This reader faults the Common Core standards for claiming that students should engage in “close reading” of texts without context or background knowledge. In this post, he explains that this does not “level the playing field,” as every reader has different background knowledge to decipher meaning in text.

Categories Common Core

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Michael Lambert says:

May 19, 2013 at 12:24 pm

Close reading, another magic bullet, inevitably bites the dust.

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- Yvonne Siu-Runyan says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 6:33 pm
  
  I find the term “close reading” to be strange. It’s just another buzz word meaning nothing.
  
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Bill Heller says:

May 19, 2013 at 12:31 pm

My first inkling that there was something rotten about the Common Core was watching David Coleman on a video on engageny in which he “modeled” a close reading of King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” He also spouted that nonsense about “privileging background knowledge” It was the most soulless, uninspiring, stultifying and disengaging lesson I could imagine. The teacher was the center of the lesson, supplying all of the information and interpretation. Giving students background information serves to level the playing field. It makes students feel smart and competent to approach the text. And heaven forbid that a teacher would attempt to connect the theme and content of the reading to the lives and experiences of the students! In Coleman’s infamous words, in the real world, “nobody gives a $#*t about what you think or feel.”

It is pretty clear that the shills for the Common Core do not want critical reading. They want readers and writers who they can control, who will stick to the script, who won’t think independently, who won’t use their background knowledge to question or even debunk a text that some authority hands to them. Close reading is just one ingredient in the giant economy-sized bottle of snake oil that is the Common Core. I disagree with Weingarten. The Common Core is irredeemable.

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- Yvonne Siu-Runyan says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 6:35 pm
  
  Bill,
  
  Right on, Comment!
  
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- 2old2tch says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 9:50 pm
  
  I hate to say it, but Coleman’s close reading is what I remember from the golden years of education (tongue in cheek). I can remember sitting in my high school English class reading “Heart of Darkness” thinking how the heck was I supposed to connect to this stuff. Moby Dick was almost fun because I had my sister notes on all the symbolism that no high school student could possibly pull out the air.
  
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M. Schneider says:

May 19, 2013 at 12:32 pm

And where is the research on this one?

My students look forward to reading as a class and contributing their experiences while hearing of the experiences of others. They especially enjoy my “stories” since I represent a different generation; as a result, I can contribute a firsthand “historical” perspective to much of what we read, thereby building a richer, multi-generationally-influenced knowledge base from which my kids might draw in the future. (I am not “old” by the standards of some, but I am three times the age of my students, so my experiences often intrigue them.)

And where have I “tested” my approach? Why, in my own classroom, though the discussions and written work submitted by my students– not in ivory tower meetings, and not with bubbled responses.

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- M. Schneider says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 12:34 pm
  
  …through the discussions…
  
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- Lehrer says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 4:06 pm
  
  I am still scratching my head and trying to figure out how exactly David Coleman became the authority on teaching reading. I cannot imagine not accessing background knowledge with my transitional readers. Not all children have the same life experiences and vocabulary.
  
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  - Chi-Town Res says:
    
    May 19, 2013 at 8:11 pm
    
    Easy peasy. This is consistent with the pattern of behavior of corporate “reformers.” Non-educator politicians and non-educator business people have no respect for trained, experienced educators. They see no value in educator preparation and they like people from their own elite club of non-educators, so that is who they typically appoint to positions of power in education. This practice goes back to the nineties in some places.
    
    Why do you suppose most alternative teacher certification programs, which began to spring up in the 90s (after the advent of TFA), will not accept people who have studied education???
Sally Canzoneri says:

May 19, 2013 at 12:36 pm

After I read Coleman’s Gettysburg Address lesson, I can’t imagine any teacher using it or similar “no context” lessons. Aside from the problems noted in Russ’ piece, the “no context” approach conflicts with CCSS goal of having students leave school with lots of general knowledge.

Moreover, most of the time students are reading text to learn about the content of the text and/or the role of this particular text in a subject, such as history or science. To have students read the text without teaching its context in those cases, means that the students are not being taught the subject. Of course, the Gettysburg Address is a prime example of this. To even begin to understand what Lincoln was saying, why he was saying it, and why this speech was crucial in shaping American thought and our national identity, students need to know the context. To do what Coleman urges (and, BTW, doesn’t succeed at) and get students to analyze the text with no background info might be okay in a college course in literary analysis, but it is an awful approach in a elementary/high school social studies class.

It’s also important to recognize that many children, of all socio-economic groups come to school woefully lacking in the kind of general background knowledge that textbooks (& not a few teachers) assume they will have. More than once, I’ve had the experience of talking with students who were studying the Industrial Revolution, but didn’t know how the fabric of the shirts they were wearing was made. Obviously, it is hard to grasp the importance of the spinning Jenny, if one doesn’t know how thread is made, or what a loom does. These kids were not all poor, and they had good teachers; but between the demands of using poor texts and test prep, the teachers couldn’t fit in the sort of field trip, classroom visitor/demonstrator, or art activities that would give the students the experiences they needed to understand the Industrial Revolution. So all the children did was memorize word definitions and factoids that were useless without context.

Maybe David Coleman is like the students I meet; and he too doesn’t know that his polo shirts are made from the same stuff put in the top of medicine bottles.

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- Louisiana Purchase says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 2:36 pm
  
  Excellent point! For example, I have to teach students what a score (four score and seven) when I teach the Gettysburg Address. Otherwise, it starts out making no sense to the kids and they’re lost. How can students learn if there is NOT background knowledge?
  
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Robert D. Shepherd says:

May 19, 2013 at 12:38 pm

I think that two things are being confused here. What the Common Core State Standards (more exactly, the Publishers’ Criteria that accompanied the standards) attacks is not the necessity of background knowledge for reading comprehension but, rather, a kind of prereading activity that has become ubiquitous in educational materials that is typically called something like “Activate Prior Knowledge” that does not, typically, address the background knowledge issue. This is an extremely important issue, so I hope that people will bear with me while I explain it in some detail.

First, background knowledge is extraordinarily important to reading comprehension, and the amount of background knowledge required for comprehension is generally vastly underestimated. Artificial intelligence researchers working on natural language processing systems became aware of this fact decades ago. Roger Shank and his colleagues and students worked for years on a software program that would be able to order a meal in a fast-food restaurant. What they soon realized was that all communication involves an enormous amount of world knowledge that is tacitly assumed. Shank gives this example: It’s a simple matter to write a computer program that can count to ten. It’s an entirely different matter to deal with a real-world phenomenon like counting to ten on one’s toes. One has to understand what toes are and that one has to remove one’s shoe and sock first, that one must start at one side or the other, and so one must understand what a shoe and a sock are and what “one side” means, and so on. If you want to build an anthropomorphic robot that will count to ten on its “toes,” it turns out that that robot must have an enormous amount of information about the world, most of which we all take for granted.

Second, the same situation obtains with reading. Consider the phrase “the twelve triangles of the cherub wind,” from a Dylan Thomas poem. The phrase contains fairly common words and a has a simple grammatical structure. It would be judged highly readable by most readability formulas (Lexile, Flesch-Kincaid, etc). However, the phrase is absolutely impenetrable to someone who does not know about and remember that old maps had drawings of cherubs on them and that those cherubs were commonly pictured as blowing winds that circumscribed triangles on the map. So, Thomas is imagining twelve cherubs, representing winds, dividing up a map into twelve triangular parts. Once the background knowledge is supplied, understanding the phrase is fairly simple. Well, what’s true of the Thomas phrase is true of all language–it has correspondences to the world (or to imaginary worlds), and it takes for granted a great deal of knowledge of those correspondences.

Third, reading instruction that really did take into account the importance of background knowledge would supply the necessary background knowledge before the student tackles a given text (for example, by making sure that the reading is part of a sequence that builds knowledge progressively) and, when appropriate, would test comprehension and supply the necessary background knowledge either before or during the reading.

Fourth, that’s not what these silly “Activate Prior Knowledge” activities in current textbooks typically do. Instead, they tend to be activities like this:

Prior Knowledge Activity given before reading Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”

Think of a time when you had an important decision to make. Did you do what everyone else expected you to do, or did you act in a way that surprised other people? Discuss with your classmates.

Notice that this activity supplies NO INFORMATION that the student would need in order to understand the poem. It provides nothing that the student did not already know. It is not an activity for building prerequisite background knowledge. It’s purpose seems, rather, to be to connect something in the student’s experience to the theme of the poem. It’s purpose is emotional, not cognitive. However, notice this: The activity contains an implicit assumption that Frost’s poem is about making an unusual decision–following a different drummer, being an individualist. In other words, the activity predetermines the reading of the poem. As it turns out, that reading is a simple-minded misreading of Frost’s poem, as many critics have pointed out.

Moral of all this: What the Common Core Publishers’ Criteria document denounces is emphatically NOT supplying students with necessary background knowledge but, rather, this sort of wasting of horrible pedagogical practice, unfortunately extremely common now, of a) wasting a lot of classroom time with mostly irrelevant student discussion of their own experiences (time that might be spent engaging with a text) and b) prejudging the meaning of a text–reducing it to some blithering generality–before engaging with it to find out what it actually says.

In fact, the Common Core implicitly takes stock of the importance of background knowledge by calling to teachers to have students read RELATED texts across the school year and across multiple years. The sound pedagogical reason for doing this is that doing related reading builds background knowledge in a subject area so that subsequent texts are more comprehensible. That’s why, for example, the Common Core ELA document gives the example of having elementary students read about the body across a school year and across multiple years.

So, no, the Common Core does not call for reading without background knowledge. Quite the opposite. What it does call for is not doing these inane “Activity Prior Knowledge” activities that infest educational materials these days and that are worse than a waste of time because they encourage NOT engaging with texts but, rather, assuming before one actually reads the text what it is about.

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- Jgrif says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 4:22 pm
  
  I think you are wrong about the Road example. That is exactly the way our brains process information…by connecting to events we already understand. Thinking about a time when you took a different path would CERTAINLY help you connect to and understand the MEANING of the poem.
  
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  - Robert D. Shepherd says:
    
    May 19, 2013 at 11:56 pm
    
    I agree, of course, that it would be valuable to have students, in this case, think about decisions that they have made. But look again at the example I gave. The activity presupposes a particular reading of the poem and so encourages students not to attend at all to what the poem says but, rather, to substitute for reading the poem itself the banal generality that people should take the road less traveled. The poem becomes irrelevant (and is misread). Here’s a 2-minute activity that would be valuable as a way into the poem: “Name the three most important decisions that a person will make in a lifetime.” End of activity. No presuppositions, there about what the poem is going to say.
- EC says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 5:30 pm
  
  I think you’re wrong, Robert. Both David Coleman, in his speeches promoting the CCSS, and “Student Achievement Partners,” the organization started by CCSS authors, explicitly urge teachers to give students ZERO background knowledge. A sample lesson plan from “Student Acheivement PArtners” instructs teachers to “avoid
  giving any background context or instructional guidance at the outset. This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge. It is critical to cultivating independence and creating a culture of close reading that students initially grapple with rich texts without the aid of prefatory material, extensive notes, or even teacher explanations.”
  
  This is obviously dumb. The rest of the lesson isn’t any better (I rip it up here: http://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-common-cores-supposed-emphasis-on.html), and, most crucially, doesn’t seem to provide for very much actual reading. The Common Core offers a bit of lip service to the idea that students should do independent reading, but it is, on the whole, like most skills-based standards and all of the CCSS lesson plans I’ve ever seen, teacher-centered and reading-phobic.
  
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  - Sheery says:
    
    May 19, 2013 at 6:23 pm
    
    As I sat with a group of teachers and administrators at a CCSS training session last week, we all noted that we understood the task at hand only because we had background knowledge. Just try reading Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” without it.
lohvfl says:

May 19, 2013 at 12:45 pm

If you look at an average lit text today, the tiny scrap of literature in a given lesson is absolutely buried among hundreds of activities, most of which are completely irrelevant to the text. Literally, a passage of four or five paragraphs will be buried in ten pages of activities, none of which build knowledge on which the text itself is dependent. A lot of those activities are meant to get the kids interested in the piece, but what they amount to, in fact, is kids sitting around in a circle talking to one another about inanities and irrelevancies. We’ve gone so far down this road of self-directed instruction with the teacher as facilitator that we have lost sight of the whole idea of teaching as the transmission of knowledge and understanding from one generation to the next.

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- EC says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 5:31 pm
  
  Yes, exactly!
  
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- EC says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 5:40 pm
  
  But this inanity is exactly duplicated in the lesson plans being written to follow the CCSS and being published and promoted by the CCSS authors’ own organization: if you look at “Achievethecore” and its sample “close reading” lesson plans, you will find tiny scraps of literature buried in boring questions. I agree that we don’t need kids sitting around talking about inanities; instead, we need (1) kids sitting around reading a lot and (2) kids sitting around talking to each other about a text, guided by teacher-modeling and non-trivial (i.e. open-ended) teacher-posed questions. The CCSS does not encourage (1) and promotes boring teacher-led explication (e.g. or Coleman on MLK)trivial question/answer work (e.g. those “achievethecore” lesson plans) in place of (2).
  
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- Tom Hoffman says:
  
  May 20, 2013 at 9:47 am
  
  It just isn’t clear to me that the old or new standards have much to say about these practices. This whole discussion just distracts from any substantive analysis of the standards themselves, which seems to barely have taken place, at least in public, despite the fact we’re well into the process of implementing them.
  
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  - Robert D. Shepherd says:
    
    May 21, 2013 at 11:48 am
    
    yes yes yes. I could not agree more. The new ELA standards are pretty awful, and there has been no detailed critique of them. I have grave concerns about many particulars of these.
lohvfl says:

May 19, 2013 at 1:01 pm

I have many specific quibbles with the Common Core ELA standards. Among the strongest of these is my distaste for the one-size-fits-all approach. However, the emphasis on close reading of related texts in order to build background knowledge and the emphasis on teaching skills incidentally, as they are needed in order to decipher particular passages are both long overdue, solely needed correctives. Again, education is about transmitting world knowledge and procedural knowledge from one generation to the next so that the next generation can use that knowledge combinatorially to fashion its own understandings and procedures. The flight from “the sage on the stage” has gone so far in our educational materials that students can now complete whole units of literature instruction without learning much of anything that they did not already know. Kids desperately need someone who knows something to share this knowledge with them, but sharing knowledge with kids has become anathema. Instead, we have hundreds of thousands of classrooms in which students do little else but sit around and talk about their own prior experiences and feelings.

Consider the best-selling high-school American literature textbooks. One can read the unit on the Puritans without learning anything about what the Puritans actually thought–about Original Sin, election, predestination, self-governance, the individual’s relationship with god, the notion of grace, etc. One can then turn to the unit on the Transcendentalists without learning anything about what those folks thought (about their panentheism) or where those ideas came from (from reading early translations of Hindu classics). Instead, in the contemporary textbooks, Transcendentalism becomes little more than appreciation of nature. The student does not come away having had encounters with people who thought very differently than they do. Instead, they come away having spent a week sitting around listening to other kids talk about the time their family went on a camp-out. Such approaches ROB students of the opportunity to encounter and assimilate the alien, and it is from such encounters that people grow.

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lohvfl says:

May 19, 2013 at 1:09 pm

Now, of course students’ personal experiences are important, and of course we should have as a goal having them make personal connections to texts, but this has to be two-way. The text has to matter. Ideally, the student is connecting to something that he or she is NOT already familiar with, something that will be challenging, alien, strange, unfamiliar–so that he or she can grow. That’s the point. We have so deemphasized the text and so overemphasized the student’s experiences and feelings that our literature texts have come almost content free. The best-selling lit texts in the country, right now, are vast exercises in student solipsism.

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lohvfl says:

May 19, 2013 at 1:19 pm

Now, why bother learning about the Puritans and the Transcendentalists? Well, because their ideas mattered. Those ideas form two mighty currents that have rolled down through our history and that explain a great deal of the left-right divide, the astonishing polarization, in our politics. For example, the Protestant notion that the individual had a direct relationship with God mediated not by some external authority but via the Word, and the notions of local self governance connected to that idea, have had a profound influence on and help to explain, to a great degree, the theories of the right in the United States today–the emphasis on individual responsibility and on limited and local government. These are developments with a history. Likewise, the environmental movement, New Age spirituality, Wicca, paganism, the popularity, today of yoga and meditation and Eastern religion, have a great deal to do with what the Transcendentalists thought. We understand where we are if we understand where we have been. Our literature textbooks no longer teach kids where we have been. To put it somewhat crudely, they are largely exercises in onanism.

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- Duane Swacker says:
  
  May 20, 2013 at 10:29 am
  
  MMOOO!
  
  I put together a “standardized test” on the problems of standardized tests. One of the questions is a graphic of a cow tail raised making a cowpie of the various MO iterations of standardized tests- MMAT, MAP, EOC’s, etc . . . while MMOOOing away. With the question being: What does the acronym MMOOO stand for? The correct answer is mental masturbation or obligatory onanism.
  
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Heather Poland says:

May 19, 2013 at 1:36 pm

Here is my take- First, I have not seen anything in CCS that explicitly say NOT to supplement with background knowledge. Second, as PROFESSIONALS, teachers know how to teach their students. I know that some articles, yes my students will need background knowledge, and this other article, they won’t. However, will they ever have to read something and not have much background knowledge about it? Yep. Therefore, as a professional, I know I need to teach ,y students how to make sense of a reading if they do not have much background knowledge of that topic. Furthermore, as a professional, I have also started having my students read an Article of the Week (from Kelly Gallagher) to build their background knowledge of current events.

I really think that just because the CCS don’t say something, that does NOT mean we ignore it. We are TEACHERS. We KNOW HOW to TEACH. Even if we are not told to do something. Playing into this notion that we won’t do something because the freaking standards don’t say it- that is just giving in to the stereotype that teachers are worthless and not professionals.

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Christine Romano says:

May 19, 2013 at 1:52 pm

Couldn’t agree more….the best thing I ever learned in graduate school was in a Reading class….the professor said, “What you bring to the printed page is what you take away from it”. In my 30 year teaching career I have always lived by those words and have spent many lessons giving students background knowledge so they can actually understand and enjoy what they are reading. Just plopping a child into a meaningless and very difficult text and expecting them to muddle through it on their own is the best way to discourage children from enjoying reading.

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- lohvfl says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 1:54 pm
  
  amen to that
  
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lohvfl says:

May 19, 2013 at 1:54 pm

In summary, Russ needs to reread the Publishers’ Criteria. The Common Core does NOT call for deemphasizing background knowledge. It calls for eliminating the barbarically ignorant “Activate Your Prior Knowledge” activities that reduce a text to whatever the student already felt and thought and has already experienced prior to engagement with the text. That’s what is attacked by the Common Core, not the idea of providing students with necessary background knowledge.

Here’s the problem with the contemporary “Activate Your Prior Knowledge [sic]” approach: The whole point of engagement with a text is to come out the other side CHANGED because of an experience that is novel. One is supposed to learn from the experience, as one learns from visiting a foreign country. Instead, we have literature texts with prereading activities that reduce the text, before students have engaged with it, to some blithering generality (courage, good; nature, good) and post-reading activities that reinforce that misreading with extension activities and higher-order thinking skills activities that amount to little more than reiteration of the idea planted by the prereading activity. The text itself gets lost, or at least, anything challenging or unfamiliar in it does. The Transcendentalists get reduced to guys who liked nature. Well, it wasn’t liking nature that almost got Emerson lynched after he delivered the Divinity School Address. In 1836, he got in his buggy, drove into Cambridge, and told the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity School that God was not some guy in the sky but was within them. He quoted Christ quoting David and saying, “Ye are Gods.” That’s because he had been reading the Upanishads. All around the country, thousands of women teaching in one-room schoolhouses, read Emerson and became excited about this idea that God permeated all of nature and was to be found within, and that current, fed by various tributaries such as Native American views of nature, became, in time, a mighty river giving us contemporary environmentalism and New Age spirituality.

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- EC says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 5:43 pm
  
  I think you’re wrong. CCSS-author-approved lesson plans DO explicitly prohibit offering any background info.
  
  http://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-common-cores-supposed-emphasis-on.html
  
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  - Robert D. Shepherd says:
    
    May 19, 2013 at 11:19 pm
    
    I dearly hope that I am not. Background information is essential to reading comprehension. That’s easily demonstrable. Anyone who thinks that it isn’t simply doesn’t understand much, at all, about reading and certainly should not be advising people on pedagogical practice.
Dinosaur English Teacher says:

May 19, 2013 at 2:10 pm

The quintessential Common Core piece is Letter from Birmingham Jail. It’s good- really good, it’s “diverse,” it’s an important American historical document… From what I’m seeing length-wise with the stuff my district is throwing at us, it may be a tad bit too long.

I teach Birmingham Jail to my senior AP students. It’s truly a college piece. In fact, I studied it in freshman comp in college at UNC-Asheville. It’s in A World of Ideas, Ed- Jacobus. Which I use for my AP kids.

The reader has to have A LOT of background knowledge to get King’s points and get what he’s saying. Cold reading with no background knowledge is child abuse. The other option would be to have students spend a few class periods getting down all of the references and allusions King makes via lectures or Internet research. But if you throw this at a kid with just some vocabulary help, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

The more I see of the Common Core State (sic) Standards, the more I can see that this is a train wreck waiting to happen. Ever hear people say, “This ship has sailed” when they want you to throw in the towel and just comply? Our mantra on the CCCS needs to be, “The rails have been set and spiked but the bridge ahead is never going to be built.”

If I had it my way, the quintessential reading would be Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary of Richard Nixon unedited: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/

How about “Common Sense 2009” by Larry Flynt. Pair it up with Thomas Paine.

If we’re going for a long piece, how about “War is a Racket” by Smedley Butler.
Nixon’s Impeachment Proceedings Opening by Barbara Jordan
A Crisis in Confidence by Jimmy Carter
Eisenhower’s Farewell Address
Wenner’s interview of John Lennon for Rolling Stone in 1971 where he says of the Beatles, “Our best work was never recorded.”

I teach all of the above.

My mantra? “The Common Core, where you have to be subversive to be effective.”

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- timmcfarland says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 7:28 pm
  
  I would almost be willing to endure high school again to be in your class.
  
  Thanks for keeping the faith.
  
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Robert D. Shepherd says:

May 19, 2013 at 2:28 pm

Smedley Butler!!! Wonderful. Your students are quite lucky!

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Jason Endacott says:

May 19, 2013 at 2:41 pm

As a social studies methods professor, I see these “close reading” activities invading the history classroom daily. The most unfortunate aspect of close reading from a history teacher’s standpoint, is that the strategy treats each piece of text as an isolated chunk of information devoid of context or connection. How does one read the “Gettysburg Address” or “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” without background knowledge or any attempt to weave in historical context? The notion that the author of any piece writes in a contextual vacuum is asinine, yet that’s how close reading activities treat each and every piece of text I’ve seen.

Further, the literature on reading comprehension clearly states that prior knowledge is central to a students’ ability to comprehend text. Contextual clues are not always found within any single piece of text, but are often located in similar or related texts that students might come across at other points in time. To discourage students from making those connections is nothing less than throwing up a roadblock to comprehension. That may level the playing field, but only because it makes each student equally helpless in their attempts to understand an isolated and contextually devoid piece of text.

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- Robert D. Shepherd says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 11:35 pm
  
  Absolutely. Let me give a particular example to illustrate. I was talking with a fifth-grade teacher recently who was telling me about how, the previous year, another teacher had “taught” her students Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars. Those students came into the fifth grade thinking that the Holocaust was a time in Europe when some bad guys tried to massacre Jews but failed to do so because good guys smuggled the Jews out to safety. The teacher in the previous year had obviously presented the book without providing any background information, any context, and so the kids came away with completely distorted notions about the history. Context is the golden key to comprehension. Anyone who does not understand this should not be teaching reading.
  
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Dave says:

May 19, 2013 at 2:52 pm

Again, another debate of extremes in the field of literacy! There are instances (based on the intent of the learning objectives and the task) where we would like students to initially close read a text with only their current knowledge, and other times, again, based on the instructional intent and difficulty of the text, where it would be appropriate, even necessary to activate or build background knowledge. For goodness sake, just let the teachers work together and they will figure this out, regardless of the polarizing education debates that always seems to emerge during times of change.

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- Robert D. Shepherd says:
  
  May 20, 2013 at 9:42 am
  
  These debates are healthy. It’s valuable for people to think about what they are doing. I think that the best-selling lit texts in the country today are pretty awful–that they bury the lit in a a lot of mostly irrelevant activities and that the students end up, as a result, learning very little because they have spent most of their time sitting around listening to other kids talk about vague, tangentially related stuff from popular culture and their own lives. The lit itself is now being treated as some sort of awful bitter pill that has to be swallowed with ENORMOUS amounts of that crap. It is barely attended to. Instead of being encouraged to poke around the the world of the story or poem or play, to experience that world imaginatively, they are encouraged by current texts to get away from the text as quickly as possible, as though the text itself were poisonous. Kids can come away from studying Beowulf, for example, without having spent any time learning about Anglo-Saxon ways of life and habits of thought but having spent a lot of time listening to other kids talk about questions like this: “Do you think that fate plays an important role in our lives? For example, are people sometimes fated to fall in love?” And so kids sit around and listen to other kids talk about that and they miss the opportunity to think about what it might have been like to live in a time when conditions were harsh, when people were subject to capricious forces like harsh winters and Viking invasion and disease for which there were no cures and so on. And nothing they hear from the other kids in all that time is anything that they didn’t already know.
  
  I recently did an examination of the best-selling lit programs in the country. Typically, a very, very small sliver of lit was lost in page after page after page of tangentially related crap. This sort of thing has gotten worse and worse–with every new edition of these texts, we see more of it. And that’s because people are doing more of the same thing that they have been doing and are not thinking about what’s happening. They are like the proverbial frog in the glass of water that is being slowly heated. People who used to teach literature and history now find themselves being–I don’t know what one might call it–life coaches or something, and the literature and history is almost entirely ignored.
  
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Joanna Best says:

May 19, 2013 at 3:36 pm

The Common Core enforcer at our school, who works out of the Data Room, hosted a reading event and sent letters home for parents to “read closer and deeper” with their children. Had it read “more closely and more deeply” I might have been excited, but as that I just kinda sighed. Closer and deeper to something. . .not literacy.

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- timmcfarland says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 7:44 pm
  
  Rigor, Joanna. You forgot rigor.
  
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Jgrif says:

May 19, 2013 at 4:11 pm

Interesting that there are two passionate interpretations of what the common core says. This in itself is a huge problem.

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nittany89 says:

May 19, 2013 at 7:02 pm

Put me, a non-scientist, in a room with a nuclear physicist. Who would do better with a text on fission? Or (given my interest in horses) a manual on horse training?

No background knowledge does not level the playing field. It does the opposite.

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Michele says:

May 19, 2013 at 10:04 pm

So it seems that we all got the lame Gettysburg Address lesson. At the workshop I attended we were told that students “would get the gist” on the first reading and that second and third readings would be necessary. Not for my ELL students. They would be confused at “four score”, lost by “we cannot consecrate” and totally frustrated by “full measure of devotion.”

This goes against everything I learned in grad school, and all my experience in the classroom. I know how important it is to build background knowledge and sorry Robert, we were explicitly told NOT to build background knowledge. If it’s true that this is not what Coleman meant, why is it that so many people are confused? One would think that a man who wants to force his brand of education down our throats would do his best to be explicit and clear. But then again, Coleman is not a teacher.

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- Robert D. Shepherd says:
  
  May 19, 2013 at 11:26 pm
  
  The notion that a text is comprehensible outside its context–that it can somehow exist in a world of its own making–is preposterous. It is demonstrably preposterous. If someone thinks that people can read without having the background knowledge assumed by the text, then he or she is clearly clueless about how language works. No one who thinks such a thing should be allowed in front of students. Such a person certainly should not be entrusted with advising others on pedagogical practice.
  
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  - Michele says:
    
    May 20, 2013 at 12:07 am
    
    Agreed!
Andrew King says:

May 20, 2013 at 12:09 am

Who needs scaffolding? Sure, try building a structure without it…

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Robert D. Shepherd says:

May 20, 2013 at 9:14 am

from the 3-12 Publishers’ Criteria for ELA:

This passage from the Criteria seems to me not a call for eliminating relevant background information but, rather, for eliminating activities that encourage students to substitute some predeterminaiton of what the text says for attention to the text itself:

“Scaffolds enable all students to experience rather than avoid the complexity of the text. Many students will need careful instruction–including effective scaffolding—to enable them to read at the level of text complexity required by the Common Core State Standards. However, the scaffolding should not preempt or replace the text by translating its contents for students or telling students what they are going to learn in advance of reading the text; the scaffolding should not become an alternate, simpler source of information that diminishes the need for students to read the text itself
carefully. Effective scaffolding aligned with the standards should result in the reader
encountering the text on its own terms, with instructions providing helpful directions
that focus students on the text.”

This passage from the Criteria gets to my point that lit selections are buried, in contemporary texts. The lit itself gets lost among lots of mostly irrelevant, mostly inane activities:

“Everything included in the surrounding materials should be thoughtfully considered and justified before being included. The text should be central and surrounding materials should be included only when necessary, so as not to distract from the text itself.”

The Criteria also call for putting off blithering generalization about and evaluation of the text until after kids have figured out what the text itself is about. Now, unfortunately, exactly the opposite is the case in the best-selling literature programs in the country. Those programs bury the literature in seas of activities that encourage the student to make unwarranted generalizations and evaluations, and the text itself is barely attended to. The Criteria aim to correct that:

“Questions and tasks require careful comprehension of the text before asking for
further evaluation or interpretation. The Common Core State Standards call for students to demonstrate a careful understanding of what they read before engaging their opinions, appraisals, or interpretations. Aligned materials should therefore require students to demonstrate that they have followed the details and logic of an author’s argument before they are asked to evaluate the thesis or compare the thesis to others. When engaging in critique, materials should require students to return to the text to check the quality and accuracy of their evaluations and interpretations. Often, curricula surrounding texts leap too quickly into broad and wide-open questions of interpretation before cultivating command of the details and specific ideas in the text.”
.

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- Russ Walsh says:
  
  May 20, 2013 at 11:41 am
  
  Robert,
  
  I find myself agreeing with everything you say about reading, scaffolding and even the Core Content State Standards as they stand. The devil, however, is in the details of how these standards are being communicated. In my post, I drew directly from recommended lesson plans that explicitly told teachers not to develop background knowledge. These are exemplar lesson plans developed with the sanction of the authors of the CCSS and many of them contain the boiler plate language I cited in the post. Ultimately, as we can see from other comments here, the message has gotten out that building background knowledge is discouraged in the initial reading of the text. As Tom Hoffman points out, David Coleman is very much responsible for this message being so widespread. I suspect this is because it represents what he really thinks.
  
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  - Galton says:
    
    May 20, 2013 at 7:26 pm
    
    I would guess that Russ Wallace has forgotten more about reading instruction than David Coleman ever knew.
    
    One speaks from experience and the other speaks from hubris and intuition.
  - Robert D. Shepherd says:
    
    May 21, 2013 at 11:55 am
    
    I stand corrected, Russ, and appalled. Thank you for emphasizing the importance of background knowledge. It’s astonishing to me that anyone would seriously advance the proposition that it makes pedagogical sense to treat texts in a vacuum.
Tom Hoffman says:

May 20, 2013 at 10:16 am

I could give the Common Core ELA a gentleman’s “C,” any maybe even give the Publisher’s Criteria a “B” since I think it does clarify the intent of the standards. People who don’t like the Publisher’s Criteria (like Lucy Calkins) are mis-reading the standards themselves.

But Coleman deserves an “F” overall for his advocacy campaign. He was terrible, unless his goal was to confuse and anger teachers. Usually it is a third party who introduces an absolutist caricature of the good ideas in a new set of standards, but Coleman did the deed himself. His much-viewed “Letter from Birmingham Jail” lesson deserves an “F,” and all the initial round of EngageNY examples from his Student Achievement Partners was awful.

I think that Robert is right that there is justification in Coleman wanting to focus on real excesses in bogus pre-reading exercises, but the fact of the matter is that the entire subject is outside the scope of the standards-writing process. It is bad tactics, but standards are about grand strategy and strategy. You can say the same about fiction/non-fiction balance and almost every other conversation in the context of CC ELA.

Coleman seems bored by standards, and he goes out of his way to pontificate about everything else. It is a problem!

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Robert D. Shepherd says:

May 20, 2013 at 12:31 pm

There are many, many other problems with the Common Core State Standards. The more I work with them, the more mediocre and confused I think they are.

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ConcernedParent says:

June 2, 2013 at 3:21 pm

The gene pool is not a level playing field. Disparate circumstances and experiences perpetuate this. I am so tired of the argument that equity in education means everyone must get the exact same instruction instead of providing each student what they need to be successful with the content. Since teachers are already spread too thin to help students individually, we need to enable them to work within more homogeneous small groups established according to content-specific abilities and challenges. Unfortunately, there are too many idiots out there that think separating children this way is unfair even if it means they get more support and help for their specific learning needs. If a student feels badly about being placed in a slower reading group as an example, we need to work on our messaging around this structure – that it is not a measure of intelligence or ultimate potential, just that those students learn at a certain pace and require a certain level of support that is different from other students. That is much closer to the root cause of the issue…instead, we throw out a valuable, functional structure because it might hurt someone’s feelings.

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Mary DeFalco says:

July 23, 2013 at 1:23 pm

Common Core: Built on Sand
How did the Phonics become so entrenched in the CCSS? It goes back to the Bush administration when the federal program,
Reading First, was developed. The program is the cornerstone of NCLB and remains today the foundation of the Common Core Primary
Reading Standards. Common Core espouses a phonetic approach only and eliminates the other conceptual tools of semantics and syntax for beginning readers resulting in “closed reading.” CC furthermore emphasizes knowledge in lieu other higher order thinking skills such as imaging, evaluating, applying, and creating.

How is that possible?! CC claims to be research based and yet other reading programs guided by the Constructivist approach are totally ignored. I started researching and I sat in disbelief! Reid Lyon is key here. He was a key adviser on the federal Reading First program under President Bush; Reid Lyon developed the program. Reid Lyon is well known for his work and research with disabilities. He developed a phonetic program that helped the disabled children decode successfully. However, a recent study revealed that after spending $ 6 billion on Reading First -a phonic program but an incomplete program. Since CC’s Primary Reading Standard is anchored in the phonetic approach, I believe it is safe to say Reid Lyon’s program is still with us. His program did not help develop the skill of comprehension.
Maria Glod in the Washington Post 11/19/08 reports: Study of Reading Program Finds a Lack of Progress http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/18/AR2008111803650.html

Michael Grunwald’s report, Billions for an Inside Game on Reading http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092901333.html in Washington Post explains how phonics won the “Reading War.”
Grunwald explained that Reid Lyon, a presidential advisor and the the person who designed Reading First, maneuvered the situation to lock out programs anchored in the Constructivist approach such as Reading Recovery. Reading Recovery is grounded in research and is an internationally acclaimed program. Reading Recovery has a phenomenal track record of success in decoding and comprehension. Literacy Collaborative and the Arkansas Literacy Intervention programs have applied the philosophy and methodology in teaching groups of students.
Reid Lyon, just like Marie Clay- the developer of Reading Recovery, has a background in cognitive psychology. Marie Clay, however, developed a wider spectrum of teaching tools; she included semantics, syntax, graphs, along with phonics. Marie Clay taught in the primary schools and then did post graduate study in Developmental Psychology at our prestigious University of Minnesota on a Fulbright Scholarship and completed her doctorate at the University of Auckland with a dissertation entitled “Emergent Literacy.” She developed a non threatening evaluation program called An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement which evaluates a student’s needs and progress without the nationwide standardized test; it is further more administered without stress and is standardized. She furthermore developed set of teaching tools – books called Rigby, Sunshine Books and others such as Irene Fountas and Gay Sue Pinnell’s leveled books. Yet her program was denied consideration by administration because of Reid Lyon.

Another interesting facet about Reading First as noted in http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/literacy/texasscam.asp
“Texas- Reading First Program owned by President Bush’s Brother Neil Bush is a Fraud Scam.”

Reid Lyon and Doug Carnine, both of whom wound up in Washington, D.C., as advisors to Bush and his now-controversial No Child Left Behind act. Lyon and Sonnenberg are believers in phonics and made that method the cornerstone of Bush’s reading initiative. Retired reading teacher and former Fort Worth school administrator Judith Scott said the highly touted educational reforms in Texas aren’t working and that she is “tired of educators getting a bum rap” for the failures. ” “You only have to look at the people” who ushered in those reforms, she said, to understand why they have failed. They were politicians, millionaire businessmen or big-time attorney-lobbyists, with no history in education, she pointed out. And Marsha Sonnenberg, the reading expert, “never even had a reading certificate.” The whole reform movement, Scott said, became “a political football” that gave power and money to Bush supporters and promoted his “phonics-only agenda.”
Choosing Democracy: Reading, First; fraud, Bush cronyism http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2006/09/reading-first-fraud-bush-cronyism.html
Reading First Financial Corruption/ Fair Test http://www.fairtest.org/reading-first-financial-corruption
“The Office of Inspector General in the U.S. Department of Education has found numerous legal and ethical violations in how the department steered funds toward favored programs..”

Some districts in the past turned down federal money so that they could use a program that they knew would work, a program anchored in the Constructivist approach. Teachers knew phonics only wouldn’t work. Now teachers are caught in a trap; they must adhere the CC standards.

Are we now to believe that D.C. has washed their hands?
Mary DeFalco

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Danielle says:

July 31, 2014 at 10:41 am

Look what this otherwise great school district assigned for an 11th grade, honors English summer assignment. What a waste to assign The Crucible as summer reading with no teacher guidance and class discussion. What a way to make kids HATE reading, writing, and school. Note that the purpose tells students that, “The most satisfying and thorough analytical writing comes from close reading of a text and the critical thinking skills that develop as a result of that close reading.” What a crock. The assignment continues to demand “rigor” through a requirement to hand write. Why?

http://crsd.org/Page/891

Honors English 11 Summer Assignment
Honors English 11 Summer Assignment Packet

Honors English 11 – Summer Reading, Thinking, and Writing Assignment

Part I

Purpose: The most satisfying and thorough analytical writing comes from close reading of a text and the critical thinking skills that develop as a result of that close reading. In order to become an active, close reader, you must reflect, analyze, question, and write about what you have read.

The following reading and writing assignments will enable you to come to class in the fall with a developing perspective of American literature and life.

Materials: a composition notebook (PREFERABLY the Staples® Eco-Friendly Composition Notebook or something comparable), a pen, and a highlighter.

Directions:

1. For each reading you will be expected to write a page and a half, single-spaced response in your Writer’s Response Notebook (WRN). Responses can be broken up in sections and/or paragraphs. You must provide at least one specific quote from the text per response to strengthen your thoughts and impressions. Blue or black ink only. NO PLOT SUMMARY IS PERMITTED! React, Respond, Question, and/or Challenge: Good thinking produces good writing. No word processed responses are permitted. Any plagiarized responses will result in a zero. Date each entry and title each entry according to the assignment.

2. You are required to read, highlight, and annotate each assigned text. See handout for an example of thorough highlighting and annotating. Annotating can and should involve connections to Americanism(s) and American thinking, questions, concerns, and even ideas that relate to 21st century thinking. No credit will be given for assignments not annotated and highlighted.

Texts and assignments:

The Iroquois Creation Story

How do the good mind and the bad mind reflect the duality that is found throughout the study of American history? What aspects of the story show the roots of some of America’s songs and traditions? How would such beliefs influence the Native American response to the arrival of explorers and settlers? How would the visitors to the “New World” respond to the tale of

Creation?

Giovanni Da Verrazzano From Verrazzano’s Voyage: 1524

What evidence of the “salad bowl” (diversity of culture in America) exists in Verrazzano’s accounts? What are some of the observations Verrazzano makes about the people and their appearances and customs? How does this compare with the later confrontations between American Indians and European settlers?

William Bradford “War Threatened with the Pequots”

Note the tone of Bradford’s narrative. How is the tone unique, considering the circumstances?

How is such a non-fiction account valuable in recalling American history?

What are the characteristics of each people group?

Does Bradford’s diction (word choices) or phrasing reveal a bias? How so? Toward who?

John Smith From a Description of New England

What did Smith believe should move people to embrace employment? What “enticements” or “advertising tactics” does Smith use to persuade people to embrace a colonial existence? Why were these enticements so necessary to establish the new colony? How does Smith’s account lead the way for the entrepreneur ideology in America?

St. Jean De Crevecoeur From Letters From an American Farmer

If you were in Europe, reading Creveoeur’s letter, what would entice you to come to America?

What elements in Letters From an American Farmer are reflected in the early words of the Founding Fathers: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? What aspects of our inalienable rights are present in the text? What elements of the American Dream begin to emerge in the text?

Part II

The Crucible by Arthur Miller-to be read after the handouts

Assignment: Either Post-it-Note the text or purchase a copy and then, as you read, highlight and annotate. Use the list of topics and ideas below as a guide for annotating. Of course, in literature taking note of the characters and their actions, the settings and their influences, and other literary devices always help to make meaning. A total of six entries (same as above) are required.

Much has been written about the Salem Witch Trials, but The Crucible is also an amazing study in human nature, in the value of reputation, in mob mentality, and about truth and perception.

Write one entry for each of the topics below. Again, select a passage from the text and include it in the response, unless it is a longer section, then just include the page numbers and reference the specific section.

1.The power of the will

2. The power of choices

3.The power of fear

4.The power of the physical wilderness and isolation

5.The power of the individual

6. The power of society

All of the work for Parts I and II will be due on the first day of school. Please bring materials with you to class. An objective test that includes both the materials on the handouts and the play will be given during the first few days of class.

Council Rock School District Disclaimer:

Council Rock School District strongly encourages parents to survey the outstanding collection of challenging literature contained within our program. Much of the content presents ideas and issues that are important, complex, and encourage critical thinking. Any connection discussed in class is made that much stronger by the conversations and connections that are made at home. We invite you to discuss any of the elements of our courses with your child’s teacher.

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