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"You don't have to burn books to destroy culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Fahrenheit 451

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Schools value the development of test-takers more than they value the development of readers.

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In overemphasizing reading that students will confront on standardized reading tests, schools are working against developing independent readers.

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Schools are limiting authentic reading experiences.

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Teachers are overteaching books

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Teachers are underteaching books

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Testing has become so completely unbalanced that it is drowning any chance our adolescents have of developing into lifelong readers.

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Why does emphasis on test prep harm young readers?

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Why does emphasis on test prep harm young readers?

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1. A curriculum steeped in multiple-choice test prep drives shallow teaching and learning.

2. Rather than lift up struggling readers, and emphasis on multiple-choice test prep ensures that struggling readers will continue to struggle. Test prep reading plays a large part in maintaining "apartheid schools."

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1.  A curriculum steeped in multiple-choice test prep drives shallow teaching and learning.

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1.  A curriculum steeped in multiple-choice test prep drives shallow teaching and learning.

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There are too many standards. Content standards prohibit going really and truly in-depth.

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Teachers thrust into an unwinnable situation: Either teach all of the standards shallowly to make sure the content on the test is covered before students it down to take the exams or they slow down and teach deeply thus sacrificing their test scores by not covering all the content that will be on the exam. (AP Much!?!)

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By sacrificing deep, rich teaching, we begin chipping away at our students' motivation. Want to extinguish an adolescent's curiosity? Cover as much material as possible. See "Many Children Left Behind" for examples of testing driving shallow teaching and learning.

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"By my reckoning we would have to cut content by about two-thirds. The sheer number of standards is the biggest impediment to implementing standards."

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2.  Rather than lift up struggling readers, an emphasis on multiple-choice test prep ensures that struggling readers will continue to struggle.  Test prep reading plays a large part in maintaining "apartheid schools."  

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2.  Rather than lift up struggling readers, an emphasis on multiple-choice test prep ensures that struggling readers will continue to struggle.  Test prep reading plays a large part in maintaining "apartheid schools."  

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"Teaching to the test is not the problem. The problem occurs when we spend most of our time teaching to a shallow test."

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"Instead of pounding factoids into our students' heads, Sternberg suggests that we should be emphasizing those skills that would make our students "expert citizens": creativity, common sense, wisdom, ethics, dedication, honesty, teamwork, hard work, knowing how to win and how to lose, a sense of fair play, and lifelong learning. But memorizing books is certainly not one of them."

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What you test is what you get.

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Rod Paige - secretary of ed for George W Bush - "father of readicide". See page 17.

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Check out the Paige Paradox and specifically the Texas Miracle / Mirage

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Hard Talk:  Questions to begin literacy discussion

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Hard Talk:  Questions to begin literacy discussion

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1. What do we mean when we say our school "values" reading?

2. Is our quest for higher test scores harming our students' long-term reading prospects?

3. Why is it that the higher the grade level, the higher the chances that students are turned off to reading?

4. Are our students being trained to think deeply? Is width drowning depth? Which world is more important for us, as teachers, to heed - the political world or the authentic world?

5. Are we out of balance? (authentic vs. political)

6. Is our treatment of struggling readers helping to lift them out of the remedial reading track? Or are the same students mired in remedial classes year after year? Is our treatment working?

7. Are remedial readers even farther behind when they leave high school than they were when the entered high school?

8. Are we losing more and more readers every year? Is the percentage of students who love reading dwindling? What might be occurring inside our school that may be contributing to the downward trend?

9. Are our students doing enough academic reading? If not, why not? What can we do to change the downward trend?

10. Are our students doing enough recreational reading? IF not, why not? What can we do to change the downward trend?

11. Are we giving our students the kinds of reading experiences that lead them to be "expert citizens"?

12. Are we stuck in the vicious cycle of the Paige Paradox?

13. Do we understand that intensive focus on state tests has not translated into deeper reading on other assessments, such as the SAT or National Assessment of Educational Progress? Do we understand that there is evidence that this focus actually decreases college readiness?

14. Do we understand that the goal of this testing madness - every student will be proficient by 2014 - is (was) unattainable and is used as a hammer to push more students into a readicide curriculum?

15. Do we agree with Diane Ravitch, who notes, "Unless we set realistic goals for our schools and adopt realistic means of achieving them, we run the risk of seriously damaging education and leaving almost all children behind"?

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By third grade, students who suffer from "word poverty" are often at a million-word reading deficit...by sixth grade they are already three grade levels behind their average-performing peers.

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Readicide Factor:  Many Schools Have Removed Novels and Other Longer Challenging Works to Provide Teachers and Students with More Test Preparation Time.  

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Readicide Factor:  Many Schools Have Removed Novels and Other Longer Challenging Works to Provide Teachers and Students with More Test Preparation Time.  

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Students can regurgitate text on a literal level, but increasingly, they have trouble with heavier intellectual lifting. They can find information on a moment's notice on the Internet, but they have trouble getting past a surface-level understanding of the text they receive.

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"'Neuroscience suggests strongly that if the child's developmental needs during these periods (of brain growth) are not met, we may actually close down some of those developmental windows." p. 39

In short, many children (distracted by tv, phones, video games) are literally starving the lobes of the prefrontal cortex of their brains.

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"When schools remove novels from the students' curriculum and replace challenging books with shorter pieces and worksheets, they are denying students the foundational reading experiences for developing those regions f their brains that enable them to think deeply." p. 40

Continued...

"When we deny students the opportunity to read long, complex work, we are starving a part of their brains, and we start producing kids like the students in m y class who can read but who cannot get below the surface of what they read."

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"Novels are not part of the problem; the problem lies in how the novels are taught. Any teacher worth his salt can teach any language arts standard through teaching any novel."

When novels are removed what is not understood is that kids are not just reading stories. That the standards are being taught through complex novels and the benefits to students are two-fold: a. they not only learn the standards but also develop the deepest regions of their brains. b. They stretch their brains to read longer, more challenging works.

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Readicide Factor:  Students Are Not Doing Enough Reading in School

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Readicide Factor:  Students Are Not Doing Enough Reading in School

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1. Less than 1/3 of 13 year-olds read daily. (as of 2007)

2. Among 17 year-olds, the percentage of nonreaders has more than doubled over a twenty-year period from 9% in 1984 to 19% in 2004.

3. The percentage of 13 year-olds who read for fun on a daily basis declined from 35% to 30% and for 17 year-olds the decline was from 33% to 22%.

4. On average, Americans ages 15-24 spend almost two hours a day watching tv, and only seven minutes of their leisure time on reading.

5. Nearly 1/2 of all Americans ages 15-24 do not read books for pleasure.

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Casualty of the Testing Era:  SSR (Sustained Silent Reading)

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Casualty of the Testing Era:  SSR (Sustained Silent Reading)

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3 reasons with this is wrong:

a. SSR is a valuable investment in test preparation.

1. in 38/41 studies students given free voluntary reading time did as well as or better in reading comp. tests than students given traditional skill-based reading instruction.

2. The longer FVR is practiced, the more consistent the results.

3. Reading as a leisure activity is the best predictor of comprehension, vocabulary, and reading speed. Kids who d the most recreational reading become the best readers.

4. Reading is too complex to learn one rule at a time.

b. SSR is necessary to allow students an opportunity to build their prior knowledge and background. With regards to vocabulary acquisition...

1. Each time an unfamiliar word is seen in print, a small increase in word knowledge typically occurs.

2. Students who read a novel with many unique words actually learned the meaning of those words from context clues only.

3. FVR results in better reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development.

STRUGGLING READERS WHO DO NOT READ EXTENSIVELY WILL NEVER CATCH-UP. (Also a key concept in LETRS training).

c. SSR provides many students with their only opportunity to develop a recreational reading habit.

1. When academic reading is the only kind of reading put on our students' plates, readicide occurs.

2. Where SSR has failed, in most cases it is because of one or more of these contributing factors.

1. Students were placed in SSR without interesting books to read. Telling a student that reading is a worthwhile activity is one thing, having numerous interesting books for the student to choose from is another.

2. Students were required (or allowed) to do academic reading or homework during SSR.

3. Teachers did not understand the value of SSR. Often they were not reading with their students or were using this time to grade essays, catch up on paperwork, or answer emails.

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1. Making sure that EVERY student has a book to take home (when reading novels) is the single most important issue in our quest to develop young readers. We need to take a stand against the "We don't have enough money" excuse. Go up the chain of command of resource allocation all the way to the school board, if necessary, and if they refuse funding, go to the media. If this doesn't work, go teach somewhere else.

2. Augment books with authentic, real world text. Students must become "bi-textual", or multi-textual readers. Try "Article-of-the-Week": real-world writings taken from news stories, essays, editorials, blogs, speeches, etc. Sometimes related to unit and sometimes not...but all articles have one purpose: broaden students' knowledge of the world. In this way, by graduation, students will have read approximately 140 articles, building knowledge capital and improving likelihood that they can comprehend our world.

3. Establish a Book-Flood Zone. Discuss books with students...(pleasure reading). Recommend. Create wait lists for library books. Often it is more effective to take the library to the students than vice-versa. Kids need to be surrounded with interesting books. Consider book drives, scholastic.com, donations at Project Discover, used books on amazon.

4. Recognize and fight against summer reading loss. Particularly, students in print-poor home environments will lose ground with no access to reading materials. Consider:

1. Summer reading loss is one factor contributing to the achievement gap between more and less economically advantaged students.

2. Children from low-income families have more restrictive access to books, both in school and at home, than their more advantaged peers.

3. Lower-achieving readers read less in school and out of school than higher-achieving readers. Evidence points to a social-class effect here, with poor children having fewer reading opportunities.

4. Better readers read more than poorer readers, supporting the importance of extensive, successful reading experiences in the development of reading proficiency. We must become serious about motivating kids to read over summer. Summer reading loss can be prevented by reading 4-5 books, yet "honors" and AP students are generally the only ones who have reading expectations, not non-honors students (who tend to need reading the most). Be attentive to what is assigned for summer reading. Want to kill the love of reading? Assign Hamlet or Great Expectations for summer reading. Summer should not be the time to develop academic readers. Use summer to develop recreational reading habits. High-interest, high-quality books. eg: Tuesdays with Morrie, Fast Food Nation, The Kite Runner, not Heart of Darkness.

5. Challenge all students with difficult text. Work students through text that is a little bit too hard for them. It's not teaching difficult novels that is the problem; it is how they are taught.

6. Recognize the difference between liking a text and gleaning value from a text.

7. Make sure teachers and administrators are aware of the damage done to adolescents when students' brains are not stretched by longer, challenging works.

8. Conduct your own research to find out how much students are reading in your school. Are colleagues aware of how little reading is actually occurring during the school day? (Gallagher did his own research, found that freshmen read about 17 minutes on average, during the school day).

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How does overteaching lead too readicide?

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How does overteaching lead too readicide?

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1. Prevents students from experiencing the place where all serious readers want to be - the reading flow.

2. Creates instruction that values the trivial at the expense of the meaningful.

3. Spills over and damages our students' chances of developing recreational reading habits.

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Readicide Factor:  The Overteaching of Books Prevents Our Students from Experiencing the Place Where All Serious Readers Want to Be - The Reading Flow.

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Readicide Factor:  The Overteaching of Books Prevents Our Students from Experiencing the Place Where All Serious Readers Want to Be - The Reading Flow.

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"Reading Flow": So engrossed in a book that the world around you is "lost".

The Chop Chop Curriculum

1. Long, drawn out, over-mapped curriculum with goals, habits of thinking, etc. creates a tsunami that drowns readers. A few goals or habits of thinking is better. One novel should not be used to pound dozens of different standards into the heads of our students. "All Things in All Books Syndrome"

2. The goals alone are undoubtedly worthy, but trying t teach them all while working through a novel leads to readicide.

3. The irony: One of the great novels of American literature (To Kill a Mockingbird) ends up becoming used to ultimately turn students off to reading.

4. WE MUST CREATE READING SITUATIONS IN WHICH STUDENTS DISCOVER READING FLOW NEEDED TO ACHIEVE WHILE READING BOTH ACADEMIC AND RECREATIONAL WORKS, ASSIGNED AND SELF-SELECTED.

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Readicide Factor:  The Overanalysis of Books Creates Instruction That Values the Trivial at the Expense of the Meaningful.

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Readicide Factor:  The Overanalysis of Books Creates Instruction That Values the Trivial at the Expense of the Meaningful.

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1. The problem with "tsunami" curricular guides: direct teachers to chop up novels into so many pieces that novels are destroyed. Worse, they often gloss over or ignore the imaginative rehearsals these books offer. e.g.: TKAM: The real value is not in reading so students can "detect and comprehend the relationships among the novel's characters, including internal and external conflicts, motivations, influences, and how those relationships relate to the novel's plot lines"...Not so the can identify the "characteristics of effective constructed literary analysis focusing on their structures and techniques, and on assessing the appropriateness and quality of evidence and explanations." Certainly not so that they can "find and use ways to remember, track, and retain information from a long and complex text such as this novel, over the course of several weeks." (If students need several weeks to read a novel, readicide will happen). The value comes from using this book as a springboard to examine issues in today's world. Read, write, and debate about relevant issues: racism. Enables students to make connections between the issues illustrated in the novel and the issues found in their world...in a real world context. It's not just reading stories: "we want them to read novels to make them wiser about the world. We want to take advantage of the imaginative rehearsals that great literature provides before our students reach adulthood." "Flogging novels leaves the readers flogged, too."

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Readicide Factor:  The Overteaching of Academic Texts Is Spilling Over and Damaging Our Students' Chances of Becoming Lifelong Readers.

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Readicide Factor:  The Overteaching of Academic Texts Is Spilling Over and Damaging Our Students' Chances of Becoming Lifelong Readers.

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"We subject students repeatedly to treatments that are counterproductive to developing book lovers. And we do it book after book, year after year. Worse, we rationalize our behavior by believing we must prepare students to perform well at test time. Shameful."

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"If our students are to have any chance f discovering reading flow, if they are t have any chance to discover what it is like to come up for air while reading, if they are to have any chance of becoming lifelong readers, they will need what all readers need when they read: access to great books and large doses of uninterrupted time to read them."

See McQuillan's Study: pp. 74 - 76. Discussion of Accelerated Reader.

1. Teach students to recognize the Value That Comes from Reading Academic Texts.

1. Teens, anyone, are wiling to work hard when they recognize that their efforts will bring them something valuable. Spend time teaching students the value that can come from serious reading...e.g. Hamlet: spend time helping students see value by sharing famous advice scene between Polonius and his son Laertes. Father's advise for living a productive life. Have students translate into modern English.

2. When exposed to wisdom in Hamlet (or any work) and recognize what happens to those in today's world who fail to heed that wisdom, they begin to understand that there is real value in reading the play...it's not just a story, it's an imaginative rehearsal for living a productive adult life.

3. Start with the Guided Tour; End with the Budget Tour...

1. Begin a book with guided tour. Roll up sleeves and actively do everything you can to ease students into academic reading. Frame the text. Provide a specific purpose for each chapter. Design close reading that enable kids to delve deeper. Model to students how we would read the text...give them a hands-on guided tour of the front half of the book. Half-way through, shift to the Budget Tour. Require students to take the journey on their own. Do not hold the hands the entire way through a novel. If the first half is taught properly, the second half should require much less assistance.

4. Augment Books Instead of Flogging Them.

1. Augment every novel with real-world text that shows them the book they are reading offers valuable insight into living productive lives.

2. e.g.: articles that relate by Theme to 1984. Pages 79 - 80.

5. Create Topic Floods. A packet for each student consisting of numerous new stories, editorials, and letters to the editor...balanced politically. Leads to debate followed by persuasive essays.

6. Adopt a 50/50 approach: 1/2 academic readings and half recreational. This reading imbalance that happens in most schools needs immediate attention.

7. One-Pager. Self-selected reading creates accountability problem for teacher. If teacher infuses the recreational reading experience with too much accountability - chapter questions, worksheets, double-entry journals - then the experience ceases to be recreational. One-pagers are an attempt at solving this conundrum. Each student reads one self-selected recreational books per month. Upon completing each book, students are asked to fill out a one-pager - a process taking no more than 20 minutes. These are reflections...jumping off points for having book conferences. Provide just enough accountability to encourage reading but not too much to ruin the reading experience. Hold students accountable without killing them.

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Remember:  3 Ingredients to Building a Reader

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Remember:  3 Ingredients to Building a Reader

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1. They must have interesting books to read. (Bring the books to them).

2. They must have time to read the books inside of school. (Carve out time every single day).

3. Have a place to read. (Make school a place where reading occurs.

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Simply handing students difficult books and asking them to fend for themselves is not the answer either. Underteaching can be as damaging as overteaching.

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Highly skilled, engaging teachers can help close the achievement gap.

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Highly skilled, engaging teachers can help close the achievement gap.

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Where it is not:

1. a 122 page curriculum guide.

2. in books that are too difficult for them and ask them to navigate on their own.

It IS somewhere between these two extremes.

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We have to mentor, mediate, and model reading and writing by working directly with students as we are the best readers and writers in the classrooms (and the best one's in many students' lives).

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"High school students are trying to make sense of adulthood - schools too often engage them in a version of reading that is so limiting and so demanding, so bereft of intentionality or personal meaning, that what they learn is to forgo pleasure reading and its satisfactions and, for four years, 'do English'".

Move away from "doing English." Learn how to select:

1. which books they need to let settle inside themselves.

2. which are page-turners, about which there isn't a whole lot to say.

3. which do they want to think about more deeply and consider as works of art by writing about them.

Gallagher admits that much of this is impossible because of State and District mandates on required reading. Argues that there is real value in every American 9th grader reading Romeo and Juliet as we all acquire a shared cultural literacy, a sharing that is foundational if we, as a culture are going to be able to communicate with one another. Rigor is not avoided in reading classics, in fact, classics provide practice for reading demanding text. Rigor, actually, is guaranteed.

The Sweet Spot: Reading challenging work, like Hamlet, does not have to be an awful reader-killing experience...when taught in the Sweet Spot is can motivate students to take additional English classes, not to avoid them. 'Doing English' is not the issue; how students do English is the issues. The appropriate question: How do we get students reading classics to reach the sweet spot?

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If a student reads a major literary work, and exits the work finding it "bereft of intentionality or personal meaning", this is an indictment of the teaching of that work, not of the work itself.

Any classic has something of value...you (or students) may not "like" it, but you can find value in the imaginative rehearsal for adulthood. Our job is to put the reader in a place where s/he can discover that classic's greatness.

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How to find the sweet spot when teaching difficult literature to adolescents:

1. Recognize the importance of framing.

2. See example of text incomprehensible to non-baseball fans on page 95.

3. Likewise, what we do before students begin reading is paramount. Many difficult texts look like gibberish to students.

4. e.g.: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. cannot simply assign Chapter 1 and tell kids to get started. Text needs to be framed...for example.

1. Preview of the final exam essay question so as to provide a specific reading purpose.

2. Vocabulary preview to help with archaic language.

3. Discussion of the historical context of the story. Explain how writing in the Victorian Age contributes to the meaning of the work.

4. Background on the author and what he was trying to accomplish with this work.

5. An anticipation guide to help students begin recognizing the universal truths found in the novel.

6. Discussion on why we are reading this book and the value it offers to the modern reader.

5. This kind of framing is not necessary when reading recreationally.

6. Remember the Value Found in Second-Draft and Third-Draft Reading. Students begin trying to understand something like Romeo and Juliet in survival mode - just striving for literal understanding. The beauty is not discovered until a second or third read guided by a teacher.

7. Look at duality in first paragraph in Jekyll and Hyde. Students know from the start their essay question: Discuss Stevenson's idea of duality in DJ&MH and share how this duality is still found in today's world. The value is in the application to us now...not merely in they story.

1. Students mine value from the story, whether they like it or don't is immaterial. But this new, sharper lens with which they look at the literature is rarely developed without the guidance of a teacher.

8. Adopt a "Big Chunk / Little Chunk" Philosophy. Students do a lot of first-draft reading of large chunks of text on their own, after initial framing by teacher. Next comes 2nd and 3rd draft close readings of excerpts in the classroom, requiring teacher expertise. Demonstrate how you, the teacher and best reader in the room, read this difficult text...pause to think out loud. Show them how you tackle the initial confusion of a new book. To help students find FLOW in academic reading, always provide a purpose for their reading before they read a large chunk. Focus on only one or two elements while they read. See example on pp. 100-101. Students come back to class, share their thinking, then shift to close reading...prepare a small chunk from last night's chapter they reread closely to hone analytical skills...not chopping up the entire chapter, revisit one small piece taken from a large chapter they have already read.

9. "How to do a Close Reading" - Patricia Kain, 1998.

1. Read with a pencil in hand, and annotate the text. Underline/ highlight key words and phrases, anything surprising or significant, making notes in margins.

2. Look for patterns in the things you've noticed about the text - repetitions, contradictions, similarities.

3. Ask questions about the patterns you've noticed - especially "how" and "why".

10. When students hit stride, chunks students are required to read can be lengthened.

11. Find the Metacognitive Sweet Spot. Research has made it clear that students need ongoing support in order to handle the more difficult kinds of reading and writing they must do in the upper grades. Support must come from very active teaching.

12. See "What Good and Struggling Readers Do" on page 103.

13. Students are not strategic when confronted with difficult text. This must be taught. Most students will get confused and keep on reading, minimizing their chances of reaching deeper levels of comprehension.

14. We know how to choose the tools to help us read...monitor comprehension as we read, back up, reread. See list of strategies that good readers do on pp. 104 - 105.

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Teaching Both the Reading and The Reader

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Teaching Both the Reading and The Reader

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"If you want to kill the love of reading in a student, plant innumerable stop signs in the text that will require the student to examine his reading processes at each stop." ESPECIALLY with regards to recreational reading.

"The teacher teaches most by showing how he/she learns." Donald Graves, 1985

Imperative to show students what good readers do.

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Don't Lose Sight of the 50/50 Approach (Recap)

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Don't Lose Sight of the 50/50 Approach (Recap)

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To avoid readicide:

1. recognize the importance of framing.

2. understand the value of second-draft (and third-draft) reading

3. adopt a big chunk / little chunk philosophy.

4. start with the guided tour, but ease students into the budget tour to find the sweet spot of instruction.

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Is it hyperbole to say that we are killing a generation of readers?  Consider findings from To Read Or Not to Read (NPR, 2007):

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Is it hyperbole to say that we are killing a generation of readers?  Consider findings from To Read Or Not to Read (NPR, 2007):

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1. The first generation of students raised in the midst of electronic media read less - and less well - than previous generations of students.

2. Students who read less, read less well. Students who read less well, do less well in school. People who do less well in school do less well in the workplace and participate less in civic life.

3. Internet reading produces shallower reading than book reading. When reading the Internet materials, there is more emphasis on reading headlines and blurbs. Deeper reading is less likely to occur.

4. The reading proficiency of college graduates fell 23% in thye past ten years.

5. Less than one out of three college graduate reads at a "proficiency" level - what use to be considered a proficient high school level of reading.

6. One in three high school students in the United States drops out.

7. 55% of people who read at a "below basic" level are unemployed.

8. Half of the adults in this country do not read either to themselves or to their children.

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Look to Finland? These features of Finnish education and culture may surprise you:

1. Parents of newborns receive government-paid packs of child-development materials that include books. Some libraries are attached to shopping malls. Book buses travel to remote towns so that everyone has access to books.

2. Children do not start school until age 7.

3. Finnish students rarely do more than a half-hour of homework a night.

4. There are no classes for the gifted. Much more emphasis is paid to those students who are behind grade level in reading.

5. Finnish teachers have more freedom to design lessons to meet the needs of their students. One principal says, "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are entrepreneurs."

6. In Finland, there is very little standardized testing. Students demonstrate thinking through written and oral responses.

7. Finland is more culturally and linguistically homogeneous than the United States, giving them an advantage over us. In the USA, 8% (as of 2008) were learning English as a second language.

8. How did the Finns build the best readers in the world? By eliminating standardized testing and emphasizing the importance of reading and critical thinking, by nurturing deeper thinking and creativity, and by leading their students away from the drill-and-kill instructional approach that is currently permeating American schools.

9. See the "Ending Readicide: The 50/50 Approach" table on page 117.