Reading Reconsidered

A Practical Guide to Rigorous Literacy Instruction

Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, Erica Woolway

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119104254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

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 withmore than40video 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.

Part 1
The 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 1
Text Selection

1. Module 1.1: The Decline of the Canon
   The books you choose to teach are just as important as how you teach them.
2. Module 1.2: Text Attributes and Leveling Systems
   Leveling systems can be inconsistent, especially in terms of the qualitative complexity of texts.
3. 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.
4. Module 1.4: Book Choice
   Including the totality of a text is important for providing literary utility, cultural capital, knowledge development, and disciplinary literacy.
5. Module 1.5: Managing Selection
   Managing selection and establishing a schoolwide canon improve intertextual discussion, as well as teacher knowledge and workload.

Chapter 1
Text 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?

The reality, however, is that in teaching reading, many educators have come to believe that the goal is to teach students a set of skills—“how to read”—that are applicable to any text. Teach a book, almost any book, the “right way”—by fostering rich discussion, say, and drawing students' awareness to depth of characterization and the role of figurative language—and students will learn to read any text well.

The million-dollar question is, of course, “What is the right way?” Once that is settled, for many teachers, text selection can boil down to choosing something relatively engaging for kids to read. If there's buy-in and students like a book, there's a viable platform for practicing the skills of reading in whatever manner a teacher defines them. Assuming there's reasonable diversity in genres and authors, that's probably enough. But in fact, what students read shapes how and how well they learn to read in far more ways than what might at first seem obvious.

A closer look at this famous scene from Oliver Twist suggests a few of the reasons why.

Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months: at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger, that one boy, who was tall for his age, and hadn't been used to that sort of thing (for his father had kept a small cookshop), hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to eat the boy who slept next him, who happened to be a weakly youth of tender age. He had a wild, hungry eye; and they implicitly believed him. A council was held; lots were cast who should walk up to the master after supper that evening, and ask for more; and it fell to Oliver Twist.

The evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master, in his cook's uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his pauper assistants ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served out; and a long grace was said over the short commons. The gruel disappeared; the boys whispered to each other, and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbours nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:

“Please, sir, I want some more.”

The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralysed with wonder; the boys with fear.

“What!” said the master at length, in a faint voice.

“Please, sir,” replied Oliver, “I want some more.”

Imagine a typical student, a ninth-grader perhaps, reading this passage and struggling. Let's say the student failed to realize that young Oliver was goaded into his actions—that they were not characteristic of his true gentleness of character. Let's say that our high school student failed to hear Dickens's sardonic, narrative voice exaggerating the cruelty of Oliver's wards.

Let's also consider just as plausibly that our student might struggle to follow the basic action—that “child as he was” means “because he was a child,” that a “copper” is a pot, the “commons” was their meal, that “lots were cast” means they decided by drawing straws, that “it fell to Oliver” means he lost, and that when the master “gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel,” Dickens means he was looking at Oliver. Maybe our student would simply have run out of steam and given up somewhere in the maze of Dickens's thirty-seven-word first sentence!

The cause of the debacle is unlikely to be that our student lacks practice in common reading skills, such as making inferences or assessing character motivation. It's far more likely that our student can't execute those skills—or even achieve basic comprehension—with a complex text, specifically one full of lengthy, multiclausal sentences written in nineteenth-century syntax and relying on knowledge of nineteenth-century society.

Quite plausibly, prior to Oliver Twist, our student might have been almost exclusively exposed to benignly appealing youth fiction written after 1980, chosen specifically because of its easy accessibility. Of course many high school students struggle to read Dickens. A huge number have never read anything older or more disorienting than Tuck Everlasting. And although we tend to assume that a basic skill like assessing character motivation is fungible across books, it is not necessarily true that assessing Winnie's motivation in fifteen scenes from Tuck Everlasting will set a student on a course to understand Oliver Twist's.

The “skills” of reading, in other words, may not be so universally applicable. They are applied in a setting, and the details of the setting—what we read—matter immensely. Almost anyone can make accurate character inferences about Curious George. Making them in a George Elliott novel is tougher. A systematic exposure to certain types of text experiences is at least as necessary in determining a student's ability to read widely and successfully as a systematic exposure to certain kinds of skill-based questions.

Choosing harder texts, as we will discuss, is one element necessary to preparing students for success in college. But more than that, students need to wrestle with specific types of challenges posed by a rich array of challenging texts, systematically introduced starting in elementary school.

In this chapter, we will reflect on factors teachers can consider in deciding what students read—what, for example, they can be reading in fifth grade to help ensure later success with Oliver Twist. The goal is to make choices as rigorous as possible—in a balanced way that still allows for Tuck Everlasting—and to think about how the texts students read now can contribute to their success in and love for reading later on.

Module 1.1: The Decline of the Canon

In many schools, reading has come to be tacitly defined as “the act of asking and answering questions about a text.” Depending on what philosophy of reading you choose, it consists, at its core, of asking students to demonstrate a specific vision of skills inherent in readership. There are different visio...