New York City and Néw York State have enthusiastically embraced the Common Core standards.
In the background, however, is a simmering–one might say boiling battle between literacy guru Lucy Calkins of Teachers College and Common Core architect David Coleman about teaching reading. Calkins supports balanced literacy, Coleman supports close reading.
The city and state adopted materials based on Coleman’s model lesson about teaching the Getysburg Address by analyzing the text.
Calkins described Coleman’s model as “a horrible lesson.” She called him “an expert in branding.” She points out that Coleman is not an educator and has never taught.
NYC Chancellor Carmen Farina has experience with balanced literacy. Her support may tilt the balance to Calkins, who has a devoted following and whose work was in favor during the Klein administration when Farina was deputy chancellor.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Go, Lucy! According to David Coleman, studying when, how, or why the Gettysburg Address was written or given means nothing, just the words used. Talk about destroying a chance to actually understand something beyond how to pass a standardized test…
The controversy about close reading vs. balanced literacy strikes me as a red herring. I have taught both ways and frankly effective teachers don’t hew to a single approach. Rather, they experiment, absorb, modify, and teach. This is an ongoing dynamic process. Just like you don’t tell a comedian how to deliver a joke, or a novelist how to write prose(assuming a minimal level of competence), you give teachers the tools to experiment and the desired outcomes. If they are competent, the results will be positive. This is based on 9 years of experience and observation in an urban high needs school
Fantastic news!!!!!!!! There is hope for our literacy teachers. Lucy is coming to the rescue!!!!!!!
I’ve seen Coleman’s “lesson” in Martin Luther King on three occasions. It’s a canned promo; he’s been the mouthpiece for PARCC and the CCSS from the inception. All fluff, no stuff!
Well, the students are supposed to magically figure everything out from the text without a context. Of course, the original audience for that speech had a context, didn’t they?
I did a close reading lesson with my students on Annabel Lee. While it did get the students to look carefully at the poem, it was clear to me that they were never going to develop independence that way. The questions I asked led them towards my interpretation. Talk about being the sage on the stage.
Who else has written about close reading, besides Coleman and CC contributor Louisa Moats? What an inane concept –as if everyone has been teaching “far reading” until they came along and thought of this unique idea. And how “close” can you really get when along with that dictum comes the requirement that you may not provide background knowledge to further comprehension?
It’s amazing that these people with limited or no experience actually teaching children in schools have absolutely no clue about what they don’t know.
In one of the college courses that I teach, last week, when students were asked to provide end of course info on how to improve the class, one student said that he didn’t know enough about teaching yet to be able to make any recommendations. I have never, ever heard that before from a student, in my two decades of teaching in higher ed! Nearly everyone thinks they already know how to teach just because they have been a student. Coleman and Moats could learn a lot from this reflective student!
Not that I agree with the practice of close reading, especially with my 1st graders, but to answer your question regarding who besides Coleman and moats has written about close reading…Timothy Shanahan. Google him; you’ll find plenty of info.
Yeah, I know who he is. He’s from my area. He claims to have had a major influence on the development of the ELA CC. I have never been impressed by him or his take on emergent literacy.
Thanks for the info!
The interesting thing here is Dr. Ravitch’s evident cognitive dissonance. She obviously wants to continue bashing Coleman, whom she despises; but she (admirably) can’t bring herself to endorse Calkins’ approach, which is contrary to everything Ravitch has ever said about the importance of a rich curriculum with lots of content knowledge.
I think you should try a close reading here. I’d say Diane is endorsing Calkins.
Instead of criticizing Ravitch, perhaps you should consider what is argued in the post. As a history teacher, context is crucial to the full interpretation and comprehension of any primary document.
I repeat, crucial.
Close reading is for drones. This is how one gets uninformed opinions. Reading without context is just silly.
Go ahead and re-read the entire post with Colemanic approach–a.k.a. close reading with context(!). It’s obvious you do not seem to be capable of hiding your bias and displeasure with what Dr. Ravitch brings up. One doesn’t have to be a native speaker of English in the first place to master literacy or closing reading.
with/without
Who does Lucy Calkins think she is? How dare she challenge the Great David Coleman? I mean, really, it’s not as if she has spent a lifetime studying literacy, doing the research on how children learn and which teaching strategies are most effective. The next thing you’ll probably do is quote Don Murray on how to teach writing.
There was such an anti BL/Lucy Caulkins reaction from NYC teachers after that program was forced down their throats (2003-7) and people who questioned were persecuted, the instant reaction so far has been a plague on both their houses. Carmen Farina was part and parcel of that forced feeding in the early BloomKlein years – no respect for people who did not agree — that her bringing back Lucy may cause a counter reaction and help Coleman.
Actually, many teachers from the top performing public elementary schools in Manhattan fully embraced, and have continued to do so, the Balanced Literacy approach as advocated by Lucy Caulkins. Please see New York Times, June 27, 2014, Pages A23-A24, in which teachers at a high performing NYC elementary school are excited to continue implementing and re-tooling Balanced Literacy, along with other valid methods to help engage all of their students in reading and comprehension of text. For further info, please go to the TCRWP website video section to see how Caulkins is helping schools raise their level of reading and writing instruction in collaboration with the much acclaimed Danielson techniques. The best elementary schools in Manhattan, including the “gifted and talented” Lower Lab have been strong proponents of the Balanced Literacy approach. I do not know of any data which shows that “close reading” vs “balanced literacy” is more helpful to special needs or ELL students. My understanding is that Lucy Caulkins welcomes several approaches, including phonics and “close reading” where they are not the only methods being used to engage learners. I do wish spelling was not sacrificed to the degree that it has been in NYC public schools, as I will always believe this is an important tool for most of us, i.e. filling out a job application correctly.
Norm.. you are so right and I remember this well! Calkins wanted students to write in daily journals and have peer to peer corrections – for example. This did NOT WORK AT ALL WELL with English language learners whose parents were poor recently arrived immigrants and who had no access to books and vocabulary in their first languages. NYC teachers in title one schools were very frustrated by her program which at the time was the “latest and greatest” as deemed by Bloomberg. We have to stop “guru-izing” every theory that comes down the pike and start allowing educated professionals we call “teachers” to deem what techniques are appropriate for their classes. Just thinking here. Yes Coleman should be vilified hands down but this does not mean we find a “new one-size-fits-all” literacy guru!
Rob Pondiscio, a person whom Dr. Ravitch knows and at least used to respect (he advised her on the “Death and Life” book), doesn’t have trouble picking sides here: he’s on the side of teaching poor kids the knowledge that they need:
A lengthy quote from his comment on the linked article:
I have the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project to thank for my advocacy of a content-rich version of literacy. I spent several years damaging my South Bronx students before realizing that however well-intentioned and earnest it might be, it was simply insufficient to turn my students into readers and writers. For all its faults in conception, execution and implementation, Common Core is built on an essential understanding that Calkins work elides, which I have described elsewhere as the most important words in education reform:
“By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and
other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields
that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content
areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is
intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge
within and across grades.”
Common Core or no Common Core, our most disadvantaged students will never achieve full literacy until or unless our schools do all in their power to ensure that students — all students — have access to the same rich, broad knowledge base their affluent peers have. This, not “mini lessons” and practicing the habits of good readers and writers, is the soul of literacy. Reading comprehension is simply not a skill you teach, it’s a condition you create.
It simply won’t do to have our children plumb the depths of the souls for “small moments” or “read with their minds on fire.” Literacy is not about what readers and writers DO. It’s about what readers and writers KNOW. When you boil it down to its essence, this is what Common Core strives to achieve. I’ve seen no evidence that Calkins understands this in any meaningful way.
The city is “obviously” moving in Calkins’ direction? Then we will just as obviously put intellectual shackles on another generation of low-income students.
I have to take issue with your statement, “Literacy is not about what readers and writers DO. It’s about what readers and writers KNOW”. Literacy is a mix of both. If we’ve learned anything from Paulo Freire (and John Dewey before him and bell hooks after), it’s that reading and writing are both personal and political acts. The production (DO) and reception (KNOW) of a text holds equal importance in the development of a student’s critical literacy. I do agree that reading comprehension is a “condition you create”. But the methods that Mr. Coleman prescribe (as seen on those videos) appear to be a move back toward a New Critical approach to reading comprehension. There is so much more to literacy than a close reading that ignores the space between the words. Yes, it’s something to which all students should have access and there’s no reason all students shouldn’t be able to learn and utilize a variety of critical lenses beyond a close reading of a text.
Thanks type40ttc for mentioning Freire. Paulo Freire saw “reading the world” as the first act of becoming part of whatever community or family or society we were born into. He insisted that all humans are continually “reading the world” as a way of making sense of their experience. “Reading the word” was not the same natural habit as “reading the world,” but could draw from and build on the deep habit of “reading the world,” which Freire understood as the experiential “context” in which our learning takes place. Freire saw the critical teacher’s role as integrating “text and context,” that is, enabling students to read the world when they read texts while also enabling them to turn to texts for readings of their contexts. Reading was not an abstract skill taught in isolation from student context; neither was writing or thinking. We read about, write about, and think about “something,” a contact which shapes the nature of these literate acts.(see Freire’s famous essay “The Importance of the Act of Reading.”)
WT’s approach, along with Pondiscio who once worked for the Core Knowledge group and now runs Education Next, although he tries to portray himself as a South Bronx “teacher” which he was for a few short years (I was too!), is all about not giving voice to those who are below them on the social scale. It’s a bedrock tenet of conservatism — keep things the way they are, including the rule of white, straight, Christian, wealthy men — and silence those who question them or challenge their supremacy. Read the thoughts and words of your betters and accept them as gospel truth, which can only be revealed by close reading of their words and writing about them. Remember, as Coleman so famously said, “No one gives a sh*t what you think” if you aren’t one of the ruling white rich Christian elder male class.
Take a good look at who is running for Tea Party/Republican office, who already holds office, and who has the money and power and you will see this as clearly as you see your own hand.
Core Knowledge is based upon the idea that if you make poor black and brown children parrots of the white upper class, having them able to converse about Plato and Great White Canon, then they will be allowed to rise to the same social and economic heights. Truth and facts prove otherwise (see the massive, unending hatred of Obama that is never grounded in the bad things he does, but in being who he is) and no 1%er is welcoming eloquent black and brown men and women into their family circles or promoting them into leadership positions in their companies no matter how deep their classical education and upper crust eloquence.
Susan Neuman, one of the main architects of the ludicrous NCLB also commented on this article and she was outed by another commenter (me) — that will probably be erased from the site soon because they don’t allow deviation from the accepted, conventional wisdom conservative agenda in comments there as a rule.
If Pondiscio and his Education Next profiteers and the NCLB cheerleaders are against Calkins then I know that I am on the right side being for her.
“Core Knowledge is based upon the idea that if you make poor black and brown children parrots of the white upper class, having them able to converse about Plato and Great White Canon, then they will be allowed to rise to the same social and economic heights.”
Nope. Simply put, Core Knowledge is based upon the idea that you have to teach children actual content. The “canon” objection is a strawman.
From what I have seen in my own children’s classrooms, balanced literacy is nearly content-free. In the hands of a particularly zealous practitioner, it is as much about “nothing” (process) as George’s vision for “Jerry.”
tim, I’m surprised at your ignorance of Core Knowledge.The entire theory behind it was that brown and black students entered E. D. Hirsch’s college classroom not knowing about a battle in the Civil War. From the Core Knowledge site:
“For the sake of academic excellence, greater equity, and higher literacy, elementary and middle schools need to teach a coherent, cumulative, and content-specific core curriculum.”
Hirsch has always claimed that the reason poor children don’t succeed in school is because they lack the referential knowledge of the upper classes and once that knowledge is supplied through his scripted curricula then they will be able to read with comprehension because they will have the necessary background knowledge that students of a classical education in the upper classes take for granted.
I actually like the Core Knowledge curriculum but I can’t support the Core Knowledge foundation because of its ties to extremist right-wingers such as the Fordham Foundation. Too much control and Hirsch has yet to prove his theory will end poverty and ensure success for poor children — that “greater equity” thing they talk about that you seem to want to ignore.
Priscilla,
Almost all rightwing reformers claim that they advocate on behalf of black and brown children. It is nonsense and/or deliberate obfuscaction.
WT,
Thank you for saying all of this. The misgivings I have about the Common Core ELA standards are in that they resemble the Calkins cult when they emphasize empty reading comprehension skills.
Fair enough. But that seems to fly directly in the face of close reading. Close reading doesn’t provide knowledge. And pulling the background from the Gettysburg Address would make it a far less interesting piece.
WT, I agree with you that Calkins’ Balanced Literacy is a fraud and that Pondiscio gravitated to Common Core because he thought it would lead to more content-rich curriculum –which is the real key to creating better readers. But I think his hope was built an a thin reed that is decomposing as we speak : Common Core is turning out to be almost as content-indifferent as Balanced Literacy. Common Core’s call for a rich, coherent, sequenced curriculum –Pondiscio’s reason for endorsing it — is faint and buried in a mountain of pages that leads teachers in the opposite direction; i.e. towards content-indifference and a fixation on skills. In fact, Calkins and the Common Core have this one huge thing in common: they portray teaching reading as a matter of practicing metacognitive strategies on texts. True, Common Core demands complex texts and Balanced Literacy doesn’t; that’s a minor improvement. But Calkins and Coleman are closer than you’d think –and that’s a bad thing, as both gurus have fundamental errors in their understanding of how to make good readers.
Ponderosa,
Thank you so much for saying this so clearly. I am among those Americans who support the standards because they are a step in the right direction, aware of the power of the educational establishment to undo the work of educators trying to include content, but hoping teachers would find in subject matter content the protein that would begin to replace our addiction to artificial sweeteners.
spot on, Ponderosa. Many of the CCSS in ELA are simply vaguely, poorly formulated abstract statements of skills and strategies to have been mastered. There is almost no attention to world knowledge (knowledge of what), and the statements of skills are so vague, so abstract, that they do not rise to the level of procedural knowledge. So, for all the vaunted revolutionary nature of these “standards,” they are more of the same.
Priscilla,
You have drawn a caricature of Hirsch, not an honest portrait. Hirsch is a liberal democrat. The fact that some conservatives support the Core Knowledge curriculum does not mean that it won’t help do things that progressives like Hirsch and I want, like closing the achievement gap. Regrettably, you also caricature the canon and Western Civ as a vast blueprint for elevating rich white men. I certainly thought this way when I was 19 and almost got kicked out of college for disrupting a meeting of rich white men on campus. But then I realized that I knew almost nothing about Western Civilization and set about reading the Great Books and found a whole lot of clashing, contradictory ideas, a lot of intellectual diversity and subversiveness. Just to give one example, Socrates is the ultimate fearless critical thinker who was executed by the conservatives of Athens for rocking the boat. If you read the canon superficially, you may just come away with a burnished caricature of dead white male superiority. If you read it thoughtfully, however, you come away with a rich portrait of humanity and many, many reasons for being a progressive. Martin Luther King cites Socrates in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” (a letter now tarnished by its association with Coleman); his parents obviously took inspiration from another dead white man and dangerous rebel, Martin Luther.
Take a look around. The world we live in is still controlled by rich white men. Nothing has changed.
You are very attached to your manspalining — I can tell you practice a lot.
PS I am over 60, have 2 MA’s — one in Western Literature and the other in Western History, both from a top-notch private university. I don’t need lessons on how to read or interpret from you.
Lucy Caulkins, “I don’t really agree with rigid, myopic interpretations of the Common Core. It needs to be a big tent.” NYT June 27, 2014, pg. A24 – ….”She has tailored her approach to the Common Core standards, by increasing the amount of nonfiction, incorporating more discussion of difficult texts and decreasing the amount of time devoted to personal writing.”
Close Reading is the lazy #CCSS approach to choosing reading materials. The architects do not have to provide any background materials, cross reference anything, only throw a dart at open books, cut & paste, rummage through tons of written text by stopping a time clock, cut & paste some more, brand it as Close Reading, convince the corpDeformers with a couple more $M…Tadah! There it is! Easy for the Pearson publishers to slip into their millions of #CCSS materials.
A new and improved way to teach reading. Unbelievable!
Why don’t we teach foreign languages that way? Drop Coleman off downtown Istanbul and have him read a Turkish newspaper. No prior knowledge needed! No connection to previously learned skills! As they say…Cold Turkey!
Teachers around the country should record their laughter on YouTube, point fingers at Gates & Coleman, and teach the way children should be taught. This Close Reading Crap is FOR THE BIRDS! Actually, it could be used to line the bird cages as poop paper…maybe. Sorry, birds!
Where else can a rich college dropout control, mandate, dictate the future of an entire nation and millions of children? Is this a great country, or what? The US should be the laughing stock of the world…it probably is already. Thanks Gates – 4 Nothing!
Your analogy about reading Turkish is perfect. That’s what we’re doing to kids when we give them texts and a suite of strategies, but don’t make a concerted effort to teach the vocabulary first. And what’s the best way to teach vocabulary? Not word lists and quizzes, rather, units that immerse kids in a topic for a couple weeks or more. That sets up a context that accelerates inference-making about unfamiliar words. This approach also, incidentally, teaches kids about the world they live in –a goal that seems to have been forgotten by most of our education “experts”.
Hooray for Lucy Calkins!
As my colleague Marc Aronson and I have commented recently on our blog, Nonfiction and the Common Core (http://nonfictionandthecommoncore.blogspot.com/), we need to stop talking about personalities and who is for the CCSS and who isn’t. We need to talk about the real issues–teaching and learning. And yes, content matters. Kids need excellent books and other materials to build background knowledge and generate inquiries.
There are two other voices entering this conversation that are worth listening to. I’m giving excerpts below. They both write for a blog called The Uncommon Corps:http://nonfictionandthecommoncore.blogspot.com/ On June 25, Marc Aronson:
“I think we need to shift some of our attention away from the CC heat — objections on the Left, objections on the Right; this state changing the name of the standards, that state delaying the assessments, this governor trying to win his national political bones by loudly resisting CC — to the fact that the mode of selecting, sharing, and reading NF that we discuss here in this blog is now required in essentially every state. The key point is not “common” — shared terminology — but “core” — a basic approach.
“There is a key “turning the ship” part of this approach: we are asking educators, parents, administrators, librarians who may themselves have experienced NF as textbooks, and “information” as data to be passively absorbed, to now see NF as active inquiry involving comparing sources, questioning ideas, probing for the research and argument behind any claim — in math, science, history, as well as poetry, fiction, drama. The kinds of books — and approach to books we feature here can help. But only when the adult professionals using those materials recognize that NF is now playing an entirely new role: it is not imparting knowledge to be absorbed, it is, rather, introducing students to the rules by which knowledge is created.”
And his comments were reinforced the next day by Myra Zarnowski, also from the Uncommon Corps.
“Marc’s latest post reinforces what I have been thinking: We need to focus our conversations about teaching and learning on—guess what?—teaching and learning, not on who’s in the CCSS club and who’s out.
One overlooked segment of the interested population is parents. I was reminded of this by a recent New York Times opinion piece entitled, “But I Want to Do Your Homework” by Judith Newman. Please read this piece at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/helping-kids-with-homework.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C%5B%22RI%3A9%22%2C%22RI%3A17%22%5D You won’t be sorry. It’s not only amusing, it also makes an important point: Many parents want to participate in their children’s education, but they don’t know how.
Heaven knows, we educators could use their help, but for this to happen there are problems that need solving. Children both want their parents’ help, but they also fear that their parents don’t know the “right” way to help them. Parents, in turn, are often clueless about so-called newer approaches to learning. It’s no fun to learn that your understanding of math, science, and social studies is hopelessly out-of-date.”
Hello Diane,
I am working on a piece to encapsulate the end of the year without test prep and it would be a nice follow-up to your blog. I shared the results with you earlier, but will work them into a piece.
While Coleman has the rhetoric, we have the results to validate Calkins’ statements (although we did it without the test prep unit). I teach in a school with a free/reduced lunch rate of 39% and is 48% white. The results in my classroom have never been higher and the bond between student and teacher has never been stronger.
Selfishly, I would love to see Calkins succeed. Every child has an opportunity to be successful (as does every teacher). You see promise and potential instead of rigor and failure.
I can send you the piece when it is all set. Below is the graphic I am hoping to use.
All the best,
Kevin
The Horrible vs. the Mundane
I have seen the Lucy Clalkins Model in action and it is so controlling, where kids are told to “Turn and Talk” to the person next to them on cue, very behaviorist, like seals at feeding time. They sit on the floor, like subservient vassals. Principals, like Farina jumped on it and drove out the teachers who opposed this fantasy, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing for Carmen, as she dumped 80% of her teachers, and is now back to the same game with Calkins, whose Teachers College received millions from the former Bloomberg chancellors…..The sad part is that this debate makes it seem that these are the only possibilities. :”Turn and Talk” has replaced cooperative learning and shared reading. Literacy development is a cornucopia of activities with enlightened teachers, who do not follow the “readers workshop” script, but their children’s assortment of many literacy activities. Coleman should not even appear in the debate unless it includes the “Good” with the Bad and the Ugly
This is all anyone should have ever had to said to deny CCSS: ‘Coleman is not an educator and has never taught.’
There is a movie out on Netflix right now about Noam Chomsky, one of the most brilliant minds on earth. He raves about the Dewey education he received early on in sschool. Saying it helped make him who he is today. Why can’t all children go to such wonderful schools lead by REAL educators! (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1817287/)
i.e. Calkins the Bad, and Coleman the Ugly
My look at Coleman’s Gettysburg lesson and Close Reading: http://hamburgta.com/2013/11/19/closed-minds-from-close-reading/
Let’s come back to planet earth. No matter how you feel about Common Core, let’s not forget the DECADES that Calkins had free reign with her program, without ANY evidence of success. It is a great program for rich kids, but left generations of poor kids in the dust. It is NOT supported by any recognized research, and even Joel Klein saw that.
The current programs regarding testing and teacher evaluation are an outgrowth of Calkins’ failure. Even the term “balanced literacy” is phony. It is simply the much-and-rightly maligned WHOLE LANGUAGE program renamed to deceive that it is something new.
Remember “Month-By-Month Phonics?” I seem to recall it was a perceptive historian named Diane Ravitch who blew the whistle on that one. Don’t fix the problems of today by returning to the mistakes of yesterday.
Don’t malign WHOLE LANGUAGE with Lucy Calkins. Ultimately, programs do down as a correlation to the need for material$ by publisher$. Whole Language used authentic literature and by passed the nonsense of the publishers, causing them great distress. Paolo Friere was Whole Language.
Andrew Wolf ,
Thank you for saying what you have said here.
Am I supposed to conclude that Lucy Calkins is wonderful because David Coleman is not?
Diane, is it true that you are endorsing Calkins and balanced literacy, as Dienne says above?
David Coleman is not wonderful.
The pedagogical approaches that any teacher uses, as experienced teachers know, changes depending on the group of kids sent to you each year. Balanced literacy is the only way early grades are going to learn all of their foundational skills. Richard Allington is the one to follow here. He collects and analyzes the research about literacy practices. He presents which literacy practices in elementary have shown the greatest overall effect size. There is not now, nor will there ever be, a “one size fits all”, program for teaching literacy skills, but we can all continue pretending that there is; designing and selling programs that purport to be.
If we were talking about someone who wasn’t politically connected to the mayor and chancellor, the conversation here would be how Calkins’s “balanced literacy” has contributed to the “schools to prison pipeline”. If you think that statement is inflammatory or overwrought, please let me know a better way to describe a curriculum and approach that has failed so miserably with at-risk male students. (It fails miserably with just about every type of student, even gifted ones, but kids who don’t have someone to make up for its deficiencies are just dead in the water.)
There would also be howls of “follow the money”–Klein’s decision to let schools out of “balanced literacy” took with it a lot of fat consulting and PD contracts. Now Calkins is back in the game!
Bringing Lucy Calkins out of exile, streamlining the ability of the wealthy to have special ed private school tuition picked up by the DOE, and shortening the school day for the kids who need it the most–these are the signature achievements of the de Blasio/Fariña DOE so far.
BRAVO! Thank you for making these points so assertively:
“… Calkins’s “balanced literacy” has contributed to the “schools to prison pipeline”…. kids who don’t have someone to make up for its deficiencies are just dead in the water.”
Frank Smith says that children learn to read “despite school”.
The early colonies had a 93 -100% literacy rate for all races. Literacy has been steadily declining since WW l and the creation of Public Schools.
Every “program” is an obstacle.
In 1940 96% white, 80% black literate
In 2000 83% white, 60% black (NAEP)
We spend three to four times as much on education between 1040 and 2000
(JT Gatto)
Dan Willingham on the sheer ignorance of public officials who support Lucy Calkins’ materials over Core Knowledge, even though the data support the latter:
realcleareducation.com/articles/2014/06/30/literacy_new_york_city_carmen_farina_1037.html
Public officials often disregard educational research, but it’s hard to catch them red-handed. They don’t reach positions of influence without learning to obfuscate, to redirect. Rarely does a policymaker as much as say, “Screw the data, I’m doing what I want.”
Last week, one did.
Please post the evidence supporting the Gates USDOE CCS and their effect on teaching and learning. We will wait.
WT,
Every part of NCLB and Race to the Top ignores education research.
From a bygone era when Dr. Ravitch cared about strong evidence-based curricula:
nychold.com/art-wsj-ravitch-050512.html
WT,
From your link, with many thanks:
http://nychold.com/art-wsj-ravitch-050512.html
Where the Mayor Went Wrong
Would you want to study at a Bloomberg school?
May 12, 2005
NEW YORK DISPATCH
BY DIANE RAVITCH
… Neither Mr. Bloomberg nor Mr. Klein knew about the war of ideas that had been raging among educators for many years. On one side, beloved by schools of education, are the century-old ideas of progressive education, now called “constructivism.” Associated with this philosophy are such approaches as whole language, fuzzy math, and invented spelling, as well as a disdain for phonics and grammar, an insistence that there are no right answers (just different ways to solve problems), and an emphasis on students’ self-esteem…
On the other side are those who believe that learning depends on both highly skilled teachers and student effort; that students need self-discipline more than self-esteem; that accuracy is important; that in many cases there truly are right answers and wrong answers (the Civil War was not caused by Reconstruction); and that instructional methods should be chosen because they are effective, not because they fit one’s philosophical values.
… The new curriculum has proven to be a bonanza for the education establishment, particularly schools of education such as Columbia’s Teachers College, which receives millions of dollars each year to train teachers in constructivist methods…
WT,
That article is indeed from a bygone era. I don’t take sides anymore between Balanced Literacy and Core Knowledge. Each has strong points and weak points. Everything depends on how they are taught. They can be blended. They can be taught well or poorly.
Well, this thread really gives me a high degree of confidence in the public school education my kids are getting.
FLERP, you have much more reason to have confidence than you think that you do, for actual practice in classrooms tends to be a lot more valuable than are people’s blithering abstractions.
I can only take your word for it. All I ever seem to hear is that teachers are forced to slavishly apply some curriculum that a large portion of experts say is a total disaster and akin to child abuse. Then 5 years later teachers get a new curriculum that a large portion of experts say is a total disaster and akin to child abuse. On the bright side, in the meantime some of the experts will say they changed their mind.
What happens, typically, is that people push some nostrum, some snake-oil cure-all, and the wise, experienced teachers take it with a grain of salt, use what’s useful, ignore what is not.
So, a few years ago, teachers were told in their trainings that it was EXTREMELY IMPORTANT that they make sure that kids encountering texts have the requisite PRIOR KNOWLEDGE. Workshops on PRIOR KNOWLEDGE were given all over the country. Now, all over the country, they are being told JUMP INTO THE TEXT. READ IT CLOSELY. DON’T PREJUDGE OR PREDETERMINE WHAT IT MEANS with those silly prior knowledge activities.
And after teachers have been through these 180-degree flip-flops a few times, they learn to take it all with a grain of salt. Some, unfortunately, become very cynical. That’s understandable, but it’s not a good thing.
Exactly! We go to our PDs, listen when we are told what’s new and ‘effective’ this year (i.e., what will make us ‘highly effective’, usually by people who are no longer or have never been in the classroom, smile (perhaps ironically), go back our classrooms, shut the door, and teach our students based on a balanced mix of best practices (theory) and prior knowledge (practice). 🙂
Here’s how I put it, Josh: These sessions exist to acquaint people with what’s hot on the education midway this carnival season.
As I read this, I thought to myself, I run my 8th grade class the Calkins way. Never was taught anything about doing it that way. Never had any training. That’s just how it happened. That’s how I read to, modeled, read with, then later talked about reading material with my own children. As they got older, I left them more and more on their own with reading, but that was after years of modeling in a more Calkins-like manner.
http://speakingofeducation.blogspot.com/
Texts exist in context. If someone says, “Tie up the loose ends,” it makes a difference whether that person is a) a macramé instructor or b) a mob boss giving instructions to members of his or her criminal gang!!!
One of the texts recommended in CCSS Appendix A is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from The Republic. I heartily approve of the selection for use with 12th-grade students, as long as it is put forward as a possible text and not as a mandated one, but anyone who thinks that this text can profitably be approached with high-school students without providing a context for it really needs to try doing that. For the text to make any sense at all, its readers have to understand what sort of questions Plato is addressing. Most people don’t even know that such questions exist or what they are.
We’ve seen all this text out of context stuff before in the twentieth century from New Critics like Brooks and Warren, and we actually made a lot of progress in literary criticism as a result of critiques of that approach. Of particular merit, I think, are the Intentionalist critique of New Criticism put forward by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., in his great book on hermeneutics Validity in Interpretation; the contextualism of the late Heidegger, represented by the essays in Poetry, Language, Thought; and the New Historicism of folks like Stephen Greenblatt (for an excellent example of Greenblatt’s approach, see his essay “Shakespeare and the Exorcists”).
BTW, long before he published Cultural Literacy and established the Core Knowledge Foundation, Hirsch was a central and controversial figure in hermeneutics in the United States. In Validity in Interpretation, Hirsch makes a CRUCIAL distinction between, on the one hand,
a. interpretation as reconstruction of intention (which is dependent on a lot of stuff, including characteristics of the text, the author, the period, and the genre) and, on the other hand,
b. the significance of the text to a reader.
CONFUSING THE TWO OF THESE IS THE SOURCE OF AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF CONFUSION IN LITERARY STUDIES, and for this reason, Hirsch’s book is extraordinarily important.
And, of course, it’s more than a little naive to tell people that they need to start attending to the text–basing instruction on textual evidence–as though we hadn’t been doing this all along. If a nonphysician’s advice to physicians was, “Hey, I have an idea. You need to start paying attention to your patients’ symptoms,” then that person would be viewed as being
a) clueless about actual practice and
b) possessed of astonishing hubris.
I have written and edited literature texts for use in K-college for over 20 years now. I’ve worked on most of the widely used K-12 basal literature programs at one time or another. IN EVERY ONE OF THESE, MUCH of the instruction was about careful analysis–line by line, paragraph by paragraph, scene by scene, or chapter by chapter–of texts. In every one of them, students were asked, again and again and again to write or otherwise to respond based upon, in part, evidence from the text.
But that is not the only evidence that is relevant.
Texts exist in context, and often that context is not only relevant but crucial.
And sometimes responses to text are not getting at intention but at significance. That, too, needs to be evidence based, and here again, in every literature program that I have ever worked on, instructions to students to respond regarding the significance of work to them required them to reference textual evidence.
Only a complete neophyte–someone completely unfamiliar with actual practice in English classrooms–would think otherwise.
Context is important.
Close reading is important.
Significance is important.
What is of almost no value whatsoever is discussion of generalized “skills.” There is no such thing as a general “finding the main idea” skill or procedure. This is an entirely mythical notion born of slackness of thought, of which there has been far, far too much in discussions of literacy by education professors. The general “finding the main idea” procedure, applicable to all texts, that can be profitably taught is as mythical as Pegasus and the tree with the golden apples at the edge of the world.
Originally, the term balanced literacy was latched upon as a compromise position in the “reading wars.” If that’s all that people mean when they use this term, then I heartily endorse its use. Yes, kids need to learn phonics, for there is no dedicated machine in the head for intuiting sound/grapheme correspondences. And yes, kids need personally significant experiences with whole texts very early on. They need to fall in love with lit.
But to the extent that balanced literacy has become a code word for abstract skills instruction (“Today, class, we’re going to practice our inferencing”) it’s utter hogwash. People who haven’t a clue what an inference really is (who haven’t, for example, studied formal and informal logic, statistics and probability, and the other sciences of inference) really shouldn’t go around talking about matters of which they know almost nothing. They end up talking airy nonsense that simply erects barriers of abstraction between readers and texts.
And before someone jumps on me for the reference to education professors, let me be clear that it is NOT THE CASE that education professors IN GENERAL endorse this abstract skills instruction nonsense. There are many, many competing approaches advanced by education professors, and that’s how it should be. So, I should have made very, very clear that I was referring to a subset of education professors–those who champion spending a lot of time applying abstract, vaguely formulated “reading strategies” like “finding the main idea” and “making inferences” or, even worse, thinking about one’s thinking about these matters (“metacognitive strategies”).
But even there, if the strategy is made very concrete–is operationalized–and is applied to the right sort of text in the right circumstance, it can be of some limited value. So, for example, the “reading strategy” of scanning a text to preview it can be useful in particular contexts with particular kinds of texts if it is combined with specific knowledge. So, for example, if you know what the parts are, usually, of a scientific paper, it’s a useful strategy to skim some of these parts to figure out, at the outset, whether the paper addresses the question that you are interested in learning about. You might skim the abstract, the introduction/literature review, and the results to see if the content is going to be of value to you before reading the paper closely.
But notice that what is being taught, here, is a highly operationalized procedure, dependent on knowledge of conventional forms, applied to a particular kind of text.
I am horrified at myself for not having said “by SOME education professors” above. There is BRILLIANT WORK being done ALL THE TIME by education professors. Despite the pressure, these days, or people to fall in line with a priori theoretical positions, there are still many independent thinkers in the profession who put forward practical, well-researched, thoughtful ideas applicable to classroom practice. I AM SICK OF THE CONTINUAL BASHING OF EDUCATION as a distinct field of study. There are things to learn about how learning works, and there are many, many folks teaching in education departments who are very serious about advancing our knowledge, there, and I honor those people for what they do.
I definitely applaud Lucy Caulkin and at least her model comes with actual education experience UNLIKE COLEMAN who should have a restraining order for all things education! However, it is time to stop “Guru-izing” each and every education theory that comes down the pike. Teachers as professionals need to read many different theories out there and choose which to use and when to use them by LOOKING AT THE STUDENTS IN THEIR CLASSROOM. This includes the Lucy Calkin’s model! Teachers need to be treated like intelligent professionals.
Teachers as professionals need to read many different theories out there and choose which to use and when to use them
Amen to that
It’s of enormous value to English teachers to get training in hermeneutics–the study of interpretation–so that they can learn about the many approaches to interpretation that have been advanced and about the value and limitations of each. One can do profitably WITH THIRD GRADERS activities with texts that are
Formalist. Emphasis on the formal aspects of the text.
Historicist. Emphasis on differences in historical milieu, then and now, and their consequences or understanding what’s going on. No, Hansel couldn’t look up where he was on his iPhone.
Structuralist. Emphasis on presupposed binary oppositions (kin, not kin; male, female)
New Critical. Close reading of the text itself, with particular emphasis on rhetorical devices and figures of speech.
Deconstructivist. Challenging the preconceptions on which the text is based.
Intentionalist. Asking what the author wanted to communicate or wanted the reader to think o experience.
Reader Response. Attending to the work as an imaginative experience. Really experiencing it. Then thinking about the significance of that.
New Historicist. Emphasis on differences in historical milieu with healthy understanding of the limitations of one’s ability to understand or reconstruct another era.
Sociopolitical. Emphasis on class, gender, power relations, etc.
Speech Act Analysis. What sort of act is being performed with this language? Is this assertive, directive, commissive (a promise or oath), expressive (thanks, congratulations), declarative (verdict, commissioning, conferring of status), interrogative?
There are many, many ways in and out of texts.
This is pretty much how I start off each year with my 12th grade AP English classes. A unit on literary theory/criticism and pedagogical practices. And it’s amazing how many students come back and tell me the value of learning these critical lenses when they read/analyze/write about texts in college (and not just in English courses).
extraordinarily valuable. and, surprisingly, doable at very young ages because one doesn’t have to be able to generalize about an approach to carry it out. The generalizing about the approach (“OK, this is what you just did.”) can come later.
Thank you so much for this. I look forward to applying this framework in my work with my third graders.
Almost all of these approaches bear on teaching in the visual arts. That is not surprising, but the formalist and intentionalist viewpoints are still dominating practice, especially in elementary schools.
Modeling is another way of saying the “teacher centered” instruction, like kids can not read on their own or with each other and construct meaning. The classroom where the teacher is speaking is numbing. I have been in classrooms where teachers read to the class or do Round Robin reading, so dull, rush for the bathroom break! Many times publishers materials are used, when children could be sharing exciting library books with an authentic text. There is nothing more boring than hearing the teacher. Teachers should have specific reasons for everything that comes out of their mouth, and keep it to a minimum. Teaching is observing and listening, not Calkin type scripts, Unfortunately you can not sell books about listening, just yapping.
Joseph, I wouldn’t overgeneralize. There is stultifying teacher talk and there is electrifying teacher talk. Likewise, there is stultifying group work and there is its opposite. The dogma these days is that most teacher talk is bad. OK, I agree that Calkins’ scripts are bad But I’ve had teachers who could read the phone book to me and I’d be mesmerized. “Teaching is observing and listening” is, at best, only partially true. For thousands of years, teaching has been about telling –in China, Africa, Greece, etc. Is this no longer true just because we have cars and iPhones? Telling, that worst form of teacher malpractice, is exactly what professional parents to for their kids all the time (e.g. “This cloth is from Bali; that’s an island in Indonesia where people practice a religion called Hinduism.”). Plain, old-fashioned read-alouds, done well, are a fantastic way to educate kids. One of my fondest memories of elementary school is having Mrs. Taylor read “Charlotte’s Web” to us in second grade. Another fond memory is when by aunt and uncle retold “The Hobbit” to us in their own words.
A friend of mine recently shared this story with me: He was in downtown Chicago with his five-year-old. They saw a grate with steam rising out of it. The boy asked him about it, and he told the boy about the stuff under the city. For YEARS thereafter, the kid would say, “Talk about it again, Daddy. About the stuff under the ground.”
Kids want to KNOW.
We’ve done far, far too much denigration of “the sage on the stage.”
I recently asked the daughter of a friend how things were going in college. Here’s what she said to me: “It’s awesome. People aren’t afraid to get up in front of a class and tell people stuff they didn’t know.” I asked her to explain. She said, “Well, in high-school, we were always sitting round in groups having discussions. And most of it was a complete waste of time. I didn’t learn anything. Now, I’m learning a lot, every day, every class.”
Now, in telling this story, I am NOT arguing that we shouldn’t have discussions in class and that small-group discussion cannot be valuable.
But there is something to be said for someone who is engaging and knowledgeable and passionate about what he or she knows sharing what he or she knows and cares about. The times that I remember most fondly from my own education were almost always like that. Mr. Schimezzi, in fifth grade, telling us about all the things that live in side us that are NOT us. Creepy. Fascinating. Cool. And when he talked of these things, his own wonder and amazement was evident, so he became a model of what it was to be a knowledgeable person–of how awesome that was.
Read alouds are wonderful Ponderosa, that is not what I am talking about about. Teachers should read above the grade level too, so that students can hear rich language. I see teachers reading books below grade level.
I just come from the school of abandoning round robin
which incorporates children judging others, being focused on each word of the text, and wondering who will read next. Reading can be more than that. I see reading as creating meaning, not a linear activity.
Thank you, P: I so agree with you! There are so many aspects of good instruction and being an effective teacher. My students LOVE when I read to them and tell them stories–it leads to the most lively discussions and learning by all of us. There are so many different ways to share a passage as a whole group. A good teacher gets everyone participating, thinking, discussing, and wanting to discover more about the subject or issue. My own Italian family told stories from the “old days,” and I will never forget their tales. Great teachers do talk and involve their students in that process.
There are actual,y two separate issues–upon which they probably disagree on both. ow to learn to read, and how to study literature. Coleman is probably for a systematic phonics-heavy approach vs “balanced” plus close textual analysis.
Terrible mistakes occur when administrators latch onto ONE IDEA and then try to apply it everywhere. This happens all too much in education. Coleman hated–with reason–the sorts of activities that have kids just writing or thinking about their feelings about texts and imagined, falsely, that these WERE THE NORM, and wanted to correct that by calling for close reading and response based on evidence. But to make that the sole approach is like making a micrometer the only tool in your kit. You probably should not use that 400-dollar micrometer to hammer nails with. For hammering nails, you need a different tool.
But I have have had many English teachers from around the country report to me that they are being told in their “trainings” (“Sit up. Roll over. Good boy.”) not to provide any context and to jump right into the text.
Sometimes that’s possible.
Sometimes that is just CRAZY.
Obviously.
“And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
“It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”
–Sherwood Anderson, “The Book of the Grotesque,” Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
“f all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Abraham Maslow’, The Psychology of Science (1966)
In other words, unfortunately, the ALL CLOSE READING, ALL EVIDENCE-BASED RESPONSE ALL THE TIME approach is a reaction to a COMPLETELY INACCURATE CARICATURE of actual practice in ELA.
I recently reviewed a series of leveled readers put out a number of years ago. Every reader ended with questions about the text. ALL OF THE QUESTIONS were about the kids’ feelings WITH ALMOST NO REFERENCE TO THE TEXT. In other words, they were of the “Have you ever faced a challenge yourself? Write about a time when you faced a challenge and overcame it.”
So, there were SOME examples of that kind of thing, BUT THEY WERE FAR, FAR from the NORM.
Much, much more common were lit texts that had a series of questions that started with factual details, proceeded to analysis, and ended with synthesis–that became increasingly broader, or more abstract, on a Bloom or DOK model.
One who thinks a caricature a reality betrays ignorance. It’s the same sort of ignorance that one finds, generally, among those who deal in stereotypes.
Why can’t both approaches be combined? Even high school students don’t know so many things about the world or history or science, Mine love the background and depth I provide, but know that I will demand that they read “closely.” In examining my own children’s notebooks from history and English courses (my daughter’s biochem is beyond me), I notice the rich background information their professors provided in order to illuminate works for them? David Coleman is just plain wrong. But Calkins may not be right. Are there any other adults in the conversation? PS If my typing on an iPad is any indication of the problems that can happen with online testing, Arne Duncan might like to try it and see what foolish things autocorrect provides.
Beautifully put, Bob!
Good Anderson quote Bob. Too many administrators just have no experience so they grab a program to hide this. Literacy development is so exciting when you create all kinds of opportunities and keep kids guessing: they can write a script for a puppet show based on a theme, or create a board game inculcating what is learned on a field trip, see how many word can be made from the letters in a long word, share a library book, write ” process notes” for any group activity, silent reading, journal writing. Kids need to be writing all of the time, which is more important than reading, but teachers use publishers hand outs, ” which begin nowhere, and go nowhere” (Cambourne) Children can write about their feelings and senses, what makes them human, the important of virtues and compassion, which will not be in the publishers script, they can interview their parents or family members. New teachers never learn this and children as young as 2nd grade are doing narrow cloze passages, when they are one year away from testing. These teachers are hammering children with scripts that they have not bought into or embraced, as they themselves are being hammered along with administrators, then they are thrown a life raft, with a trendy name from Teachers College, and hang on while they are swept out to sea along with their students.
I was an Assistant Principal for ten years at a high school when Balanced Literacy hit the DOE, and for high school students, it was not a workable program. Students were reading different books without understanding the complexity or context of the texts they were reading. I remember I observed a class where a student was reading MAUS, independently. He ws not aware that the book had two points of views. He also was not aware of the history in the book, Years later, when the school did away with bBalanced Literacy, I observed a class that used MAUS as a whole class novel with context and close reading. The students were engaged in intelligent discussions about the way Spiegelman had written the book not only as a survivors tale of a Holocaust survivor but a tale of being the son of a Holocaust survivor. The students looked at the drawings and what the bike means, and I could go on. Balanced Literacy is an elementary and early midddle school program. Why does one program preclude the other?
EXCELLENT EXAMPLE!!!!!
Exactly.
Treating skills in the abstract and texts out of context are terrible mistakes. A teacher needs to be a guide to the territory that is the text.
This is one of the wisest posts I have ever read, jfraad! I dearly wish that it would become a text for study in every English methods class in the country. yes. yes. yes. yes. yes.
I begin the year with lit crit and actually end the year with MAUS. It’s the perfect text to work to bring together all of those avenues of critical reading/thinking. I’ve used it with every level of learner in grades 9-12 and it is equally effective in all classes. It’s a text with multiple levels of narrative (as evidenced by the four distinct endings of the MAUS II). Good stuff.
I agree, Josh. A great text. And really engaging to kids and complex. It lends itself to a lot of very interesting analysis. But as jfraad says, it’s extremely important to provide context for it. Some kids will have a lot of context already, of course. But most will not.
I wasn’t instructing you, there, Josh, for clearly you know what you are doing with this text! I want to make sure that I didn’t give that impression. But I did want to make the no text out of context point, which is a general one in this thread.
Bob – Completely agree with you and never took it otherwise. Don’t fret. 🙂
Alas, my fear with CCSS and the push toward a plethora of nonfiction is how dull it gets, and how it saps any and all need for prior knowledge and creative and critical thinking. My older daughter just finished 5th grade (Pittsburgh Public Schools) and continually noted how horrid it was to read only historical/nonfiction texts. (I believe they read one novel, which was—wait for it—historical fiction.) To put it another way, it’s like practicing New Historicism with only a ‘co-text’ and not a piece of literature on which to ground that historical document. We are losing the context battle with a style prescribed by Coleman/CCSS.
(Also, I used to use Calkins’ The Art of Teaching Reading in my grad classes years ago, but quickly moved on to other resources as it just never worked well with secondary ELA instruction.)
“Balanced Literacy is an elementary and early middle school program.”
I agree with this! The problem with common core, according to my elementary teacher perspective, is that close reading for the elementary school aged children becomes dry and boring and students loose interest. Elementary students need to learn to love reading. Balanced Literacy succeeds in doing just that. I lost my students during this year’s switch over. The minute we started the engageny modules, my students stopped reading independently. They were turned off. There was no time to incorporate the read alouds, mini-lessons, and independent reading, while working with small groups. The modules were whole class and many students were not able to keep up. Common Core does not belong in the elementary classroom.
It is not surprising that Ms. Caukins has enthusiastically embraced the CCSS for ELA because it is for the most part simply a list of abstractly formulated skills. The CCSS is AT ODDS WITH ITSELF because, on the one hand, it calls for a great RETURN TO THE TEXT and for emphasis on SUBSTANTIVE TEXTS, and there are even proponents who claim that the CCSS in ELA are knowledge based. But that’s simply not so. If you read through the actual enumerated items that make up the CCSS, they are almost vague formulations of abstract skills–the student will be able to shows how two central ideas in a text are developed and connected.
In other words, more of the same.
Now, here’s where people get into trouble: They reify such an abstraction and imagine that it is an identifiable, teachable skill. But there simply is NO SUCH THING as a general identifying who two central ideas are developed and connected skill. Concentrating on the abstraction–imagining that one is teaching the “identifying the central idea” skill
a. erects a barrier of abstraction between the reader and the text
b. enables precious little in the way of concrete instruction in operations that the reader can carry out, generally, with texts
c. has enormous opportunity costs in the time taken away from engagement with the subject matter or experience of the text
d. leads to grotesque lessons that engage not whatever is key to understanding a given text but to fitting the text into the Procrustean bed of the abstract skills formulation
Kids want to read about snakes because they are interested in learning about snakes. If you and your students are reading about snakes, you FOR THE MOST PART, you should be talking about snakes and what the writer has to say about snakes!!! That’s the whole POINT of reading about snakes. All that stuff about what the central idea is and how the figurative language used affects the mood of the piece and what method of development was used in Paragraph 14 so on SHOULD BE INCIDENTAL. Concentration of abstract skills instruction leads, ironically, to instruction that SUBORDINATES the text. The text becomes a mere interchangeable opportunity for application of a “skill” or “strategy.” And so the VERY PURPOSE OF READING is undermined.
These days, I see lesson after lesson after lesson after lesson that basically ignores what’s going on in the text because the author of the lesson has concentrated not on what the text is saying and what one needs to know or understand to follow it but, rather, on a predetermined list of skills or strategies to be imparted.
Imagine, for example, that you are teaching “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. If you haul off, at the beginning, by asking about the central idea or the theme or the structure of the work or whatever, you are going to get NOWHERE. You need to talk about what the poem describes: A person stops in the woods. He thinks he knows who owns these woods. The owner lives in the nearby village. He’s stopping to watch the woods “fill up with snow.” One needs to encourage students TO TAKE THAT TRIP–to put themselves imaginatively, in that place, following the clues in the poem to do that.
If you start with, “Today we are going to talk about the theme in a poem” you’ve already SKIPPED OVER THE EXPERIENCE OF THE POEM. The poem–this particular act of communication, this particular experience–is no longer CENTRAL to what you are doing. Mastery of “theme finding” is.
That’s a GROTESQUE DISTORTION OF READING.
correction: they are almost all vague formulations of abstract skills
Bob Shepherd ,
Once again, you have worked so hard to get to the truth of the matter, and from my perspective you have succeeded. The malpractices you describe are not just a waste of time, not just a shame that the student you talked with is now happy in college because her instructors are telling her about the world, whereas in public school she chatted with her friends. The worst of this cult of distraction is that it is a form of child abuse. The dictate to look away from what you are seeing and to repeat empty, undoable, abstract conceptual behaviors is torture.
I have seen children abused in the period in which phonics instruction was forbidden, forced to try to guess at a word by thinking about their own lives. I don’t think I was imagining the pain these children were going through as they struggled to find a way to understand what was expected of them. The worst of this was that other children in their classrooms, those with previous phonics instruction, were able to read. This only deepened the pain of not knowing how to do it.
I would have to agree with a grandparent who visited his grandson’s fuzzy math class and was asked what he thought of it. He responded that he would have to describe it more as a crime scene.
Linda, at what point do you let go of phonics? More than half of the language does not follow these rules. Either kids know words when they see them, or they do not. Do you sound out the word “Stop” when you come to a Stop sign?
Joseph,
I’m surprised by your question because it tells me there is still enormous misunderstanding about phonics instruction. My understanding from personal experience is that it is meant to be initial and enabling. Children afforded the brief and concentrated time to practice the sounds of letters until they are known, then practice the blending of groups of letters until they become second nature, quickly begin to sound out words of increasing complexity until reading virtually anything becomes second nature.
As with reading music and practicing scales, once the student fluidly plays in the basic mode, key signatures are introduced, sharps and flats being exceptions to the rules, so to speak, and at first those exceptions seem daunting. But as with practicing anything, knowledge builds knowledge, and a student finds the ability to add complexity not only possible but rewarding and empowering. That is what I observe in the exceptions throughout our language to phonetic correspondence. The beauty of our phonetic written language system is that it is very doable for most people.
If children learn these basics in 1st grade, by 2nd grade they should be reading more complex language, and by 3rd grade they should be reading fluently. The reason we have seen 4th graders and even high school students in the United States receiving phonics instruction is that if they have not experienced it earlier, they are often still struggling, still guessing, still lost. However, as with so many other things, learning from this kind of practice later in life is often very difficult.
Linda, regarding phonics, there are so many nonsense workbooks out there to reduce reading and grammar to tedium, and teachers give it to kids because it fills up the time. Rarely do kids sound out words successfully, especially ones that they do not know. Students create meaning within the context of the sentence and story. Children need to know what whole words look like too. Sorry, but this is whole language, and children brains are very sophisticated in recognizing whole words.
It’s important to know the basic sounds of the letters, but more often than not the rules do not apply since each letter has so many variable sounds within the context of a word
Joseph, there is an enormous amount of research that shows that that is just wrong. If you think about it, writing is a relatively recent human invention. We have dedicated machinery in our heads for intuiting syntactic structures automatically from our ambient spoken language environment. THE BRAIN HAS NO SUCH DEDICATED STRUCTURES FOR INTUITING SOUND-GRAPHEME CORRESPONDENCES. Instead, it must rely on general-purpose pattern recognition faculties. Consequently, for most kids, those sound-grapheme correspondences have to be explicitly taught. This is not something about which there is any remaining SCIENTIFIC doubt. For excellent comprehensive reviews of the relevant science, see the following:
Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us about How to Teach Reading, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004.
Language Development and Learning to Read: The Scientific Study of How Language Development Affects Reading Skill, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2005.
Particularly compelling is the evidence from comparative study of learning to read languages where one must learn to recognize a unique symbol for every word.
The trick is to do the phonics instruction in a concentrated, orderly way, unmuddied by confusion of sound-grapheme correspondences with the alphabet, which is NOT THE CODE.
Linda’s analogy to learning to read music is spot on. There is not dedicated machinery in the mind for interpreting the symbols on a musical score. One must learn these to automaticity. And once one has done that, it’s done. It becomes automatic and the reader no longer is consciously aware of “sounding it out.”
So, there is no escaping the necessity of doing a concentrated phonics block early on. And this block needs to be coherently organized and, again, care needs to be taken not to confuse the phonetic code with the alphabet–a HUGE mistake made by many reading programs.
At the same time, schools need to be creating for little kids lots of immersive, joyful experiences with literary works. Read alouds, professional storytelling, chanting, memorizing songs and poems, reading circles, reenactments–all are great for this.
If THAT were all that people meant when they used the term balanced literacy, we would be in good shape. Yes, kids need phonics. Yes, kids need joyful experiences with authentic literature and orature.
Unfortunately, that’s not all that people mean. They also mean a LOT of explicit instruction in extraordinarily abstract and blitheringly ill-defined “comprehension skills and strategies” and “metacognitive strategies,” and that stuff, by and large, simply erects barriers of abstraction between kids and texts. Again, one shouldn’t make the skills and strategies the FOCUS of lessons but, rather, incorporate them incidentally where and when they make sense.
Bob, there may be much research to support your opinion and you may disagree with me, but it is not possible to come to a final conclusion, that I am wrong. All of these entries are matters of opinion. There is much miscue research showing that students are able to read and identify words in the context of the text, that is being used. Reading is about creating meaning. We do it all of the time as adults, where we say a word, when reading, which is incorrect because we “predicted” what the text would say, and quite often, the word is similar to the actual word. I hear adults do it all of the time when they read something aloud. Good readers are those who read often and see these words often, not so much as those who are good “decoders”. Frank Smith says that “phonics will work if you know what the word might be, but not if you have no idea about what you are reading in the first place……We recognize words like we recognize all other familiar objects….The fact that the written word is made up of letters that seem of themselves to be related to the sound is as irrelevant to their recognition as the fact that all automobiles have their model name stuck on them somewhere. We recognize the word “car” in the same way that we recognize a picture of a car. …..Children memorize all of the time so effortlessly that we are not aware that they are doing it. Only nonsense is difficult to memorize. (Reading Without Nonsense)
He says that many people think that phonics “should work”. Here we are again with that reductionist nonsense which sells publishers’ wares. “We can read -in the sense of understanding print- without producing or imagining sounds.”
When you come down to it, the best translator of “truth” is your own immediate experience of an event. Followed by an event which has been shown/expressed to you by a trusted friend. And so on down the line.
My personal experience has shown me that a well developed, phonics based, remedial reading program can be extremely effective. I’ve used such a program with kids and adults who have learning disabilities, behavior issues, self esteem problems, or just wanted to learn to read after not bothering for a while.
When do you leave the phonics behind? When the students are ready to move beyond it. That’s what was so effective about the program I used. Most of the kids were intimidated by reading. This program was “safe” and moved according to the pace of the student(s).
Comprehension exercises started early on. Very simple passages with simple answers. They become more complex as new skills were mastered.
The kids weren’t bored. They enjoyed reading classes. You can make it interesting to them if you like kids and know how to engage them and when to let up. I actually had one kid say, quietly to himself (he really wasn’t trying to impress anyone), “Wow…I’m really reading”. He had major self-esteem problems and this program that was so heavily phonics based, was perfect for him.
Once again, though: I don’t think this would be a good choice of program for someone who’s been exposed to reading from an early age and has no learning disabilities. Phonics based programs can be very well employed in the area of reading remediation. This is what my personal experience of 22 years teaching has shown me. Balanced literacy works better with students who come from a home life that has a strong reading base already intact.
“All that stuff about what the central idea is and how the figurative language used affects the mood of the piece and what method of development was used in Paragraph 14 so on SHOULD BE INCIDENTAL. Concentration of abstract skills instruction leads, ironically, to instruction that SUBORDINATES the text. The text becomes a mere interchangeable opportunity for application of a “skill” or “strategy.” And so the VERY PURPOSE OF READING is undermined.
These days, I see lesson after lesson after lesson after lesson that basically ignores what’s going on in the text because the author of the lesson has concentrated not on what the text is saying and what one needs to know or understand to follow it but, rather, on a predetermined list of skills or strategies to be imparted.”
EXACTLY! Sadly, the CCLS driven state exam for 4th graders was filled with questions regarding central idea and how the author’s craft was used. It’s unnerving to feel that administration is now forcing us to teach in a way that will not help a child become a deep reader of text, by participating in rich discourse to create meaning of the text, but rather to understand author craft, which is more for teaching writing.
The skills and strategies stuff needs to be treated as INCIDENTAL. Instruction in reading that treats a list of skills or strategies AS THE CURRICULUM is the tail wagging the dog.
Here is what literacy has become, the “Skills of the 21 Century” to be “College and Career Ready”.
Do we really need to analyze a work to death? If the kids don’t pick up every nuance, so be it. Why can’t they read it and make meaning of it on their own terms or with other students. Books written for children by publishers are too artificially complex and they begin to hate reading. Enough with teacher “modeling”.
Here are the skills, where staff developers meet with teachers and might spend hours on just one concept: Main Idea, Facts and Details, Understanding Sequence, Recognizing Cause and Effect, Comparing and Contrasting, Making Predictions, Find Word Meaning in Context, Drawing Conclusions-Making Inferences, Distinguish Between Fact and Opinion, Identify Authors Purpose, Interpreting Figurative Language, Summarizing.
Why can’t they read it and make meaning of it on their own terms?
Answer: because that’s not why people read and write and speak and listen. These are transactions in which one person attempts to communicate to another. Meaning is not simply whatever someone attempts to construct. It is an attempt to bridge an ontological gap between persons. A text does not “mean” whatever someone might chose for it to mean. That notion that people “make meaning . . . on their own terms” confuses two senses of the word “meaning.” Meaning as significance to a person is not the same as meaning as intent.
Bob
Let me know what book you are reading, and I will explain it to you. Are you comfortable with that without “ontological gaps”.
“Meaning as significance to a person is not the same as meaning as intent”. The reader as perfect dummy? How about reader as victim of cultural conditioning and propaganda, which is Common Core?
Joseph, that’s not what I said. I never claimed that anyone necessarily has the one understanding of what what this text means or that ontological gaps do not exist. Neither did I say that the reader is perfect dummy, for clearly, attempting to reconstruct a likely intent is far from being a dumb process.
But equally clearly, Joseph, people write and speak with an intent to communicate, and not to communicate ANYTHING at all (though, of course, there are subtleties there. One should never say never. It’s perfectly possible to produce work that one doesn’t one’s self understand.
Often, in these discussions, people grasp onto a straw man version of the other’s argument. I did not say that reconstructing intent was achievable, only that it is a desirable goal and an essential one in that it respects the function of language for communication. One could say the same of, say, world peace, that it is desirable even if not achievable. People write and speak in order to communicate. That needs to be respected.
Joseph, I believe that our basic ontological situation is that your mind is over there and that my mind is over here and that much of our business on this planet is about bridging that distance. And some of the ways that we have invented for doing that are writing and speaking and various other arts. The idea that a text can mean anything at all that a reader happens to construct does violence to the very possibility of communication. I never said that communication was EASY or that anyone could be said to have cracked it for a given text. That would be absurd. We don’t even understand ourselves and our communications that well. We couldn’t possibly make that claim about others.
You and I are one, thanks Bob
“Make sense on their own” guided by a teacher who is in control of the process and not parroting the skills that will appear on a standardized test. Children can discuss books on their own terms.
If we are doing a good job with reading and writing, why do kids not care to do either? Boring nonsense programs turn kids off to literacy by the 3rd grade. I have seen 2nd graders begging to read, when the nonsense is over. We need them to be good readers and writers on their own terms before we undo this energy with “programs”. Why are we training them like monkeys to be able to be “writers”, when not one of them will become writers. Writers write about what is interesting to them, then they hone their craft. Do I need to know how all of the parts of a car operate in order to be a good driver? I will learn about these parts in the course of my driving, so that I will have full command of the relationship between me and my car.
I am sick to death of seeing lessons on a poem or short story that treat it as a mere opportunity to exercise skill at drawing conclusions, distinguishing fact and opinion, identifying the author’s purpose, summarizing, and so on. These crude lists of skills do not even begin to capture the subtlety of what writers do.
Yes, one can read Ambrose Bierce’s short story “Chickamauga” and do all of these things. But if you approach that story by simply going down this list, you are simply going to erect barriers of abstraction between your students and the text. You will end up doing literature instruction that skips over the literature. The important thing is that the student have the experience of going down the rabbit hole, through the wardrobe, through the rip in the space-time continuum into the world of that story, that the reader have an experience there, an imaginary experience in all its particularity. Then, and only then, does it make sense to talk about some of this stuff–some of these abstractions–but only AS THEY HAPPEN TO COME UP AND HAPPEN TO PROVE USEFUL IN THE ENGAGEMENT WITH THE TEXT.
Ambrose Bierce did not write “Chickamauga” in order to provide opportunities for people to exercise their identifying the author’s purpose skills.
If real imaginative engagement with the story occurs, then the author’s purpose will be plain enough. But if you frame the lesson with “Today we are going to practice our identifying the author’s purpose skills,” you have blasphemed against the work itself by relegating it to unimportance. It is simply an occasion for exercising a skill.
$#*($*(#(&$*@&!!!!!!
I often think that a lot of progress would be made in creating real readers if teachers were forced quite often to discuss literary works with their students without using ANY abstract literary terminology. You are reading The Great Gatsby? Well, talk with your kids about Gatsby and Daisy and Nick and Dr. Eccleberg’s sign and Gatsby’s house and what Gatsby wants and what Daisy wants and so on. And then, if you must use these blithering abstractions about texts, do so sparingly, incidentally, as they come up and are useful, or do so after the fact. Well, guys, here’s what we just did: We discussed motivation.
Engagement with the text, in its concreteness and particularity, must be at the FOREFRONT of our instruction. We must always remember why it is that people would want to read. And it’s not so that they can identify the method of development used in Paragraph 23 of Chapter 16 or so that they can practice their CCSS.ELA.Literacy.RL.11-12.4a skill.
Glad you mentioned Gatsby. You don’t know what is happening, Mr. Jones. http://www.lyrics.astraweb.com/display/147/bob_dylan..highway_61_revisited..ballad_of_a_thin_man.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballad_of_a_Thin_Man
It’s funny you should mention Dylan’s song, for it’s clearly about someone incapable of groking the intent around him–about cluelessness regarding meaning that is obvious to others because they are familiar with the context and conditions of the “text” (using that term in its broad contemporary meaning).
These abstractions about literature SHOULD BE hard won. You can talk about the genre of the pastoral poem after you have engaged a bunch of pastoral poems and have some actual knowledge and experience to work from. In other words, one builds these understandings experientially and inductively, not deductively, by hauling off, at the beginning, with an abstract definition or a hunt for examples of some general thing. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is not a vehicle for stringing together symbols. It’s a communication about something–a vision. What’s the vision of? What does this speaker foresee? Later, once we get that–once we’ve SHARED THAT VISION–we can talk about the technique. Well, we’ve had this amazing experience with this work. How did Yeats pull THAT off?
Very lucid analyses, Bob. You must have had a wonderful class where you and your classmates constructed an understanding of analysis and then practiced the skill on random texts, snack foods and social dilemmas. How else does one develop such an aptitude for analysis?
I think a lot of Americans –especially here in Silicon Valley –feel a powerful need to jettison content because it seems more hindrance than help in this world where the ever-accelerating churn of new technologies and new economic landscapes requires quick learning of new information.
Storing a lot of old facts in the brain would seem to eat up mental bandwidth that needs to be devoted to rapid adaptation. The problem with this view is, a. that if you want to make a human soul and not just an economic cog, you need to transmit cultural knowledge; and b. even an economic cog needs to be literate these days, and to be literate you need to know a ton of general knowledge; and c. mental weight lifting exercises prescribed by SBAC and the 21st C. Skills crowd don’t make you a stronger thinker; it’s pseudo-science. So by obliterating the liberal arts, they’re diminishing us as humans without even making us more effective economic cogs –probably making us even less effective economic cogs.
LOL, Ponderosa. It is possible, of course, to generalize about these matters–to put forward heuristics for approaches and procedures–but they become real in concrete application, and the generalizations should be looked upon with suspicion as the crudities that they are. The flower is not the sum of my ideas about it. That was, possibly, one of the points of the Buddha’s Flower Sermon, I think–a sermon that people will be familiar with if they have acted on the belief that there are some fragments from our human past that have lasted because they were of extraordinary value.
There is no expertise without knowledge–world knowledge and procedural knowledge. Abstract skill is just crude abstraction for describing what we have learned to do through concrete engagement.
I have just challenged the political ambitions of the former Chair of the Education Committee of the NYC Council, Robert Jackson, who was indifferent to testimony about Public School PS 7, which was built on a toxic site of chlorinated solvents. Jackson is looking to become State Senator. I have testified numerous times before his committee with his indifference, where NYC refused to do testing, along with the UFT, the school vapor intrusion system had been turned off without permission from the State. I have alerted local Republican leaders. Bill De Blasio was a Profile in Courage, calling for an investigation when I was fired. These issues can affect literacy development. For data, contact me at j.mugivan@yahoo.com
Yet the first thing Lucy did to keep herself relevant was start workshops and write books on using the Common Core. Her publisher is a subsidiary of Pearson, and the president of Columbia U sat on Pearson’s board. As for Balanced Literacy, I did like it, however I had to adapt it to my students and if that meant teaching phonics, I included it even though the program was firmly against it. It worked beautifully in areas where the children read above level, but also offered struggling students a chance to grow.
The problem with this is that growth is still measured by testing, and Balanced Literacy gives the students a chance to love reading by allowing them to read on their level until they are ready to move on. Common Core refuses to do that. And Farina has no power over testing and its punitive nature against students and teachers. Farina is also showing her true nature by allowing members of the Klein regime to still be on the DoE payroll. She never took a personal interest in school closings and left that decision to the Kleinies.
Thank you Schoolgirl for speaking my thoughts!
Children should be allowed to read on any level.
There are so many statements made on both the earlier and later “Comments” that jar me. As new researchers publish their findings, the teaching of literacy takes on a new perspective changing programs some for the better and some most problematic. Read Lyon’s and David Coleman’s are two examples of a problematic approach which is based on the Behaviorist philosophy. Depending upon which philosophy one buys into will depend which program you agree with. I buy into the Constructivists philosophy – a philosophy that stresses the need of interaction, to be selective, and to be strategic. the The reader needs to interact with visual/perceptual which includes background knowledge along with knowledge of the language structure: semantic, syntactic, and graphophonics systems. It is a selective process bringing together experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities. It is an approach that realizes the need of bringing meaning to print before one can acquire meaning from it. It is a strategic process- strategies used before, during, and after reading to achieve goals. Emannanuel Kant, a philosopher in the18th century purported that new information, new concepts, and new ideas can have meaning only when they can be related to something the individual already knows. Reason without experience is hallow. Experience without reason is aimless. This is vital aspect of literacy which Coleman and his cohorts don’t understand. Dewey stressed the importance of interaction in learning. Learning can’t be on an abstract, passive mode. He stressed the importance of the social aspect- we learn from one another. Frank Smith, a psycholinguist maintained that readers must bring meaning to print rather than expect to receive meaning from it. He too purports that reading is an interactive process. Marie Clay’s methodology reflects the Constructive philosophy. She also stressed the importance of a happy environment, freedom to explore, confidence, feeling of success, a challenge that can be met, hands on, modeling, and utilizing all senses. These conditions are all missing from Coleman’s CCSS. Teachers who were initially guided by the Behaviorist approach and then took on the Constructivist approach are witnesses to common sense approach.
In response to a few statements that jarred me:
Joseph stated:
“I have seen the Lucy Calkins Model in action and it is so controlling, where kids are told to “Turn and Talk” to the person next to them on cue, very behaviorist, …”
Quite the contrary. Turning to ones neighbor to express a response is an activity that encourages interaction which Dewey maintains is so essential. Plus, a good learning program develops listening, speaking, writing, and reading. Students must utilize all their senses. The Behaviorists believe that knowledge can be “poured” into the students cranium. They believe regurgitation of facts is learning. Emphasizes is on memory in lieu of reasoning, synthesizing, forming analogies, and applying what has been learned. The Behaviorists emphasize the phonic approach instead of Shared Reading, Familiar Reading, Guided Reading, and Read-aloud (Listening to more complex language structures instead of trying to force a student to read on a frustration level.) Coleman advocates occasionally to try and have the students function on a higher level. Higher level is a frustration level for too many. The school systems that try and force the students to conform to Colman’s standards instead of meeting the students’ needs are irresponsible to say the least. Life long irreversible damage can be caused when students are asked to read on a frustration level:
– an inferiority complex
– a defeatist attitude.
– a bully; he/she can’t get attention by succeeding so they get attention in other ways
– an eventually a drop out
school gal wrote:” It worked beautifully in areas where the children read above level, but also offered struggling students a chance to grow.”
I maintain that no student should struggle. If a student is struggling that student is trying to read on a frustration level.
“It is a great program for rich kids, but left generations of poor kids in the dust…”
I maintain that it doesn’t matter if a student is poor or rich when learning to read. The key are the parents, along with the creative teacher. Sure poverty interferes if we let it. Where there is a will there is a way. If students don’t have the necessary background for a story, background must be established. What is problematic is ignorant adults be they wealthy or poor. If kids live in a city where the authorities are ignorant about ways to make great readers, there is a problem such as published on
6/9/14 Boy, 9, creates library in his front yard. City, stupid, shuts it down. http://boingboing.net/2014/06/19/boy-9-creates-library-in-his.html
“Thorndike, after studying reading comprehension in 15 countries, discovered two conditions that prevailed in strong readers. All had been read to from an early age and had come from homes that respected education.” Rdg. Teacher March 1989 To the degree parents take and active part in their child’s education to that degree that child will succeed in achieving. “Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” Emilie Buchwald.
Linda Wood stated, ” I have seen children abused in the period in which phonics instruction was forbidden, forced to try to guess at a word by thinking about their own lives…”
That is bizarre. At no time was a teacher forbidden to teach phonics. Whole Language, Whole Word… phonics was not stressed but taught when it appeared feasible. Goodman was accused of teaching the guessing game by those who didn’t read his works and understand his message.
Back to you Joseph. You are so right about phonics. You asked “… at what point do you let go of phonics?”
To teach phonics after second grade reading level is a waste of time. If a student in third grade is reading on a second grade level, aspects of phonics need to be taught if for no other reason than to help encode. Phonics should never dominate the reading lesson – no more than 25% or less. However, you stated that either kids know words when they see them, or they do not. You are forgetting context clues. Children may not know words in isolation but in context all they usually can unlock a word with only the help of the initial consonant.
Ponderosa:I agree with you on teacher talk and about read-alouds being a fantastic way to educate kids.
” “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children. “Commission on Reading in a Nation of Readers
However, I don’t agree with:
“… to be literate you need to know a ton of general knowledge;…” With the technology at ones finger tips, one can tap into the on
line “encyclopedia” in seconds. It is the ability to think critically, to use the higher order thinking skills that is essential.
Joseph: “…Kids need to be writing all of the time, which is more important than reading…”
How can anyone agree with that statement. Reading and writing support each other. Both are important. Writing is very important but to say it is more important than reading appears to me as asinine.
Bob Shepherd: “The skills and strategies stuff needs to be treated as INCIDENTAL. Instruction in reading that treats a list of skills or strategies AS THE CURRICULUM is the tail wagging the dog.”
It is obvious that you are not an elementary teacher. A good teacher illustrates the children’s thinking via graphic organizers, develops their imagination through modeling, probes their thinking through the Socratic method of questioning, makes connection, …all skills and strategies.
Bob Shepherd: “One needs to encourage students TO TAKE THAT TRIP–to put themselves imaginatively, in that place, following the clues in the poem to do that.”
On a primary level we call that modeling – the teacher thinks out loud. It is a higher order thinking skill to imagine and needs practice. It is through the teaching of skills and strategies by a creative, insightful teacher that students can construct meaning in lieu of regurgitating facts.
Bob Shepherd: “The idea that a text can mean anything at all that a reader happens to construct does violence to the very possibility of communication….”
The whole idea of Constructivism recognizes what the children bring to a text their experience. It is through a dialogue they come to an agreement on what a text says or its meaning.
Bob Shepherd, there is a difference between recreational reading and guided reading. Guided reading develops critical thinking skills. Developing critical thinking skills especially of analogies and comparing via the Venn Diagram helps students to think beyond the text relating the message to their own life. Recreational reading teaching us about life.
Mary,
Are you a teacher because you sound more like a researcher than someone who actually is in front of a classroom? If you had bothered to read my comment carefully, I clearly stated it Balanced Literarcy allowed children to read at their own level or what we call “just right books”. My point was that the testing mentality under Common Core does not understand that children learn at different rates. Or do you disagree with that as well?
BTW, if your school paid for a staff developer from Teachers College, you were not allowed to use any phonics-based programs. Some principals actually had to sneak them in. So you owe that commenter an apology as well. If you have a large ELL population, than phonics is an important component no matter the grade level. And yes, we do know how to teach meanings in context. But that has more to do with the unknown (tricky) word even if it is pronounced correctly. And that’s where we use different strategies.
Teachers have to identify why students are struggling. Some may have issues that are best met by special ed. Others might just need more time to reach their level of comprehension. But make no mistake, our students do struggle because as teachers we are forced to follow mandates we don’t agree with.
As or “turn and talk” I agree it’s misunderstood unless you have taken the course work offered by Calkins. But when principals take it, they bring it back as if it’s the Bible when Lucy herself tells you it’s not. Some principals have even timed the mini lessons and gave a negative review if it went one minute over the suggested “10 minutes”.
My principal for instance changed Reading Response Journals to test-prep questions. She refused to read the responses I brought to her that clearly proved the child was relating to the readings. Then again, she was more interested in her bonus. Another principal wouldn’t allow students to use different colored pens in their Writer’s Notebook. And, we were no longer allowed to start seed ideas. In fact we had to hand in a finished piece each month based on a specific genre starting in September. And September’s topic was “memoir” which takes time to develop through the use of touchstone texts. Many teachers handed in “narratives” instead. The principal didn’t even know the difference. That is NOT how the writing process works. Yet this is what we must endure. I bet your “research” doesn’t cover the realities of working in a school where you have no input whatsoever.
Mary, guided reading is simply coaching a kid through the text–pointing out things to attend to. The difference between independent reading and guided reading should be just like the difference between taking a stroll in the park by one’s self and having a guide take you through the park, stopping from time to point things out that you might not have noticed, sometimes to explain them to you or to provide some background, sometimes simply to wait while you engage with what has been drawn to your attention.
To the extent that people are doing a kind of reading that excellent readers do not actually do in the real world when they read a text, they are probably doing something really, really wrong.
I am a lucky guy. I have literate friends who read good books and call me to talk about them. And guess what, our conversations never go like this:
Yes, but Bob, what I am really interested in is your opinion about what method of expository development was used in Paragraph 13 of Chapter 3.
No, Anna, you need to draw a Venn diagram to relate what Pinker is saying to your own life.
Yes, Tom, but explain to me two central ideas that the author presents and how these are related.
Yeah, I hear what you are saying, but what are three examples of figurative language that the author used to help create the tone?
No. Real conversations about real reading NEVER sound like that. Someone reads Jonathan Haidt’s book on moral foundations theory and calls me TO TALK ABOUT WHAT HAIDT HAS TO SAY ABOUT MORAL FOUNDATIONS, not so we can quiz one another about our “meaning construction strategies.”
Such skills and strategies stuff is INCREDIBLY ARTIFICIAL–a weird classroom phenomenon–a bunch of fabrications by literacy teachers that have almost nothing to do with actual reading as it is actually practiced by readers in the real world. It’s the equivalent in reading of what the five-paragraph theme is in writing–a peculiar kind of thing that exists only in some English classes taught by folks who have forgotten the primary transactional purpose of reading and writing–to communicate something, which is the point of doing the reading in the first place and what should be front and center in our discussion and writing about what we read together in a class.
Orwell did not write 1984 in order to provide opportunities for exercise of finding the main idea skills. He wrote it to warn us about how totalitarian states work and to make those warnings extraordinarily vivid to us.
Again, the skills and strategies are not what should be placed front and center.
And, again, there is a BIG DIFFERENCE between meaning as intent and meaning as significance, and it’s important not to muddy these.
And Mary, Kant’s point about those categories was that they functioned automatically–without our having to help them along or strategize about them. They are built into the machinery–perceiving duration or extension, for example. We don’t have to be TAUGHT to experience things as having extension. That’s simply how our operating system works.
I barely understood Kant when I read him in college, but he keeps coming to mind in these discussions about thinking skills.
Love this critique of the Balanced Literacy formula for discussing a book! Very effective.
I find that the chief obstacle that I have in reading Kant is overcoming sheer boredom because of his unrelenting abstraction, mixed with occasional confusion because he has piled abstraction on abstraction to such a point that it is not at all clear–to ANYONE–what the heck, in places, he is talking about. I have to keep reminding myself that he created many of the categories in which people subsequently thought and so is valuable to know for that reason. That’s the reason why every graduate philosophy program has a required Kant course. BTW, I found this really amusing:
Joseph stated:
“I have seen the Lucy Calkins Model in action and it is so controlling, where kids are told to “Turn and Talk” to the person next to them on cue, very behaviorist.”
It’s amazing to see John Dewey used here to attack my statement….
There is no real interaction here for kids, they should be able to talk with each other and in groups throughout the day. If someone says that you must turn to the person next to you on cue and force a conversation on a narrow topic or event in a few minutes under teacher directed control, the message is that children should not be sharing other times unless permitted in a very controlled way. It is boring to do scripted activities and nonsensical.
I have problems with people using the word “higher order thinking skill” without defining “lower order ones”, which seem to prevail in most classrooms, this is a great term for administrators with no knowledge.
Mary you are perfectly conditioned, and teachers don’t have a chance to live a self examined curriculum because their world is the teachers guide to publishers’ textbooks. Venn diagrams and graphic organizers are prison bars for the imagination. They inhibit self actualized writing.
Mary, the first thing to do is to attack everything that you have been conditioned to believe, think of an alternative, and then see if there is any value in using these things further. All curriculum is developed by publishers to sell stuff. teachers need to break away from these orthodoxies, which dumb children down. Your excitement about being in the hands of Lucy Calkins is troubling.
There is a LOT of misuse among educrats and edupundits of this notion of “higher-order thinking.” What commonly happens in education is that people start with a good idea–one of these taxonomies, for example–and then they apply it across the board and extremely crudely and it becomes another hammer for treating everything as if it were a nail. The thinking levels, of course, are laid out in a number of taxonomies. Bloom’s taxonomy used to be the go-to categorization of these “levels of thinking.” The currently fashionable one is DOK.
So now, for example, a writer or editor for an educational publishing house starts with a list that says something like, you need to have 10 questions that cover these six Common Core Standards, and they all have to be DOK 2 or 4. And what would make sense FOR THE GIVEN TEXT is ignored. The Common Core is supposed to be about higher-order thinking and drawing conclusions based on evidence, and so the questions are supposed to be almost exclusively “higher-order” ones. And so the facts get short shrift.
Here’s what Thomas Huxley said about science:
“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.”
Again, one should start with the text and do WHATEVER KIND OF THINKING THAT TEXT REQUIRES, not with a list of types of thinking to be exercised. Doing the latter results in incoherent lessons. In this question the student exercises his or her higher-order “visualizing” skill. In this one the student exercises his or her higher-order “comparing and contrasting” skill. The lesson is no longer driven by the text and by understanding that but by the a priori list of skills to be covered. And that’s incredibly ironic because the Common Core is supposed to represent a great RETURN TO THE TEXT–attention to close reading. The problem, of course, is that educational materials publishers treat the list of abstract skills AS THE CURRICULUM. They are teaching THOSE, not texts.
Silly me, I think that a lesson on The Grapes of Wrath ought to be about The Grapes of Wrath.
You are correct Joseph. There are many ways to incorporate this technique and I always felt Lucy’s program should be altered to fit the needs of the classroom. I hated Turn and Talk when it was presented at the Reading and Writing Institute, but I realized I had been using a similar method for over 20 years called “huddle” when I ran my cooperative classroom. Everything old is new again!!
Teaching is about facilitating “student centered” activities in a broad sense within time and space. People like Calkins look to restrict and dominate time and space with their “teacher centered” scripted time management, and with children on the floor in their designated individual space. The same is done to teachers who adopt these programs.
Some people have come to believe that giving students instruction in a list of vague, abstract “reading comprehension skills” is going to affect, dramatically, students’ reading comprehension. And they end up holding discussions that are all about the skills–now we are going to look for cause-effect relationships, now we are going to look for sequences, now we are going to hunt for the main idea or the theme. And people get so brainwashed with this junk that they often fail to notice how far removed they have gotten from the text and what it is saying and from any sane approach based on the particular text and what it is doing. I see this is textbooks ALL THE TIME–what’s actually important or interesting in the text is skipped over because the lesson is on “cause-and-effect” and there happens to be an example of a cause-and-effect relationship in paragraph six. This is the tail wagging the dog. Instruction in strategies and skills is something that one should do INCIDENTALLY, as it comes up and happens to illuminate a particular line or passage as one engages with what is being said or, in some cases, with a vicarious, imaginative experience.
Introduction to Poetry | By Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
What an ignorant , imbecilic comment I made when Dr. Ravitch first posted “Lucy Calkins Vs David Coleman”! I assumed Lucy Calkins still had a handle on what good teaching was all about. I read Dr. Ravich’s comment but not the article she referred to. I haven’t kept up with Lucy Calkin’s platform (philosophy & methodology.) I am appalled to learn that she “embraced the (CC) standards.”
Schoolgal, I wasn’t attacking you when you made the statement, “… offered struggling students a chance to grow.” I was attacking a prevailing notion. I later read the article and learned that Lucy Calkins made a similar statement which I find problematic. I totally agree with yours and Calkins first statement,
“Balanced Literarcy allowed children to read at their own level or what we call “just right books”. Calkins went on to say, “… that balanced literacy includes “shared texts” at or above grade level, which classes read together and teachers supplement with background information.”
I need further information on that procedure; it appears very problematic for me.
You stated that I sound more like a researcher than someone who actually is in front of a classroom. Let me back track. I started teaching in the midwest with Behaviorism as my guide. I soon thought I knew everything there was to learn about teaching reading. I move to the east coast and accepted a position in the inner city of Newark, NJ. which I terminated after one year because of total frustration. After teaching two more years in NJ I moved to NY. I needed a masters so I focused on the teaching of reading which I thought would be quick and easy. To my chagrin I quickly discovered that I knew nothing about teaching reading. My professors were very patient with me and introduced me to researchers that were guided by a different philosophy – Constructivism as it is know today. As I reflected back on the students that I thought I was helping, I cringed.
Through the years I kept searching for the ideal approach- reading books and The Reading Teacher. It was through The Reading Teacher I was introduced to Mary Clay and her methodology. At that time I was blessed to join a dedicated faculty that went beyond the call of duty. Teachers would go out of state to study Marie Clay’s approach as well as the Reading Collaborative approach. They came back and shared their new knowledge. Teachers wrote grants to support the reading program. Neighboring districts put their heads together and offered workshops on Saturday as well as after school. We had school wide reading functions in the evening for parents and their children- all volunteered. We had workshops for parents- all volunteered. Add to that situation academic freedom- the teachers were free to choose the reading program the district adopted.
Twenty some years ago I felt a need to share what was given to me and I constructed a reading web site for neophytes so they would spared the trauma I went through. Through the years it has taken on many different forms. On the site are my favorite quotes from various educators and philosophers I encountered over the years.
Mary, Just a word of advice, don’t make statements like “jarred me” when you read comments and then go on to name people. You put a target on our backs and we respond in kind.
I never heard of Clay, but I took my reading ed courses over 30 years ago. What I did learn, I learned by watching good teachers. And what I did do was not follow the Teacher’s Guide to a tee. I was one of the first teachers to use cooperative learning at my school. My students enjoyed working together. But at that time, my position didn’t hinge on test scores like they do today. Hence: Teaching to the Test. Instead the principal liked what I accomplished and so did other teachers, students and parents. In fact my first year teaching I was the 3rd teacher for a difficult 4th-grade class. They scared the other two away. I was new, but I also knew I had to rely on common sense rather than someone’s study on the best way to teach reading. Of course I cried each and every day until the class finally came together. It wasn’t as important that I teach them to read…it was more important that they learned school could be a good place, rules must be followed and that I truly cared about them.
When Lucy came along, I did like the writing program, but found it difficult to work with a class of 30+ kids on their “Just Right Book”. It’s insanity. Then schools (and teachers via VAM) were rated on test scores. I couldn’t wait to retire rather than turn into a Stepford Wife and follow a scripted lesson. But the techniques I learned throughout my career did help enhance a student’s understanding of the material. There is no “one” :miracle model” because each and every child is different. A true model wouldn’t measure growth by one high-stakes-test score. A true model would let our students grow at their own rate. But Reformers don’t care. And VAM is a sword hung over our heads. In NYS, if your VAM score is low 2 years in a row, you can be fired. That could put a teacher of a gifted class in quite a lot of trouble when you think about the low rate of growth when these children are at a highest level to begin with. Maybe this will enlighten you on our frustrations. I think Marie Clay would have a difficult time.
Lucy recognized that failing a high-stakes test is not the same as saying a student didn’t progress. However, she did go on to write books on using the Common Core which I wish she didn’t do. Nor did she join the voices of students at Columbia who wanted to oust the college’s president Susan Fuhrman if she didn’t cut her ties to Pearson. Lucy’s publisher is owned by Pearson.
Bob, there may be much research to support your opinion and you may disagree with me, but it is not possible to come to a final conclusion, that I am wrong. All of these entries are matters of opinion. There is much miscue research showing that students are able to read and identify words in the context of the text, that is being used. Reading is about creating meaning. We do it all of the time as adults, where we say a word, when reading, which is incorrect because we “predicted” what the text would say, and quite often, the word is similar to the actual word. I hear adults do it all of the time when they read something aloud. Good readers are those who read often and see these words often, not so much as those who are good “decoders”. Frank Smith says that “phonics will work if you know what the word might be, but not if you have no idea about what you are reading in the first place……We recognize words like we recognize all other familiar objects….The fact that the written word is made up of letters that seem of themselves to be related to the sound is as irrelevant to their recognition as the fact that all automobiles have their model name stuck on them somewhere. We recognize the word “car” in the same way that we recognize a picture of a car. …..Children memorize all of the time so effortlessly that we are not aware that they are doing it. Only nonsense is difficult to memorize. (Reading Without Nonsense)
He says that many people think that phonics “should work”. Here we are again with that reductionist nonsense which sells publishers’ wares. “We can read -in the sense of understanding print- without producing or imagining sounds.”
IME, there is no one “correct” method of teaching reading. It depends on the individual student and his/her interactions with classmates and teacher.
The best remedial reading program I’ve ever used began with a heavy emphasis on phonics and then, gradually, made transitions towards comprehension. The scaffolding was very effectively distributed and the lessons were predictable and “safe”. My kids loved that program and those who put themselves into it became very, very good readers.
My daughter, on the other hand, is the product of balanced literacy. She’s an excellent reader and writer and part of that has to do with the fact that we, as a family, spent lots of time reading to and with her from her early childhood. She had no need of anything close to a remedial reading program. Somehow she “survived” without the use of “close reading”.
Close reading can be effective as a PART of a reading program, but it’s not the be all and end all of anything and it’s certainly not a new idea. Why does everyone have to be “right” about this, anyway? Where’s the flexibility?
Anyone who’s going to say, “…nobody gives a s#*t…” about what my kid thinks (now or later in life) doesn’t deserve a place in any education forum. The fact that we’re actually taking this guy seriously is a very, very sad reflection of where we are, as a nation, at this point in history.
How I regret that a reporter ever overheard me saying that I’m not fond of Coleman’’s Gettysburg Address lesson! Although it is true that I don’t think that lesson represents state-of-the-art literacy instruction, a lot of teaching that i have done over the years is also not the epitome of great instruction. That happens to us all. Coleman’s lesson was distributed years ago, and we’ve all learned a lot since then.
The bigger point is that Coleman is one of the architects of The Common Core. Lately the standards are meeting with mixed reviews, and certainly there have been some problematic consequences to them. Still, I, for one, have found that the Common Core has lifted the level of my teaching in important ways. I am grateful to Dave Coleman for spotlighting the importance of argumentation, of close and critical reading, of content literacy, and of schools developing coherent school-wide approaches to teaching writing. I also applaud the fact that Dave is not just standing on the sidelines of education battles and throwing fruit. He has theories about what he believes will help and is actively working to make a difference. I applaud him for that.
I have no interest in perpetuating wars that are a distraction. None of us has figured out all the answers, and we all have something to learn from each other. I have certainly learned from the work that Dave Coleman has initiated, and I hope he will someday visit some of the schools across New York City to see the great work that is occurring, partly as a result of his leadership.
Meanwhile, Chancellor Farina is right to say that there is more than one pathway to the Common Core, and that the important thing is that we all maintain learning curves that are off the charts.
It’s one thing to be an education theorist or activist whose arguments are subject to critique and revision and stand or fall on their merits and quite another to be one whose notions are MANDATED FOR ALL.
And I do hope that you are not suggesting that those commenting on this blog are “standing on the sidelines and throwing fruit.”
One thing is certain: No one commenting here had his or her half-baked notions suddenly elevated by fiat to the status of mandates that every teacher in the country must follow with every student:
“You will teach every student to identify gerunds and their functions in grade 8–whatever the value of explicit instruction in grammatical forms, however out of any rational instructional sequence this might be, wherever your student might be starting from. And you must do this because it’s going to be on THE TEST.”
The real issue about Common Core is the horrid cloze lessons that suck the oxygen out of an authentic reading experience going down to 2nd grade. These are the “wonderful” Common Core “skills of the 21st Century” Ultimately, this is where administrators will focus their efforts and abuse teachers and children using any creative way of literacy learning. To have anything good to say about the Common Core is disheartening. Go back to your days of ethnographic studies and actually step inside the classrooms and away from your “programs”.
The issue with Farina is her intolerance. Let’s keep perpetuating these wars which are a “distraction” from your program, so that teachers have choices with what they do. If they don’t like your program, Farina will get rid of them, like she did with 80% of her teachers as principal. Let’s challenge all programs, there the truth will find away.
“…I also applaud the fact that Dave is not just standing on the sidelines of education battles and throwing fruit. He has theories about what he believes will help and is actively working to make a difference. I applaud him for that.”
There are many of us in the trenches (far, far from the sidelines) who are doing much more than just “throwing fruit”. We know what does and doesn’t work with the kids we teach. And we know that one size (no matter how “elastic”) does not fit all.
David Coleman’s ability to actively work to make a difference through employing his theories of education come as a direct result of being bankrolled by Bill Gates. These theories and ideas are not novel and, though effective for some, are not going to bring out the best in others.
Coleman’s infamous quote has gotten so much airplay that it’s become almost trite to mention in a forum such as this. So has the fact that K-12 educators and psychologists were left out of the writing process of the CCSS. Yet these and other CCSS related “news” are, all the same, red flags that signal a need for scrutiny.
I’m sure you know, as an educator, that personal narratives and memoirs are effective devices in teaching writing because they spark an interest in the student. Young and old. That’s why those styles are so prevalent in our education system. As a result of this spark of interest, the teacher is given a product which can then be used to teach editing and revision skills. Students move on to other areas of writing, building upon those learned skills. Some end up writing better than others. Writers also continue to work within the genre of personal experience because it’s actually enjoyable to do just that and it helps people to get to know each other and exchange ideas.
Mr. Coleman’s statement would have us believe that personal narratives are all that we teach our kids. This is a simplistic bit of propaganda. A clever move that attracted a lot of attention. Bad press is better than no press at all.
Your track record is impressive, Ms. Calkins, and I admire you for posting your opinions here. I just don’t see the value of an untested set of national standards (and the accompanying curricula/tests being forced on all schools, regardless of past successes or failures. And I, personally, DO give a s#*t about what people feel and think, as do many of my colleagues and friends. Just because Coleman and/or some people think differently doesn’t give him and/or them the right to force such a philosophy on an entire nation of children who might just want to feel that they are important and can make a difference.
Over the years I have noticed that education is as subject to fads as is couture.
I’ve also noticed that one of the keys to becoming and REMAINING a high-powered, well-remunerated education guru is a talent for shape-shifting to accommodate those fads.
And I have often wondered just how insane an edufad–a new, mandated educational approach–would have to be for a well-known, highly remunerated education guru to oppose it.
One of our huge national education gurus used to go around the country giving talks about how we should deemphasize summative testing and do formative testing instead. He made quite a name for himself doing this. But the moment the standardized summative testing dollars started flowing, he had a sudden change of opinion. Not that he announced this as a change, of course. He pretended that he had been a supporter of summative standardized testing all along–that such testing had always been a key component of his vision.
And now, here, we have the author of Small Moments: Personal Narrative Writing commenting on the educational ideas of the fellow who goes about the country talking about what a waste of time personal narrative writing is, the author of books on persuasive writing commenting on the wonderful shift in the Common Core to emphasis on argument.
aie, aie, aie. . . .
One way in which the Common Core differs from previous textbooks and many previously existing state standards is in its promotion of the teaching of Argument as opposed to Persuasion.
A little background on that: In the past, most basal composition texts in the United States had separate units on each of three “modes” of writing: narrative writing, informational or expository writing, and persuasive writing. The authors of the Common Core opted, instead, to label these modes narrative writing, informative writing, and argument because, or so the standards say, they wanted to de-emphasize appeals to emotion and appeals to authority.
I suspect that what’s behind that switch from Persuasion to Argument, ultimately, is a condescending presumption that people need to be taught that reasons–arguments and evidence–matter and that their “feelings” don’t.
However, I think that there are very good reasons to continue to use the traditional term, persuasion. The traditional name for the third mode makes more sense because it is BROADER. Persuasion involves making a case that is BOTH appealing and rational, and often rational BECAUSE it is appealing. Most of the issues about which people disagree have to do with what matters to people. Furthermore, it is precisely what does and does not matter to people–what people care about–that is often the evidence that is most relevant. The authors of the Common Core make the case that the switch from persuasion to argument is important because “college is an argument culture” (Appendix A), and in this they show themselves to be oddly unaware of (or on the indefensible side of) a debate that has raged in the humanities departments of our universities over the past half century over precisely the issue of whether we can and should treat the curriculum in isolation from its human meaning as mattering and the extent to which choosing which facts we attend to and how to frame those facts is a power play and so involves meaning as mattering.
If someone stands before a crowd and tells the assembled guests that “No one gives a $#&*&*$#*&#$!!! what you feel” and then goes on to explain that people are looking, instead, for evidence, he is failing, of course, to recognize that how people feel is, quite frequently, THE VERY EVIDENCE THAT IS RELEVANT. It’s odd that anyone would make such a statement given the intellectual history of the past century. Philosophers have almost all long rejected logical positivism, verificationism, and behaviorism on logical, empirical, and ethical grounds. Anyone who knows anything of 20th-century philosophy and rhetoric should understand that there are powerful and compelling objections to those discredited positions. Here’s an example of such an objection: Hume was wrong in saying that one cannot derive Ought from Is because what matters to people—people’s “oughts”—are themselves observable, demonstrable facts about the world. In fact, one can apply to those “oughts” the same sort of inductive reasoning that one applies to any scientific question. I find that I don’t like to have sticks poked into my eye and that I feel that people shouldn’t do that to me. I make a generalization: People don’t like to have sticks poked into their eyes, and people shouldn’t do that to one another. And the former part of the generalization proves to be repeatedly verified, and the latter part of it follows logically from the first by a simple consistency criterion. Perhaps one who thinks that no one cares about how people feel but that they do care about evidence should go back and take an introductory ethics class before spouting such hoary, discredited nonsense. Of course people give a $@#*$*(*@$!! how they feel and how you feel, and almost no human interaction is free from such concern, including, ironically, an interaction in which someone attempts to make others believe that “no one gives a $&&$@&*!! how you feel.” That’s a self-defeating and so indefensible stance if ever I encountered one.
We cannot, as the CCSS attempts to do, drive a wedge down the middle of ourselves and divorce our rational being from our emotional being, for these are inseparable. Even a method of purely deductive proof–something that could be carried out by a machine–will have been developed and given credence because it yielded results that satisfied, that mattered, that people could depend upon and that, as a consequence, they cared about.
That’s what it is to be human. That’s what Heidegger said our kind of being, in essence, is. It’s caring. It’s giving a $#&$&*#&*!!!.
So, I would suggest to proponents of this Argument versus Persuasion line go read some Heidegger.
The CCSS often reads as though it is touting a simple-minded verificationism. But as one will learning in any intro philosophy class, verification often fails as a criterion for truth. Almost no professional philosophers these days consider themselves verificationists like the A. J. Ayer of Language, Truth, and Logic. At its most extreme, verificationism treats all statements that are neither well-formed formulas in a purely formal system (e.g., arithmetic or logic) nor declarative descriptions of that which is immediately present, including all statements that matter in aesthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics, as nonsense. For example, a verificationist would be forced to say that a statement like “We should not commit genocide” is neither true nor false but meaningless. But such a view fails to take into account that the fact that something’s mattering to an organism is a fact about that organism as surely as its mass or its method of locomotion is. Debate has always dealt with appeals based on formal reasoning and empirical evidence (logos) and and on reasoning from what matters (ethos and pathos). There’s a reason for that. The last thing we should do is remove from debate WHAT MATTERS!!!
Obviously.
For a great treatment of this subject, see Rebecca Goldstein’s wonderful short story “The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish,” from her collection Strange Attractors.
cx: But such a view fails to take into account that something’s mattering to an organism is a fact about that organism as surely as its mass or its typical method of locomotion is.
And, of course, there are VERY STRONG arguments against a simple-minded New Critical approach to texts. Simply “reading closely” is insufficient. Texts exist in context. They are transactional and involve both intention and significance, neither of which resides solely in the text, there to be discovered. If someone says, “You better tie up the loose ends,” it makes a difference whether it’s a macrame instruction or Tony Soprano who is talking.
For powerful arguments regarding the importance of extratextual matters to understanding the intention behind a text, see E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s Validity in Interpretation. For a superb review of many alternatives to New Critical close reading (and for an amusing illustration of these alternatives via various readings of a children’s poem called “Tony the Tow Truck,” see Paul Fry’s superb series of lectures “Introduction to Theory of Literature” from Open Yale Courses.
cx: a macrame instructor
Bob Shepherd ,
I treasure everything you say here. I continue to support the Common Core State Standards in spite of the fact that I agree with you, especially about vapid skills, and in spite of what you say about David Coleman. At some point I hope to explain how I believe the inclusion of subject matter will be like protein for children now starving on a diet of torturous forced distraction.
If I were teaching the Gettysburg Address, I would read it to young children a couple of times a year, without comment. I would tell them the name of the author. No context. Years later, when they began to learn about the Civil War, it would provide them with insight. It is evocative. It’s not art. It’s not even a speech. It’s an account. I’m not trying to say it’s timeless. It’s a point in time.
Linda Wood,
If you were teaching the Gettysburg Address, wouldn’t you want your students to know about Lincoln, who he was? About the Civil War? About the battle and the reasons for Lincoln’s speech that day? How can the Address have any meaning if students know nothing about who wrote it and why?
Linda Wood ~ I have this sneaking suspicion that Coleman LOL whenever his FOLLOWERS PREACH HIS CLOSE READING SERMON. He has no knowledge, research or experience behind peddling the close reading crap down teachers’ throats & wasting children’s time. Who has ever heard of withholding information from children while teaching? Why? Really? Biggest bunch of hooey!!
Teachers across America will tell curious, eager, highly motivated learners that they are not allowed to provide any context to the close reading. It would be in violation of the Gates Gestapo and they would do poorly on Papa Pearson’s Toxic Tests if teachers gave children more information than permitted. Children begging and googling for context. Wanting to share it with classmates, but teachers have to tell them, that that information is off limits, a secret, forbidden, verboten & not to utter one word about it…or, the teacher will get in trouble.
Yup! Sounds about right! Follows the same ‘deep thinking’ congruent with CCSS. Such intellectuals, education experts & highly educated imposters!! Definitely worth following because their roads are covered in gold dust while teachers and children bleed from months of testing.
Yup, makes sense! Can’t help but think Coleman is laughing his head off because he pulled one over on the American people. Hahaha…
Linda, imagine a list of a few thousand questions about the teaching of English.
Should we teaching Orwell’s 1984? Why, or why not?
If so, at what grade? Grade 10? Grade 12? What do we expect students to get from the experience? How should we approach teaching this so that they will have gotten from the experience what we want them to get from it?
Should we teach the alphabet at the same time that we are teaching the phonetic code?
Should we teach the five-paragraph theme format?
Should we copyedit for correctness the writing that students do for us?
How often should a student write?
Now, I submit that the way an individual should answer such questions is to refer to all the relevant information that he or she has–to what he or she knows based on current and past research and scholarship, to what he or she knows about his or her students, to what he or she knows of the rest of the learning progression being implemented, and so on. But here’s how NOT to answer such questions: Don’t think about them. Find out what the PARTY LINE IS, and adhere to that.
It seems, to me, very, very strange to answer such questions based on whether one is or is not a “supporter” of the Common Core. That’s like being a legislator and answering a particular policy question based not on what the actual consequences of policy are likely to be but based on what one thinks one’s political party affiliation demands. It’s like saying I should vote for or against this particular appropriation for this particular bridge based not on the specific merits of the proposal but based on what my political party believes about such matters IN GENERAL. One who makes decisions in that way is not a practical person but an ideologue.
Factionalism about these matters is a terrible mistake forced upon us by across-the-board mandates. We should not be ideologues. We should be thinkers. The question should not be “Is this what the Common Core says?” but “With regard to this particular question, what does research tell us? what do I know from experience? what will be the consequences of this or that course for my students?”
People who write about the Common Core rarely address particular questions. The Common Core says that at several grade levels we should have students look at how the use of figurative language affects tone and mood. Well, should we be doing that? Is that what students should know about about figurative language? Is that how they should approach questions of tone and mood? Should we not pose such questions at all but simply say, “Well, all these questions have been answered for us by the CCSSO?”
Instead, they talk in generalities. They say things like, “The Common Core calls for higher-order thinking” or “The Common Core calls for close reading” or “The Common Core calls for renewed attention to content knowledge.” And there is an ENORMOUS DISCONNECT between these generalities and the actual standards. Where, exactly, does the Common Core call for renewed attention to content knowledge? Can one make this claim based on its saying, in a few places, that students should read Shakespeare and selections from the Federalist papers? The Common Core consists of 1,600 or so enumerated items. A few of these items mention content. Almost all of them are descriptions of abstract skills. Given that there is almost no attention to content in that 1,600-item list, and given that the tests based on the CCSS are tests of skills and not AT ALL of content, how can one make the claim that the CCSS are about renewed attention to content knowledge? And yet this claim is made. And that seems quite odd.
Now, we could debate the approach to the Gettysburg Address that you are suggesting, but surely you know that this is not the approach that Mr. Coleman took to it in his well-known video about teaching that piece. And it seems odd to say that the Gettysburg Address is not art and not a speech, for surely it is both. And surely a close reading of it would suggest that this “Address” (synonym–“speech”) both references a particular time and circumstance and undertaking (“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place”) and all time (“that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause. . . .”)–that there are time-specific and time-independent elements to it.
“…At some point I hope to explain how I believe the inclusion of subject matter will be like protein for children now starving on a diet of torturous forced distraction…”
We are still being fed the lie that there’s an education crisis in the USA and that the CCSS is here to fix it.
The crisis is in the inner city schools where poverty, crime, violence, and a legitimate distrust of “the system” are the norm.
We listen to and rant about Coleman’s slant on the pervasiveness of personal narratives, but never take the time to really address it. As with all propaganda, there is a grain of truth to his statement. I wrote this to Ms Calkins, above and think it bears repeating:
“…personal narratives and memoirs are effective devices in teaching writing because they spark an interest in the student. Young and old. That’s why those styles are so prevalent in our education system. As a result of this spark of interest, the teacher is given a product which can then be used to teach editing and revision skills. Students move on to other areas of writing, building upon those learned skills. Some end up writing better than others. Writers also continue to work within the genre of personal experience because it’s actually enjoyable to do just that and it helps people to get to know each other and exchange ideas.
Mr. Coleman’s statement would have us believe that personal narratives are all that we teach our kids. This is a simplistic bit of propaganda. A clever move that attracted a lot of attention. Bad press is better than no press at all.”
If the CCSS have elevated your teaching abilities, then there is value there for you, Linda. I’ve, personally, been able to make scripted lessons into a fun time for my kids. A teacher can do wonders when he or she is committed to the profession. I just keep coming back to the same thing, however:
We are doing a great job and have been for a long, long time.
Personal narratives are only a part of what we do and we DO, actually, include subject matter. Close reading can be an effective part of a reading program, but it’s only a part of it and, really, isn’t necessary at all for many kids when it comes to developing good reading and writing skills.
The crisis is in the inner city. Why not offer the CCSS to those schools that need them and leave the others alone? Why the mandate for all?
Questions like “How can we reduce the number of grammatical errors in student writing?” and “How can we educate people to understand and use figurative language?” are not ones on which we should have dogmatic views based upon mandates from some central committee–some Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. These should be questions for ongoing research, discussion, and debate. I should be able to put forward my answers to such questions, and others should be free to accept or reject my answers ON THEIR MERITS, understanding that NO ONE HAS THE LAST WORD.
Linda, I am guessing that you are not a teacher.
You say that “someday you hope to explain” Common Core, but you “treasure” everything that is said.
When was subject matter not in the curriculum?
I don’t know if, as a teacher, I would advise the student to use the word “treasure” in this context. Are you with a publisher?
I would rather children learn to enjoy writing, before I would force them into figurative language.
dianeravitch,
I have a lifelong interest in the Civil War, I have a book of Lincoln’s speeches that I keep handy because he writes so eloquently about labor and capitalism and I like to quote him when I’m arguing about those things. I wish every high school student could read William Tecumseh Sherman’s memoirs and Herbert Gutman’s history, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom. I definitely want American kids to know as much as possible about the Civil War.
But I think the Gettysburg Address is a piece of heritage for children. I would give them a copy of it at a young age to hang on to. I would hope they would hear it before they learned about the war. It does provide context. It is powerful enough on its own to increase our understanding of the effect of the war on all our lives and the importance of our history in that moment. I think it is a priceless expression at an indescribably grim time. I think it stands on its own. I also think young children would understand it, whereas the war would be better understood at an older age. I hope our children eventually learn more about the Civil War and slavery than we did.
Linda Wood,
In school many years ago, we all memorized the Gettysburg a address. I too love it. But it helps to know what it was about and to discuss who Lincoln was. And that makes the speech even more beautiful when it has meaning.
Dr. Ravitch,
Thank you for this kind response. I agree with you. In this multi-dimensional struggle for children’s well being, you are the tai chi master of focus, progress, and peacemaking.
I love common core! I am no longer at the mercy of writing workshop, just right books, XD##!(oops I mean daily) five, or other flavor of the month stuff posing as “curriculum.”
CCSS has finally given me the freedom to create and design curriculum that addresses important interesting topics like Civil War (Gettysburg address fits right in), World War 1 in the intermediate grades; in primary grades Los Conquistadores, and Lewis and Clark’s expedition through thematic units, that are created using backward mapping and
The skills? They are being quickly absorbed and owned by students who are so interested in the history and science topics they want to read more (complex text) and write (argumentative and explanatory) to present their NEW learning to peers. Students are learning to be skillful at using language in all 4 Domains. Children are smart and naturally curious, they know when they are learning something interesting and relevant.
Content is important, it’s the reason we go to school at any age.
What I can’t understand is how so many fail to see that a bag of gold has been dropped on our doorstep!
I have always fancied teachers as the real scholars, here is our chance to prove it!
Please free us from this thread. Lilia should have been doing exciting teaching all along.
Take control of your pedagogy. Enough hero worship. May this be the last posting so we can put a stake through both hearts.
Joseph:
I don’t think you get that before CCSS –we (teachers) were MANDATED to follow the flavor of the month programs by the administration of the moment- Walkthroughs/ Learning rounds, and observational checklists conducted by administrators ensured that scripted programs were being implemented weekly at the schools. I used to be on those walkthrough admin teams…
Exciting teaching was defined by the particular strategy being implanted with high fidelity.
Please forgive me, Joseph, but I can’t let this pass and die:
Lilia:
Good for you that you’ve found what you need in the CCSS. Seriously: good for you.
Now: please don’t take it for granted that the rest of the teachers, children, and admins, throughout the ENTIRE United States of America (general and special education), will (or should) (or HAVE TO) experience the same elation.
Or, to put it more bluntly: stop forcing this on everyone. It’s not for everyone. To act as though it is shows a strong degree of selfishness and myopia.
btw, Lilia:
I honestly mean it when I say that it’s good that you’ve found meaning in the CCSS. And I’m sorry if my reply comes across in a mean spirited way. It’s just that I’m tired of this. So tired. For the students I teach, the CCSS and all the tests associated with them are completely meaningless. Yet we’re forced to comply. And schools with high degrees of success MUST comply. They MUST change their programs.
Why?
Bob-
Thanks for your thoughtful reflection on the purpose and value of developing critical lenses in our students. As to the materials you utilize to teach your students about these lenses, have you found a particular text or collection of resources to be particularly effective?