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.

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

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

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

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

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

For vocabulary, input volume matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

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"?

Is Explicit Vocabulary instruction Worth It?

I've been thinking about vocabulary a lot recently.  I've tried to teach vocabulary in a "robust" way in recent years (offering friendly definitions, using the words in context, playing fun games, etc.), but I haven't had much success.  Some kids knew the words already, some didn't; some studied, some didn't; most forgot the words by the end of the year.  I was dispirited.  Then, while following the common core debate, I noticed that in a recent letter in Education Week Linda Diamond defended the National Reading Panel Report and its emphasis on skills, "explicit instruction," and vocabulary instruction ("Common-core standards in reading not 'flawed,'" March 28). I was most interested in the question of vocabulary instruction, and I decided to try to figure out who was right, the Common Core Standards, the National Reading Panel, and the "What Works" Clearinghouse, or those who argue that explicit vocabulary instruction is probably less valuable than other activities, like reading itself.

My first step was to look up the government's "What Works" publication on adolescent literacy (http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide.aspx?sid=8).  I found that this apparently authoritative, evidence-based publication said there was "strong" empirical evidence for explicit vocabulary instruction. When I followed up on their evidence, however, I was surprised to find that there was almost nothing there--and that some of what their strongest evidence seemed rather to question the value of explicit vocabulary instruction.

The strongest evidence cited by the What Works report seemed to be in the following passage: "Children often learn new words from context. However, according to a meta-analysis of the literature, the probability that they will learn new words while reading is relatively low--about 15 percent. Therefore, although incidental learning helps students develop their vocabulary, additional explicit instructional support needs to be provided as part of the curriculum to ensure that all students acquire the necessary print vocabulary for academic success.

This sounded interesting, but a little obscure. If the probability of learning new words while reading is "relatively low--about 15 percent," what exactly does that mean? 15 percent of what? Does that mean that 15 percent of my students learn NO words at all in the course of their reading? That would be terrible. Or does it mean that for any occurrence of a word they don't know, there is a 15 percent chance of their learning it? That doesn't sound so bad.

Curious, I followed the citation to a 1999 paper by a couple of researchers in Amsterdam, researchers who wrote in perfect English, of course. (An aside: how did they acquire their excellent English vocabulary? Not, I imagine, from much explicit instruction in vocabulary, but I could be wrong). These Dutch academics, Swanborn and De Glopper, had reviewed a number of studies of vocabulary acquisition from what they charmingly called "natural reading." They noted that some uncertainties remained, because there seemed to be great variability among students in how many words could be learned incidentally, and it was unclear also how many unknown words students encountered in their "natural reading," but the researchers concluded on a positive note: "What we do know, however, from our meta-analysis, is that students have a fair chance of learning unknown words from reading. Natural reading has the potential to make a contribution to vocabulary growth." This is, strikingly, at odds with the way the government publication interpreted their article. So I decided to look more closely, at the 15 percent that the What Works article had claimed was too low a number.

According to Swanborn and de Glopper, students encounter unknown words at a rate of at least one percent. That is, in a thousand words of text, ten of them will be unknown to a student who is reading a book that's comfortable for him to read. Of those unknown words, 15 percent will be learned without any conscious effort. The What Works authors deemed this too low a number. But how many words would a student learn at this rate? Say a student read ten pages a day, hardly impossible, and say each page had three hundred words, also a low estimate. Then in a week the student would have read 7x10x300 words, or 21,000 words. Of those words, at least one percent, or 210, would be unknown. Of those 210 unknown words, the student might be expected to learn 15 percent, or 31 words. So, according to the meta-analysis that the What Works authors cited to show the inadequacy of natural reading as a way of improving one's vocabulary, students who are reading at the relatively slow pace of 70 pages a week could be expected to learn 31 new words a week. At my school, we have had a big push in recent years to teach more vocabulary, and many teachers are spending as much as 10 or 15 percent of their class time to explicit vocabulary instruction. But even with this extraordinary expenditure of time and energy, no teacher is teaching her students more than 10 words a week, at the most, and few students are actually learning all ten of those words. With the hour a week that we are spending on vocab, our students could be reading another thirty pages, thereby learning another 13 words, and also accruing all the other benefits that reading brings.

It seems that having a 15% chance of learning new words is far from "too low"; instead, it is wonderful and promising. So the main evidence cited by the What Works authors does not support their argument that explicit vocabulary instruction is needed.

Natural reading may work to improve vocabulary.  But what about explicit vocabulary instruction?  Maybe research shows that explicit instruction is very effective--even more effective than natural reading, despite my own poor results.  So I looked at some of the research the report cited and I looked at some papers I found elsewhere, and NOWHERE could I find clear empirical evidence that explicit instruction in vocabulary would lead to more word acquisition than just plain reading, nor that the word acquisition that was achieved in any of the studies had actually increased comprehension.  As Baumann et al. say in their 2003 paper, "causality regarding vocabulary-to-comprehension relationships [...] remain [sic] murky."

This is typical of my experience with educational research.  The claims people make about what is supported by the data are often strikingly at odds with what the data actually support.  There is no doubt that good readers usually have good vocabularies, and there is no doubt that they acquired their good vocabularies somehow, but it is very far from clear how they did, and it is very far from clear what teachers can do to help.  In the absence of much clearer evidence that explicit instruction is significantly better than just reading, I think we should mostly stick with just reading.  That said, I am still going to do some vocabulary stuff in my classes next year.

This year, after I had my students learn vocabulary words drawn from the books we read as a class, they didn't make much progress.  Next year I am going to have them pay attention to words in the books they read on their own and make their own vocab tests from those words.  I also hope to be very intentional about using a lot of higher-order words in class myself.  A few weeks ago I used the word "behoove" a few times, and many of my weakest students loved it.  I'm skeptical about whole-class word lists, but I hope that modeling and encouraging word-love (and upping the reading volume) can make a difference.  We'll see.

How many books did our students read this year?

I'm going away for a few days on a camping trip, but I'm going to try to schedule this to be posted on Friday.  Miraculous technology!  (I feel like Willy Loman's boss, Howard, who tells Willy about his amazing new tape recorder, which allows him to listen to Jack Benny at any hour he wishes, as long as the maid remembers to record the show for him when it's aired.  I suppose if this doesn't work I could always have my maid do it--if I had a maid...)

"How many books did our students read this year?" is a question that we should all be asking.  A couple of weeks ago I asked it of the students in the "Tutorial" class I work in once a week.  Not how many books they were supposed to read, but how many they actually read.  The answers I got were interesting.  The students read, on average, about six books each over the course of the year.

These are kids who are in a very well-run academic support program.  More than half of them are in honors English classes.  They have been in school for eight and a half months.

If we assume that kids are truthful in their reporting, and even if we pretend that kids are reading every page of the books they claim they are reading, and if we assume that a book is, on average, 300 pages long, that would mean that each kid is reading fewer than ten pages a day.  And if you look only at the lower half of the distribution (mostly kids who are not in "Honors" classes), each kid is reading only 150 pages a month, which works out to 5 pages a day.  For the kids in the lower quarter of the distribution, each kid is reporting reading reading 2 to 3 pages a day.

I think it's safe to say that this is not enough.  Children should be reading closer to two books a month, at the least. 

What were the averages for kids in my own standard-level classes?  8.5 books per kid.  Better--but again, not nearly enough.

There are a number of reasons it's hard for schools to get kids to read more:

• If we ask kids to read at home, it is very hard to make sure they really do it, and the weakest readers will tend to read least
• If we have kids read in English class, the teacher then feels that she herself isn’t doing enough.
• If we have an academic support program, that program will support the work that is being directly checked and graded that day or week, and that usually means producing or processing a piece of paper (because that's checkable), not reading a book.
• If we have a remediation program, we tend to want to remediate the particular areas in which we see the kids are weak (fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, etc,) so we tend to teach “strategies” or vocabulary aimed at these specific areas.
• Remediation teachers have the same desire to feel personally useful, and just having the kids read doesn’t seem like “teaching”
• Also, remediation programs have very little time (typically an hour a week), and we know the kids need more reading than that, so spending the time having them read seems inadequate.

These are major obstacles in every school: my own son just finished sixth grade at a wonderful school, and he reports that most of his “Reader’s Workshop” time is spent with the (excellent) teacher giving direct instruction.  Less than half of the time, according to his report, is spent reading.  I have trouble believing this, since I admire his teacher so much, but it may well be true.  In his case, it doesn’t matter much, since he reads a lot at home, but I am sure there are number of kids in his class who do not read at home and who, because they have little time to read in school, read very little overall.  My son will get better and better at reading, and they won’t—not because he is gifted and they aren’t, but because he actually reads. (He also told me yesterday that the vocabulary lists he is made to memorize are completely pointless, that it would be much better to just read a book, because that's the way he actually learns words--and, he said, it's more enjoyable.)

So how can we make kids read more?  The answer is simple: provide them with a large number of good books at their independent reading level to choose from; and make them read; and watch them do it.  Our school has kids under its control for over six hours a day.  There is no good reason we can't have them sitting and silently reading books for at least an hour each day.  Nothing else we do with them is as important; nothing else would be as efficient, productive, and individualized.

End of Year Assessment

I end the year feeling relatively happy with what I accomplished in my "Honors" Junior classes.  There we have a more or less coherent curriculum ("American Literature"), and I know that most of my students can do things now (recognize and speak intelligently about the most famous works of American literature) that they couldn't before.  Some of my students fell in love with Henry James and Edith Wharton, reading Portrait of a Lady and The Age of Innocence on their own; others loved Vonnegut, Morrison, or Junot Diaz.  They all have a pretty good idea who Whitman, Dickinson and Wheatley are.  They can talk familiarly about modernism, post-modernism, and the Transcendentalists.  They've been to Walden Pond!

I feel much less happy--not to say completely dispirited--about my Ninth grade "Standard" classes.  In those classes I tried many things, and none of them worked very well.  I tried to split the class time between whole-class texts and independent reading.  For some kids, the independent reading was great.  Other kids did everything they could do to avoid actually reading.  The best I can say is that the in-class independent reading worked, like nothing else I've ever done, to reveal the real problems that are often, in a more conventional curriculum, hidden from view.  I now know that some students really, really, really struggle with and dislike reading--at least most books, at least so far.

With a conventional curriculum, it's easier to pretend that you are reading a little bit even if in fact you're not reading at all.  You can use Sparknotes, you can fake the reading homework, you can glean something from what the teacher or other students say, and often you can participate in class discussions and activities.  Failing any of those, you can always claim, or the teacher can imagine, that it is just the assigned book that is failing to fire your interest.  You are a reader, but not of this book--or so you claim.  With in-class independent reading, the non-reader is terrifyingly exposed.  Sitting there with his book is for him a form of torture--and what's worse, public torture.

If actually reading is important to improving literacy, and I can't see how it couldn't be important, then I have to figure out how to get these kids to read.  One thing I might try next year is starting the year with children's books, trying to have everybody in the class remembering--or (for those who struggled terribly in the very early grades, discovering--that reading is really fun.  In the first two weeks maybe we can move from Dr. Seuss to Jack and Annie to Matt Christopher to Roald Dahl to Harry Potter, and some students can stay at the level at which reading is actually fun and not feel bad about reading Matt Christopher instead of Dennis Lehane.

I really, really want my students to learn how enjoyable reading can be.  I asked my freshmen to write about a book they liked this year, and a number of them wrote some variation of: I usually don't like to read, but there's one book I truly loved.  Usually this book was either a Sonya Sones title or The Hunger Games, but I think it's really important to try to help them find more than one book or author that they love.  Some literacy researcher, I forget which, talks about "home run books," books that turn non-readers into readers; my experience this year says that one home run book is not enough. How can I get them to go beyond Sonya Sones?  I need more books, we need to spend a lot of time trying to find books that they like, and some of the kids are going to have to read easier books...

Over the summer I'll think all this through more, but for now I just want to note down four goals I have for next year:

1) I want my students to read more.  To that end I plan to buy a lot more books, including easier ones, take them to the library more regularly, and do more reading in class in a more structured way.  (I will also cut out the non-fiction independent reading unit that I tried this year and that largely failed--the kids did a good job of writing non-fiction, but because the books were just not appealing enough, most of them didn't read much of it.  David Coleman can come in as a long-term sub and do that unit if he wants to.)

2) I want my students to learn more vocabulary.  This year I had them learn vocabulary words drawn from the books we read as a class, and yet they made, as a class, less than a year's progress in their vocabulary level (I gave them a vocab assessment in September and in June).  Next year I am going to have them pay attention to words in the books they read on their own and make their own vocab tests from those words.  I also hope to be very intentional about using a lot of higher-order words in class myself.  Last week I used the word "behoove" a few times, and many of my weakest students loved it.  I'm skeptical about whole-class word lists, but I hope that modeling and encouraging word-love (and upping the reading volume) can make a difference

3) I want my students to do more close reading--in the form of mark-ups, socratic seminars and passage essays.  I need to find difficult, high-interest texts or excerpts.

4) I want my students' writing to be more polished.  They have to get tough with themselves about the mechanics of their writing.  Too many of them produce work that is embarrassingly sloppy, and they just keep on making the same mistakes over and over again.

I still think independent work and independent reading should be a big part of English class, and I want to do even more of it next year, but I now see even more clearly that you have to not only lead a student to books, but create a social system in the classroom that helps him pick out good ones and encourages him to read them.