Kramer: Whole new lifestyle! Jerry: What are you doing? Kramer: Levels.

According to Kath Glasswell and Michael Ford's recent interactions with elementary classroom teachers, there is a frenzy underway among educators to use strict systems of leveled texts for young readers.  But while assigning levels to texts is, at heart, a sound idea, the authors note that educators rely too much and too rigidly on these systems at the expense of using their professional judgement.

In considering matching texts to readers, Glasswell and Ford examine one curriculum planning guide issued by The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction in 1986.  The guide suggests that teachers consider five text characteristics: content, format, concepts, organization, and author's purpose.  And certainly any leveled reading program will probably take these factors into consideration when assigning a a level to a text, but what about assigning a leveled text to a reader?  That same document suggests we also consider five additional factors about the child (motivation, subject knowledge, background experience, vocabulary, and purpose) as well as four factors about the learning environment (physical setting, activity, outcome, and emotional climate) for a total of 5 x 5 x 4 = 100 combinations of factors.  What has happened since 1986?  We seem to have retained only the textual considerations, and by only considering a text's assigned level when helping a child choose a book we are ignoring the bulk of considerations that should go into a good match.

Even more disturbingly, because these leveled text systems often deny a motivated reader the opportunity to read longer and more complex text, the students who need the most practice often end up reading the least.  Furthermore, the authors note this means that although below-level readers may progress, more advanced readers progress much more due to more practice with more advanced texts, and the gap between these two groups actually widens.  In a school that uses leveled texts year on year, these gaps accumulate year on year.

At the heart of all this is a fairly obvious problem:  Teachers rely on leveled text curricula too strictly.  They seem to believe in the power of leveled text systems more than in the power of their own professional discretion.  And it is professionalism that is the issue here, as with the implementation of so many other educational frameworks.  Teachers respond to ingrained cultural assumptions that they are not professionals, that they are not to be trusted to implement their own understandings, by falling back on systems like leveled reading which they perceive to be professionally beyond reproach.  Needless to say, blindly implementing these types of programs without a strong enough understanding of the underlying reasoning to know when they cease to be useful is not very professional.  As educational trends come and go, professional teachers cannot place their faith in acronyms or proprietary curricula.  To do so is to acknowledge what many people already feel about them: teachers' methods should be standardized and interchangeable because teachers simply can't be trusted to do their jobs properly on their own.

Thinking Thinking

As I was reading Debbie Miller's Reading With Meaning: Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grades I was struck by her use of the word "schema."  Miller opens a read-aloud/think-aloud by telling children that "[t]hinking about what you already know is called using your schema, or using your background knowledge.  Schema is all the stuff that's already inside your head, like places you've been, things you've done, books you've read--all the experiences you've had that make up who you are and what you know and believe to be true" (p. 57).

Now, I thought That all sounds great, but why use the actual word "schema"?   What could be the use of bogging down the children's comprehension with this strange new vocabulary word?  Why not just teach the concept and leave the teacher jargon out of it?

But as I read on I started to see how very explicitly Miller was teaching her kids to think about thinking about texts.  Her explanation of her metacognitive approach to reading used a number of concrete metaphors for an abstract concept.  She explains that schema is like "files in their heads" (p. 67) and that to activate background knowledge, we "search our brains for that mental file, open it, and make connections between what we know and the new information" (p. 129-130).  She shows them paper files and files on the computer, and over two days she models the process of "activating, building, and revising schema" (p. 68) by making a physical chart with a file folder and connections written on sheets of paper that are candidates for inclusion in the folder.

Now the first thought that occurred to me was those kids are going to be pretending to be robots with computer brains any time they read.  But hey, maybe that could be a good hook to attract young kids to this strategy.  Then I thought about the mental process that kids might go through when first hearing Miller use the word "schema."  If they are anything like me, when they are presented with an unfamiliar word they might look at the way that it fits into the overall structure of what is being said to decide if it is worth paying attention to.  The way Miller is speaking clearly indicates that "schema" is the main idea that she's talking about.  So I say to myself Hey, this word is important! and then go on to figure out how this idea is like and unlike other concepts I already know about.  So, in effect, the jarring sensation that encountering this word in a piece of speech meant for children had on me is probably quite like the effect it has on children.  How different is that sensation that tells them Hey, this is important from telling their brains to make space for a new idea, or from telling a computer to create a new file and name it "schema"?

Any skepticism I still had that the children would meaningfully incorporate this strange new word was put to rest by one student's definition of schema which is as concise and eloquent as any I've ever heard: "It's kind of like your old schema comes out of your head and grabs the new schema and pulls it back inside your head" (p. 69).

Sound It Out, Shmound It Out

In “'Sounding Out': A Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading”, Catherine Compton-Lilly details her own research indicating that, despite students', parents', and even teachers' reliance on the mantra sound it out as a strategy for approaching unfamiliar words, successful readers actually use a range of strategies including, but not limited to, relying on the structure of language to guess the unknown word and using cues like pictures. In fact, it turns out the sound-it-out strategy is pretty low on the list.

Last semester, during my first field experience, and in the absence of practical knowledge about teaching literacy in K-2, I certainly found myself falling back on the familiar mantra. In one particular case, a second grader (who had been held back a year) asked me how to spell the word 'ready' (a spelling strategy in its own right) during a writing activity. Although reading and writing are not the same thing, the two processes do have a reciprocal relationship, and so I instinctively told her to sound it out and to try to think about which letters would correspond to those sounds. And I did this in spite of the fact that she had an Fudd-like speech impediment. To her credit, she knew that the word ready involved the vowel digraph “ea” and that the word ended in “y”, but because of my over-reliance on the sound-it-out strategy, she naturally ended up spelling the word 'weady.' Looking at it now, I see all the strengths she brought to the table and that my only contribution resulted in her only spelling error.

Although this student who was held back had a generally positive disposition toward reading, there was another student in this K-2 class who was feeling very frustrated with his own efforts to read. He enjoyed books and loved to be read to, but when individual reading time rolled around he focused exclusively on pictures and often refused to attempt to work with text. It occurs to me now that this first grader also had a (much more serious) speech impediment, and I wonder whether his frustration was the result of a clash between his own ability to reproduce phonologically Standard English and the general cultural insistence on the sound-it-out strategy.

Compton-Lilly suggests that the sound-it-out strategy is of limited use to all students and that it is of particularly limited use to students who speak a dialect other than Standard English. I wonder then, do speech impediments present another distinct dimension of complication to phonetic reading strategies? What particular considerations should we keep in mind for these students?

2.15.14 UPDATE:  It turns out that they reciprocal relationship between reading and writing is not quite as strict on the sound-it-out strategy.  While it is true that this strategy remains of limited use for reading, for a particular stage of writing development, this strategy is actually very useful.  Of course, I didn't know that at the time!

Two-year-olds' Writing?

On another Voice of Literacy podcast, Dr. Baker interviewed Dr. Deborah Wells Rowe about her research into the writing of two- and three-year-olds.  Yes, that's right, two-year-olds writing!  Dr. Rowe is quick to point out that if you weren't present to observe the child at work you might not know that it is writing-oriented, but that, in fact, children start to distinguish reading and writing activity as early as two and certainly by three years of age.

This writing may consist of nothing more than lines, as opposed to circular shapes which might indicate drawing, but nonetheless Dr. Rowe points out that children observe the way that writing is part of grown-ups' daily lives and attempt to emulate it.

As Dr. Rowe went on to describe how we should encourage children's imaginative play to include writing, as well as how we as adults might fold children into our own writing activity, I couldn't help but be reminded of The Donut House.  In both cases, the authors mention play and pretending as fundamental to improved literacy development.  In The Donut House, Powell and Davidson advocate for situated literacy (i.e. real-world contexts) in pretend scenarios, and here Dr. Rowe would have that extrapolated to preschool.

If nothing else, I have to imagine that this sort of play would at least foster a productive disposition toward reading and writing, something which my field experience has indicated is definitely a problem for the most struggling readers.