Today's paper of record has a front-page story about how much "easier" it is to improve student scores in math than in reading. Predictably, the article mentions many specific skills and "concepts", but never explicitly mentions what would seem the most important factor: time spent actually reading.
The story describes lessons on close reading and inferences, it discusses acting out the dialogue in books, and it mentions narrative perspectives, subtext, character motivation, vocabulary, background knowledge, sentence length, text density, and cultural deficits. It talks about the enormous differences in how much "literacy" children are exposed to outside of school. But none of the teachers and experts quoted in the article suggests that perhaps the best way to raise reading scores is to have kids actually read.
A few months ago the same newspaper published an op-ed by a Mexican novelist, David Toscana, who asked a very important question:
One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”
...
A few years back, I spoke with the education secretary of my home state, Nuevo León, about reading in schools. He looked at me, not understanding what I wanted. “In school, children are taught to read,” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “but they don’t read.”
Too often, this is true in America as well. Our schools have our children six hours a day for twelve years. That is a lot of time. Let the kids read!
Showing posts with label Natural Reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Natural Reading. Show all posts
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Jane Austen's theory of education
I've been reading Pride and Prejudice out loud to my son, and last night I was happy to find that Austen's theory of education is similar to my own. In chapter 29 she presents her thinking in the form of a dialogue between Lady Catherine de Bourgh, one of Austen's great monsters, and the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, who is always right except about men.
Here is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, prefiguring Dickens's Gradgrind: "Nothing is to be done in education without steady and regular instruction, and nobody but a governess can give it."
And here is Lizzy Bennet defending, in the great tradition of Franklin, Douglass, Malcolm X and Stephen Krashen, her reading-based education: "We were always encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary."
Novelists are biased, no doubt, but it is striking how often they portray education as coming entirely out of independent reading. The only counterexample I can think of offhand is something John Updike said once--something like, "I read what I was assigned and thought myself the better for it." But Updike was probably being contrarian.
*****************************************************
Update on Updike: I was wrong; I just looked it up (the internet is amazing), and even in the passage I was thinking of, Updike, too, makes the case for self-selected reading in childhood and adolescence. Updike was a very erudite guy, and did extremely well academically (top of his class in English at Harvard, for whatever that's worth), but his preparation seems to have been largely pleasure reading:
"I read books of humor by Thurber and Benchley and Wodehouse and Frank Sullivan and E. B. White, and mystery novels by Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner and John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. This diet pretty well took me up to Harvard, where I read what they told me, and was much the better for it."
-- John Updike, Self Consiousness, page 109
Here is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, prefiguring Dickens's Gradgrind: "Nothing is to be done in education without steady and regular instruction, and nobody but a governess can give it."
And here is Lizzy Bennet defending, in the great tradition of Franklin, Douglass, Malcolm X and Stephen Krashen, her reading-based education: "We were always encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary."
Novelists are biased, no doubt, but it is striking how often they portray education as coming entirely out of independent reading. The only counterexample I can think of offhand is something John Updike said once--something like, "I read what I was assigned and thought myself the better for it." But Updike was probably being contrarian.
*****************************************************
Update on Updike: I was wrong; I just looked it up (the internet is amazing), and even in the passage I was thinking of, Updike, too, makes the case for self-selected reading in childhood and adolescence. Updike was a very erudite guy, and did extremely well academically (top of his class in English at Harvard, for whatever that's worth), but his preparation seems to have been largely pleasure reading:
"I read books of humor by Thurber and Benchley and Wodehouse and Frank Sullivan and E. B. White, and mystery novels by Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner and John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. This diet pretty well took me up to Harvard, where I read what they told me, and was much the better for it."
-- John Updike, Self Consiousness, page 109
Friday, March 15, 2013
How many books have our students read this year so far?
My assumption has long been that our students are not reading enough, and that the most important thing we could do to help them improve in this essential area would be to help them read more. I just did a quick check of their reading logs and my own records, and we put up some stickers on our chart--so I'm going to spend a quick post on how it's going.
Last Year's results
Last year I asked this same question about the students in my own classes and the students in the academic support program I was working in, and the results were interesting:
Students in the academic support program (from both Honors and Standard classes): 6 books in ten months (on average)
Students in my classes (all Standard classes): 8.5 books in ten months (on average)
Both groups were reading, on average less than a book a month--far from ideal. (I'd say the average should be three books a month, but I would be happy with two. My 12 year old reads four or five every month, and it doesn't take up much of his spare time.)
This year: slight improvement
I have made an even more concerted effort this year to get my students to read more. We have done more independent reading, and less reading of whole-class texts. I am pretty sure there has been a real opportunity cost to this focus, but it has at least resulted in somewhat more reading. This week my students and I calculated their reading, and the results were:
Ninth graders in my (standard-level) classes this year so far: 8.2 books in 7 months (on average)
(This average is skewed a bit by a few kids who are reading a lot (over 20); the median is 6.)
This is better than last year--by the end of the schoolyear, the average should be up to 11 or 12 books--but it is still not great. Two of my 32 ninth grade students have only read two books all year. (On the other hand, one of those students is actually a success story, having read zero books in the first three months and two books in the second three months.)
Does more reading mean increased vocabulary and improved skills?
So, I have been somewhat successful at getting my students to read more. What remains unclear is how much benefit my students have gained from the increased reading. My assumption is that the increased reading volume will mean increased vocabulary, improved reading comprehension skills, and perhaps even improved writing--but I don't know if that's true, and I can't check in a very reliable way, because I really only have a good baseline for their vocabulary.
Interestingly, whether their skills are improved or not, the reading is not obviously correlated to how well the students do in school. One of my students, who has failed ninth grade twice already and is now taking both my grade English class and a tenth grade English class, has read 14 books this year. He tells me he didn't finish any last year. Nevertheless, he is failing both my class and the tenth grade English class--because he never does any written work outside of class. In fact, as I write this, I am waiting for him to show up for an afterschool appointment to do some of his missing work. He's not going to show; we need a new system to help kids like him! Success or failure in school has less to do with skill than with being able to get the work done--we need to figure out how to help them do it. I've figured out how to get this kid to read books; now I need to work on the writing piece.
I'll look into this again in June. Until then, I'll keep trying to get them to read, and I'll get the Dean to help me get my failing students to come after school to do their work.
Last Year's results
Last year I asked this same question about the students in my own classes and the students in the academic support program I was working in, and the results were interesting:
Students in the academic support program (from both Honors and Standard classes): 6 books in ten months (on average)
Students in my classes (all Standard classes): 8.5 books in ten months (on average)
Both groups were reading, on average less than a book a month--far from ideal. (I'd say the average should be three books a month, but I would be happy with two. My 12 year old reads four or five every month, and it doesn't take up much of his spare time.)
This year: slight improvement
I have made an even more concerted effort this year to get my students to read more. We have done more independent reading, and less reading of whole-class texts. I am pretty sure there has been a real opportunity cost to this focus, but it has at least resulted in somewhat more reading. This week my students and I calculated their reading, and the results were:
Ninth graders in my (standard-level) classes this year so far: 8.2 books in 7 months (on average)
(This average is skewed a bit by a few kids who are reading a lot (over 20); the median is 6.)
This is better than last year--by the end of the schoolyear, the average should be up to 11 or 12 books--but it is still not great. Two of my 32 ninth grade students have only read two books all year. (On the other hand, one of those students is actually a success story, having read zero books in the first three months and two books in the second three months.)
Does more reading mean increased vocabulary and improved skills?
So, I have been somewhat successful at getting my students to read more. What remains unclear is how much benefit my students have gained from the increased reading. My assumption is that the increased reading volume will mean increased vocabulary, improved reading comprehension skills, and perhaps even improved writing--but I don't know if that's true, and I can't check in a very reliable way, because I really only have a good baseline for their vocabulary.
Interestingly, whether their skills are improved or not, the reading is not obviously correlated to how well the students do in school. One of my students, who has failed ninth grade twice already and is now taking both my grade English class and a tenth grade English class, has read 14 books this year. He tells me he didn't finish any last year. Nevertheless, he is failing both my class and the tenth grade English class--because he never does any written work outside of class. In fact, as I write this, I am waiting for him to show up for an afterschool appointment to do some of his missing work. He's not going to show; we need a new system to help kids like him! Success or failure in school has less to do with skill than with being able to get the work done--we need to figure out how to help them do it. I've figured out how to get this kid to read books; now I need to work on the writing piece.
I'll look into this again in June. Until then, I'll keep trying to get them to read, and I'll get the Dean to help me get my failing students to come after school to do their work.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Thousands of little countries that don't read
There's an interesting op-ed in the Times today about reading in Mexico ("The Country that Stopped Reading"). Its author, David Toscana, an eminent Mexican novelist, argues that his native country, which took next-to-last place in a Unesco survey of reading habits, ought to encourage a love of reading by providing students with enjoyable and compelling texts and giving them time to read in school:
One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”
...
When my daughter was 15, her literature teacher banished all fiction
from her classroom. “We’re going to read history and biology textbooks,”
she said, “because that way you’ll read and learn at the same time.”
The US is very different from Mexico, but I'm afraid that the Common Core and other Ed Reform efforts are taking us in the wrong direction. We, too, can learn from Toscana's prescription: give kids enjoyable books and time to read. Thousands of our children are not getting that, and thousands of our kids are, in themselves, little countries that don't read.
One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”
...
A few years back, I spoke with the education secretary of my home state,
Nuevo León, about reading in schools. He looked at me, not
understanding what I wanted. “In school, children are taught to read,”
he said. “Yes,” I replied, “but they don’t read.” I explained the
difference between knowing how to read and actually reading, between
deciphering street signs and accessing the literary canon. He wondered
what the point of the students’ reading “Don Quixote” was. He said we
needed to teach them to read the newspaper.
The US is very different from Mexico, but I'm afraid that the Common Core and other Ed Reform efforts are taking us in the wrong direction. We, too, can learn from Toscana's prescription: give kids enjoyable books and time to read. Thousands of our children are not getting that, and thousands of our kids are, in themselves, little countries that don't read.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Conversations and discussions as (formative) Reading Assessments
After spending a few days thinking about little besides snow, I want to take an hour and try to write about reading assessment, and in particular about the kind of natural assessment that can happen in a conversation about a book.
All assessment is formative, and all assessment is also instruction
The only valid educational reason for assessment is to improve education; therefore, anything we think of as "summative" should probably be re-engineered to make it more formative. In addition, assessment is always, inevitably, teaching something, and we should consider, before we assess, what our assessment will teach. But that's abstract...
Conversation and discussion as assessment
One good way to assess student reading is through conversation and discussion. In a discussion about a text she has read, the student should get a lot of truly immediate feedback about her reading.
While my students are reading in class, I go around and talk to individual students. Sometimes these conversations are on a specific topic common to the whole class: in our grammar unit, for instance, I will have quick check-ins with kids about, say, prepositional phrases on the page they are reading; if I've assigned the class an essay about point of view, we will talk about that. At other times, however, the conversations are totally individualized, organic exchanges in the style (I think) of Nancie Atwell, about particular issues in the books they are reading on their own, and sometimes about particular passages from these books (I usually stick to the passage they happen to be on just then).
Usually I have not read these books--and if I have read them, I don't remember the details all that well--so the student is of necessity playing the role of the expert. This is a good role for a student to play in an assessment, since it empowers her to put on her best performance. If, as in most classroom situations, not to mention most assessments, the student is not the expert, then she is put in a position of wanting to say what the teacher thinks is right, and it's hard for either the student or her teacher to get a sense of the quality of her own independent thought.
When I have a conversation like this, I think my job is to ask the student questions that will get at the quality of her reading and make her thinking more visible to herself and to me--so that she can see what she knows, how she knows it, and what she doesn't know. I ask different questions depending on the student. Sometimes I start out with a general question. If the student is just starting a book, I might ask, "Are you liking it so far?" Whether the answer is yes or no, I might ask, "Why?" Or: "What's good about it?" Sometimes, instead of starting with a question, I start by having the student read to me for a half a page or so. This is another kind of assessment, and one I don't even have to give feedback on--the kid can hear, herself, where she is stumbling.
When students have to stop and think
As I follow up, either on my original question or on the passage the kid read to me, the questions narrow to a particular focus, and very quickly we get to a question that the student doesn't know the answer to already. In some cases these questions are ones that I would expect to be obvious, like, "Why is the main character so angry at her friend?" In that case, the student's confusion is very interesting, since we would seem to be identifying a basic problem with comprehension, yet doing so in a way that might seem inherently interesting, and in a way that encourages the student to find out the answer, rather than, as on a standardized assessment, putting the emphasis on the student's failure to figure out what the teacher or state already know, and with little opportunity for immediate follow-through.
In other cases the questions that give the student pause are more difficult or literary, like "Why do you think the author started the book with this scene?" or "How could you tell that she was angry?" In these cases, too, we are noticing what the student has already considered and what she has not given a thought to. (At other times, the students get something obviously wrong, and the teacher can follow up in a gentle and friendly way and allow the student to figure out for herself what she was confused about and why.)
One thing that's striking in doing these one-on-one conversations is how quickly we get to points at which the students need to stop and think before they respond. This stopping and thinking is a pretty big difference between thoughtful intellectual conversations and the usual adolescent repartee. As I remember from my own youth and observe in my students, adolescent conversations are mainly about loud, immediate disagreement or loud, immediate agreement. The loudness and immediacy overwhelms most of the potential for thoughtful critical analysis. One-on-one conversations in the classroom, conducted in a whisper and aiming less at feel-good agreement or dramatic disagreement, are dramatically different, not least because they lead to so much stopping and thinking.
My guess is that this stopping and thinking is when much of the learning happens, as students see what they understand and what they don't, and as they think through new ideas that they haven't thought about before. For the conversation is not only assessment, but is also a form of instruction. In my questioning I am instructing them in ways of looking at a book, in categories of literary thought, in literary vocabulary, and so on.
Disadvantages of this method of assessment
The major disadvantage of these individual conversations is that each student can't get very much of my time. If it takes a couple of minutes for the class as a whole to settle down enough for me to start talking to kids individually, and if each conversation takes four minutes, and if also I want to quickly check on what progress the other kids in the class have made, then I can get through four conversations in a twenty-minute independent reading period. That means, for my sixteen-student classes, that I can talk to each kid individually for four minutes each week. That's not very efficient.
Another disadvantage is that the assessment is not uniform. I'm not checking each kid against the same benchmark, so it's not easy to compare. Another disadvantage is that these assessments are often random, coming organically out of whatever passage the kid happens to be reading right then. Of course, these two disadvantages are also advantages, since the lack of uniformity means that the assessments are better suited to the individual students and the randomness of the passages often sparks my thinking in ways that I couldn't have anticipated.
A last disadvantage is that it's been hard, at least for me, to keep good records of this kind of qualitative, individualized assessment, so it's hard to measure progress and to follow up. I have to confess that in my preliminary experiments with this kind of assessment, I haven't yet figured out a good record keeping system. It needs to be very simple, because I, like Ben Franklin, am not very organized. I'm going to work on this over the next month or so, and I'll follow up with another post, in which I also give some more specific examples of these kinds of conversations.
Conclusion
Most people think about assessment in the same way Mr. Google does (google "reading assessment" to see what I mean): that is, as standardized tests, usually written, administered, by all-knowing adult authorities, upon children who are probably all too aware that (1) they're being tested and (2) that the assessment is of very little interest to either the adult or kid except as an assessment. So perhaps the best thing about using an informal conversation about an independent reading book as an assessment is that it doesn't feel like an assessment. All of what I'm saying here seems incredibly obvious--probably even when Rousseau said it it seemed pretty obvious--but it might be worth reminding ourselves that assessment is about more than just testing.
*****************************************************************
Post Script: Similarity to what happens naturally in a literate family; limitations of school
The kind of conversations I've discussed are essentially like the conversations that we have with children in our own homes, starting with the conversations we had when we were reading picture books to them. The fact that I think doing this in a classroom for four minutes a week is worthwhile is quite amazing, given that many four-year-olds get this kind of treatment for twenty minutes every single night.
This points, perhaps, to the limitations of school. There's no way that I can possibly do as good a job, as an English teacher responsible for the reading and writing of 85 children, as I do as a father responsible for the reading and writing of two children. In a sense that's okay--as long as what they do with me is worthwhile--but it's worth remembering the limitations of the system in which we work.
All assessment is formative, and all assessment is also instruction
The only valid educational reason for assessment is to improve education; therefore, anything we think of as "summative" should probably be re-engineered to make it more formative. In addition, assessment is always, inevitably, teaching something, and we should consider, before we assess, what our assessment will teach. But that's abstract...
Conversation and discussion as assessment
One good way to assess student reading is through conversation and discussion. In a discussion about a text she has read, the student should get a lot of truly immediate feedback about her reading.
While my students are reading in class, I go around and talk to individual students. Sometimes these conversations are on a specific topic common to the whole class: in our grammar unit, for instance, I will have quick check-ins with kids about, say, prepositional phrases on the page they are reading; if I've assigned the class an essay about point of view, we will talk about that. At other times, however, the conversations are totally individualized, organic exchanges in the style (I think) of Nancie Atwell, about particular issues in the books they are reading on their own, and sometimes about particular passages from these books (I usually stick to the passage they happen to be on just then).
Usually I have not read these books--and if I have read them, I don't remember the details all that well--so the student is of necessity playing the role of the expert. This is a good role for a student to play in an assessment, since it empowers her to put on her best performance. If, as in most classroom situations, not to mention most assessments, the student is not the expert, then she is put in a position of wanting to say what the teacher thinks is right, and it's hard for either the student or her teacher to get a sense of the quality of her own independent thought.
When I have a conversation like this, I think my job is to ask the student questions that will get at the quality of her reading and make her thinking more visible to herself and to me--so that she can see what she knows, how she knows it, and what she doesn't know. I ask different questions depending on the student. Sometimes I start out with a general question. If the student is just starting a book, I might ask, "Are you liking it so far?" Whether the answer is yes or no, I might ask, "Why?" Or: "What's good about it?" Sometimes, instead of starting with a question, I start by having the student read to me for a half a page or so. This is another kind of assessment, and one I don't even have to give feedback on--the kid can hear, herself, where she is stumbling.
When students have to stop and think
As I follow up, either on my original question or on the passage the kid read to me, the questions narrow to a particular focus, and very quickly we get to a question that the student doesn't know the answer to already. In some cases these questions are ones that I would expect to be obvious, like, "Why is the main character so angry at her friend?" In that case, the student's confusion is very interesting, since we would seem to be identifying a basic problem with comprehension, yet doing so in a way that might seem inherently interesting, and in a way that encourages the student to find out the answer, rather than, as on a standardized assessment, putting the emphasis on the student's failure to figure out what the teacher or state already know, and with little opportunity for immediate follow-through.
In other cases the questions that give the student pause are more difficult or literary, like "Why do you think the author started the book with this scene?" or "How could you tell that she was angry?" In these cases, too, we are noticing what the student has already considered and what she has not given a thought to. (At other times, the students get something obviously wrong, and the teacher can follow up in a gentle and friendly way and allow the student to figure out for herself what she was confused about and why.)
One thing that's striking in doing these one-on-one conversations is how quickly we get to points at which the students need to stop and think before they respond. This stopping and thinking is a pretty big difference between thoughtful intellectual conversations and the usual adolescent repartee. As I remember from my own youth and observe in my students, adolescent conversations are mainly about loud, immediate disagreement or loud, immediate agreement. The loudness and immediacy overwhelms most of the potential for thoughtful critical analysis. One-on-one conversations in the classroom, conducted in a whisper and aiming less at feel-good agreement or dramatic disagreement, are dramatically different, not least because they lead to so much stopping and thinking.
My guess is that this stopping and thinking is when much of the learning happens, as students see what they understand and what they don't, and as they think through new ideas that they haven't thought about before. For the conversation is not only assessment, but is also a form of instruction. In my questioning I am instructing them in ways of looking at a book, in categories of literary thought, in literary vocabulary, and so on.
Disadvantages of this method of assessment
The major disadvantage of these individual conversations is that each student can't get very much of my time. If it takes a couple of minutes for the class as a whole to settle down enough for me to start talking to kids individually, and if each conversation takes four minutes, and if also I want to quickly check on what progress the other kids in the class have made, then I can get through four conversations in a twenty-minute independent reading period. That means, for my sixteen-student classes, that I can talk to each kid individually for four minutes each week. That's not very efficient.
Another disadvantage is that the assessment is not uniform. I'm not checking each kid against the same benchmark, so it's not easy to compare. Another disadvantage is that these assessments are often random, coming organically out of whatever passage the kid happens to be reading right then. Of course, these two disadvantages are also advantages, since the lack of uniformity means that the assessments are better suited to the individual students and the randomness of the passages often sparks my thinking in ways that I couldn't have anticipated.
A last disadvantage is that it's been hard, at least for me, to keep good records of this kind of qualitative, individualized assessment, so it's hard to measure progress and to follow up. I have to confess that in my preliminary experiments with this kind of assessment, I haven't yet figured out a good record keeping system. It needs to be very simple, because I, like Ben Franklin, am not very organized. I'm going to work on this over the next month or so, and I'll follow up with another post, in which I also give some more specific examples of these kinds of conversations.
Conclusion
Most people think about assessment in the same way Mr. Google does (google "reading assessment" to see what I mean): that is, as standardized tests, usually written, administered, by all-knowing adult authorities, upon children who are probably all too aware that (1) they're being tested and (2) that the assessment is of very little interest to either the adult or kid except as an assessment. So perhaps the best thing about using an informal conversation about an independent reading book as an assessment is that it doesn't feel like an assessment. All of what I'm saying here seems incredibly obvious--probably even when Rousseau said it it seemed pretty obvious--but it might be worth reminding ourselves that assessment is about more than just testing.
*****************************************************************
Post Script: Similarity to what happens naturally in a literate family; limitations of school
The kind of conversations I've discussed are essentially like the conversations that we have with children in our own homes, starting with the conversations we had when we were reading picture books to them. The fact that I think doing this in a classroom for four minutes a week is worthwhile is quite amazing, given that many four-year-olds get this kind of treatment for twenty minutes every single night.
This points, perhaps, to the limitations of school. There's no way that I can possibly do as good a job, as an English teacher responsible for the reading and writing of 85 children, as I do as a father responsible for the reading and writing of two children. In a sense that's okay--as long as what they do with me is worthwhile--but it's worth remembering the limitations of the system in which we work.
Monday, November 26, 2012
The Talk of the Town: Malcolm Gladwell, non-fiction, thrillers, and the delusions of realism
(A piece online in the NYTimes has been getting a lot of attention in the past few days. Here's a quick response.)
Perhaps our students do need to read a bit more non-fiction
The Common Core calls for having kids read more non-fiction. A recent post on the NY Times website says that reading non-fiction is a good idea because it will help students write non-fiction. This is the best argument I've seen for reading non-fiction, and it echoes something I've said for years: that it is absurd to ask students to write analytical essays when they never read them. Nevertheless, the most important thing is that kids read a lot. If you read a lot, it’s easier to learn to write. And if you can write, you can write anything, more or less. You just have to look at some examples first.
When I taught Leafstrewn's Senior creative writing course (those were the days!), I structured the whole course around literary apprenticeships. As a class, we read, studied, and then emulated a number of authors; in the culminating project, students read, studied, and emulated an author of their own choosing. The course was easily the most satisfying and coherent teaching I've ever done.
For most kids, creative writing comes more easily than analytical writing. This is probably partly because most kids have read a fair amount of creative writing but very, very little analytical writing. If, therefore, we want our kids to get better at writing analytical essays, we should have them read some analytical essays—but not necessarily thousands of pages of them.
Any reading that’s not pleasure reading should have a clear short-term purpose
The Times post starts off with a very compelling story about Malcolm Gladwell reading a hundred Talk of the Town pieces before writing one of his own. But the post draws the bizarre conclusion that this anecdote supports the Common Core's drastic (and, like the rest of the Common Core, totally non-data-driven) call for fully half of students' reading to be of "informational texts."
This conclusion is silly. First of all, the argument suffers from one of the great weaknesses of educational discourse, the tendency to overly short-term thinking. Reading 100 Talk of the Town pieces probably took Malcolm Gladwell about two hours. Those two hours were no doubt excellent short-term preparation for the immediate task before him, but surely no one would argue that those two hours were what made Gladwell a successful New Yorker writer. Gladwell's writerly skill was probably the result of decades of reading, and if we want our students to be able to write more like Malcolm Gladwell, the question we should be asking is not, What did Malcolm Gladwell read for the two hours before he wrote his first Talk of the Town piece, but what did he read for the decades before that?
Fortunately, my amazing research skills were able to provide some insight into Gladwell's reading habits. The first sentence of the first search result of the first thing I typed (typoed, actually) into the google box on my browser ("lamcolm gladwell childhood reading") provided this testimony from the man himself:
"I am, first and foremost, a fan of thrillers and airport literature, which means the number of books that I read this year that reach the literary level of the typical New Yorker reader is small."
Now, I love Jack Reacher just as much as the next guy, but I would not use Gladwell’s reading list to argue that the best preparation for writing for the New Yorker is to read a lot of Lee Child novels. Instead, our students should, over the long term, be reading a lot of whatever interests them, and then, in the short term, be reading more targeted texts for specific purposes.
Pleasure Reading
The Gladwell anecdote highlights not only the distinction between short-term and long-term thinking, but another important distinction as well: the difference between pleasure reading and purposeful reading.
As I've said before, I think of pleasure reading not as skimming, but as a deep immersion of the kind that can remove you from yourself and your surroundings. Gladwell, like many travelers, likes thrillers for precisely this escapist reason (it's less clear why people would want to bring them to the beach!). For me, as I get older, non-fiction increasingly provides this deep immersion, but in any case the purpose is largely the pleasure, the immersion--and the benefits of this immersion are comfort and facility with language. These benefits accrue only over the long term. A course of pleasure reading will not show many practical results in a time frame of less than a year or so (though I have learned a thing or two from Jack Reacher about guns and Ford Crown Victorias). Pleasure reading also strikes me as different from "informational text," which is the Common Core term for non-fiction. The NYTimes post used The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as an example of the non-fiction that students should be reading. That book would serve well--but for pleasure reading, not for a specific purpose.
Purposeful Reading
Purposeful reading is pretty different from pleasure reading. This activity is almost always of short-term benefit. For students, there are two main purposes: (1) to get information; (2) to learn how to write a particular kind of text. The first purpose is more important for Social Studies, Science, and other "content area" courses, and the second is more important for English class. Since I think reading is a very effective way to learn, I think the main place for purposeful reading of informational text is in the content areas, and the main purpose should be to get information. Ideally, these informational texts should also be pleasurable--I never learned much history in school, and most of what I know about history comes from adult pleasure reading, mostly of the popular kind—but in a social studies course the purpose is primary, and it is, again, short-term. Deep knowledge and understanding will no doubt accrue over the long-term, but the short-term purpose is informational.
The second kind of purposeful reading—that aimed at craft, at learning how to write a particular kind of text—is the main reason for English class ever to privilege non-fiction. The excellent journalism program at Leafstrewn has students read regularly, but the reading is always purposeful, aimed at the immediate goal of improving the students own writing—learning how to write a news lead, learning how to handle quotes in a profile, learning how to frame the nut graf in a feature article, that kind of thing. This kind of purposeful reading is extremely effective, and we need to learn how to incorporate it better into our regular English classes as well.
The Common Core’s emphasis on reading non-fiction should be in the “Writing” section, not the “Reading” section
What we don’t need is non-fiction just for the sake of non-fiction. Unless kids are supposed to learn, immediately, about Mumbai slums or how to do amazing reportage, there’s no particular reason to have them read Behind the Beautiful Forevers instead of, say, Midnight’s Children. I happen to prefer the Boo book to the Rushdie book, but a very gifted former student just wrote her college essay about how the Rushdie book changed her life. That kid can write anything; all she has to do is spend a few hours immersing herself in some models (last year I suggested Pale Fire and a few weeks later she produced an astonishing Nabokovian story in the form of a scholar’s notes on a haiku). For a particular writing assignment, she should read texts that can serve as models, but in general she should read whatever interests her. There is good reason for her to read what interests her--or what interests her teacher--but there is no good reason for her to read what interests David Coleman, or an imaginary marketing executive. The Common Core, like most curricula, is not founded on evidence or data. In the matter of “Informational Text” as in many other matters, the Common Core is confusing the appearance of usefulness with the reality of usefulness, confusing what might be useful in the short term with what is necessary in the long term, and, above all, I suspect, showing a disdain for anything that is not ostentatiously practical. As so often, it seems to me that the people who see themselves as hard-minded realists are actually the ones who are deluded about reality, while those the realists deride as idealistic dreamers are actually a lot more realistic.
Over this, as I.B. Singer told my father-in-law about another tempest in a teapot, no children will die; but then, some children might suffer unnecessarily. Why not just let kids read what they want to read? The first thing is to provide time, space, and books, and the second thing is to create a culture in which books are discussed in a meaningful way.
Perhaps our students do need to read a bit more non-fiction
The Common Core calls for having kids read more non-fiction. A recent post on the NY Times website says that reading non-fiction is a good idea because it will help students write non-fiction. This is the best argument I've seen for reading non-fiction, and it echoes something I've said for years: that it is absurd to ask students to write analytical essays when they never read them. Nevertheless, the most important thing is that kids read a lot. If you read a lot, it’s easier to learn to write. And if you can write, you can write anything, more or less. You just have to look at some examples first.
When I taught Leafstrewn's Senior creative writing course (those were the days!), I structured the whole course around literary apprenticeships. As a class, we read, studied, and then emulated a number of authors; in the culminating project, students read, studied, and emulated an author of their own choosing. The course was easily the most satisfying and coherent teaching I've ever done.
For most kids, creative writing comes more easily than analytical writing. This is probably partly because most kids have read a fair amount of creative writing but very, very little analytical writing. If, therefore, we want our kids to get better at writing analytical essays, we should have them read some analytical essays—but not necessarily thousands of pages of them.
Any reading that’s not pleasure reading should have a clear short-term purpose
The Times post starts off with a very compelling story about Malcolm Gladwell reading a hundred Talk of the Town pieces before writing one of his own. But the post draws the bizarre conclusion that this anecdote supports the Common Core's drastic (and, like the rest of the Common Core, totally non-data-driven) call for fully half of students' reading to be of "informational texts."
This conclusion is silly. First of all, the argument suffers from one of the great weaknesses of educational discourse, the tendency to overly short-term thinking. Reading 100 Talk of the Town pieces probably took Malcolm Gladwell about two hours. Those two hours were no doubt excellent short-term preparation for the immediate task before him, but surely no one would argue that those two hours were what made Gladwell a successful New Yorker writer. Gladwell's writerly skill was probably the result of decades of reading, and if we want our students to be able to write more like Malcolm Gladwell, the question we should be asking is not, What did Malcolm Gladwell read for the two hours before he wrote his first Talk of the Town piece, but what did he read for the decades before that?
Fortunately, my amazing research skills were able to provide some insight into Gladwell's reading habits. The first sentence of the first search result of the first thing I typed (typoed, actually) into the google box on my browser ("lamcolm gladwell childhood reading") provided this testimony from the man himself:
"I am, first and foremost, a fan of thrillers and airport literature, which means the number of books that I read this year that reach the literary level of the typical New Yorker reader is small."
Now, I love Jack Reacher just as much as the next guy, but I would not use Gladwell’s reading list to argue that the best preparation for writing for the New Yorker is to read a lot of Lee Child novels. Instead, our students should, over the long term, be reading a lot of whatever interests them, and then, in the short term, be reading more targeted texts for specific purposes.
Pleasure Reading
The Gladwell anecdote highlights not only the distinction between short-term and long-term thinking, but another important distinction as well: the difference between pleasure reading and purposeful reading.
As I've said before, I think of pleasure reading not as skimming, but as a deep immersion of the kind that can remove you from yourself and your surroundings. Gladwell, like many travelers, likes thrillers for precisely this escapist reason (it's less clear why people would want to bring them to the beach!). For me, as I get older, non-fiction increasingly provides this deep immersion, but in any case the purpose is largely the pleasure, the immersion--and the benefits of this immersion are comfort and facility with language. These benefits accrue only over the long term. A course of pleasure reading will not show many practical results in a time frame of less than a year or so (though I have learned a thing or two from Jack Reacher about guns and Ford Crown Victorias). Pleasure reading also strikes me as different from "informational text," which is the Common Core term for non-fiction. The NYTimes post used The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks as an example of the non-fiction that students should be reading. That book would serve well--but for pleasure reading, not for a specific purpose.
Purposeful Reading
Purposeful reading is pretty different from pleasure reading. This activity is almost always of short-term benefit. For students, there are two main purposes: (1) to get information; (2) to learn how to write a particular kind of text. The first purpose is more important for Social Studies, Science, and other "content area" courses, and the second is more important for English class. Since I think reading is a very effective way to learn, I think the main place for purposeful reading of informational text is in the content areas, and the main purpose should be to get information. Ideally, these informational texts should also be pleasurable--I never learned much history in school, and most of what I know about history comes from adult pleasure reading, mostly of the popular kind—but in a social studies course the purpose is primary, and it is, again, short-term. Deep knowledge and understanding will no doubt accrue over the long-term, but the short-term purpose is informational.
The second kind of purposeful reading—that aimed at craft, at learning how to write a particular kind of text—is the main reason for English class ever to privilege non-fiction. The excellent journalism program at Leafstrewn has students read regularly, but the reading is always purposeful, aimed at the immediate goal of improving the students own writing—learning how to write a news lead, learning how to handle quotes in a profile, learning how to frame the nut graf in a feature article, that kind of thing. This kind of purposeful reading is extremely effective, and we need to learn how to incorporate it better into our regular English classes as well.
The Common Core’s emphasis on reading non-fiction should be in the “Writing” section, not the “Reading” section
What we don’t need is non-fiction just for the sake of non-fiction. Unless kids are supposed to learn, immediately, about Mumbai slums or how to do amazing reportage, there’s no particular reason to have them read Behind the Beautiful Forevers instead of, say, Midnight’s Children. I happen to prefer the Boo book to the Rushdie book, but a very gifted former student just wrote her college essay about how the Rushdie book changed her life. That kid can write anything; all she has to do is spend a few hours immersing herself in some models (last year I suggested Pale Fire and a few weeks later she produced an astonishing Nabokovian story in the form of a scholar’s notes on a haiku). For a particular writing assignment, she should read texts that can serve as models, but in general she should read whatever interests her. There is good reason for her to read what interests her--or what interests her teacher--but there is no good reason for her to read what interests David Coleman, or an imaginary marketing executive. The Common Core, like most curricula, is not founded on evidence or data. In the matter of “Informational Text” as in many other matters, the Common Core is confusing the appearance of usefulness with the reality of usefulness, confusing what might be useful in the short term with what is necessary in the long term, and, above all, I suspect, showing a disdain for anything that is not ostentatiously practical. As so often, it seems to me that the people who see themselves as hard-minded realists are actually the ones who are deluded about reality, while those the realists deride as idealistic dreamers are actually a lot more realistic.
Over this, as I.B. Singer told my father-in-law about another tempest in a teapot, no children will die; but then, some children might suffer unnecessarily. Why not just let kids read what they want to read? The first thing is to provide time, space, and books, and the second thing is to create a culture in which books are discussed in a meaningful way.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Literacy by any means necessary: the Malcolm X method of learning vocabulary
As an American literature teacher, I'm used
to thinking of classic American literature as a treasure trove of
extremely thoughtful meditations about almost everything, so I'm very
interested in what the American canon has to say about education in
general, and about reading in particular. I've written about To Kill a Mockingbird's caustic portrayal of school and its loving celebration of a Frank Smith-like
culture of reading, and about the great scene in which Huck Finn's
father castigates his son for learning to read. American
autobiographies are full of wonderful descriptions of coming into literacy (in Smith's words, of joining the literacy club)--sometimes by reading books on your own (Ben Franklin), by
reading aloud as a family (Henry James), by using the library (Richard Wright).
These American autobiographies are especially good on reading as a form of self-definition and self-discovery. Most of the richest and most poignant examples of this that I can think of happen to be from autobiographies of Black Americans--from Frederick Douglass to Richard Wright to Barack Obama. I love Frederick Douglass's story of deliberately making friends with poor white boys and bribing them with bread so that they would teach him to read--but Malcolm X's story is the one I'm going to focus on today. I'll talk about Malcolm's efforts in more detail, but I want to note first that for all of these extraordinarily gifted and amazingly determined men, the journey to literacy was, in Douglass's words, "a long, tedious effort for years." We should not kid ourselves; even as we try to help make the process as easy and painless as possible, we need to remember that learning to read and write well is not always easy, especially for those suffering from their place in an oppressive social system.
The Malcolm X method of vocabulary instruction
If we want our kids to learn vocabulary, maybe we should think about people who have actually done it. We've probably all read the part of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in which Malcolm describes teaching himself to read, but I hadn't reread it for years, and it's worth looking at again. In prison, Malcolm (I call him by his first name with all respect) had started corresponding with Elijah Muhammad, and he became frustrated with his inability to express himself clearly. He also found that when he tried to read, he didn't know many of the words. He ordered a dictionary from the prison library and looked at it. Not knowing what to do--since there were so many words he needed to learn, he just started writing, and he copied the down the first page of the dictionary: definitions, punctuation and all.
It took him all day to copy out that first page. Then he re-read what he had written down. He was fascinated. He liked the word "aardvark." So he copied down the next page. And he filled tablet after tablet of paper, and in the end he COPIED OUT THE ENTIRE DICTIONARY!
According to Malcolm X, copying out the dictionary was a great way to learn words, and as he learned more words, he was able to understand the books he tried to read, and as he could understand the books better, he came so to love reading that he read non-stop, and you couldn't have gotten him "out of books with a wedge." And the famous clincher: reading was liberating. Although he was in prison, he had "never been so truly free." For Malcolm, every page of his books was what Richard Wright called it: a "ticket to freedom."
When the work becomes their own
Copying out the entire dictionary worked very well for Malcolm X. Should we have our students do it? Maybe. But I think, looking at this story, the main lesson I take away is that of motivation. Malcolm was obviously gifted--but he had always been gifted. He had a lot of time--but so did every other prisoner. The determination to improve his vocabulary came only when he was (a) highly motivated and (b) face to face with his own poor ability (1). He was very interested in writing to Elijah Muhammad, and he realized that he could not, in his letters, say what he wanted to say. When motivated to read and write, and aware that he needed to improve, he figured out a method that worked for him.
Is it possible to create, for our students, conditions similar to those that led Malcolm X to copy out the dictionary? (Our students are certainly not imprisoned, but they are under the supervision of the state for several hours a day, for many years.) How can we ask them to do writing that they actually care about doing? The student newspaper is an excellent way--for the kids who work on it. What can we do in our classes? Creative writing? Sure--for some. Have them write letters? Have them write opinion pieces? We do that stuff... How can we have them do more writing that they actually really want to do? The second condition--that they be confronted with their own poor ability--we arguably already try to do, in our grades and comments.
So one thing we could try is giving the students more freedom in what they write and harsher grades on their writing. Another thing we could try is giving significantly less feedback on their writing and how to improve it. This would feel extremely unnatural to us, and would probably be really difficult, and our students might hate us for it--but it might work. (Is that crazy? Maybe. It's been a long week...) I remember my father's telling me he only learned to write when he was a freshman in college and had a choice: learn to write better, or fail out. My wife, too, only really learned to write when she was a freshman in college and had to work really hard on revising her own papers. The burden needs to be on the students, not on us. How do we put it there?
I don't know how to do it, but I have seen the results. Tonight I watched the Shakespeare play at my school. It was wonderful. The students did amazing work, and they took full responsibility for it. In fact, they took so much responsibility that in the talk-back after the play, the teacher who directed the play was not even mentioned--not even once. Now that is a triumph of teaching! The play couldn't have happened without her, but for the students the work became their own.
********************************************************
Footnote:
(1)
These two factors are exactly parallel with the ones that spurred Ben Franklin to extraordinary efforts at self-improvement. Franklin was having a debate in letters with a friend of his on various hot topics of the day--like whether it was worth educating women (Ben said yes)--and his father happened to see a few of the letters. His father told Ben that while Ben often had stronger arguments, the friend was a better writer. This criticism so wounded Ben's vanity that he went to extraordinary lengths to try to improve his writing: first he took articles from his favorite magazine, the Spectator, made notes on their content, and then tried to reconstruct the article from his outline; second, he took Spectator articles and tried to turn them into rhyming verse; third, he took the rhyming verse versions of the articles and put them back into plain prose. This is not even to go into the lengths he went to obtain books (after he "borrowed" one in the evening he would stay up all night to read it by candlelight so as to be able to return the book before it would be missed in the morning, and he became a vegetarian and subsisted on a "bisket" or "a handful of raisins" in order to save money to buy books). Ben Franklin, like Malcolm X, had a powerful practical reason to want to be good at writing (to best his friend Collins) and was confronted with his own poor ability (when his father said Collins wrote better than he did).
These American autobiographies are especially good on reading as a form of self-definition and self-discovery. Most of the richest and most poignant examples of this that I can think of happen to be from autobiographies of Black Americans--from Frederick Douglass to Richard Wright to Barack Obama. I love Frederick Douglass's story of deliberately making friends with poor white boys and bribing them with bread so that they would teach him to read--but Malcolm X's story is the one I'm going to focus on today. I'll talk about Malcolm's efforts in more detail, but I want to note first that for all of these extraordinarily gifted and amazingly determined men, the journey to literacy was, in Douglass's words, "a long, tedious effort for years." We should not kid ourselves; even as we try to help make the process as easy and painless as possible, we need to remember that learning to read and write well is not always easy, especially for those suffering from their place in an oppressive social system.
The Malcolm X method of vocabulary instruction
If we want our kids to learn vocabulary, maybe we should think about people who have actually done it. We've probably all read the part of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in which Malcolm describes teaching himself to read, but I hadn't reread it for years, and it's worth looking at again. In prison, Malcolm (I call him by his first name with all respect) had started corresponding with Elijah Muhammad, and he became frustrated with his inability to express himself clearly. He also found that when he tried to read, he didn't know many of the words. He ordered a dictionary from the prison library and looked at it. Not knowing what to do--since there were so many words he needed to learn, he just started writing, and he copied the down the first page of the dictionary: definitions, punctuation and all.
It took him all day to copy out that first page. Then he re-read what he had written down. He was fascinated. He liked the word "aardvark." So he copied down the next page. And he filled tablet after tablet of paper, and in the end he COPIED OUT THE ENTIRE DICTIONARY!
According to Malcolm X, copying out the dictionary was a great way to learn words, and as he learned more words, he was able to understand the books he tried to read, and as he could understand the books better, he came so to love reading that he read non-stop, and you couldn't have gotten him "out of books with a wedge." And the famous clincher: reading was liberating. Although he was in prison, he had "never been so truly free." For Malcolm, every page of his books was what Richard Wright called it: a "ticket to freedom."
When the work becomes their own
Copying out the entire dictionary worked very well for Malcolm X. Should we have our students do it? Maybe. But I think, looking at this story, the main lesson I take away is that of motivation. Malcolm was obviously gifted--but he had always been gifted. He had a lot of time--but so did every other prisoner. The determination to improve his vocabulary came only when he was (a) highly motivated and (b) face to face with his own poor ability (1). He was very interested in writing to Elijah Muhammad, and he realized that he could not, in his letters, say what he wanted to say. When motivated to read and write, and aware that he needed to improve, he figured out a method that worked for him.
Is it possible to create, for our students, conditions similar to those that led Malcolm X to copy out the dictionary? (Our students are certainly not imprisoned, but they are under the supervision of the state for several hours a day, for many years.) How can we ask them to do writing that they actually care about doing? The student newspaper is an excellent way--for the kids who work on it. What can we do in our classes? Creative writing? Sure--for some. Have them write letters? Have them write opinion pieces? We do that stuff... How can we have them do more writing that they actually really want to do? The second condition--that they be confronted with their own poor ability--we arguably already try to do, in our grades and comments.
So one thing we could try is giving the students more freedom in what they write and harsher grades on their writing. Another thing we could try is giving significantly less feedback on their writing and how to improve it. This would feel extremely unnatural to us, and would probably be really difficult, and our students might hate us for it--but it might work. (Is that crazy? Maybe. It's been a long week...) I remember my father's telling me he only learned to write when he was a freshman in college and had a choice: learn to write better, or fail out. My wife, too, only really learned to write when she was a freshman in college and had to work really hard on revising her own papers. The burden needs to be on the students, not on us. How do we put it there?
I don't know how to do it, but I have seen the results. Tonight I watched the Shakespeare play at my school. It was wonderful. The students did amazing work, and they took full responsibility for it. In fact, they took so much responsibility that in the talk-back after the play, the teacher who directed the play was not even mentioned--not even once. Now that is a triumph of teaching! The play couldn't have happened without her, but for the students the work became their own.
********************************************************
Footnote:
(1)
These two factors are exactly parallel with the ones that spurred Ben Franklin to extraordinary efforts at self-improvement. Franklin was having a debate in letters with a friend of his on various hot topics of the day--like whether it was worth educating women (Ben said yes)--and his father happened to see a few of the letters. His father told Ben that while Ben often had stronger arguments, the friend was a better writer. This criticism so wounded Ben's vanity that he went to extraordinary lengths to try to improve his writing: first he took articles from his favorite magazine, the Spectator, made notes on their content, and then tried to reconstruct the article from his outline; second, he took Spectator articles and tried to turn them into rhyming verse; third, he took the rhyming verse versions of the articles and put them back into plain prose. This is not even to go into the lengths he went to obtain books (after he "borrowed" one in the evening he would stay up all night to read it by candlelight so as to be able to return the book before it would be missed in the morning, and he became a vegetarian and subsisted on a "bisket" or "a handful of raisins" in order to save money to buy books). Ben Franklin, like Malcolm X, had a powerful practical reason to want to be good at writing (to best his friend Collins) and was confronted with his own poor ability (when his father said Collins wrote better than he did).
Thursday, November 1, 2012
"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.
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.
Friday, October 12, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, July 27, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Emails from a student
This spring, the excellent Leafstrewn student newspaper (let's call it "The Pequod") ran a column about reading. The column was written by a former of student of mine. My former student said, more or less, that he didn't like the books his Junior-year teacher (that is to say, I) had assigned him, and that if students weren't forced to read boring books like My Antonia or Their Eyes Were Watching God (a "real stinker"), and had a little more choice, they might read more. His nut graf: "I don’t believe that nobody today reads, but I think the problem lies in
what students are being forced to read rather than why they aren’t
reading. It’s time to revamp English class so that students discover a
passion for literature instead of just deciding books aren’t for them."
This student has a point, and I had been worrying much the same thing. In fact, after a so-so experience with his very class, and after worrying a lot about how many students managed to avoid the assigned reading, I built more choice into my syllabus, and I gave the students a bit more time to read in class. Also, though I have always had very mixed feelings about motivational lectures and the like (my recent conviction that schools should create a "reading culture" is a flower that grows out of a complicated bog of ambivalence), I gave a brief, passionate lecture about how important reading was, and how lame it was not to do the reading, how especially lame it was to use Sparknotes or other cheatsites. These are good books, I said; read them!
I wasn't sure how well this had gone over, but I was going on the wise advice of my department chair, who had told me that I had to pretend I believed in what I said. So I pretended. I was happy, then, to get an email from a student at the end of the year that read, in part, "i really enjoyed your class this year. To be honest, i dont usually read my english class books but what you said in the beginning of the year resonated with me and i am proud to say i really did read all the books this year. I am glad i did too because some of them were really great. You are a really awesome teacher. Thanks for the wonderful year!"
I discounted the last bit for the obvious reasons (she probably wants me to write her rec next year, etc.), but I was pretty interested in her admission that she doesn't "usually" read her English class books. I wrote back and asked if she wouldn't mind elaborating. (I didn't tell her I was going to be putting her response up on a blog, but I excuse myself by imagining that no one will know who she is--she could be anyone, really!)
I didn't think she would write back with much more detail, but she did. Here is (most of) her second email:
"Freshman year i pretty much didnt read a single book. I read about 20 pages of ------. Sophmore year I read the beginning half of most of the books we read. i usually just ask one of my friends that have read the book to give me a synopsis and then i improvise from there. i think that there are a lot of people who just copy off of others or use spark notes but i find that i can use clues in the question to guess the answer. sometimes im totally off but for the most part i usually at least get partial credit. Before high school, i could finish all my hw within 20 minutes so i used to read at least a book a day for pleasure.. i used to read literally allll the time. since hs my pleasure reading has been reduced to about a book a semester and over the summers, although this summer i was assigned more reading than usual since I'm taking ----- so i didnt even both bringing any of my pleasure reading books to ----."
There you go. The problem in a paragraph. This is a smart kid, too--she was recommended for an English department award--but her ability in English class is probably due far more to the "book a day" she used to read, back when she wasn't given much homework, than to the hours and hours of work and explicit instruction she has received in school.
This student has a point, and I had been worrying much the same thing. In fact, after a so-so experience with his very class, and after worrying a lot about how many students managed to avoid the assigned reading, I built more choice into my syllabus, and I gave the students a bit more time to read in class. Also, though I have always had very mixed feelings about motivational lectures and the like (my recent conviction that schools should create a "reading culture" is a flower that grows out of a complicated bog of ambivalence), I gave a brief, passionate lecture about how important reading was, and how lame it was not to do the reading, how especially lame it was to use Sparknotes or other cheatsites. These are good books, I said; read them!
I wasn't sure how well this had gone over, but I was going on the wise advice of my department chair, who had told me that I had to pretend I believed in what I said. So I pretended. I was happy, then, to get an email from a student at the end of the year that read, in part, "i really enjoyed your class this year. To be honest, i dont usually read my english class books but what you said in the beginning of the year resonated with me and i am proud to say i really did read all the books this year. I am glad i did too because some of them were really great. You are a really awesome teacher. Thanks for the wonderful year!"
I discounted the last bit for the obvious reasons (she probably wants me to write her rec next year, etc.), but I was pretty interested in her admission that she doesn't "usually" read her English class books. I wrote back and asked if she wouldn't mind elaborating. (I didn't tell her I was going to be putting her response up on a blog, but I excuse myself by imagining that no one will know who she is--she could be anyone, really!)
I didn't think she would write back with much more detail, but she did. Here is (most of) her second email:
"Freshman year i pretty much didnt read a single book. I read about 20 pages of ------. Sophmore year I read the beginning half of most of the books we read. i usually just ask one of my friends that have read the book to give me a synopsis and then i improvise from there. i think that there are a lot of people who just copy off of others or use spark notes but i find that i can use clues in the question to guess the answer. sometimes im totally off but for the most part i usually at least get partial credit. Before high school, i could finish all my hw within 20 minutes so i used to read at least a book a day for pleasure.. i used to read literally allll the time. since hs my pleasure reading has been reduced to about a book a semester and over the summers, although this summer i was assigned more reading than usual since I'm taking ----- so i didnt even both bringing any of my pleasure reading books to ----."
There you go. The problem in a paragraph. This is a smart kid, too--she was recommended for an English department award--but her ability in English class is probably due far more to the "book a day" she used to read, back when she wasn't given much homework, than to the hours and hours of work and explicit instruction she has received in school.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Social class and reading
I've been worrying recently about the ways in which reading is social, cultural, and deeply influenced by one's social class. Below are a few attempts to start to think this through.
Images of Reading: solitary, but also social
Reading is in many ways a solitary activity. People tend not to read in large groups, and when they do (reading rooms; subway cars), reading often seems to wall off the self from the group. When I think of images of reading, I think of those portraits of female readers, in which the reading is nearly always shown as an activity of almost circular self-sufficiency. Here's a picture by Fragonard:
It's a lovely picture, and we like it partly because it makes makes us imagine what it's like to be the young woman. We want to be her because reading looks so pleasant, so private, so self-sufficient--not necessarily passionate, not necessarily joyful, but reasonable, calm, and, despite the pillow against which she is propped up so straight, wakeful. We put ourselves in her place, we want to know what the book is about, we imagine such a wonderful self-sufficiency (perhaps we are enjoying the painting in the same way the young woman enjoys the book), and the picture is so much about at-one-ness that viewer and subject partly merge.
But the picture is more complicated, and the apparent solitude is less solitary, than it might seem. It is also less self-sufficient, and it is embedded in a pretty distinct social and cultural context. First, and most obviously, such a celebration of privacy, such solitary self-sufficiency in a young woman, may seem, as in Vermeer paintings, to have (that pillow!) an erotic tinge. The young woman in Fragonard's picture is both attractive and quite fetchingly dressed, and if reading might seem a solitary activity, she is less alone than she thinks, for both painter and viewer may play the role of peeping Tom.
(Here's one, by Renoir, in which the inherent eroticism of the subject is a bit more obvious:
The eroticism of the picture is merely the most obvious way in which reading is never completely solitary. These young women, like reading itself, are also clearly of a certain class--or rather, are distinctly not of a certain class--that is, they are not poor. The woman in the Fragonard painting is probably richer than Renoir's subject--by Renoir's time, reading, or leisure, had filtered down to the middle class---but both have had time in their childhoods to learn to read, someone to help them learn, and maids and servants to clean the house, shop for and cook the food, put on their dresses, tie their ribbons and plump their pillows. While their servants were doing such work (you might argue that Renoir's girl looks like she might have to do some housework herself, but then Renoir is an inveterate fantasist), these non-poor women enjoyed available books to choose from, an undistracting space and continuous leisure time in which to read the books they choose, and friends with whom they could discuss the stories. In nearly every way, reading was an upper-class pursuit.
Reading and social class in To Kill a Mockingbird
The situation is similar in To Kill a Mockingbird. The book paints a wonderful picture of an apparently self-sufficient childhood culture of reading. Jem, Scout and Dill don't need school--Harper Lee seems deeply skeptical of the idea that reading can be taught--and the children's summer world, a combination of unsupervised outdoor play and passionate engagement in Tom Swift and Tarzan books, seems as beautifully self-sufficient as Fragonard's idyll of solitary reading. Anyone should be able to read, it seems, and when the book's villain, Bob Ewell, is asked by the book's hero, Atticus Finch, whether he can write, Mr. Ewell is indignant, but in the joke he makes (or should I say the joke the author has at his expense), we are given to understand that his level of literacy is despicably low. "Of course I can write," Mr. Ewell says. "How do you think I sign my relief checks?" We laugh, but we understand that the Ewells probably can't read, as we would think of reading, and that their illiteracy is a part of their separateness, their subhumanness. According to Atticus, it's not even worth making the Ewell children go to school, because the Ewells are the Ewells and will never change.
I'm dwelling at length on to Kill a Mockingbird because it presents such a clear picture of a good reading culture and such a clear picture of the all-important social divisions. In Maycomb, one is almost completely defined by one's family and one's class. Jem, Scout and Dill are good readers, but nearly every other upper-class character, that is to say, everyone who lives on the town's "main residential street," is also a member of the reading club: even the mean, racist Mrs. Dubose kicks her morphine habit with the assistance of a Walter Scott novel; and even Boo Radley likes to cut out newspaper articles for his scrapbook.
The poor farmers, on the other hand, who occupy the next rung down on the social ladder, may be literate, but they are not readers. Of the farm children who make up most of her class at school, Scout tells us that "the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature." The Cunninghams and their neighbors were not raised by lawyers who are professional readers and writers, they did not see their parents sitting in the armchair reading every night, and they were provided neither the books nor the time to read even if by some form of extra-sensory perception they had somehow gotten it into their heads that reading was a worthwhile pursuit.
The social groups who occupy the bottom two rungs of the social hierarchy, the African-Americans and the poor white trash, are mostly illiterate--not only immune to imaginative literature, but hardly able to read or write at all. Bob Ewell may be able, barely, to scratch out his name, but his son Burris, who at eight or nine years old has only spent two full days in school, can't spell his, and his nineteen-year-old daughter Mayella, the best of the bunch, has only been to school for two years and can read and write only as well as her father. Most of the African-Americans in the town are also illiterate; of the large congregation in the First Purchase church, only four or five, including Calpurnia and her son Zeebo, know how to read.
That African-Americans, and poor Whites, are still less literate than the upper classes is completely to be expected. The Fragonard picture was painted about 250 years ago. To Kill a Mockingbird takes place less than a hundred years ago. Cultures usually change very, very slowly. Burris Ewell was younger than my grandfather; his grandchildren could be my students. We, like them, are living with the inheritance of centuries and centuries of social divisions. For centuries in Europe, only the clergy knew how to read. In England, your crimes were treated much more leniently if you could prove you could read (they'd ask you to read Psalm 51, the "Neck Verse," and if you could read about God's mercy, then the powers that be would offer mercy as well). In the American south, education for slaves was prohibited by law. This was all very, very recent, and since we are still living in a culture shaped by this history, we can most effectively make progress by accepting that our work is not only "instructional," not only about "skills," but is primarily social and cultural.
Family, Peers, and School
The point I am laboriously making here is that reading is not only solitary, and it is not a "skill" that can be isolated, taught and tested in the way that perhaps long division can (though I wonder); no, reading is social and cultural, and we teachers of reading must keep that uppermost in our minds.
We often assume that all parents want their kids to succeed, to become readers, but some of them probably don't. There's a funny and horrifying scene in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which Huck's absent, illiterate father comes back to find that while he's been away his son has learned to read. Pap is upset: "Looky here -- you drop that school, you hear? I'll learn people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own father and let on to be better'n what he is. You lemme catch you fooling around that school again, you hear? Your mother couldn't read, and she couldn't write, nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn't before they died. I can't; and here you're a-swelling yourself up like this. I ain't the man to stand it -- you hear?"
When Huck reads a bit, Pap knocks the book across the room and warns Huck that if he catches him at school again, he'll beat him. The scene is funny partly because Pap's attitude is so counter to all the middle-class bromides (Stay in school, etc.), but it's also funny because it expresses something real: there is a real anti-academic feeling in a lot of people. Sure, nearly every parent genuinely wants his or her child to succeed in school--but a lot of them have mixed feelings. They may have hated school themselves. A part of them may feel that they didn't succeed and don't want their kids to succeed. I had mixed feelings about school myself, and I know I have transmitted those feelings to my children.
It's not only parents, but peers, who work against creating a culture of reading. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the only two readers in the First Grade classroom are Scout and the teacher, and even if they could work together it would be difficult for them to move the great mass of the rest of the class. The greatest obstacle to student success is often the students. Not the student, singular, but his or her peers. It takes more than one person to create a culture--and a teacher is only one person. True, she has a vested authority, but she is competing against a score of other people, many of whom are not yet initiates into the society of readers.
This is a huge, and potentially growing problem
In the United States, despite the constant talk of our weak performance and the "crisis" in education, the situation is roughly what it's been like for decades. The rich kids do very well, even by international standards, and the poor kids don't. Recent results on the OECD's PISA tests make this clear: in 2009, US schools with less than 10% poor kids had reading scores averaging 551, significantly better than the scores in any other country (schools with more than 75% of students receiving Free or Reduced Price Lunch averaged 446, significantly worse than Turkey), but US poverty rates are among the highest in the OECD.
In any case, US schools with few poor kids do very well, and this has been clear at least since 1972, when Christopher Jencks and his colleagues published their magisterial Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (and every year other writers like Richard Rothstein and Gerald Grant make the same obvious point). Oddly, it was also in 1972, or thereabouts, that the economic fortunes of the bottom 50% took a turn for the worse. Median wages, adjusted for inflation, peaked in the early 1970s and have been flat or declining since, even as the incomes of the upper-middle-class have grown quite a bit and the incomes of the rich have grown enormously.
This inequality has large educational effects. Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame) gave a talk recently on inequality that has been getting a lot of press (David Brooks, whom I usually loathe, wrote a somewhat reasonable column about it this week). The basic idea is that poor kids grow up in dramatically different environments, and are given much, much less attention and fewer resources (like books!) than their higher-SES peers. The inequality among children, according to Putnam, is getting dramatically worse. I look forward to Putnam's book, but we teachers should be taking this stuff into account every day, trying to provide, in school, the cultural and social education that our students are missing outside of school.
We can't make up for cultural gaps by mechanical means. Instead, we should be doing just what the Deweyan teacher in To Kill a Mockingbird is trying and failing to do: we should be reading to our students--but reading them stories they like. We should be modeling our love for reading and thinking. We should be providing them with books to read, and time in which to read them. We should be fostering student discussion in lit circles and the like. What we should not be doing is what we too often are doing: giving our students the educational equivalent of Scout's classmates daily chores: drudge-work, like feeding hogs and chopping cotton, that keeps them from the valuable, mind-growing work of leisure-reading. School should look like this:
...or even like this:
Images of Reading: solitary, but also social
Reading is in many ways a solitary activity. People tend not to read in large groups, and when they do (reading rooms; subway cars), reading often seems to wall off the self from the group. When I think of images of reading, I think of those portraits of female readers, in which the reading is nearly always shown as an activity of almost circular self-sufficiency. Here's a picture by Fragonard:
It's a lovely picture, and we like it partly because it makes makes us imagine what it's like to be the young woman. We want to be her because reading looks so pleasant, so private, so self-sufficient--not necessarily passionate, not necessarily joyful, but reasonable, calm, and, despite the pillow against which she is propped up so straight, wakeful. We put ourselves in her place, we want to know what the book is about, we imagine such a wonderful self-sufficiency (perhaps we are enjoying the painting in the same way the young woman enjoys the book), and the picture is so much about at-one-ness that viewer and subject partly merge.
But the picture is more complicated, and the apparent solitude is less solitary, than it might seem. It is also less self-sufficient, and it is embedded in a pretty distinct social and cultural context. First, and most obviously, such a celebration of privacy, such solitary self-sufficiency in a young woman, may seem, as in Vermeer paintings, to have (that pillow!) an erotic tinge. The young woman in Fragonard's picture is both attractive and quite fetchingly dressed, and if reading might seem a solitary activity, she is less alone than she thinks, for both painter and viewer may play the role of peeping Tom.
(Here's one, by Renoir, in which the inherent eroticism of the subject is a bit more obvious:
 |
!) |
The eroticism of the picture is merely the most obvious way in which reading is never completely solitary. These young women, like reading itself, are also clearly of a certain class--or rather, are distinctly not of a certain class--that is, they are not poor. The woman in the Fragonard painting is probably richer than Renoir's subject--by Renoir's time, reading, or leisure, had filtered down to the middle class---but both have had time in their childhoods to learn to read, someone to help them learn, and maids and servants to clean the house, shop for and cook the food, put on their dresses, tie their ribbons and plump their pillows. While their servants were doing such work (you might argue that Renoir's girl looks like she might have to do some housework herself, but then Renoir is an inveterate fantasist), these non-poor women enjoyed available books to choose from, an undistracting space and continuous leisure time in which to read the books they choose, and friends with whom they could discuss the stories. In nearly every way, reading was an upper-class pursuit.
Reading and social class in To Kill a Mockingbird
The situation is similar in To Kill a Mockingbird. The book paints a wonderful picture of an apparently self-sufficient childhood culture of reading. Jem, Scout and Dill don't need school--Harper Lee seems deeply skeptical of the idea that reading can be taught--and the children's summer world, a combination of unsupervised outdoor play and passionate engagement in Tom Swift and Tarzan books, seems as beautifully self-sufficient as Fragonard's idyll of solitary reading. Anyone should be able to read, it seems, and when the book's villain, Bob Ewell, is asked by the book's hero, Atticus Finch, whether he can write, Mr. Ewell is indignant, but in the joke he makes (or should I say the joke the author has at his expense), we are given to understand that his level of literacy is despicably low. "Of course I can write," Mr. Ewell says. "How do you think I sign my relief checks?" We laugh, but we understand that the Ewells probably can't read, as we would think of reading, and that their illiteracy is a part of their separateness, their subhumanness. According to Atticus, it's not even worth making the Ewell children go to school, because the Ewells are the Ewells and will never change.
I'm dwelling at length on to Kill a Mockingbird because it presents such a clear picture of a good reading culture and such a clear picture of the all-important social divisions. In Maycomb, one is almost completely defined by one's family and one's class. Jem, Scout and Dill are good readers, but nearly every other upper-class character, that is to say, everyone who lives on the town's "main residential street," is also a member of the reading club: even the mean, racist Mrs. Dubose kicks her morphine habit with the assistance of a Walter Scott novel; and even Boo Radley likes to cut out newspaper articles for his scrapbook.
The poor farmers, on the other hand, who occupy the next rung down on the social ladder, may be literate, but they are not readers. Of the farm children who make up most of her class at school, Scout tells us that "the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature." The Cunninghams and their neighbors were not raised by lawyers who are professional readers and writers, they did not see their parents sitting in the armchair reading every night, and they were provided neither the books nor the time to read even if by some form of extra-sensory perception they had somehow gotten it into their heads that reading was a worthwhile pursuit.
The social groups who occupy the bottom two rungs of the social hierarchy, the African-Americans and the poor white trash, are mostly illiterate--not only immune to imaginative literature, but hardly able to read or write at all. Bob Ewell may be able, barely, to scratch out his name, but his son Burris, who at eight or nine years old has only spent two full days in school, can't spell his, and his nineteen-year-old daughter Mayella, the best of the bunch, has only been to school for two years and can read and write only as well as her father. Most of the African-Americans in the town are also illiterate; of the large congregation in the First Purchase church, only four or five, including Calpurnia and her son Zeebo, know how to read.
That African-Americans, and poor Whites, are still less literate than the upper classes is completely to be expected. The Fragonard picture was painted about 250 years ago. To Kill a Mockingbird takes place less than a hundred years ago. Cultures usually change very, very slowly. Burris Ewell was younger than my grandfather; his grandchildren could be my students. We, like them, are living with the inheritance of centuries and centuries of social divisions. For centuries in Europe, only the clergy knew how to read. In England, your crimes were treated much more leniently if you could prove you could read (they'd ask you to read Psalm 51, the "Neck Verse," and if you could read about God's mercy, then the powers that be would offer mercy as well). In the American south, education for slaves was prohibited by law. This was all very, very recent, and since we are still living in a culture shaped by this history, we can most effectively make progress by accepting that our work is not only "instructional," not only about "skills," but is primarily social and cultural.
Family, Peers, and School
The point I am laboriously making here is that reading is not only solitary, and it is not a "skill" that can be isolated, taught and tested in the way that perhaps long division can (though I wonder); no, reading is social and cultural, and we teachers of reading must keep that uppermost in our minds.
We often assume that all parents want their kids to succeed, to become readers, but some of them probably don't. There's a funny and horrifying scene in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which Huck's absent, illiterate father comes back to find that while he's been away his son has learned to read. Pap is upset: "Looky here -- you drop that school, you hear? I'll learn people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own father and let on to be better'n what he is. You lemme catch you fooling around that school again, you hear? Your mother couldn't read, and she couldn't write, nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn't before they died. I can't; and here you're a-swelling yourself up like this. I ain't the man to stand it -- you hear?"
When Huck reads a bit, Pap knocks the book across the room and warns Huck that if he catches him at school again, he'll beat him. The scene is funny partly because Pap's attitude is so counter to all the middle-class bromides (Stay in school, etc.), but it's also funny because it expresses something real: there is a real anti-academic feeling in a lot of people. Sure, nearly every parent genuinely wants his or her child to succeed in school--but a lot of them have mixed feelings. They may have hated school themselves. A part of them may feel that they didn't succeed and don't want their kids to succeed. I had mixed feelings about school myself, and I know I have transmitted those feelings to my children.
It's not only parents, but peers, who work against creating a culture of reading. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the only two readers in the First Grade classroom are Scout and the teacher, and even if they could work together it would be difficult for them to move the great mass of the rest of the class. The greatest obstacle to student success is often the students. Not the student, singular, but his or her peers. It takes more than one person to create a culture--and a teacher is only one person. True, she has a vested authority, but she is competing against a score of other people, many of whom are not yet initiates into the society of readers.
This is a huge, and potentially growing problem
In the United States, despite the constant talk of our weak performance and the "crisis" in education, the situation is roughly what it's been like for decades. The rich kids do very well, even by international standards, and the poor kids don't. Recent results on the OECD's PISA tests make this clear: in 2009, US schools with less than 10% poor kids had reading scores averaging 551, significantly better than the scores in any other country (schools with more than 75% of students receiving Free or Reduced Price Lunch averaged 446, significantly worse than Turkey), but US poverty rates are among the highest in the OECD.
In any case, US schools with few poor kids do very well, and this has been clear at least since 1972, when Christopher Jencks and his colleagues published their magisterial Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (and every year other writers like Richard Rothstein and Gerald Grant make the same obvious point). Oddly, it was also in 1972, or thereabouts, that the economic fortunes of the bottom 50% took a turn for the worse. Median wages, adjusted for inflation, peaked in the early 1970s and have been flat or declining since, even as the incomes of the upper-middle-class have grown quite a bit and the incomes of the rich have grown enormously.
This inequality has large educational effects. Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame) gave a talk recently on inequality that has been getting a lot of press (David Brooks, whom I usually loathe, wrote a somewhat reasonable column about it this week). The basic idea is that poor kids grow up in dramatically different environments, and are given much, much less attention and fewer resources (like books!) than their higher-SES peers. The inequality among children, according to Putnam, is getting dramatically worse. I look forward to Putnam's book, but we teachers should be taking this stuff into account every day, trying to provide, in school, the cultural and social education that our students are missing outside of school.
We can't make up for cultural gaps by mechanical means. Instead, we should be doing just what the Deweyan teacher in To Kill a Mockingbird is trying and failing to do: we should be reading to our students--but reading them stories they like. We should be modeling our love for reading and thinking. We should be providing them with books to read, and time in which to read them. We should be fostering student discussion in lit circles and the like. What we should not be doing is what we too often are doing: giving our students the educational equivalent of Scout's classmates daily chores: drudge-work, like feeding hogs and chopping cotton, that keeps them from the valuable, mind-growing work of leisure-reading. School should look like this:
...or even like this:
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Breast is Best; The Questionable Worth of Explicit Vocab Instruction, Redux
I've read some more studies, and it still is very far from clear to me that spending time on explicit vocab instruction in non-specialized lexicons is more valuable than "natural reading." I'll try below to explain where the uncertainties lie, and why the studies I've read have not quelled my doubts. I apologize for getting into the boring weeds of these scholarly articles and their trails of footnotes, but looking for evidence that vocab instruction improves comprehension brings me back to 2003: it reminds me of looking for evidence of Saddam's nuclear arsenal. Supporters of explicit vocab instruction insist that proof is there, and they have created endless daisy chains of references to others who insist that proof is there, but in the end I couldn't find it.
It is just amazing how often assertions about the value of vocabulary instruction are made without offering good evidence. I talked about this problem in relation to the What Works document in my last post, but I see it over and over again. In one of our readings for today, Karen Bromley offers as one of her "Nine Things Every Teacher Should Know About Words and Vocabulary Instruction" the following remarkable statement in bold face print as her seventh essential truth we all should know:
"Direct instruction in vocabulary influences comprehension more than any other factor."
Taken at face value, this is just absurd. We wonder: Is explicit vocab instruction a more important factor than how much a student reads? Is explicit vocab instruction a more important factor than the family a student comes from? Of course not. But then, not only does Bromley immediately backtrack from her statement ("Although wide reading can build word knowledge, students need thoughtful and systematic instruction in vocabulary as well"--and again, Jay Gatsby might appreciate that "as well"), she also cites research that does not seem to back up her claim.
Her first (and best) reference is Blachowitz and Fisher's 2004 article, which does contain a section on "The Research on Vocabulary Instruction." This section, however, primarily offers evidence for home environment and wide reading as important factors, and then concludes that explicit instruction must be needed to fill in the gap for students who don't come from literate families or read a lot.
Why, we wonder, shouldn't we try to work on the wide reading part of it? (And the socialists among us might suspect that reducing inequality and poverty might help too). But that's not considered, so we are left only with explicit instruction, for which Blachowitz and Fisher offer only lukewarm support. The closest the article comes to arguing that explicit instruction can fill the gap is when it says, "studies support the idea that good vocabulary instruction can teach students the words they need to know to learn to read (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982; Biemiller, 2001)." Blachowitz and Fisher's article eventually concludes with the underwhelming sentence: "Research indicates that effective vocabulary instruction can make a difference."
Nevertheless, the article did offer those two citations: Beck et al, 1982; Biemiller, 2001. So I looked at those.
Biemiller's article is entirely armchair theorizing, with no data of its own, as far as I could tell. That left the Beck et al. article from 1982. That article is, mirabile dictu, the same one that my workshop instructor gave me today after I questioned whether explicit vocab instruction could actually improve comprehension. That this somewhat lame article (the "Curveball" of vocab instruction?) has been the mainstay of explicit vocab instruction promoters for 30 years is, again, just amazing.
The Beck et al. article, which contains data from a controlled trial of a 5 month long unit of in-depth vocab instruction in 104 words, has two large problems. One problem is that control group in their experiment was only given "a traditional textbook curriculum." It seems very possible that this traditional textbook curriculum was totally worthless. I would like to know more about what that curriculum was, and I'd prefer to see explicit vocab instruction competing against a well-implemented free-choice reading program.
The second problem is that the Beck et al. experiment only taught 104 words, and only tested the students on passages that contained those very words. This may perhaps be relevant for other disciplines, but it does not seem very impressive for English. Of course if you teach kids words that occur in a passage, they will be able to understand the passage better; the question is whether teaching kids words (or roots, or morphemic awareness or whatever) will help them read passages that are not hand-selected to contain those words.
In a follow-up paper the next year, Beck et al. refined their experiment, and trumpeted it as a real breakthrough. According to their introduction, "studies that have attempted to improve comprehension through vocabulary training have brought equivocal results"; but their study had finally proved a link. That Beck et al. were evidently so proud of proving that five months of instruction on 104 words could improve students' comprehension of passages containing those very 104 words is just mind-boggling to me.
What all this leaves me with is a feeling of befuddlement. I am pretty sure that wide reading over many years will improve both vocabulary and comprehension, and to support that claim there is abundant empirical and anecdotal evidence which even the explicit instruction promoters acknowledge. Wide reading over many years: is that impossible? Schools have near-total control over students for six hours a day over many years. Then why in the world can we not make sure that our students are reading for at least an hour a day, every day, in every grade? Why are we going to such enormous lengths to try to prove that a mechanical process is as good as an organic one? Explicit vocab instruction, like so many things in our curriculum, is like a vitamin pill, a nutritional supplement. Why would we want to give our students endless vitamin pills, rather than just feeding them wholesome real food? Why would we spend decades and decades trying to formulate nutritional supplements? Or, for another analogy, explicit vocab and skills instruction looks to me like infant formula. OK, we can get better at making infant formula, but it's still probably never going to be quite as good as the real thing. I want a slogan. What's the educational equivalent of "Breast is Best"?
It is just amazing how often assertions about the value of vocabulary instruction are made without offering good evidence. I talked about this problem in relation to the What Works document in my last post, but I see it over and over again. In one of our readings for today, Karen Bromley offers as one of her "Nine Things Every Teacher Should Know About Words and Vocabulary Instruction" the following remarkable statement in bold face print as her seventh essential truth we all should know:
"Direct instruction in vocabulary influences comprehension more than any other factor."
Taken at face value, this is just absurd. We wonder: Is explicit vocab instruction a more important factor than how much a student reads? Is explicit vocab instruction a more important factor than the family a student comes from? Of course not. But then, not only does Bromley immediately backtrack from her statement ("Although wide reading can build word knowledge, students need thoughtful and systematic instruction in vocabulary as well"--and again, Jay Gatsby might appreciate that "as well"), she also cites research that does not seem to back up her claim.
Her first (and best) reference is Blachowitz and Fisher's 2004 article, which does contain a section on "The Research on Vocabulary Instruction." This section, however, primarily offers evidence for home environment and wide reading as important factors, and then concludes that explicit instruction must be needed to fill in the gap for students who don't come from literate families or read a lot.
Why, we wonder, shouldn't we try to work on the wide reading part of it? (And the socialists among us might suspect that reducing inequality and poverty might help too). But that's not considered, so we are left only with explicit instruction, for which Blachowitz and Fisher offer only lukewarm support. The closest the article comes to arguing that explicit instruction can fill the gap is when it says, "studies support the idea that good vocabulary instruction can teach students the words they need to know to learn to read (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982; Biemiller, 2001)." Blachowitz and Fisher's article eventually concludes with the underwhelming sentence: "Research indicates that effective vocabulary instruction can make a difference."
Nevertheless, the article did offer those two citations: Beck et al, 1982; Biemiller, 2001. So I looked at those.
Biemiller's article is entirely armchair theorizing, with no data of its own, as far as I could tell. That left the Beck et al. article from 1982. That article is, mirabile dictu, the same one that my workshop instructor gave me today after I questioned whether explicit vocab instruction could actually improve comprehension. That this somewhat lame article (the "Curveball" of vocab instruction?) has been the mainstay of explicit vocab instruction promoters for 30 years is, again, just amazing.
The Beck et al. article, which contains data from a controlled trial of a 5 month long unit of in-depth vocab instruction in 104 words, has two large problems. One problem is that control group in their experiment was only given "a traditional textbook curriculum." It seems very possible that this traditional textbook curriculum was totally worthless. I would like to know more about what that curriculum was, and I'd prefer to see explicit vocab instruction competing against a well-implemented free-choice reading program.
The second problem is that the Beck et al. experiment only taught 104 words, and only tested the students on passages that contained those very words. This may perhaps be relevant for other disciplines, but it does not seem very impressive for English. Of course if you teach kids words that occur in a passage, they will be able to understand the passage better; the question is whether teaching kids words (or roots, or morphemic awareness or whatever) will help them read passages that are not hand-selected to contain those words.
In a follow-up paper the next year, Beck et al. refined their experiment, and trumpeted it as a real breakthrough. According to their introduction, "studies that have attempted to improve comprehension through vocabulary training have brought equivocal results"; but their study had finally proved a link. That Beck et al. were evidently so proud of proving that five months of instruction on 104 words could improve students' comprehension of passages containing those very 104 words is just mind-boggling to me.
What all this leaves me with is a feeling of befuddlement. I am pretty sure that wide reading over many years will improve both vocabulary and comprehension, and to support that claim there is abundant empirical and anecdotal evidence which even the explicit instruction promoters acknowledge. Wide reading over many years: is that impossible? Schools have near-total control over students for six hours a day over many years. Then why in the world can we not make sure that our students are reading for at least an hour a day, every day, in every grade? Why are we going to such enormous lengths to try to prove that a mechanical process is as good as an organic one? Explicit vocab instruction, like so many things in our curriculum, is like a vitamin pill, a nutritional supplement. Why would we want to give our students endless vitamin pills, rather than just feeding them wholesome real food? Why would we spend decades and decades trying to formulate nutritional supplements? Or, for another analogy, explicit vocab and skills instruction looks to me like infant formula. OK, we can get better at making infant formula, but it's still probably never going to be quite as good as the real thing. I want a slogan. What's the educational equivalent of "Breast is Best"?
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