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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
TEACH YOUR STUDENTS TO READ WITH PRECISION AND INSIGHT The world we are preparing our students to succeed in is one bound together by words and phrases. Our students learn their literature, history, math, science, or art via a firm foundation of strong reading skills. When we teach students to read with precision, rigor, and insight, we are truly handing over the key to the kingdom. Of all the subjects we teach reading is first among equals. Grounded in advice from effective classrooms nationwide, enhanced with more than 40 video clips, Reading Reconsidered takes you into the trenches with actionable guidance from real-life educators and instructional champions. The authors address the anxiety-inducing world of Common Core State Standards, distilling from those standards four key ideas that help hone teaching practices both generally and in preparation for assessments. This 'Core of the Core' comprises the first half of the book and instructs educators on how to teach students to: read harder texts, 'closely read' texts rigorously and intentionally, read nonfiction more effectively, and write more effectively in direct response to texts. The second half of Reading Reconsidered reinforces these principles, coupling them with the 'fundamentals' of reading instruction--a host of techniques and subject specific tools to reconsider how teachers approach such essential topics as vocabulary, interactive reading, and student autonomy. Reading Reconsidered breaks an overly broad issue into clear, easy-to-implement approaches. Filled with practical tools, including: * 44 video clips of exemplar teachers demonstrating the techniques and principles in their classrooms (note: for online access of this content, please visit my.teachlikeachampion.com) * Recommended book lists * Downloadable tips and templates on key topics like reading nonfiction, vocabulary instruction, and literary terms and definitions. Reading Reconsidered provides the framework necessary for teachers to ensure that students forge futures as lifelong readers.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Video Contents
Video Clips
Useful Tools
Dedication
About the Authors
About Uncommon Schools
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading Reconsidered
“Figuring Out” Reading
The Core of the Core
How to Use This Book
Notes
Part 1: The Core of the Core
Chapter 1: Text Selection
Chapter 1: Text Selection
Module 1.1: The Decline of the Canon
Module 1.2: Text Attributes and Leveling Systems
Module 1.3: The Five Plagues of the Developing Reader
Module 1.4: Book Choice
Module 1.5: Managing Selection
Notes
Chapter 2: Close Reading
Chapter 2: Close Reading
Module 2.1: Layered Reading
Module 2.2: Establish Meaning via Text-Dependent Questions
Module 2.3: Close Reading to Analyze Meaning
Module 2.4: Processing Ideas and Insights in Writing, and the Power of Clear Focus
Module 2.5: Close Reading Bursts
Notes
Chapter 3: Reading Nonfiction, and the Challenge of Background Knowledge
Chapter 3: Reading Nonfiction, and the Challenge of Background Knowledge
Module 3.1: The Key Challenge: Background Knowledge
Module 3.2: Absorption Rate
Module 3.3: Embedding Texts to Increase Absorption Rate and Build Background Knowledge
Module 3.4: Other Ways to Build Background Knowledge
Module 3.5: Some Unique Challenges of Nonfiction
Notes
Chapter 4: Writing for Reading
Chapter 4: Writing for Reading
Module 4.1: Reading Class Cycles
Module 4.2: Writing Is Revising
Module 4.3: Art of the Sentence
Module 4.4: Building Stamina
Module 4.5: Monitoring and Assessment via the Stack Audit
Note
Part 2: The Fundamentals
Chapter 5: Approaches to Reading: Reading More, Reading Better
Chapter 5: Approaches to Reading: Reading More, Reading Better
Module 5.1: Approaches to Reading
Module 5.2: Accountable Independent Reading (AIR)
Module 5.3: Control the Game
Module 5.4: Read-Aloud
Notes
Chapter 6: Vocabulary Instruction: Breadth and Depth
Chapter 6: Vocabulary Instruction: Breadth and Depth
Module 6.1: Explicit and Implicit Vocabulary Instruction Compared
Module 6.2: Explicit Vocabulary Instruction: The Daily Word Rollout to Achieve Deep Word Knowledge
Module 6.3: Implicit Instruction: Building Vocabulary during Reading
Module 6.4: Maintenance and Extension
Notes
Chapter 7: Reading Systems
Chapter 7: Reading Systems
Module 7.1: Interactive Reading: An Overview
Module 7.2: Phases of Implementation: Rollout, Modeling, Prompting, Autonomy
Module 7.3: Interactive Reading System: How to Mark Up a Text (and What to Mark)
Module 7.4: Discussion Systems: Laying the Groundwork for Habits of Discussion
Module 7.5: Discussion Systems: Beyond the Groundwork
Note
Chapter 8: Toward Intellectual Autonomy
Chapter 8: Toward Intellectual Autonomy
Module 8.1: Frameworks for Interpretation
Module 8.2: Technical Vocabulary
Module 8.3: Phases of Development
Module 8.4: Autonomous Writing Structures
Module 8.5: Autonomous Discussion Structures
Appendix: Useful Tools
Ideas for Meta-Embedding
Examples of Embedding
Unit Plan with Embedded Texts
Embedding Nonfiction: Quality-Control Checklist
Read-Write-Discuss-Revise Cycle Template
Sample Vocabulary Rollout Script
Reader's Response Journal Template
Literary Terms and Definitions
Index
How to Access the Online Contents
More Ways to Engage and Learn with Teach Like a Champion
Companion Website
Train-the-Trainer Workshops
Plug and Plays
End User License Agreement
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Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Reading Reconsidered
Figure I.1 Mean SAT Scores by Year
Chapter 1: Text Selection
Figure 1.1 Common Core Exemplars by Lexile and Grade Estimate
Figure 1.2 Uncommon Schools Canon vs. Common Core Exemplars by Lexile
Chapter 3: Reading Nonfiction, and the Challenge of Background Knowledge
Figure 3.1 A magazine article with a complex visual layout
Chapter 4: Writing for Reading
Figure 4.1 A Typical Reading Lesson
Figure 4.2 A Reengineered Reading Lesson to Address the Reading CFU Gap
Figure 4.3
Miracle's Boys
Stop and Jot
Figure 4.4 Student sample work that comes across as wooden
Figure 4.5 Student sample work that contains elements of woodenness characteristic of the writing of many emerging writers.
Chapter 5: Approaches to Reading: Reading More, Reading Better
Figure 5.1 It's important to understand and master all the benefits and limitations of these three approaches to reading
Chapter 6: Vocabulary Instruction: Breadth and Depth
Figure 6.1 When you teach words explicitly and deeply and you also help students broaden their vocabulary through Implicit Vocabulary Instruction, you help them improve both their depth and their breadth of word knowledge
Figure 6.2 Two diagrams showing less rigorous and more rigorous vocabulary instruction
Chapter 7: Reading Systems
Figure 7.1 A bulletin board that praises excellent Interactive Reading habits
Figure 7.2 A visual reminder of how to read interactively
Figure 7.3 Prompting and transaction costs
Chapter 8: Toward Intellectual Autonomy
Figure 8.1 A classroom reference wall of words students use to talk about literature and poetry
Figure 8.2 Example of a Reader's Response Journal
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Text Selection
Table 1.1 Modern Equivalents of Archaic Language
Chapter 2: Close Reading
Table 2.1 Levels and Purposes of TDQs
Table 2.2 Paraphrase versus Summary
Table 2.3 Updated Map of TDQs
Table 2.4 Completed Map of TDQs
Table 2.5 The Four Types of Close Reading Bursts
Chapter 4: Writing for Reading
Table 4.1 Variations for Revising
Chapter 7: Reading Systems
Table 7.1 Habits of Discussion
Table 7.2 Sample Sentence Starters
Chapter 8: Toward Intellectual Autonomy
Table 8.1 Elements and Devices
READINGRECONSIDERED
A Practical Guide to Rigorous Literacy Instruction
DOUG LEMOVCOLLEEN DRIGGSERICA WOOLWAY
Copyright © 2016 by Doug Lemov and Uncommon Schools. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
A Wiley Brand
One Montgomery Street, Suite 1000, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594—;www.josseybass.com
Written by Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, and Erica Woolway
Video clips copyright © 2016 by Uncommon Schools except for Bracey/Reading Class Cycles (Clip 10) and Bracey/Control the Game (Clip 18), which are copyright © 2016 Relay Graduate School of Education. All rights reserved.
Credits continue on page 385.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.
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Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lemov, Doug, 1967- author. | Driggs, Colleen, author. |Woolway, Erica, 1979- author.
Title: Reading reconsidered : a practical guide to rigorous literacy instruction / Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs,
Erica Woolway.
Description: San Francisco, CA : Jossey-Bass & Pfeiffer Imprints, Wiley, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015038419 (print) | LCCN 2015049348 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119104247 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781119104346 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119104254 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Reading. | Reading comprehension. | Language arts–Correlation with content subjects. |
BISAC: EDUCATION / Teaching Methods & Materials / Reading & Phonics.
Classification: LCC LB1050 .L44 2016 (print) | LCC LB1050 (ebook) | DDC 372.4–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038419
Cover design: Wiley
Cover image: ©kyoshino/Getty Images, Inc., ©marekuliasz/Shutterstock
Chapter 2: Excerpt from “Harlem” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associated Editor. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC., and Harold Ober and Associates. All rights reserved.
Chapter 7: “My Papa's Waltz” copyright © 1942 by Hearst Magazines, Inc. from Collected Poems by Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Faber and Faber, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Figures 1.1, 1.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3; Chapter 3: Sample Embedded Outline (Javsicas); Chapter 4: Stop and Jot example (DeLuke); Appendix: Ideas for Meta-Embedding, Embedding Nonfiction: Quality-Control Checklist, Glossary of Technical Vocabulary Terms, Read-Write-Discuss-Revise Cycle Template, Sample Vocabulary Rollout Script, Reader's Response Journal Template, Literary Terms and Definitions, all copyright © 2016 by Uncommon Schools.
Appendix: Sample Vocabulary Rollout Script image of a fortune teller, copyright © Everett Collection/Shutterstock
Video Contents
These video clips and useful tools are accessible via a login at www.wiley.com/go/readingreconsidered
For instructions, please see How to Access the Videos in the back of the book.
Video Clips
Close Reading (
Chapter 2
)
Clip
Module
Teacher
Description
1
Layered Reading
Patrick Pastore
Patrick uses both contiguous reading and line-by-line reading as he and his students read “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”
*
2
Close Reading to Analyze Meaning
Rue Ratray
Rue reads for subtlety and author's craft by juxtaposing a line from
The Giver
with plausible alternatives.
3
Close Reading Bursts
Beth Verrilli
Beth and her students closely read a short and crucial moment in
Othello
.
Nonfiction (
Chapter 3
)
Clip
Module
Teacher
Description
4
Embedding Texts
Colleen Driggs
Colleen makes the familiar more rigorous with an embedded text.
5
Embedding Texts
Patrick Pastore
Patrick embeds a short nonfiction piece on the Civil War to illuminate elements of a short story set in that time. (“Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”)
6
Embedding Texts
Patrick Pastore
Patrick models rigorous character analysis with the help of an outside-the-bull's-eye embedded text. (
The Westing Game
and a description of histrionic personality disorder)
Writing for Reading (
Chapter 4
)
Clip
Module
Teacher
Description
7
Writing for Reading
Gillian Cartwright
Gillian builds student writing stamina and uses writing to support a high-quality discussion of
Fences
.
8
Reading Class Cycles
Kelsey Clark
Kelsey has systematized Stop and Jots that give her students multiple opportunities to reflect on their reading in writing.
9
Reading Class Cycles
Julia Goldenheim
Julia expands the Read-Write-Discuss cycle by having students revise based on insights gleaned from discussion of the text. (
The Winter of Our Discontent
)
10
Reading Class Cycles
Jessica Bracey
Jessica “re-cycles” to ensure that students frequently reflect on their reading through writing and to create the illusion of speed.
11
Writing Is Revising
Julie Miller
Julie carefully monitors student writing, then provides clear feedback based on her observations of students' writing. (
The Life and Times of Oscar Wao
)
12
Writing Is Revising
Julia Goldenheim
Julia quickly addresses a common error by Show Calling one student and soliciting constructive feedback from the class.
13
Building Stamina
Eric Diamon
Eric strategically helps students build their writing stamina. (
Baseball in April and Other Stories
)
14
Building Stamina
Lauren Latto
Lauren supports students' writing stamina by giving them a choice of three equally rigorous writing prompts for
Romeo and Juliet
.
Approaches to Reading (
Chapter 5
)
Clip
Module
Title
Description
15
Accountable Independent Reading
Patrick Pastore
Patrick encourages quality Accountable Independent Reading by giving students a clear focal point. (
Catcher in the Rye
)
16
Accountable Independent Reading
Daniel Cosgrove
Daniel uses a catchphrase to expand Accountable Independent Reading duration at low transaction cost. (
James and the Giant Peach
)
17
Control the Game
Nikki Frame
Nikki gently administers a consequence and positively brings an inattentive student back into the class's Control the Game reading of
A Single Shard
.
18
Control the Game
Jessica Bracey
Jessica masterfully Controls the Game during a Read-Aloud portion of her lesson. (
Circle of Gold
)
19
Control the Game
Rob De Leon
Rob bridges for his students as they finish a section of
The Mouse and the Motorcycle
.
20
Control the Game
Eric Snider
Eric prompts students to fill in missing words to ensure that the students are following along during a Control the Game reading. (“Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed”)
21
Control the Game
Patrick Pastore
Patrick names the sound and Punches the Error to minimize transaction costs and put the majority of decoding work on students. (
The Westing Game
)
22
Control the Game
Bridget McElduff
Bridget normalizes error and brings in the whole class to help a student correctly pronounce a word.
23
Read Aloud
Taylor Delhagen
Taylor injects life into reading aloud with drama and pizzazz.
24
Read Aloud
Maggie Johnson
Maggie asks for a little spunk, and gets some joy and laughter in return. (
To Kill a Mockingbird
)
Vocabulary (
Chapter 6
)
Clip
Module
Teacher
Description
25
Explicit Vocabulary Instruction
Akilah Bond, Colleen Driggs, and Gillian Cartwright
Watch Akilah, Colleen, and Gillian demonstrate the importance of accurate and student-friendly definitions.
26
Implicit Vocabulary Instruction
Tondra Collins
Tondra turns one student's struggle into an opportunity for Implicit Vocabulary Instruction. (
Twelve Angry Men
)
27
Implicit Vocabulary Instruction
Nikki Frame and Patrick Pastore
Nikki and Patrick drop in definitions to support students' understanding of a text. (
Number the Stars
and
A Single Shard
)
28
Implicit Vocabulary Instruction
Jamie Davidson
Jamie projects a picture of a scalpel on the overhead to support a definition that's critical to understanding the text. (
Boy: Tales of Childhood
)
29
Implicit Vocabulary Instruction
Maura Faulkner
Maura, after quickly defining a key word, asks a series of application questions to increase rigor and support student mastery of the word. (
Number the Stars
)
30
Implicit Vocabulary Instruction
Erica Lim
Erica pushes students to use a tough vocabulary word, as well as identify nonexamples of it. (
The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela
)
31
Maintenance and Extension
Steve Chiger
Steve reviews and reinforces vocabulary words in his high school English class.
32
Maintenance and Extension
Beth Verrilli
Beth reviews the word
exploited
as it relates to
Macbeth
through a series of Cold Calls.
Reading Systems (
Chapter 7
)
Clip
Module
Teacher
Description
33
Phases of Implementation
Patrick Pastore
Patrick rolls out and models Interactive Reading for his students. (
Miracle's Boys
)
34
Phases of Implementation
Kim Nicoll
Kim models elements of Interactive Reading like labeling and writing margin notes. (
The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963
)
35
Phases of Implementation
Amy Parsons
Students in Amy's class autonomously annotate as they read
Forgotten Fire
.
36
Interactive Reading System
Alex Bronson
Alex highlights a student's Interactive Reading notes in her science class as a model for the rest of the class.
37
Discussion Systems
Erica Lim
Erica encourages the use of nonverbals like eye contact and strong voice in her class discussion.
38
Discussion Systems
Erica Lim
Students in Erica's class hold a rigorous discussion with little prompting.
39
Discussion Systems
Erin Krafft
Erin installs a system that students can use to respectfully agree or disagree with their partner during their Turn and Talks.
40
Discussion Systems
Eric Snider
Eric uses multiple Turn and Talks while reading a short story, “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” to check for comprehension and keep engagement high.
41
Discussion Systems
Laura Fern
Laura's class engages in an impeccable Turn and Talk supported by strong systems she's established.
Toward Intellectual Autonomy (
Chapter 8
)
Clip
Module
Teacher
Description
42
Toward Intellectual Autonomy
Maggie Johnson
Maggie facilitates a discussion based on phrases students have autonomously identified as important during independent reading of
To Kill a Mockingbird
.
43
Autonomous Discussion Structures
Beth Verrilli
Beth clearly lays out the frame for a class discussion to support a rigorous and student-driven conversation about
The Great Gatsby
.
44
Autonomous Discussion Structures
Ryan Miller
Ryan models for students replicable actions of higher-level discussion as he facilitates a peer-to-peer conversation in his history class.
Useful Tools
Reading Nonfiction (Chapter 3)
Ideas for Meta-Embedding
Unit Plan with Embedded Texts: Rue Ratray and The Giver
Embedding Nonfiction: Quality-Control Checklist
Writing for Reading (Chapter 4)
Read-Write-Discuss-Revise Cycle Template
Vocabulary Instruction (Chapter 6)
Sample Vocabulary Rollout Script
Toward Intellectual Autonomy (Chapter 8)
Reader's Response Journal Template
Literary Terms and Definitions
*
For the video clips in which a specific text is highlighted, we've included the text title as an additional note.
To our kids, with whom we have 16,000 more nights to read—not nearly enough
About the Authors
Doug Lemov is a managing director of Uncommon Schools and leads its Teach Like a Champion team, designing and implementing teacher training based on the study of high-performing teachers. He was formerly the managing director for Uncommon's upstate New York schools. Before that he was vice president for accountability at the State University of New York Charter Schools Institute and was a founder, teacher, and principal of the Academy of the Pacific Rim charter school in Boston. He has taught English and history at the university, high school, and middle school levels. He holds a BA from Hamilton College, an MA from Indiana University, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Visit him at www.teachlikeachampion.com.
Colleen Driggs is a director of professional development for the Teach Like a Champion team at Uncommon Schools. Alongside Erica and Doug, she works to train thousands of high-performing teachers and school leaders across the country each year—reaching over one million students. Colleen is also an adjunct professor for Relay Graduate School of Education's National Principals Academy Fellowship. Before joining the Teach Like a Champion team, she taught middle school science in New York City; middle school science and literacy in New Haven, Connecticut; and middle school literacy in Rochester, New York. In Rochester, she served as the chair of the Reading Department, coaching literacy teachers and developing curriculum and assessments, at Rochester Prep Middle School. Colleen received her BA in psychology and education from Hamilton College and a master of education degree from Pace University.
Erica Woolway is the chief academic officer for the Teach Like a Champion team at Uncommon Schools. In this role, she works with the team to train thousands of high-performing teachers and school leaders across the country each year—reaching over one million students. Prior to becoming CAO, she served as both dean of students and director of staff development at Uncommon Schools and as an adjunct literacy instructor at Relay Graduate School of Education. Erica began her career in education as a kindergarten teacher and then worked as a school counselor. She received her BA in psychology and Spanish from Duke University, an MA and master of education degree from Teachers College in school counseling, and an MA in school leadership from National Lewis University. She is a coauthor of Practice Perfect with Doug Lemov and Katie Yezzi. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and their three boys.
About Uncommon Schools
At Uncommon Schools, our mission is to start and manage outstanding urban public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income scholars to enter, succeed in, and graduate from college. For nearly twenty years, through trial and error, we have learned countless lessons about what works in classrooms. Not surprisingly, we have found that success in the classroom is closely linked to our ability to hire, develop, and retain great teachers and leaders. That has prompted us to invest heavily in training educators and building systems that help leaders to lead, teachers to teach, and students to learn. We are passionate about finding new ways for our scholars to learn more today than they did yesterday, and to do so, we work hard to ensure that every minute matters.
We know that many educators, schools, and school systems are interested in the same things we are interested in: practical solutions for classrooms and schools that work, can be performed at scale, and are accessible to anyone. We are fortunate to have had the opportunity to observe and learn from outstanding educators—both within our schools and from across the United States—who help all students achieve at high levels. Watching these educators at work has allowed us to derive, codify, and film a series of concrete and practical findings about what enables great instruction. We have been excited to share these findings in such books as Teach Like a Champion (and the companion Field Guide), Practice Perfect, Driven by Data, Leverage Leadership, and Great Habits, Great Readers.
Since the release of the original Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov and Uncommon's Teach Like a Champion (TLaC) team have continued to study educators who are generating remarkable results across Uncommon, at partner organizations, and at schools throughout the country. Through countless hours of observation, Doug and the TLaC team have further refined and codified the tangible best practices that the most effective teachers have in common. Teach Like a Champion 2.0 builds off the groundbreaking work of the original Teach Like a Champion book and shares it with teachers and leaders who are committed to changing the trajectory of students' lives.
We thank Doug and the TLaC team for their tireless efforts to support teachers everywhere. We hope our efforts to share what we have learned will help you, your scholars, and our collective communities.
Brett PeiserChief Executive OfficerUncommon Schools
Uncommon Schools is a nonprofit network of forty-four high-performing urban public charter schools that prepare more than fourteen thousand low-income K–12 students in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to graduate from college. A 2013 CREDO study found that for low-income students who attend Uncommon Schools, Uncommon “completely cancel[s] out the negative effect associated with being a student in poverty.” In July 2013, Uncommon Schools was named the winner of the national 2013 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools for demonstrating “the most outstanding overall student performance and improvement in the nation in recent years while reducing achievement gaps for low-income students and students of color.” To learn more about Uncommon Schools, please visit our website at http://uncommonschools.org. You can also follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/uncommonschools, and on Twitter and Instagram at @uncommonschools.
Acknowledgments
Having seen this book through to reality demands of us many heartfelt thanks to a great many people. We start with our team: John Costello, Dan Cotton, Joaquin Hernandez, Derek Hines, Maggie Johnson, Jennifer Kim, Tracey Koren, Hilary Lewis, and Rob Richard. Writing this book wouldn't have been possible without your superb analysis and insights, your relentlessness about honoring teachers with deep study of their work, and your great camaraderie. We love coming to work because of the joy that you all bring to it, and that helps us do our best thinking and writing.
We are especially grateful to Rob and John, who happily granted every request in order to edit and produce all of the invaluable videos of teachers you see here and to Maggie, our reading content specialist, who generously devoted hundreds of hours sharing anecdotes and examples from her own teaching experiences, provided feedback on drafts, and offered thoughtful ways to frame some of the key ideas in the book. If she sees her thinking in this book, we are honored.
Without knowing it, we started drafting this book five years ago with our colleagues in the 5–8 Reading Working Group at Uncommon Schools: Kelly Dowling, Mabel Lajes-Guiteras, J. T. Leaird, Amy Parsons, Patrick Pastore, Serena Savarirayan, Hannah Solomon, and Lauren Vance. Your collective wisdom about literacy instruction is the foundation of this book, and the talented teachers you lead continue to inform and shape our understanding of excellent reading instruction. A special thanks to Evan Rudall, former CEO of Uncommon Schools, who originally gave us the overwhelming and incredible task of helping Uncommon “do reading” better. We'll try not to hold it against you!
Thank you, perhaps most of all, to the teachers who graciously allowed us to observe and videotape their instruction, who responded to emails and requests for phone conversations even at the end of long workdays, and who shared student work samples as well as the templates they've created in hours of careful planning. Teachers do the most important work in our society, we believe, and they do it with insight, passion, and skill. We are grateful to you all for doing that and for sharing what you've learned with us.
And there's the original literacy team at Rochester Prep, with whom Colleen worked and learned much of her craft. Thank you to Stacey Shells, Patrick Pastore, and Jaimie Brillante for helping pilot some of the early ideas for this book and for your constant feedback in helping make those ideas better.
An incredible thank you, also, to Christy Lundy and Stephen Chiger, both leaders of literacy at Uncommon Schools and trusted thought partners. Steve, thank you for your eloquent contributions, your sagacious feedback on drafts, and for your incredible spirit of collaboration and humility. The good news is, we owe you a pony. The bad news is, we are going to keep promising it at the next get-together so you keep coming to talk reading with us. Thank you to Katie Yezzi, Sam DeLuke, and Emily Hoefling for thoughtful feedback on our drafts using your experienced elementary school lens, and to all of the school leaders within Uncommon with whom we work, for your leadership generally and for your insight on teaching reading. Of course, all of the work at Uncommon Schools is possible only because of the support and guidance of our leadership: Brett Peiser, Julie Jackson, and Paul Bambrick-Santoyo.
There are also many friends outside of Uncommon to whom we owe a great deal of thanks: David Didau and Judith Hochman for significantly informing our discussion of writing, Sara Yu for her depth of knowledge about books and youth fiction in particular, David Coleman for taking the time to meet with us to discuss the vision behind the Common Core, Jessica Petrencsik for reviewing early drafts, and professor Patricia O'Neill for her comments in the Text Selection chapter.
Thanks to our agent, Rafe Sagalyn, for your leadership, guidance, and keeping us in line most of the time. A huge thanks to the team at Jossey-Bass who have supported us through the entire process, including Nic Albert, whose writing was a major asset to both the content and organization of this book; Michele Jones, whose careful edits ensured at least some clarity of ideas; and our editor, Kate Gagnon, whose constant support made this project possible.
Finally and most of all, thank you to our families: to our spouses, who put up with quite a bit even without the strain of a manuscript to write when there are bedtimes looming; and to our children, whom we adore beyond words and who we hope will forgive us for experimenting wildly on them with ideas from this book in our nightly reading with them.
Introduction
Reading Reconsidered
This book is about the enduring power of reading to shape and develop minds, both in the classroom and, ultimately, outside of it. Of the subjects taught in school, reading is first among equals—the most singular in importance because all others rely on it. Excellence in almost any academic subject requires strong reading. This applies to the history, math, science, arts, and other subjects that students study in their K–12 years, as well as the behavioral economics, organic chemistry, or ancient religious history they will pursue at the university level (to say nothing of the intellectual pursuits of their private and professional lives).
One of the core requirements of reading beyond the K–12 level is the ability to make meaning from the literature of a discipline: often dense and arcane, and where grasping the main idea—this is a document about the rights of citizens!—is insufficient. The specifics must be mastered—which rights, say, as defined how and by whom. Getting the gist is not enough. Academic success often means a student with a challenging text—sometimes at the margins of his comfort level—that he must read and master, alone. It's not all challenging reading—there will surely be fantastic lectures and labs and discussions, but even then, what a student is able to contribute to or take from those activities will depend heavily on what she took from the hundred pages of dense critical theory, case law, restoration drama or metastudies she sat down with the night before. The farther students advance, the more demanding the reading required of them.
If our hopes and expectations for our students stretch far—to the highest levels of accomplishment and learning—then our responsibility includes preparing them to read with rigor, independence, precision, and insight in the long run. However, it is important to remember that the journey and the destination do not always look the same.
Consider the case of Xavier University of Louisiana's premed program. Though you've probably never heard of it, you could argue that it's the most successful premed program in the country. Certainly it is the most effective at closing the preparation gap for students not born to privilege. Why do we say that? Well, consider that it is tiny, unheralded Xavier—with an enrollment of just under three thousand students, most of whom are first in their family to go to college and many of whom grew up with limited financial resources and attended high schools that did not prepare them for advanced STEM work—that produces the largest number of black medical school students in the country.1 Yes, you read that correctly. More black students make it to med school from Xavier than from any Ivy League school or any flagship state university with an enrollment ten times Xavier's. Why? Xavier seeks to reverse-engineer the skills and knowledge required in med school and ensures that every student masters those elements systematically in the first years of the program. The school prepares students for autonomy, independence, and problem solving through a program that not only offers practice at autonomy, independence, and problem solving but also ensures that every foundational skill on which they rely is robustly developed.
The reading teacher's job is similar: to ensure that each and every student—privileged in knowledge and skills or not, motivated (at first) or not—moves steadily and reliably toward mastery of advanced, complex skills. This requires understanding how such skills are built, not just hoping they will bloom. K–12 reading teachers, in short, must prepare students for college and university with intentionality and backwards design. This book proposes how to do that.
Once, a century-and-a-half ago, before compulsory schooling was universal, the beliefs of the English-speaking world were shaped by the words of writers like Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Charles Darwin, and Jane Austen, and those four visionary nineteenth-century thinkers have at least this in common: all four were educated primarily outside of any formal schooling system, via deep and constant reading. In part or in totality, books were their teachers, and they were able to shape the world's opinions based on what they read while working in a boot-blacking factory (Dickens) or under the lash of enslavement (Douglass). They show us that an exceptional reader can learn to do anything, no matter where those first pages of text reach him or her, no matter how long the journey to mastery. The power of their ideas reminds us that a well-read citizen can do anything.
Our argument is not, of course, that the way to educate the greatest number of future scholars to excellence is therefore to let them read on their own and hope for the best. Certainly, with that approach, some would rise to the top—but many more would sink. No, what brilliant self-educated readers teach us has to do with the power of reading. Words, especially the written variety, remain the primary currency of ideas, and the diligent study of reading is the diligent study of idea creation and development, so the urgency of making the teaching of reading in American schools as effective and rigorous as it can be must always be at the forefront of the work—and every teacher plays a role. Every student must glimpse, as much as possible, the power that comes from the world that reading can bring to light.
“Figuring Out” Reading
A few years ago, the head of Uncommon Schools, the nonprofit where we work and which runs forty-four high-performing urban charter schools, turned to us in the midst of an otherwise ordinary meeting and asked us to “figure out” reading. By “figure out,” he meant for us to go and analyze what we (our schools and teachers) were doing in our reading classrooms and determine what we needed to do more or less of. In other words, we were tasked with finding better ways to reach a consistently higher reading standard—to better prepare our students to succeed in college and in their lives beyond. We received this mandate despite the fact that, by most people's measures, we were succeeding in our ELA classrooms. Our students were consistently able to significantly outperform “expectations” as defined by what other similar populations of kids were able to achieve and what schools in similar neighborhoods did.2 Internally, however, we knew that it wasn't good enough to do better than a standard that was not nearly high enough; we needed to find a way to help our kids outperform students born to privilege and the lifetime of implicit benefits to literacy that come with it.
Our standard had to be true and enduring excellence, and there we fell short.3 Whereas in math and other subjects we would close the gap between our kids and those of privilege in just a year or two, our best schools took three and four years to do so in ELA. Some of them never did. Whereas our math results were consistent, those in ELA were far less predictable. Further, our first rounds of graduates brought back tales from college that were not always the march of triumph we'd expected. We'd sent 100 percent of our graduates on to college, but in many cases 150 pages of reading a night in texts of dizzying complexity had left our students overwhelmed by the challenge.
The charge to figure out reading was relatively terrifying. Our first thought was, “What if we can't think of anything to say?” But we set out to solve the problem in the way we've become accustomed to: by watching and learning from what successful teachers do and by doing our best to figure out what, among those things, works best.
Even before we started to develop thoughts about solutions, we noticed a lot about the challenge. For example, we noticed that “what we did” in our ELA classrooms could roughly be described as “just about everything.” There was a daunting breadth of skills and knowledge teachers were setting out to ensure that students mastered in a typical ELA classroom: learn to use hundreds of new words, develop the ability to comprehend texts in multiple genres, interpret texts in discussion with peers—and independently. Develop clear and evocative prose. Love and celebrate books. Know deeply some of the best ones that had been written. In some cases, the list included teaching those things to students who arrived in fifth grade not yet able to decode reliably. Oh, is that all?
But we noticed, also, that teachers did “just about everything” in another way, too. There was an immense inconsistency in the methods used by teachers across our network, even in comparison to the diverse approaches used by teachers in other disciplines. Our teachers, we sometimes thought, not only used every approach and ascribed to every philosophy under the sun but also often saw their chosen approach—to a degree far more evident than in our math or science classrooms, say—as something more than practical. The way they taught ELA was an expression of themselves, of their most deeply held beliefs. They were not necessarily going to relish suggestions that they make changes to that, we thought.
Our journey, several years in the making, began with that initial request to “figure it out,” but it was refined and focused with even greater urgency soon after, in response to another clarion call, this one directly from teachers and sounded in reaction to the phrase Common Core. At that point, no one had yet written standards or promulgated a test or tied that test to the lives of teachers and students in a variety of useful and not-so-useful ways. But teachers knew there would be changes, challenging ones, and they wanted their students to succeed with them. And with some anxiety, they knew they would be measured on something they did not yet fully understand. As information trickled out, we strove to combine what we were learning about teaching reading with what the Common Core required—or at least with the best arguments it was making—and how we saw teachers making those changes.
Because our work is informed in part by the phrase Common Core and because that phrase is fraught for many teachers, let us reflect on it for a moment. First, we want to observe that there are two levels on which teachers can react to the Common Core: the practical and the philosophical.
On the practical level, teachers have to consider the sorts of questions their students will have to be able to answer, about what kinds of texts, in what kinds of formats when they (both students and teachers) are formally assessed. They have to place bets to some degree: what the assessments will ask them to read and do is not always transparent, even though they understand that they will be evaluated for their success in preparing students for them. Teachers must make a “best guess” or, alternatively, bet in a different way and choose not to consider the assessments, continuing to teach in the manner they think is right and rigorous and true, no matter how reading is measured. These practical challenges are real, and we do not intend to minimize how stressful they can be for teachers. On a practical level, how rigorous, fair, accurate, and worthy those assessments turn out to be and how much teachers should adapt their teaching to them are questions we cannot answer.
But no matter how teachers may feel about the practical realities of assessment and implementation, it is also important for teachers to engage the questions the Common Core seeks to raise at the philosophical level. What is it that it asks teachers to do? Why? Are they good ideas, even if the pragmatics of the implementation are messy?
The Core of the Core
To that last question, we think the answer is a clear “Yes”—particularly if one were to try to simplify the changes the Common Core asks of teachers to focus on a few most important ideas and then think about how to execute them, regardless of how they are measured. We tried to do that and distilled from the Common Core four very clear and, we think, very good ideas. Those four ideas make up what we think of as the Core of the Core:
Read harder texts
“Close read” texts rigorously and intentionally
Read more nonfiction more effectively
Write more effectively in direct response to texts
When we discuss the Common Core in this book, it is, for the most part, these four ideas that we focus on. We of course discuss other topics as well: the end goal of autonomous reading, and a variety of foundational aspects of reading instruction, such as developing vocabulary. But the rationale behind these four Common Core ideas is, we think, sound and addresses some of the most important gaps in current reading instruction. So no matter what happens to the Common Core on the practical side—how it is assessed and implemented by districts and states, and so on—making those four changes and making them well is likely to ensure that students are better prepared for college and life. Therefore, we put aside the pragmatic questions we cannot answer, to focus instead on the ideas that are powerful, rigorous, and worthwhile. If, as an ancillary bonus, focusing on them also means that students will succeed on assessments, then hooray.
So why do we think these four ideas, which we discuss directly in the first four chapters of the book, make so much sense? We discuss the rationale more deeply in the chapters themselves, but offer a brief defense of each of them here.
Reading Harder Texts
Arriving at college means making adaptations: to dorms and meal halls (usually), to bigger classes, to managing time. But it also means encountering science classes that require the reading of highly technical abstracts and dense textbooks; social sciences courses that tend to transition from using secondary sources (discussion of a document in a textbook, say) to primary sources (reading the document itself, be it by Freud or Darwin, or the Declaration of Independence); and English classes that introduce texts that deliberately resist easy meaning-making by readers: John Donne, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez. To send students who are unfamiliar with the struggle of challenging text—never mind having never read a book more than a hundred years old—to this environment is to send them unprepared. A steady exposure over the years leading up to college both to harder texts specifically and to the experience of struggling with the challenge of difficult text is critical to success on campus.
The SAT is an instructive source of data on this topic. Where once the average American SAT reading score exceeded the average math score, the reverse is now true. As illustrated in Figure I.1, in 1986, the average Critical Reading score on the SAT was 507, and the average math score was 501. In the intervening years, Critical Reading scores have gone steadily down (to 495 in 2015) while math scores have gone steadily up (to 511 in 2015).4 At some point in the early-1990s, their trajectories crossed. Math was no longer the bigger challenge; reading was. ELA scores are in “relative decline,” and whatever scholastic or demographic or instructional trends have pushed SAT scores downward have affected reading more negatively than math, a fact which suggests that the most common explanation cited—that a wider percentage of U.S. students now take the test—is probably insufficient. Something else is happening to reading skills in the United States. One clue may lie in Marilyn Jager Adams's observation that the scores of the top 10 percent of test takers have dropped the most.5 Her argument, that this statistic indicts a lack of preparation for the notoriously challenging level of text difficulty on the SAT, is compelling, and one of many arguments for reading harder texts in school.
Figure I.1 Mean SAT Scores by Year
Close Reading
If success in college demands of students the ability to read successfully above their comfort zone, then the importance of teaching students how to struggle with challenging text is another good argument both for reading more challenging texts and for “Close Reading,” which is, as we define it, the set of tools readers use to “solve” text when it is challenging and out of their comfort zone. It involves strategies of both rereading and analysis—ways of unlocking the densest, most challenging lines of text, and in so doing learning how language works. It is the study of the mechanics of meaning-making, a topic that will serve students well everywhere they go and, in addition, teach them to be poised and composed in the face of struggle.
Reading More Nonfiction
Reading more nonfiction more effectively is wise advice too. Nonfiction poses a special set of challenges. It relies more on background knowledge and is among the most useful tools in building background knowledge, a happy fact if one is blessed with excellent knowledge to start, but which for others can result in a downward spiral of less comprehension and less knowledge, especially given that most students read less nonfiction than they do fiction. This, in and of itself, is yet another challenge, as nonfiction has its own distinctive conventions. When unfamiliar, they create yet another barrier to comprehension. And nonfiction is dense, information packed, and less likely to try to sell the reader on its own engaging storytelling style as it is to make its case straight up and using a stay-with-me-if-you-can prose style. Certainly much of the nonfiction that students read in college will be of that type. And, crucially, most of what students read in college will be nonfiction, which stands in stark contrast to the balance of what most probably read during their K–12 years (and certainly in reading and English classes), which tends to be overwhelmingly fiction and narrative nonfiction. So a shift in the balance of text to more—and more intentional—nonfiction will help students not only prepare for what they'll read in college but also build the knowledge they'll need to get there. And with a few clever tricks, we think teachers can do this engagingly and still teach all of the novels and stories they love so well. In fact, as we'll explain in the chapter, we think nonfiction can help you teach that literature better.
Writing for Reading
Finally there is the topic we define as “writing for reading.” Writing, we note, is the “coin of the realm,” the currency in which ideas are most widely circulated and valued. If you cannot put it in writing, you aren't assured of full credit—and in that statement we are referring to both school and life. Every act of textual interpretation may not have to be set down on paper to be fully credible, but the student, the thinker, who cannot get those interpretations onto paper operates at a massive handicap. What is written is permanent, enduring, recorded. True, learning to write directly in response to texts is a unique art worthy of practice; true, the experience, when focused on most intently, develops an affinity for language and its forms, but more urgently, we think, there are deep synergies between learning to read well and learning to write well, so the way students write in reading and English classes influences a lot more than just what they put on paper. It shapes what they take from their reading. Nothing for example, helps a student decipher a sentence of complex, thorny syntax like having sought to use complex syntax to capture complex ideas herself. One of our goals in this book then is to be more intentional about plumbing the synergies between reading and writing.
How to Use This Book
To make the material presented easier to navigate and digest, we've broken each of the following chapters into a series of shorter modules. The broader structure of the book reflects our belief in the four core ideas we've just described. As noted earlier, we address them in the first four chapters.
Chapter 1 addresses text selection, the idea that what you choose to read matters as much as how you read it. This sounds obvious, but we argue that in many classrooms, teachers have, without even realizing it, come to assume that reading is how one reads. We propose a set of qualitative measures of text complexity that can be used for choosing text. We also discuss hidden benefits of coordinated text selection among teachers.
Chapter 2 takes on one of the most critical and, at the same time, poorly defined ideas from the Common Core: Close Reading. We start by defining it, then provide a set of tools that can help teachers Close Read with rigor and insight.
Chapter 3 addresses the importance of nonfiction. The challenges of reading nonfiction are many; this is both a cause and an effect of the knowledge deficit. Therefore, we set out to examine ways to ensure that teachers can use reading of nonfiction, especially, to build knowledge.
Chapter 4 takes on the topic of writing for reading. Both writing and reading are not only critically important but also deeply synergistic. Teaching writing in specific ways, we think, can help students read more effectively.
The next four chapters address what we think of as the “fundamentals”—core elements of literacy instruction important in their own right that also offer deep synergy with the four Core of the Core Ideas.
Chapter 5, Approaches to Reading, focuses on ensuring that students read a lot and read in a variety of ways: reading silently, reading aloud, and being read to. We also address the often hidden challenges of reinforcing fluency and building decoding skills; we refer to them as “hidden” because we think many students struggle with them well beyond the early elementary grades, after which those skills are often no longer taught or reinforced.
Chapter 6 takes on vocabulary, something that almost every teacher addresses and that, in part because of its overwhelming familiarity and apparent mundanity, we think presents an opportunity for study. (At least watching great teachers at work makes us think that's so.) We propose a two-part approach that focuses on building both depth and breadth of word knowledge via both explicit and implicit vocabulary instruction.
Chapter 7, Reading Systems, focuses on consistent ways to approach key activities in the literacy classroom to make them more efficient, productive, and autonomous. For example, we discuss how to make text markup during reading—what we call Interactive Reading—as productive as possible, and how to motivate and monitor independent reading.
Chapter 8 addresses the ultimate goal of reading instruction: intellectual autonomy. Intellectual autonomy has to do with developing readers who are able not just to understand but also to critique and provide thoughtful answers to our questions and their own. This kind of autonomy doesn't happen by magic, so we propose ways to build the skills that will ultimately sustain students in developing their own ideas and interpretations about what they read.
Notes
1
The school's premed preparation program was profiled for its accomplishments in the September 9, 2015 issue of the
New York Times Magazine
.
2
More than 80 percent of Uncommon Schools students live beneath the poverty line.
3
Nor do we claim to be at that high standard yet.
4
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, “Fast Facts: SAT Scores,”
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171
; “Average SAT Scores of College-Bound Seniors (1952–Present),”
http://www.erikthered.com/tutor/historical-average-SAT-scores.pdf
.
5
Marilyn Jager Adams, “Advancing Our Students' Language and Literacy: The Challenge of Complex Texts,”
American Educator
, Winter 2010–2011, 3–11, 53,
http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Adams.pdf
.
Part 1The Core of the Core
In the Introduction, we briefly discussed four core elements of the Common Core—reading harder texts, Close Reading, reading more nonfiction, and writing in direct response to texts—that we think are especially enduring and valuable and that we see reflected in the teaching of our strongest peers. We dub them the Core of the Core, and discuss each in turn in the four chapters that follow, studying how these ideas can play out in the sometimes hectic, sometimes messy, almost always short-on-time reality of the classroom.
Chapter 1Text Selection
Module 1.1: The Decline of the Canon
The books you choose to teach are just as important as how you teach them.
Module 1.2: Text Attributes and Leveling Systems
Leveling systems can be inconsistent, especially in terms of the qualitative complexity of texts.
Module 1.3: The Five Plagues of the Developing Reader
It is imperative to expose students to a broad and deep list of difficult texts.
Module 1.4: Book Choice
Including the totality of a text is important for providing literary utility, cultural capital, knowledge development, and disciplinary literacy.
Module 1.5: Managing Selection
Managing selection and establishing a schoolwide canon improve intertextual discussion, as well as teacher knowledge and workload.
Chapter 1Text Selection
One of the most important topics in teaching reading is text selection, the process by which teachers choose what their students will read. Yet the importance of this topic remains partially invisible to many educators. This might seem at first to be a strange statement. Naturally, every teacher is aware of the text he or she is teaching. Of course, every teacher selects texts (or oversees students selecting them) carefully, right?
