NYT sees no evil in ability grouping; but I wonder if it enables boring curriculum

According to a piece in yesterday's New York Times, ability grouping in elementary school is seeing a resurgence.  The article gives very short shrift to the potential problems with tracking, so it might be worth pointing them out. In general, kids in higher groups like tracking; those in lower groups don't, so most of the problems with ability-grouping are obvious Matthew-effect issues: kids in lower-level groups might feel ghettoized; kids in lower-level groups might learn less. But there's one problem that is less obvious, and that affects students at all levels: tracking may allow teachers to get away more easily with less-interesting curriculum that they might otherwise have to rethink.

The Times article describes one teacher's practice:

Ms. Vail teaches the same lesson, whether it is a math concept or a book, to the entire class, but gives each group a different assignment. Working on each week’s set of new vocabulary words, all four groups draw illustrations and write captions using the assigned words, but she encourages team C, her highest-achieving group, to write more complex sentences, perhaps using two new vocabulary words in the same sentence. She also asks children in team C to peer-teach students in the other groups.

“At the end of the day, they’re learning the same words, but just with different levels of complexity and nuance,” she said.

When she moves students to new groups, she tells them it is because she can best help them there, and she believes they see the grouping positively, she said.

“It has to be done properly — you can’t make a kid feel small because they’re in group A,” her lowest-achieving group, she said. “If you don’t have a stigma attached to the group, then I don’t see the problem.

The teacher doesn't see any problems here ; I see three:

1. There is probably, despite the teacher's assurances, still a stigma attached to the lower groups.  How can she really know?  And how can she know what the long-term effect of always being in the lower group might be for some kids? It could be pretty harmful, and she would have no idea.
2. Even if there were really no stigma, there might be harm done to the lower-level kids if they aren't exposed to the more interesting work done by the higher-level kids.
3. Vocabulary study may well be largely pointless, so there is a large potential opportunity cost here: the kids could be reading instead of doing vocab work.  This is especially important for the kids in the lower groups, who are much more likely to essentially never read.

This last point may seem the least germane to the debate, but is actually potentially very important. Ms. Vail's vocabulary lesson strikes me as pretty tedious, but by adapting it to different levels, she makes the boring lesson workable. Tracking, then, may enable boring curriculum, by allowing its weaknesses to be masked by some made-to-measure tailoring. To offer another example: a curriculum that mimics a standardized test won't work with a heterogeneous group, because the test questions will be too hard for the less able students and too easy for the highly skilled.

My theory is that to make heterogeneous classes work well, you need to do more interesting curriculum. The more meaningful the activity, the more it will allow students of different abilities to engage with it in their own ways. An open-ended discussion can be joined in by students of all abilities, and a mini-lesson on Modernist poetry may be appreciated by everyone as well. If you really want to do vocabulary, why not have every kid write something meaningful (a story, a book review, an argument) using the words? That way each kid could write at his or her own level, and stories tend to be less boring than isolated sentences. If you want kids to push themselves, ask all kids to write the piece using and reusing as many words as possible, or offer variations adapted to the meaningful assignment.  In any case, the more the assignment fits into a larger purpose, the better: instead of isolated sentences, have students use the vocab words in the book reviews they are writing of their independent reading books after having read a bunch of book reviews pulled from a variety of publications, with the eventual goal of putting together a class magazine modeled after the London Review of Books--or whatever.  The point is, meaningful tasks can almost always be done at a wide range of levels; meaningless tasks depend on teacher-created difficulty levels, and if you don't have those levels the meaninglessness is perhaps more exposed.

So though I don't actually know if tracking is always a bad idea (though I'm sympathetic to Jennie Oakes's arguments), I think as a general rule we should have whole-class lessons that aren't tracked, have individual work that is appropriate for the individual kid, and have group projects that are mixed-ability.

Front-page NYT article on raising reading scores never mentions actually reading

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!

Kids talking about not reading

Below is a video made by the estimable Penny Kittle, whose brand new title, Book Love, ably makes the case for an English curriculum of 50% free-choice reading.  The video's a bit self-serving, but that seems to be the nature of a lot of the discourse in the education world. In any case, she's doing the right thing, and I imagine her students are reading almost as much in her class as they say they are.  Here's hoping that this title, coming not so long after the similar but less amiably titled Readicide (though many years after the wonderful Mary Leonhardt books--and perhaps other books I don't know about yet), heralds a new age in adolescent literacy.

Here's the video:

A kid who "hates" reading

I. "I hate reading!"

At the beginning of one of my classes last Thursday, I asked the kids to get out their books and start reading.  We frequently spend the first ten to fifteen minutes of class reading silently, and some students had already started; others were opening backpacks and digging out their independent reading books.  Then one girl--I'll call her "Karenna"--slammed her copy of The Lovely Bones on her desk and said, loudly: "Why do we have to read?  I hate reading.  We spend forty-five minutes a day reading.  Can't we do something else?"

This got everyone's attention, and we hadn't talked about this issue recently, so I decided to speak to the whole class.  I suggested that in fact we averaged about ten minutes a day of reading, and that we had only once or twice all year spent more than half an hour reading in class, and I said, as I often do, that reading was important, it was what we were there in English class to get better at, there was no way to get better than to actually do it, and most people would prefer to read a book of their own choosing.  Then I asked the class how many of them would prefer to do something else.  One other girl, a friend of the first one, raised her hand.

In any case, Karenna, I went on, I don't believe that you just never enjoy reading.  You are smart and interesting, and there are lots of different books in the world.  Maybe The Lovely Bones just isn't the right book for you.  What's a book you've enjoyed?

She admitted to having liked an Ellen Hopkins book she read earlier in the year.  Well, I said, even though you've tried other Ellen Hopkins books and haven't liked them, we know you CAN like to read.  You just need to find a new book.  Then I turned to her friend.

Her friend, who happened to be reading another Alice Sebold book, Lucky, cannily said, "Well, I like my book.  But I don't like reading.  I just don't enjoy the activity."

I thought about this for a second.  Clearly with these two kids I hadn't succeeded in "teaching a love of reading."  What to do?

II. Inappropro... what kids like?

I ended up sending Karenna down to the library to find another book.  I sent another student (not her friend) along with her, to help out.  The girl I sent didn't want to go--maybe she wanted to read?--but I told her that since she had already read dozens of books this year, missing twenty minutes of reading wouldn't hurt her--and besides, as an avid reader, she'd be able to help Karenna find a book.  But, the girl said, I don't like the library; I haven't been to the library all year. Okay, I replied, it will be good for you, too, then--you should get to know the library!

After they left, the rest of the class got down to business.  It wasn't long before Karenna's friend, the one who had backed her up and said that she, too, hated reading, called me over to tell me about what had happened in her book. Last week, this girl had been amazed that Alice Sebold's memoir had moved so abruptly away from the verdict in the trial of her rapist, without going into how it had affected her.  Now she wanted to let me know that Sebold had started discussing the longer term effects of her trauma.  "She's got PTSD," the girl informed me.   I said something appreciative, and moved on.  A few minutes later, the same girl called me back over and informed me, in a loud voice, that Sebold was doing crack and heroin.  A few minutes later she had to tell me that Sebold had gone to Germany and let a bunch of guys have sex with her all in a row.  I was duly horrified, and I think the girl appreciated my horror.

A few minutes later, as we were finishing up our twenty minutes of reading, the two other two girls returned from the library, the one who hated reading holding a copy of Lauren Myracle's l8r, g8r. Some adults don't like that book, focusing on the inappropriate sex--but maybe that's what some (all?) kids want to read about...

III.  What next?
I don't know yet how Karenna is liking l8r, g8r (and I wonder why she didn't start with the first book in the series!), but the day overall left me thinking about how I could have done a better job of encouraging these girls to find books they actually like. Karenna has been resistant since the beginning--I remember she told me on day one that she only liked Ellen Hopkins, and I had a talk with her very thoughtful mom on parents' night about how difficult it always was to get Karenna to read--but I think if I had been able to put in her hands a much wider variety of books, especially books that were easier than The Lovely Bones, then maybe by now she would have developed more "reading perseverance," as some people put it.

The best way to do this would be to have lots and lots of books in the classroom, since going to the library doesn't come easily to some kids (like the avid reader who hadn't yet been to the library), but I should have been taking the class to the library regularly, having kids booktalk more often, and talking often about how we find books.  (I also could have instituted a rule about how quickly you have to move through your book before you have to switch.  Karenna has been moving very slowly through The Lovely Bones for about a month now, and I should have forced her to switch.)

In any case, while independent reading has been working well for most of my students, there are some for whom it's not working.  I've often said that we need to be better at providing kids books to read and time to read them.  I've gotten much better at providing time; now I need to get better at providing books.

The best book I've read so far about teaching high school English

A lot of the good books about teaching reading are by and for K-8 ELA teachers.  I like Nancie Atwell's The Reading Zone, and I just read a good one by Patrick Allen about reading conferences, which said everything I have been groping toward over the past month or two.  I haven't read many books aimed at high school English teachers, but of the ones I have looked at, this one is the best:

The author, Mary Leonhardt, who taught for 37 years and ended her career at Concord-Carlisle, published a bunch of well-received books about reading aimed at parents, but this one is for teachers.  Leonhardt writes in a clear, common-sense style, and she is very wise.  Basically, she advocates a lot of self-selected reading and daily in-class reading.  No wonder I like it!

Summer Reading Blues

A committee of teachers
I'm on a committee charged with rethinking the summer reading program at Leafstrewn.  Over the past several years there has been a whole-school summer reading book.  The title changes very year: Fahrenheit 451; Farewell, My Subaru; First Crossings; etc.  This afternoon our committee talked about changing things around--perhaps by having a book for every grade, so that maybe every year Freshmen would have to read Fahrenheit 451, but maybe Juniors would have to read Dreams From My Father--or whatever; we didn't talk about specific titles.  I advocated, predictably, for a free-choice program that would require reading at least one book but would encourage reading many more, a program in which the choice would be a central part of the conversation--but I didn't think what we ended up with was so terrible.  The department chair sent out notes about the meeting, which included the following bullet point:

•    We agreed that the goals of summer reading are  1) to promote the enjoyment of reading and 2) to give students practice in choosing books they enjoy reading.

Pleased to see these admirable goals, I went happily off to a seder.

A student's perspective
At the seder table, my cousin, a recent graduate of Leafstrewn and now an English major at a fine college, was sitting--or should I say, reclining--next to me. When I mentioned in passing that I'd been at a meeting about summer reading--I didn't say anything about what had been said--my cousin said, Oh, summer reading!  I said, Yeah--what did you think about the summer reading program?  He said, I can describe it in one word: CRUEL.  I said, Really?!  He said, Well, I don't resent it that much anymore, but if you'd asked me six years ago I would have gone on a rant.  I said, I'm surprised; I didn't think it was so terrible.  He said, Being forced to waste your time reading a terrible book OVER THE SUMMER?  The books were awful, we were forced to read them, and then we didn't even do anything intetresting with them in the fall.  It was infuriating.  My friends and I all hated it.




What now?
First, we might consider surveying students to see what they think.  Second, if our goals are really to promote the enjoyment of reading and to give students practice in choosing their own books to read, then having a single assigned book (whether for the whole school or by grade) is almost certainly not the best way to accomplish them, and is possibly even counterproductive.



An admission
Although I have been a compulsive reader since the age of 5, when I was assigned a book to read over the summer before my freshman year of college (it was "The Machine in the Garden," by Leo Marx), I didn't read it.  And I am not alone.  Many people--even many teachers at Leafstrewn--just don't like assigned reading.  Designing a summer reading program that actually encourages reading may require some unnatural teaching.

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

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

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

TEACH LESS, LEARN MORE

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

Remember Why We Teach -

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

Reflect on What We Teach - 

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

Reconsider How We Teach - 

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

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.

Recording reading conferences

A month ago I wrote about reading conferences, and I said that I wasn't sure how to keep good records of the discussions I had with students.  Some of my brilliant colleagues, who have been thinking about these kinds of discussions too, have started recording their conferences using a voice recorder. Today I started doing this too, using my ipod.  I have the kids read to me for 30 seconds or a minute from wherever they are in the book they're reading independently, and then I ask them some questions.  I usually start with something like, "What do you think the author is doing in this passage?"  I try to follow up with "What specifics in the passage do you see that make you say that?"  And then we go from there.

A few thoughts after my first day:

1) It's a good thing we get used early to the look of ourselves in mirrors; I'm not yet used to the sound of my voice on a recording.

2) Maybe if I did this more my voice would improve?

3) All of my students have a fair amount to say about what they're reading--that's good!

4) I wonder if they would have as much to say if they were talking about a whole-class text.  I suspect that talking about the independent reading book makes the students the experts, and therefore empowers them--but I don't have a control group, so I don't really know.

5) It takes longer than I realized to get at an important question, or to get to something that makes the students stop and think.  When I wrote about this a month ago, it seemed easy and quick to get to those points; I think I had had an exceptionally good day of conferences just before I wrote that post. (I wrote, "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.)  Listening to today's recordings, I am struck by how relatively smooth the conversations are.

6) I wonder if this is partly because in today's conversations I allowed the student to direct the conversations more than I often do.  A couple of days ago I was talking to colleagues about conferences, and we discussed using open-ended questions, so today I tended to start the same way with everyone, and I didn't have the explicit goal of coming up with a question that made the student stop and think. This way of questioning, which was partly modeled on the VTS method ("Visual Thinking Strategies"), showed me more clearly what the student was capable of on her own, but didn't lead to the "stop and think" moments that last month I was apparently so proud of facilitating.

6) Nevertheless, I do get something out of these conversations--they are possibly useful assessment tools.  From conversations today I learned that: student A doesn't know the historical background, so can't get the humor and nuance of the conversation; student B almost never refers back to the text, even when asked repeatedly about "specifics in the passage"; student C makes great connections between this scene and other parts of the book; students B, D and F are not very fluent or accurate in their reading aloud, but B and D nevertheless seem to understand the passage perfectly; student E doesn't seem to remember anything from the book except what he's just read to me; etc.

7) It seems to me that these conversations might be pretty good for diagnosing issues--and for instruction, as I was thinking before--but again, as with all instruction, it is SO INEFFICIENT!

8) My main instructional function in these conferences seems to be to push them toward a closer attention to the text and toward deeper thinking. This is really difficult!

9) I still haven't figured out how to keep a good record of these conferences.  In one sense I have excellent records--I have audio recordings--but in another sense these records are uselessly unwieldy.  From 13 conferences I have about a little over an hour of audio.  I did not try to take notes at the same time--but I probably should, so that I can later check my notes against the audio and improve my note taking...

10) I am still haunted by the sheer slipperiness of trying to improve reading comprehension.  I do think that making kids look more closely at text is a worthwhile exercise, but I also wonder how much my own reading comprehension "skills" have improved in the years since I was 12 or 13.  I know much more (background knowledge, vocabulary, literary terms, etc.), but are my actual reading skills (questioning, inferring, making connections) any better?  I am reading an apparently excellent 2005 overview of the research on comprehension acquisition (Perfetti, Landi, Oakhill), and it seems that their recommendations for instruction center on: 1) Reading more (and making sure the reading is "successful"--i.e. comprehensible input); (2) Instruction that tries in various ways to get students to pay more attention to the text and to their own understanding of it ("monitoring").  I take some comfort in thinking that reading conferences are one way to try to do #2--and that while I'm conferencing, the rest of the kids are doing #1.

I look forward to recording more conversations with students about what they're reading next week, and trying to put together the data into some kind of coherent record.  For now, I'm going to just try to get used to the sound of my own voice.

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.

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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.

My colleagues and I gave a common assessment!

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

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

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

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

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

(3) everyone got a B;

(4) that’s okay!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(3) Everyone got a B

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

(4) That’s okay!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guys Read--but may not like the books they're assigned in high school!

A "Read In"
Today our school had a "Read In"--a whole day, in between midyear exams and the second semester, in which we shared books, read, and talked about reading. During one of my free blocks I was on a panel of four male teachers; we talked to an audience of about a hundred and fifty students about our own reading, we read to them from a book we liked, and we took their questions.

Even future teachers don't like assigned reading
In the course of the discussion, every single one of us let it slip that he had not liked much of the assigned reading in high school--that we liked reading, but not the books we were given in our English classes.  I remembered that the same thing happened on the panel I was on last year, and I asked a friend who was on another panel today, and he said he and the guys he was up on stage with had said the same thing.

Does high school discourage reading?
At a certain point in the discussion, when we were asked when we had really been turned on to reading, I turned the question back around to the audience and asked them to raise their hands if they read more now than they did in elementary school.  A few brave souls raised their hands.  Then I asked them to raise their hands if they read more in elementary school than they do now.  eighty percent of the audience raised a hand.

We need to change this
One day is a nice start, but we high school teachers really need to think about how we can change the way we encourage-- or discourage--student reading.  What we are doing now is not working very well.  I think the way to go is toward more independent reading and group discussion and analysis focused on shorter passages (and of course a lot of writing); in any case, what we are doing now, and what has been done at most high schools over the past fifty years or more, is not very inspiring.

An interesting question in regards to teaching

News flash: new research shows that if you run, you get better at running
To me it was news that this was ever in doubt, but a recent post on a New York Times blog (okay, not so recent, but a smart education professor just sent it to me) tells us there is a hot debate over whether running should be taught, and that scientists in England have done a study showing that runners develop more efficient form "just by running more."

Apparently the runners in the study increased their "running efficiency" (oxygen used at a given pace) by nearly ten percent over a ten week period in which they were given no instruction, they just ran.  The scientists say that the runners all learned to bend their knees and ankles more at certain appropriate points in their strides, and all learned to be less "wobbly in the rear foot," whatever that means. 

The post made me think, naturally, about reading; perhaps, like running, reading can be improved just by doing it? Hm...

An interesting question
The most eye-opening thing in the post was not the (somewhat predictable) result that regular running made people better at running, but a little paragraph near the end of the post in which the researcher who led the study said that the results ""raise an interesting question in regards to teaching people to run."

What was this interesting question?  The next sentence in the article began: "'If runners can self­-optimize,' as the women in this study seemed to do, then..."

Okay, how would you finish that sentence?  What interesting question does the study raise in regards to teaching people to run?  I myself thought the question was going to be: "Why bother?"

But no!  The interesting question about teaching running that this study raises for the researcher is not, "Why bother?" but instead: "maybe we should teach runners to learn to understand how the movement feels to them."

Ha!  This woman has done a ten week study showing that people can improve on their own, without instruction, and her conclusion is that maybe we should teach people to learn to understand how the movement feels to them?!

I mean, I am not against mindfulness.  Far from it.  I recently spent a weekend at a Buddhist monastery, and it was great!  Pay attention to the way things feel to you, by all means.  It will help you in many ways, and it might even help your running, and your reading.  But if non-teaching works well for some things, why not just leave it at that?

Interestingly, non-teaching doesn't work well for everything...
The runners in the experiment all learned to bend their joints more efficiently, and all learned to be less wobbly--so maybe those aspects of running aren't worth teaching. None of the runners in the study, however, learned to land on the middle or front of the foot, which some scientists (and, if I remember correctly, the running tribe in the book Born to Run) say makes the stride more efficient and the runner less injury-prone.  So maybe people do need to be taught that?

This result goes along with what I've been thinking about "Visible Learning" and "Direct Instruction" and so on.  There are very likely some things (math?) that require more explicit instruction, and some things (reading?) that require less explicit instruction, and even within a discipline, like reading or running, there may be some things that require more or less explicit instruction. 

One might think that this conclusion--use direct instruction when it's helpful and don't use it when it's not necessary--would be obvious to everybody, but it's not obvious.  We are, I hope, nearing the end of a counterrevolution against the progressive education of the seventies and eighties, and we have gone so far that people like the researcher in the running study cannot imagine anyone learning anything that is not taught--even when she has herself just completed a scientific study showing exactly the opposite.

Teaching or no teaching, you can't run better if you don't run at all
Again, no matter how we are teaching, we need to make sure kids are reading enough.  So I'll close with this old chestnut (table from Allington, numbers originally from here):

Reading Volume of Fifth Grade Students at Different Levels of Achievement

Achievement                         Minutes of                                       Words per

Percentile                            Reading per day                                     year

90th                                           40.4                                             2, 357, 000

50th                                           12.9                                                601, 000

10th                                             1.6                                                  51, 000

 

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.



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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).

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.