is the key difference in determining a student’s college readiness; at least half of all graduating high school students, the report finds, aren’t ready. The big reveal of the report, though, is curricular in nature. The problem is as much one of access as it is outcome: the sophistication and language demands of high school textbooks and student opportunities with and exposure to complex texts in high school have been on the decline for decades.
You’ve heard the phrase “every teacher a reading teacher”; the Common Core is taking it a step further, suggesting that every class is a reading class. In this new reality, the text itself plays a crucial role; more than simply a vehicle for content, a rich text is a vehicle for both teaching the standards and for building student capacity to be proficient and independent readers.
Ensure Reading Is a Practice, Not an Act
The CCSS tell us only what students are to understand; instruction must be the source of how they understand. Research tells us that the two essential factors affecting a reader’s capacity to understand a text are knowledge and cognitive strategies—that is, what a reader knows about the subject matter, language (including vocabulary), and structure of a text and what the reader undertakes mentally to form a coherent representation of a text, such as by rereading, visualizing, generating questions, and so on (Cain, Oakhill, Barnes, & Bryant, 2001; Liben & Pearson, 2013). These factors work together to help the reader connect language and ideas within the text and across texts or prior knowledge (Magliano, Millis, Ozuru, & McNamara, 2007). If and when comprehension fails, the expert reader has the capacity to monitor and correct as needed in order to establish or reestablish basic comprehension. This ability to grasp the literal and inferential meanings should look familiar—it’s Reading anchor standard one, and the student is expected to engage in it during every single class, every single day.
What’s radical about these ideas—developing knowledge, utilizing comprehension strategies, building schema, and so on—is that they are hardly radical at all. The research supports them, and the individual pieces are probably already immersed in your school’s curriculum, if not your own. But it’s no longer only the English teacher who teaches reading strategies, the history teacher who teaches content, and the science teacher who teaches vocabulary. Everyone has to teach everything all of the time. It’s a practice, rather than a solitary act. Content, skills, metacognition, and self-efficacy are intertwined and interdependent. A student cannot, say, apply what he or she might have learned about mass in a previous lecture to a Science article on the composition of space if he or she is unable to read highly technical scholastic writing; likewise, no set of strategies will be sufficient to understand a primary source account of the French Revolution if a student has no background knowledge on the context, people, or historical significance of the French Revolution. Only through the synthesis of supportive instruction, curriculum, and learning environment can students comprehend complex texts and be ready for the literacy demands of college and career.
Make Practice Deliberate
Selecting texts and attending to the comprehension needs of students is not, however, enough. To ensure student literacy is up to standard, it is crucial to connect intentionally frequent and meaningful experiences with what students are expected to learn—what has been referred to as deliberate practice (Ericcson, 2002). The concept, perhaps most widely known as the conceptual basis for Malcolm Gladwell’s (2008) 10,000-hour rule for developing expertise, rests on the idea that frequency or repetition of a learned concept or activity alone is not enough to ensure mastery; learners must instead be deliberately engaged in the skill in terms of what they are learning, and when, how, where, and with whom they are learning it. The activity of reading is no different: students must not only be exposed to a variety of texts, they must engage them in a variety of ways—to solve different kinds of problems and to engage others around solving them—if they are to demonstrate increasing independence and proficiency with content that is itself increasing in complexity. The task, not just the text, then, becomes an essential lever for supporting high-quality student work.
The following principles suggest a major shift for educators, particularly when planning instruction. These principals alone are not enough to ensure instruction is up to standard; however, together they provide a foundation for up-to-standard instruction.
о Teachers must develop curricula centered on daily engagement with high-quality texts.
о Teachers must support engagement with high-quality texts through assisted development of comprehension skills, background knowledge, and metacognition.
о Teachers must sequence and scaffold instruction over time so they increase in complexity and autonomy.
Building such a foundation is key to selecting the right texts, aligning standards to literacy pedagogy, and facilitating student engagement with and understanding of rigorous material.
Textbook Supplementation
You’ll find no argument here for the elimination of the textbook. By its very nature, however, a textbook alone is insufficient for helping students demonstrate proficiency in the Common Core standards. Mastering a standard requires students to engage with texts rich in thought and language—features a textbook lacks. A student can’t analyze where a textbook “leaves matters uncertain” (RL.11–12.1) or “analyze the author’s purpose” (RST. 11–12.6; NGA & CCSSO, 2010). The Integration of Knowledge and Ideas domain of the Reading anchor standards, requires working with ideas across multiple texts and different kinds of texts, which is something that textbooks, with their discrete chapters and sections, are not set up to do well. Textbooks lack the extended anchor texts students are expected to read in all content areas; many do not feature enough short excerpts of analytical writing that students will need exposure to in order to prepare for the PARCC, SBAC, and ACT assessments. Even if passages used in a textbook are rigorous, reliance on the instructional materials included with the selected text in the teacher’s edition of the textbook is likely to be insufficient in helping students demonstrate comprehension that is up to the expectation set by the standards.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
