What Happens to the Basics? - Center for the Collaborative Classroom

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What Happens t

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s to the Basics?

Teachers and students will experience how powerful literacy can be when texts are not only used to teach basic skills, but also viewed as a source of knowledge. Elfrieda H. Hiebert and P. David Pearson

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chools in the United States are making curricular changes from kindergarten through college to meet the Common Core State Standards’ demands for higher expectations in reading and writing. But as we make these important changes, we need not overturn all that we learned about effective reading pedagogy during No Child Left Behind (NCLB). It’s better to think of the Common Core movement not as a reversal of NCLB, but as the next step on a journey toward close, critical reading and powerful writing. Part of No Child Left Behind’s legacy is the understanding that certain skills (such as knowing letter names and sounds and decoding unknown words) are foundational to more advanced skills (such as reading critically and writing compellingly). Students need to learn the underlying, consistent patterns of written words. In plain talk, they need to crack the code. We must remember such basic skills as we move into the Common Core era, in which deeper learning and more advanced literacy assume a prominent role. Achieving these higher goals is where No Child Left Behind comes up short. Although NCLB has successfully focused educators’ efforts on making sure that all students have basic literacy skills, it hasn’t produced the thoughtful, critical readers and writers we desire. By going beyond NCLB’s fascination with the basics, we can transform the literacy curriculum into what we wanted in the first place: a systematic effort to develop engaged and powerful readers, writers, and thinkers.

The Importance of 2nd and 3rd Grades Nowhere in education will this transformation be more pivotal than in 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms, where the Common Core State Standards call for increasing expectations for text complexity. In grades 2 and 3, the Common Core standards envision students climbing the first step on the stairway to “reading and comprehending complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently” (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices [NGA Center] & Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSS], 2010, p. 10). We may question whether the acceleration of text complexity should begin at such a young age (Hiebert & Mesmer, in press), but there is little doubt that the disappointing comprehension results from the No Child Left Behind era call for changes in early-grades literacy instruction. No Child Left Behind emphasized the primary grades, at least in part because of research demonstrating that students’ literacy skills at the end of 3rd grade predict their success in high school (Alexander, Entwisle, & Horsey, 1997). Hernandez (2011) confirmed this pattern: Third graders who had failed to recognize words on a 3rd grade test were later four times more likely than their higher-performing peers to drop out of high school. In 1983, Jeanne Chall identified essential stages of reading development and suggested that in stage 1, students should master basic letter-sound relations and learn to decode one- and two-syllable

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words. Back then, stage 1 occurred in grades 1 and 2, but today we expect it to happen in kindergarten and 1st grade. Grades 2 and 3 have now become the setting for Chall’s essential stage 2, in which students become automatic in their word recognition and confident about their understanding of what they read. Students who have not gained this foundation of automaticity and confidence by the end of 3rd grade are the ones that Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin (1990) predicted would experience the 4th grade slump, faltering in their progress into more advanced literacy. What Can We Keep? What Needs to Change? What we should retain from NCLB is the recognition that students need to acquire a fundamental set of proficiencies by the end of 3rd grade. Scaling the staircase of text complexity requires that students become highly automatic in recognizing the majority of the words they meet in texts, especially when reading on their own. To attain this automatic word recognition, most 2nd graders and some 3rd graders need a substantial amount of reading of accessible text that they can handle without much teacher scaffolding. In other words, instruction in grades 2–3 should focus on the goals— consolidation of word knowledge and the use of text to acquire world knowledge—not on pushing for texts that have particular readability levels. But this focus does not preclude giving students additional experiences with complex ideas. Fortunately, there has never been a period in history in which 50

and reading to learn occur simultaneously and synergistically. The standards demand conceptually rich texts that build skills while engaging students in reading and learning. Common Core primarygrade classrooms are characterized by (a) building knowledge, (b) increasing students’ responsibility for reading, and (c) providing more time for student involvement with text.

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Building Knowledge In the primary-grades Common Core classroom, “students establish a base of knowledge across a wide range of subject matter by engaging with works of substance” (NGA Center & CCSSO, 2010, p. 7). Students read informational texts to acquire knowledge about the world: which animals are awake at night, where the geese that they have seen in the fall sky are headed, and why icebergs are melting. From narrative text, they gain other kinds of knowledge: how people plan, act, react, and reflect on experience.

educators could choose from so many high-quality primary-level texts with such rich opportunities for acquiring knowledge. Several projects, such as Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading (Lawrence Hall of Science, 2010), show that texts can be highly informative and engaging while enabling students to develop facility with the core vocabulary of school English—the approximately 4,000 simple word families that account for 90 percent or more of the words in most primary-level texts (Hiebert, 2012a). In the primary grades, the emphasis on simultaneously building foundational skills and introducing complex content is what differentiates a Common Core curriculum from its No Child Left Behind predecessor. NCLB’s sharp focus on basic reading skills often resulted in giving short shrift to content areas like social studies and science. In contrast, the Common Core standards support classrooms in which learning to read

The Knowledge in Narrative Texts High-quality narrative texts tell about how people interact with one another, the consequences of actions, and a host of other aspects of human experience. Unfortunately, some texts in our curriculum are poorly written, vacuous, and devoid of meaningful knowledge or insight about the world. Primary students are often subjected to tedious reading and rereading of highly decodable text with nonsensical content. Such texts have no place in the curriculum. Texts that support movement up the staircase of increasingly challenging core vocabulary

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can be full of engaging content yet support students in becoming adept with the meanings and patterns (both morphological and orthographic) of the core vocabulary. The Knowledge in Informational Texts One advantage of reading content-area texts is the knowledge that students gain—knowledge that begets more knowledge throughout students’ school careers. Knowledge is not only an end in itself; it also serves as a means to an end. The engagement that students experience in gaining knowledge improves their proficiency in reading, which, in turn, increases their capacity to gain even more knowledge from future texts. In the past, some reading experts (for example, Gray, Baruch, & Montgomery, 1940) asserted that reading instruction should emphasize narrative texts because of their familiar content. More recently, however, educators have raised questions about a predominantly narrative diet in the primary grades. Children are interested in learning about their environments—trees, animals, cars and trucks, people, machines, construction sites, and so forth. These features that surround them are likely to offer more concrete connections for students than does the content of many fictional stories. Informational text may also be more useful in building students’ vocabulary because new words in informational texts are repeated more frequently than those in narrative texts. A writer who writes about seeds and plants is likely to use such words as petal, stamen, and stem repeatedly (Gibbons, 1991). In contrast, narrative writers often try to use more varied vocabulary: thus a disagreeable character may scowl in one sentence, frown in a second, and glare in a third. Because developing readers need repetition to learn new vocabulary, informational texts may give students more opportunities to become

facile with words that will be useful in content-area reading. Increasing Students’ Responsibility as Readers One procedure that is intended to be a scaffold for supporting beginning and struggling readers has unfortunately become a permanent fixture of reading lessons in many primary classrooms: teacher read-alouds of instructional texts. For example, teacher guides of a core reading program advise teachers to

basic word-recognition skills, however, students often lack stamina—the ability or willingness to keep on reading when the task is hard or long (Valencia et al., 2010). This stamina problem presents itself in classrooms as slow and reluctant reading. Part of the solution is increasing the amount of reading in classrooms. Educators at all levels need to learn how to support students as they read texts in which, even though most of the vocabulary is familiar, the sheer length of the

Children are interested in learning about their environments—trees, animals, cars and trucks, people, machines, construction sites, and so forth. read the week’s main instructional text to below-level students before students read the texts (Beck et al., 2009). Teacher read-alouds of high-quality literature have multiple benefits— engaging students in texts, exposing them to rich vocabulary, and giving them access to high-level insights and ideas they might not have been able to comprehend on their own. We know of no research, however, that shows that teacher read-alouds of instructional texts build students’ ability to read independently and proficiently. This instructional routine needs to be replaced with alternative strategies that are true scaffolds—that is, temporary supports that help students increase the level of texts they can read proficiently and independently. Capacity and Stamina By the end of 2nd grade, most students can recognize a substantial percentage of the words in grade-level texts (Cummings, Kennedy, Otterstedt, Baker, & Kame'enui, 2011). Even with these

text poses a challenge. Students may be easily discouraged from staying the course with such long texts. We need to help them learn that they can meet this challenge. To increase students’ stamina, teachers should talk to them explicitly and consistently about expectations and the goal of increased capacity. A conversation might begin with, “This text may seem challenging to you. But you have the skills to read it.” Teachers can also support students’ stamina by helping them cope with the vocabulary demands of texts. Typically, only a small percentage of the vocabulary will be new to students. Before students read a text, teachers can guide them in scanning the text for words they don’t know. For example, in the book From Seed to Plant (Gibbons, 1991), a typical 2nd grader might identify pollination and pollen. A focused but short discussion of the pronunciation and meaning of these words follows this identification, concluding with the reminder that the student now has the ASCD /

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vocabulary to read the text and that his or her goal should be to identify the different forms of pollination described in the text. By letting the students take the lead in identifying these new words, teachers help them develop crucial selfmonitoring skills. Well-Designed Silent Reading Opportunities As students move into 2nd grade, the ratio of silent to oral reading should begin to tip in favor of silent reading. Silent reading is the mode in which most reading occurs—including, we anticipate, on the assessments that the two consortia are developing for the Common Core standards. Teachers need to teach silent reading habits, in particular the ability to sustain attention to the content over increasingly longer and more challenging texts. They can help students build silent reading habits by providing focused periods in which the task is clear and by monitoring and following through on expectations (Reutzel, Jones, Fawson, & Smith, 2008). Increasing Reading Time Brenner, Hiebert, and Tompkins (2009) found that since the implementation of No Child Left Behind, time devoted to reading instruction in many schools had doubled, whereas time students actually spent reading text had increased by only about 15 percent. Responding to findings like this one, Allington (2009) repeated the question he had asked in a seminal article in 1977: “If they don’t read much, how they ever gonna get good?” Allington’s question is rhetorical, but his message is on target. Unless students read more, they will never become proficient readers. Students need frequent and consistent opportunities to read widely to develop familiarity with the ideas, vocabulary, and background knowledge of texts, as well as automaticity and fluency. 52

Time Spent Reading Teachers need to steadily increase the length of time that students read and the amount of text they read at one sitting. Even small increases can make a difference. Kuhn and Schwanenflugel (2009) found that 2nd grade classrooms in which students made substantial gains spent seven more minutes reading each day than did classrooms in which students made insignificant gains.

The Common Core views the foundations of literacy as more than just accurate word recognition. Before teachers embark on an effort to increase the amount of time their students read during the day, they should collect information on how much and what students of different proficiency levels are asked to read independently over a week and across subject areas. With this information in hand, teachers can begin to identify ways to increase opportunities for independent reading (see Hiebert, 2012b)—for example, building silent reading into the routine for class transition times, having students reread part of texts to locate evidence to support an assertion during a group discussion, and assigning students to read magazine articles to extend their knowledge of the content of instructional texts. Areas of Expertise To become proficient readers, students need to engage in reading both inside and outside of school. U.S. 4th graders ranked near the bottom in an international comparison of motivation for reading (Mullis, Martin, Gonzalez, & Kennedy, 2003). Schools, districts, and states need to initiate programs that

support students in developing areas of personal interest and expertise that they can satisfy by reading texts. Teachers should guide students in reading both widely and deeply in particular topics. The New Meaning of Foundational Skills No Child Left Behind was inspired by research showing that students must attain foundational reading proficiencies—decoding, word identification, and basic comprehension—by the end of 3rd grade if they are to succeed in school. We must remember the importance of these skills; indeed, they are included in the Common Core standards. But in the Common Core standards, attending to foundational skills does not occur at the expense of engaging students with compelling content in texts. NCLB taught us that a simple view of reading instruction—in which skills come first and learning from text comes next—does not create engaged readers. The Common Core initiative views the foundations of literacy as more than just accurate word recognition. As schools incorporate Common Core standards into the primary grades, teachers and students will experience how powerful literacy can be when texts are not only used to teach basic skills, but also viewed as a source of knowledge. EL

References Alexander, K. A., Entwisle, D. R., & Horsey, C. S. (1997). From first grade forward: Early foundations of high school dropout. Sociology of Education, 70(2), 87–107. Allington, R. L. (2009). If they don’t read much . . . 30 years later. In E. H. Hiebert (Ed.), Reading more, reading better (pp. 30–54). New York: Guilford Press. Beck, I. L., Farr, R. C., Strickland, D. S., Ada, A. F., McKeown, M. G., Washington, J. A., et al. (2009). Storytown. Orlando, FL: Harcourt School Publishers. Brenner, D., Hiebert, E. H., & Tompkins, R. (2009). How much and what are third graders reading? In E. H. Hiebert (Ed.), Reading more, reading better

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(pp. 118–140). New York: Guilford Press. Chall, J. S. (1983). Stages of reading development. New York: McGraw-Hill. Chall, J. S., Jacobs, V. A., & Baldwin, L. E. (1990). The reading crisis: Why poor children fall behind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cummings, K. D., Kennedy, P. C., Otterstedt, J., Baker, S. K., & Kame'enui, E. J. (2011). DIBELS data system: 2010–2011 percentile ranks for DIBELS next benchmark assessments (Technical Report 1101). Eugene: University of Oregon. Gibbons, G. (1991). From seed to plant. New York: Holiday House. Gray, W. S., Baruch, D., & Montgomery, E. (1940). Basic readers: Curriculum foundation series. Chicago, IL: Scott, Foresman. Hernandez, D. J. (2011). Double jeopardy: How third-grade reading skills and poverty influence high school graduation. Baltimore: Annie E. Casey Foundation. Hiebert, E. H. (2012a). Core vocabulary: The foundation for successful reading of complex texts. Retrieved from TextProject at www .textproject.org/teachers/text-matters/ core-vocabulary

Hiebert, E. H. (2012b). 7 ways to make the 7-minute challenge produce learning. Retrieved from TextProject at www .textproject.org/frankly-freddy/7-ways-tomake-the-7-minute-challenge-producelearning Hiebert, E. H., & Mesmer, H. A. (in press). Upping the ante of text complexity in the Common Core State Standards: Examining its potential impact on young readers. Educational Researcher. Kuhn, M. R., & Schwanenflugel, P. J. (2009). Time, engagement, and support: Lessons from a 4-year fluency intervention. In E. H. Hiebert (Ed.), Reading more, reading better (pp. 141–160). New York: Guilford Press. Lawrence Hall of Science. (2010). Seeds of science/Roots of reading. Nashua, NH: Delta Education. Mullis, I. V. S., Martin, M. O., Gonzalez, E. J., & Kennedy, A. M. (2003). PIRLS 2001 international report: IEA’s study of reading literacy achievement in primary school in 35 countries. Chestnut Hill, MA: International Study Center, Boston College.

National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core State Standards for English language arts and literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Washington, DC: Authors. Retrieved from www.core standards.org/assets/CCSSI_ELA%20 Standards.pdf Reutzel, D. R., Jones, C. D., Fawson, P. C., & Smith, J. A. (2008). Reconsidering silent sustained reading. Journal of Educational Research, 102(1), 37–50. Valencia, S. W., Smith., A. T., Reece, A. M., Li, M., Wixson, K. K., & Newman, H. (2010). Oral reading fluency assessment. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(3), 270– 291. Elfrieda H. Hiebert (hiebert@textproject .org) is president and CEO of TextProject and research associate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. P. David Pearson ([email protected]) is a professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley.

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