills versus process debate?  How did I miss that?  Fortunately, as I read on, I think I got the basic idea.

My colleague wrote that she fears her focus on skills undermines her goals around process.  She believes that many of our students in the "standard" (lower) track need a fair amount of explicit teaching of skills--the "training wheels" of checklists, rubrics, graphic organizers, etc.; and, while she sometimes worries that students can become dependent on these training wheels, she also thinks that, for almost all of our students, taking the training wheels off leads to high anxiety and not particularly interesting or imaginative work.

This tension played out, according to my colleague, around a recent passage paper that every tenth grader at Leafstrewn was assigned.  The tenth grade teachers, she writes, decided to take a less didactic or "skills"-focused approach to the assignment; I think this means the teachers didn't provide a lot of scaffolding--didn't tell students to make double-entry notes, didn't give a graphic organizer outline, didn't provide a list of literary terms and concepts, etc.  The students were simply, as I take it, given the assignment.

The resulting papers, my colleague reports, were "somewhere between terrible and mediocre."  My colleague now wonders whether she should have done more explicit teaching around the assignment.  Such explicit "skills" teaching might, she suggests, have made the assignment more like a "paint by numbers exercise," but she is also believes it would have led to better papers.

In her conclusion, my colleague writes that we need both skills and process.  She discusses an article by Lisa Delpit (here I felt on firmer ground--I haven't been to Ed. School, but I have read Other People's Children!).  As my colleague writes, Delpit's argument was that "the students who are most in need of the cultural power and capital schools provide get shortchanged by the skills vs. process debate," at least as it was playing out in the eighties.  Delpit calls the debate "fallacious; the dichotomy," she says, "is false."

My reaction
This was all very interesting to me--perhaps partly because I missed out on the debate fifteen years ago, but also because I worry about the issue all the time, though I don't use the term "process."  I wondered, as I was reading, if the debate was really so fallacious and the dichotomy so false as Delpit claimed. There is a distinction here, and it is significant in the real world, as my colleague's story about the tenth grade passage paper shows.

The story about the tenth grade passage was really interesting; like my colleague, I'm not sure what to conclude.  I do, however, have some questions.

One question is whether we teachers maybe tend to focus too much on the short term when we are thinking about lesson planning and assessment.  My colleague thinks, rightly, that her students' papers would have been better if she had given them, along with the assignment, specific strategies for how to do it.  I'm sure that's true; on the other hand, she shouldn't hold herself responsible for the performance of students that she had never seen six weeks before.  So part of it is that she was the coach of a team whose players she had never coached before, and if they don't know the fundamentals, like basic literary terms, or how to mark up a text, then (a) that's not her fault, and (b) giving them a quick primer on those fundamentals is probably not going to make a lasting difference.

Another question the story raises for me is what we should think of as the fundamental skills we are responsible for helping our students acquire.  Is writing a passage paper a fundamental skill?  Is doing double-entry notes?  Is knowing literary terms?  Maybe they are--although I realize that I myself didn't know what "double-entry notes" were until a couple of weeks ago, and I have certainly never made them myself.  But if passage papers, double-entry notes and literary terms are fundamental skills, akin, say, to the two-on-one in hockey, then our tenth graders probably should have been practicing them in earlier grades. 

But maybe the fundamental skills are deeper--even more "fundamental".  That is, maybe they are the more or less unconscious skills of reading, thinking and writing, and the skill of being able to quickly adapt those skills to a new assignment.  Maybe writing a passage paper is like running a particular play on a two-on-one, or like playing a box-like zone defense when one of your five skaters is in the penalty box.  Running a particular play, or killing a penalty with the box defense, is something that a young hockey player might not be too familiar with, so it might need to be taught, and if it weren't taught, you might expect the results to be "somewhere between terrible and mediocre."

So these are the questions my colleague's story raises for me.  My gut instinct--but I'm not sure I'm right--is always to think that we should focus less on teaching particularized skills than on trying to make sure that our students are doing a lot of reading, a lot of talking about what they read, and a lot of revising of their own writing. My gut instinct is perhaps partly supported by what's been happening in youth hockey in recent years.  According to my friend John, the President of the youth hockey program my kids play in, there has been a realization, in recent years, that a lot of hockey practices have been too focused on explicit instruction, that kids were not getting enough time actually playing the game.  John told me that in the past, coaches used to be able to assume that their players were coming to them with thousands of hours of pond hockey and/or street hockey experience under their belts. That experience gave them a feel for the puck on the stick, a sense of how to shoot, how to pass, how, on defense, to challenge the guy with the puck.  These thousands of hours cannot, John said, be made up for with explicit instruction. 

If the analogy with English class holds (my grandmother tells me that these analogies are suspect--that she mistrusts analogous thinking so much that her memoir, soon to be published, contains only one metaphor!), then I'm still not sure what the lesson is.  What I fall back on is my feeling that if the task is meaningful, and if we can get the students to engage with it, then they will need some explicit instruction and lots of practice.  We shouldn't be too worried about teaching a skill right at the same time we're assessing it.  If the tenth grade common assignment was an initial or formative assessment, then teaching them about double-entry notes probably isn't appropriate.  If it was summative, then it should have come later in the year.  But above all, it is not our job to make the student's product excellent now, while we are teaching them, but to help the students become capable of making their own products excellent in the future.

Trying to think this through leaves me wondering what "process" is, and whether, if I would tend to downplay lots of explicit skill instruction (as opposed to practice and fine-tuning), that means I am more a "process" kind of person.  Maybe, but I don't love that term.  ("Process," to me, sounds like architecture-school claptrap--the kind of hooey untethered to the real world that gets you the kinds of buildings featured on a website I make sure to check at least twelve times a year: the eyesore of the month.)  The process that matters is the process of the students themselves being focused on the product--which I guess is the idea, but using the term "process" implies that the product is not important.  It is--and so the key next step would be to have the tenth graders look back at their own papers and try to make them better--which would require understanding why they were terrible or mediocre in the first place.

The Writing Counterrevolution

I. "The Writing Revolution"
There's an interesting but insidious article about writing instruction, "The Writing Revolution," in this month's Atlantic.  The article tells the story of a high school on Staten Island that changed the way it taught writing and saw its test scores and graduation rates improve significantly.

The changes in the writing instruction don't seem unreasonable--an increased focus on argument and grammar, along with a heavy use of sentence stubs and frameworks (e.g. "I agree/disgagree that_____, because _____")--and it seems possible that instituting a coherent writing and thinking curriculum as a big part of a schoolwide overhaul could be a big improvement in a bad school. Why, then, does the article so raise my hackles?

I think it's mainly because the article takes this one curricular shift and weaves it, with a lot of dangerously simplistic received ideas, into a standard narrative of recovering a lost golden age--in this case, the golden age of the 1950s. According to the article, the school's shift to "formal lessons in grammar, sentence structure and essay-writing" was a return to the ways that "would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950." This counterrevolution (the article's headline is misleading) was necessary, according to the article's narrative, because misguided educational movements of the 60s, 70s and 80s had led schools away from teaching "the fundamentals" and toward a weak, pointless curriculum of "creative-writing" in a "fun, social context."

This long-term narrative is annoyingly untethered to any hard data.  Were students better writers in the 1950s?  I doubt it very much.  The best data we have on long-term trends comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which shows little change from 1971 to 2008, but if anything shows a gradual upward trend.  If the story this Atlantic article is telling has much truth to it--if there was a shift in the 70s and 80s to a more fun and creative writing curriculum that ruined academic achievement across the country--then we should see NAEP scores going down.  But they don't go down, they go (slightly) up! Here are the National NAEP reading scores for 13 year olds:

1971       255
1975       256
1980       258
1984       257
1988       257
1990       257
1992       260
1996       258
1999       259
2004       259
2008       260

The reading scores for 9 year olds, who wouldn't have had as much schooling, and 17-year olds, who had more, tell basically the same story.  Students in 1971 had not had much time to be ruined, as the article implies they were, by teachers teaching Paulo Freire in Ed school, and yet they seem to have been no more literate than students in the nineties, or in 2008.

The particular story the Atlantic article tells, about one high school that changed (among other things) its writing instruction, is an interesting anecdote, one whose facts could be probed further (what else was changed at the school?) and whose meaning can be debated (even if the shift in writing curriculum was responsible for a dramatic improvement in academic achievement, is it possible that any coherent writing curriculum, even one that focused on personal or creative writing, could have had the same effect?).  The interesting anecdote, however, is put in the context of a larger narrative that seems to be clearly and demonstrably wrong.  It is simply not true that because misguided 60s and 70s pinkos, in the name of freedom, stopped teaching anything, student achievement plummeted.  Whatever teachers were doing in the 70s, 80s and 90s, student achievement did not plummet.

II. "How Self-Expression Damaged My Students"
The main Atlantic article is accompanied by a shorter piece by a former "teacher" (the guy seems to have used a brief stint in the New York public schools as a stepping stone from a career in magazine publishing to a career in the Ed Reform industry), entitled "How Self-Expression Damaged My Students." This bizarre article likens the "Reader's and Writer's Workshop" approach (one that this guy used in his classroom) to a "cargo cult."  In other words, the reading and writing his students did was, as he sees it, as totally pointless as the building of runways by primitive peoples who hoped that by imitating the form of an airfield they could bring back the airdrops of supplies and food that had come during the war.  This comparison is so insane on so many levels that I am not going to take the time to analyze it.

Later in his article, apparently realizing that he has gone off the deep end, the author tries to reel himself back, writing, "Let me hasten to add that there should be no war between expressive writing and explicit teaching of grammar and mechanics," but he goes on to argue that "at present, we expend too much effort trying to get children to 'live the writerly life' and 'develop a lifelong love of reading.'" And he concludes by implying that it is ten times more important to teach grammar and mechanics than to try to get kids to love reading and writing by having them actually do it.

These people are all about data, but where is the data that shows that grammar and mechanics "instruction" works better than just reading a lot? It sounds like the author of the Atlantic article had his students spend way too much time on the writing process and not nearly enough time reading, but just because he was bad at it does not mean that getting kids to develop a lifelong love of reading won't help them read and write better.  It almost certainly will.  Grammar and mechanics instruction, on the other hand, should be a small part of the curriculum.


III. What, then, to think? (Besides that the Atlantic is owned by right-wing crazies...)
I'm not sure what my own overarching narrative is (maybe that we're in the middle of a decades-long counterrevolution in which we are making the poor poorer, blaming them for the results of their poverty, and then telling them they ought to act more like they did in the 50s, when people respected their betters?), but I am pretty sure that these people in the Atlantic don't have the right one.

Studying English is a chronic condition; we must do "the same old things in the same way"; that's okay!

I. English class is repetitive

At our department meeting this week, one of my colleagues said that she feels discouraged when she looks at what her daughter is doing in English class in sixth grade, because it looks so similar to what we are doing in our high school classes at Leafstrewn.    My colleague said that on the first day of school, when she tells her students about the cool things on her syllabus, her students look like they've heard it all before.  "Oh great, we're going to write another profile," she imagined her students thinking. "Let's see, we did one of those in fourth grade--and sixth grade--and seventh grade--and..."

We laughed about it, but the story points up a distinctive aspect of English class that I've written about before: English, unlike math, science, French, or most other subjects, does not have a well-defined body of knowledge that it is our job to transmit.  In this English is much more similar to a sport--soccer, for instance, or running.  It does not seem totally unreasonable to write up year-by-year curriculum standards for math.  My daughter, in second grade, is just beginning to think about multiplication.  My son, in seventh grade, is beginning to think algebraically.  While it's true that different students may move through these topics at dramatically different rates (my son had a homeschooled friend who was learning integral calculus in second grade), the topics seem distinctly different.  In English, the tasks are largely the same year after year.

My daughter last year, in first grade, wrote an argumentative essay (like many of her classmates, she suggested that we should not despoil the planet).  The length and sophistication of her argument was not quite up to what my ninth graders do, but the task itself was basically the same, and even much of the vocabulary was the same.  Her teacher taught that one needed evidence to support one's main idea, that one's evidence should be relevant, that one should consider one's audience, and so on--concepts that sound very much like one of the state's Writing Standards for both grades 9-10 and grades 11-12: "Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence."  This is, again, like sports (my 12-year-old son's hockey team practices skating, passing, shooting, exactly the same fundamental skills practiced by six-year olds, and by the Bruins), and this is why the Massachusetts State Curriculum Frameworks are so hard for me to take seriously.  Their aim to provide what I think is called "scope and sequence" results in the absurdity of  seeming to suggest that only in grade four do students need to begin to "Choose words and phrases to convey ideas precisely" (L.4.3a.)

II. Studying English is a chronic condition

This summer, I read a book by Arthur Kleinman about doctoring and chronic illness that argues against strictly uniform, standardized systems of care, suggesting that they represented and produced a "dangerous hubris."    "Uncertainty," Kleinman suggests, "must be as central to the experience of the practitioner as it is to the patient."  Much of what his book says seems applicable to education in general, and English class in particular.  Rigid curricula, scripted lessons, the kind of backwards planning that assumes a pre-ordained destination: we can all come up with educational parallels to Kleinman's "complete...systems of care that claim to answer wholesale each and every one of the dilemmas faced by patients, families, and clinicians (and in a standardized manner, yet!)."

Kleinman's book is talking specifically about the chronically ill, and he often distinguishes what he says about chronic illness from the different truths that may be seen in cases of acute illness.  He says, for instance, that the doctor who cares for the chonically ill has more time to get things right, to build a relationship with his patient, to consider more fully his patient's social position and larger life situation, than an acute-care doctor, who is seriously constrained by the urgent necessity to act as quickly as possible.  Considering this distinction, it struck me that teachers, who deal with their students over the course of a whole year on an almost daily basis, are much more in the position of doctors for the chronically ill than in the position of doctors dealing with acute illness.  An ER doctor wants uniformity and certainty--a script, a checklist, an algorithm--while we teachers have the luxury of knowing that if we take the time to get to know our students' individual needs they will not die before we act.

The experience of the ER doctor may in some ways, however, parallel the experience of teachers in disciplines like math, science, or History.  If by the end of the week everyone in the class needs to learn the quadratic formula, or what the cell wall is and does, then perhaps a script or a checklist might make sense.  But in English especially, we are working on the same skills and tasks over and over, and every kid's needs are different, and the learning goals we have are not, and cannot be, acute.  Our student's do not have to learn the basic facts about Shay's Rebellion by next week.  Instead, they need to learn to read more nimbly, to think more deeply, to write more clearly, profoundly and coherently--or, as the state standards put it, to "Choose words and phrases to convey ideas precisely."

In this sense, being an English student in particular is a chronic condition.  Just as the essence of having a chronic condition is that you can never be cured, that you are always working on the same underlying issues, the essence of being an English student is that you can never be fully educated, that you are always improving the same basic skills. A math problem can be solved; no piece of writing is ever perfect.  If we see education in this way, Kleinman's discussion of chronic illness is interesting.  "We must begin," Kleinman says, "with the premise that chronic disease by definition cannot be cured, that indeed the quest for cure is a dangerous myth that serves both patient and practitioner poorly."

Is it possible, then, that the quest for mastery is a "dangerous myth" that serves both teacher and student poorly?  Perhaps! (1)

III. So is being repetitive a cause for despair?

No. The fact that we are working on the same tasks over and over is no reason for despair, any more than Claude Julien should despair when he has his players practice their passing for the umpteenth time.  We should think of ourselves as coaches as much as possible.  A good coach doesn't do much teaching; instead, she "runs a good practice."  In a good soccer practice, there shouldn't be much standing around, and there should probably be more than one ball on the field. In a good practice, the coach will often be helping one kid while other kids do drills or practice skills on another part of the field.  A good practice will include activities that will be useful for every single kid on the team, from the most skilled to the least skilled.

Yes, we are doing the same things over and over, but what we are doing is not only of immense practical importance, it also provides an opportunity, as one of my favorite poems says, "for love to continue and be gradually different."

IV. A poem!

Lack of novelty is a favorite theme of postmodern poetry (as Robert Hass wittily puts it: "All the new thinking is about loss./ In this it resembles the old thinking...").  One of my favorite poems, "Late Echo," by John Ashbery, is about this issue, and I kept thinking about it this week as I pondered our chronic condition.

Ashbery begins by feeling that "there really is nothing left to write about."  This is analogous to feeling like there is nothing left to teach (As Mallarme put it, "The flesh is sad, alas, and I have taught all the reading strategies"). But although Ashbery begins by saying that there really is nothing left to write about, he does not then, as Mallarme does, fantasize about sailing away to a tropical isle. Instead, the rest of Ashbery's poem is a revision of and counter to the ennui and discouragement of repetition; instead, his poem is a paean to repetition and dailiness, a pep talk to himself.

For immediately after saying there is nothing left to write about, Ashbery revises:

   Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things

   In the same way, repeating the same things over and over

   For love to continue and be gradually different.

Poetry is always about seeing the same things differently; so is English class!  We. too, need to repeat the same things over and over, to write about things in the same way, to read books in the same way, to discuss texts in the same way, to love words in the same way, so that love may continue and, as Ashbery puts it in another of the poem's wonderful, unpredictable shifts of meaning, "be gradually different."

The rest of the poem is a beautiful elaboration of this idea, of the idea that being merely a "talking engine," and one moreover who suffers, as our adolescent students do, from "chronic inattention," can, over time, with continual, loving repetition, reveal an "unprepared knowledge," which the poem doesn't have to say is a lot deeper and more satisfying than the "prepared knowledge" of scripted lesson plans.

Now off to dinner and a birthday party!

Appendix: The full poem...

LATE ECHO (by John Ashbery)

Alone with our madness and favorite flower

We see that there really is nothing left to write about.

Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things

In the same way, repeating the same things over and over

For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally

And the color of the day put in

Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter

For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic

Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention

Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory

And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows

That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge

Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.


Footnote:
(1) Kleinman goes on to say that the real goal is not a cure, but the "reduction of disablement," that is to say, "reducing the frequency and severity of exacerbations." This last goal is not easy to map onto education.  Kleinman is essentially saying that the doctor of a chronically ill patient should try mainly to help the patient not get worse.  This would be an odd, if not quite perverse goal for a teacher to adopt, but it is a goal that strikes a certain chord in me. When I first started teaching high school full time, I adopted as my explicit goal and first principle--and I told my students this straight out--one of the first principles of the Hippocratic oath, to "do no harm."  Back then I was haunted by the possibility that school is doing as much harm as good, that books like Wounded by School and Readicide; How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It are partly right.  Over ten years of teaching and parenting, my views have changed (largely because I've seen what a humane place school can be, and how supportive and wonderful schools can be to many students, especially those who are wounded outside of school), but I still think it's important to try not to do harm!

What Seems "Natural", and to Whom, and Why?

Natural Reading?  OK.  Natural Teaching? Maybe not.
A couple of times on this blog I have suggested that "natural reading" should be an important component of literacy education.  I still think so, but I recently read an interesting scholarly paper that made me realize that "natural" is a pretty subjective term.  I should have known this, since "all natural" is a classic slippery phrase in food marketing, and maybe in some sense I did know it, since my own use of the term "natural reading" was always intended to be partly humorous.  After all, who would be in favor of unnatural reading?  But while I still think "natural reading" is a good idea, I'm less sure, after perusing this 2009 paper by Mckeown, Beck and Blake (Rethinking Reading Comprehension), about natural teaching.

Scholarly articles are a bit more objective (i.e. unnatural?!)
Articles about education aimed at a policy audience, or a popular audience, are often terrible, distorting, inflating or ignoring the often ambiguous data.  Nevertheless, the data, though ambiguous, are often worth looking at.  Science is supposed to be objective--and it is fairly objective, compared to the gross distortions that often come in work aimed at a popular or a policy audience. Reading the scientific literature, looking at the actual data, is a useful and interesting check on the received ideas and self-serving propaganda that you find in a lot of magazines or in publications like the National Reading Panel.

In the articles presenting the results of their experiments the same scholars often take a much more objective and moderate view than they do when they're writing for an audience of teachers.  Teachers are looking to be told what to do; scholars are looking for an argument (And then there are teachers like me). Writing for policy advocates or managers, you want to use the data to promote your favored policy; writing for teachers, you want to offer specific advice for things the teachers can actually do; but when you're writing for your fellow scholars, who are always looking to nitpick, because that's their job, you have to be somewhat more guarded in your assertions. (Being guarded and objective may not be natural, but it has its advantages!)

The paper
This post is about a 2009 paper by Isabel Beck and Margaret Mckeown, two big names in reading research and coincidentally the same researchers who back in the early eighties did the questionable research on vocabulary that is still being used to promote the idea that explicit vocabulary instruction increases reading comprehension.  The paper is about a study comparing two different ways of teaching reading, one a "content "approach" and one a "strategies" approach.  The study seems to show, interestingly, that the "content" approach is superior, but the paper is as interesting for its asides as for its data, which data are not, as usual, particularly conclusive.

Aside #1: We don't really know what works (or do we?)
The first interesting passage in this paper came in its introduction. Mckeown and  Beck are prominent, veteran researchers, and yet they paint a fairly grim picture of the current state of knowledge in reading research, essentially saying that very  little is known about the best way to teach reading.  This humble admission of ignorance, while not unusual in the sober scholarly literature on reading, is in striking contrast to the countless  books and magazine articles that offer specific advice to teachers on the explicit pretense that the advice is grounded in "the research", and Mckeown and Beck's humility also contrasts with such pretended authorities as the National Reading Panel and the "What Works" publications.  The professors who taught my workshop last week were wonderfully open about how unclear the research literature is, but many of the articles they provided were of the popular kind that I have come to see as fundamentally dishonest.

"The research on strategies and content approaches," Mckeown and Beck write, "provides little guidance on what in the instruction was responsible for the outcomes.  It could be the case that simply more time and attention to text is the key that leads to improvement."

Maybe spending more time and attention on text is the key.  Ya think? As a teacher who has spent way too much time doing my own talking and having my students either listen to me or do something that is not focused directly on the text, and as someone who has walked around my school for years seeing way more teachers talking than students talking, this last conjecture seems eminently reasonable: most of the time in most reading lessons is probably not spent either on actual reading or on students looking closely at the text and talking about it, so if you make teachers spend time actually looking closely at an actual text,  that might be expected to lead to more learning.

Amazingly enough, after presenting this eminently reasonable hypothesis, Mckeown and Beck immediately say, "We doubt that is the case." They don't explain the basis for their doubts, saying only, "it is more likely that some activities are more effective than are others" (222). Well, yes, some activities are probably more effective, but that is hardly any reason to doubt the hypothesis that spending time and attention on the text itself is important; perhaps those activities that focus student attention more sharply on the text are more likely to be effective.  But perhaps such a relatively simple hypothesis is too simple for Mckeown and Beck. Like the policeman in Poe's great tale, scholars are heavily invested in their complicated, time-intensive methods, and may respond to a suggestion that the answer is simple with anxiously incredulous laughter: ""Ha! ha! ha! --ha! ha! ha! --ho! ho! ho [...] oh, Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!"
  
The study itself
In any case, the study that the paper is primarily about compared two approaches to teaching reading, the "strategies approach" and the " content approach."  In a strategies approach, discussion of a text is a sort of meta-discussion, focusing primarily on which "reading strategies" might be useful in answering a given question about the text and only secondarily on the text itself.  In a content approach, student attention was focused on the content of the text through "meaning-based questions."  The study's results seems to show a "content" approach doing better than a "strategies" approach, basically because the strategies approach leads kids to focus on the strategies and not on the text itself, whereas a content approach encourages kids to think more deeply, and pay closer attention to the text. It seems to me that the content approach might be considered the more "natural."

The study worked with six classrooms in the same district, replacing one of the week's 5 regular reading periods (working in a basal reader) with a scripted lesson.  Two of the classrooms used a scripted lesson that focused on comprehension strategies; two classrooms used a scripted lesson based on discussing the content of the reading; and two of the classrooms used a scripted lesson based on the questions included in the basal reader.  The students who had discussions focused on content performed somewhat better than students in the the other classrooms on such tasks as recall and offered LONGER answers to discussion questions.  This is an interesting result, since it suggests that asking students to talk about what happened in the text is just as helpful, and possibly more helpful, than offering explicit instruction in HOW to talk about the text.  As with other research I've looked at, this study provides little support for explicit skills instruction in English class.  But the most interesting part of the paper was a result that the authors presented almost as an aside.

Aside #2: Natural teaching may not be natural learning
Although the content approach looks to me to be the more natural one, the teachers in the study didn't experience it that way.  When asked, "How natural did the approach feel?", the teachers who used the strategies approach were happier with their approach, saying that the strategies approach felt "very natural." Amazingly enough, the content approach teachers said that the content approach felt less natural.  One teacher said that it wasn't "natural at first [...] I always wanted to put my two cents in." The other teacher said, "It's not natural to not go deeper. It's hard to just let them think on their own and not pull the information from them."

What's interesting about this is that teachers do not "naturally" use a natural approach.  Instead, what seems natural to a teacher is to put her own "two cents in," instead of asking questions to elicit the students' own thinking. To a teacher, to go "deeper" apparently means to "pull the information from them." The strategies approach, on the other hand, felt natural to the teachers who used it, perhaps because that approach's explicit skills instruction allowed the teacher to feel she was putting her own "two cents in."

One reasonable explanation for the teachers' feelings is that teachers like to, well, teach.  They are teachers, after all.  But more teaching does not always mean more learning.  What's natural to the lion may not seem so natural to the zebra.

Conclusion: we may have to work unnaturally hard to foster natural reading and learning.
Natural reading, and natural learning, do not necessarily happen naturally.  School is an unnatural environment, and to create natural events in an unnatural environment probably means hard work.  That's only natural.

Two curricula: one for the elite, another for the masses

     The elite are "nurtured"and "inspired" toward a "love" for reading

Like Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, Bill Gates did not go to a public high school.  Instead, Gates, a scion of an elite Seattle family, went to a fancy prep school called Lakeside.  Lakeside's English curriculum is quite different from the Common Core Standards that Gates paid millions to have created and is spending millions now to promote, and that Obama and Duncan are pushing as well, through their "Race to the Top" (sic) program.  The Common Core standards suggest long and detailed classroom analyses of extremely difficult texts, and offer absolutely nothing in the way of requiring extensive reading or encouraging a love of reading.  This curriculum is dramatically different from the ones offered at Lakeside, where Bill Gates's kids now go, but I wouldn't expect Lakeside to change its ways anytime soon.

Here are the mission statements for Lakeside's English programs at the middle school and high school levels:

    "The Middle School English Department is dedicated to nurturing a lifelong love of reading
    and writing. We strive to create a community of readers and writers that inspires students to
    experiment with a variety of written forms."

    "Lakeside’s [High School] English Department’s highest goals are to inspire in students a 
     love of literature and to help students become great writers."

Both the middle school and high school statements use the word "love" and emphasize writing in an "authentic voice" and "artistically."  The curriculum is notably literary and cultural, and not narrowly designed to ready students for the business or political world.

It's also notable that these English departments aren't afraid to talk about encouraging a love of reading.  Encouraging a love for reading might seem like an obvious goal of English class, but in the Orwellian world of the Education-Industrial-Complex that goal is controversial.

     The masses are given "instruction" aimed at "proficiency"

This Orwellian madness surfaced in 2006, when the new President of the International Reading Association came out against encouraging a love for reading.  Professor Tim Shanahan, one of the biggest names int he reading world, had already made clear that he was against natural reading: he was a prominent member of the "National Reading Panel" (2000) that after a cockeyed look at the evidence, argued at length for explicit instruction and dishonestly claimed that there was no evidence that independent silent reading was effective.  In 2006, he became President of the International Reading Association, which has as one of its three stated purposes, in addition to improving reading instruction and promote reading proficiency, to "encourage reading and an interest in reading" (Reading Today, June 2006). Shanahan's first move as President of the Association was to say that while he could support improved instruction and promoting proficiency, he was not in favor of "encouraging reading and an interest in reading."  Although Shanahan can be eloquent and passionate about why reading is important, he apparently thinks it's inappropriate and dangerous to encourage interest in it.

For this, Shanahan was not laughed out of the profession; he remains one of the big shots of the reading world. This past week, the thoughtful, intelligent instructor of my PD workshop referred to Shanahan in glowing terms and gave us a couple of his articles.  How could this be?  How could the President of the International Reading Association argue against teachers' trying to encourage "an interest in reading"?!  Bill Gates's kids have teachers that nurture a lifelong love of reading, but the rest of us can't even encourage an interest in reading?  Are there different rules for private and public schools?  Well, yes--according to Shanahan.

     Interest in reading and "freedom of choice"

For, although his central (if insane) argument is that encouraging an interest in reading is somehow inimical to effective teaching, and that we should be "jealous of instructional time" which would apparently be wasted by encouraging student interest in our subject, Shanahan also argues at length that it is beyond a public school teacher's mandate to encourage interest in his subject.  In order to make this argument, Shanahan shifts the terms of the debate from the words "interest" to "pleasure" and then to "desire" and then to "love", and argues suggests that as "institutional beings," teachers have no right to try to instill love or desire in anyone.  A teacher's "public responsibility," according to Shanahan, does not include "encouraging reading," which is, he says, a "personal goal" that might carry "danger."  What danger?  Apparently encouraging reading would limit "freedom of choice."

That encouraging an interest in reading could be considered as limiting to freedom of choice is obviously Orwellian.  As Bill Gates found when he went from public school to private school, and as Shanahan should know, given his explanation of why he is passionate about teaching reading, encouraging an interest in reading actually promotes freedom of choice, while merely teaching it dispassionately as a useful skill is usually a good way to limit freedom. For Shanahan public schools, although obligated to impose explicit instruction of the kind Bill Gates found so tedious when he went to public elementary school, are not allowed to offer students encouragement and nurturing of the very practices that will allow freedom.

     Conclusion: We need to create a culture of reading, even in public schools


Why is Shanahan so uncomfortable with the notion of encouraging interest in reading, even though he acknowledges that reading is important?  Why does Gates spend his billions to promote increased class size and increased testing, even though he sends his kids to a school that brags about its average class size of 16 and that manages to have 40% of its Seniors be National Merit Scholarship Finalists without having done any of the kind of high stakes testing Gates is working to impose on the rest of us?  The obvious answer for Shanahan is that he has spent his career promoting explicit skill instruction, and for Shanahan to admit that it's important to teach reading as an organic, pleasurable experience, or to admit that reading is largely a socially mediated activity, might seem to him to call into question his life's work.

As for Gates, perhaps he doesn't know how to address the social and cultural aspects of learning, or perhaps he thinks the changes he's pushing will lead indirectly to an improved cultural and social environment in the classroom.  My guess is that Gates sees public school as properly different from what he offers his own children. When Gates himself switched from public school to private school, he noticed a dramatic cultural shift.  As he recalls, "it was a change at first.  And the idea of just being kind of a goof-off wasn't the sort of high reward position like it had been in public schools." It seems possible that, partly based on this experience, Gates doesn't think it possible to change that culture.

But he should think so, for in the same interview I quoted before, he offers an excellent example of a public institution that encourages reading. Gates remembers that when he was a kid, the library would give you a gold star if you read ten books over the summer, and two stars if you read twenty.  According to Gates, he and "five or six girls" would compete to see who could read the most books.  For reading is a solitary activity, but reading is also a social activity, and it can be encouraged.

The first job of every high school English class should be creating a culture of reading.  This is difficult to do when many of our expert authorities don't believe that interest matters, and think that human beings are mechanisms that have only to be properly programmed for "proficiency." The best way make sure that our public schools are not like the one Bill Gates went to, where "being a goof-off was more socially rewarding," is to replace the interest in goofing off with an interest in reading and thinking, and that can only happen if we encourage that interest.  We must make sure that our public schools do "encourage reading"--even inspire a love for it.  If reading is, and has always been, strongly linked to social class, we don't have to accept the social class divisions that we are given.