Get Back to Normal… OR Start Thinking Bigger?
There has been a lot of buzz around schools and their efforts to get “back to normal.” On a social, psychological, and physical level, kids need interaction to learn and grow. However, this morning as I was driving to work I was thinking (I try to do that once a day–haha), what does “back to normal” mean for literacy?
What does “back to normal” mean for literacy?
Does it mean back to the status quo of more than 60% of all 4th graders and 80% of minorities reading below grade level? Maybe that’s the first step… but let’s first address the learning loss of the last three years. Then, we can re-evaluate how to address the problem that has existed, unchanged, for the last 40 years.
This is a negative take on the situation, yet I can’t help but wonder, when is the best time to re-evaluate and push for change? The answer is always, of course, now; and the answer the U.S. has not had much luck with so far is, how?
That’s a huge question, but there are three things we know for certain based on research, and one overlying issue I have a ferocious passion for:
#1 – Phonological Awareness
The vast majority of students need foundational skills to decode words. The lucky few that learn to read through word exposure alone are the exception. Reading is hard and complex.
My favorite expert on the topic of Phonemic Awareness is David Kilpatrick. He wrote Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. There is a three-part webinar series based on the book that discusses phonological awareness, orthographic mapping, and phonemic awareness. Check it out!
#2 – Reading Comprehension
It seems nearly all online reading programs, and even some core curriculums, attempt to help kids understand and think about what they read by repeatedly practicing/assessing comprehension skills. Assessment is made to assess, not improve. Surprising to some, research does not support the constant practice of skills aligned to standards. Furthermore, most adaptive programs seem to simply give kids more practice of skills they do not know in the first place. That doesn’t work. To learn to think about and apply the text in different ways, teachers must find a way to ensure kids retain information from a text.
It doesn’t matter how hard you work, the questioning strategies you use, or the amount of practice you provide. If you don’t help a student get comfortable and familiarize themselves with the text, it’s going to be nearly impossible to help them learn to connect on high levels.
So what can we do?
As a kid, I know I remembered much more about a story or topic I enjoyed (high-interest text) or already had some experience with (background knowledge). If the teacher was talking about a book we read that I didn’t remember much about, which was the majority, I stayed as silent and out of eyesight as possible. If the teacher asked me a question, it often led to embarrassment, leading to more reluctance to participate next time. So, what can we do?
- Focus our instructional efforts on a small portion of text and walk and talk through it out loud. It could be a single paragraph or a poem. Then we can focus on instructional strategies that break it apart, facilitate discussion, and allow for open-ended questioning and dialog. Bite site bits of text are more comfortable if we’re targeting inferential, or higher-level comprehension.
- We can also read a text, then re-read it, and repeat. Once a student has it down, they’ll focus less on how they are reading and more on what they are reading, giving them a better shot at connecting with depth.
Timothy Shanahan’s blog has multiple articles on teaching inference and the difference between teaching comprehension skills vs comprehension strategies if you’re looking for more information.
#3 – Reading Fluency
The issue with reading fluency instruction isn’t that it is hard, or that the research isn’t behind it (it is, irrefutably), it’s more likely one of three things:
Repeated reading:
It’s the core ingredient of every successful fluency program, however, it is straight-up boring; painfully so. It definitely works, but nearly every intervention and supplement out there uses repeated reading, and it will not engage your kids or get them excited. There is, of course, one way we can make any content exciting to read repeatedly; that’s through music. So I guess there is one program you could turn to 🙂 – Lyrics2Learn
Teacher time:
There are five components of reading (and don’t forget writing), each with its own systematic, explicit instructional needs. Unfortunately, most of us only have 100-120 minutes during our literacy block, and hitting all of them simply isn’t feasible. That’s where online supplements like Lyrics2Learn can come in and help.
Collecting data:
Even if we find a way to work direct fluency instruction into our day, 15-20 minutes every day, benchmarking our kids to stay on top of whos advancing and who’s not takes, at a minimum, an hour each time we benchmark the class (definitely a minimum).
I am again going to turn to Timothy Shanahan’s blog on this one. A favorite I have not posted is “Clearing up Misunderstandings about Fluency.”