How Do We Meet the Framework's Reading Goals, Part 2?
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This brief entry will offer some suggestions for organizing curricula so that the reading goals of the standards can be realized. In the previous entry, I argued that teachers must let go of certain practices to meet this goal:
When considering substitute activities for those above, consider these basic principles.
A substitute reading/writing principle would be: “Assign enough reading to meet the grade-level goal, but analyze, discuss and assess only a portion of it. Assign more writing than you can collect and assess.” How much more? Two to three times would be reasonable. But experiment and see what works best for your students and in your classroom.
Make most pedagogical decisions in line with the grade-level reading goal. If you never lose sight of, or give up on, this goal, most decisions you make will be in the best interests of your students. You will find yourself eliminating most of the pedagogical practices now in vogue because they gobble up too much class time and make the reading goal impossible to attain.
Here are some strategies you might employ that support the reading goal and replace current pedagogical practices:
1. Work every day on fluency.
a. In all my hours of classroom observation I have never seen any strategy in use whose purpose was to increase student fluency.
b. However, in my classroom the past two years, my students worked daily on increasing their fluency, the goal being to make their reading so automatic that they can free their brains for the higher order cognitive task of comprehension. One way to increase fluency is for students to time chunks of their reading on a daily basis and record their reading rate. There are various ways to implement this important strategy and I will talk about them in a subsequent post.
2. Work every day on close reading skills.
a. Many classroom teachers get caught up in closely reading every piece of text they hold students responsible for. This results in the class reading a story a week and taking a month or more to read Romeo and Juliet or To Kill a Mockingbird. There is no way to achieve the grade level reading goals using this strategy. It severely limits the amount of text students will read in your class. And it has the unintended consequence of turning a fair number of your students against literary analysis.
b. I am firmly committed to close reading and for the students learning the skills necessary to do it. By reading closely, your students will master most of the Literary Analysis grade-level content standards. But it helps meet the reading goal and avoids the pitfalls described above, if you read a play a week, analyzing only one scene, or even part of a scene, per act. Read a novel every 2-3 weeks, carefully choosing selected passages to closely read. Students do not read enough poetry and they over-analyze the few poems they do read. They should read poetry every day and closely read, or analyze only 1-2 per week. Poetry is an acquired taste and it is mostly acquired by reading deeply and broadly and not by analyzing a small sample.
3. At the 9th and 10th grade level, use new material to assess for content standard mastery. According to the framework: “If a summative assessment in later grades involves reading a passage and answering comprehension questions, students should not have read the measurement passages previously. If students are to write a critical review of a literary work in high school, they should analyze and evaluate a new reading selection [pp. 222-223].”
a. This eliminates a day or two given over to review of previously read and analyzed stories.
b. It also allows you to read more stories and analyze less of them. Some stories you can skip analyzing altogether. The close reading you do on a weekly basis, in stories, poems, non-fiction and dramatic works, are practice for content standard mastery assessment. Since your test is not cumulative, but over new material, you are free to analyze as much or as little of the works that lead to the assessment as time permits. Thus, it is more valuable to read 10-15 stories, analyzing 1-2 in detail and 3-5 in a cursory way, the rest not at all, than to analyze in significant detail 5 stories, then spend a day in review, and then test the students on what they already know.
- Oral reading of text.
- The ‘crayola curriculum,’ including graphic organizers, posters, charts, etc., especially if they utilize large chunks of valuable class time.
- Cooperative Learning. Use groups when cooperative learning is the best way to learn a particular concept, not just for variety.
When considering substitute activities for those above, consider these basic principles.
- If you only assign reading that you can analyze in class and assess with a test, the students are not reading enough.
- If you only assign writing that you can collect and assess, the students are not writing enough.
- Since all readings are selected from a much larger canon, the pieces are somewhat arbitrary. The best reason for reading a short story is to become a better reader of the next short story. This is also true of poetry, novels and dramatic works. Give up on the idea that this small part of the canon must be mastered and retained. The skills of close reading are more important that what is closely read.
A substitute reading/writing principle would be: “Assign enough reading to meet the grade-level goal, but analyze, discuss and assess only a portion of it. Assign more writing than you can collect and assess.” How much more? Two to three times would be reasonable. But experiment and see what works best for your students and in your classroom.
Make most pedagogical decisions in line with the grade-level reading goal. If you never lose sight of, or give up on, this goal, most decisions you make will be in the best interests of your students. You will find yourself eliminating most of the pedagogical practices now in vogue because they gobble up too much class time and make the reading goal impossible to attain.
Here are some strategies you might employ that support the reading goal and replace current pedagogical practices:
1. Work every day on fluency.
a. In all my hours of classroom observation I have never seen any strategy in use whose purpose was to increase student fluency.
b. However, in my classroom the past two years, my students worked daily on increasing their fluency, the goal being to make their reading so automatic that they can free their brains for the higher order cognitive task of comprehension. One way to increase fluency is for students to time chunks of their reading on a daily basis and record their reading rate. There are various ways to implement this important strategy and I will talk about them in a subsequent post.
2. Work every day on close reading skills.
a. Many classroom teachers get caught up in closely reading every piece of text they hold students responsible for. This results in the class reading a story a week and taking a month or more to read Romeo and Juliet or To Kill a Mockingbird. There is no way to achieve the grade level reading goals using this strategy. It severely limits the amount of text students will read in your class. And it has the unintended consequence of turning a fair number of your students against literary analysis.
b. I am firmly committed to close reading and for the students learning the skills necessary to do it. By reading closely, your students will master most of the Literary Analysis grade-level content standards. But it helps meet the reading goal and avoids the pitfalls described above, if you read a play a week, analyzing only one scene, or even part of a scene, per act. Read a novel every 2-3 weeks, carefully choosing selected passages to closely read. Students do not read enough poetry and they over-analyze the few poems they do read. They should read poetry every day and closely read, or analyze only 1-2 per week. Poetry is an acquired taste and it is mostly acquired by reading deeply and broadly and not by analyzing a small sample.
3. At the 9th and 10th grade level, use new material to assess for content standard mastery. According to the framework: “If a summative assessment in later grades involves reading a passage and answering comprehension questions, students should not have read the measurement passages previously. If students are to write a critical review of a literary work in high school, they should analyze and evaluate a new reading selection [pp. 222-223].”
a. This eliminates a day or two given over to review of previously read and analyzed stories.
b. It also allows you to read more stories and analyze less of them. Some stories you can skip analyzing altogether. The close reading you do on a weekly basis, in stories, poems, non-fiction and dramatic works, are practice for content standard mastery assessment. Since your test is not cumulative, but over new material, you are free to analyze as much or as little of the works that lead to the assessment as time permits. Thus, it is more valuable to read 10-15 stories, analyzing 1-2 in detail and 3-5 in a cursory way, the rest not at all, than to analyze in significant detail 5 stories, then spend a day in review, and then test the students on what they already know.