M'reen
I chose this photo of my walk in Malham as the ancient structure of a style has steps
of an appropriate height for the situation, with hand supports for the walker
and a swing 'door' for dogs of various sizes and abilities.
It is simple to use, effective in execution of its purpose, cheap to construct / maintain,
tested in its effectiveness
and importantly it is an attractive and satisfying way of furthering one's progress.
I think that it demonstrates the conclusion of the following article that an appropriate combination
of styles is preferable for a rounded approach that provides the desired benefits.
Considering regarding reading beyond one's current capabilities,
be that as a student of reading or reading in a
new subject area
then
Turbo Charged Reading comes into its own because the unknown is taken
directly into the innermind where it becomes part of one's inner confidence
so that when brought into the working conscious awareness during reading (out loud),
study or conversation it has a basis of knowledge that is enhanced with reading.
Leveled Reading:
The Making of a Literacy Myth
By Robert Pondiscio and Kevin Mahnken
Among opponents of
the Common Core, one of the more popular targets of vitriol
is the standards’
focus on improving literacy by introducing higher levels of textual complexity
into the
instructional mix. The move to challenge students with more knotty, grade-level
reading material represents a shift away from decades of general adherence to
so-called
“instructional
level theory,” which encourages children to read texts pitched at or slightly
above
the student’s
individual reading level. New York public school principal Carol Burris,
an outspoken
standards critic and defender of leveled reading, recently published
an anti-Common Core missive on the Washington Post’s Answer
Sheet blog that was fairly typical
of the form. Where, she wondered, “is the research to support: close reading,
increased Lexile levels, the use of informational texts, and other questionable
practices in the primary grades?”
The blog post,
which has already been intelligently critiqued by Ann Whalen at Education Post, expanded on remarks delivered by Burris
earlier this month at an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate with Fordham president Michael Petrilli and former assistant secretary
of education
Carmel Martin.
There, too, she demanded evidence of literacy improvements
arising from the
use of complex texts.
A fair request and
one that warrants a thorough response.
But first, for the
benefit of readers who are neither teachers nor literacy specialists,
a quick explainer
on how these two theories of
reading work:
In leveled
reading, a teacher listens as her student reads a piece of text at a given
reading level.
If the child makes
two-to-five mistakes per one hundred words,
that is considered her
“instructional” level. Zero or one mistakes means the book is too easy;
six or
more mistakes and that level is deemed her “frustration” level.
Children are then
offered lots of books at their “just right” level on the theory that if they
read extensively and independently, language growth and reading proficiency
will follow,
setting the child
on a slow and steady climb through higher reading levels. It sounds logical,
and, as we will
see, there are definite benefits to getting kids to read a lot independently.
By marked
contrast, Common Core asks teachers to think carefully about what children read
and choose
grade-level texts that use sophisticated language or make
significant knowledge
demands of the reader (teachers should also be prepared, of course,
to offer
students support as they grapple
with challenging books).
Instead of asking,
“Can the child read this?” the question might be, “Is this worth reading?”
Leveled reading is
intuitive and smartly packaged (who wants kids to read “frustration level”
books?),
but its evidence base is remarkably thin.
There is much
stronger research support for teaching reading with complex texts.
What’s the source
of the blind faith that Burris and others have in leveled reading instruction?
“In the decades
before Common Core, an enormous amount of the instruction
in American
elementary and middle schools has been with leveled text,” says David Liben,
a veteran teacher
and Senior Content Specialist at Student Achievement Partners.
“The generally
poor performance of our children on international comparisons speaks
volumes
about its effectiveness.
To become proficient, students need to have the
opportunity to read, with necessary
support,
rich complex text. But they also need to read—especially if they are
behind—a huge volume
and range of text types just as called for in the
standards.”
Students could
read many of these less complex texts independently. “Instruction with complex
text
at all times is not what is called for, even by Common Core advocates,”
Liben takes care to note.
Burris and others,
however, offer a reflexive defense of leveled instruction.
At the Intelligence
Squared event, she claimed that “We
know from years of developmental reading research that kids do best when they
read independently with leveled readers.”
Such surety is
belied by a surprising lack of rigorous evidence.
Literacy blogger
Timothy Shanahan, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of urban education
at the University
of Illinois at Chicago, recently detailed his
discovery of the inauspicious origins
of instructional
level theory as a young scholar.
Made famous in
Emmett Betts’s influential, now-little-remembered 1946 textbook
Foundations of Reading Instruction, leveled reading theory actually emerged from
a more obscure
study conducted by one of Betts’s doctoral students.
“I tracked down
that dissertation and to my dismay it was evident that they had just made up
those designations
without any empirical evidence,” Shanahan wrote. When the study—
which had in
effect never been conducted—was “replicated,” it yielded wildly different
results.
In other words,
there was no study, and later research failed to show the benefits of leveling.
“Basically we have put way too much confidence in an unproven theory,” Shanahan
concluded.
Experts have spent
much of the last four decades unraveling elements of Betts’s thesis,
as Douglas Fisher
and Nancy Frey recently
demonstrated in The Reading Teacher,
a popular journal.
The authors, who work closely with the International Reading Association (IRA),
were longtime advocates of leveled reading. Re-examining the published research
in light of the new standards, however, they found that the use of leveled text
beyond the very first years of primary school
yielded no achievement gains in
students.
The belief that
young readers should only be taught from texts that they understood
to a level
of 95 percent or higher—a stringent notion of comprehension first envisioned by
Betts
—has been found to
be erroneous. Researchers William R. Powell and C.G. Dunkeld,
as early as 1971,
said that the 95 percent–cutoff was too high; and, more recently,
academic Juliet
Halladay condemned it as “somewhat arbitrary.”
Even more striking
to Fisher and Frey was the abundance of support for the use
of more difficult
reading material: “Surprisingly, we did find studies suggesting that students
learn more when taught with texts that were above their instructional level.”
One such prominent
study, though unheralded in their review, was that of the Science IDEAS model
put forward by researchers Michael Vitale and Nancy Romance.
The program, which replaces eight weeks of English Language Arts lessons with a regimen
of complex science
instruction for a group of third- to fifth-graders,
was shown to not
only enhance scientific aptitude among the group,
but also accelerate reading comprehension through the use of complex science texts.
Another trial, organized by specialists at Brigham Young University, divided a swath of struggling students into
three groups of “paired readers,” each furnished with texts of a set difficulty
level. Paired reading, a method by which two pupils read aloud together, has
proven broadly successful
in generating
literacy gains among children; indeed, all three groups improved through the
use
of the paired
system. But the greatest advance was made by the group using text that was two
years above its instructional level. Burris has dismissed paired reading and
the study as “idiosyncratic”;
her meaning here
is obscure, but she might have more simply described it as a proven,
effective, and
inexpensive way of helping children learn to read.
In addition to these
studies, Shanahan, in the IRA journal Reading Today Online,
lists twenty
studies showing the efficacy of instruction with more complex text.
Thus we have a
significant and growing body of research providing support for this initiative.
To be emphatically
clear, none of this is data should be taken to advocate for a total phasing-out
of texts students
can read independently, many of which would be at lower levels of complexity.
“Nowhere in the Common Core standards,” Liben concurs,
“or in the work of these
experts is it recommended
that we abandon this practice.
This is why the
Core standards call for all students to read ‘widely and deeply.’ Not doing so
would make it
impossible to grow the vocabulary and knowledge essential to success.”
Russ Walsh, a teacher
and curriculum director, making the case for leveled instruction
in another Answer
Sheetpost, finally concedes that the
best approach
“is to balance our
instruction between independent level, on-level, and frustration level texts.”
On this we agree.
But before Common Core, such balance was far less likely, too often denying
our most needy
students the opportunity to read, enjoy, and benefit from a full range of rich
texts.
As Alfred Tatum noted in the Fisher article cited above, “Leveled texts
lead to leveled lives.”
This first
appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Common Core
Watch blog.
http://educationnext.org/leveled-reading-making-literacy-myth/
A practical overview of Turbo Charged Reading
YouTubeHow to choose a book. A Turbo Charged Reading
YouTubeEmotions when Turbo Charged Reading
YouTube
Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
To quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”
