Texts, Tasks, and Talk. Brad Cawn
complexity of current event or real-world application articles: Science teachers commonly share readings that relate to current or recent areas of study. These often are discovered by chance, from not particularly intellectually charged sources, and are utilized in a spur-of-the-moment fashion. Sourcing deliberately from more intellectually rigorous materials, however, is a logical way of helping students use textual evidence (CCRA.R.1) and summarizing complex concepts (CCRA.R.2). The websites of Science, Discover, and Seed magazines all feature articles on the latest science news that are written for the scientific community. Editorial and feature reporting in the New York Times or the Economist may also suffice. Such works are equivalent to the ideas and rhetorical complexity of the texts students are likely to see on the PARCC, SBAC, and ACT assessments.
3. Provide frequent opportunities for students to understand the core questions, arguments, and advances of key scientific concepts: To integrate complex texts more seamlessly into your curricula, focus reading opportunities on the intellectual development and complexities of key concepts, not on their historical background or practical uses. What makes the writing of scientists like E. O. Wilson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Stephen Jay Gould more literary is their inquiry into what is known and unknown in science and their interest in the ethical and philosophical implications of such knowledge. Texts of this quality are particularly good for defining central ideas (CCRA.R.2.), defining technical vocabulary (CCRA.R.4), considering the author’s purpose (CCRA.R.5, CCRA.R.6.), and evaluating arguments and explanations (CCRA.R.2). Because such works tend to be rich in thought and intellectually heavy, they need not be long in length. A brief excerpt, sometimes only a paragraph or two, may suffice (NGA & CCSSO, 2010).
4. Synergize texts: Reading anchor standards seven and nine ask for students to synthesize information from multiple kinds of texts—prose, visual texts, and quantitative texts—and science teachers can respond by constructing tasks centered on analyzing a range of texts that help students solve a scientific problem (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). For example, in a biology or environmental science class, students might study population decline by reading a theory or technical account of the phenomena and then, using quantitative data and an article on a particular species’ decline, identify the cause of the decline, compare it with other species or scientific explanations, and suggest or evaluate solutions. Reading a range of texts—from a complex explanation of theory to a chart to a newspaper article—and engaging in exploration and analysis of data emulates the work scientists do when attacking problems in their field.
Next Steps: Three Implications for Instruction
Looking at the suggestions for all three content areas, it’s clear that students need to be reading authentic texts—the same kinds of texts professionals in the discipline study and rely on when posing questions and solving problems. They also need to be engaged in authentic tasks—the same kind of problems that professionals in the discipline experience or attempt to solve. Rigor, after all, is not just upping the quality and complexity of the content but also equally enhancing the quality and complexity of how teachers and students engage in it. Thus, three implications for instruction are clear: you must (1) ensure text quality is high, (2) ensure reading is a practice, not an act, and (3) make practice deliberate.
Ensure Text Quality Is High
The emphasis on text complexity in the CCSS and talk surrounding the CCSS stem from a report from the testing company ACT (2006), which finds that students’ ability to read complex texts independently 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