Literacy Reframed. Robin J. Fogarty
We talk about the problem of failed reading scores all the time, we think about it, and we try to accommodate it, but to positively address it requires a massive shift. No one has taken this disaster in hand by moving the multiple, necessary working parts from the community, district, school, and home. We can’t afford to be naïve about how radical the necessary changes are. We compare the shift to the children’s game Fruit Basket Upset; in the game when a player calls out the words of the game’s name, everyone must move to a different seat. We’re talking about changes that impact existing schedules, curriculum, instruction, and assessment structures throughout the schooling community. A credible revamping of the literacy conundrum will take a village. There are already pockets of success in literacy achievement that are often attributed to superintendents with the right goals for their students, principals who champion literacy goals, extraordinary reading directors leading with common sense, and naturally, dedicated teachers who live by Rick DuFour’s mantra, “Whatever it takes” (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Karhanek, 2004). Like them, we believe in a fail-proof school, a safe haven to nurture literate young people and ready them for the ever-changing, ever-challenging world that awaits them. We strive to create schools where everyone can read fast, write well, speak clearly, and listen attentively, a backpack they can then take along on their life journeys.
Researchers Jared Myracle, Brian Kingsley, and Robin McClellan (2019) conclude, “Alarm bells are ringing—as they should be—because we’ve gotten some big things wrong: Research has documented what works to get kids to read, yet those evidence-based reading practices appear to be missing from most classrooms.” How do we bring real change to an enormous, powerful, and deeply entrenched institution like K–12 education in the United States? This book presents the solution.
The Solution
While the broad K–12 education community is just truly beginning to acknowledge the reality of long-term flatlining reading performance, the research community has been waiting for educators to wake up. According to Myracle et al. (2019), “Literacy experts have been recommending the same research-based approaches since the 2000 National Reading Panel report, yet there still aren’t systemic mechanisms for ensuring this information reaches the educators who set instructional directions,” with “systemic failures having left educators overwhelmingly unaware of the research on how kids learn to read.” Education journalist and author Natalie Wexler (2018) claims that much of our current approach is based on assumptions about how students learn that research has disproven, such as the need to teach lists of vocabulary words. We will delve into research throughout this book. The education world, however, hasn’t yet paid much attention to these findings (Wexler, 2018).
The good news is that there is a substantial body of evidence, which we will share more fully throughout these pages, suggesting that we can address this phenomenon in knowledgeable ways. But it will require reframing our approach to literacy acquisition in terms of both policy and practice. Reading and writing success, as we will show, is fueled by the very performances we desire—that is, lots of reading and writing. But teachers must orchestrate reading and writing throughout the K–12 instructional day. This is no easy task. Our mission is big. Are we ready to finally end the reading wars, truly rely on evidence, and transition to ways of advancing literacy that actually pay dividends? If we are to have any chance of taking more students to a higher level of performance, substantive changes in our approach are required.
Source: © Mark Anderson, www.andertoons.com. Used with permission.
A Distillation of Reading Comprehension
We clearly want students to continue to grow in their ability to comprehend successively more difficult texts. Yet before we go further, let’s nail down exactly what reading comprehension is. For something so central to all academic success, remarkably, many of us, as educators, struggle to define it or explain it in any detail greater than saying, “It’s when you understand what you read.” How students learn to read may well be the most thoroughly researched area in education, yet our explanations of reading comprehension are tragically simplistic. In fact, at times, comprehension has been known as a phantom skill (Fogarty, 2007), meaning that we talk about it, reference it, write about it, and even test, retest, and score students on it, yet we seldom, if ever, define it succinctly. In short, comprehension is the ability to make sense of text by processing the code of language, understand its meaning, and integrate it with prior knowledge.
Nebulous definitions of comprehension hint at a fundamental problem that we must resolve if we are to ever have a highly literate populace. If we have a limited ability to describe reading comprehension, then it is highly unlikely that we will effectively guide students to master the ability to decipher meaning from coded language with consistency and precision. How do we arrive at the appropriate destination if we do not know precisely where it is?
As we discuss the true aspects of comprehension and how to foster them, you will likely find that you are doing a lot of good things that this book suggests you do in the classroom (such as read-alouds, voice and choice books selected by readers, buddy reading, vocabulary spotting, and accountable independent reading). You may also find that some things you are doing may in fact hinder the process of comprehension (for example, too much focus on worksheets, workbooks, isolated skill development, teacher talk, and sustained silent reading without sufficient checking for understanding).
Also, it’s important to remember that some students are so profoundly advantaged by outside factors, such as having the opportunity to read voraciously on their own time, that they acquire advanced reading comprehension despite what teachers do or don’t do. And other students, less advantaged, have little chance of success unless we significantly advance our ability to describe reading comprehension—the destination—in detail and learn how to effectively guide all students there. For these students, we must create multiple, quality opportunities to read with a partner for the needed support, use digital tools so they will use auditory stories, and even take time to do more oral reading with them so they hear the sound of language.
While we are suggesting that educators need to shift their focus from skill-based reading routines to meaning- or knowledge-based efforts, we want to make it very clear that we are not blaming educators for their choice of where to focus. Reform and regulatory requirements are certainly impactful. Author and cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene (2009) places a good portion of the blame on policymakers and decision makers who “swing back and forth with the changing winds of pedagogical reform, often blatantly ignoring how the brain actually learns to read” (p. 2). Hirsch (2018) remarks that it is unfair that “teachers are being blamed for the poor results of this system” because “teachers have been misinformed about the actual nature of reading comprehension” (p. 75). In addition, leaders sometimes seem to imply that teachers must use all of the elements of the reading program supplied by the publisher. This may not be the case, but teachers will do whatever they think is expected of them.
When we consider the professional literature about reading comprehension as a whole, we find the usual suspects that are featured in this text, but with fundamental perspectives that make all the difference. We see phonics as a necessary first step to decoding written language; vocabulary, word choice, phrasing, sentence structure, and graphics as the visual input to help readers interpret meaning; and perhaps most important, background experiences, prior knowledge, emerging knowledge, and of course, the new knowledge revealed as understanding, meaning, and making sense are achieved. A survey of the professional literature reveals a common refrain: multiple authors discuss the same elements as critical and sometimes-overlooked factors contributing to reading comprehension (Hirsch, 2003; Lemov et al., 2016; Willingham, 2017). We present the elements here as the big three.
1. Decoding: Can you decipher the text? Can you use phonics to sound out unknown words? If so, how fluently?
2. Vocabulary: Do you know all the words in the text? If not, what percentage is unknown to you? Can you use