Dan Willingham is on target (as usual) in his Washington Post piece yesterday, discussing the secret to reading comprehension.
Dan explains that teaching kids “reading skills” does not make them good readers because a focus on teaching reading strategies ignores that reading comprehension is dependent on lots of prior knowledge. Students who are trained in practicable reading skills without this knowledge are the students who can “‘read’ (they can sound out the words on the page) but [who] can’t consistently comprehend. They read it, but they don’t ‘get it.’”
According to Dan: “The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country.” We’re not sure the authors of the draft “common core” ELA standards make this mistake — as Dan suggests. After all the “common core” ELA standards are at pains to describe the type of vocabulary, level of complexity, and general quality of the works students will be required to read. And unlike P21, for example, the standards-writers appear to know the difference between trivial and serious knowledge. They recommend Whitman and Austen, after all. Still, our disappointment is that these college and career readiness standards fall short of naming texts outside of a handful of examples. And the K-12 standards that are the “common core” effort’s next task will require even more specificity.
What the current standards require to be successful–and the K-12 ones likely will, too–is to be coupled with an excellent curriculum that delineates the breadth and depth of knowledge students require to learn to read effectively, and to expand their knowledge through reading and writing, over time. The standards could have been that curriculum, in effect. A good portion of their current value resides in the fact that they create the space for one.
Dear Common Core,
Yes, Mr. Willingham has a POINT but he does not have an ANSWER. Specifically, he does not have an answer to how kids who lack content knowledge can gain it WHILE reading.
I just posed this question to him, so we’ll see what he says. But even Mr. Willingham says that kids get a lot of their background knowledge from reading.
Now, as someone who is a pretty good reading teacher, I like to point to kids that sometimes when we read our comprehension breaks down. Maybe we don’t know what a word means or maybe we don’t get an entire sentence. Or worse, maybe we hardly understand a thing at all (think new textbook chapter).
So what’s a reader to do when his comprehension breaks down? And the answer has to be USE A SKILL/STRATEGY. I have three that I like to teach to kids and they produce excellent results. I know about 20 more but, as Mr. Willingham notes, I have not found that the teaching of strategies outside the context of repairing breakdowns in comprehension to be very useful.
Finally, there’s a BIG difference in what readers need depending on whether our goal is raise their reading level (vital for kids who are behind) or increase their comprehension of new ideas (vital for kids who are learning a new subject).
But the basic idea is the same: if a reader’s comprehension breaks down, the reader needs to do SOMETHING and that something is often a SKILL or STRATEGY.
I think even Mr. Willingham would agree with this. But I’ll let you know when and if he writes me back.
Thanks,
Steve Peha
President, Teaching That Makes Sense
And one more thing… I just read your draft standards in Reading. Nice job. But every one of the 18 standards I read was a skill. I did not find any reading content standards.
No literature was mentioned. No texts of any kind, actually. No genres. No authors. No time periods.
So what you have with your Reading standards is a set of READING SKILLS. So have you unwittingly out-Willinghamed yourself?
And, btw, your writing standards work pretty much the same way. This doesn’t make your standards bad at all. But you need to come clean on your commitment to content standards and your general distaste for process or skill standards.
Reading and writing are process-oriented. As such, they tend to defy attempts to be defined as single things. Content standards are usually a little easier to work with. And, I agree, they are important.
Math may provide similar challenges to you in some areas. Problem-solving isn’t a “thing” either, it’s more of a process. And it often involves many different kinds of content.
Process and content go together like peanut butter in your chocolate. And you’re proving it each time you release a new draft. This is not a problem, just a fact.
Moral of the story: lay off P21 a little, huh? I mean, really, do you have to devote your entire front page to the notion that P21 is killing American children? If your standards are better, you will win. If you’re more connected, you will win. If you make a better case, you will win.
So just play your game. And let P21 play theirs.
Steve Peha
President, Teaching That Makes Sense
The current version of the standards doc says this:
“While this document defines the outcomes all students need to reach to be college and career ready, many important decisions about curriculum will necessarily be left to states, districts, schools, teachers, professional organizations, and parents. For example, while the standards require that students read texts of sufficient complexity, quality, and range, this document does not contain a required reading list.”
But you say this:
“After all the “common core” ELA standards are at pains to describe the type of vocabulary, level of complexity, and general quality of the works students will be required to read.”
If CommonCore is so big on content standards, why don’t they just come out and make a set? Why make suggestions? Or exemplars? And how can one say that students have to read Whitman and Austen in order to be college-ready? That’s a dangerous assumption. And it pre-supposes that there is some magical set of books or authors that makes people smart.
We all know this isn’t true. Just survey a few folks in your own office to find out how varied their high school knowledge was. And how varied their exposure has been even as adults to what we often refer to as “classics”.
PS I got a BA with an emphasis in American Lit and a near-4.0 average from a good English Dept at a major university and I never even read Moby Dick. Austen wasn’t even on the curriculum.