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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jane Austen's theory of education

I've been reading Pride and Prejudice out loud to my son, and last night I was happy to find that Austen's theory of education is similar to my own.  In chapter 29 she presents her thinking in the form of a dialogue between Lady Catherine de Bourgh, one of Austen's great monsters, and the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, who is always right except about men.

Here is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, prefiguring Dickens's Gradgrind: "Nothing is to be done in education without steady and regular instruction, and nobody but a governess can give it."

And here is Lizzy Bennet defending, in the great tradition of Franklin, Douglass, Malcolm X and Stephen Krashen, her reading-based education: "We were always encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary."

Novelists are biased, no doubt, but it is striking how often they portray education as coming entirely out of independent reading.  The only counterexample I can think of offhand is something John Updike said once--something like, "I read what I was assigned and thought myself the better for it."  But Updike was probably being contrarian.

*****************************************************
Update on Updike: I was wrong; I just looked it up (the internet is amazing), and even in the passage I was thinking of, Updike, too, makes the case for self-selected reading in childhood and adolescence.  Updike was a very erudite guy, and did extremely well academically (top of his class in English at Harvard, for whatever that's worth), but his preparation seems to have been largely pleasure reading:

"I read books of humor by Thurber and Benchley and Wodehouse and Frank Sullivan and E. B. White, and mystery novels by Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner and John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh.  This diet pretty well took me up to Harvard, where I read what they told me, and was much the better for it."
     -- John Updike, Self Consiousness, page 109

The Common Core is not "research-based" and its "efficacy" is unproven

In poking around looking at PARCC (the new testing associated with the Common Core) I stumbled onto an interesting document: the "publishers' criteria" set out by the two lead authors (Coleman and Pimentel) of the ELA Common Core "State" Standards. These criteria are intended to guide publishers in their development of curricular materials for teaching under the Common Core regime. (Although I don't actually know any teachers who use a publisher's curriculum materials, many must do so, since producing these materials seems to be a huge industry.)
 
Here's the conclusion--again, this is Coleman and Pimentel telling publishers how to create materials for teaching to the Common Core standards:

CONCLUSION: EFFICACY OF ALIGNED MATERIALS
Curriculum materials must have a clear and documented research base. The most important evidence is that the curriculum accelerates student progress toward career and college readiness. It can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text, accelerate student growth, and deepen instructor facility with the materials. A great deal of the material designed for the standards will by necessity be new, but as much as possible the work should be based on research and developed and refined through actual testing in classrooms. Publishers should provide a clear research plan for how the efficacy of their materials will be assessed and improved over time. Revisions should be based on evidence of actual use and results with a wide range of students, including English language learners.

This paragraph may seem fairly reasonable on its face; nevertheless, I have two thoughts about it.

I. The Common Core does not, itself, "have a clear and documented research base"

My first thought is that what Coleman and Pimentel say about publishers' Common Core-aligned materials seems quite relevant for the Common Core itself.  It is as if Coleman and Pimentel had realized all the things that should have been done, but that they didn't do, in writing up educational standards for the entire country.

The Common Core is hardly "research-based"; the research base on which it rests is incredibly flimsy.  The authors of the Common Core make their case, such as it is, in an appendix purporting to offer, among other things, "research supporting key elements of the standards."  The relevant section of this appendix is only three pages long and offers "research" worthy of an undergraduate paper or a blog post, not of a major national endeavor.  Its three pages make roughly the following case:

1) College performance correlates with the ability to read and understand difficult texts, and especially expository texts. (This is probably true.)

2) Complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined over the last 50 years, and high school students read relatively little expository text. (This may be true.) 

3) Therefore, students need to be assigned more difficult texts, and more of those texts should be expository. (This third part neither follows logically nor is supported by empirical data.)

As I noted, the first part of this argument seems very likely, and the second is plausible, but the third part is very problematic, neither seeming logical nor being supported by the historical record or empirical research. The gap in logic is obvious: just because kids who are better at reading complex expository texts do better in college does not mean that most of the reading kids do in high school should be of complex expository texts, and just because the complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined somewhat over the past several decades does not mean that assigning more complex texts is the right remedy.  For these conclusions to be valid, there would have to be empirical support either of the historical or experimental variety.  There is neither.

First, the historical fallacy.  Robert Hass tells us that all poetry is about loss.  The same is true of the stories Ed reformers tell—we have lost the good old days when teachers taught more rigorously and even poor students could achieve like the rich kids.  The problem with this story is that it is by no means clear that students were more college-ready 50 years ago.  The only historical evidence the Common Core authors cite is what they call a "statistically significant" decline in adult reading proficiency.  What is the actual decline? From 15% in 1992 to 13% in 2007.  This hardly seems precipitous, it covers fifteen years, not fifty, and is belied by (slightly) rising reading scores on the NAEP.  The historical record does not provide a clear argument for making students read more difficult texts or having more of those texts be expository--and Ed reformers, unlike poets, don't have the excuse of poetic license. (For a longer analysis of this historical fallacy in the stories Ed reformers tell, see here.)


Second, there is a shocking lack of experimental data.  As usual in writing about education, the discussion in this Common Core appendix is a mish-mash of much unfounded assertion and some offhand citations of actual empirical research; also as usual, even when there are references, the articles cited often fail to support the assertion.  I'll discuss just one example--the first specific citation I looked at--but they are almost all equally embarrassing.

     References that don't support what they are cited to support

I am skeptical of the idea that students need to read a lot of specifically expository text; my suspicion, based on my own and others' experience, is that the key thing is to simply to read a lot, and that a high volume of reading even of trashy airport thrillers will lead, with only a bit of specific practice, to skillful reading of expository text.  The Common Core document states that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies." Now, I doubt this very much, but while I only have anecdotal evidence (me, Malcolm Gladwell, and everyone else of our generation, who learned to read before reading strategy instruction was current) to support my skepticism, the Common Core folks seem to have more: they cite several articles to support their statement.  I looked at the first citation (Afflerbach, Pearson and Paris, 2008), a 2008 overview from "The Reading Teacher" about the difference between strategies and skills (unsurprisingly, the article suggests that skills are unconscious, strategies are conscious, and you need both; I agree, but I'm skeptical that these things can be explicitly taught or usefully assessed)--the article does not support the assertion it is cited to support.  

I have now read the article three times looking for evidence that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies," and I have so far failed to find any evidence at all.  Thinking maybe I'd missed it, I searched for "expository," for "exposure" and for "sustained".  None of those words appears in the text.  Neither does "non-fiction."  Looking through again, the closest I could come to anything supporting the claim that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to develop reading strategies is the following very general assertion about practicing strategies, which is completely untethered to any actual data:
  
"The scope and complexity of these strategies are large, and there is ample variety of text difficulty and genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic. The general rule is, teach children many strategies, teach them early, reteach them often, and connect assessment with reteaching." 

First of all, we should note that this "general rule" is, like most general rules in writing about education, totally unproven and highly dubious. Many people, like me, like Ben Franklin, like Frederick Douglass, received virtually no formal instruction, and absolutely no assessment, in reading strategies, and yet learned to be highly skilled readers and writers.  Second, this brief, unfounded passage bears little relation to the Common Core's assertion that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to get better at it. If this-- "there is ample ... genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic"--is supposed to mean this--"students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies"-- then either I am a bad reader, David Coleman is a bad reader, or he simply has no idea what a "clear and documented research base" would mean in a field that was, unlike education, actually scientific.

Again, the first citation offered by Coleman and Pimentel to support one of their central claims provides absolutely no support; far from reporting research or empirical data, the article never even mentions the matter at hand.  This is still amazing to me, despite my having found this to be the case with so many other supposedly "research-based" recommendations to teachers.

II. Books and (maybe) a teacher are all students really need

The other thing to notice about the Common Core’s recommendation to publishers is although the authors say that most of the materials "will by necessity be new", this is probably untrue. In fact, developing new materials may be unnecessary, since books alone would seem to fit most of their requirements.  Books support student "readiness for college."  Books have "a clear and documented research base."  Books have a long history of "actual use" with a "wide range of students."

The best ELA program for infants is simply a lot of natural adult talking and reading aloud, and the best college ELA curriculum is simply good books and an engaging professor, but somehow schools have fallen into a muddy puddle of "instruction" and "curriculum materials." Also, one of the major stated purposes of the whole Common Core/PARCC effort is to make sure young people are prepared for college.  I wonder why, then, the best private high schools and the best private colleges aren't using publisher-created curriculum.  Is it possible that Andover and Harvard are delivering a sub-par product.  Perhaps--but far more likely is that either their curriculum is better or that the curriculum really doesn't matter all that much. 

The Common Core anticipates that the questions, tasks and instructions used with readings will be created by publishing companies.  This begs the question of what role, if any, we teachers are supposed to play.  I suppose eventually we will be replaced by computer programs.  That might be okay...

Conclusion

Except that it's not okay. Children need human connection, and the best thing that we do every day is provide that connection.  If scholars and bureaucrats with zero teaching experience can tell us what we can do that will help us connect better, great!  But all too often--that is, almost all the time--their recommendations are shockingly unfounded on any empirical data.

On the one hand, many of the CC's specific recommendations—like the suggestion that students focus on close reading, or the observation that “it can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text”—seem reasonable, but the hypocrisy and hubris of the whole enterprise give off a very questionable smell. 

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

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

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

TEACH LESS, LEARN MORE

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

Remember Why We Teach -

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

Reflect on What We Teach - 

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

Reconsider How We Teach - 

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

How many books have our students read this year so far?

My assumption has long been that our students are not reading enough, and that the most important thing we could do to help them improve in this essential area would be to help them read more.  I just did a quick check of their reading logs and my own records, and we put up some stickers on our chart--so I'm going to spend a quick post on how it's going.


Last Year's results
Last year I asked this same question about the students in my own classes and the students in the academic support program I was working in, and the results were interesting:

Students in the academic support program (from both Honors and Standard classes): 6 books in ten months (on average)

Students in my classes (all Standard classes): 8.5 books in ten months (on average)

Both groups were reading, on average less than a book a month--far from ideal.  (I'd say the average should be three books a month, but I would be happy with two.  My 12 year old reads four or five every month, and it doesn't take up much of his spare time.)

This year: slight improvement

I have made an even more concerted effort this year to get my students to read more.  We have done more independent reading, and less reading of whole-class texts.  I am pretty sure there has been a real opportunity cost to this focus, but it has at least resulted in somewhat more reading.  This week my students and I calculated their reading, and the results were:

Ninth graders in my (standard-level) classes this year so far: 8.2 books in 7 months (on average)

(This average is skewed a bit by a few kids who are reading a lot (over 20); the median is 6.)

This is better than last year--by the end of the schoolyear, the average should be up to 11 or 12 books--but it is still not great.  Two of my 32 ninth grade students have only read two books all year.  (On the other hand, one of those students is actually a success story, having read zero books in the first three months and two books in the second three months.)

Does more reading mean increased vocabulary and improved skills?
So, I have been somewhat successful at getting my students to read more.  What remains unclear is how much benefit my students have gained from the increased reading.  My assumption is that the increased reading volume will mean increased vocabulary, improved reading comprehension skills, and perhaps even improved writing--but I don't know if that's true, and I can't check in a very reliable way, because I really only have a good baseline for their vocabulary.

Interestingly, whether their skills are improved or not, the reading is not obviously correlated to how well the students do in school.  One of my students, who has failed ninth grade twice already and is now taking both my grade English class and a tenth grade English class, has read 14 books this year.  He tells me he didn't finish any last year.  Nevertheless, he is failing both my class and the tenth grade English class--because he never does any written work outside of class.  In fact, as I write this, I am waiting for him to show up for an afterschool appointment to do some of his missing work.  He's not going to show; we need a new system to help kids like him!  Success or failure in school has less to do with skill than with being able to get the work done--we need to figure out how to help them do it.  I've figured out how to get this kid to read books; now I need to work on the writing piece.

I'll look into this again in June. Until then, I'll keep trying to get them to read, and I'll get the Dean to help me get my failing students to come after school to do their work.

"English" class and language classes

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

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

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

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

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

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

For vocabulary, input volume matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An interesting question in regards to teaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Volume of Fifth Grade Students at Different Levels of Achievement

Achievement                         Minutes of                                       Words per

Percentile                            Reading per day                                     year

90th                                           40.4                                             2, 357, 000

50th                                           12.9                                                601, 000

10th                                             1.6                                                  51, 000

 

"Visible Learning," School Reform, and In-school Reading

(I wrote this really quickly; I apologize for typos.  I wanted to get it written while it was still fresh in my mind, but I have too much schoolwork to take a long time and write it well.)

In-school reading makes parents uncomfortable
At my son's middle school, and indeed throughout the district in the city my family lives in (slightly less leafstrewn than Leafstrewn, but graced with the Perfect University and the Institute of Machine Perfection), English teachers are having their students do a lot of in-class reading.  On Parents' Night, I told my son's teacher I was thrilled about this.  Last week, at a pot luck dinner for my daughter's class, a mom who also has a seventh grader told me she had wondered about what I said.  "You said, 'I think in-class reading is a great idea,'" she said. "I couldn't tell if you were serious,  or being sarcastic."

It turns out that she, and many other parents, see reading in class as a strange idea.  That same week, on a parent email forum, a couple of parents raised the issue: why, they said, does school have them doing silent reading, an activity that they could easily do at home?

I wrote a response in which I made the obvious arguments: that reading is (as even such a champion of whole-class direct instruction as Doug Lemov argues) always a productive use of class time; that it is, in fact (as Lemov says), the (very high) baseline against which any other use of class time should be measured; that many kids don't read at home and indeed hardly read at all; that in-class reading allows the teacher to do more one-on-one instruction, which is the best kind; and so on.

Of the parents who responded, most backed me up.  Some parents, however, were still not convinced. Most of these parents were willing to admit that reading in class might be good for other people's children--the implication I think was that good parents would have kids who read--but not for their own children, because their own children didn't need it.  At the pot luck dinner I talked to a couple of parents whose kids read a lot at home; they were confused as to why their kids would spend time in school reading when they could be doing something else.

What the Research Says
I spent several hours over the weekend immersed in John Hattie's magisterial 2009 overview, Visible Learning.  I've also spent some time looking back at Marzano's interesting 2000 monograph, A New Era of School Reform, which is, while less impressively encyclopedic, very much along the line that Hattie takes. Hattie and Marzano stress very clear and well-defined "learning objectives," very clear teacher control over where the lesson is going, and lots of "feedback" going both ways between teacher and student.  Most education reformers over the past twenty years or so have justified their efforts by pointing to research like that which Hattie and Marzano synthesize. For a different perspective, I also looked back at Stephen Krashen's summary of studies of in-class reading, The Power of Reading.  I've learned a lot, but I come away with more questions than clear answers.

Hattie and Marzano are very clear on what does work.  Hattie calls it "visible learning"--he says that it's very important that both teachers and students be able to see what is working and what is not working.  That requires very clear learning objectives, something Marzano stresses that seems to be taken to heart by all of today's reformers.  It also requires a lot of feedback, from teachers to students, but also, and according to Hattie even more importantly, from students to teachers. Teachers need to know what their students are "getting" and what they are not getting.   Teachers should be "activators" and not "facilitators."  Hattie argues strongly and explicitly against the classic "constructivist" conception of teaching, in which the teacher facilitates "authentic" learning that is open-ended, "student-centered," and aimed at "discovery"--that is, learning whose end points or goals neither the teacher nor the student know beforehand.  According to Hattie, this kind of "hands-off" teaching and "intrinsically motivated" learning is "almost directly opposite" to the kind of learning that the experimental data says is most successful.

Hattie and Marzano back up their arguments with vast amounts of experimental data.  Hattie's book is particularly sweeping: his book is a meta-meta-analysis--that is, a meta-analysis of over 800 meta-analyses, each of which included several individual studies.  Hattie's book synthesizes research on over a hundred million students, and with this vast body of evidence, a logical organization, a thoughtful, placid style but a forceful argument, it is certainly the most impressive analysis of educational data I've ever seen.  That said, I came away not fully convinced.

Two Ways to Critique Hattie: theoretically and empirically
There are two kinds of potential problems with the "recipe" that Hattie (along with Marzano and all the other proponents of "clear learning objectives") is selling.

One kind of problem is theoretical: it seems possible that this kind of learning is potentially dry, uninspiring, and limited--and perhaps especially boring to students who get the idea quickly;  also, it's not clear to me that, in the case of reading, the "learning goals" can be, to use Hattie's words, "challenging, specific and visible" (25).

A second class of problems, that I'll deal with in a post later this week, have to do with the empirical evidence Hattie is using: (a) the evidence for this recipe's efficacy seems to be quite thin in the case of reading; (b) the evidence for this recipe's efficacy seems to be mostly short-term, not long-term; (c) Hattie's evidence is mostly from controlled experiments, not from natural experiments; (d) Hattie and especially Marzano argue loudly that their evidence shows that poverty can be overcome by good schools and good teaching, but as far as I know this has never actually been done by an actual school in the real world--or at least not in the United States--despite the fact that thousands of schools across the country are trying to put this kind of "visible learning" into practice.

A theoretical critique: Is "Visible Learning" possible in English class--and if so, is it doomed to be dry and boring?
Today I wrote the following on the board in my "Honors" American Lit. class: "Learning Targets:  (1) I will be able to write a good question about a sophisticated text and find a specific passage through which I can explore the question; (2) I will be able to discuss coherently the relationship between Hawthorne and Transcendentalism."

The cluster of A students who sit near the front of the room noticed what I had written and hooted derisively.  One of them asked, "Is that a joke?"  Another said, "No teacher in my entire school career has ever written learning targets on the board."  Another one said it reminded him of a description of a typical day at a Fall River charter school that was posted a few days ago on Edushyster, an anti-corporate Ed reform blog.  This led to a spirited discussion for a minute or so, before I shut it down so that we could get to our learning targets.

One student said that she liked the idea of learning targets, even in English class, but the most common knee-jerk response from the kids was that putting up a "learning target" every day in English class was laughable and ridiculous. Again, we didn't spend much time on this, but I believe their reaction was based on two ideas that I've written about before: (1) that, on the micro level, the skills we work on in English class are very complex and interdependent, so that isolating one of them each day is either absurd (today we're learning about commas in Hemingway) or obvious (the one I put up), while on the macro level the skills are  (2) daily learning goals promote short-term thinking, while English-class skills are gained over the very long term--learned through repeated practice over years.

What are the learning goals in the case of upper-grade reading?
It is worth asking, then, what people who support "visible learning" would say should be our learning goals.  The obvious place to look for these learning goals is in the Common Core.

The Common Core has two reading strands for grades 6-12, one covering "Literature" and one covering "Informational Text."  I looked at the Literature strand.  The Common Core specifies 9 standards for literature in the ninth and tenth grade.  Three of them are below:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language evokes a sense of time and place; how it sets a formal or informal tone).

These standards seem fairly unhelpful. They are essentially the same as standards from earlier grades (1).  That would be fine in itself; as I've written, English class is a matter of practicing the same skills over and over.  The problem is that these standards don't tell us anything we don't already know.  We know that every English student in the world will be required to "determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text." This is quite a low-level goal. 

In the end, I don't think putting a "learning target" up on the board is a particularly bad idea.  I don't think it's necessary, but in the hands of a decent teacher it won't necessarily hurt.  The danger with the practice is that it may lead to reductive, simplistic, boring teaching, in which kids are taught a lesson completely focusing on the simple structure of Hemingway's sentences.  On the other hand, the danger with the opposite approach, the let's-just-read--and-talk-about-it approach, is that it may lead to a class that is way too loose.  Either way is dangerous, but it seems unlikely that telling kids specifically what they are going to learn in every lesson is going to lead to more learning overall.  Learning in English class is, as the Common Core standards admit both implicitly and (sometimes) explicitly, cumulative and long-term.  To pretend that students are going to be noticeably better at "determining the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text" after a day-long lesson, or even after a month-long unit, is silly.  Determining the meaning of words and phrases is a life-long task--and it is one at which the learning curve becomes flatter and flatter.  I am probably better in some ways at this now than I was when I was twenty-five; but I'm not sure anyone would notice the improvement.  Does this mean that reading a new author (as when I discovered Edward St. Aubyn last year) is useless?  No, of course not.  But it would be silly to set targets for that learning ("I will be able to describe Patrick Melrose's family dysfunction...").

That may mean that more advanced students will be the more dismissive of "visible learning"; perhaps, but I think it's not necessarily great for any students, and I'll talk more about that in a post on the empirical critique of Hattie's work later this week.

********************************************************************************
Footnote:
(1)
The fourth grade standards include the following:


CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text; summarize the text.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including those that allude to significant characters found in mythology (e.g., Herculean).

Research shows that "research-based" pedagogy doesn't work! (but discussion does!)

I. Excellent scholarship is multivalent

Great education scholarship does many things at once.  McKeown, Beck and Blake's excellent paper about content pedagogy vs. skills pedagogy is a good example: they manage to show that content pedagogy can actually do a better job of teaching skills than  a pedagogy that aims at direct instruction in those skills; but the paper also contains some remarkable data implying that what seems "natural" to teachers may be both unnatural and ineffective.

Another wonderful paper on reading is a 2006 classic by Martin Nystrand, called "Research on the Role of Classroom Discourse As It Affects Reading Comprehension".  Nystrand's paper, a magisterial review of 150 years of research into American classroom discourse, argues powerfully that discussion-based teaching can produce significant gains in reading comprehension.  The paper is worth reading for its main point, but it also sheds light on our era's focus on misguided reforms that claim to be "data-driven--and as a bonus, Nystrand is a sharp, funny writer.  In fact, I laughed aloud more than once while I was reading the paper last summer.  At one point, my wife asked what I was laughing at, and I tried to explain:

In his paper, Nystrand says that the National Research Council (the NRC) and the Department of Education have declared that education is woefully unfounded in data-based research, being stuck instead, according to these august bodies, in "a 'folk wisdom' of education based on the experience of human beings over the millennia in passing information and skills from one generation to the next." Denigrating "the experience of human beings over the millennia" is kind of funny--education is a deep human enterprise, and most of the deepest human experiences (love, child-rearing) have rightly held modern "data-based research" at a skeptical arm's length--but it was  Nystrand's next sentence that really cracked me up:

"While considerable recent work supports the NRC's contention that the education research base is little used in schools, research also strongly suggests that this conception of education research is, in the case of the pedagogical effects of classroom discourse, inappropriate, and even counterproductive." (393).

My wife didn't think it was funny.  I tried to explain: in other words, I said, research does show that education is not often based on research, but research also shows that education that is based on research is inappropriate and counterproductive.

Ha!

II. The limitations of prescripted lesson plans; the limitations of rigidly "scientific" social research

Nystrand's whole paper, like that sentence, is excellent, both witty and wise. In fact he isn't really saying that all research is counterproductive, only research of the type privileged by the National Research Council, that is, research in which the relevant variables are strictly defined and rigidly controlled.  For classroom practice to be strictly defined and rigidly controlled, it must follow prewritten scripts.  The use of prewritten scripts, however, precludes a more flexible pedagogy, and more particularly precludes rich conversation of the kind Nystrand calls "dialogic" (after Bakhtin and Volosinov, and informed by Vygotsky--what is it with Russians?).

I'm very interested in this" dialogic" mode of classroom discourse, and how it relates to what my colleagues and I are trying to do this year with our focus on close reading of brief passages, but first I had to think about the implications of Nystrand's point about research.  I have been curious and confounded by the inadequacy of a lot of "research-based" pedagogy, and Nystrand's point about education research gave me a new persective on why the research is so weak.

If a process is standardized, it is much easier to reliably measure results.  To produce a more scientifically rigorous and reliable conclusion, then, you want to compare one type of highly standardized instruction with another.  For instance, if you're comparing a skills approach to a content discussion approach, you don't want your data muddied by the way different teachers implement the two approaches.  If you have two teachers doing each approach, you want both skills teachers teaching the skills in exactly the same way, and you want the two content discussion teachers running the content discussions in exactly the same way.

However, Nystrand is arguing, standardization itself may be bad pedagogy.  In the example of a study comparing a skills approach to a content approach, neither approach might be as good as one that allows for more open-ended discussion.  Any script, he suggests, might be too limiting.

In some ways, this seems to support my suspicion of Common Core standards and indeed all backwards lesson planning in English class: if you know exactly where you are heading in a lesson from the very beginning, how can you be excited about the lesson, and how can you make it exciting?

III. The (Research-Proven) Benefits of Discussion-Based Pedagogy

His insight into the limitations of much education research is, however, basically an aside; Nystrand's paper is largely about the significant  benefits of discussion-based pedagogy. Ironically, he makes his case by citing dozens of empirical studies, including more than one showing that discussion leads to large gains in reading comprehension. He also says that the best discussions are those in which the teacher controls text and topic but students have both time and interpretive control.

According to Nystrand, the virtues of discussion-based pedagogy, rather than lecture or recitation, have been reiterated in American scholarship on teaching since at least 1860, when Morrison complained that "young teachers are very apt to confuse rapid-fire question and answer with effective teaching." One of the great virtues of Nystrand's paper is his review of the history of American classroom discourse.  According to Nystrand, it is well-documented that the prevalent form of classroom discourse for over a hundred years has been "recitation," that is, rapid-fire question and answer about the basic facts of what the students have already read.  Some writers celebrated this, but many argued that recitation was essentially pointless, and that discussion was a much better practice.  Nystrand quotes Bloom (1956) as saying that in his observation over 50% of instructional time in American classrooms was taken up with teachers talking.

This is still true, apparently.  In a helpful overview of the state of English instruction, Nystrand reports on research finding that 95% of ELA teachers value discussion, and their students report that discussion helps them understand their readings--yet only 33% of the teachers regularly make room for it.  Indeed, Nystrand writes, other researchers found that in the 58 ninth grade classes they observed, only five classes had any group work, and 90% of this group work was merely collaborative seatwork.  In an even more disturbing finding, the same study reported that in these 58  ninth grade classrooms, open-ended whole class discussion averaged only 15 seconds a day.

This is disturbing, but perhaps not particularly surprising.  Fostering "open-ended discussion" does not come naturally to many teachers, including me at times.  But it is incredibly important to do so, partly because a "discussion-based" classroom results in greater recall and comprehension, but also because discussion-based classrooms help build what Nystrand calls "classroom epistemology" and what my colleagues and I have been calling "habits of mind."

First, Nystrand's own research and the research of others, involving thousands of classroom observations, shows that the amount of classroom discussion is strongly correlated with improved recall and comprehension of the reading, and, interestingly, a greater response to the "aesthetic elements" of literature.  Second, a "dialogic" classroom also creates a culture of thinking more deeply and helps students develop an "identity" as a reader--which will indirectly help students over the longer term.  As Nystrand writes, citing dozens of studies, it is "the conversations teachers lead with their students" that define the way students think about literature.

IV. How we should put "dialogism" into practice in our classrooms

In short, Nystrand says that research shows that we should control text and task (and we should prefer problematic and difficult passages (duh!)), and we should give students time and interpretive responsibility.  According to Nystrand, a recent meta-analysis of 49 studies found that the most productive discussions were clearly framed by the teacher, but gave students extended time to elaborate their ideas and allowed for considerable flexibility in what students actually said. Nystrand also suggests that pair discussion is not as good as larger group discussions.

This fall, I am planning to put some of these ideas into practice.  In addition to high-volume independent reading, my ninth grade classes this year are going to be largely focused on brief passages.  In addition to writing short analytical essays about such passages, and partly to prepare them for the writing of the papers, they will have extended large-group discussions about brief passages more than once a week (as Nystrand suggests, I will mostly retain control of text and topic).  My hope is not only that these discussions will help their reading comprehension and their analytical abilities, but that the discussions will also foster a culture of thoughtful discourse and intellectual and aesthetic curiosity.  We'll see how it goes.

I was going to stop this section there--but then it occurred to me that "seeing how it goes" is far from a simple concept.  In fact, I wish I had a better handle on how to know whether changes I make in my teaching actually make any difference to student learning--but what I see over and over again is that even people who are very interested in data, like Bruce Baker of the excellent blog schoolfinance101, are very suspicious of the validity and reliability of evaluating teachers based on test scores.  Is my own classroom a large enough sample for me to have much confidence that any improvement in my students' performance is actually due to my own efforts?  Hm...  I'll try to find out.  In the meantime, let me go back to my conversation with my wife, after I laughed aloud at Nystrand's wit.

Coda:  Is research-based reform ever helpful?

I didn't get to talk about discussion-based pedagogy with my wife--and it actually took me a while to get back to the article itself, because after I laughed at Nystrand's sentence about research showing that education based on research is inappropriate and counterproductive, she asked a very good question: Well, when is research-based reform not counterproductive?

Um, maybe in automobile safety, I said.

My wife just looked at me.  It was a witty look, and I laughed, because I could see what she was thinking. Automobile safety is a perfect example to use, since decades of research and data-based improvements in safety have resulted in a system that still produces nearly 40,000 violent deaths in the United States every year.  It's possible, said her look, that what's needed is not evidence-based tinkering but a paradigm shift.

Okay, obviously I should have offered a medical example--knee-replacement surgery, maybe--in which research-based reform is useful.  Still, my wife's response was a wise one: what is necessary in the case of automobile safety, as well as what would be helpful in the case of reading, is to look, not more closely at the component parts of the system, but at the system overall.  This is in a way what Nystrand attempts to do in his article about classroom discourse, suggesting that we need to get the sage off the stage.  I wonder if we might also look at the overall system by looking at so called "natural experiments"--for instance by trying to look at the differences between the Finnish educational system and that in the US, or the automobile safety system in Holland as compared to that in the US, in something of the way a recent excellent post on the New York Times's economics blog discusses teacher salaries.  Another way of looking at the overall system is by comparing it to other systems--by comparing education to health care, say.  I hope to explore these comparisons a bit in future posts.

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.