Bob Shepherd, the brilliant polymath and man of many interests and talents, has had a long and distinguished career in educational publishing. He has developed assessments, written textbooks, and ended his career as a classroom teacher in Florida. I defer to his superior knowledge on almost every subject.
Pour yourself another cup of coffee and sit back for a long read about literacy and how it is acquired.
He wrote about the flaws in the teaching of reading in an essay that begins with these words:
An Essay Touching upon a Few of the Many Reasons Why the Current Standards-and-Testing Approach Doesn’t Work in ELA
NB: For all children, but especially for the one for whom learning to read is going to be difficult, early learning must be a safe and joyful experience. Many of our students, in this land in which nearly a third live in dire poverty, come to school not ready, physically or emotionally or linguistically, for the experience. They have spent their short lives hungry or abused. They lack proper eyeglasses. They have had caretakers who didn’t take care because they were constantly teetering on one precipice or another, often as a result of our profoundly inequitable economic system. Many have almost never had an actual conversation with an adult. They are barely articulate in the spoken language and thus not ready to comprehend written language, which is merely a means for encoding a spoken one. They haven’t been read to. They haven’t put on skits for Mom and Dad and the Grandparents. They don’t have a bookcase in their room, if they have a room, brimming with Goodnight, Moon; A Snowy Day; Red Fish, Blue Fish; Thomas the Tank Engine; The Illustrated Mother Goose; and D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. They haven’t learned to associate physical books with joy and closeness to people who love them. In the ambient linguistic environment in which they reached school age, they have heard millions fewer total numbers of words and tens of thousands fewer unique lexemes than have kids from more privileged homes, and they have been exposed to much less sophisticated syntax. Some, when they have been spoken to at all by adults, have been spoken to mostly in imperatives. Such children desperately need compensatory environments in which spoken interactions and reading are rich, rewarding, joyful experiences. If a child is going to learn to read with comprehension, he or she must be ready to do so, physically, emotionally, and linguistically (having become reasonably articulate in a spoken language). Learning to read will be difficult for many kids, easy for others. And often the difficulty will have nothing to do with brain wiring and everything to do with the experiences that the child has had in his or her short life. In this, as well as in brain wiring, kids differ, as invariant “standards” do not. They need one-on-one conversations with adults who care about them. They need exposure to libraries and classroom libraries filled with enticing books. Kids need to be read to. They need story time. They need jump-rope rhymes and nursery rhymes and songs and jingles. They need social interaction using spoken language. They need books that are their possessions, objects of their own. They need to memorize and enact. And so on. They need fun with language generally and with reading in particular. They need the experiences that many never got. And so, the mechanics of learning to read should be only a small part of the whole of a reading “program.” However, this essay will deal only with the mechanics part. That, itself, is a lot bigger topic than is it is generally recognized to be.
Permit me to start with an analogy. As a hobby, I make and repair guitars. This is exacting work, requiring precise measurement. If the top (or soundboard) of a guitar is half a millimeter too thin, the wood can easily crack along the grain. If the top is half a millimeter too thick, the guitar will not properly resonate. For a classical guitar soundboard made of Engelmann spruce (the usual material), the ideal thickness is between 1.5 and 2 mm, depending on the width of the woodgrain. However, experienced luthiers typically dome their soundboards, adding thickness (about half a millimeter) around the edges, at the joins, and in the area just around the soundhole (to accommodate an inset, decorative rosette and to compensate for the weakness introduced by cutting the hole).
To measure an object this precisely, one needs good measuring equipment. To measure around the soundhole, one might use a device like this, a Starrett micrometer that sells for about $450:
It probably goes without saying that one doesn’t use an expensive, precision tool like this for a purpose for which it was not designed. You could use it to hammer in frets, but you wouldn’t want to, obviously. It wouldn’t do the job properly, and you might end up destroying both the work and the tool.
But that’s just what many Reading teachers and English teachers are now doing when they teach “strategies for reading comprehension.” They are applying astonishingly sophisticated tools—the minds of their students—in ways that they were not designed to work, and in the process, they are doing significant damage. Leaving aside for another essay the issues of physical and emotional preparedness, to understand why the default method for teaching reading comprehension now being implemented in our elementary and middle-school classrooms fails to work for many students, one has to understand how the internal mechanism for language is designed to operate.
Very interesting. Can you provide the link to the whole article, please.
I typed “bob reading” into the search box. https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/on-the-pseudoscience-of-strategies-based-reading-comprehension-instruction-or-what-current-comprehension-instruction-has-in-common-with-astrology/
Is there a link to the full article?
See above.
Bob Shepherd’s essay about how children learn to read should be required reading…
— for every member of the RINO MAGA Party and every ALEC member that knows nothing about the profession of teaching since people that love to read already know this.
Oh, wait, most RINO MAGA morons and the ALEC billionaires that love to manipulate MAGA RINOs hate to read and they are already adults with their minds set in an alternative universe where reality and facts and books do not count.
So, how do we get these morons and their greedy, power hungry ALEC masters to learn to butt out of public education and let teachers do what teachers do, teach.
I think we should turn these morons and their ALEC masters over to Tier One Special Ops teams to train them (with no bell to ring saying you quit) until they are convinced it is in their best interest to leave public teachers and our children alone. In this case, the only tactic that will work is to instill the fear of God in these morons and their ALEC masters just like Marine Corps drill instructors do to recruits.
Since most people that grow up to be RINO MAGA morons are taught how to be racists and haters by their parents, et al. we should also take children away from these morons and their ALEC masters and turn those children over to dedicated public school teachers and loving guardians who will then teach and nurture those children how to become life-long learners that enjoy reading.
Mr. Lofthouse,
You obviously have very limited exposure to the world outside the far Left bubble. Bob Shepherd’s ideas about reading comprehension have been championed by many right-of-center people who are very well-read, William Bennett being the most prominent one. Bob is implicitly advocating the educational approach that undergirds the Core Knowledge curriculum. The biggest opponents of the Core Knowledge approach are hardcore Leftists in the educational world and fans of progressive education.
You have made clear many times that at heart you are totalitarian – not a democrat. Taking kids away from their parents? You’re serious – you would do this if you could get away with it.
All these labels are confusing. I like Core Knowledge, and I’m a fan of progressive education, if that means humane, non-mechanistic, non-standardized learning.
A number of years ago I wrote this blog post about my tragic collision with an after-school tutoring program focused on “reading comprehension strategies.” I’ve never gotten over the angst this caused me. Here is the gist of it.
The practice of urging children to attend an after-school program, which is touted to their families as a means to improve their academic skills, but in reality is focused on improving their scores on standardized tests of dubious quality and value, in utter disregard for the children’s needs for meaningful engagement with print-based materials, is unconscionable. Of the five children in my class last year, one was so distressed by the format of the pre-test on the first day that he literally would not make a mark on the paper. When I read with him to encourage him to participate, he inadvertently let slip hints that he could indeed read the passages, but the score of 0 on the pre-test in no way revealed what he actually could do as a reader. Throughout the days and weeks of the program, he was withdrawn and disengaged, only showing sparks of interest when I brought in beautifully illustrated books or poems to supplement the required materials. I’ll never forget his plaintive question: “Why I have to take reading program? I can read.” Why indeed.
Another student in my group dutifully plodded through the entire pre-test without a break. She appeared to be wholly absorbed in the task, and doing her best. When grading her pre-test later, I was dismayed to find that she had gotten almost all of the answers wrong. This student was given the pre-test and post-test at her grade level, as was required by the program, though the instructional materials were one grade level below her grade in school. When working with her during the program sessions, it quickly became obvious that she could not read English print at all. She barely could read individual question words, let alone passages, questions, and answer choices at any grade level. When I questioned the head of the after-school program about this, I was told that we were not there to teach reading comprehension, but to teach strategies (such as main idea, cause and effect, compare and contrast, etc.), so it shouldn’t matter the grade level of the materials! I was so concerned about this student and what would become of her as she progressed through the grades without being able to read, I called the school to volunteer to work with her one-on-one. I described the situation to the school receptionist, who assured me that she would inform the principal. I never heard back.
The whole article is long but very much worth reading. He clarifies the role of foundational skills, which are necessary but not sufficient to achieve reading comprehension.
I have found micrometers very useful for measuring intelligence.
I call it MQ (MAGA Quotient) and the scale is MAGArithmic.
How does one measure something that has never been adequately defined?
With Pure Imagination (imagine Willy Wonka singing) “What you see will defy explanation”
Agree with post but when the expression “reading comprehension “ is used it often includes the two separate skills of decoding each individual word and understanding the meaning of the entire paragraph. My dyslexic son had no trouble understanding the content of a paragraph that was read aloud, but had great difficulty figuring out what word was indicated by that particular clump of letters. Every brain is unique and the world of high stakes testing is destroying many children.
For more information on the full range of reading skills involved in proficient reading, I recommend “Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert,” by Castles, Rastle and Nation, 2018.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325710300_Ending_the_Reading_Wars_Reading_Acquisition_From_Novice_to_Expert
This is great UNTIL it veers off into “reading strategies” la la land. It’s precisely the emphasis on THOSE, instead of on the primary necessities for comprehensions–the decoding ability, vocabulary in context (including the morphology of inflected and derivative forms), syntax acquired automatically from an increasingly syntactically sophisticated ambient oral language environment, domain knowledge instruction (knowledge of that which the writer took for granted, as well as the automatic vocabulary acquisition that occurs as that knowledge is learned), and familiarity with textual context and conventions–that takes our reading instruction so dramatically off course, and THAT is the major theme of my essay. The problem happens when teachers try directly to “teach” those “strategies,” like “finding the main idea” and “inferencing,” when those are all vagueness–there is no news the kid can use. There is no such thing as a general “finding the main idea skill.” There are specific techniques for doing specific types of inferences, and those can be taught, but they are complex and usually not taught and not needed for reading IN GENERAL, and what is done (“Today, we are going to practice our inferencing skills”) is a waste of time and energy and effort that could have been put to some valuable use such as building syntactic fluency via exposure to increasingly syntactically complex oral language, building knowledge and vocabulary in context in important domains, and familiarization of students with contexts and conventions (e.g., those of various genres of literature). That’s the point of my essay–to try to sift the grain from the chaff–these important matters for teachers to attend to from the widespread and mostly useless folk practices. And one of the most essential concepts for teachers and reading researchers to keep in mind, always, is that different stuff is taken in in different ways. In particular, some things (the grammar of the language, most vocabulary) are automatically acquired from the right environments and others (domain knowledge; genre characteristics) need to be explicitly taught.
Imagine a bat flying about, chasing moths and other insects in the air. The bat’s brain is performing functional equivalents to sophisticated calculus to compute trajectories –its own and those of the insects. But no one TAUGHT the bat how to do that. There isn’t a little bat school somewhere with little bat teachers using Powerpoint slides on calculating the slope of a tangent line at a point. One teaching a list of “insect snatching strategies.” LOL. Yet even sophisticated reading researchers constantly commit this error of treating stuff that the brain is built to do automatically (e.g., acquire the rules governing the morphology of derivations and inflected forms in a language; make inferences GENERALLY) as though it can or should be turned into a list of “skills” to be taught. And that is one of the dramatic errors in our reading pedagogy that I hoped to expose in my essay. Some things require that we create ideal environments for automatic acquisition too occur. Others require instruction. It’s really important to sort out, to understand, what things are which.
It’s often the case that whole fields are plagued by really fundamental confusions, like the confusion by reading people of acquisition and learning, which are distinct processes. For example, much, much, much basic confusion and fruitless argument occurs in literary criticism because of people’s failure to take into account the difference between meaning as significance (Wow. That meant a lot to me.) and meaning as intention (What an author meant to convey).
Bob, this comment is wonderful (posted about 2 am EST). I always thought it was absurd to teach “strategies” like “inferencing skills,” which confuse children. Better to teach decoding, background knowledge, and making sense of what you read without fancy labels.
When reading your comment, I was reminded of a true story (I logged about it several years ago). A poet discovered that one of her short poems appeared on a standardized test, followed by questions about the “main idea” of the poem and the “meaning” of duffeeent phrases.
She was dumbfounded and outraged. The “right answers” were completely wrong.
I agree with everything you say, Bob, which is beautifully clear and comprehensive. And I hope it brings you some comfort to know that the reading community is definitely catching up to your point of view. One clarification about strategy instruction.
After emphasizing the points you make about vocabulary, syntax, domain knowledge and textual context, Castles, Rastle and Nation state:
“As discussed by Willingham (2006), this makes sense if strategies are thought of not as skills that keep developing but as “tricks” that, once explained and discovered, are available for children to use in other situations. In this view, explicitly teaching a strategy helps children to understand the purpose of reading more quickly than they would otherwise, via self-discovery; although strategies can be learned quickly and to good effect, continued instruction and practice does not yield further benefits. Willingham (2006) also drew our attention to the fact that more consistent effects are seen when strategy instruction is applied in later grades (approximately fourth grade onward in the United States). This probably reflects the fact that a reasonable level of reading fluency is needed before children can benefit properly from text-level strategy instruction . . .Explicit strategy instruction is effective, it can be short (Willingham suggests five or six sessions), and it works best once the basics of word-reading fluency are in place.”
Although I primarily work with struggling first and second graders who are still establishing ‘word-reading fluency’, I taught a third grade class once a week over the past four years, and this experience showed me the importance of everything you describe as well as the importance of having foundational skills in place so that students can turn their attention to the purpose of reading: making meaning.
And because I work with students who come from backgrounds with few literacy experiences in the home–with few opportunities that allow “syntax acquired automatically from an increasingly syntactically sophisticated ambient oral language environment”–helping these students navigate grade-level text is a tall order. The one ‘strategy’ (or ‘trick’ as Willingham calls it) I teach is ‘determining importance’. Students choose their own symbols for coding a text as they read to separate what is important information from what are interesting details. This allows them to separate the crucial facts from the cool facts and guides them toward a more complete understanding of the topic under discussion.
For example, one of the articles we read last year was on biomimicry, which gave numerous examples of how scientists look to nature to solve human problems. To gain a rich understanding of this concept, I want my students to separate how the kingfisher, gecko, and mosquito helped scientists solve problems, and I don’t want them to get sidetracked by the interesting aspects of the bullet train or the biographical details of the scientists–though I definitely want them to appreciate these details to amplify their enjoyment in reading the article.
If it makes you feel better, rest assured that the main points you express are now mainstream in reading research and were amplified in Natalie Wexler’s book The Knowledge Gap. You were ahead of your time and could have helped many of us in our teacher training programs as we were led astray by reading strategy bites applied to decontextualized text.
Thanks for taking the time to clarify these points.
Noting “this might be important.” That kind of thing is useful. If you and Dan W. want a fancier word for “tricks” in this sense, I would suggest “heuristic.” My issue, Harriet, is with the fact that this Reading Strategies Instruction crowded out almost everything else that teachers did to improve students’ reading comprehension, and much of it had zero value. I have literally seen hundreds of textbook programs in which Reading Strategies were the primary diet in Comprehension lunchrooms.
I have a signed copy of Cognition that Dan Willingham gave to me at lunch, years ago. He’s a great fellow. Very bright and knowledgeable and personable, and I’ve learned a lot from him over the years. For example, I remember an article by him that discussed various studies that had shown that spending lots of time doing “context clues strategies” and teaching the meanings of roots as part of the “word analysis strategy” had almost zero effect on student vocabulary. Yes, if you have learned Latin or French, this might help some. But a few of these one-offs like learning that spec means see hardly pays enormous dividends. There are opportunity costs to all this wasted time spend on “Reading Strategies,” and at any rate, education people use the word “strategy” incorrectly. A strategy is a master plan, an overall plan for an undertaking, not only little thing that is useful, as you and Dan recognize in choosing “trick” over the overblown “strategy.” In the real world, outside education, such a thing is called a tactic, ofc, or a heuristic, aka, a useful rule of thumb. The problem occurs when these pedagogical approaches of minimal or zero value become almost all that’s done. Hmmm. Let’s spend 2 minutes with the background knowledge you will need with this piece and 45 minutes “practicing our [nonexistent general] inferencing skills.”
For many of these supposed “Reading Strategies, there’s no there there AT ALL. There is no such thing as a general procedure for main idea finding that obviates the necessity of being able to decode, being able to parse the morphology and syntax automatically and unconsciously, knowing the vocab, having the requisite background knowledge that the author took for granted, and being familiar with context to which the piece refers and the conventions that it uses, including conventions of genre–matters that reading teachers OUGHT to attend to instead of “practicing our inferencing skills.
You are clearly an extremely thoughtful reading teacher, Harriet. I really don’t get why people think early systematic phonics instruction so dreadful. This can be a lot of fun IF teachers know what they are doing. Heck, I REMEMBER it being a lot of fun, back in the day. And, of course, it needs to be systematic, not willy nilly and occasional, but it needs to share space with lots and lots of engagement with meaningful text. One doesn’t do one or the other. One does both. OF COURSE.
Everything you say, Bob, is so very sad but so very true. We have completely lost our way with reading strategy instruction–as you eloquently describe. Now we have to claw our way back up the cliff. As for phonics–who took the phun out of phonics? Not me. I’m going into a first grade class this afternoon to have some fun. I’ve cued up my segmenting song, gathered my stuffed animals, slinkies, and magic pointers. And we are ready to roll.
“I really don’t get why people think early systematic phonics instruction so dreadful. This can be a lot of fun IF teachers know what they are doing. Heck, I REMEMBER it being a lot of fun, back in the day. And, of course, it needs to be systematic, not willy nilly and occasional, but it needs to share space with lots and lots of engagement with meaningful text. One doesn’t do one or the other. One does both. OF COURSE.”
A beautiful piece of writing.
Like Diane, Bob has the gift of making very complicated ideas seem so…obvious..
(But they surely are not!)
It gives me the feeling, if only more of the world could be reading their work and listening to them.
P.S. and, yes, if there’s more of Bob’s essay I’d like to see the link.
Agreed. I’ve enjoyed reading this eloquent post for years.
And see above.
Got it! Thanks.
It would be great to have the rest of the article.
See above.
Bob, have you seen the video Frustration Anxiety Tension workshop by Rick Lavoie?
Here’s a word list:
the
twelve
triangles
of
cherub
wind
Here’s a phrase from a Dylan Thomas poem:
the twelve triangles of the cherub wind
Make sense? No, it probably doesn’t UNTIL I remind you of those old maps that picture cherubs blowing the winds and tell you to think of a circle of cherub heads in the middle of such a map, each blowing, dividing the map into twelve triangles. Once you have the conceptual key, it makes sense. Until you do, forget it.
Actual context (situation), not “context clues.” Consider:
We need to tie up the loose ends here.
What does it mean when Tony Soprano says it about a hit?
When a macrame instructor says it?
Texts mean in contexts., Which is a reason why Coleman’s New Criticism Lite is insufficient.
Bob, thank you for posting a link to the program for parents and teachers to view!
My son is dyslexic, but would get perfect scores at Equations math competitions.
When my son was in third grade [2003 early days of No Child Left Behind], his teacher gently encouraged me to switch him to a different school [my interpretation was that she did not want his low reading test score].
In fifth grade, it was the first year that fifth graders were getting the high stakes test. His teacher unfortunately, seemed to both be clueless about learning disabilities and seriously stressed about test score pressure and assigned six hours of homework a night.
My degree is not in education. At a research university, I teach science courses that many education majors take for their state certification, so I have interacted with lots of ed majors. I try to have a LD compatible classroom.
When my son was in fifth grade, I loaned the Principal of his elementary school a vhs tape of the Frustration Anxiety Tension workshop. When I was playing the tape to verify that the tape functioned well enough to be viewable, my son was in the room. He had tears running down his face, and said that he wished that his teacher could watch the video.
I wish that every one who teaches would watch the program.
Thank you, Ms. Fan. And keep showing your science educators that video!!!
It so clearly illustrates how context and background clarify!
University education programs need to do a better job of teaching all K-12 teachers about learning disabilities. My son had some teachers that dismissed LD students as just not trying hard enough.
Bob Shepherd’s comments about emphasizing the joy of reading with young children is right on!
Thanks, Diane!
Oops…I was so enthused about this article that I didn’t check my sentence structure before I posted my comment.
I meant to say – Bob Shepherd’s comments about emphasizing the joy of reading with young children are right on!
Thanks again!
Thanks, Barbara. I feel strongly about that. This is one of the many reasons why Billy G. was wrong to think that teachers could be replaced by computers. Kids get the windfall of their teachers’ enthusiasms.
Thank you! And thanks to Bob Shepherd for commenting here. He is the only polymath I know.
Classical Educators have been saying this for years. It is sad that so many are coming to this realization so late, and tragic for the children who were not taught to read.