The common standards movement has sparked a useful discussion of teaching reading. Many critics like the newest draft of the standards, reports Curriculum Matters.
Carol Jago, the president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English, tells me she thinks the draft has improved in two ways. First, it emphasizes “quantity in reading.” Jago, an author and former high school teacher, served as one of several outside reviewers of the English-language arts version of the document.
“More is more when it comes to students and reading,” Jago told me in an e-mail. “I was delighted to see this important point addressed so directly…The dramatic difference between the number of books students read in high school and the number they are assigned in college I believe contributes enormously to student failure in the first semester at university.”
Jago also likes the focus on reading challenging books independently, a skill needed for college and the workplace.
Will Fitzhugh, the founder of The Concord Review, wants more stress on nonfiction documents and research papers.
In a Washington Post op-ed, cognitive scientist Dan Willingham critiques the standards for assuming students can understand what they read without background knowledge. Teaching “strategies” doesn’t lead to comprehension, he writes.
Remarkably, if you take kids who score poorly on a reading test and ask them to read on a topic they know something about (baseball, say, or dinosaurs) all of a sudden their comprehension is terrific—better than kids who score well on reading tests but who don’t know a lot about baseball or dinosaurs.
In other words, kids who score well on reading tests are not really kids with good “reading skills.”
Once students have “cracked the code of letters and sounds” and read fluently, the good readers are the ones with the prior knowledge to enable them to understand what they read, Willingham argues. Students who lack background knowledge can reason their way through a text, but it’s slow and difficult, “a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.”
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I think that Willingham is spot on. Without that context, one might as well have been reading a foreign language. I still remember being dragged to a Shakespeare play 2 years after I had thought (hoped?) that I was done with the Bard forever.
But something had changed. Suddenly it all made sense! When had they rewritten the play. Of course, the only thing that had been rewritten in the previous two years was me…
Which means I do pity teachers today. it’s got to be an incredible challenge to find common cultural and more importantly emotional contexts in reading material.
“In other words, kids who score well on reading tests are not really kids with good “reading skills”.”
I’m curious about this statement. Are the issues with “reading skills” only test related? Its seems straight forward to me that knowing the content for a test will give a big advantage over not knowing the content. But reading for the purposes of learning seems like it might be something different. Is it reasonable to think that there is either some knowledge that can be learned and applied with broad scope or some basic mental capacities that can be expanded? Or both? Is either of these or something else a skill?
I agree with the value of quantity and I believe it applies to writing too.
The primary reason that Accelerated Reading actually works is that students read more.
A club would work just as well but there are legal issues.
The actual language on “quantity” is far weaker than Jago’s statement implies. Here’s the essence: “Students must have the capacity to handle independently the quantity of reading material, both in print and online, required in college and workforce training.” Is that college AND workforce training or college OR workforce training? How much reading do you need to do for workforce training. A binder?
These standards are far weaker than they appear to be at first blush. If you check the “international benchmarks,” they are far more narrow and lower than those used by high achieving countries and high achieving states.
Actually, since you brought it up earlier, which states do you think have the lowest standards for English Language Arts? I’d like to do a comparison.
Oh, and my full analysis is here: http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2009/09/10-reasons-why-you-should-care-about.html
I’m curious. Every teacher I’ve ever met (as well as myself) has spent WAY more time working on background knowledge that reading strategies. If you’re teaching Mockingbird, you don’t spend 90% of your time with “find the main idea” it’s all Scottsboro boys and discussions and mock trials. That’s not in the Standards but its what we all do. Are we right despite ourselves or still sadly, sadly wrong.