Robert D. Shepherd has had a long career as an author, curriculum developer, and textbook editor. But more than that: he is a remarkably independent thinker. Here are some of his latest reflections on the Common Core:
“Ideas matter. In part, the faculties of education schools and state and local education administrators have brought the current education deform movement upon themselves by imagining that it’s a simple matter to derive and then apply, in the human sciences and humanities, generalizations of the kinds that are the goal of mathematics and of “hard” sciences like chemistry and physics.
The accountability movement is based upon the notion that one can promulgate standards, test kids on their achievement of these, and then evaluate teachers and schools based on them. Have a look at these standards, and what do you see? Well, the standards are abstractions, generalizations: The student will be able to recognize the main idea. The student will be able to draw inferences. The student will be able to determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text. In English language arts, the CONTENT of what is studied is treated in the new standards AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT. We are told that students should be reading substantive, grade-level appropriate works. Some examples of these are given in an appendix. But the standards themselves are simply a list of abstract skills and “strategies.” They don’t even include ANY descriptions of procedures that students might learn for carrying out tasks. So, they completely ignore both world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how), though they occasionally make vague references to what would result if one had (miraculously, by what means they do not say) acquired the latter.
Back in 1984, Palinscar and Brown wrote a highly influential paper about something they called “reciprocal learning.” They suggested, in that paper, that teachers conducting reading circles encourage dialogue about texts by having students do prediction, ask questions, clarify the text, and summarize. Excellent advice. But this little paper had an enormously detrimental unintended effect on the professional education community. All groups are naturally protective of their own turf. The paper by Palinscar and Brown had handed the professional education community a definition of their turf: You see, we do, after all, have a unique, respectable, scientific field of our own that justifies our existence—we are the keepers of “strategies” for learning. The reading community, in particular, embraced this notion wholeheartedly. Reading comprehension instruction became MOSTLY about teaching reading strategies, and an industry for identifying reading strategies and teaching those emerged. The vast, complex field of reading comprehension was narrowed to a few precepts: teach kids to identify the main idea and supporting details; teach them to identify sequences and causes and effects; teach them to make inferences; teach them to use context clues; teach them to identify text elements. Throughout American K-12 education, we started seeing curriculum materials organized around teaching these “strategies.” Where before a student might do a lesson on reading Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he or she would now do a lesson on Making Predictions, and any text that contained some examples of predictions would be a worthy object of study.
Now, the problem with working at such a high level of abstraction—of having our lessons be about, say, “making inferences,” is that the abstraction reifies, it hypostasizes. It combines apples and shoelaces and football teams under a single term and creates a false belief that some particular thing—not an enormous range of disparate phenomena—is referred to by the abstraction. In the years after Palinscar and Brown’s paper, educational publishers produced hundreds of thousands of lessons on “Making Inferences,” and one can look through all of them, in vain, for any sign of awareness on the part of the lesson’s creators that inference is enormously varied and that “making proper inferences” involves an enormous amount of learning that is specific to inferences of different kinds. There are, in fact, whole sciences devoted to the different types of inference—deduction, induction, and abduction—and whole sciences devoted to specific problems within each.
The question of how to “make an inference” is extraordinarily complex, and a great deal human attention has been given to it over the centuries, and a quick glance at any of the hundreds of thousands of Making Inferences lessons in our textbooks and in papers about reading strategies by education professors will reveal that almost nothing of what is actually known about this question has found its way into our instruction. If professional educators were really interested in teaching their students how to “make inferences,” then they would, themselves, take the trouble to learn some propositional and predicate logic so that they would understand what deductive inference is about. They would have taken the trouble to learn some basic probability and techniques for hypothesis testing so that they would understand the tools of inductive and abductive inference. But they haven’t done this because it’s difficult, and so, when they write their papers and create their lessons about “making inferences,” they are doing this in blissful ignorance of what making inferences really means and, importantly, of the key concepts that would be useful for students to know about making inferences that are reasonable. This is but one example of how, over the past few decades, a façade, a veneer of scientific respectability has been erected in the field of “English language arts” that has precious little real value.
I bring up the issue of instruction in making inferences in order to make a more general point—the professional education establishment, and especially that part of it that concerns itself with English language arts and reading instruction, has retreated into dealing in poorly conceived generalization and abstraction. Reading comprehension instruction, in particular, has DEVOLVED into the teaching of reading strategies, and those strategies are not much more than puffery and vagueness. There is no there there. No kid walks away from his or her Making Inferences lesson with any substantive learning, with any world knowledge or concept or set of procedures that can actually be applied in order to determine what kind of inference a particular one is and whether that inference is reasonable. Why? Because one has to learn and teach a lot of complex material in order to do these things at all, and professional education folks have decided, oddly, that they can teach making inferences without, themselves, learning about what kinds of inferences there are and how one evaluates the various kinds.
The retreat into generalization by education professionals in reading and English language arts is one example of a more general phenomenon—the desire by social scientists and politicians and a few wealthy plutocrats to do social engineering based upon abstract principles—you get what you measure, for example. Beware of people and their abstractions because the social sciences are MUCH harder than the so-called hard sciences are. Valid, true abstractions in the social sciences almost always have to be hard won and to be highly qualified. A quick glance at Greenberg’s book on language universals is instructive in this regard. Almost every one is an abstraction followed by pages of exceptions. Ideologues love political, social, and economic abstractions. They love to think that there are simple answers to every problem and that these can be encapsulated in generalizations.
Amusingly, the new Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] are totally schizoid on this issue of abstraction and generalization in education and social engineering. On the one hand, the supporting materials around those standards [sic] call for a great RETURN TO THE TEXT—for having our students read substantive works with higher Lexile levels and having them do close reading of those texts. The supporting materials around the new standards also call for subordinating skills and strategies instruction, for making these incidental to emphasis on the text. Well and good. But the standards themselves are more of the same. They are lists of abstract, general skills and strategies, and they encourage the continuation of a kind of schooling that focuses on form rather than on content (knowledge of the world and knowledge of procedures). And so the new [sic] standards [sic] are, sadly, more of the same. However, lists of abstractions have appeal to those who think that they can confidently implement their social engineering based upon their own abstract principles like “you get what you measure,” so it’s not surprising that the social engineers would LOVE the new CCSS in ELA.
We need to return to reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—to focusing on this poem, this essay, this novel, and what it communicates, and we need to retreat from having our students read to practice their inferencing skills or their identifying the main idea or context clues skills. We read because we are interested in Hedda Gabler or Madame Bovery and the plights they are in, not because we wish to hone our understanding of the structure of the novel IN GENERAL. That will come, but it can come ONLY as a result of first READING the novels. In our rush to make ELA education scientific, in our emphasis on abstract form over content, we’ve forgotten why we read. We don’t read to hone our inferencing skills. We don’t read because we are fascinated by where, in this essay, the author has placed the main idea. Our purpose in reading is not to find out how the author organized her story in order to create suspense. We read because we are interested in what the text has to say, and the metacognitive abstraction about the text is incidental. It grows out of and relates to what this particular text does and takes meaning from that. The Common Core State Standards in ELA is just another set of blithering, poorly thought out abstractions. And starting from there, instead of starting with the text and its content, is a mistake.
Beware the social engineer and his or her abstractions.”
Shepherd added this additional thought:
“One could implement the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts perfectly and have students entirely miss what reading literature is about. They would not come away from their literature classes with the understanding that when they read a literary work well, they enter into an imaginative world and have an experience there, in all its concreteness and specificity, and it is then THAT experience that has significance, that matters, that has “meaning.”
You can’t skip the experience and go directly to the meaning, and that’s what students are encouraged to do if their lessons concentrate on abstract, formal notions from some list of standards rather than upon reading as experiencing. Now, when I say that reading literature is experiencing, I do not mean that all readings are therefore equally good. Literature makes use of conventions and inventions designed to give people particular imaginative experiences that will be common to readers, with, of course, some variation, experiences that will mean something, not mean anything at all that the reader takes away from it. Literature counts on the fact that when people have an experience like this, they will take away common learnings. Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, a person tells a story because there is something that he or she wishes to communicate. The Vietnam vets used to say, “You wouldn’t know because you weren’t there, man.” Well, reading literature well is about going THERE. It’s about having that experience, carefully arranged so that you will come from it with certain learnings, often with wisdom.
Find THAT in the Common Core State Standards for literature.
Good luck.”
Thank you Richard Shephard for a totally ON POINT discussion. To me, this quote says it all,
“We read because we are interested in Hedda Gabler or Madame Bovery and the plights they are in, not because we wish to hone our understanding of the structure of the novel IN GENERAL. That will come, but it can come ONLY as a result of first READING the novels…” and “…You can’t skip the experience and go directly to the meaning, and that’s what students are encouraged to do if their lessons concentrate on abstract, formal notions from some list of standards rather than upon reading as experiencing… ”
If we would only let education professionals.. yes teachers.. teach! But there is always some top-down system imposed on educators which is created by non educators far removed from the reality of the learning process!
I wish one could edit these posts. Of course, I should have written “novel or play” because Hedda Gabler is a character from a play by Ibsen of the same name.
sorry should have said “Thank you Robert Shepherd….
What? No comma of direct address? LOL 😉
I really appreciate this piece, for it validates what I do in my classroom. I don’t deal in abstractions. I deal in the reality of texts and students and of bringing the two together, of teaching students to appreciate what is in the text. It really is a matter of second nature for a seasoned ELA teacher, and Common Core has absolutely zero appreciation of this fact.
Reading your wonderful posts, Meredith, I very much suspected that that was the case. One doesn’t write as well as you do without being, also, a reader.
Thank you, Robert. I am an avid reader.
I was thinking the same thing. If a teacher JUST taught like this, then yes, children would not want to read. It’s not a new way to teach. It’s a new hoop to jump through to save my job.
I am absolutely in rhetorical love with this piece. As a 20-year frustrated-as-hell English teacher who THOUGHT he had the right words to express what was going on, this essay schools me but good.
AWESOMELY well spoken.
What he describes is eerily like the entire mantra of Johns Hopkins University’s “Talent Development High School” program, a program that I was forced to pilot in Syracuse City Schools a few years ago and instantly hated, though I could not quite put my finger on why. This essay spells it out. TDHS has been popping up over the last several years in many school systems (curiously, by my count, only urban ones, hmmm…..) Anyone else have any run-ins with this teaching methodology/system/protocol/program? TDHS also has a mathematics analog called TAM (forget what that stands for) which as I understands it, also breaks down curriculum into “abstractions,” and as a result, leaves students with no appreciably better set of math skills than when they began.
I think this article (essay, whatever) also speaks to, though it doesn’t come out and say it, the transition from teaching a COURSE — i.e. a body of work and its historical, literary, etc… contexts (i.e. American Lit, British Lit, World Lit, Genres of Fiction, Poetry, etc…) and teaching to a test, or teaching test strategies, which is what so much of high school has become. Shepherd doesn’t say anything about that, but I see a clear link, don’t you think?
Art is long and life short. But yes, Andrew, absolutely!!! I have written about that very matter in other contexts. Thank you for making the point.
Excellent, excellent commentary. Those interested in doing something about this should read Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, preferably one of the editions before 1972.
About 100 inexpensive used copies of Adler’s book available here: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?kn=adler+&tn=%22how+to+read+a+book%22
New ones too.
One of the great pieces of advice that Adler gives in How to Read a Book is to read twice. The first time through, he says, suspend your disbelief–give the author the benefit of the doubt; try to see things from her perspective. Then, read it again critically. It’s the same advice that Coleridge gave, of course. Wise words.
We are a not-for-profit educational organization, founded by Mortimer Adler and we have recently made an exciting discovery–three years after writing the wonderfully expanded third edition of How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren made a series of thirteen 14-minute videos–lively discussing the art of reading. The videos were produced by Encyclopaedia Britannica. For reasons unknown, sometime after their original publication, these videos were lost.
Three hours with Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, lively discussing the art of reading, on one DVD. A must for libraries and classroom teaching the art of reading.
I cannot exaggerate how instructive these programs are–we are so sure that you will agree, if you are not completely satisfied, we will refund your donation.
Please go here to see a clip and learn more:
http://www.thegreatideas.org/HowToReadABook.htm
ISBN: 978-1-61535-311-8
Thank you,
Max Weismann
This was very refreshing. When I first glanced over the ELA CCSS, my immediate thought was: What a joke! Many of these standards are attempting to teach children exactly what and how they should be thinking. That is not how teaching and genuine learning happens in a classroom. Once again, this gives assurance that classroom teachers were left out of much of the process when the standards were developed.
“One could implement the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts perfectly and have students entirely miss what reading literature is about. They would not come away from their literature classes with the understanding that when they read a literary work well, they enter into an imaginative world and have an experience there, in all its concreteness and specificity, and it is then THAT experience that has significance, that matters, that has “meaning.”
David Coleman should do a “Close Reading” of some of Robert D. Sheperd’s work.
What a joke! Many of these standards are attempting to teach children exactly what and how they should be thinking. That is not how teaching and genuine learning happens in a classroom.
Well said.
Thanks for this insightful analysis, Robert. Mistserv, you note that “many of these standards are attempting to teach children exactly how and what they should think.” From what I have learned from “training” in New York, that is EXACTLY what is intended. The reformers don’t want students to have actual knowledge. So providing actual knowledge is the “great civil rights” issue left for teachers, parents, andadministrators to promote. I hope the mainstream media picks up this important story. Thanks, Diane, for publishing it.
Thank you. This is one of the more eloquent explanations of the problems inherent in the Common Core’s ELA standards.
Agreed. When it comes to wordsmithing, I am but a cook; this essay was a Master Chef at work.
I am in ‘rhetorical love’ with this piece as well (as Mr. King put it) — twitterpated particularly w/reference to Shepherd’s assessment of the ‘schizoid’ nature of CCSS with reference to older (middle/high school) learners. But I also think it’s critically important for younger learners — those who are still literally learning how to read, as distinct from those who are learning to think more critically and empathically about their reading — to name, to model, and to practice such strategies of effective readers. Indeed the least effective teaching of such strategies reduces reading instruction to ‘puffery and vagueness,’ subsuming the content of great works to cognitive abstractions. In its most artful practice, however, effective teaching and methodical practice of sound reading strategies creates an intentional, purposeful culture of reading in the classroom that empowers students truly to appreciate the nuances, import, and impact of great writing in the many dimensions to which Shepherd alludes.
By the same token, classroom practice (at any level) that abjectly ignores purposeful and concrete support of students’ reading strategies — I don’t misunderstand Shepherd to be suggesting this, but worry some might take this to be his conclusion — can easily devolve into thematic discussion of big ideas, which has immense intrinsic value, but doesn’t seem to have much impact on students’ developing reading comprehension per se. In its least artful practice, a teacher’s exclusive focus simply on the content of great works does more to promote the teacher’s understanding and reaction to great works, than to cultivate the students’ ability to develop and represent their own understanding — which would seem to be our collective goal as language arts teachers.
I think we’re looking for an artful balance of the two approaches — a ‘both/and’ rather than an ‘either/or’ — that attends to developmental differences in younger v older readers, supports the differing needs of developing v highly proficient readers, and, in any case, navigates these tensions more artfully, less abstractly, and less prescriptively than CCSS.
Great article. The more I study the Common Core State (sic) Standards, the more I see that it’s going to flop. But before it does it’s going to cut a wide swath of damage throughout the public education system. This and the PARCC test will solidify the myth of broken schools. The good news is that it’s a house of cards. It will eventually fall apart but, again, not before causing serious damage.
“All children can learn”
“Whatever it takes”
Welcome to the brave new world of education.
Welcome to educational nihilism.
The Common Core is scary. It assumes that all students are on the same level all of the time. It assumes that difficult is always good. It neglects true literature. It will gut our curriculum of those books, stories and plays that “change” us.
And forget about the standards/curriculum lie. This is going to turn into a curriculum, brought to you by Pearson, Holt, etc.
The Common Core was created for a school that will never exist. A school with no special ed students, no poor kids, no English language learners. I think the creators of this monster thought of John Hughes’s upper-middle class north of Chicago world. They must have skipped The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
We’re going to create a generation of children who hate school. Not that NCLB didn’t already do it for a vast majority.
Me? I might last a bit longer as long as I keep my mouth shut. I taught in Texas from 1994-2005. It was in a wasteland of suburban sprawl outside of Houston where you had to be subversive to be effective.
Thinking of Texas, I feel like a soldier in the Alamo. And like Billy Bob Thornton playing Davy Crockett, I’m going to go out screaming.
Wow……what a powerful posting!
This needs to go further … as others have stated, it is right on point. This echos my thoughts as I turned on my own MA in “Reading” and proceeded to a PhD in critical studies of Curriculum & Instruction. In my opinion this is derailment that “Literacy” has caused. The structure and content of all disciplines is lost to “strategies.”
As a social studies teacher who will eventually be required to use the CCSS ELA standards in my subject areas, I’ve been trying to put my finger on what was bugging me about those standards. I’m not an ELA teacher, so I’m less familiar with the specifics of teaching literature or reading, but something struck me as wrong with the entire set up. The rubrics for writing (argumentative, informative, narrative) all left me with a sense of “something’s missing here.”
I think Robert Shepherd has nailed it. In social studies we read for information almost constantly. We look for main ideas and supporting details to understand the patterns and relationships between events, people, and places as a matter of course. But he’s right that in determining those ideas and details one must use different types of reasoning to make those inferences. Students, based on their prior knowledge, will find different supporting details (or think everything is a supporting detail) than myself, who has a different and more extensive prior knowledge. The standards do not allow for this reality. The rubrics give us no way of “measuring” this reality. And no mention, much less emphasis, on how we find those main ideas or details.
I am participating in a seminar this summer that is supposed to help guide teachers through implementation of the CCSS. Thanks to Mr. Shepherd and Dr. Ravitch, I have some very specific questions to pose now.
I’m skeptical about some of what the writer says about the history of reading instruction. It’s a lot more complicated. See P. David Pearson’s chapter “Reading in the 20th Century,” in American Education: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, edited by Thomas L. Good. A good chunk of it is available online, and believe it or not, it makes excellent reading.
My teaching career started in 1972. I taught language arts and reading to seventh and eighth graders. The Ginn 360 basal reading series we used was loaded with disembodied skills instruction of the sort mentioned in this piece. We used two separate workbooks along with the basal readers. In the summer of 1973 I took a class with Professor Pearson, who made a strong case that the Ginn 360 program was the publisher’s answer to Jeanne Chall’s book Learning to Read: The Great Debate. In other words, the skills binge started a lot earlier than 1984
My introduction to schema theory and constructivist approaches came in 1982. That was an eye-opener and informed my teaching from then on.Teaching kids comprehension strategies was a great idea. I was also learning about reader-response theories at the time. Most of it made good sense to me and still does. (Some of the ELA Common Core Standards materials don’t jibe very well with what I’ve learned about reading, reading instruction, and literature study.)
I wish I had time to go into more detail. I’ll just say that as a teacher, what I learned from current research and textbook materials was always tempered by actual classroom experience with real kids, which meant that the high level of abstraction and Mr. Shepherd complains about was never a problem. As in any discussion of literature, the first questions were always about what was happening in the story.
I’m against the Common Core Standards for lots of reasons, but not because Palanscar and Brown or any other researcher was influential during the 1980’s. One problem with the “Standards” (and with some commentators on them) is that teachers aren’t always given a whole lot of credit for their ability to translate ideas into classroom practice.
Just to clarify, I was introduced to constructivist approaches in the 1970’s but first learned about using them in a more strategic way in teaching reading and literature in the 80’s. That’s when I took a reading course that featured current research from the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. It’s that sort of exposure to research (and literary theory, for that matter)–and years of applying it in the classroom–that tells me how wrong David Coleman is about forcing kids to stay “within the four corners of the text,” for example. It also makes me question the idea that teacher educators somehow “have brought the current education deform movement upon themselves.” I don’t buy that for a minute. There are plenty of other forces at work.
And, Randal, I did say that say that “In part” the professional education community has brought this on themselves. We’ve had a lot of folks in state departments of education who bought into the whole notion of turning English language and literature studies into pursuit of totally abstract cognitive goals assembled into a list of standards. It was not my intention, at all, to discount the great body of truly scientific work that has been done on reading instruction and language acquisition, some of it by reading specialists in education departments of universities and a lot of it by professional linguists, cognitive psychologists, and computer scientists working in the areas of pattern recognition and natural language processing. However, it’s clear to me that the CCSS in ELA do not reflect what is now known in these areas and that they encourage bad pedagogy that focuses on abstractions and forgets why we read.
Indeed, Randal. My comments are “broad stroke.” One point: I’m a textbook writer and curriculum designer by trade. So, I’m coming from a LOT of experience with publishers whose guidelines for preparation of educational materials in fact have shown the sort of devolution that I refer to whereby the content of what is read becomes of no importance whatsoever and lessons are about abstract “strategies.”
Anybody old enough to remember diagraming sentences? Strikes me that’s this long-abandoned silliness that claimed to teach kids proper writing by pulling apart sentences, labeling words/word groups, and graphing the deconstructed mess in a specific manner is much like “standards” that require kids to pull apart stories and novels according labels. If these practices were simply useless time killers, it would be bad enough. That they turn kids’ reading and writing experiences into mind-deadening tedium is educational malpractice. Double amen, Robert.
Thanks, Robert. Excellent analysis and a clear argument. Will it help? I doubt it.
I just retired from a high school library program. For the last 10 years, in coaching, teaching beside, and conversing with colleagues, and in library spending, I promoted a simple curricular practice: Stephen Krashen’s Free Voluntary Reading. I didn’t argue against any other curricular goals or classroom practices, against NCLB or CCSS. I just suggested a thorough try-out for FVR. Only one of 20+ English and ELD teachers ever committed to a real try-out. That teacher now spends about one period a week with 2 of her 4 classes attending to her version of FVR.
The library program was cut by 40% for next year. Given the district’s embrace of CCSS professional development this summer, and the arrival of the Smarter Balanced Consortium test in 2014, she’ll feel greater pressure to lead her students “to get what will be measured.” Measures, after all, provide data, and data is gradually taking over classrooms.
Jack Gerson said in well: “When the [reformers] say that instruction must be ‘evidence-based,’ and ‘data-driven,’ they don’t mean that schools and teachers should be guided by statistical studies. When they say ‘data-driven,’ they mean breaking down jobs into tasks, breaking tasks into components, and then measuring and quantifying each component to develop target work norms. The norms are used to establish new conditions of work and workplace discipline. These are used to impose scripted learning, narrow ‘teach to the test’ curricula, canned software, and cyber-schools.” (“The Neo Liberal Agenda and Teachers’ Unions,” in The Assault on Public Education, p. 110.)
I don’t see how anything can prevent public school teaching from becoming the pursuit of Gerson’s predicted target work norms.
I fear that your analysis is spot on.
This post speaks volumes to me personally and puts into words what I have been trying to say at our district and state level. No one is listening. I don’t have a problem so much with the 50/50 split of literature/informational sources for elementary when it takes into account science and social studies and math. However, we are being told that teachers need to split ELA materials 50/50 as well. I just see so many excellent pieces of literature flying out the window and being replaced with reading about kinds of boats. And from our state department we hear things like doing away with connecting to students’ experiences and feelings about text. It’s all about answering a question and finding the answer in the text. How does that help one connect to Robert Frost when he says,
“…the woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep…” How can one even begin to address this type of literature without connecting to experiences and feelings?
“One could implement the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts perfectly and have students entirely miss what reading literature is about. They would not come away from their literature classes with the understanding that when they read a literary work well, they enter into an imaginative world and have an experience there, in all its concreteness and specificity, and it is then THAT experience that has significance, that matters, that has “meaning.” Thank you, Mr. Shepherd.
It’s me again, on my lunch break. I’m in the middle of a poetry unit with my sophomores in American Lit: I’m looking at what we’re studying (what I’m turning my kids on to). Joni Mitchell (shh- Canadian), Amiri Bakara, Harryette Mullen, Theodore Roethke, Lucile Clifton, John Updike, ee cummings, Samuel Jackson, Gergory Corso, Robert Frost, Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jim Morrison, Robert Lowell, Alan Dugan, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Louis Simpson, Janis Ian, Billy Joel, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Alice Walker, Randall Jarell.
How do I check these for reading level? The better question is why would I want to in the first place?
Even the concept of American Literature looks like it will be going by the wayside.
So we ended up discussing Charlotte’s Web. These kind of off the script shenanigans happen sometimes. It started with the discussion about what makes a good poem, song, scuplture, painting…” Then it went to great works of literature. And I brought up Charlotte’s Web. So I took down my copy and read from page 171.
“Good-bye!” she whispered. Then she summoned all her strength and waved one of her front legs at him. She never moved again.
Try reading this to a class and not get tears in your eyes.
How sad that some idiot in a district office is going to put a book like this through the Readinglevelmatic Machine and decide that it’s not “rigorous enough” for students.
I always like to say, “Teaching English isn’t rocket science.” Maybe I’m wrong.
And now lunch is over. WWI poetry with my juniors (Brit Lit). Sassoon, Owen, Brooke…
“Even the concept of American Literature looks like it will be going by the wayside.”
That has already happened in my district. It is, if such a thing can be said to exist, a crime against our culture. Maybe if we started calling it “cultural genocide” or some such it would get some attention. I don’t know, but I want my children (my own children) to learn American Literature, not Canned McCore Level IV.
cultural genocide. yes. well said, Ron!
Wonderful. BTW, I was recently working on a high-school lit project for a client. I suggested that we might do a lesson on Sassoon, Owen, and Brooke at Grade 12. I was told that this material was too esoteric, too unfamiliar, that I had to stick to material that dealt with what the students already had familiarity with, that “activated their prior knowledge” and, of course, “taught” a list of abstract Common Core skills. Forget teaching kids something they didn’t know before. Forget getting into the trenches with Sassoon, Owen, and Brooke. Forget about giving students those extraordinarily meaningful and unfamiliar experiences. Give the kids material they are already familiar with and concentrate on using that material to teach them to “Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.” Sigh.
After some consideration, I realize that despite (or because of) the difficulties presented by Common Core and a host of other contemporary educational gremlins, we do live in a wonderful time to be a teacher. We live in one of those times when a man or woman can become a hero.
Ron, beautifully said! And thanks for reminding me of that wonderful clip.
I take issue with this quote, which I think shortchanges the depth of interest kids (and all of us) have in books.
“Our purpose in reading is not to find out how the author organized her story in order to create suspense. We read because we are interested in what the text has to say, and the metacognitive abstraction about the text is incidental”
For me, thinking about and discussing the way a story is developed and what courses the author charts and avoids, the appearance and disappearance of characters, the shifts in voices, and the placement of key events is fascinating stuff. It’s the same when you’re looking at a good painting kicks off a pinball game full of thoughts and questions that make you think about it long after you’ve left the gallery. Why one book, one sculpture,one play, or one symphony does this to you, and another one doesn’t is meaty stuff. Good teachers who know and love books can make the mechanics interesting; others can fall back on departmental guidelines.
I agree, John. I, too, am fascinated by that kind of thing. I will sit down a read something like Northrup Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism or Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale with great relish. But when the point of the lesson is always the abstraction, when it’s ALL about something like, identifying six methods used to develop characters . . .
Please watch: “Why Huck Finn Matters: Classic Literature in Schooling” featured this panel discussion with Mark Bauerlein, Emory University, Robert Pondiscio, Core Knowledge Foundation, and Sandra Stotsky, University of Arkansas. The panel was moderated by David Steiner, Dean of the Hunter College School of Education.
Well worth watching although I feel like I should watch it more than once. No one is calling each other names; no one demonizes each other’s positions. It was thought provoking and refreshing to get beyond my own prejudices.
Thanks Erin for the great video. The panelists get to the scary heart of the matter at the end: the tests, not the standards, are king. Even if the standards are interpreted to mean “Teach rich literature and other content”, it will be moot if the new tests seem to dictate skills drills on “bleeding chunks” (to use Steiner’s apt term).
And thanks Robert for analyzing so well the fuzzy thinking at the heart of the dominant mode of thinking about literacy. Sadly most of my teacher colleagues are infected with bad ideas spawned by Lucy Calkins et. al.
Ah, David Steiner, the former commissioner of education in New York state. Now we have the Pineapple Rheeformy King John. Sigh.
When I was around 10, I read “The Last Unicorn,’ by Peter S. Beagle. I was hooked from then on. This was the story that created my love for Literature. I didn’t read this story in a classroom. However, from this novel, I learned what figurative language was. Our children do read on their own. Some do not read as much as others, but those who do, read because they understand, automatically, the strategies needed to infer. When we break down reading into abstract pieces, it distracts the reader from experiencing it for themselves. Another great novel is Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. I can see down the road a great book-burning if curriculum continues to be so fragmented, it turns off the student. Remember, it was the people who decided to ban books in the novel, or at least it was what the government wanted its citizens to believe. Will owning books that give us enrichment of who we are become a crime? This is scary stuff.
Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place has one of the best opening lines anyone ever wrote:
The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door.
: )
When was the last time your district office announced that it was holding professional development sessions having to do with the content of your subject? sessions with the purpose of increasing your knowledge about it?
You will be told that you are to attend this or that session on using text-dependent questioning; on using foldables or conducting think, pair, share activities; on design for learning; on acting upon your test data; on using your whiteboard; on the new Core-aligned curriculum maps; on anything and everything
EXCEPT your subject.
Merely suggesting that a “training” might be held for English teachers that would impart knowledge about, say, current scientific models of English grammar or archetypes of the folktale, for biology teachers about the recent developments in epigenetics, for social studies teachers about expansion of federal powers via judicial interpretation of the commerce clause–the very idea that such a “training” (you have to love the language that is used–as though teachers were beasts being taught tricks for a circus) might actually deal with subject-area knowledge sounds, in the current education climate in the United States–absurd.
But that’s what absurd. That content, that subject-area knowledge doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether the kid knows about the Dust Bowl and Tom Joad. It matters whether she has demonstrated her command of making inferences based on text features (boldfaced words, captions, call-outs, graphs, illustrations, etc). That will be on the test. Tom Joad will not.
Teacher eduction is structured to deemphasize content. If what is important to teaching history is knowledge of history, potential history teachers would spend most of their time in the history department, not the school of education. This works against the interest of the education schools.
Exactly right “teachingeconomist.” This is the fundamental core weakness of the modern teaching “profession” as its members like to call it in order to magnify their status in the absence of knowledge.
Excellent analysis Mr. Shepherd.
I particularly like your discussion of how entire disciplines are subsumed within “English” standards today. It often seems to me that “information literacy” standards assign “determine what is true” to a subsidiary step in the reading process, rather than the end of the entire educational process, indeed the entire intellectual endeavor.
I’m not sure what we’re seeing is so much a transformation of the discipline of English Language Arts as it being supplanted by “literacies.” The first drafts of the Common Core did not call them ELA standards at all; they were “College and Career Readiness Standards for Reading, Writing, and Speaking and Listening.” They added back ELA in the title and tucked a bit of content randomly in the standards (not, of course, within the range of reading standards) and in the commentary and appendices, but the experts who contributed to the process primarily consider themselves “literacy” people (or psychometricians, or whatever) but almost nobody specializing in “English Language Arts.”
I think it is fair to consider the CC authors hostile to ELA as a discipline. They certainly go very far out of their way to avoid requiring any of the fundamental analytical tools of the discipline, such as genre or rhetorical techniques beyond the simplest logic. To me the simplest and least intrusive fix to the CC standards would be to pare the current standards back down to exclusively “literacy” standards and write an entirely separate set of Arts & Humanities standards that would include literature, and the two would be taught as completely separate core courses.
I think the drift toward skill/strategy standards is primarily driven by testing more than philosophy. You have to define reading in a way that can be quantified, it has to devolve to skills and strategies. Other countries don’t obsess on quantifying reading, so they aren’t sucked down the same reductive path. The fundamental design goal of the Common Core is to allow the production of vertically aligned reading scores for teacher and school evaluation. If they couldn’t do that, they’d be useless to the RttT regime.
To me the simplest and least intrusive fix to the CC standards would be to pare the current standards back down to exclusively “literacy” standards and write an entirely separate set of Arts & Humanities standards that would include literature, and the two would be taught as completely separate core courses.
This is a wise suggestion
And despite this appalling situation, the country’s classrooms are still filled with teachers who care passionately about their subjects and about igniting that passion in their students, with teachers like Dinosaur English Teacher, above. But such people are being dictated to by the social engineers with their buckets of poorly conceived, semi-literate abstractions, of which the Common Core State Standards in English language arts are but another sorry example.
You’ve built a good case here. I remember teaching reading comprehension (pre strategies days) to sixth graders and saying to myself “surely there is more to it than this” as I followed the teacher’s guide. I was a good reader; not a good reading teacher. I think that there is a great deal of art and craft to teaching and I wasn’t skilled in my craft as it came to teaching reading.
That being said–Schools of Ed. are NOT filled with faculty carrying out scads of Palinscar type of research–there simply is no time or other resources for such. Mostly we teach and then work to keep our institutions operating and our communities improving. Yes a few Education faculty carry out influential research on a large scale but that is not even 15%. I have no problem with being characterized as misunderstanding the process of teaching and learning–I strive every day to improve– but I don’t like to be accused of creating unworkable theories to justify my work and being out of touch with the reality of the classroom.
Klmk55, I wish that in my original posting, which was written quickly and without revision (one can’t edit these comments), I had made clearer that this was not meant as an indictment of ALL education professors, all state department people, etc. In my defense, the note does start with the qualifier “In part.” It is, of course, undeniable that professional educators are an extraordinarily varied lot. One simply can’t generalize about folks in a profession that includes people as disparate as Michelle Rhee and Diane Ravitch, Arne Duncan and Jonathan Kozol. I, too, have little patience for blanket statements about teachers, education schools, education professors, etc. Clearly, there is much that one can learn in education classes in universities. It’s extraordinarily valuable for elementary school teachers in training to learn, for example, about kinds of questions they can pose when conducting a reading circle or various cooperative learning strategies like think, pair, share; about philosophies of education and how these might drive practice; about approaches to curriculum and lesson design; about the history of education (I wish that every person interested in education reform would read Diane Ravitch’s brilliant Left Back); and much, much else aside from subject-area content. But I think that it is also undeniable that we’ve seen in the profession an emphasis on questionable generalization about skills and cognitive processes and a corresponding de facto devaluing of subject-area expertise on the part of teachers. I’ve met a shocking number of English education professionals (state department and district-level people and, yes, education professors) who simply didn’t know much literature or grammar; were not, themselves, avid readers or accomplished writers; who didn’t know their subjects well at all and yet were making decisions for others about what should be taught to whom and when.
Here’s an example of what I’m referring to: Since the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957, we’ve had a revolution (actually, a series of them) in our understanding of how languages are learned and how they are structured. It’s not an exaggeration to say that a folk theory of grammar has been replaced by extremely robust scientific models. And a lot of what one can learn from those models is directly applicable to teaching reading, writing, speaking, and listening. One really can’t begin, I believe, to think clearly about how to teach reading and writing well without understanding in some detail how the grammar of a language is acquired and the consequences of this process for our pedagogy. But English as an academic subject is not emphasized in the preparation of English teachers, and few know much of anything, at all, about what is now known about how languages work and are acquired. If we cared more about subject-area expertise, then there would be a lot more English education professors who had read Andrew Radford’s Minimalist Syntax. There are exceptions, of course, but those are rare.
I really enjoy your words, but I think you are stretching it a bit too much when you suggest that Arne Duncan is an educator. He is no such thing, nor has he ever been, nor will he likely ever be. I could be generous and call him a politically connected sociologist and a third-rate basketball player, but that is all.
I utterly agree.
Have you read Chall, J S (2000) The Academic Achievement Challenge? I’m reading it now and wondered what you think.
BtW the only English/English Ed. Folks I know are all well and extensively read, also most write very well, few have any opportunity to make decisions regarding what teachers/teacher candidates should know about the discipline as that is driven by “standards.”
I concur that there is a good deal of craftsmanship in teaching. I also sometimes hear that a school honors “teaching as an art.” I’ve never understood what that means. What is the “art” in teaching??? Or the “art” of teaching. What art is it?
Correction:
One really can’t begin, I believe, to think clearly about how to teach reading and writing well IN THE EARLY GRADES without understanding in some detail how the grammar of a language is acquired and the consequences of this process for our pedagogy.
Thank you, Robert, for this wonderful piece. I have bookmarked it and will send it to colleagues.
Thanks, Diana!
I stopped reading after this comment:
“Ideas matter. In part, the faculties of education schools and state and local education administrators have brought the current education deform movement”
I’m sorry but you are not a professional of any credibility when you resort to name calling. This is not how professional adults act.
It has become a sad state of affairs that this behavior has become the norm.
Kate, I am reporting, above, what I have observed over many years, a tendency to relegate the text to secondary status, to treat it as a mere occasion for practice and explicit discussion of some abstractly formulated and explicitly taught skill. When we do that, we forget why we read in the first place. A child reads about snakes because he or she wants to learn about and think about and talk about snakes, not because he or she has a burning desire to know what method of expository development was used in paragraph 4. That stuff should be WAY down the list of considerations when confronting a text. The emphasis should be on what is being said and the experience being created. The skills stuff is secondary and should enter discussion only in service of understanding, when necessary and appropriate. It’s time we stopped putting the cart before the horse. If abstract discussion of “the main idea” were banned from ELA classrooms tomorrow, we would doubtless all be better off. If kids are reading a piece that argues that animal agriculture is a greater contributor to global warming than is transportation, they should be discussing THAT–the relative contribution of animal agriculture and transportation to the creation of greenhouse gases, not spending half the period discussion, for the billionth time, what a main idea is and what textual clues point to some sentence or sentences being a statement of that idea.
Consider this. Every speaker of English “knows,” implicitly, that
the green, great dragon
is not grammatical
and that
the great, green dragon
is grammatical,
but not because he or she has been explicitly taught the rules for order of precedence of adjectives in English. These are acquired, not explicitly learned. Likewise for a lot of these “strategies.”
Kids are little inference makers by evolutionary design. See Alison Gopnik’s many wonderful books on this. Kids have astonishingly capable wetware for making inferences (and some cognitive biases built into that wetware that are the common human inheritance).
They need opportunities to exercise that wetware, not vague, typically inaccurate, abstract formulations of what an inference is. The chances are pretty good, unless the teacher has studied logic and probability, that he or she doesn’t know enough about explicit formulation of the notion of “inference” to speak about it accurately, and at any rate, doing that is generally a waste of time and a distraction. Certainly, almost every lesson I’ve ever seen in a textbook that dealt with “making inferences” was extraordinarily vague and confused. Many of these confuse the most basic notions. For example, I have read hundreds of times in grammar school texts over the past few decades that deduction is argument from the general to the specific. I’ve read that again and again in the best-selling literature program in the United States. Well, no, it isn’t argument from the general to specific. It’s argument in which the conclusion must be true if the premises are true. And, at any rate, until kids are much older, the way to teach them how to do something like deductive inference is to give the practice doing it, not to have them learn about it explicitly, for they have automatic hardware for making such inferences that needs practice. Even professional logicians don’t typically, in their everyday lives, apply explicit logic rules to their thinking, to figuring out where they left their car keys, for example. They do that thinking automatically because they have developed habits of thought based on automatic functions of their cognitive machinery. At most, they may apply some previously practiced heuristic, like retracing their steps from the last time they remember having their keys in their hands.
The CC$$ in ELA is almost exclusively a bullet list of abstractly formulated skills, and it’s a backward, hackneyed, often prescientific, amateurishly prepared bullet list at that. Ironically, the material around the bullet list of CC$$ for ELA calls for a great “return to the text,” but because the “standards” are almost exclusively a list of skills, like the groupthink state “standards” from which the CC$$ were drawn, they continue to encourage “teaching reading” AS OPPOSED TO TEACHING TEXTS AND KIDS, that is AS OPPOSED TO ENCOURAGING READING.
Reading and writing are first and foremost means of communication, and what matters most is what is being communicated. We should not forget that. We write and read to communicate ideas and experiences. That’s the point. If we read and write a lot and discuss what we are reading and writing about, the skills stuff will for the most part take care of itself. Yes, sometimes it’s worth taking time to point out a technique or a strategy, but we should be a lot more wary of that than we are, for often that pause swallows up the entire class. Often it simply takes time and attention away from engagement with what is being said.
Our job is to create readers. What they are reading about is what is engaging. It’s what matters.
Kate, just last week, I was speaking to a friend who teaches fifth graders. She told me about something that happened in her class earlier that day. They were reading a piece of Julius Lester. In the piece, he mentions vultures and how they clean up dead carcasses and LOVE the smell of rotting meat. The kids were FASCINATED BY THAT. They wanted to talk and talk about it.
Here’s what she said: “But I had to cut that short because we had a whole bunch of Common Core skills to get through in this lesson, and my Assistant Principal was observing.”
That is a tragedy.
And it’s just one of the many tragedies of the Common [sic] Core [sic].