David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, believes that students should analyze difficult text as written, without reference to context or their personal reactions. This blogger disagrees. His blog is vigornotrigor, though you might be tempted to call it Wag the Dog. However, if you google Wag the Dog, you will never find it.
He includes a video of David Coleman, New York State Commissioner John King, and a member of the State Education Department staff named Kate Gerson discussing how to teach Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Coleman, who has never been a teacher, says:
“The first question is for kids as readers, how much can they draw from the text itself, you always want to ask yourself, how can they make do…I think we as readers often decide what can I skip. In other words, I don’t fully get this, but I get it enough to keep moving. I think it’s Ok to say that because you can’t read complicated things without choosing, there are some references that you don’t quite get, that you are not going to follow up on.”
And further:
“These speakers clearly do not realize that many of our slow learning, at-risk, and learning disabled middle school students are not developmentally ready and experienced enough independent readers to make such critical judgment calls when it comes to complex informational text.
“Coleman and crew also fail to grasp that students’ thoughts and feelings matter a great deal. Successful teachers at any grade level are genuinely interested in their students’ lives and the classroom is a safe and welcoming environment where each person’s thoughts and feelings are highly valued and respected.
“Trust is an essential ingredient of good teaching and it will flourish in the classroom when the teacher takes time to learn about the individual needs and interests of each student…..
“Learning unfolds in a safe environment that rewards and values curiosity, innovation, imagination, and risk-taking. A properly designed and implemented education program will nurture student confidence rather than fear, and cultivate hope rather than despair.
“The CCSS close reading strategy demands that all students independently “dive into” and master complex informational text and teachers are discouraged from answering student questions or introducing and reviewing prior knowledge with them.
“This unproven approach directly contradicts Bloom’s Taxonomy which has clearly demonstrated that students will first acquire knowledge before they can progress to comprehension and understanding.
He concludes:
“From an educator’s perspective, the importance of text is not simply how well students can comprehend a reading passage, but how the ideas, ideals, and values expressed in the text are internalized and then implemented by students in real life situations.
“Another way of looking at this issue is to simply ask, what would Martin Luther King, Jr. want our students to do?
“Spend two weeks deconstructing and dissecting the nuance and subtlety of his words and how well he supported his claims, or two weeks applying and teaching his principles in our schools and local communities?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
An exercise in social control. Not only is there little (less than a decade combined) in terms of teaching experience or understanding of child/learner development-there is also an implicit desire to undermine the truly critical thinking, independent and cooperative nature of the people being subjected to this. It’s reducing a segment of the population to adequately skilled followers of directions/instruction. Soldier/servants for the world economy. Guess whose kids get the real education… The “think/reason critically/and lead” education…Yes, it’s a “choice” that’s out there, but who will have that choice?
It’s even more creepy to actually watch
and hear David Coleman say this
infamous “no one gives a sh–” quote
at a speech in an auditorium at the
New York Department of Ed. in April
2012.
Watch how smug and creepy he comes
across… apart from the potty-mouth…
and how the crowd laughs along with
this educational war crime:
Again, Coleman has never taught
a day in his life… those children’s lives
and minds that he and his Common
Core are ruining are mere abstractions or
commodities… like a Nazi with slave
labor imported from an occupied country,…
or a Soviet Five-Year Plan apparitchnik
from the 1930’s contemplating how many
millions will be necessary to starve to
death to create the socialist utopia…
Coleman is stone cold, ice cold… in his
desire to provide mindless drones
to create a capitalist utopia that his
masters have tasked him to create
an educational program for.
HE – MUST – BE – STOPPED!!!!!
Close reading can mean simply thinking about what’s in front of you. But it can also easily become all about hegemony and control–about enforcing a dominant culture reading.
Here’s a little text for some close reading. Two selections from an interview with Dick Hebdige called “Dick Hebdige: Unplugged and Greased Back.” The interviewer is Timothy Dugdale:
Selection 1 (Hebdige and Dugdale are discussing a presentation that Hebdige gave in which he used a lot of clunky, old technology–VHS tapes, for example).
HEBDIGE: Shambling, always. Shamanistic, maybe. You’re trying to help people overcome their terror of things that are out of their control. That are unanticipated. Their terror of the magician who drops the eggs or can’t keep the plates spinning. So there’s a comic, a ludic element to that brinkmanship of catastrophe. The technology dream is all about comfort, like a kid tucked into bed. The digital world is going to help us process information so that we are comfortably in control. And I don’t think knowledge has anything to do with those information processes. Knowledge comes from things breaking down. As Leonard Cohen said, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. To a certain extent, I’m trying to orchestrate little disasters. A bit of comedy, a bit of tension, you’re bringing in elements of theatre and of ritual. It’s definitely not the PowerPoint presentation.
DUGDALE: You’ve found me out! Marcel [O’Gorman, Director of Electronic Critique] and I were plotting to get your slides into a black box and put them into a neat-o PowerPoint nightmare. But watching your presentation, there is a certain ghoulishness to the process, what is this mad bastard up to? What if it doesn’t work?
HEBDIGE: It never works. There’s always some sort of breakdown. People are wont to blame me but it’s not really my fault. They want something to happen without it happening.
DUGDALE: Very McLuhanesque! You’ve found the perfect equilibrium between the technology and your unique physiology.
HEBDIGE: PowerPoint is the ironing out of inconsistencies. It’s the amplification of clarity. And clarity isn’t really what I’m interested in. I want a bit of filth, a bit of opacity because I think knowledge is acquired at some cost. You have to lean forward to understand what’s going in the world. You have to make an effort. And if you’re continually being told what you’re going to hear and then you get a reprise on what you’ve just been told, this is a large part of the problem in a culture where everybody feels it’s their right to feel comfortable all the time. It’s not that I want to make people feel uncomfortable, like in avant-garde theatre of the sixties, but I think a bit of friction and breakage helps you remember that you’re living in time.
Selection 2: Dugdale and Hebdige discuss risk-taking in art. (Robert Frost says in one of his essays that “the beauty of metaphor is that it breaks down.”)
DUGDALE: Or youth and its criminalization. Just look at the fallout from the shootings at Columbine.
HEBDIGE: I’m interested in three trends. One is the infantilization of adult culture. Last night I was watching Day of the Locust on television. I don’t think that film could be made now because it’s so adult, so skeptical, so cynical and critical. Now the prime target audience of film producers and screenwriters in Hollywood is a 13 year-old boy from the San Fernando Valley. That’s what they’re giving to the world, material that they think is appropriate for someone with very little experience. That is literally dumbing down the whole culture. That’s why I’m interested in the Disney “effect.” In some ways, it’s charming, seductive, enjoyable, and light. At another level, though, it’s so empowered now. It’s a massive media corporation. They get children very young and train them.
This is not unconnected to a re-thinking of what citizenship means, replacing the consumer with the citizen. The other side of that is the criminalization of youth. Youths are continually seen as being at risk. All kinds of legislative measures and law-enforcement norms are in place to prevent kids from doing what their baby boomer parents did. There are curfews in place that seem to violate the civil rights of young people. At the same time, young people are subject to enormous pressure to perform well at school, to become model workers when they’re young because it’s a competitive ratrace, nobody’s sure about the future. There’s all this anxiety about getting your children into the best schools. It’s lowering the ratrace to the elementary school level. You’ve got to come out fighting. [big guffaws all around]
DUGDALE: There’s no room to f***-up.
HEBDIGE: Absolutely not. So there’s no art because art always requires the possibility of failure. It’s all very passive-aggressive because the kids are constantly being presented as if they’re potential Columbine killers or mack daddies and cartoon thugs. You can be executed in 17 states at the age of 16. This is the only country in the world that has that on the books. At the same time, you’ve got to look like you’re 35 years old before they’ll sell you a pack of cigarettes. The kids are being put into a terrible double-bind.
The third thing is pathologization of childhood where if children are mischievous or boisterous, they’re diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and are slung on Ritalin until they snap out of it. Instead of the idea that human culture is a negotiated situation, an intersubjective negotiation of difference, it’s as if there’s some bureau dictating that this is the metabolism that the world must have. Everybody’s got to be happy so you get this dream about homogenizing the human race, to get rid of turbulent character traits and metabolisms which used to produce art and conflict and happiness.
I’m quoting this because the typical Coleman model is one in which he basically stands in front of a group of students and mansplains the text. There’s a reading. It’s simple. He knows it. They don’t. And they can’t, because they haven’t the tools, yet, and so that confers a great deal of power to control the reading, to enforce one.
To enforce on that can be put in a bullet list in a PowerPoint slide.
Now, I’m someone who believes that texts have intended meanings, generally, and that groking those is a large part of what reading is about. But it’s important to be clear that this kind of dynamic that Hebdige is critiquing can take place–in fact, does take place, all the time. One of the reasons why the Coleman videos are so off-putting is that they are such pure examples of what horrifies Hebdige.
cx: To enforce one (a reading) that can be put on a PowerPoint slide.
Thanks for that reading, Bob!
Do you have a link for the complete interview?
Thanks in advance!
Duane, here’s the link to the full interview with Dick Hebdige. He’s the author of Subculture: The Meaning of Style. He’s one of the leading figures in the much-maligned Cultural Studies movement.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/postid/pid9999.0004.102/–dick-hebdige-unplugged-and-greased-back?rgn=main;view=fulltext
Thanks,
Quite an interesting chap that Hebdige!
Él es un tipo interesante. Su libro se ocupa de tres subculturas juveniles de los años 80. Estoy leyendo el libro ahora. La sección que estoy mirando ahora se ocupa de la cultura punk y sus relaciones con la religión Rastafari, la cultura juvenil británica negro, glam rock, etc
Thank you, thank you, thank you for the quote! It’s driven me nuts all these years when the teaching/PD model has been “This is what I’m going to tell you, here it is, and this is what I just told you. They lose me at hello.
Thanks for getting my brain in gear early this morning, Bob! I miss reading provocative texts such as this. I am always appreciative of the thought provoking information that you share with us.
In my district the “close read” is being pushed at every PD session, with little thought to whether it is appropriate for our mostly high poverty students. The students rarely have the background knowledge or vocabulary exposure to connect to any text. What is typically diagnosed by a Dibels test as a comprehension problem is usually a deficit in vocabulary. If you take the time to interact with the student through probing questions, then you find that they are able to comprehend the text with a little background information. But standardized tests that “measure” achievement don’t allow for such luxury as human interaction.
Close reading is the death of reading for pleasure and for critical thinking. It is intended for the worker bees to read the manual and ask no questions. Just do as you are told, so corporate America can make their billions.
Thank you David Coleman, but no thanks. I personally do care what my students are thinking AND feeling. I want my students to rise up and rage against the machine. I want them to participate in their democracy.
Standardized tests that “measure” achievement don’t allow for such luxury as human interaction.
This is a profound statement.
What needs “close reading” are these unexamined notions: standard, assessment, etc.
It’s all in preparation for the test – the whole curriculum is one big test prep. They have once again changed the NY State ELA Regents exams. Students are now instructed to “closely read” and the amount of readings has tripled. http://www.nysedregents.org/hsela/
This is the Center For American Progress recommendations on Common Core testing:
“Continue to improve and implement educator evaluation and support systems but use a gradual three-year plan to incorporate high-stakes consequences for teachers and students that are based on the new Common Core-aligned assessments.”
Note: “high stakes consequences for teachers AND students”
What are the planned high stakes consequences for students? Shouldn’t that have been debated/discussed before states adopted these tests?
The truth is none of these think tanks or non-profit “consortiums” will have any control over how these tests are used (other than, obviously, a use that is barred by existing state or federal law).
They have no earthly idea what any state legislature or governor will do with this testing. I assume my state will use the results to hold 3rd graders back because we have adopted the ridiculous and gimmicky “third grade reading guarantee”.
http://www.americanprogress.org/press/release/2014/06/25/92698/release-cap-proposes-1-2-3-approach-to-use-common-core-test-results-in-teacher-evaluations/
Sent from my iPad
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It’s just hard for me to take “close reading” and “critical thinking” seriously coming from the US Department of Ed.
They are devout believers in the VAM formula, which seems to me to be very controversial and not at all a settled issue, and Arne Duncan repeats one-sided slogans about the “skills gap” as if it is 100% valid and not at all debateable, and that’s simply not true. There’s a lot of debate among economists on the “skills gap”. Not in DC apparently, but there IS a lot of debate. Duncan shouldn’t present it as fact. The Governor of Wisconsin relying on it to explain his poor job numbers doesn’t make it “true”, it makes it politically and ideologically expedient for the Governor of Wisconsin.
I don’t see a whole lot of “close reading” and “critical thinking” coming from the people promoting these tests. That matters. One can’t ask someone else to do something one won’t do.
When will VAM be applied to their job performance?
Hah! Never.
I was reading about Rocketship’s experiment with 100 student classes.
Any manager reading this should laugh, because managers reported on their own experiment. Questionable! 🙂
Guess who is responsible for the failure of Rocketship’s experiment on low income kids? I’ll give you a hint. It isn’t the managers or the people who came up with the experiment:
“Making a “flexible classroom” work requires a high degree of teacher expertise, along with extensive training and coaching. Currently, the profession is not set up to develop such experts early on in a teacher’s career. Most new teacher rely on pre-determined schedules and procedures, with clearly defined expectations about their work, in order to focus on building basic teaching skills. Without these structures, it becomes difficult for a novice teacher to exercise command of a classroom.”
Teachers! Again! Front-line employees. Now there’s a shocker! The managers say the front-line employees didn’t do it right.
https://www.edsurge.com/n/2014-07-15-lessons-from-rocketship-s-100-student-classroom-model?utm_content=bufferd5c69&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Thank you, Diane, for posting this aspect of Common Core ELA. I appreciate the information and facts about how these standards came to be and the “thinking” behind them. It helps me to put the standards in the proper perspective.
I don’t know what the fate of CCSS in Ohio will be, but I’m not waiting to find out. I’ll use the standards as a guide for me and my second grade students. I’ll continue turning to the real experts, though, for targeted instruction and effective and researched educational practices. Some of my mentors are Sharon Tabersky, Lucy Calkins, Nancie Atwell, Tanny MacGregor, Ann Marie Corgill, Richard Allington, Patricia Cunningham, Ellin Oliver Keene, Stephanie Harvey, Regie Routman, Fountas & Pinnell, Tim Rasinski…oh my, look at the numbers of mentors! And there are many, many more available to me and my colleagues across the country who can guide us in maintaining the human aspect of teaching and learning.
Most, if not all, of these mentors have years and years of professional training and experience within the classroom, actually interacting with students. Teaching AND learning. I do not know any of my mentors personally, but if their resources include long-term and wide bodies of research and actual experiences with what they are advocating, then using these tools is the next best thing to knowing them on a personal level. For 26 years I’ve been learning from them AND my students.
Sadly, not all of my colleagues across the country have as much freedom as I do to use, in their classrooms, what these mentors have to offer. It is my hope and dream that all teachers can at least use mentors to help bring, or maintain, that human element into their classrooms. Some resources that help me are: Responsive Classroom, Ruth Charney’s book Teaching Children to Care, and Peter Johnston’s book titled Choice Words. To implement Responsive Classroom successfully and keeping its integrity intact, training is a must, which our district no longer supports…one of MANY important initiatives/practices to leave our district.
Just noting that this teacher didn’t list Louisa Moats as one of her “real experts” and mentors…Moats (a Special Education expert) is one reason DIBELs is used so much in the US (a throwback to NCLB/Reading First days). I’d venture a guess that NONE of the experts this teacher listed would use DIBELs. My hope is that teachers like this one stick to their principles and teach with children in mind. I also hope this post encourages other teachers to read the books listed!!
More on DIBELs – http://www.fairtest.org/dibels-pedagogy-absurd-hurts-children
I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the Connecticut legislators has had the “help” of Jeb Bush’s FEE. The K-3 Reading “expert” on the FEE staff is – yup, you guessed it – a former Reading First promoter from the NCLB days!!
More on Moats’ influence on Reading Tests and Programs AND Teacher Prep Programs
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/08/21/how-the-reading-wars-are-being-reignited/
“The National Council of Teacher Quality’s recent report on teacher preparation programs claims that the majority of reading textbooks included on early-literacy course syllabi were either “partly or wholly unscientific.” The three “reading experts” behind the council’s evaluation of textbooks have one very troubling thing in common: They all worked as trainers for Louisa Moats’ Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading program (LETRS).”
I am with you both, PearlEssence and Colorado teacher. Those experts are my mentors, too. Moats’ criticism of balanced literacy and her push for decoding before comprehension is scary. Our building assesses children’s reading by counting words per minute and how accurately our children decode nonsense words. Two assessments that Moats supports and encourages. Easy to assess and you can make cool graphs with that data, but really? Many classroom teachers accept what is going on and then close the door use DRAs, running records and other authentic ways to assess. This climate of high stakes testing has caused many administrators to only value what can be easily measured.
My daughter just finished 9th grade and of all aspects of the CC the close reading to me seems the most damaging. The two of us figured out a compromise as she finds all the annotating and text-marking make it impossible to comprehend a story. She now reads the materials and then goes back and underlines and adds the comments. I see that the common core ELA standards cuts way back on the amount that the kids read since the close reading is so time-consuming. It’s hard to know what to do about it. I’m sure that this is so stupid that it’ll disappear but probably not soon enough.
Charter school lobbyists in Michigan defend complete lack of transparency and accountability for public funds and insist it isn’t about quality, it’s about “choice!”
They’ve now gone full Milton Friedman, which was probably predictable. Where are the “liberal” ed reformers in Michigan and the Democrats who backed this? Why don’t they have any influence in ed reform circles?
This whole “movement” is completely dominated by conservatives.
http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/20281#MichEd
Click to access ExitExam_FINAL.pdf
So here’s how state exit exams could align with Common Core testing. States could use the CC tests as the exit exam and apply it to students who had little or no exposure to the Common Core until high school.
Apparently no one thought to put safeguards against this use into the state law that facilitates adoption of the Common Core testing. Turns out “building the plane in the air” carries a lot of risk for students, although not for policy-makers.
The critical issue is–who shall decide for whom? Is this a dispute that should be decided by a “expert” panel, for all American classrooms and schools?
Exactly. Well said! I know that in my years as a student, I had teachers and professors who took many different approaches, and I benefited enormously from those varying models. I have more sympathy for the close reading model than most do, but the New Critical theory on which it is based is discredited hokum.
Enough of the new American Lysenkoism. The last thing we need is some Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth telling us what we can teach, when, to whom, and how. And those quotation marks that you put around the word expert definitely apply in this case. The CCSS for ELA is the work of amateurs.
cx: are the work of amateurs.
What a wonderful post, Diane.
I used a tool to help kids to find their own meaning in anything they read, especially difficult text. Each week, they wrote a letter to me, called a “reader’s letter” designed after Nancy Atwell’s tool. I read her book “in The Middle” just before writing the curriculum for the 6th and 7th grade at East Side Middle School. I was given nothing but a room… no materials, no guidelines… but as an experienced teacher I knew the outcomes expected for 12 and 13 year old children. This seemed a way to get them to make meaning, and begin the discussion as we examined together the actual words King used to express his conviction.
The students’ letters, by the way, over 8 years were so extraordinary, I had a book offer to explain how ‘I got’ kids to speak so clearly on paper about what they discovered in text.
It is easy to GET kids to tell you what they think and then help them to seek deeper meaning… just ask them to tell you. With 130 or more kids, the letters let me hear each one.
BTW: The standards research team identified those letters as a unique tool for learning.
It seems that some of the thinking guiding the development of the CCSS comes from a desire to control an individuals learning with a precision that does not exist in nature. This impulse reflects a lack of tolerance and awareness of the balance between how a teacher teaches, and how a student learns.
It’s developmentally natural for children to learn to walk over a range of months, not all at the same time. Likewise, given the natural unfolding of a child’s cognitive ability, what can, and do we, as teachers, control? When I taught reading to first graders I was struck by the fact that while I was providing the structure, the material, and the environment to learn how to read, the actual learning was being done by the students. Those that were cognitively ready grabbed onto the content in the way that a young monkey grabs onto a tree branch. The capacity for the abstract use of symbol needed for learning how to read, was in a state of readiness for these students. It’s also true that, for a range of reasons, many students are not developmentally ready to read, and need more time, or other supports. This feature of being ready to learn does not apply only to emergent readers, but, is a significant portion of what all teaching is.
This is not an argument against national standards, but against the corporate, and thus, political impulse to turn public education into a commodity.
The CCSS and, especially, it’s associated high stakes testing, become a template into which all learning has to fit, without the discretion or tolerance needed to accommodate genuine learning.
Too many policy makers running education reform significantly lack teaching experience and, consequently, have not developed a feeling for how students learn. When it comes to teaching, Duncan, Coleman and King live in a world of ideas, as apposed to a world rooted in experience.
Well said!
How is close reading different than reading with strong comprehension? Coleman wants claims about the text to be based on the text. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve seen myriad adults who are incapable of this. Put a poem or philosophy article in front of many adults –even college graduates –and they’ll often fail to understand. Worse, they’ll create unfounded interpretations and not even realize how off-base they are. This is a travesty of reading and Coleman is right to attack it. The problem is that neither Coleman nor his acolytes seem to understand HOW to enable humans to read with comprehension. Merely practicing reading difficult texts won’t do the trick.
Merely practicing reading difficult texts won’t do the trick.
Indeed.
And, again, texts exist in context, and all that is necessary for understanding either intent or significance is not going to be in the text itself. Anyone who thinks that is true knows nothing of language and how it works. Background knowledge is key, as you often point out on this blog.
As Bob Shepherd said in an older post – there are many ways in and out of a text. A knowledgeable teacher interacts with students and opens windows. Teaching is both an art and a science.
Excellent post, Ponderosa. Coleman seems to believe both that readings of texts should be text-bases and that it’s a great idea to skip over allusions and so forth if one doesn’t understand them. Truly baffling. Electing not skip elements of a text is not close reading.
As a teacher, I always have students answer study guide questions when they read. I have designed these questions to bring out important points in the reading. Yes, I decide what those points are because I’m the instructor, but that doesn’t generally mean that students should read only the part of the text where the answer lies– doing so usually isn’t enough for a coplete or thoughtful response anyway.
The other thing they are required to do is look up anything they don’t understand, and read all assignments until they do understand them. Then thinking about how they might relate to the text personally can come after that.
One of the huge problems is that this approach ends up, in practice, in the actual CCSS lessons being produced, to be distorting of the pedagogy appropriate to a given text. There is no one way into a text.
Here are four of the most common distortions that I am seeing in CCSS lessons:
1. No context is provided, and so the student, not having that context, is at a complete loss.
2. The lesson skips over entirely what is being communicated and concentrates only on formal elements exemplified by/in the text.
3. The lesson ignores everything about the text but whatever happens to be the topic or topics raised by the particular standard or standards being “taught.”
4. In order to examine the text in minute detail–to read it closely–only a snippet is provided.
I see this kind of thing again and again and again in CCSS lessons. I have reviewed hundreds of new CCSS products and LDC modules, and they TYPICALLY suffer terribly from one or more of these problems.
If the work is a literary text, it’s very important that the reader “take the trip” into that imaginary experience. Instruction must encourage and assist that. The student needs to fall down that rabbit hole, step through that wardrobe, into the world of the text and experience it. Lessons that plunge immediately into looking at the context clues that one can use to decipher the meaning of some word in paragraph 3 often skip over this.
The more foreign the text is, the more important this is to understanding. When I do Shakespeare with kids, I typically have them watch and act pieces of works long before we do any sort of close analysis. Plunging immediately into line-by-line explication is a sure way to kill it for them. That comes later.
And how the hell is this supposed to get kids ready for college and career? It is Orwellian in its very essence. Imagine doing a close reading of 1984. It would be metaOrwellian.
That “college and career” thing kills me. Yup. This course will prepare you to be a cosmetologist or a cosmologist.
LHP: to answer your question, careful and thorough reading of tough texts is exactly what you have to do in college and careers, so there is some logic to Coleman’s dream of starting kids off with this stuff in first grade. The problem is, he’s blind to the invisible ingredients. To grasp and take apart a David Brooks op-ed, for example, you need to have broad knowledge of the world and words, as Bob Shepherd , E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham say, not just a generic “close reading” skill (this is a mythological entity, a term that has no existing referent). This is the invisible ingredient. Ergo to make a kid capable of grasping and interrogating that David Brooks piece (and hopefully debunking it!), you need to start telling the kid about the world and the words used to describe it. THIS is what kids need to begin in first grade, not close reading, which for a six year old is nothing more than aping an expert reader.
Oh, I have an idea. Why don’t teachers share Coleman’s pet theory video with students and see if his teaching makes sense. If so, let’s see how teachers and students would react to his speech as close reading exercise(!) It’s supposed to be much easier than King’s speeches because he’s suggesting his close-reading principle is universally applicable to all schools across the nation?
That’s a good idea, Ken. Especially since Coleman seems to believe both that reading texts closely is important and that skipping over things you don’t know is acceptable.
The contradiction will make for an interesting classroom discussion.
Close Reading is completely developmentally inappropriate for my 1st graders who are just learning how to read.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The ‘Close Reading’ method itself, like anything else you might learn about, must at least be tested against its historical context to determine whether it has any value at all to the everyday reader, let alone become a guiding principle in public-school ELA. It is lifted in its entirety from ‘The New Criticism” of the 1940’s-’50’s, tho it was applied primarily to poetry, secondarily to literature, not to non-fiction. It was a radical attempt to counterbalance the excesses to which the lit-crit pendulum had swung in the opposite direction under 19thc. German methods. And so it goes. The lit-crit field is replete with extreme and esoteric methods which have had their followers (take deconstructionism– please 😉 they are essentially philosophies of interest to scholars, without application to the K-12 classroom.
The ‘Close Reading’ kernel expressed by Coleman in the demo on the MLK letter– as the blogger puts it, “a “discipline”.. that children are.. denied the opportunity to make sense of difficult text by drawing upon their own life experiences and understandings”– is undoubtedly as a mom above says “so stupid that it’ll disappear but probably not soon enough.”
Do we really need to talk about why it’s important for learners to be free to relate new material to what they already know &/or have experienced? If so, here’s an example from my preschool [pre-lit] world lang classes. You’re going to teach the colors in Spanish. Teacher A has the kids memorize a song that goes, ‘rojo’ is red, ‘azul’ is blue, (etc). Teacher B personalizes it by inserting after each line of the song, “¿Quién lleva rojo? ¡Levántete!” (who’s wearing read? stand up!)… Whose students learn the colors?
“David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, believes that students should analyze difficult text as written, without reference to context or their personal reactions.” Asinine!
Frank Smith, a psycholinguist, maintained that one must bring meaning to print before one can acquire meaning from it. As we become fluent readers we learn to rely more on what we already know, on what is behind the eyeballs and less on the print on the page in front of us.
Researchers have emphasized, what students already know about the content is one of the strongest indicators of how well they will learn new information. Constructivists, encourage students to interact with the text by activating prior knowledge, and throughout the text, question, predict, and analyze as they read. If, for example, a student has no background with the new concepts being developed, the background must first be developed via discussion, photos, video, a class trip etc.
Comprehension occurs when readers integrate the text and prior knowledge. Linking is a crucial tool. It helps students understand, remember as well as retrieve.
We must relate all new knowledge to the students’ experience.
Responding takes on many more forms than just answering questions. Making applications, analogies, writing, illustrating, drama… all are very important. Constructivists want children to make connections – to self, another text, and the world around them. One problem Coleman and his cohorts is their belief that kindergarten and first graders are not capable of higher order thinking. But I say, ask if they like the main character; why or why not?- Evaluation. Students as young as kindergarten and first graders love to have their brains picked. They love to predict- a sign that they have knowledge about the topic. Their responses and contribution to a Venn Diagram – comparing their life to the life of the characters or a situation- will knock the teacher’s socks off. Dramatizing fine tunes their awareness, interpretation, and imagining skills, helping them step into the shoes of the characters. Drama effectively integrates language arts -speaking, writing, and listening but Common Core doesn’t value drama.
Regurgitating what print is saying is not reading.
Application is key; if a student can apply he/she understands.
Close reading is an impossibility. Reading is an extension of oral language. When one listens to another, they constantly monitor their thought processes for understanding. The listener may pose questions or arguments based on prior knowledge. Reading is the same. Good readers moniter their understanding of the text. They may draw from many sources but in the end it is understood from the readers perspective. The reader may ask questions and pose arguments based on their own prior knowledge. Separation Of the readers prior experience and knowledge is not possible.
Where do these people come from? It’s getting beyond absurd. We need to take a close look at our next elections and put the right people in power who can put an end to this absurd nonsense. I see students now who have graduated, working at take-out restaurants, and they don’t know how to count change correctly. Our next generations of adults will not know how to think or figure things out for themselves.
Jon,
The problem is not new. Sexy-but-false ideas have been seducing education leaders and teachers for at least one hundred years (see Diane Ravitch’s Left Back). Newspapers as early as the 40’s were decrying the anti-knowledge bias of progressive education (today rebranded as “constructivism”):
http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2014/07/15/if-only-we-had-listened/
The extent to which our own schooling was any good is about the extent to which our teachers ignored the dictates of progressivism and other half-baked theories. Teaching “Common Core-style”, as it’s coming to be understood, is not 100% bad, but it’s based on another half-baked understanding of education.
Ponderosa:
Do you have any knowledge of how E. D. Hirsch progressed from earning a diploma at the Todd School for Boys to becoming one of John Dewey’s harshest critics? Other students who attended the Todd School were Gahan Wilson (famous cartoonist), Robert Wilson (founder of Fermilab), Joe Granville (stock market personality and technical analyst), and Orson Welles, who credited the school and its headmaster Roger Hill for his later success.
What a horrible thing it must have been for these giants to have had a progressive education! I wonder how Professor Hirsch came to turn against the idea. As for progressive education and constructivism being “anti-knowledge,” I’d like to know where that misconception came from, and why you’re so intent on spreading it.
Here’s some more info on this den of progressivism that stayed open for over 100 years in Woodstock, Illinois, the place Orson Welles referred to as his hometown:
Click to access ToddSchoolHistoryWoodstock.pdf
Randall, I suggest you and any reflexive critics of Hirsch read Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit. If you’ve already read it, I’d be interested to know what parts of his argument there you find weak.
Progressive education is harmless to those (i.e. the upper class) who get vast quantities of background knowledge at home. It’s disastrous for kids, like myself, who come from non-elite families. We need to acquire at school the core knowledge that the rich get at home.
Ponderosa:
Last year I spent quite a few hours reading and reflecting on Professor Hirsch’s work, especially The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Although I enjoyed going through the entries, brushing up on topics I was familiar with and noting the ones I’d never heard of, I think it’s a wretched book. I carried two of his other books around for weeks, but when they came due at the library a second time I just didn’t have the heart to renew them. But I’ll take your assignment and report back to you later.
You say, “We need to acquire at school the core knowledge that the rich get at home.” Thanks for putting in a nutshell several of the major flaws in Hirsch’s approach. To imagine that “the rich,” unless they’re tutored in academic subjects from birth, receive the equivalent of a formal school curriculum at home is just ridiculous. What really poor kids may miss in the home is the richness of experience that forms the basis for language and learning that many affluent kids enjoy. I believe that if experiential learning is good for affluent kids, it’s probably even better for poor kids. The solution to the problem of kids growing up with a deficit of informal learning and planned enrichment experiences is NOT to present them with a set body of academic topics once they get to school (and expect them to master it).
My family didn’t have any money either. What we did have was copy of Compton’s Encyclopedia, 1953 edition, and the expectation that the kids would go to college. And our small town had a one-room storefront library. We later moved to an affluent suburb, where the resources were deeper. As I went through each of these school systems some of my best learning resulted from the vestiges of progressive education that were still in place, along with self-directed learning opportunities that opened up during the late 60s. Throughout my schooling, I learned the most by pursuing my own interests, inspired by a nearly unbroken string of good teachers (some truly great) that started in kindergarten. The curriculum had an impact, but it wasn’t the essential ingredient. Hirsch, by contrast, believes that the school’s curriculum is more important than its people (including, apparently, the student’s personal interests and desire to learn).
Ponderosa – I’m with Randel – having taught young (mostly language impoverished) children to read for 30 years and having read the research on the gap in the amount of language (as in pure # of words heard) children have when entering school I, too, think it’s not what you’re learning but THAT you’re immersed in a language rich environment and learning something as you learn how to learn and that learning has joys and benefits.
YOU got it right!
Like any skill, PRACTICE IS THE KEY.
Tru playing an instrument or even riding a bike…repetition makes it work… and if you use only 500 words,and if you hear (on tv, or at home) only 1000 words, and if SCHOOL DOES NOT IMMERSE YOU IN LANGUAGE, then all the test prep in the world won’t make a difference in the PERFORMANCE.
M y grandkids, home-schooled in Texas. are immersed in the language of Shakespeare’s time, where Elizabethans used and grasped 50,000 words. My daughter in law, their mother Andee Kinzy (an actress-flmaker) created an improvisational theater. After years immersed in that rich language, my grandkids speak with erudition that would be the envy of high school kids. At eight, my grandson has a huge vocabulary and uses language with a facility that comes only from PRACTICE SPEAKING.
Here is the link to the site, and it will knock you out ( and BTW, Hamleta is my granddaughter, Zia , who was 10 when she played that role, and 9, when she played Prospera. She has also played SHYLOCK… ( reversing the trend for males to play females)
http://improvedshakespeare.wordpress.com
This is some photos from As You Like It… Yes, they are having fun. NO, there is nO test-prep, or even vocabulary lessons… it all is learned by LISTENING AND SPEAKING! Oh dear…there is that pesky whole language ‘there’ again.
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.752278624802836.1073741843.356625077701528&type=1
And by the way, I was the NYS English Council’s 1998 Educator of Excellence,
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
for my work in getting 13 year old kids to speak and write in ways that allowed them to ace NYC standardized tests, win every writing competition they entered, and accepted to the top high schools…and I never gave a test ( a few quizzes to keep them on their toes, but the EVALUATION AND ASSESSMENT was portfolio.
I immersed them ins rods from day one, for ten months… speaking and writing and LISTENING to me, to each other and listening to plays and poetry…and…. drowned in words!
Randall,
I’m glad you’ll read The Knowledge Deficit. I’ve never read the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, so I cannot defend or comment on it.
What I mean by “learning at home” is three fold. One part of this learning comes from the flood of rich verbiage in professional homes that CO Teacher alludes to –this nutrient rich broth imparts thousands or millions of bytes of knowledge (about words and the world the words refer to) implicitly in kids’ minds. The second part is the straight-ahead explicit didactic instruction that professional parents bombard their kids with. I don’t have kids, but I listen. I listen to conversations between yuppie parents and their kids at the gringo Mex restaurant in my affluent neighborhood. I hear parents giving little mini-lectures and explanations all the time. I once heard a dad telling a 7 year old about Bali. There is a LOT of unacknowledged lecturing that goes on in these households. The third part of the learning at home is the instilling of pro-academic values and habits.
CO Teacher, we don’t need to “learn how to learn” –that’s what our brains are designed to do. What we need is…to LEARN. That’s what’s not happening in too many homes and in too many schools. The more you know, the easier it is to learn –prior knowledge is like a wad of mental velcro. The bigger that wad, the faster you pick up new knowledge. This is what Hirsch calls the Matthew Effect –to him who has, more shall be added; to him who has not, more shall be taken away –or something to that effect. Schools that don’t build up this wad of mental velcro in poor kids’ heads are hobbling them in the race with professionals’ kids.
Ponderosa:
I just checked The Knowledge Deficit out of the library. I’ll do my best to get through it this time. The book I want to finish first is Creativity, Inc., by Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace. It’s the story of Pixar, with the founding president’s reflections on the company’s struggles and successes. Self-appointed “education reformers” ought to read it. I’ve found very few similarities between their suspect ideas and what has worked for a “learning organization” like Pixar. Not sure if Catmull uses that exact term, but i think it fits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_organization . . .
A recent Chronicle of HE review of research by Emory psychologists, Robin Fivush and Patricia Bauer, underscores the crucial importance personal narrative plays in developing child memory and identity. David Coleman’s quick writing of CCSS/ELA,
without input from representatives of the core academic fields such as english, sociology, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, etc., is doomed to fail. Best
case scenario…revisit and revise CCSS for “college readiness” with an extensive
committee of higher education academics, PS-12 educators, and parents deeply
involved. Perhaps, some upcoming legislative and executive branch candidates, could
embrace this compromise!