A tale of two summers

One more post before my August vacation: two stories and a conclusion.  Regular readers of this blog will know where I'm going; as ever, I think our thinking about school should be informed by extracurricular learning, which varies much more than school, and I think we should be spending a lot of our energy on helping kids find texts and creating time and space for them to read. 

Summer #1: From non-reader to reader

A good friend of mine, a fellow teacher, was concerned that her son wasn't reading enough.  Maybe she had been reading a blog post that cited data linking school achievement with time spent reading outside of school, or maybe she was just, like many other parents, aware that reading is the most important academic skill, and that no one becomes really good at anything without spending large amounts of time doing it (K. Anders Ericsson's 10,000 hour rule may be a cliche and may be nitpicked in various ways, but it's basically right that almost all expert musicians, athletes and readers spent many thousands of hours as children practicing their skills).  In any case, her son was not reading at home very much, and hadn't been reading in school, either (his reportedly excellent second grade teacher had allowed him to spent most of his literacy and reader's workshop time writing a very long story and drawing pictures of hockey players).  Her son needed to read more.

So my friend took action.  She told her son that he would have to read for twenty minutes every night.  Following good SSR protocol, she would read her own book alongside him.  They went together to the library and spent the better part of an hour searching out books he might be interested in.  They took out a bunch of Matt Christopher sports novels, and a book by Avi.

That first week, the reading did not go so well.  He asked every minute or two how much time was left, and he never picked up a book when it wasn't his appointed time, preferring instead to go outside or to pick up the family iPad and check the sports scores.

That was in June and early July.  Then, two weeks ago, the boy visited his grandmother for a weekend, and his grandmother took him to her local library and asked her local librarian for help.  The librarian spent a half an hour or so with him, reading and talking, and set him up with a number of volumes from the "Weird School" series that were much easier to read than the Matt Christopher or the Avi .  When he came back from his grandmother's, he not only had easier books to read, he also had fewer distractions: his parents had put away the iPad.

I saw my friend and her son last week, when they were staying with the rest of their family at a cabin in the woods.  More than once I saw the boy take out, unprompted, one of his "Weird School" books and read it to himself.  His mother reports that he has been voluntarily reading more than the required thirty minutes a day, and she has not had to sit with him and read.  Within a month, he had moved from reluctant reader to reader. 

Summer #2: From reader to non-reader

My own son is in sixth grade.  Since the second grade, he has always read a lot.  His favorite books have been biographies of athletes (he's read the new Willie Mays biography a few years ago, and last summer he raced through Andre Agassi's Open), but he has also enjoyed graphic novels (Tintin, Bone, Persepolis) and action books (Alex Rider books, the Hunger Game series).  He probably reads, over the school year alone, rather more than a book a week, and over the past few summers he has read at an even faster pace.

This summer is half over, and in its six or so weeks he has not yet read a single book.

I ascribe this to three factors:  1) competing activities; (2) electronic distractions; (3) more limited availability of books.

First, he has been pretty busy, going to a few different camps, going on two different camping trips, and playing a lot of sports when he's not at camp.

Second, he has spent an hour of every day at home on the computer, and he just got an iTouch.  He is allotted an hour of computer time a day, and he rarely spends even a minute less.  Most of that time is following the professional tennis tour, and he is frighteningly well-informed about who is ranked what and why and so on.  His iTouch, which is somewhat under our control, hasn't increased his screen time by much, but somehow his relationship to books seems different.

Finally, and this may be the most important, he hasn't been to the library yet this summer.  He himself blames his non-reading on this: "I don't have anything to read!"  Despite our shelves of books, nothing has jumped out at him, and I haven't thrust a We Die Alone into his hands this time around. 

Conclusions: Providing appropriate books and a distraction-free environment matter a lot

These two stories are mirror images of each other.  In both cases, reading was difficult for kids who (a) were distracted by electronic devices and (b) didn't have interesting, appropriately leveled books easily to hand.  When appropriate books and a distraction-free environment were provided, both kids read a lot.  These conditions may seem obvious, and they don't seem terribly difficult, but still, most children don't have either one, and most children don't read as much as they should (45 minutes a day at a minimum).

Because in fact these two conditions are not easy to provide.  I am extremely interested in my children's reading, and yet my son has read next to nothing in the past six weeks.  My friend is also very interested in her kid's reading, and yet he read very little over his whole second grade schoolyear.  And no wonder: providing the appropriate books and the time was in fact not so easy.

Providing books for my friend's son (the "Weird School" series; I love that title) took two trips to the library and a few hours of adult time, and in the end it took a trained professional--the children's librarian in the grandmother's town.  It also took a well-stocked library--the boy's grandmother lives in a town that's probably as wealthy as Leafstrewn.  (If we want to get kids reading, we should not be cutting library budgets, and we should be taking the 20 billion or more dollars we spend on standardized testing and spending that money on books and librarians.)

Providing distraction-free time is also not easy.  We're all busy, and we all have lots of things that need to get done now.  In English class we feel we need to get through the whole-class novel, we need to do the prewriting work for the essay, we need to teach the vocabulary lists.  At home, there's television, music, texting, sports, iPads.  But it's important to provide the time, both in and out of school. 

Post-script: a trip to the library

After I wrote the post above, we took my son went to the library, and he came home with a stack of books two feet high.  That night he read a graphic novel and started a mystery story about a brother and sister whose mom disappears in the Grand Canyon.  And now we're going on vacation, so he'll have a lot of time!

As for this blog, I'm going to take a month-long break.  I'm going to do some pleasure reading, and I'll also think about how to take the message I've been hammering away at here to a broader audience..

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.

The Fault in Our Stars

is very good, if a little too perfect and precious.  The best novels I've read this summer are still by Beverly Cleary.

Thank God for YA fiction

If you have had a reasonably good childhood, or at least a reasonably repressed one (same thing?), or maybe even a miserable one, becoming an adult means losing your illusions, letting go--accepting a more tawdry and depleted reality than what you have been used to experiencing. Among the many illusions our students are due to lose, among the many wonders that they will have to let go of, is the pleasure of reading fiction. So I'd like to take a moment, as an English teacher, to give thanks for YA fiction, in which our students are lucky still to be immersed.

Serious contemporary fiction is pretty grim fare. I picked up the New Yorker magazine before dinner last night and read Junot Diaz's story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love."  I can't believe I read the whole thing.  Diaz's narrator, a writer not unlike Diaz himself, tells about his love life over the past several years--though "love life" is too good a term for the miserable history of infidelity and failure from this guy who calls women "hos" and manages to cheat on his girlfriend 50 times in the course of a few years.  Why would I want to read about this loser?  Of course by the end of the story we see the narrator and his buddies lonely and longing for family life, and according to an interview with Diaz that I read this morning his narrator is poised for some kind of maturity: "Perhaps now, for the first time," Diaz says, his character "can cohere an authentically human self—but only future tales will tell."  Okay, but why would we want to read these future tales?  Why do we want to read this one?

After I finished the Diaz story I thought, wow, are there any YA books as pointless and unentertaining as this story?  Then this morning after watching John Green and his brother discuss Fahrenheit 451 (which I think they made sound better than it is), I went and bought The Fault in Our Stars from my local store.  I hope it's good.

(My other thought was, Wow, grown-up non-fiction is really better than grown-up fiction!  The only grown-up fiction I've liked a lot recently has been Edward St. Aubyn, but that's almost non-fiction, and I can't imagine others less gifted than St. Aubyn producing anything nearly as good.  The mind-bogglingly amazing Katherine Boo book, however, might be approximated by any number of good reporters who were willing to put in the extraordinary time and energy Boo devotes to her task.) 

Update: Even YA authors like John Green himself are apparently worried about fiction. Green's anxiety is in fact so intense that the author's note in The Fault in Our Stars is entirely devoted to a defense of the validity of fiction itself, and he makes the following wild, desperate claim: "the very idea that made-up stories can matter .... is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."

Emails from a student

This spring, the excellent Leafstrewn student newspaper (let's call it "The Pequod") ran a column about reading.  The column was written by a former of student of mine.  My former student said, more or less, that he didn't like the books his Junior-year teacher (that is to say, I) had assigned him, and that if students weren't forced to read boring books like My Antonia or Their Eyes Were Watching God (a "real stinker"), and had a little more choice, they might read more.  His nut graf: "I don’t believe that nobody today reads, but I think the problem lies in what students are being forced to read rather than why they aren’t reading. It’s time to revamp English class so that students discover a passion for literature instead of just deciding books aren’t for them."

This student has a point, and I had been worrying much the same thing.  In fact, after a so-so experience with his very class, and after worrying a lot about how many students managed to avoid the assigned reading, I built more choice into my syllabus, and I gave the students a bit more time to read in class. Also, though I have always had very mixed feelings about motivational lectures and the like (my recent conviction that schools should create a "reading culture" is a flower that grows out of a complicated bog of ambivalence), I gave a brief, passionate lecture about how important reading was, and how lame it was not to do the reading, how especially lame it was to use Sparknotes or other cheatsites. These are good  books, I said; read them!

I wasn't sure how well this had gone over, but I was going on the wise advice of my department chair, who had told me that I had to pretend I believed in what I said.  So I pretended. I was happy, then, to get an email from a student at the end of the year that read, in part, "i really enjoyed your class this year. To be honest, i dont usually read my english class books but what you said in the beginning of the year resonated with me and i am proud to say i really did read all the books this year. I am glad i did too because some of them were really great. You are a really awesome teacher. Thanks for the wonderful year!"

I discounted the last bit for the obvious reasons (she probably wants me to write her rec next year, etc.), but I was pretty interested in her admission that she doesn't "usually" read her English class books.  I wrote back and asked if she wouldn't mind elaborating.  (I didn't tell her I was going to be putting her response up on a blog, but I excuse myself by imagining that no one will know who she is--she could be anyone, really!)

I didn't think she would write back with much more detail, but she did.  Here is (most of) her second email:

"Freshman year i pretty much didnt read a single book. I read about 20 pages of ------. Sophmore year I read the beginning half of most of the books we read. i usually just ask one of my friends that have read the book to give me a synopsis and then i improvise from there. i think that there are a lot of people who just copy off of others or use spark notes but i find that i can use clues in the question to guess the answer. sometimes im totally off but for the most part i usually at least get partial credit. Before high school, i could finish all my hw within 20 minutes so i used to read at least a book a day for pleasure.. i used to read literally allll the time. since hs my pleasure reading has been reduced to about a book a semester and over the summers, although this summer i was assigned more reading than usual since I'm taking ----- so i didnt even both bringing any of my pleasure reading books to ----."

There you go.  The problem in a paragraph.  This is a smart kid, too--she was recommended for an English department award--but her ability in English class is probably due far more to the "book a day" she used to read, back when she wasn't given much homework, than to the hours and hours of work and explicit instruction she has received in school.

Social class and reading

I've been worrying recently about the ways in which reading is social, cultural, and deeply influenced by one's social class.  Below are a few attempts to start to think this through.


Images of Reading: solitary, but also social

Reading is in many ways a solitary activity.  People tend not to read in large groups, and when they do (reading rooms; subway cars), reading often seems to wall off the self from the group.  When I think of images of reading, I think of those portraits of female readers, in which the reading is nearly always shown as an activity of almost circular self-sufficiency.  Here's a picture by Fragonard:

It's a lovely picture, and we like it partly because it makes makes us imagine what it's like to be the young woman. We want to be her because reading looks so pleasant, so private, so self-sufficient--not necessarily passionate, not necessarily joyful, but reasonable, calm, and, despite the pillow against which she is propped up so straight, wakeful.  We put ourselves in her place, we want to know what the book is about, we imagine such a wonderful self-sufficiency (perhaps we are enjoying the painting in the same way the young woman enjoys the book), and the picture is so much about at-one-ness that viewer and subject partly merge. 

But the picture is more complicated, and the apparent solitude is less solitary, than it might seem. It is also less self-sufficient, and it is embedded in a pretty distinct social and cultural context.  First, and most obviously, such a celebration of privacy, such solitary self-sufficiency in a young woman,  may seem, as in Vermeer paintings, to have (that pillow!) an erotic tinge. The young woman in Fragonard's picture is both attractive and quite fetchingly dressed, and if reading might seem a solitary activity, she is less alone than she thinks, for both painter and viewer may play the role of peeping Tom.  

(Here's one, by Renoir, in which the inherent eroticism of the subject is a bit more obvious:

!)

The eroticism of the picture is merely the most obvious way in which reading is never completely solitary.  These young women, like reading itself, are also clearly of a certain class--or rather, are distinctly not of a certain class--that is, they are not poor.  The woman in the Fragonard painting is probably richer than Renoir's subject--by Renoir's time, reading, or leisure, had filtered down to the middle class---but both have had time in their childhoods to learn to read, someone to help them learn, and maids and servants to clean the house, shop for and cook the food, put on their dresses, tie their ribbons and plump their pillows.  While their servants were doing such work (you might argue that Renoir's girl looks like she might have to do some housework herself, but then Renoir is an inveterate fantasist), these non-poor women enjoyed available books to choose from, an undistracting space and continuous leisure time in which to read the books they choose, and friends with whom they could discuss the stories.  In nearly every way, reading was an upper-class pursuit. 

Reading and social class in To Kill a Mockingbird 

The situation is similar in To Kill a Mockingbird. The book paints a wonderful picture of an apparently self-sufficient childhood culture of reading.  Jem, Scout and Dill don't need school--Harper Lee seems deeply skeptical of the idea that reading can be taught--and the children's summer world, a combination of unsupervised outdoor play and passionate engagement in Tom Swift and Tarzan books, seems as beautifully self-sufficient as Fragonard's idyll of solitary reading.  Anyone should be able to read, it seems, and when the book's villain, Bob Ewell, is asked by the book's hero, Atticus Finch, whether he can write, Mr. Ewell is indignant, but in the joke he makes (or should I say the joke the author has at his expense), we are given to understand that his level of literacy is despicably low.  "Of course I can write," Mr. Ewell says.  "How do you think I sign my relief checks?"  We laugh, but we understand that the Ewells probably can't read, as we would think of reading, and that their illiteracy is a part of their separateness, their subhumanness.  According to Atticus, it's not even worth making the Ewell children go to school, because the Ewells are the Ewells and will never change.

I'm dwelling at length on to Kill a Mockingbird because it presents such a clear picture of a good reading culture and such a clear picture of the all-important social divisions.  In Maycomb, one is almost completely defined by one's family and one's class. Jem, Scout and Dill are good readers, but nearly every other upper-class character, that is to say, everyone who lives on the town's "main residential street," is also a member of the reading club: even the mean, racist Mrs. Dubose kicks her morphine habit with the assistance of a Walter Scott novel; and even Boo Radley likes to cut out newspaper articles for his scrapbook.  

The poor farmers, on the other hand, who occupy the next rung down on the social ladder, may be literate, but they are not readers.  Of the farm children who make up most of her class at school, Scout tells us that "the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature."  The Cunninghams and their neighbors were not raised by lawyers who are professional readers and writers, they did not see their parents sitting in the armchair reading every night, and they were provided neither the books nor the time to read even if by some form of extra-sensory perception they had somehow gotten it into their heads that reading was a worthwhile pursuit.

The social groups who occupy the bottom two rungs of the social hierarchy, the African-Americans and the poor white trash, are mostly illiterate--not only immune to imaginative literature, but hardly able to read or write at all.  Bob Ewell may be able, barely, to scratch out his name, but his son Burris, who at eight or nine years old has only spent two full days in school, can't spell his, and his nineteen-year-old daughter Mayella, the best of the bunch, has only been to school for two years and can read and write only as well as her father.  Most of the African-Americans in the town are also illiterate; of the large congregation in the First Purchase church, only four or five, including Calpurnia and her son Zeebo, know how to read.

That African-Americans, and poor Whites, are still less literate than the upper classes is completely to be expected.  The Fragonard picture was painted about 250 years ago.  To Kill a Mockingbird takes place less than a hundred years ago. Cultures usually change very, very slowly.  Burris Ewell was younger than my grandfather; his grandchildren could be my students. We, like them, are living with the inheritance of centuries and centuries of social divisions.  For centuries in Europe, only the clergy knew how to read. In England, your crimes were treated much more leniently if you could prove you could read (they'd ask you to read Psalm 51, the "Neck Verse," and if you could read about God's mercy, then the powers that be would offer mercy as well).  In the American south, education for slaves was prohibited by law. This was all very, very recent, and since we are still living in a culture shaped by this history, we can most effectively make progress by accepting that our work is not only "instructional," not only about "skills," but is primarily social and cultural. 

Family, Peers, and School

The point I am laboriously making here is that reading is not only solitary, and it is not a "skill" that can be isolated, taught and tested in the way that perhaps long division can (though I wonder);  no, reading is social and cultural, and we teachers of reading must keep that uppermost in our minds.

We often assume that all parents want their kids to succeed, to become readers, but some of them probably don't.  There's a funny and horrifying scene in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which Huck's absent, illiterate father comes back to find that while he's been away his son has learned to read.  Pap is upset:  "Looky here -- you drop that school, you hear? I'll learn people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own father and let on to be better'n what he is. You lemme catch you fooling around that school again, you hear? Your mother couldn't read, and she couldn't write, nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn't before they died. I can't; and here you're a-swelling yourself up like this. I ain't the man to stand it -- you hear?"

When Huck reads a bit, Pap knocks the book across the room and warns Huck that if he catches him at school again, he'll beat him.  The scene is funny partly because Pap's attitude is so counter to all the middle-class bromides (Stay in school, etc.), but it's also funny because it expresses something real: there is a real anti-academic feeling in a lot of people.  Sure, nearly every parent genuinely wants his or her child to succeed in school--but a lot of them have mixed feelings.  They may have hated school themselves.  A part of them may feel that they didn't succeed and don't want their kids to succeed.  I had mixed feelings about school myself, and I know I have transmitted those feelings to my children.

It's not only parents, but peers, who work against creating a culture of reading.  In To Kill a Mockingbird, the only two readers in the First Grade classroom are Scout and the teacher, and even if they could work together it would be difficult for them to move the great mass of the rest of the class. The greatest obstacle to student success is often the students.  Not the student, singular, but his or her peers.  It takes more than one person to create a culture--and a teacher is only one person.  True, she has a vested authority, but she is competing against a score of other people, many of whom are not yet initiates into the society of readers.

This is a huge, and potentially growing problem

In the United States, despite the constant talk of our weak performance and the "crisis" in education, the situation is roughly what it's been like for decades.  The rich kids do very well, even by international standards, and the poor kids don't.  Recent results on the OECD's PISA tests make this clear: in 2009, US schools with less than 10% poor kids had reading scores averaging 551, significantly better than the scores in any other country (schools with more than 75% of students receiving Free or Reduced Price Lunch averaged 446, significantly worse than Turkey), but US poverty rates are among the highest in the OECD.

In any case, US schools with few poor kids do very well, and this has been clear at least since 1972, when Christopher Jencks and his colleagues published their magisterial Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (and every year other writers like Richard Rothstein and Gerald Grant make the same obvious point). Oddly, it was also in 1972, or thereabouts, that the economic fortunes of the bottom 50% took a turn for the worse.  Median wages, adjusted for inflation, peaked in the early 1970s and have been flat or declining since, even as the incomes of the upper-middle-class have grown quite a bit and the incomes of the rich have grown enormously.

This inequality has large educational effects.  Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame) gave a talk recently on inequality that has been getting a lot of press (David Brooks, whom I usually loathe, wrote a somewhat reasonable column about it this week).  The basic idea is that poor kids grow up in dramatically different environments, and are given much, much less attention and fewer resources (like books!) than their higher-SES peers.  The inequality among children, according to Putnam, is getting dramatically worse.  I look forward to Putnam's book, but we teachers should be taking this stuff into account every day, trying to provide, in school, the cultural and social education that our students are missing outside of school.

We can't make up for cultural gaps by mechanical means.  Instead, we should be doing just what the Deweyan teacher in To Kill a Mockingbird is trying and failing to do: we should be reading to our students--but reading them stories they like.  We should be modeling our love for reading and thinking. We should be providing them with books to read, and time in which to read them.  We should be fostering student discussion in lit circles and the like.  What we should not be doing is what we too often are doing: giving our students the educational equivalent of Scout's classmates daily chores: drudge-work, like feeding hogs and chopping cotton, that keeps them from the valuable, mind-growing work of leisure-reading.  School should look like this:

...or even like this:

A reader writes...

 MisterFischer, a fellow teacher and a reader of this blog, writes in offering his own ideas about how English class could change.  I think he's going in the right direction, and I'm interested in thinking more about the "close reading of small passages."  I should say that I'm not against "teaching reading in English class," and I 'd say his approach seems to me to still fall under that heading--but the idea that "teaching reading" isn't really possible, and so doesn't belong in English class, is close to what Harper Lee seems to suggest, and it's a provocative way to begin!

I'm wondering: what if we stopped teaching reading in English class?  At some point in our pedagogical history, we started to pretend that we were college professors designing literature-based courses: American Literature; World Literature; European Literature.  Why? Well, at some point (1910's?), college professors re-designed the HS English curriculum in their own image.  The curriculum was designed for a select few (those who stayed in school after 14 instead of going to work) and, probably, for the purposes of weeding out the non-academic.

What if, instead, we went back (way back) to teaching rhetoric instead.  That is, rather than using text as a springboard for pseudo-intellectual discussions (which are sometimes fun and enlightening, but often times vapid and used to hide the fact that the kids haven't really read the material), we use text to examine how text works and how to create text.  We focus on close reading of small passages to help kids understand how text works--how are we manipulated and persuaded? how are we encouraged to like one character or one side of an argument? how do we use words to convince? to create a convincing character? Back to the Trivium! (or some modified version)

As you've written everywhere, kids need to be reading as much as possible.  But evidence (anecdotal and otherwise) seems to suggest that we teachers aren't helping matters.  Will kids read on their own if we don't assign it or make them do it?  THAT's a great question.  Personally, I think that they will, with a little help.  They need help finding the right books, and then more and more and more right books.  Kids need to know how to go about finding the right books--and this is NOT in our school's curriculum anywhere.  We teachers are OK with this; we know about literary books and a little about other books.  But this isn't what most kids want to read.  We need 50 more Robin Brenners and 100 more school librarians...or we need to do some hard thinking about how we can learn enough about what's out there to help guide the kids to the right books.

Do kids need to get credit or points or rewards for reading books?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  They certainly need time.  They need blocks in the day for reading and time at night for reading.  They need to stop filling their time with the books we're assigning them and taking more time reading books that are more appropriate for them to be reading.  This isn't to say that we shouldn't be pushing them to read more and more difficult texts; we can certainly do that.  But clearly trying to make 25 kids read the same difficult text at the exact same time at the exact same pace isn't working.

So, as I see it, we need to stop teaching--assigning--reading so that kids can begin to read.  We need to start doing something else (rhetoric is my vote) so kids can start doing what we want them to do, what we know they need to do, which is to read.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Interest in reading and "freedom of choice"

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Long roots moor summer to... idleness, reading and reflection

Summer is a time for recharging and reflection--and for reading a lot.  Some readers of this blog have expressed a wish to hear more about Leafstrewn, about classroom experiences and particular instructional issues.  I'll try to write a lot about specifics in the fall, but over the summer I want to read and think on a larger scale. So until my vacation in August I'm going to post, every Friday, mostly about big issues.  I'll try to make it entertaining and provocative.

Over the past couple of days I've been thinking about social class; maybe this Friday I'll write about that.

To Kill a Mockingbird and Literacy

To Kill a Mockingbird has its problems.  An article last year about students who don't read the assigned texts was titled, "The 800-Pound Mockingbird in the Classroom".   It's too hard for many students, and many students don't read it.  I don't love the way it seems to solve the problem of racism by substituting classism, in which the elite White people of Maycomb are mainly good and enlightened, the country farmers are good at heart if not always fully enlightened, the obedient and/or crippled Black people are good, and the people who are bad include the powerful, uppity, separatist Black person (tall, strong Lula, who is a "troublemaker" with "fancy ideas and haughty ways") and the great villain of the novel, Bob Ewell, whose evilness is directly linked to his class status as poor white trash.  I also don't love the way the book glorifies the she-asked-for-it rape defense.

It's not my favorite book, and I wish I wasn't required to teach it, especially to my "Standard" level ninth grade classes.  Nevertheless, in the past couple of days I've found myself thinking a lot about what the book says about reading and school.  Like many of our culture's most beloved books, To Kill a Mockingbird gives a picture of reading and of school (and of explicit instruction in particular) that is as interesting as any broadside in the great education debates.

First, To Kill a Mockingbird shows us a group of young people with a deep culture of reading. When Dill first introduces himself to Jem and Scout, he states his identity in the following way: "I'm Charles Baker Harris.  I can read." Jem, Scout and Dill are left to their own devices most of the time, and many of their activities relate to the books they read.  They share adventure novels (Tarzan, Tom Swift and the like), they act out their plots, and when in the first chapter Dill wants to get Jem to run up and touch the spooky Radley house, he does it by offering to bet "The Gray Ghost against two Tom Swifts".

This culture of reading is independent of school.  As in a lot of other books (the autobiographies of Ben Franklin, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, Henry James, etc., and novels like Tom Sawyer and Ramona and Beezus), we see children whose reading is deep and sustaining in the absence of explicit instruction.  What has happened is that these children have been inducted into the society of readers (what a wonderful passage in Crevecoeur calls an "extensive intellectual consanguinity"); once in that society, they have not needed much extra guidance.

How are they initiated?  Not through explicit instruction.  Mockingbird is bitterly satirical about school--mocking the idea that reading can be taught at all.  As Scout tells it, when on the first day of school her teacher, Miss Caroline, "discovered I was literate, she looked at me with more than faint distaste.  She told me to tell my father not to teach me anymore, it would interfere with my reading."

The joke here is many-layered.  First, Miss Caroline sees "reading" as something that should be entirely within the purview of school.  Second, she imagines that reading must be "taught."  Third, her notion, that teaching will interfere with reading, is true, but not in the way Miss Caroline imagines.  It isn't Atticus, but Miss Caroline herself whose teaching will interfere with Scout's reading.

For, as Scout sees it, Atticus has never "taught" her.  He is too tired in the evenings, she tells her teacher, to do anything but sit in the livingroom and read.  But Miss Caroline can't believe it.  "You tell your father not to teach you anymore.  It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind.  You tell him I'll take over from here and undo the damage."  When Scout tries to protest, Miss Caroline cuts her off: "Your father does not know how to teach.  You can have a seat now."

So, either Miss Caroline does not know how to teach, or else "teaching" itself is suspect.  The novel implies the latter, but it's not a simple picture.  For in fact Miss Caroline is not just an old-fashioned teacher with a ruler.  She is also a representative of a new way of teaching that Jem identifies as the "Dewey Decimal System."  This too is a multi-layered joke.  On the one hand, Jem is confusing John Dewey, the philosopher and education theorist, with Melvil Dewey, the inventor of a strict and systematic library classification system, and Miss Caroline's teaching seems somewhat strict and systematic.

On the other hand--and this is where the joke gets complicated, this is where the book raises a challenge to us as teachers--Miss Caroline is really, to some extent, a teacher in the progressive tradition of John Dewey, who believed that learning was largely social and that the teacher should be a member of the community rather than a purveyor of facts in the mold of Dickens's Mr. Gradgrind--and yet her  attempts to guide and model rather than command and instruct are always falling short.  Harper Lee has us laughing at Miss Caroline's reading of The Wind in The Willows, which no one in her class understands or cares about.   She is trying to lead the kids to reading, but she's failing.  Her failure is contrasted with Atticus's success: at the end of the section on school, Atticus reads to Jem and Scout about a flagpole sitter, the kids are rapt, and Jem heads out to the yard to try it himself.

Our challenge as teachers, like Miss Caroline's challenge, is to try to initiate our students into the culture of reading--to get them to join that extensive intellectual consanguinity. Why does Atticus succeed and Miss Caroline fail?  How can we do what Atticus does?  Can school even work that way?

I was too tired to post anything yesterday or Wednesday

I am tired.  I sympathize with my students!  The course I am taking is kind of hard (I'm in class most of the day, and then I have homework at night), I have spent a lot of time with my kids in the evenings, and I spent a couple of hours on both Monday and Wednesday writing blog posts.  I'm thinking of doing a post tonight on what To Kill a Mockingbird says about literacy.  Even though I have mixed feelings about using  To Kill a Mockingbird in the classroom, I love the complex picture it gives of reading and school.  In brief, Harper Lee seems to be for the natural-reading, homeschooling-y understanding of literacy learning, and pretty much against explicit instruction.  More later.

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.

I'm taking a literacy workshop!

This week I'm doing a workshop at my school, the beginning of a pretty big initiative aimed at increasing literacy and reading skills across the disciplines.  The workshop is being taught by a couple of local education professors who are consultants at AdLit PD and Consulting, a company that focuses on adolescent literacy.  It's pretty interesting, so I'm going to write something every day here, rather than every week.


The first day was full of interesting discussions about what literacy is, what reading skills kids need in the different disciplines (in the room there are social studies teachers, foreign language teachers, english teachers, science teachers, librarians and special ed teachers).  We talked about our own reading, about problems our students have, we talked about the common core, we talked about habits of mind, and we talked about skills and strategies.  One thing we didn't talk much about (though I did my best to annoyingly inject the subject at every opportunity) was how much kids actually read.  As usual, the focus is on strategies and skills and explicit instruction, and the fundamental question of how much kids are actually reading is an afterthought, if it is mentioned at all.  When I talked about it with one of our very intelligent and competent instructors, he said something like, "Oh, I agree with you completely.  That's so important.  You must like Dick Allington.  When I ran an eighth grade intervention, all I did with those kids was read, and they made the most improvement of any kids in the city. But we have to not only have kids read, we also have to teach them these habits of mind.  Reading by itself is not enough."  I agreed with him, and said that I only focused so much on reading volume because it was what practice (our school) and theory (most discussions, courses, texts, reports, etc.) completely ignored.  He agreed, but then he talked about habits of mind for the rest of the time.


I'll keep trying, but in the meantime I'll do my homework.  One part of the homework was my favorite kind: to pick a text (they had brought a lot of books) and read it.  I picked out a Kylene Beers book with a catchy title (When Kids Can't Read--What Teachers Can Do).  I skimmed it, and I found that she although she goes into great detail about strategies, graphic organizers, and so on, she spends almost no time on how to increase the amount that kids read.  What I want is a book with the title, When Kids Don't Read--What Teachers Can Do; but I don't think I'll be seeing that book anytime soon.



Our second assignment was my second favorite kind of homework: to write a blog post.  The post is supposed to be about vocabulary, something I've been thinking about.  I'll post that separately.

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.

Field Trip: an interlude

This week I was going to write about giving kids time in school to read, but I'll save that for another Friday.  Last night I chaperoned an overnight field trip with my son's sixth grade class, and it gave me a couple of new perspectives on my own job.

My first thought was that while I had thought that my ninth graders were at peak kookiness, now I am convinced that peak kookiness occurs in sixth grade.  I don't know how my son's teacher does it.  I learned a lot about dealing with the middle-school set from her equanimity, her patience, and her good humor.

My second thought was that teacher-dominated explicit instruction can, despite my reservations about it, sometimes actually be better than independent work.  The field trip was an overnight at the science museum in Boston. I hadn't been to the museum for years, but I remembered lots of hands-on exhibits, lots of DIY learning where you do things like experiment with gear ratios and gyroscopic effects, wire up primitive circuits and climb inside Apollo landing craft.  Most of the museum was indeed as I remembered it--but most of the students I was with seemed to get very little out of those exhibits.

There was a table with blocks that was designed to help students explore the way volume changes as length changes.  The students played with the blocks, but then they started throwing them at each other.  There was a playground with swings, spinning circles, seesaws and huge scales with 500 lb. weights on one side and ropes hung at different points on the other side of the fulcrum.  The sign said: Do not climb on the ropes.  Naturally, my students immediately started climbing, and I heard no students talking about leverage, torque, rotational momentum or any of the other mechanical concepts they were supposed to be exploring.  There was a shadow theater which was designed to help students explore the connection between how close the shadow puppet is held to the light and how large its image becomes.  The kids had a great time making up a shadow play, but as far as I could tell they didn't give a thought to the concepts the exhibit was intended to make them think about.  A light sensitive wall on which you could take shadow images of yourself was an opportunity, for the kids I was with, to create pornographic tableaux in silhouette.  A display that allowed you to change the group behavior of fish was played with for about forty seconds, far too short a time to notice what changed with the different settings.

The self-directed exhibits were fun for the students to explore, but without help from an adult--and usually the kids were more interested in each other than in me;  it was a field trip, after all--I noticed very, very little thinking about the ostensible subjects of the exhibits.  Maybe having so many children in the group creates a social buzz that can't help but swamp any interest in the topic at hand.  I remember a passage in Rousseau's Emile that suggests that the best form of education would be to take the child on walks in the countryside, and help the child to point out interesting phenomena for the child to puzzle over--for example, to notice that the sun is rising in a different place in the sky than it had been a few months before.  This method might work with one kid, but if you had a larger group it seems likely that nobody would be paying much attention to the sun.  But I remember the same kind of impatience with the exhibits from my own visits to the museum as a kid.  Maybe Rousseau's method would work better because the natural setting would be richer than any preplanned lesson or exhibit could be.  Or maybe I was wrong, and my son and his classmates were actually getting much more out of the exhibits than I realized.

Whatever the case, my visit made me question my usual bias in favor of student-directed exploration.  Summerhill is my usual ur-text, but on this visit I kept thinking about Lord of the Flies.  Not that the kids were necessarily so out of control--and in any case Lord of the Flies is less a counter to Rousseau than his complement, since it seems to me that Roger and Jack have been made sick by the horrifying adult world whose war they were fleeing when they crashed and whose supposedly civilizing influences are represented as tragically inescapable in the bitterly ironic last page, with its clueless naval officer and his "trim cruiser" representing the machinery of civilization that has left the boys so traumatized.  I thought of the book last night for two reasons: the fact that on their own, or at least as a small group, most of the kids didn't seem able to learn; and the contradictory fact that they were, nevertheless, surprisingly willing to be civilized by somebody who was authoritative and commanding enough.  The boys seemed to want someone to take charge, and they were happy when someone did.

For while the self-directed exhibit halls  didn't work very well for my group, the lecture-like lessons in the lecture halls and cinemas worked amazingly well.  First we had an introductory lecture (or "show) on sound; the students were engaged and entertained throughout.  Later we saw the demonstration in the "Theater of Electricity" (lightning coming from huge Van der Graaff generators and Tesla coils, etc.), and the kids loved it.  The planetarium show too was amazing; the wildest kids were rapt throughout.  And of course the film about migrations in the Omni Theater was a huge hit.

I know that hands-on learning is supposed to be messy, and that neat, entertaining lectures may be less effective than they seem, no matter how quiet they keep the kids, but still, the contrast was remarkable, and made me wonder if I should try to be more entertaining, if I should try to get more comfortable with being on stage.  Is being a charismatic, engaging teacher necessarily mind control?  Is it okay to indoctrinate kids, if its in the service of The Good? Is it possible that explicit instruction really works?