Literacy Now

If you are a literacy leader, you’ve invariably been part of a meeting in which a group of dedicated but exhausted educators and administrators gather around a table to discuss how to improve reading scores across a grade level, building, or district. The literacy leader is then asked to field the question, “What strategy should we teach kids in order to bring up our reading scores?” They’re looking for the perfect answer—preferably something with a clever acronym that fits nicely on a poster.

There is no one perfect answer. There never is.

I find myself in this meeting time and time again. My response? “It depends.”

A hand slaps the table. “For crying out loud! Stop beating around the bush and just tell us! What’s your favorite strategy?”

I smile politely, trying not to laugh, and think about how my answer must sound to exasperated administrators. The table-slapping principal is clearly frustrated by my lack of specifics. What she and the many administrators in the room want is something that I know requires work. Something much deeper and broader than what they are envisioning.

Administrators aren’t the only education professionals with misconceptions about the use of strategies. About three times a month I get an e-mail like this one: “My principal is coming to observe me, and he/she says we need to focus on literacy. What’s a reading strategy I can use for my observation?”

These conversations provide me with clear insight to the biggest misconception my colleagues have regarding reading instruction. They’re thinking that I will share with them The Strategy that will solve the problems our students face with comprehension of rigorous material. That once they use The Strategy, we will see great gains.

Unfortunately, The Strategy alone won’t raise our test scores, even if we put it on posters in every classroom.

Think about K-W-L. Well known. Effective. In some instances.

Let’s pretend I’m excited to bring a new topic to life with my seventh-grade students. My lesson might start like this:

“OK, fellow historians! Today we’re going to continue digging into America’s past by talking about the French and Indian War. Let’s use a strategy to help us—one you all know—K-W-L! Let’s start with K. What do you know about the French and Indian War?”

Crickets. Silence. Blank looks.

Finally, this: “There were French guys in it? And Indians, right?”

I shift gears.

“Maybe we’ll need to read a bit and gain more knowledge here. But we can still talk about the W. What do you want to know about the French and Indian War?”

Again, crickets.

After an appropriate amount of time has been spent engaging in learning about this pivotal event, I’ll end with this: “Let’s finish up our reading strategy. We talked about both the K and the W in K-W-L. It’s time for the L. What did you learn about the French and Indian War?”

At least one student will say “nothing” or “nothing new.” In reflecting on the lesson, I’ll wonder why I bothered to use a strategy at all. It took up valuable class time and achieved little. The students weren’t better readers when I finished, and they seemed unlikely to use this strategy on their own in the future.

It’s a shame, too, because K-W-L is a great strategy. It just was used in the wrong situation.

Generally, students need to learn strategies to help them engage with a text to gain deep comprehension, or to organize their thinking, or to prepare for class discussion, or to gather new vocabulary. They may need to read critically through a particular lens. Each purpose requires a different type of thinking and analysis. The strategy an adult reader might use in each instance is different. Strong readers perform these strategies without even realizing it, while others need modeling and practice to begin to see the benefit.

Back to the meeting with administrators: Now I answer their question with some of my own: “What are your students not yet able to do independently when approaching a particular type of text? Where and when do they struggle, become frustrated, and disengage with the reading?” The answer to these questions will lead teachers to the best instructional choices.

We’ve made quite a few changes in the way we approach reading since my first experience with that type of meeting. We’ve begun asking the right questions in these collaborative conversations. We’ve learned it’s not about the strategy, the acronym, or the poster—it’s about the thinking a person does while engaged with text. It’s about making sure we’re preparing students for the many different types of reading and thinking adults engage in every day.

How and what they will read as adults? It depends. On us.

Julie Scullen is a former president of the Minnesota Reading Association and Minnesota Secondary Reading Interest Council and is a current member of the International Literacy Association Board of Directors. She taught most of her career in Secondary Reading Intervention classrooms and now serves as Teaching and Learning Specialist for Secondary Reading in Anoka-Hennepin schools in Minnesota, working with teachers of all content areas to foster literacy achievement. She teaches graduate courses at Hamline University in St. Paul in literacy leadership and coaching, as well as reading assessment and evaluation.

Scullen will present “Read Any Good Stuff Lately? Building a Culture of Literacy in Secondary Classrooms” Saturday, July 18, at the ILA 2015 Conference in St. Louis, MO, July 18–20. The session will suggest how make meaningful reading and literacy activities palatable with humor and practical ideas. Visit the ILA 2015 Conference website for more information or to register.

There’s been much discussion about which words should be taught and how many. Although answers differ, there is general agreement that words taught and learned should be useful. But what does it mean “to know a word”?

The continuum on which we can know a word has long been considered. In 1965, Edgar Dale, author of The Living Word Vocabulary and other books on vocabulary development, described four stages of word knowledge development:

• No knowledge of the word; we don’t even know it exists
• Awareness that such a word exists, but we don’t know what it means
• Vague notion of what the word means, in a particular context
• Rich understanding; we know the word well and can use it

With this framework in mind, consider the word ineffable. This may be your first encounter with the word, or you may have seen it or heard it before but really know nothing about it. Or you may apply morphological knowledge of the prefix un- and the context of the sentence What an ineffable sight the Grand Canyon is! to deduce that the word has something to do with “not” and a magnificent scene. If you know the word, you understand that the author is communicating that the beauty and grandeur of the Grand Canyon are beyond words.

Dale’s framework can be useful for getting a sense of what learners know about vocabulary words. By creating a matrix with the four categories as headers and listing the vocabulary words down the side, learners can check off their level of understanding for each of the words, before and after a particular unit of study.

Psychologist L. J. Cronbach outlined a continuum of five dimensions, each demonstrating greater depth of understanding:

• Generalization (can define the word)
• Application (can use the word correctly)
• Breadth (know multiple meanings of a word)
• Precision (know when and when not to use a word)
• Availability (can apply the word in discussion and writing; namely, can use it productively)

For instance, dock is a word you likely understand as a place where ships unload and load or are repaired and could use the word appropriately in that narrow sense. But how deep is your understanding of the word? Do you know which of the following meanings also apply to dock?

• to link two more spacecraft together in space
• the fleshy part of an animal’s tail
• to reduce a person’s wages
• the area in which a defendant stands or sits during a trial
• a type of plant

If you identified all of the entries and could use them appropriately, your understanding of dock is very deep.
We can create a matrix similar to the one that follows, based on Cronbach’s work, to document a student’s growth in learning particular words. The matrix also could be adapted to reflect an entire class’s understanding of a particular target word, by recording students’ names where the words are listed.

Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge (B = Before; A = After)

Just as the people we know best are those with whom we have had the most experiences, so too with words: Once we’ve been introduced, our knowledge of them relies on lots of exposures in meaningful contexts. Although paraphrasing may enable readers/listeners to get the gist of a word in order to maintain meaning of a text, it is not likely to lead to learners “owning” the word, being able to access and use it whenever they wish. Estimates vary and words vary, but it can take 40 or more meaningful encounters with a word before owning begins to happen. Therefore, it’s important to remember to bring vocabulary that’s been taught into the daily classroom talk.

As a reminder of that, post a few of the words in a conspicuous place on a Teacher’s Word Wall. As learners begin to use the words, remove the known words and post new ones. Make the learning process active and engaging through raps and songs, games, dramatization, and drawing. And celebrate the enriched talk that can result.

Kathy Ganske is professor of the Practice at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, with more than 20 years of experience in the classroom. She is current chair of the AERA Vocabulary SIG and author or coauthor/editor of Word Journeys: Assessment-Guided Phonics, Spelling, and Vocabulary Instruction (2nd edition); Write Now! Empowering Writers in Today’s K–6 Classroom; and other works on word study/vocabulary development, supporting struggling readers and writers, and perspectives and practices on comprehension.

A thoughtful teacher recently wrote to me on Facebook with the following controversial question:

Jennifer Serravallo, could you weigh in on choice during reading workshop time? I know there are a lot of strong feelings and opinions by literacy leaders and teachers all around this topic and we all know teaching how to find good-fit books is important. What is your take on completely free choice or choosing from within level during the instructional independent reading time?

Phew. Good one, right? It’s a bit of an elephant in the room at a lot of literacy conferences I attend, and it relates closely to what I’ll be talking about at the annual ILA conference this summer. My answer is one that is based in my experience as a classroom teacher, my work as a consultant, and my recent research on whole book comprehension. Without further ado (I promise I’m not stalling!), here’s a slightly revised version of how I responded.

I want to create conditions where students are at their peak level of engagement during independent reading, and allowing children to choose what they read has been shown to boost engagement. I also regard independent reading time as an important instructional time where I’m conferring with students, helping them to select goals, and equipping them with strategies to support them with their goals, while students who aren’t meeting with me are independently practicing. Choice is important because it helps if the books they want to get better at reading are ones they chose themselves.

That said, I think it's dangerous to allow kids to choose anything they want if what they gravitate toward are too-hard texts. (Hear me out, librarians!) In my two-year pilot study for my whole-book assessment and teaching system called Independent Reading Assessment,I sent books with comprehension questions preplanted to schools all over the United States. I asked kids to answer questions as they were reading and, at the end, to rate whether they felt the book was “easy,” “just right,” or “too hard.” Countless kids responded that the book was “easy” while answering all or most of the questions incorrectly. This tells me that kids aren't as good at monitoring their own comprehension as I’d hoped and that many consider just getting the gist to be good enough. I want kids to have experience with texts that are highly comprehensible so they are able to do deeper thinking work. I want them to feel the joy of truly understanding. It’s no fun to be confused.

That said, there are a number of variables that determine text appropriateness, and a “just-right level” is rarely a fixed letter or number for most kids. Factors such as motivation, higher or lower levels of background knowledge, and more come into play when matching children with books. Being too rigid and allowing a child to choose only within a single level all the time doesn’t sit well with me, either. If once in a while a child chooses a book you think is a stretch, but you're willing to provide some extra support, or she's reading it with a book club who will support her, or the child has incredible background knowledge about the topic, then maybe it would be fine. On the other end of the spectrum, if a child wants to read easy books, I'm OK with that, as long as there is some just-right reading in his or her weekly “diet” of reading as well.

So, for independent reading, I’d tend to guide students’ choosing toward books that are “just right” (96% or higher accuracy, with fluency and comprehension) or “easy” with a rare exception for a book that’s a bit more of a stretch, in which I’m willing to provide extra support. My opinion is largely shaped by Richard Allington's research that has convinced me a high volume of high-success reading is crucial for readers to grow.

So what happens when a child chooses a book you know is too hard for independent reading? Well, I would never snatch a book from a child's hand. One thing I would do is to invite the child to take it home to read after their regularly assigned independent reading minutes in school and at home, or suggest it would make a good bedtime book with a parent or older sibling. Another thing I’d do is to find out what it is about the book that the child is really excited about, and then see if there is another book that fits the same topic/theme/character type/genre that is a better fit in regards to complexity. I often find that it’s the “hot new books” kids want to read, in part because it seems like everyone else is reading it, but also partly because the publisher’s marketing is so good! I think it’s a teacher’s responsibility to do book talks for the unsung heroes of the classroom library to make them seem as enticing as the latest YA novel that’s getting all the buzz, especially choosing to talk up the books that will be more within the reach of the readers in their class.

Jennifer Serravallo is the author of the new best-selling The Reading Strategies Book as well as the two-time award winning Independent Reading Assessment series. She was a a NYC elementary teacher and later a senior staff developer at Columbia University’s Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. She has also taught graduate and undergraduate courses at Vassar College and Teachers College.

Serravallo will present two sessions Saturday, July 18, at the ILA 2015 Conference in St. Louis, MO, July 18–20. The first will be “Assessing and Teaching Whole Book Comprehension: Fiction & Nonfiction,” the second will be “Accountability, Agency and Increased Achievement in Independent Reading.” Visit the ILA 2015 Conference website for more information or to register.

Let’s think for a moment about the math, science, and social studies information our students are expected to learn. Regardless of the grade level, the depth and breadth of information can seem overwhelming. Now, let’s think about the literacy skills we want our students to develop. I’m sure many of us want students to understand what they read or view, share information and opinions through both speaking and writing, and be able to develop the skills necessary to become lifelong learners. With the growing emphasis on content literacy, we can more easily help our students to achieve these goals. Through content literacy, we can target key aspects of literacy teaching and yet not compromise the amount of content information our students gain. As expectations increase regarding the amount of information students must learn, we need to make content literacy a priority in our classrooms. The following are a few key ideas to think about as we focus on content instruction and making connections.

Think content specific. As we focus on our daily lessons, let’s think about what our students must know and be able to do in the future. How can we make our current classrooms, regardless of the grade level, places where our students can develop valuable skills to think like a scientist, historian, or mathematician? As we discuss topics in the content areas, we need to talk about how people in different fields actually use information and learn from it. How might historians record historical events? In what ways can scientists show information in images and what influences their decision-making process on using words or images? Are there times when one image might be better than others to use and, if so, why? When might a pie graph be a better choice than a bar graph to share information? Likewise, why might a scientist use a simple labeled diagram instead of a flow chart?

Ensure that exposure to informational text is just the beginning. Although the current educational emphasis is on the use of informational text in the classroom, we have an obligation not only to use those texts but also to teach our students to critically examine the texts. Students must understand not only how texts in social studies and science can vary, but also that the type of text we use influences how we teach with those texts. Ask students to compare informational texts, both online and printed forms, which pertain to a specific topic but are written from different perspectives. For example, how do authors present the information, and why do they choose that format? A science text explaining how bicycles work and the use of friction is written very differently from an article explaining the evolution of the modern bicycle.  

Strengthen connections with collaboration. Collaboration is a natural process when we think about content literacy. We know that historians, scientists, and others don’t work in isolation. They work together to conduct experiments, discuss findings, and share information with larger audiences. Likewise, content literacy requires that type of collaborative environment in our classrooms. In addition, as educators, we can take advantage of the power of collaboration. Not only can we work with others at our grade level to share ideas about tying information to other areas, but we can also strengthen vocabulary. Terms such as molecule and velocity are unique, and students might encounter those terms only within science content. However, we can work together to reinforce other vocabulary terms such as predict and inference in various content areas throughout the day.

We can’t isolate strengthening content knowledge from developing literacy skills within our classrooms. By making content literacy connections within our classrooms, students will be able not only to develop the content information necessary to be productive citizens, but also to gain information from various content texts, think about the information, and share content information in a meaningful way. It’s exciting to see content literacy taking a place front and center in educational discussions, the place it has always belonged. 

Jennifer L. Altieri is a faculty member at Coastal Carolina University where she teaches literacy education courses. She also writes and presents on content literacy, including Powerful Content Connections: Nurturing Readers, Writers, and Thinkers in Grades K–3 and is currently writing a text focusing on the science/literacy connection. You can follow her on Twitter.

Keeping your students motivated and engaged in reading all year long ensures that they’ll grow “literacy strong.” Just like staying in physical shape, students need to participate actively in “workouts” by reading every day and they need to increase the level of intensity of their routines! Whether you are trying to start the year off fresh with gusto, working hard to beat the mid-year blahs, scrambling to finish the year on top, or sending students off into the lazy days of summer with books to read, each season of the year presents its own set of reading challenges.

Here are some creative and practical strategies to motivate your students to keep reading in every season all year long!

Starting the school year literacy strong

Join the class book club. Invite students to join the class book club by participating actively in read-alouds. Pass out paper “tickets” and invite students to go on a reading “trip.” Tell students throughout the year that the class will take small trips through books.

Keep book logs. Keep a class book log to record read-alouds in. List the author, illustrator, title, and either a sketch or copy of the cover art as well as the class rating on a scale of 1–4. Use the same format for individual book logs.

Beating the mid-year blahs

Read aloud books about reading. Read aloud and discuss books that demonstrate a love of books and learning. Discuss the characters in these books and talk about what the characters read, why they read, and also where and when they enjoy their books. Have students compare with their own places, times, and types of books they like to read. 

• The Best Book to Read by Debbie Bertram and Susan Bloom
• The Best Time to Read by Debbie Bertram and Susan Bloom
• Fire Up With Reading! by Toni Buzzeo
• How Rocket Learned to Read by Tad Hills
• I Like Books by Anthony Browne
• Miss Brooks Loves Books! (and I don’t) by Barbara Bottner

Play “Musical Books.” Share book titles with students in a “musical chairs” spin-off game. Arrange chairs back to back and place a book under each chair. Invite the same number of students as chairs to come up and walk around in a circle while music plays. When the music stops, the students sit in a chair closest to them and reach under it for a book to bring to their lap to flip through for one minute. Signal the students to place the books back under the chairs and walk around to the music again and repeat the activity. Reinforce positive participation (i.e., no pushing or rushing to sit down, as there are enough chairs for all). After several turns, invite students to share their thoughts about the books. Pass out the books for students to read.

Ending the year literacy strong

Post a Shelfie. Reading advocate Donalyn Miller encourages students to take a “shelfie,” a photo taken of the reader and his or her book or books. Take photos of your students with their favorite books or books they want to read next. Post them in the room or on the class or school website. Discuss places where people read.

Chant in a circle of students. Invite students to bring a book and sit in a circle. Students turn to a partner on the right and share the title and author of their book. Then invite all of the students to listen while each child in the circle takes a turn chanting the I Like Books Chant. At the end, when every one has had a turn, invite partners to again turn to the student on the right and tell why their book is their favorite by showing some evidence or an example from the text.

I like ______ books. (name the type: story, nonfiction, adventure, animal) books
Yes I do.
I like _____books. (name the type again) 
How about YOU?

Preventing the summer slide

Find online book club reviews. Use the Spaghetti Book Club as an online resource for helping students identify books they want to read and for writing reviews.

Encourage summer reading. Invite students and parents to sign up for summer reading challenges at the local library or join the online Summer Reading Challenge at Scholastic.

Lori D. Oczkus is a literacy coach, author, and popular speaker. Her most recent book with ILA is Just the Facts! Close Reading and Comprehension of Informational Text. Valerie Ellery is as a National Board Certified Teacher, curriculum specialist, mentor, staff developer, reading coach, consultant, and author. Her bookCreating Strategic Readers: Techniques for Supporting Rigorous Literacy Instruction is currently in its third edition. Timothy Rasinski, a literacy education professor at Kent State University, is a prolific researcher who has authored more than 150 articles. He is a former coeditor of The Reading Teacher and the Journal of Literacy Research.  He is coauthor, with Maureen McLaughlin, of Struggling Readers: Engaging and Teaching in Grades 3–8, published by ILA.

Oczkus, Ellery, and Rasinski will host a session Sunday, July 19, “Literacy Strong All Year Long” at the ILA 2015 Conference in St. Louis, MO, July 18–20. This session is based on a forthcoming release from ILA by the three authors. Visit the ILA 2015 Conference website for more information or to register.