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The science and poetry in learning (and teaching) to read - kappanonline.org

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The science and poetry in learning (and teaching) to read - kappanonline.org

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Reading requires multiple parts of the brain to work rapidly and in tandem. As a result, more than one form of instruction is required to build and connect all the processes that make up this essential skill.
The neuroscientist David Eagleman (2011) recently wrote that the brain's cells are "connected to one another in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessitates new strains of mathematics. . . . There are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissues as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy" (p. 1). It is the capacity to make these mind-reeling numbers of connections that allows our brain to go beyond its original functions to form a completely new circuit for reading (see research summarized in Wolf, 2016). A new circuit was necessary because reading is neither natural nor innate; rather, it is an unnatural cultural invention that has been scarcely 6,000 years in existence. On any "evolutionary clock," reading's history occupies little more than the proverbial tick before midnight.

The lack of a blueprint for reading circuitry means that its formation is subject to considerable variation, based on the reader's specific language requirements and learning environments. A large, fundamental mistake - with many unfortunate consequences for children, teachers, and parents around the world - is the assumption that reading is natural to human beings and that it will simply emerge "whole cloth" like language when the child is ready. That is not the case; most of us must be taught the basic principles of this unnatural cultural invention.

Happily, the brain comes well prepared to learn a great many unnatural things because of its basic design. The best-known design principle, neuroplasticity, underlies just about everything interesting about reading - from forming a new circuit by connecting older parts, to recycling existing neurons, to adding new and elaborated branches to the reading circuit over time. Plasticity also underlies why the reading-brain circuit is inherently malleable and influenced by key environmental factors: specifically what it reads, how it reads, and how it is formed.

A large, fundamental mistake is the assumption that reading is natural to human beings and that it will simply emerge "whole cloth" like language when the child is ready.

The second principle invokes the contributions of psychologist Donald Hebb (1949/2002), who helped conceptualize how cells form working groups that enable them to specialize in particular functions. These specialist groups build the networks that allow us to see the smallest features of letters and process them in milliseconds.

More specifically, and equally important, cell specialization enables each working group of neurons to become automatic in its specific region and to become virtually automatic in its connections to the other groups or networks in the reading circuit. In other words, for reading to occur, there must be sonic-speed automaticity for neuronal networks at the local level (such as within the visual cortex), which, in turn, allows for equally rapid connections across entire structural expanses of the brain (e.g., connecting visual regions to language regions).

In essence, the combination of these three principles forms a reading circuit that operates something like a circus, with three large overlapping rings (representing vision, language, and cognition), connected to two smaller rings (representing motor and affective functions), all of which are overseen by an "executive center" that handles attention, memory, hypothesis generating, and decision making. It incorporates input from two hemispheres, four lobes in each hemisphere (frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital), and all five layers of the brain (from the uppermost telencephalon and adjacent diencephalon below it to the middle layers of the mesencephalon to the lower levels of the metencephalon and myelencephalon). Anyone who still believes the archaic canard that we use only a tiny portion of our brains hasn't yet become aware of what we do when we read.
The many reading brains
When children step through the kindergarten door, they come in all sizes, abilities, languages, dialects, and cultures - all of which have influenced brain formation. The school's first job is to figure out who is ready to learn, who is not, and what to do about it. From the very first day, the schools must be able to assess what is needed for those children who did not receive a quality preschool experience and may well be behind in language development and other precursors of reading. From the second day, teachers need to know whether children who have had a high-quality preschool experience have different strengths and weaknesses that will require specific emphases before they are more formally taught to read. Everyone involved in what happens next needs to be aware of some important new research as well as some well-established older research, neither of which is sufficiently known or implemented in many schools.

An exciting new study could change business as usual in the first two days of school. My former Ph.D. students Ola Ozernov-Palchik and Elizabeth Norton, along with John Gabrieli and his colleagues at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and Nadine Gaab at Boston Children's Hospital, recently finished one of the largest reading prediction studies ever conducted (Ozernov-Palchik et al., 2016). These are the kind of studies that help us predict who will go on to do well in important subjects such as reading and math and why, and who will need to be followed carefully.

Our group studied well over a thousand kindergarten children from every economic circumstance and from all over New England. Six developmental profiles emerged that can help teachers and parents understand what each group needs and how each group best learns to read. Two of the profiles comprise children who are either average or very much above average and will need only good instruction to excel. Another group has difficulty with letters and sounds and may well come from environments where there is little exposure to the alphabet or the English language. We can redress these issues fairly straightforwardly. Some children in this group, however, may have rarer visual-based difficulties that need further testing.

Three of the profiles comprise children who we know will go on to be diagnosed with some form of reading disability or dyslexia. There are few discoveries more important to those of us who study dyslexia than to be able to predict it before the child has to endure ignominious, daily public failures before peers, parents, and teachers. Indeed, there is little more destructive for a six-year-old child than to suddenly think that he or she is dumb because everyone else can read but him or her, whether the reason is biological or environmental or in some cases both.

By assessing struggling young readers early on, we can prevent some of the emotional detritus that often characterizes their reading experiences. In the process, we can save society large sums of money by preventing the need for some prison beds and by preserving the spirit of children with dyslexia, who can then go on to become some of our most creative members and successful entrepreneurs (Wolf, 2007). The critical point here is that we are now on the threshold of being able to predict highly specific reading trajectories of young children before they ever begin to read. Such information in the hands of trained teachers could prevent some reading problems, ameliorate others, and deliver intensive early intervention for the children most at risk for dyslexia. Nothing in reading acquisition is more important than beginning systematic, targeted intervention as early as possible.

This research helps all children, not just those with more obvious learning challenges. The prediction battery also demonstrates the tremendous developmental variability at this age among the largest group of the more typically developing children. Some children, particularly boys, show no obvious areas of weakness in their profile but are simply not yet ready to learn to read. Understanding this group requires more in-depth evaluation (to ensure that there are no underlying weaknesses) and also more reasonable expectations for our children than is sometimes the case. Too many schools have school administrators who are under such pressure for their children to do well in later grades on the publicly recorded state tests that they pressure their teachers to push reading acquisition earlier and earlier in the kindergarten curriculum.

The Johns Hopkins pediatric neurologist Martha Denckla vehemently argues that we may be causing as many impediments to reading as preventing them by our push to get every child reading before they leave kindergarten (personal correspondence, 2015). The British reading researcher Usha Goswami (2003) reinforced this conclusion in a study of reading practices in Europe. She found that in the countries that introduced reading later, reading developed with fewer problems for the children. In other words, European children who began instruction in what we would consider 1st grade acquired reading more easily than those who began a year earlier.

Fears about 3rd-grade state test results should never dictate decisions about when whole kindergarten classes receive instruction for reading.

These results are, to be sure, confounded, because there is more orthographic regularity in the languages of the countries that introduce reading a year later than we do. Nevertheless, there are sound physiological and behavioral reasons why some children are simply developmentally not ready in kindergarten (Wolf, 2007). The bottom line is that fears about 3rd-grade state test results should never dictate decisions about when whole kindergarten classes receive instruction for reading. Some children are pushed to read too hard too soon, before they are developmentally ready. Some children read well before they end kindergarten or even enter it. Others are sent to 1st grade to receive the intervention du jour in their school that is inappropriate for their specific learning profiles. Perceptive, well-trained teachers, excellent prediction tools, and better-targeted, evidence-grounded interventions are our best defense against any of these all-too-common errors that derail children's development.

Knowing how to introduce all children with their many differences to the reading life today requires as complex a set of knowledge bases as any engineer or rocket scientist is ever called upon to use. Today's teachers need to be prepared with new knowledge, particularly about the reading brain and its implications for how we teach teachers and children. As Stanislas Dehaene (2009) emphasized, what we know about the reading-brain circuit can enrich the development of teachers' understanding, especially concerning the merits of different forms of reading instruction. It may ultimately bridge one of the most intransigent debates about methods of teaching, the so-called Reading Wars.
The debate that should never have been
By and large, 20th-century educators were trained within two strikingly different approaches to the teaching of reading. In the approach called phonics, reading instruction begins with children understanding the basic elements underlying the alphabetic principle: that words consist of sounds or phonemes and that these sounds correspond to letters in the alphabet, with rules that are to be learned as the entry to reading. Teaching is explicit, and the emphasis moves from a foundation in English phonemes and letters to systematic rules about connecting letters to sounds and about decoding different types of words.

In the approach called whole language, learning is to be implicit: The rules of decoding are to be inferred or figured out by the child, with little to no explicit instruction in decoding or emphasis on the phonemes in English. The emphasis centers on engagement in stories, authentic literature, word meanings, and the imagination of the child to the exclusion of phonic principles. Indeed, some earlier professors of education erroneously labeled phonics methods "drill and kill" and characterized teachers of phonics approaches as less progressive and child-centered.

Both approaches came to be favored by very fine teachers, many of whom maintain to this day a loyal, sometimes even zealous, belief in the methods they were originally trained in. That each of these approaches ever came to exclude the emphases of the other is one of the great unfortunate errors of the 20th century. Unfortunately, it continues. Even though there is a movement toward "balanced reading," the too-frequent reality is a thinly veiled variation of the whole-language approach with a cursory, unsystematic nod to phonics principles. This is understandable but lamentable.

Extensive, federally funded research studies unambiguously support the importance of children's learning to read through the explicit teaching of the basic principles of decoding (McCardle & Chhabra, 2004; Miller, Cutting, & McCardle, 2013; Miller, McCardle, & Long, 2014; Pugh & McCardle, 2009). While clearly supporting phonics principles, however, these results should never mean neglecting engagement with literature.

The problem is that neither evidence from science nor the experience of being unable to teach many children to reach functional literacy levels has proven sufficient to persuade many teachers who are bound by their allegiance to whole-language methods. In one of the best new overviews of research on reading, Mark Seidenberg (2017) memorably described these methods as "theoretical zombies that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons such as empirical disconfirmation, leaving them free to roam the educational landscape" (p. 271). Such a situation is a double waste: It wastes the unquestionably idealistic intentions of the whole-language teacher, and it thwarts learning to read for many children, especially those with reading or learning differences or dual language needs.

That said, neither Seidenberg nor I would ever take one minute away from the whole-language teacher's time spent on bringing words, stories, and a life of reading enjoyment to children, as long as they do not preclude a systematic, informed approach to learning the phonemes of the language, the alphabetic principle, and decoding rules. From a cognitive neuroscience perspective, the repetition fostered in the latter approach provides children with the multiple exposures they need to learn and consolidate the rules for letters and their corresponding sounds and increase their knowledge of words, stories, and literature. Repetition fosters the growth of high-quality representations from phonemes and graphemes (letters) to word meanings and grammatical forms. As a very old teacher once said, "Most times, the lower rungs of a ladder are the best ones for learning to climb. I always hate to ask a child to jump to the top rung without them." All of the rungs are important if we are to prepare children to become fluent readers who use both their imagination and their analytical capacities.

Furthermore, knowledge about the reading brain can help teachers of every method see what rungs in the ladder may be missing in how they teach children. The reading circuit activates everything it knows. So should our teaching during the entire 5- to 10-year age period. Within such a perspective, teachers of children from 5 to 10 years of age would give ample, explicit attention to every component of the reading circuit: from phonemes and their connections to letters; to the meanings and functions of words and morphemes (e.g., the smallest units of meaning) in sentences, to an immersion in stories that require ever more sophisticated deep-reading processes, and to the daily elicitation of the children's own thoughts and imagination in speaking and writing.

Knowing how to introduce all children with their many differences to the reading life today requires as complex a set of knowledge bases as any engineer or rocket scientist is ever called upon to use.

In such a way, nothing relating to cognition, perception, language, affect, and the motor regions is neglected. Learning the meanings and grammatical uses of words in increasingly complex sentences is important in 1st and 3rd grades. Learning about new letter patterns that always reappear and help us figure out the meanings of words is important in both 1st grade and 4th grade. Over time - by the 3rd and 4th grades - these lower-level, basic circuit components need to be so practiced and automatic that children can turn their attention to ever more sophisticated comprehension processes, beginning with expanding their background knowledge and ending with the elicitation of their insights and reflections.

This is the basis of fluency and the best way of acquiring it (Katzir et al., 2006; Wolf & Katzir-Cohen, 2001). Fluency is not simply about the speed of decoding, an assumption that has led to the common but insufficient practice of having children reread a passage over and over again. Think back to the circus image: Each ring has to be fast enough in and of itself so that it can pass its information forward to the other rings. Only when each of the rings is fast enough to work in tandem with the other rings can time be allocated to comprehending what is read and having feelings about it, too.

We now have extensive evidence that an approach to reading that emphasizes all of these parts of the reading circuit benefits many children. A decade of randomized treatment-control studies (Lovett et al., 2017; Morris et al., 2012; Wolf et al., 2012) demonstrates that when the major components in the reading circuit are explicitly emphasized - the earlier the better - children become more proficient readers, even when they begin with significant challenges like dyslexia.

Further, as illuminated by new work published in English by Melissa Orkin, in Hebrew by Tami Katzir, and in Italian by Daniela Traficante, fluent reading involves knowing not only how words work but also how they make us feel. Empathy and perspective taking are part of the complex fabric of feelings and thoughts, whose convergence propels greater understanding.
Completing the circuit
Emphases on the multiple aspects of words are not only critical for fluent, proficient reading in the two-thirds of our children in the United States who are failing to achieve proficiency, they are the bridge that connects the decoding of words to deep-reading processes. Rereading the same stories and sentences over and over again is helpful practice for gaining speed on a particular text, but it will never prepare children to connect concepts, feelings, and personal reflections. Deep reading is always about connection: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world.

Stories are one of humanity's most powerful vehicles for making lasting connections to people we will never meet. To feel like Charlotte about Wilbur's plight in Charlotte's Web, to identify with Martin Luther King Jr. in Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or with Ruby Bridges in Through My Eyes prepares children to empathize both with their neighbors and with people around the world or across the proverbial railroad tracks. Think about the ways you have been changed by fictional characters such as Celie in The Color Purple and Hamlet in Shakespeare's play and the real lives of people such as Eleanor Roosevelt in her autobiography and James Baldwin in I Am Not Your Negro. Whatever our age, we can be changed by the lives of others if we learn to connect the whole of the reading circuit with our moral imagination.
References
Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain: The new science of how we read. New York, NY: Viking.

Eagleman, D. (2011). Incognito: The secret lives of the brain. New York, NY: Viking.

Goswami, U. (2003). How to beat dyslexia. The Psychologist, 16 (9), 462-465.

Hebb, D. (1949/2002). The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory. Mahweh, NJ: Psychology Press.

Katzir, T., Kim, Y., Wolf, M., O'Brien, B., Lovett, M., & Morris, R. (2006). Reading fluency: The whole is more than the parts. Annals of Dyslexia, 56 (1), 51-82.

Lovett, M.W., Frijters, J.C., Wolf, M., Steinbach, K.A., Sevick, R.A., Morris, R.D. (2017). Early intervention for children at risk for reading disabilities: The impact of grade at intervention and individual differences on intervention outcomes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109 (7), 889-914.

McCardle, P.E. & Chhabra, V.E. (Eds.).(2004). The voice of evidence in reading research. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing.

Miller, B., Cutting, L.E., McCardle, P. (Eds.).(2013). Unraveling reading comprehension: Behavioral, neurobiological, and genetic components. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing.

Miller, B., McCardle, P., & Long, R. (Eds.).(2014). Teaching reading and writing: Improving instruction and student achievement. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing.

Morris, R.D., Lovett, M.W., & Wolf, M., Sevcik, R.A., Steinbach, K.A., Frijters, J.C., & Shapiro, M.B. (2012). Multiple-component remediation for developmental reading disabilities: IQ, socioeconomic status, and race as factors in remedial outcome. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 45 (2), 99-127.

Ozernov-Palchik, O.E., Norton, E.S., Sideridis, G., Beach, S.D., Wolf, M., Gabrieli, J., & Gaab, N. (2016). Longitudinal stability of pre-reading skill profiles of kindergarten children: Implications for early screening and theories of reading. Developmental Science, 20 (5), 1-18.

Pugh, K. & McCardle, P. (Eds.).(2009). How children learn to read: Current issues and new directions in the integration of cognition, neurobiology, and genetics of reading and dyslexia research and practice. New York, NY: Psychology Press.

Seidenberg, M. (2017). Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can't, and what can be done about it. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Wolf, M. (2016). A neuroscientist's tale of words. In Tales of literacy for the 21st century. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Wolf, M. & Katzir-Cohen, T. (2001). Reading fluency and its intervention. Scientific Studies of Reading, 5 (3), 211-238.

Wolf, M., Ullman-Shade, C., & Gottwald, S. (2012). The emerging, evolving reading brain in a digital culture: Implications for new readers, children with reading difficulties, and children without schools. Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology, 11 (3), 230-240.

Note: Adapted from Reader Come Home: The Fate of the Reading Brain in a Digital World (New York, NY: HarperCollins). Copyright © 2018 by Maryanne Wolf. Reprinted here with permission from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Citation: Wolf, M. (2018). The science and poetry in learning (and teaching) to read. Phi Delta Kappan, 100 (4), 13-17.

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The science and poetry in learning (and teaching) to read - kappanonline.org

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Reading requires multiple parts of the brain to work rapidly and in tandem. As a result, more than one form of instruction is required to build and connect all the processes that make up this essential skill.

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Teaching Kids to Love Reading: 3 Strategies That Work

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Teaching Kids to Love Reading: 3 Strategies That Work

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If you're an elementary teacher, you know that the most daunting and wonderful part of the job is opening the world of books and reading to students. What a responsibility! And what a delight to introduce children to favorite characters, great literature, and big questions around the world and our place in it.

The task can be overwhelming, but there are some simple, research-based strategies that work.

1. First, kids must listen to great stories every day.

It might sound obvious, but reading aloud rich, diverse texts is the single best thing you can do to help your students become readers.

When children listen to great stories, they're exposed to new vocabulary, grammar, and modes of fluency. But even more importantly, they begin to see how words construct meaning in the world around us. Whether students arrive in your classroom unable to read the alphabet or already reading chapter books, reading aloud offers the opportunity to capture students' imaginations and to introduce them to quality fiction and nonfiction.

In the primary grades, reading aloud provides equity and access to rich texts, but it also helps nurture social-emotional skills, as students learn to listen to your words, connect stories to their own emotional lives, and discuss books with friends.

Here are some of our favorite books to read aloud in kindergarten and first grade; we also love the short stories available in the Junior Great Books K-1 program.

2. Second, we must invite students to wonder.

Wonder is at the heart of a deep and meaningful relationship with reading. This is true for a kindergartener or someone working on a PhD in English literature. When we wonder about what we read, we ask questions -questions about the text, about ourselves, and about the wider world.

So how do we encourage wonder at the primary level? We can start by modeling our own questions. What is the story about? How did the story make you feel? What did the story make you think of? What is the character thinking?

Additionally, we can try simple activities that encourage perspective-taking and questioning. For example, the Shared Inquiry method encourages students in grades K-1 to act out small parts of the story. When students pretend they are wearing too-tight shoes just like the main character does in "Those Shoes," by Maribeth Boelts, they begin to understand and ask questions about how that character is feeling.

Another fun Shared Inquiry activity is choral reading using different tones of voice. When students read aloud the same sentence using a scared, happy, and surprised tone of voice, they begin to understand the tone that best matches the mood of the story.

We also love the idea of starting a "Wonder Wall" or bulletin board where students can post the questions they have about books or stories all year long.

3. Finally, we must encourage kids to share.

Sharing is fundamental to the reading experience, to which any adult reader can attest. What's the first thing you want to do when you finish a great book? Talk with someone about it! Seize onto that instinct, and show kids that what they think and that what their classmates think has real value.

You can do that by taking time for students to share their questions and their opinions, too. For many children, seeing you write their question or opinion down on the board is an a-ha moment-"what I say in this classroom matters." Again, model your own questions, and provide text frames to help children with their thinking. For example, "I liked the part where ______________, because _____________."

Sometimes getting kids to share is all about creating the right atmosphere. We love this classroom "campfire" from Literacy Loving Gals. Imagine circling around it to talk great books with your students!

When students are invited to share what they think, they begin to see how reading and sharing-and eventually, writing-are connected. And that's our goal as early reading teachers, isn't it?
What do you do in your classroom to encourage a love of reading? Have you tried the Shared Inquiry method? You can download a sample K-1 lesson here, if you're curious.

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Teaching Kids to Love Reading: 3 Strategies That Work

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If you're an elementary teacher, you know that the most daunting and wonderful part of the job is opening the world of books and reading to students. What a responsibility! And what a delight to introduce children to favorite characters, great literature, and big questions around the world and our place in it.

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What Administrators Can Do to Promote a Reading Culture |

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What Administrators Can Do to Promote a Reading Culture |

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Dear administrators,

I have been pleading with teachers for a few years to please help students become passionate readers. I have given as many ideas as I could and directed toward the great minds that inspire me as well. I have begged at times, sharing the words of my students as proof that we teachers have an immense power when it comes to either nurturing a love of reading or killing it. There are so many things we teachers can do that will have a lasting effect.

And yet, it is not just the teachers that have an immense power over whether children will read or not. It turns out that much of that power also lies within the realm of administration. In fact, many of you that are doing incredible things to create schools that are seen as literacy communities that cherish the act of reading and becoming readers. What are they doing? What can you do to foster a love of reading school-wide?

You can believe in choice for all. That means protecting the rights of students to read the books they choose. To help staff support this as well by speaking about choice, and making sure not to put restrictive policies in place that will hinder a child from developing their own reading identity. That will stop a child from choosing a book they want to read. Teachers should not be the only ones choosing books for students, please don't put them in that position. Instead, they should be working with students to learn how to self-select great books based on many things, not just their levels!

You can buy books. Research shows again and again how vital having not only a well-stocked school library, but also a full classroom library, is to students becoming better readers. Students need books at their finger tips, not far away, and they need high quality, high interest books. That takes money, please help out in any way you can.

You can fight to have a librarian full-time in your building. Everywhere we are seeing libraries that have no librarians, yet a knowledgeable librarian can be the lifeblood of a reading community. I know budgets are being slashed, but the librarian should be seen as a necessity in schools, not as an unnecessary privilege.

You can celebrate books read. Not the number of minutes logged or the points gained in computer based reading programs. How about keeping a running tally of how many books students self-selected to read and then finished? How about you keep a display board of all of the picture books being shared in your school, yes, even in middle school and high school? Celebrate the right things, not the ones that can kill a love of reading.

You can protect the read aloud. When schedules are made there should be time placed for reading aloud. This should not be seen as a frill, nor as something that would be nice to fit in if only we had more time. All students at every age should encounter an adult that reads fluently with expression aloud to them every day. It develops their minds as readers and creates community. This should not just be reserved for special times in elementary school but should be protected throughout a child's reading experience in school.

You can promote independent reading time. Students reading silently is not time wasted, it is one of the most important investments we can make in our school day for any child, any age. If you want children to become better readers, then give them the time to read.

You can hire teachers that love reading. I am amazed that there are teachers who teach literacy in any capacity that do not identify themselves as readers. This should not be happening. Years of experience shows that students will read more if we read as well and are able to create a book community where our love of reading is a cornerstone of what we do. Even when I taught non-literacy subjects, even when I taught science, the fact that I read for my own pleasure meant that our conversations were deeper, more engaging, and the students trusted me as a reading role model.

You can use levels for books and not for children. Too often the levels that a child reads at becomes their entire reading identity. Yet, that level is meant to be a teacher's tool and not a child's label to quote Fountas and Pinnell. That level should be a part of that child's reading identity but not the thing that defines them. We should not have policies in place where students can only choose books that are at their levels, but instead have policies that promote exploration of texts so that students have a natural chance to figure out who they are as readers. Confining them, even if meant to be helpful, will hurt them in the long run.

You can have tough conversations. Part of my job as a teacher is to grow and learn and while I think that most of my ideas are solid, I wish an administrator would have questioned me when I had students do reading logs and forced book reports a few years back. While the push-back may be hard to swallow, it certainly would have made me think. However, within those tough conversations, please do listen to the teacher as well. What are they basing their decisions on? Perhaps they are the ones who are right, perhaps not, but ask the questions and keep the bigger goal in mind; students who like to read!
What else can you do to create a school where the love of reading flourishes?
You can be a guest read alouder.

You can have books in your office for students to read.

You can share your own reading life by displaying your titles outside your office.

You can make assemblies and other fun events celebrate literacy.

You can bring in authors.

You can promote reading literacy projects like The Global Read Aloud or Dot Day.

You can ask students what they are reading whenever you see them.

You can institute school-wide independent reading time.

You can stand up for poor literacy decisions being made within your district.

You can ask your teachers for ideas. You can ask your students what they need and then implement their wishes when possible.

You can send your teachers to professional development with the likes of Kylene Beers, Donalyn Miller, Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher and any other of the incredibly talented literacy experts that inspire us all.

There are so many things that fall within your realm, please help us teachers (like my principal Shannon Anderson does) protect the love of reading that students have and nurture it as we teach. You can choose to create passionate reading environments or you can support decisions that smother them. The choice is yours.
If you like what you read here, consider reading my book Passionate Learners - How to Engage and Empower Your Students. The 2nd edition and actual book-book (not just e-book!) comes out September 22nd from Routledge, but rumor has it that it is out on Kindle already!

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What Administrators Can Do to Promote a Reading Culture

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Dear administrators, I have been pleading with teachers for a few years to please help students become passionate readers. I have given as many ideas as I could and directed toward the great minds that inspire me as well. I have begged at times, sharing the words of my students as proof that we teachers...

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Retelling is a strategy that is used to determine how well a student has comprehended a specific story. Retelling can be used as an effective tool in improving comprehension as well as assessing it (Jennings, Caldwell, & Lerner, 2014, p. 268). During a retelling, teachers gain insight as to how students are putting together the information offered in a text. When students' understanding of a text is observed and analyzed during retelling, teachers discover what information students remember and deem as important. According to Jennings, Caldwell, & Lerner (2014), to begin a retelling, inform the student he or she will retell a story after it is read (p. 268). Then, have the student read the text. After reading, ask the student to tell about the story as if he or she was telling it to someone who had never read it. Once the student has finished retelling the information he or she remembers from the story, you may ask the student to elaborate on certain parts. Jennings, Caldwell, & Lerner (2014) state, "this prompting is important for low-achieving readers, because they often know more about a story than they will tell in a free recall" (p. 268).

Leslie and Caldwell (2001) and Caldwell and Leslie (2008) describe guidelines for evaluating a retelling. Retellings should include:

Presence of the major character(s)

Defining characteristics of the characters

Problem presented in the story

Solution to that problem (or the end)

Events presented in sequential order

Ability to include only those events important to the story and exclude unimportant events

Indicators that a retelling may be immature:

Referring to all characters as "him," "her," or "they"

Giving a detailed description only of the first page or story segment

According to Jennings, Caldwell, & Lerner (2014), "evidence suggests that students who retell stories improve their comprehension" (p. 269). Students' reading comprehension improves when teachers give feedback about retellings.

The video above shows a teacher describing an example of oral retelling of Mercy Watson Thinks Like A Pig using a retell rope. The teacher uses the retell rope to describe the characters, settings, problem, in the beginning, next, then, and finally. The teacher then explains a written retell and shows a completed example for the same story. This written retell involves the same aspects of the story as the oral retell.

The image above is an example of an anchor chart that could be displayed in the classroom as students learn about retelling stories. It describes what students should say when they are asked to retell a story. This includes describing the setting, characters, problem, happenings (events), and solution.

The video above shows a student demonstrating an oral retell of the book If You Give a Pig a Pancake. This student uses a graphic organizer to support this retell. The chart uses the same visuals as the anchor chart on the left to support students' understanding during the retell. As this student retells key details, he is better comprehending the story by describing the setting, characters, problem, events (beginning, middle, end), and solution.

Reading- The retelling strategy is often used in reading. Students participate in oral or written retellings after reading a text in order to better comprehend the story elements. In order to do retellings in reading, students can do a picture walk through the story to assist in the retell. Students can also retell a story using props or pictures. The video above shows an example of a teacher using a retell rope to retell the story Mercy Watson Thinks Like A Pig. The retell rope helps students visualize the sequencing of events and other aspects of the story. In written retellings, graphic organizers are often used that ask questions or provide visuals for each story element. Students in primary grades might retell a story using pictures.

Math- In math, retelling can be used as a means for students to explain and describe how they were able to solve a given problem. This might involve students in elaborating on each step they took in order to solve the problem and explaining their reasoning for why they performed those steps, including whether or not each step makes sense given the problem at hand. Students' retelling of math procedures should also include when to use the procedure and a definition of this concept or procedure. Retelling can also be used in math in a way that involves students retelling what another student or what the teacher said when it comes to solving a problem.

Science- Retelling can be used in science by involving students in describing an observed experiment, or an experiment they performed themselves. Students can retell the steps that were involved in completing the experiment and tell about the hypotheses. This procedure should be described in sequential order that follows a process. Students can describe what the expected outcome was in the experiment and follow up with the result or solution, including whether this result was what was originally expected. Students should also tell about variables of the experiment in the retelling.

Social Studies- The retelling strategy can easily be used in social studies as students learn about major events and historical figures. Students can retell what the problem or conflict was in the major event and also describe the solution or result of this event. This might include retelling the "who, what, when, where, and why" about the particular event in history to demonstrate understanding. As students retell major events, it is important to pay attention to how they are sequencing the happenings together in the beginning, middle, and end, and also how they describe the setting of where and when the event took place.

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Retelling is a strategy that is used to determine how well a student has comprehended a specific story. Retelling can be used as an effective tool in improving comprehension as well as assessing it...

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NCTE - National Council of Teachers of English

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Comics in the Classroom | Harvard Graduate School of Education

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Comics in the Classroom | Harvard Graduate School of Education

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My mother was a master of deception. Committed to the long con of getting me, her pickiest son, to eat something more than macaroni and cheese, my mother tricked me into eating healthy food. On homemade pizza night, she snuck baby spinach under the mozzarella with the stealth of bootleggers during prohibition.

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Harnessing the power of your classroom library

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Harnessing the power of your classroom library

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Monday morning is team meeting day. Ten personalities, ten different jobs. How can we ensure that everybody has an opportunity to contribute and feels comfortable doing so?
Running meetings is not my strong suit. Do we need to "run" meetings. Would it be more democratic to rotate the chair or would that simply make participants feel even more uncomfortable?

I would like to gather ideas here and share my experiences trying to make necessary meetings useful and engaging and making the most of the strengths of every team member.

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Harnessing the power of your classroom library

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Monday morning is team meeting day. Ten personalities, ten different jobs. How can we ensure that everybody has an opportunity to contribute and feels comfortable doing so? Running meetings is not my strong suit. Do we need to "run" meetings. Would it be more democratic to rotate the chair or would that simply make participants feel even more uncomfortable?

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Ed Leadership - Unlocking Secrets of Complex Text.pdf - Google Drive

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Ed Leadership - Unlocking Secrets of Complex Text.pdf - Google Drive

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Ed Leadership - Unlocking Secrets of Complex Text.pdf

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Michael Rosen: How 'knowledge about language' for schools could be so much better

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Michael Rosen: How 'knowledge about language' for schools could be so much better

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If you think of language as a whole, then 'knowledge about language' is made up of anything and everything that describes language or can explain why and how we use it in the ways that we do.
Over the last few years, 'knowledge about language' in the hands of the government, the DfE and Michael Gove has been reduced to 'grammar' and 'grammar' has been reduced to one model, one form of what 'grammar' might be - a so-called 'structure and function' model.
This single model of 'grammar' (treated as if it's the only model) and enforced through the Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling test, then holds sway over primary education, and primary aged children.
First, to be clear, there are other models of grammar, which, say, treat that word 'function', not as how words 'function' inside sentences (e.g. this noun is the subject of the sentence) but as social functions (e.g. why have so many of us started saying 'So...' at the beginning of our utterances).
For some reason, this form of grammar was not the one implemented and enforced.

Over the last 150 years, a huge amount of work has gone into examining how the many different uses of language work and have created disciplines such as
There is, though, an even more important criticism to make. 'Knowledge about language' is a massive subject and can't be reduced to 'grammar' of any kind. Since the time of Aristotle, linguists have tried to examine language, describe it and explain it. Aristotle was particularly interested in the 'effects' of particular uses of language and did a damned good job of it. We all know, for example, what 'catharsis' is, thanks to him, but he did more than that in his book 'Poetics'.
narratology, stylistics, pragmatics and intertextuality. Though these are mostly written about in very academic ways, they can be broken down into very accessible (and enjoyable) ways for children and school students to use. To be clear: these are also 'knowledge about language', and because they are tied very closely to 'language in specific uses' and not 'abstract ideals', they are especially useful in helping children speak and write.
Narratology, for example, enables us to examine how stories (or any kind of writing) are 'told': e.g. who narrates? how does the narration change? what kind of narrator is narrating? what devices does the narrator use to 'talk' to us?
Narratology can help us look at how the narration enables us to know how characters think. There are several very different devices that have grown up, all the way from 'she thought' to the 'free indirect discourse' favoured by Jane Austen and many writers of children's books.
Narratology can help us look at 'foregrounding' and 'point of view' - how these shift, favouring one or more characters and why?
Narratology is very useful at helping us with time frames which often change via flashback, flash forward and invocations of continuous time or continuous existence.
Stylistics can take us into how texts 'sound' (prosody) - showing us how repetition of structure and letter sounds make rhythms in texts.
Stylistics can draw attention to sentence length, sentence complexity or simplicity, how paragraphs are constructed across texts, why and how these change as the need to express different things change.
Stylistics can draw attention to 'register' - how informal/formal a text is? How much does it draw on modes of text from which sources - does the writing empty speech modes? Are there deliberate attempts to 'borrow' language from specific sources e.g. from a field different from the one in the text, e.g. from science in a novel?
Stylistics can draw attention to which class of words are repeated e.g. many adjectives, many adverbs - or none?
Pragmatics can draw attention to how dialogue is structured and where the narrator dialogues with the audience/readership. Dialogue can be structured in many different ways in fiction and pragmatics can help us make distinctions.
Intertextuality can help us with the matter of 'borrowing' that I mentioned earlier. In essence, all writing is borrowing in that it borrows the sounds, structures and meanings that have gone before in order to do whatever it does. However, some borrowings are more obvious than others and/or more significant. This can be at the level of a whole genre e.g. Hamlet as 'revenge tragedy' or at the level say of using literary motifs or tropes e.g. 'the pathetic fallacy'. Or again allusion to writing or speech that comes before (as Dickens does in the opening pages of 'A Christmas Carol') and so on.
If the government and the DfE had been really interested in a holistic view of language and 'knowledge about language' it would have talked to applied linguists about all this, and then got hold of people who know about pedagogy and asked them to produce materials which applied this 'knowledge about language' in age-appropriate ways, using imitation, and practice and investigation as much as description and direct instruction, so that this 'knowledge about language' could have been applied directly to helping children write well.
But they didn't.
The main reason why they didn't is because the Bew Report of 2011 imposed the SPaG test instead. This was because Michael Gove told them to.

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How 'knowledge about language' for schools could be so much better

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If you think of language as a whole, then 'knowledge about language' is made up of anything and everything that describes language or can explain why and how we use it in the ways that we do.

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How to Stop Killing the Love of Reading | Cult of Pedagogy

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How to Stop Killing the Love of Reading | Cult of Pedagogy

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Listen to my interview with Pernille Ripp (transcript):
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If I had to pick one thing that makes the biggest difference in the quality of any person's education, the quality of their life, really, it would be reading. And I'm not really talking about basic literacy-not about the ability to read-I'm talking about reading for pleasure, to satisfy curiosities, to understand how people work and find solace in knowing we are not the only ones who think and feel the way we do.

That kind of reading.

But when I see what my kids do in school for "reading," it doesn't really look like reading. I ask them what books they are reading in school, and a lot of times they give me a blank stare. What they do in reading, they tell me, is mostly worksheets about reading. Or computer programs that ask them to read passages, not books, and answer multiple-choice questions.

Knowing this has bothered me a lot, and it led me to Donalyn Miller's book, The Book Whisperer, and then to Kelly Gallagher's book, Readicide. Both of these books show us that the reading programs and activities schools are using don't work very well to raise students' reading proficiency, especially if they take the place of real interactions with real books. And they certainly don't do anything to turn our students into people who love to read.

The only thing that can do that is books. Reading actual books alongside other people reading actual books.

What baffles me is that this message still hasn't reached so many schools. Schools are still shelling out thousands of dollars on expensive programs, putting pages and pages of passages and comprehension questions in front of our kids every day, sending them through the system without ever having them read a real book. Just excerpts. Just passages. Just reading-related "activities," but little to no time with actual books.

So today I'm going to do what I can to get the message out there by having my friend Pernille Ripp on the podcast. Pernille is a seventh grade English language arts teacher in Wisconsin. She has been blogging for years, she speaks all over the country, and she has written several books about teaching.

Her most recent one is called Passionate Readers, where she writes about her own journey from teaching reading through programs and activities to teaching in a way that honors books and develops a love of reading in every child. It's an awesome book. The best thing about it is how transparent Pernille is about her own doubts and struggles in this process.

In our interview we talk about why she made the change, what her reading instruction looks like now, and how other teachers can change their own practices. The key takeaways are summarized below. You can read a full transcript of our conversation here.

What's Wrong with the Way We Teach Reading Now?

In many classrooms that are feeling the pressure of high-stakes testing, instruction tends to emphasize what researcher Louise Rosenblatt called efferent reading, the kind of reading we do when looking for information, as opposed to aesthetic reading, which is done for enjoyment. Reading for information is a vital skill-without the ability to tackle challenging texts, locate evidence to support claims, summarize important ideas, and identify bias, students' academic progress will be stunted.

Unfortunately, our push toward developing close reading skills has had collateral damage. In far too many schools, reading for pleasure has been treated as an afterthought, something we encourage but don't really make time for. Instead of giving students time to read, we're giving them activities, projects, computer programs, reading logs, and worksheets that detract from actual reading.

"We're constantly reading for skill," Ripp says. "We're constantly asking kids to do something with their reading, and then wondering why they're choosing to leave us and never picking up another book. They can't wait to get out of school so that they don't have to read."

When she criticizes these practices, Ripp has no desire to teacher-bash. "I get it," she says. "We are all kind of facing the pressure of our districts and our government and our testing and our parents and everybody's focus on the data to show that these children can comprehend and compete with this global market economy that we're a part of."

"But unfortunately," she explains, "what that has led to is just this further step away from what we know works within reading instruction."

Even when we do have students read for enjoyment, we require evidence-reading logs, book reports, quizzes-to prove that the reading actually happened.

This was how Ripp taught for several years: "It was exhausting," she says. "When we did book clubs, it was all about me, and I was reading five different books and coming up with all of the questions. All the kids had to do was show up, read aloud. There was no discussion about which book we were going to read or anything like that. It was just all teacher-centered, all the time, book reports just to prove they had read rather than doing meaningful work after they had finished the book."

The Catalyst: What Caused the Change

Then one day a student said something that stopped Ripp in her tracks.

"I was doing the 'reading is magical' lesson that I think we all do at some point in the beginning of the year, and a kid in front of me whispered to his friends, 'Reading sucks.' And you know, I wanted to jump on him and be like, 'Oh, you just haven't found the right book,' because how often have we said that?"

Instead, she asked him to tell her why.

That's when the floodgates opened: Invited for the first time to honestly share their thoughts about reading, students told Ripp that they didn't like having to sit still. They wanted to be able to choose their own books, rather than being limited to a certain level. And more than anything, they hated the fact that every time they read something, they had to do some kind of activity related to the reading afterward.

Thus began Ripp's journey toward what she calls a common sense approach to reading.

Returning to a Common Sense Approach

Once her eyes were opened, Ripp found herself drawn to the people she calls the "pioneers" of a type of reading instruction: Nancie Atwell, Donalyn Miller, Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher, Kylene Beers, Stephen Krashen, and so many others. She began to understand that scripted programs and reading-related activities-teacher-centered reading instruction-were not the way to help students become life-long readers. Over time, she shifted to a different approach.

When she talks about her current practices, she emphasizes over and over again that this is nothing new. "We have so many years of really great reading research out there, and yet it seems to be forgotten."

Here are the most important components of Ripp's reading instruction the way it looks today.

Time to Read

Ripp's students are given ten minutes at the beginning of every class period for independent reading. "Every child, every day," she says. Even though she only has 45 minute blocks with each seventh-grade class, she makes sure they get that time to read every day. "It is sacred time," she says. When she taught at the elementary level, she was able to give students 30 minutes a day, but she no longer has that luxury.

During that independent reading time, Ripp does check-ins with students. "I'm sitting down and I'm simply saying, 'What are you working on as a reader?' And it gives me that two-, three-minute connection with a child if they need to book shop, if they're not doing well, to see what their reading identity is, where are they on their journey, and then I kind of pull all this information to think about what I still need to teach them (during the other part of class time)."

Students are not graded for this reading. "We can't actually grade their independent reading, because that's practice," Ripp says. So there's no other work associated with that time: no worksheets, no logs, no written reflections. "Nothing to do except to read. I want them to fall into the pages. I want them to reach flow. I want them to be silent and in this moment of their book."

Ripp uses the remainder of the 45-minute period to have students work on the other things you'd expect to see in an English language arts classroom. "When they come back to me (after the ten minutes), we then do a mini lesson on reading or writing or whatever it is we're doing, 10 to 15 minutes. And then they go and do something, and that's where I assess them." But those first ten minutes are always, always devoted to independent reading.

Choice

"Whenever I ask kids," Ripp says, "'What's the one thing you wish all teachers of reading would do?' (they say) 'Choice.' And yet, what do we do time and time again? We take away choice from kids, especially kids who might not be where we would hope they would be at this time. We end up with these limited choices for them, and then we wonder why they're the ones that distance themselves from reading the most, because they never get to develop their reading identity. They never get to go through the selection process. They never get to just read and struggle with text and have meaningful conversations and sometimes yes, make the wrong choice."

Students in Ripp's class always have free choice of what they want to read during independent reading time. Through lots of conversations, students practice getting to know who they are as readers so they can make choices that work for them. "They're constantly evaluating their book choices just either through conversation or self reflection or just their habits," Ripp says.

If a student finds that a book just isn't grabbing him, he is free to abandon it. "We should be celebrating when we abandon a book," Ripp tells her students, "because we know ourselves enough as a reader to know that this will not provide us with a reading experience that will matter to us. And we need to start building up that stamina, so we need books that work for us at that time, and that's really important for my students to remember, and to know and to recognize that what they need at this moment might be different than what they need a month from now."

A Robust Classroom Library

Ripp's classroom library houses several thousand books that students can check out at any time. You read that right: several thousand.

Why so many? "I need a book for every reader," Ripp says, "and I teach kids that read from about a second grade level to a college level. I teach kids with lives that share no similarities at times and others whose lives are very much like my own. And so I need to make sure that every child has a chance of finding a book that will speak to them."

Where do they all come from? "(At the time I had) three kids at home, you know, on a teacher's salary," Ripp explains. "I can't go out and spend thousands of dollars on books, and my school didn't have a lot of extra money, but I would rather that a child can go up to this bookshelf and find a high-quality book pretty much any time they go there rather than have to dig through the junk and hope they find something. So it just became my mission that instead of buying things to make our classroom prettier or anything like that, I bought books. I used Scholastic, I went to library sales and parents donated books, and I was always really picky. It was big for me that the books were good, and then I just purchased books."

Why not just have students use the school library? Ripp believes students need both. "Kids need to see the books staring at them at all times, and I think that has made the biggest difference for some of my kids who would go through the motions of going to the school library and they would even check some books out, but then when it came down to actually sitting down and read it, they didn't feel that same need or urge to read it." Her experience has proven the research that says students read more in classes that have good classroom libraries. "I had a seventh-grader come back to me my first year at the end of the year," she says, "and he said, 'You know what made the biggest difference? The books were always right there staring at me.'"

Ripp's classroom library also includes an incredible assortment of picture books. Having lots of picture books in the classroom helped remove the "babyish" stigma many middle schoolers attached to them. "If you walk into our classroom, yes there's all those books, the chapter books and all of that, but then all around us are picture books. And it's just a vibe, right? You feel it when you walk in that this is a classroom where you can have fun and where you get to read and you can choose whatever you want. No one cares what you're reading in our classroom, because you can pick up picture books at any time." To start building your picture book collection, take a look at the tons and tons of recommendations for picture books Ripp offers on her website.

Culture and Community

A constant thread that runs through Passionate Readers is the sense that a classroom culture is constantly being built, that every day, Ripp communicates how incredibly important books are to a good life, and how, if we get to know ourselves as readers, and have lots of conversations about our reading, we'll really get to experience the true magic of reading.

The 7th Grade Book Challenge is one way she encourages students to build more reading time into their lives. This was adapted from the 40-Book Challenge introduced in Donalyn Miller's Book Whisperer. Ripp participates in the challenge herself, just one of the ways she shares her own reading identity with her students.

Outside of things like the challenge, the culture is ultimately built on a day-to-day basis. "Teaching reading is not supposed to be quick and easy," she says. "It's supposed to be about human connection. It's one conversation at a time."

She admits that this new way of teaching is not perfect, and she's constantly reflecting on how she can do better for her students. "We cannot go in there and expect every child to change, but we can go in there hoping that we can help," she says. "I tell my students this: I'm not here to make you love reading. I'm here to make you hate it less. And if you already love it, then I'm here to protect it with all of my might." ♥

Pernille's book, Passionate Readers, goes into a lot more detail than I have room for here. It really walks teachers through how to implement a more reader-centered approach to teaching reading, complete with all the possible obstacles and pitfalls. I really encourage you to get a copy. To read more from Pernille Ripp, visit her fantastic blog at pernillesripp.com.

Stay in touch.
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Too many schools are producing non-readers at an alarming rate, but it doesn't have to be that way. Pernille Ripp and I talk about how to change things.

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Reading Assessments: Top Tips and Suggestions

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Reading Assessments: Top Tips and Suggestions

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Buzz-saw of the imagination | On children's books and illustrations

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Buzz-saw of the imagination | On children's books and illustrations

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When giving children books, well-meaning adults may feel impelled to offer challenge, too - opting for text-dense vocabulary boosters at the reader's diagnosed level, with the difficulty ramped up a little for luck. However gentle, though, this sort of nudge is not an unalloyed blessing.

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12 Word Book Summaries – A Great Way to End our Book Clubs |

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12 Word Book Summaries – A Great Way to End our Book Clubs |

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Once in a while I get a surprise package of books at my house. It honestly feels like Christmas. And while I love my chapter books as I try to figure out who the Global Read Aloud contenders should be, when picture books show up it is an even bigger celebration. So imagine my delight when Chronicle Books sent me 4 of their Cozy Classics.

While they are meant to be baby board books, I immediately saw great potential for them as a tool in the classroom. Having just finished their self-selected book clubs, I wanted my students to somehow wrap up their projects while also doing some deeper analysis of the stories they had read and discussed. Summarizing and analyzing are both skills we work on throughout the year, as is our public speaking skills. Yet I did not want them to write a paper about their books, since I had had them do other writing throughout. So this is exactly why the Cozy Classics were perfect; would my students be able to succinctly summarize their entire book in just 12 words?

This week I read War and Peace to my students and once their excitement died down I set them on their task; create a 12 word book summary that summarizes the entire book and then perform it for the class. Throughout the week they would get a few blocks of 5 to 10 minute times and today they performed them. The results were fantastic; students clearly had not only given a lot of thought to which words would best describe their stories, but also in how they should perform them for the class.

Here is one group performing their summary for Jennifer A. Nielsen's A Night Divided, which by the way is a wonderful book to have in your classroom library.

Sometimes it is the smallest ideas that can have the greatest impact.
If you like what you read here, consider reading my book Passionate Learners - How to Engage and Empower Your Students. Also, if you are wondering where I will be in the coming year or would like to have me speak, please see this page.
Posted in being a teacher, books, Literacy, picture books, Reading, Student Engagement

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12 Word Book Summaries - A Great Way to End our Book Clubs

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Once in a while I get a surprise package of books at my house. It honestly feels like Christmas. And while I love my chapter books as I try to figure out who the Global Read Aloud contenders should be, when picture books show up it is an even bigger celebration.

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Let's Stop With The Worksheets And Create Engaged Readers -

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Let's Stop With The Worksheets And Create Engaged Readers -

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The Rarity of Engaged Reading
by Angela Peery, TeachThought PD Facilitator
Grow with >> TeachThought PD Literacy Workshops
Picture a classroom full of youngsters. They could be darling, chubby-cheeked kindergartners or swaggering, confident high school seniors - or anything in between. Can you see them?

Now, picture this class engrossed in reading. What does being engrossed in reading look like? What does it sound like? What evidence exists that true, engaged reading is taking place?

In my visualization, I see a room full of freshmen - my classroom of yesteryear. There are five or six students lounging in the reading area, reclining on the sofa or stretched out on floor pillows. A dozen or so students are at their desks with their noses buried in books, their desktops strewn with pencils, highlighters, and sticky notes. A group of four girls sits cross-legged near the doorway, each with their own copy of a provocative young adult novel, whispering about what has happened and what might happen next.

They've chosen to read the book together and push each other to meet their self-imposed schedule for discussion. Along the sides of the room, near a couple of electrical outlets, are students sitting alone, with headphones, listening to audiobooks. One is lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

The other is lying on his side, following along in a hard copy of the book, often stopping, rewinding, and carefully replaying the audio, following the text with his index finger. And there I am - I can see myself near the front of the room, sitting in one chair with my feet propped up in another, devouring some current nonfiction, glaring at any student who dare interrupt my concentration or the concentration of a classmate.

When is the last time you saw a classroom like I've described, not just in your head, but in reality?

In my consulting work in the past five years, I have seen classrooms that are truly engaged in reading only a handful of times. I remember them vividly because they are exceedingly rare.

One was a room full of first-graders, spread out at various stations, rotating every 15 or 20 minutes. One group was at a table with a paraprofessional, another was in the floor with books, and yet another in the floor with tablet devices. Lastly, one group was at a table doing some kind of hands-on activity related to their reading. I listened as the adults talked with the children about what they were reading. These kids could talk about the characters, the events, the whole shebang. They weren't just regurgitating. They were invested.

Another was a middle school classroom. The teacher started class with everyone sitting in a circle in the floor. She posed an authentic, no-one-right-answer question about the book they were all reading together. The students eagerly responded to her question and to each other. They posed new questions. The discussion was energizing. After about ten minutes, the students raced to their desks, ready to open their books and continue reading, inspired.

Much more common in my observations is the room where reading is inflicted upon the students. They sit in their desks, compliant for the most part, waiting for the next worksheet or the next recall-level question. Those who enjoy playing the game of school answer aloud and answer quickly. They sometimes prod their neighbors to participate in the discussion or complete the questions on the worksheet.

Those who don't enjoy the game put their heads down or engage with whomever is on the other end of their cell phones. Those who despise the game act out. They might be up, wandering around the classroom, or they might be calling out inappropriate comments. They might be repeatedly asking to go to the restroom, or the nurse, or the guidance counselor. When the drudgery is too much for them to bear, they will do something horrendous enough to warrant the teacher removing them from the room.

What has become of reading in school? The terms "close reading" and "complex text" have been used enough the past few years to make me visibly cringe when a teacher utters them. Did we ever want students NOT to read closely? Of course not. Did we ever want the end goal of a lesson or unit to be that students could read simplistic text? No. But have these terms - or possibly our application of them - killed engaged reading in our classes?

What should engaged reading look like, sound like, and achieve for readers?

My first thought is to reach back to Nancie Atwell and her mantra for reading/writing workshop: we must give students time, ownership, and response. Are we ELA teachers giving students time to read in class? Do we assign reading and then expect it to be done somewhere else? Shouldn't reading be done when and where we can best help, which is in our classrooms? Does a reader ever become a stronger reader without role models, coaches, and peers to read alongside? I doubt it.

And what is the role of ownership? I have seen self-selected reading virtually disappear in the age of the Common Core. Teachers scurry to cover assigned text after assigned text and spend hours adapting activities to take into account the weak reading skills and the downright resistance of their students. To me, this is not the right path. The right path is to make more time for reading materials of choice in order to boost the skills (like stamina!) that are needed to tackle assigned (and often boring) materials.

Given the right conditions, students will tackle extremely complex texts on their own. Sometimes peers will help facilitate this; at other times, a caring teacher will. I vividly remember a student who told me he had never read a whole book during our first week of school. He was fifteen. He worked with his father on a commercial fishing boat. What was the first book I put in his hands? The Old Man and the Sea. And I stayed by his side as he lumbered through it. Guess what he tackled later in the year? The Call of the Wild. This is but one tiny example of what a teacher who truly values reading can do.

This particular student was buoyed by the trifecta of time, ownership, and response. I responded to him as a fellow reader, not as a teacher checking off specific objectives on some kind of record of his reading achievement. When one's teacher and one's peers are also engaged readers, it's hard not to partake in the community.

So let's stop the endless worksheets.

Let's put an end to the fake cooperative groups that skim through text merely to find answers to the teacher's tedious questions.

Let's again make room in the curriculum for engaged reading, where readers actually sit and read in the company of other readers, because it's important enough to do so together, in class, in a community.

Where readers talk with each other about what they're reading because they want to, not because they're being forced to.

And where readers tackle the classics and other difficult texts with confidence, because they know they can draw upon authentic reading experiences to help them.

As Pernille Ripp has noted, "In our quest to create lifelong readers, we seem to be missing some very basic truths about what makes a reader." We need to restore time, ownership, and response to their rightful status in instruction before we create an entire generation of non-readers.

Interested in growing literacy with Angela at your school? Contact Us >>

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Let's Stop With The Worksheets And Create Engaged Readers -

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The Rarity of Engaged Reading by Angela Peery, TeachThought PD Facilitator Grow with >> TeachThought PD Literacy Workshops Picture a classroom full of youngsters. They could be darling, chubby-cheeked kindergartners or swaggering, confident high school seniors - or anything in between. Can you see them? Now, picture this class engrossed in reading.

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Invented Spelling Leads to Better Reading, Study Says - Curriculum Matters - Education Week

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Invented Spelling Leads to Better Reading, Study Says - Curriculum Matters - Education Week

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Encouraging kindergartners' attempts to spell unknown words on their own can help them become better readers, according to a recent study by two Canadian researchers.

Gene Ouellette, an associate professor of psychology at Mount Allison University, and Monique Sénéchal, a psychology professor at Carleton University, have done a number of studies on how invented spelling plays into literacy acquisition.

"What we've found over the years is there seemed to be something with kids who are doing invented spelling on their own that's really helping them learn how to read," said Ouellette in an interview. "I'd say it's like the missing piece" in early literacy instruction.

Integrating Reading Skills

Invented spelling (also known as inventive spelling), as explained in Ouellette and Sénéchal's recent study, published in the journal Developmental Psychology, refers to "children's spontaneous or self-directed attempts to represent words in print." Children generally start with the first sound in a word; for instance, they might spell dog by writing a d, possibly followed by random letters. Then they typically represent final sounds ( d becomes dg), and gradually children will include the sounds in the middle.

"It's an engaging and cognitively strenuous activity," said Ouellette, "It helps bring together all the skills kids use when they learn how to read," including alphabetic knowledge and phonemic awareness.

The researchers' recent study followed about 170 students from kindergarten to 1st grade. It found that children who did more invented spelling and were better at it tended to have stronger literacy skills after a year.

The results, the researchers explain, were causal-meaning that by statistically controlling for how well students knew the alphabet or could listen for sounds, they could see that invented spelling led to better reading (and not the other way around).

With this study, the researchers "have mapped the powerful beginning reading-writing connection, moved us closer to being successful teachers of reading in 1st grade, and cleared up decades of confusion," J. Richard Gentry, who was not involved in this study but conducted early research on invented spelling in the 1980s, wrote in Psychology Today.

Fears About Teaching the 'Wrong Way'

To put this into practice, Ouellette recommends that teachers let students attempt to write words before showing them the correct spelling. "Instead of giving them a word list and telling them to memorize it, before a student has ever seen the word, you'd encourage them to spell it," he said. "It's a spelling-first approach."

But the idea of encouraging self-directed spelling does worry some people.

Critics of the tactic are often concerned students will learn incorrect spellings for words and hang onto them.

"People get super defensive" about invented spelling, said Ouellette. "They think we're saying you should just let kids spell how they want and never teach them the right way."

But teachers can be supportive of students' attempts without actually reinforcing misspellings, said Oullette. After students try to spell a word, the teacher can show them the correct spelling and talk about how the spellings differ. "You gradually shape them into the correct spelling," he said.

As some will remember, invented spelling was once seen as part of the "whole language" approach to reading, which minimizes phonics in favor of simply exposing students to text. That approach fell out of favor in the 1990s based on research showing that students learned to read better through systematic phonics instruction.

Ouellette emphasized that the way invented spelling was used in his research is distinct from the whole language approach, and not compatible with it. "That approach has children writing passages and narratives with invented spelling," he wrote in an email. "We are advocating word-level work. ... We would also help [children] discover how to improve their spellings over time. "
Top Image: Ellis, a kindergartner, visited the Education Week offices with his mother, assistant managing editor Lesli Maxwell, on Take your Child to Work Day last week. He documented his experience in this note, concluding that his mother is a "gurnalist." Lower Image: Ellis writes his mother a card "for a vare speshil resin." -Lesli Maxwell for Education Week.
For more news and information on reading, math, and STEM instruction: Follow @LianaLoewus
And sign up here to get alerts in your email inbox when stories are published on Curriculum Matters.

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Invented Spelling Leads to Better Reading, Study Says

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Encouraging kindergartners' attempts to spell unknown words on their own can help them become better readers, according to a recent study by two Canadian researchers. Gene Ouellette, an associate professor of psychology at Mount Allison University, and Monique Sénéchal, a psychology professor at Carleton University, have done a number of studies on how invented spelling plays into literacy acquisition.

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Books That Help Kids Walk in Someone Else's Shoes | Brightly

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Books That Help Kids Walk in Someone Else's Shoes | Brightly

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If you're reading this site you probably agree that books are magical. They can transport us to mythical lands and allow us to escape the humdrum of everyday life. They can be "windows" that show us real places we haven't yet visited, or introduce us to new ways of thinking and living through characters that are different than we are. They can also be "mirrors" to help us feel less alone in the world by reading about people who struggle with the same issues we do.

As a white girl growing up in a white, suburban neighborhood, I didn't experience a lot of diversity on a daily basis. Books were one way I could learn about the challenges, joys, and journeys of people who were different than me. As a parent, I am always looking for books that provide that same opportunity for my suburban children, who are living in a multi-racial community and an even more diverse world.

Here are eight books that the young readers on Bookopolis.com highly recommend as books that build empathy and understanding of our diverse world by allowing kids to walk in someone else's shoes for a while.

by Alex Gino

George has always felt more like a girl than a boy. She has kept this a secret for a long time, but if she wants to try out for Charlotte in the school production of Charlotte's Web, her secret might come out. A touching realistic fiction story about a fourth grader's journey to stand up and be herself. Jacob,11, says, "Once you read this book you know a lot more about being transgender. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves a good character."

What other empathy-building books would you recommend to young readers?

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Books That Help Kids Walk in Someone Else's Shoes | Brightly

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If you're reading this site you probably agree that books are magical. They can transport us to mythical lands and allow us to escape the humdrum of everyday life. They can be "windows" that show us real places we haven't yet visited, or introduce us to new ways of thinking and living through characters that are different than we are.

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How to use picture books to get your class talking about emotions | Teacher Network | The Guardian

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How to use picture books to get your class talking about emotions | Teacher Network | The Guardian

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In the early years of primary education, there is a healthy emphasis on circle time discussion that allows children to talk about their feelings openly. One of the most effective and long-standing strategies to talk about difficult emotional issues such as anxiety and loneliness has been to use stories.

Picture books in particular offer an excellent opportunity for teachers to open up discussions about sensitive topics in a safe environment and there are many authors who look at such issues. Some of the books worth seeking out include The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan, a story about fitting in; Small Things by Mel Tregonning, on finding your way in the world; and The Colour Thief by Andrew Fusek Peters and Polly Peters, in which a young boy explores the effects of his father's depression on the family. However, one of our personal favourites, and an author we would argue is the master of the craft, is former children's laureate Anthony Browne.

A well-established classroom favourite, his books are short, funny and fantastical, but they are also a good starting point for talking about feelings such as anxiety, loneliness, jealousy, neglect, depression, friendship, belonging and self-image. His characters, often in the form of gorillas, provide models for children to project their feelings on to and discuss the strategies they use to cope with difficult situations. The pared-down text is ideal for younger readers and allows older readers breathing space and enough ambiguity to explore possibilities through discussion or role-play.

Here are our recommendations for how you can use picture books to get your class talking, using Anthony Browne as an example.

Voices in the Park

A visit to the park is seen through the eyes of a boy and girl, Charles and Smudge, and both their parents. The style of illustrations exposes how each person's experience of the trip differs and brings to the surface their feelings about themselves and those around them.

Voices in the Park is useful for exploring issues of loneliness. Charles, isolated by his overbearing mother, longs for a friend. He finds brief companionship in Smudge, a young girl.

Start exploring this book by discussing how the stylistic features - font, illustration, text size - reveal the characters' feelings. How do we know that Charles is lonely? Discuss how he could talk about how he feels in relation to Smudge: what might she suggest that he do? Using role-play to bring their conversation to life could help get children talking about their own experiences.

Smudge has her own problems, chiefly supporting her father - possibly a single parent - who is struggling with low mood and unemployment. How might Charles be able to help her talk about this? How could the two children comfort each other?

Silly Billy

Billy is a little boy with worries. He lies in bed at night and he imagines all sort of terrible fates, from being carried off by giant birds to being washed away by a flood in his bedroom. He finds a solution via his grandma, who gives him a bag of worry dolls to help share the burden.

Ultimately, Billy learns that confiding your concerns to others - even if that is to a bag of Guatemalan worry dolls - is the best way to keep your worries in check. Considering Billy's wild and wonderful worries is a funny way to get children to open up about the strange things that keep them awake. The way he confides in the dolls can encourage children to discuss who they have to confide in, what should be shared with others and how this can help us all manage our anxiety.

For older children, talking about how the painting on Billy's wall, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog by Casper David Friedrich, relates to his emotions might also be an interesting starting point. What other works of art could be on his wall to reflect different feelings?

Willy the Wimp

Willy doesn't feel like he fits in. He doesn't like football, he cries at romantic movies and he often wants to at home reading his books. In Willy the Wimp we see how he tries to improve his self-image, based on what he believes he should be. But this has consequences he couldn't possibly have imagined.

Willy is a chimpanzee in a gorilla's world. He is not as strong as the other boys and, with his different, non-macho interests, he is a bit lonely. Dissatisfied with his skinny appearance, he decides to change himself to what he perceives as being normal - a big muscly gorilla. While changing to become more comfortable with yourself can certainly have benefits, asking where our ideas of normal come from is an interesting starting point for your discussion. What is normal? Who decides?

It is also worth considering how Willy's personality begins to change as his body transforms. Does it change for the better? Does our appearance determine how we feel inside and how others judge us? Try bringing this to life through role-play, with skinny Willy talking to his muscly version from later in the story. How does his friend Millie feel about the new Willy? An interesting book to explore self-image and how to develop the confidence to be ourselves.

Dr Helen Hanna is a lecturer in education studies at Leeds Trinity University and Stefan Kucharczyk is a visiting lecturer at Leeds Trinity University and founder of ARTiculate Education.
Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach, like us on Facebook, and join the Guardian Teacher Network for the latest articles direct to your inbox. Looking for a teaching job? Or perhaps you need to recruit school staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the education specialist.

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How to use picture books to get your class talking about emotions

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In the early years of primary education, there is a healthy emphasis on circle time discussion that allows children to talk about their feelings openly. One of the most effective and long-standing strategies to talk about difficult emotional issues such as anxiety and loneliness has been to use stories.

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Does Reader's Workshop Promote Close Reading Adequately? | Shanahan on Literacy

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Does Reader's Workshop Promote Close Reading Adequately? | Shanahan on Literacy

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Does Reader's Workshop Promote Close Reading Adequately? | Shanahan on Literacy

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Basically, my problem with Reader's Workshop is the lack of teaching (and the idea of mini-lessons is basically to minimize teaching).

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As an English teacher, I've had numerous conversations with college professors who lament the writing skills of their first year students. But not all writing. Most students are capable of solid expository writing. It's their skill with persuasive writing that's the problem. Specifically, they're weak at writing a thesis statement that can be argued.

I spend three years teaching my high school students how to write a persuasive essay. For many students, it takes that long. (And I'm lucky to have them that long in my school.)

Part of the problem is that our current school systems - and not just in Canada - aren't great at producing independent thinkers. Without this ability, it's hard to create a great thesis statement, anticipate the arguments against it, and then compose your own argument in light of what you understand about the pros and cons of an issue.

So for three years, I write for them, and with them. We talk about opening paragraphs, and they learn how to write them with their thesis statement either as the first or last sentence. (The latter requires more skill.) They learn to use transition words, embed quotations to support their argument, consider the advantages of active vs. passive voice, vary their sentences, and many other skills, all in the hope of creating a strong argument.

The truth is lately I've come to question the point of much of this. Does the average person, once they leave school, spend a lot of time composing academic essays? Is this the best way for our students to show their learning? In some places, the academic 5 paragraph essay is hailed as the Holy Grail of non-fiction writing achievement. Yet even if a student can become a great persuasive essay writer, they're still only semi-literate, at least according to the definition of 21st Century Literacies.

Blogging is a different beast

While traditional essay writing may not help alleviate this situation, I think blogging can. Here's the problem; Blogging is an entirely different beast. And one of the things I've learned about my students is that they don't necessarily transfer a skill they've learned in one area to another without difficulty, or even prompting.

For one, the paragraphing is different. The large, solid paragraphs of prose that can be found in a typical persuasive essay, can feel arduous and cumbersome to all but the most determined reader.

Instead, blog paragraphs tend to be shorter. It allows the piece to feel fluid and speeds up the rate at which your reader reads (often through the glare of a computer monitor or on a phone or tablet screen). And while the effective blogger still uses transition words, as many aren't necessary to provide the piece with a feeling of fluidity and coherence.

Sometimes a paragraph is one simple sentence, used for emphasis.

Another thing is the thesis statement. Its placement, in a blog, is up for grabs. Did you catch where mine is? Actually, I haven't written it yet. Huh?!

Double-dog daringly different

Blogging also requires a different voice. The way I blog isn't quite how I talk, but it's no where close to how I write a formal essay. Furthermore, the voice used in blogging needs to be rich, sharp and distinct, to gain an audience. And while some may argue that academic writing could stand to have a bit more colour and flair, I'm not sure that's currently the accepted norm (although I wish it was).

In a formal essay, I would never use a sentence fragment. Ever. In a blog, it provides emphasis. Nor would I use slang in an essay. But here? Yep. In one of my posts, I double-dog dared my readers. Could you imagine double-dog daring anyone in an academic essay? If you try it, let me know the result.

Another thing that changes is providing your reader with evidence to support your points. In teaching the typical formal essay, I show my students how to quote directly, indirectly, and using individual words. Blogs still use direct quotes, but an indirect quote can be as simple as a vague mention and a link.

We discover my thesis statement...

I think blogging is the new persuasive essay -my thesis, finally.

Truth is, I love writing essays. There's something satisfying about rendering the chaos of thoughts into an elegant form. But I love blogging more. It feels like playing.

I also find it more useful. While our students will need to know how to write essays to get through university, many won't use it after that, unless they remain in academia. I think writing and persuasive thinking skills are important. However, I question the current products we require of students as proof of their learning. Most of the essays written by our students likely end up in the garbage or the computer trash can. And most are for an audience of one.

Blogging has the potential to reach and influence many. Furthermore, it has greater potential for being a life-long skill. And isn't that our goal in education? People from all walks and professions blog for the purpose of teaching, creating, and informing. A number of my recent Masters courses didn't require papers; instead, they required blogging. Why?

Because blogging is the new persuasive essay.

If we're trying to prepare our students to think critically and argue well, they need to be able to blog. It allows for interaction. It allows for ideas to be tested. And the best posts anywhere in cyberspace tend to have a point that can be argued.

I think blogging across the curriculum, not just in Language Arts, allows for both formative and summative assessment. Blogs allow us to see the progression in the development of both thinking and writing. It may actually take more talent and skill to create an interesting persuasive post (or series of posts) on the French Revolution than a traditional essay.

We need to teach blogging as a skill

Students definitely need to understand how and why the mechanics (and style) of blogging are different.

The solution? Blogging needs to start earlier, much earlier. I read recently of a kindergarten teacher who blogs with her students. Great idea. There's a teacher in my division who does amazing things with her grade one class.

I'm not proposing that you need to do things radically different. Teach whatever you teach for Language Arts, or other subjects, but include a blog component. So if you're teaching sentence structure, teach your students to create complete sentences while blogging. Blogs, like traditional writing, need great structure. If you're focusing on capitalization or punctuation, transfer this skill to blog writing as well.

If you're teaching paragraph structure, teach students the paragraph structure required for traditional essays and that for blogs. They're different. Explain why. It's likely they won't be good at it at first. But there is merit to the quote, "Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly."

A middle years teacher at my school used to stress out when we talked about student writing. She wanted to know if she was teaching them enough. My reply: "All I need them to do is write solid paragraphs. If they can do that, I can teach them all kinds of things." Really, everything I teach is either an addition to, or a subtraction from, a solid paragraph. My work builds on her work. I don't need her to teach what I teach. That's my job. But without her previous work, mine becomes much more difficult.

The same is true with blogging. Starting from scratch with blogging in grade 10 isn't impossible. But we could do so much more if they already had the basics. In order to write well, you need to write a lot.

If you don't currently teach your students to blog, please start. Our students need you to. And if you already teach your students to blog, keep it up. Because blogging is an important 21st century skill. It's the new persuasive essay.

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As an English teacher, I've had numerous conversations with college professors who lament the writing skills of their first year students. But not all writing. Most students are capable of solid expository writing. It's their skill with persuasive writing that's the problem. Specifically, they're weak at writing a thesis statement that can be argued.

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Comics and Reluctant Learners: Dispelling the Myths

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Comics and Reluctant Learners: Dispelling the Myths

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I have been doing this whole "teaching with comics" thing for nearly 15 years and I am fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with teachers all over the country. During panels and workshops, I find that I often hear (or overhear) a specific remark: "I love these books. They're great for my reluctant readers."

When I hear teachers say things like this, or that comics are only for the "kids who don't like to read," I feel they're buying into a common myth: that reluctant readers are the only ones who can benefit from comics. While it's true that comics and graphic novels do work well with reluctant readers, that's precisely because they work well with nearly all readers. Rather than relegated to only the most struggling students, comics can be useful - even invaluable - for elementary all the way up to College Preparatory or even Advanced Placement classes, offering up countless opportunities for teachers and administrators to better engage their students.

For my part, I use comics with all my students who vary in gender, age, and academic performance - from reluctant to engaged and everything in between. Of course, curation is key here. Should you decided to take on the challenge and joy of teaching with comics in your classroom, it is important to understand what titles you have to choose from and the complexity level of these texts - particularly if you are not familiar with them - as some of them are every bit as complex as their chapter-based counterparts. For example, while I'd avoid handing a difficult book like Maus or Persepolis to a student who struggles with reading, I would also be hesitant to hand an elementary-level Smile to an 11th or 12th grade honors or college prep group.

See, that's the rub! With the diverse range of comics available today, it's hard to know exactly what works best for your students - especially if you're new to comics. To help, I have taken the liberty of listing some great examples below, along with a few of the themes that the texts take on to help you decide how to work them into your curriculum:

Elementary/Middle School Level:

Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol

Ghostopolis by Doug TenNapel

The Eternal Smile or American Born Chinese by Gene Yang

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook by Eleanor Davis

Astronaut Academy (Series) by Dave Roman

The Human Body Theatre by Maris Wicks

by Svetlana Chmakova

by Noelle Stevenson

High School Level:

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Superman: American Alien by Max Landis

Batman: Year One by Frank Miller

I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly

Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

The texts above are just a start. If you decide to start with your struggling readers by passing some comics into their hands, just keep in mind that this is where you should be beginning, not ending, your intervention. When you are comfortable with their effectiveness and your ability to implement them successfully, you can take the next step and bring these texts to your other, higher achieving students!

It may take some time but, in my experience, it usually does not take long to discover those books that will make your reading-loving students eager to explore and be challenged by new types of texts, topics, and content.

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Comics and Reluctant Learners: Dispelling the Myths

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I have been doing this whole "teaching with comics" thing for nearly 15 years and I am fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with teachers all over the country. During panels and workshops, I find that I often hear (or overhear) a specific remark: "I love these books.

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Educational Leadership:Literacy in Every Classroom:How Knowledge Powers Reading

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Educational Leadership:Literacy in Every Classroom:How Knowledge Powers Reading

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Want to become a doctor? An economist? An engineer? You'd better be prepared to read articles, primary source documents, research studies, and complex essays. The same is true for shorter-term goals, like scoring well on the new SAT. In other words, success in scholastic and professional endeavors requires the ability to learn from the literature of a discipline.

Clearly, it's important to ensure that all students can read and master nonfiction texts-but it's also challenging. Nonfiction doesn't follow the "problem, rising action, resolution" conventions of fiction that students are familiar with from novels, movies, and TV sitcoms. With the exception of memoir and biography, nonfiction rarely tries to win the reader's interest with an engaging narrative voice. The tone is more often something like, "I've got some information here; stay with me if you can."

But the biggest challenge-and the most important-is this: Recent research shows that reading comprehension, deep thinking, and even creativity all rely heavily on prior knowledge. Although you can find a thousand articles claiming that knowledge is essentially irrelevant nowadays-that mere facts are not worth teaching in the age of Google, when anyone can look up anything at any time-in fact, cognitive scientists now mostly believe that this apparently tidy logic is wrong (Allington & Cunningham, 2006; Deans for Impact, 2015; Willingham, 2006). The brain's active processing capacity is finite, so unless knowledge is encoded in long-term memory, having to search for it actually crowds out other forms of cognition. Knowing things helps you think and read successfully.

At the same time, reading is a primary way to come to know things. Every time we read and comprehend a text, we add to the knowledge that helps us make sense of further texts.

In other words, when it comes to reading, knowledge is both the chicken and the egg. Our students' ability to read nonfiction texts depends on their prior knowledge, and the act of reading nonfiction adds to their knowledge base and helps them learn more from subsequent reading. As teachers, we need to find ways to weave prior knowledge into our students' reading of nonfiction throughout the process of engaging them with texts.

Why Knowledge Counts More Than Skill

Prior knowledge affects comprehension-in many cases, far more than generic "reading skills" do. To see what I mean, consider this short passage about a baseball game:

Rick Porcello has been the anchor of the Red Sox rotation all year, and tonight, he showed why. He was perfect through the first 11 outs. Then he hit Manny Machado. Porcello shouted "I'm not trying to hit you, Bro," to remind the slugger that it would make no sense to have plunked him with a perfect game still on the table, but Machado took apparent issue. Then, after he scored on Mark Trumbo's double, he stared down Porcello. So Porcello proceeded to strike Machado out on three pitches in the sixth, and then fanned him on four in the ninth.

If you're a baseball fan, you probably gleaned a great deal of information from this passage. For example, when the article describes Rick Porcello as the "anchor of the Red Sox rotation," your knowledge of the baseball term rotation enabled you to understand that he was an excellent starting pitcher (rather than a relief pitcher or a closer). When it says "he was perfect through 11 outs," you knew this didn't mean that he was flawless in the generic sense, but that he had not allowed a base runner until he faced the third batter, Machado, in the fourth inning.

Your prior knowledge also enabled you to understand the central conflict in the passage: When Porcello "hit" Machado, it was with a pitched ball, which is painful and can be either an accident or a deliberate provocation. Because you knew that being hit by a pitch sends a batter to first base, you weren't surprised to read that Machado later scored. You could envision him pausing after crossing home plate and staring at Porcello, thus responding to the pitcher's perceived provocation with one of his own. In other words, you understood the plot; you sensed the spiraling tension between the two players. And you knew how that tension was resolved-later in the game, Porcello made a statement when he struck Machado out twice ("fanned" him).

As you read the article and made these inferences and a dozen others, you understood the text far better than a reader who knew nothing about baseball would have. Your understanding was not the result of some generic "inferencing skill"; it was the result of your prior knowledge. If I gave this passage to a group of literacy experts in the United Kingdom and to some of my daughter's 3rd grade classmates here in the United States, my daughter's classmates would understand it far better.

But you didn't just understand what you read better than a reader with no prior baseball knowledge would have, you also learned more new things. The gap between your comprehension and a less baseball-savvy reader's would likely be bigger next time around because your knowledge base grew faster. You were learning things that a reader who was just trying to connect the basic dots would not: Porcello is having a great year; Machado has a fiery temperament; big leaguers talk casually during the game, Bro. The next time you and your counterpart read a passage, the gap in understanding would be even bigger.

We call this concept-the rate at which readers are expanding their background knowledge as a result of what they are reading- absorption rate. Although this is an exaggerated example (baseball has an unusually distinctive vocabulary and knowledge base), some version of it occurs every time a reader encounters a text.

How can teachers ensure a high absorption rate that feeds students' ability to think deeply? How can they teach nonfiction successfully and engagingly so that students are confident reading it, not just in the classroom but also in their personal endeavors? The first step may be to reconsider how and when we teach nonfiction.

Enrich Understanding with Embedded Nonfiction

Many language arts teachers approach nonfiction structurally. They perceive it as a genre and strive to help their students develop an overarching structural knowledge of that genre. They reason that, if students understand how information is presented, they will understand what they read.

Such teaching often looks like this: An article is chosen and introduced and analyzed formalistically. How is the information organized? How do text features like subheads and captions function? Where and how is evidence cited? In fact, many English teachers make a unit out of such lessons. I did this myself as a teacher. In retrospect, I must admit that the results were often brutal.

That's because this approach puts students in situations where they're disconnected from the texts they read. If students are reading a text because it's a fine example of how subheads work, they're unlikely to have any emotional or intellectual connection to it.

For an alternative approach, consider what my colleague Colleen Driggs did recently. She was reading the novel Lily's Crossing by Patricia Reilly Giff (Delacorte, 2001) with her 5th graders. The book is set in New York during World War II and tells the story of Lily, whose father is away fighting in Europe. One detail in the book is the presence of rationing: staples like butter and oil are in short supply; people stand in lines and go without; rationed items can only be purchased on specific days.

Rationing is something most 5th graders today know little about. So Colleen brought in a nonfiction article on rationing-how it worked, what it was like, how people reacted. About four chapters into Lily's Crossing, Colleen had her students read and discuss the article. She focused on the article's content, not its use of subheads or other structural elements. Here's what happened:

The students were engaged and interested in an otherwise dry topic. Because they knew and identified with a fictional character who was experiencing rationing, they had some context and emotional connection.

They picked up all kinds of new details and questions-what was "fuel oil" anyway, and why was it important in the 1940s?

Because they now understood more about the context of the novel, their absorption of it also increased-doubly so when Colleen replaced stock questions, such as "What is motivating Lily in this scene?" with knowledge-based questions, such as "How is Lily's experience with rationing like and unlike the experiences described in the article?"

Through this strategy, Colleen also created an implicit narrative for her students about why someone would read nonfiction-people use it to find out about things that interest them. As adults, we would never read a nonfiction article because we felt it was an outstanding example of, say, presenting events in chronological order. We're much more likely to read an article because something else we were reading on a related topic piqued our interest.

Based on this experience, Colleen included nonfiction articles-more than half a dozen of them-throughout her class's study of Lily's Crossing. Students read articles about victory gardens and blackout curtains. They read about spies and about the United States' decision to enter the war. They read about the Luftwaffe bombing of London so they could understand why people were so fearful of air raids. The students-with growing context and knowledge-read energetically and enthusiastically and learned more and more from the articles.

But here's the really interesting part. They also learned more and more from the book itself, which was transformed from a novel pleasantly set in a unique historical period into a deep study of that period with a rich and useful context. They started to understand the book's allusions and references.

The strategy Colleen used is called embedded nonfiction. The idea is to connect and combine nonfiction with other texts (both fiction and nonfiction) to ensure richer engagement and better leveraging of knowledge. It results in students reading more nonfiction with more learning-and also getting more knowledge and understanding out of the fiction they read.

Ask Knowledge-Based Questions

Another way to enrich students' learning from nonfiction involves shifting the types of questions we ask. One of the tenets of U.S. education is the belief in teaching formal reading skills-the idea that students learn to read in large part by learning to predict, make inferences, interpret character motivation, summarize, and so on. Many teachers believe that these skills are fungible-that students who learn them in one context will be able to apply them in other contexts, and will thus develop the capacity to read anything.

However, there's lots of evidence to challenge this assumption. Consider one of your weak readers. Let's call him John. Most likely, John has no problem making inferences when he watches a movie. The problem is not that John lacks skill in making inferences, but rather that he can't do it when he is reading texts-or when he is reading certain texts. Once you've ensured that he can read technically-that he can decode and read with enough fluency to have some cognitive capacity left over to reflect-it might be better to build his knowledge rather than practicing inferences with him. Or, if you're not sure, you can hedge your bets and do both, asking some skill-based questions and some knowledge-based questions.

A friend told me about her visit to a high-performing school-one of the highest in the state she lives in despite serving a population of mostly poor kids. The school is more committed to developing background knowledge than most schools. For example, kindergarteners might be sent home with a book about ants or frogs they'd read in class. Instead of asking them to read it to their parents for homework and practice their decoding, as many schools would, this school would ask them to explain to their parents everything they'd learned about ants or frogs from the book. This practice emphasized knowledge development (retelling the facts) over skill development (practicing decoding).

I'd been thinking about what this might look like inside reading classrooms, and I soon had an opportunity to think it through myself. My daughter was reading a novel set during the U.S. Civil War. The protagonist, Emma, sneaks behind Confederate lines as a spy. As a teacher, I'd been trained to ask questions like this:

Indeed, those questions could have made for an interesting and worthwhile discussion. But what if I also wanted to address the knowledge deficit, to try to maximize my daughter's absorption rate of background knowledge as she read? In that case, I might have thought about some different questions:

What does Emma tell us about what soldiers died of during the Civil War? Is it surprising in any way? (Emma notes that far more soldiers died from disease than from battle, and that typhoid fever was a leading killer. Most people think more about dramatic combat deaths, but disease killed more soldiers in almost every war until World War II.)

Is there anything in the text that tells us why so many soldiers might have died from disease during the Civil War? (Alan, the soldier, recalls how when he started to get weak and could not keep up with his regiment, he was left behind with no food or shelter. Students might also note that Emma knows there's nothing she can do but comfort Alan-there's no medical cure, as we might hope there would be today.)

These fact-based questions are actually surprisingly rigorous, and like the more common questions, they could have led to a fascinating discussion. And the knowledge students built would have been applicable to more than just the Civil War-it could easily have been extrapolated and applied to other questions and time periods. Think of how powerful the following facts are in understanding events throughout history: Some deaths get more attention than others because they are dramatic; until recently, soldiers died mostly of sickness; and nursing used to mean comforting someone in death as much as restoring them to health.

Many of us are trained to think of such questions as second-rate or "not our job"-I know I would have for most of my teaching career-and I'm not suggesting that teachers ask only fact-based questions. But if we don't ask any such questions, we may be tacitly socializing students to believe that facts are irrelevant. By asking some fact-based questions, we can chip away at the knowledge deficit and teach our students how to unlock knowledge from what they read.

Put Writing Before Discussion

Another challenge in building students' knowledge is that we sometimes remain in the dark about how much students understand about what they read, so we let gaps in knowledge and understanding persist. With that in mind, I offer a final idea to help students build knowledge and master nonfiction texts. But first a short story.

When people ask me whether I've read Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, I never know what to say. I was assigned it in a class, where I discussed it and then wrote a paper on which I did quite well. But I never actually read the play. I was a college sophomore at the time, and busy with things that seemed more pressing than Shakespeare. Still, I went to class on the day we were slated to discuss the play, and it soon became clear that it was about jealousy. There were two kings, Leontes and Polixenes, who were friends until suddenly Leontes became convinced that Polixenes had an affair with his wife. We discussed the possible sources of Leontes's sudden jealous rage and the ramifications of his unchecked suspicion. As I gathered the basics of the story, I was able to participate in our discussion, dropping in an occasional worldly wise chestnut about the nature of jealousy from the back row.

That night, I reflected on what my classmates had said and, harvesting lines from the first scene or two, wrote a paper about the hidden seeds of Leontes's rage. I aced the paper, and for years I thought that was hilarious. Of course, it isn't-not only because I missed out on The Winter's Tale, but also because my story is the archetype of a dynamic that happens in our classes over and over. The fact that my professor thought I had read and understood the play made her, I now realize, typical of many teachers.

Students routinely appear to understand what they read far more than they actually do-simply because of the way we structure our instruction. Typically, we read a text, then discuss it, and then ask students to write about it. The writing (a paper, a test, or some other format) is usually the means of assessment, but it actually conflates two things: how much students understood of what they read, and how much they were able to augment and supplement their understanding during subsequent activities. Thus, we often don't know, and surely overestimate, whether our students can understand the text on their own. This obviously limits our ability to support their knowledge development.

Sometimes the simplest fixes can be the most powerful, though, and here's a simple suggestion: Instead of read-discuss-write, try read-write-discuss. This would let you circulate and observe what students were able to glean independently from the text. Or even better, why not read-write-discuss-revise? This would give students a chance to show what they know both from their initial reading and from the discussion; and they could also reflect on how their initial understanding has progressed.

Knowledge Is Crucial

The ability to build knowledge by reading and to learn from texts is a crucial driver of student success. It is critical to fostering ultimate student autonomy. It is crucial to equity because many students' lack of background knowledge causes them to fall further and further behind.

Many teachers understand the importance of knowledge in reading, yet they've struggled to identify specific teaching methods to help students grow their knowledge and access knowledge-building nonfiction texts. To address that challenge, try the three strategies described here: embedded nonfiction, text-based questions, and the use of writing early in the lesson cycle.

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To help students master nonfiction reading, we must design instruction that builds their background knowledge.

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How to Electrify Learning with Informational Read Alouds | Booksource Banter

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How to Electrify Learning with Informational Read Alouds | Booksource Banter

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Reading aloud to young children has always been a delight, but I must plead guilty to spending too many years focusing on fiction-based read alouds. I was afraid that informational selections couldn't possibly hold the attention of my ever-so-wiggly elementary students. But how wrong I was!

Once I began to experiment with informational read alouds from masters of nonfiction such as Seymour Simon, Nicola Davies, , Melvin Berger, Doreen Rappaport and so many more, my students erupted with questions and ignited a sense of wonder that electrified our learning.

Why Informational Read Alouds?

Informational read alouds ignite imagination, strengthen academic vocabulary, stimulate powerful questions, expand schema and build strong foundations for new units of inquiry. They're easy. They're interesting. But I am concerned because ...they aren't happening enough!

Evidence suggests that teachers are continuing to lean heavily toward fiction during read alouds. (Layne, 2015; Scholastic & YouGov, 2014; Duke, 2014). I would argue that it is time for us to unite as a profession and take active steps toward ensuring that every learner experiences the power of an informational read aloud, every day.

It's time to ensure that our learners have the same in-depth experiences and knowledge of informational titles that they are lucky enough to have with fiction. They deserve to be immersed in information-based read alouds that not only capture kid-delightful, eye-popping information but also sing with exquisite language.

All learners deserve to see that nonfiction texts can capture their interest, pique a sense of wonder and bring the world to life with striking visuals and colorful language.

I have always found it interesting that when I present an informational read aloud for audiences of adults, the room becomes completely, totally still. Movement, paper shuffling and conversations cease as adult educators lock onto the visuals, connect with the content and exhibit many of the same signs of deep engagement that we see in students during a read aloud. From my personal experience, I know informational read alouds really do connect for all ages.

Here are a few tips to ensure amazing success with informational read alouds:

Time is always a challenge, but many teachers find it helpful to shorten the fiction read aloud by a bit and then use the saved minutes to slip in an informational read aloud. Let nothing stand in the way!

Become a commercial for informational reading!

Read the book in advance so you know it well enough to bring it to the students as a joyful celebration. Bring passion! Show it in your eyes and in your voice. Read with vitality and be a commercial for a great topic and a beautiful selection.

Model the behaviors of an informational reader.

With some selections, it can be very powerful to pause occasionally and model how you might jot a note or a question on a chart. Or, show students how to place key words on individual sticky notes that can later be rearranged for a summary. These questions, jotted words and notes can then become a rich cache of possibility for modeled writing to show learners how you gather facts and then slip them into writing.

Give yourself permission to read the whole selection... or part of it!

Sometimes an informational read aloud is best when it is used to pique interest and generate excitement for a topic. I have had wonderful success reading a particularly interesting portion of a nonfiction selection and then stopping. Questions erupt, and I can ask who might enjoy adding the book to their independent reading collection to enjoy later. If you can find several copies of the book, that is even better as students can talk together about what they are noticing and learning.

Read from a wide range of sources.

The range of text types labeled as informational or nonfiction is enormous! Field guides, magazines, newspapers, informational poetry, narrative nonfiction, descriptive and explanatory pieces, persuasions and so on are examples of the enormous diversity of text types. How exciting to expose students to the wide range of linguistic styles, graphic layouts and far reaching options for topics.

Broaden schema through informational read alouds.

Informational read alouds can be an exciting way to introduce a new unit of study or to broaden general knowledge. Listening to informational selections allows students to have access to content that may be outside of their reading range but within their comprehension zone.

Reread informational selections.

We know how young children beg to hear their favorite stories again and again. The same can be true for informational selections. Each rereading provides an opportunity to lean into the text by noticing details, appreciating the language or seeing the selection as a mentor for their writing.

Celebrate visual literacy.

One of the most exciting elements of a great informational selection is the visual presentation. Showcase visuals with a document camera or digital projection and invite learners to find facts and details in the images, notice page layout and actively search for connections between the visuals and the print.

While I would never advocate for dissection of every book, or to interrupt every selection with turn and talk moments, I do believe that children's voices need to be heard. If children are deeply engaged and just want to listen on a first reading that is wonderful. Let the language of the text enfold them.

If the content is complex and questions begin to bubble up, then by all means slow down. Let them look, think together and generate wonderings about the content. When children's voices lift in concert with a great informational read aloud, comprehension is lifted and learning becomes more vigorous.

Be picky about the books you select for read aloud.

This is the gold star tip!

Become the ultimate picky shopper when selecting books for an informational read aloud. Pick the most exciting and "info-mazing" books you can find. Select those with fantastic visuals and enticing page layout. Reach for the books with the richest, most eloquently phrased language that you know will stimulate visualization and imagery. When you are picky, the paybacks are amazing.

It's time to consider the enhancement that even a brief informational read aloud could bring to experiences in science, social studies or even math. Read alouds from the content learners are addressing will advance schema, expose students to the unique linguistic patterns and vocabulary of the target learning and build confidence for joyful independent reading for information seekers of all ages.

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How to Electrify Learning with Informational Read Alouds

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Reading aloud to young children has always been a delight, but I must plead guilty to spending too many years focusing on fiction-based read alouds. I was afraid that informational selections couldn't possibly hold the attention of my ever-so-wiggly elementary students. But how wrong I was!

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leading and learning: This thing called reading

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leading and learning: This thing called reading

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Years ago Frank Smith was very popular with those who believed in holistic or experience based learning. A quick look at his book reassures me that his ideas make as much sense as ever.
I never really get involved with reading or literacy but it seems the 'default mode' for most primary teachers.

When you visit primary classrooms you become aware that the great part of the school day centres around literacy and numeracy. For all this emphasis reading still seem to be a problem for some students it ever was.

And to keep teachers on the straight and narrow there are those who see salvation in phonics waiting in the wings to distort the process even more. Schools have been deluged with 'best practice' ideas about how to run their literacy programmes.

And to make things even worse( or more serious) are the proliferation of reading tests to assess where students 'are at' all resulting in gathering and graphing data. Teacher are busy providing 'formative assessment and providing appropriate feedback.

Reading the most recent literacy book produced by the Ministry and it is enough for me to give up . As a result of all this 'expert' help teachers develop group system to ensure students are provided opportunities to learn to read. When I visit classrooms I observe what the groups, who are not with the teacher, are doing - most of it seem of doubtful value to me.

I am reminded of a UK commentator who said that the, 'evil twins of literacy and numeracy have gobbled up the entire curriculum'. Certainly in systems that nationally test their students this is further exaggerated and, as a result, in those countries teachers teach to the tests, and all too often, the arts and sciences etc are simply pushed out for lack of time.
And still children fail.
Sir Ken Robinson, an expert on creativity, has written that we are 'mining our children heads for two commodities, literacy and numeracy and, in the process, not realising the various gifts and talents that are being overlooked. Robinson believes that creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy. Another UK expert Guy Claxton writes that 'learnacy' ( the desire to learn) is more important than literacy and numeracy.

As for the most recent Ministry book on literacy teaching I was surprised that no reference is made to Frank Smith.Even more surprising there is no reference to Sylvia Ashton Warner and Elwyn Richardson both pioneers in getting young children to write and read naturally. Their approach was to tap the imagery of the children themselves as the basis for writing and reading. This language arts/experience approach was once a feature of New Zealand classroom but it seems to have been replaced by 'formulaic' 'best practice' teaching. The real need to tap the voices of the children, and to develop vocabulary through sensory experiences, is no longer common. Before the word must come the experience.
I think this lack of meaningful experiences is part of the problem and this brings me back to Frank Smith.
Frank Smith believes it is not difficult to make reading impossible. For children reading must be meaningful to attract them. What is being read must make sense to them or they won't bother and it seems some don't

The key to reading and writing lies in students seeing them as a valuable tools available to them to study what they are really interested in. What is required is for teachers to negotiate stimulating programmes that really engage their students. To do this they need to tap into the thought and personal experiences their children have. It is their stories that really count. Teachers also need to tap the interests and concerns students have and as well make use of first hand experience both inside the classroom and outdoors.

To learn like this require reading ,writing ,thinking and in turn learning.

Young children are born to learn. They are innately wired with the curiosity to want to learn and reading is just another form of learning.

Frank Smith believes that children do not need to be taught to read instead teachers need to create the conditions for them to want to. If reading is active process, that respects their ideas and worlds, they will want to join the reading club.

It is the same for learning anything.

This Friday I present at a reading conference!

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Years ago Frank Smith was very popular with those who believed in holistic or experience based learning. A quick look at his book reassures me that his ideas make as much sense as ever. I never really get involved with reading or literacy but it seems the 'default mode' for most primary teachers.

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How to Get Your Mind to Read - The New York Times

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How to Get Your Mind to Read - The New York Times

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Opinion

Image

Credit Credit Lilli Carré

Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We're too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans' trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.

Just how bad is our reading problem? The last National Assessment of Adult Literacy from 2003 is a bit dated, but it offers a picture of Americans' ability to read in everyday situations: using an almanac to find a particular fact, for example, or explaining the meaning of a metaphor used in a story. Of those who finished high school but did not continue their education, 13 percent could not perform simple tasks like these. When things got more complex - in comparing two newspaper editorials with different interpretations of scientific evidence or examining a table to evaluate credit card offers - 95 percent failed.

There's no reason to think things have gotten better. Scores for high school seniors on the National Assessment of Education Progress reading test haven't improved in 30 years.

Many of these poor readers can sound out words from print, so in that sense, they can read. Yet they are functionally illiterate - they comprehend very little of what they can sound out. So what does comprehension require? Broad vocabulary, obviously. Equally important, but more subtle, is the role played by factual knowledge.

All prose has factual gaps that must be filled by the reader. Consider "I promised not to play with it, but Mom still wouldn't let me bring my Rubik's Cube to the library." The author has omitted three facts vital to comprehension: you must be quiet in a library; Rubik's Cubes make noise; kids don't resist tempting toys very well. If you don't know these facts, you might understand the literal meaning of the sentence, but you'll miss why Mom forbade the toy in the library.

Knowledge also provides context. For example, the literal meaning of last year's celebrated fake-news headline, "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President," is unambiguous - no gap-filling is needed. But the sentence carries a different implication if you know anything about the public (and private) positions of the men involved, or you're aware that no pope has ever endorsed a presidential candidate.

You might think, then, that authors should include all the information needed to understand what they write. Just tell us that libraries are quiet. But those details would make prose long and tedious for readers who already know the information. "Write for your audience" means, in part, gambling on what they know.

These examples help us understand why readers might decode well but score poorly on a test; they lack the knowledge the writer assumed in the audience. But if a text concerned a familiar topic, habitually poor readers ought to read like good readers.

In one experiment, third graders - some identified by a reading test as good readers, some as poor - were asked to read a passage about soccer. The poor readers who knew a lot about soccer were three times as likely to make accurate inferences about the passage as the good readers who didn't know much about the game.

That implies that students who score well on reading tests are those with broad knowledge; they usually know at least a little about the topics of the passages on the test. One experiment tested 11th graders' general knowledge with questions from science ("pneumonia affects which part of the body?"), history ("which American president resigned because of the Watergate scandal?"), as well as the arts, civics, geography, athletics and literature. Scores on this general knowledge test were highly associated with reading test scores.

Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It's treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge. That suggests three significant changes in schooling.

First, it points to decreasing the time spent on literacy instruction in early grades. Third-graders spend 56 percent of their time on literacy activities but 6 percent each on science and social studies. This disproportionate emphasis on literacy backfires in later grades, when children's lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension. Another positive step would be to use high-information texts in early elementary grades. Historically, they have been light in content.

Second, understanding the importance of knowledge to reading ought to make us think differently about year-end standardized tests. If a child has studied New Zealand, she ought to be good at reading and thinking about passages on New Zealand. Why test her reading with a passage about spiders, or the Titanic? If topics are random, the test weights knowledge learned outside the classroom - knowledge that wealthy children have greater opportunity to pick up.

Third, the systematic building of knowledge must be a priority in curriculum design. The Common Core Standards for reading specify nearly nothing by way of content that children are supposed to know - the document valorizes reading skills. State officials should go beyond the Common Core Standards by writing content-rich grade-level standards and supporting district personnel in writing curriculums to help students meet the standards. That's what Massachusetts did in the 1990s to become the nation's education leader. Louisiana has recently taken this approach, and early results are encouraging.

Don't blame the internet, or smartphones, or fake news for Americans' poor reading. Blame ignorance. Turning the tide will require profound changes in how reading is taught, in standardized testing and in school curriculums. Underlying all these changes must be a better understanding of how the mind comprehends what it reads.

Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of "The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads."
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Opinion Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We're too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans' trouble with reading predates digital technologies.