LITERACY TEAM REPORT

February 20, 2012

FOCUS: Consider a football team that loses half of its games, year after year. Each week, the coaches scour the Internet to find complex plays and offensive schemes. This confuses the players, who never mastered the last set of plays. Meanwhile, offensive linemen have never mastered the fundamentals of effective blocking, like footwork and body position.

The solution to this team's mediocre performance is very simple: coaches need to stop confusing the team with new plays and start focusing on the basic, but effective, blocking techniques until they are done well.

--M Schmoeker

ASSIGNMENT MANDATED BY OPI

Make recommendations for improving literacy at PHS

Based on research (rather than folklore)

QUESTIONS THE LITERACY TEAM ASKED

1. What should be done across the curriculum in all academic classes?

2. What should be done in English classes?

3. What should be done for students struggling with literacy?

TWO DOMAINS: ACADEMICS AND ATTITUDES

1. Academic Achievement: Poor readers (little background knowledge, minimal vocabulary)

Questions: Why are some students getting to high school without the knowledge and skills to succeed? (diagnosis) What does research indicate works? (prescription)

TWO DOMAINS: ACADEMICS AND ATTITUDES

2. Attitudes and Dispositions: Unmotivated (poor work ethic, poor ability to focus, lack of engagement, lack of diligence, unable to work through boredom, impatient, egocentric, lack of purpose)

Questions: What habits and dispositions should be taught all year long in freshman classes?How can these habits and dispositions be supported throughout the school? MBI?

Hirsch argues that in abandoning content-based curricula for disproved theories of cognitive development, the educational establishment has done harm to America's students, and instead of preparing them for an information-based economy, the establishment practices have curtailed their ability and desire to learn.

Hirsch proves that if children are taught substantial knowledge and skills, and learn to work hard to acquire them, their test scores will rise, their love of learning will grow, and they will become enthusiastic participants in the information-age civilization.

“The most important book about education written in the second half of the twentieth century”

--Nathan Glazer, Harvard University

HIRSCH’S KEY ASSERTIONS

1. To stress critical thinking while de-emphasizing knowledge reduces a student’s capacity to think critically.

Focus on knowledge rather than formal “skills”

HIRSCH’S KEY ASSERTIONS

2. Giving a child constant praise to bolster self-esteem (or cultural pride) regardless of academic achievement breeds complacency, or skepticism, or both, and, ultimately, a decline in self-esteem.

Focus on knowledge rather than vague motivations

HIRSCH’S KEY ASSERTIONS

3. For a teacher to pay significant attention to each individual child in a class of twenty or more students means individual neglect for most children most of the time.

Emphasize whole class instruction more than individual attention

HIRSCH’S KEY ASSERTIONS

4. Schoolwork that has been called “developmentally inappropriate” has proved to be highly appropriate to millions of students the world over, while the infantile pablum now fed to American children is developmentally inappropriate (in a downward direction) and often bores them.

Increase the rigor of academic coursework

Reading Comprehension

Is Not a SkillReading Comprehension

Reading ComprehensionIs Not a Skill

Is Not a Skill

The reader needs the common knowledge that the author of the text assumes the reader has.

Reading Comprehensionrequires not just formal decoding skills but also

Background Knowledge

VIDEO

What is “cultural literacy”?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROIujiY1uZU

THE “MATTHEW EFFECT”

“For whosoever hath, to him shall he given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall he taken away even that he hath.”

MATTHEW EFFECT: VOCABULARY

1. Need to know 90% of words in text to make sense of it

2. Kids who know the 90% are able to figure out the other 10%

3. Kids who don’t, don’t. They fall even further behind

4. The verbal gap gets wider as they move through school

WHAT DOES NOT WORK

1. Remedial reading classes that conceptualize “reading skills” as a formal set of processes that are domain independent.

2. Building self-esteem or cultural pride 3. “Engagement” defined as “hands on” or

“active learning”4. A school culture that is anti-knowledge (“rote

learning” “mere facts” “factory model” “higher order thinking skills” “multiple intelligences” “technology” “student-centered” “careerism”)

WHAT DOES WORK

Extensive Practice: "The research evidence is overwhelming. The only thing we have seen that rapidly accelerates student performance toward reading more complex texts is extensive practice, repeatedly, even with reading the same text." David Coleman, CCSS author 

The practice will enable students do well on tests of what they have studied. Because the impact of a single course on their general knowledge may be small, there may not be measurable improvement on general reading test scores.

WHAT DOES WORK: FOCUS

“When the number of initiatives increases, while time, resources and emotional energy are constant, then each new initiative … will receive fewer minutes, dollars and ounces of emotional energy than its predecessors.”

—Doug Reeves 

WHAT DOES WORK: FOCUS

“What is ‘essential’ for schools? Three simple things: reasonably coherent curriculum (what we teach); sound lessons (how we teach); and far more purposeful reading and writing in every discipline, or authentic literacy (integral to both what and how we teach). But as numerous studies demonstrate, these three essential elements are only rarely implemented; every credible study confirms that they are still pushed aside….— M. Schmoker

VIDEO

Nathan Glazer interviewed by Education Next

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GdjTIVIgh4

THIRD GRADE READING PASSAGE

Farmers in ancient Egypt thought of the year as having three seasons: flood time, seeding, and harvest. Each year the Nile River would flood. This was good news for farmers because Egypt is mostly desert, and not enough rain falls to grow crops. The annual flood would last for a few weeks, and then the water level would drop, leaving a layer of fertile, black mud. This mud fertilized the soil, and the flood water was stored in a series of canals. A special government department was in charge of making sure the canals were kept in good repair.

NEEDED BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE

1. Egypt was a country in ancient times2. The year has seasons3. Farming depends on planting seeds in

moist soil4. Plants need nutrients and water to

grow5. “desert” “Nile” “basic farming”

THE PROBLEM IS NOT ETHNICITY OR POVERTY

The problem is diversity of preparation. The problem is background

knowledge.

VERBAL SKILL INVOLVES KNOWLEDGE OF THINGS

Improving reading proficiency often fails because of the mistaken assumptionthat reading is a skill like typingand that when you learn the techniqueyou can read any text

MANY LANGUAGE PROGRAMS

Practice abstract strategies on an incoherent array of uninformative fictions.

The opportunity costs have been enormous.

Schools waste hours practicing drills, depriving students of knowledge that could enhance reading comprehension. 

NEW YORK STATE: FOURTH GRADE READING TEST

There is a path that starts in Maine and ends in Georgia, 2,167 miles later. This path is called the Appalachian Trail. If you want, you can walk the whole way, although only some people who try to do this actually make it, because it is so far, and they get tired. The idea for the trail came from a man named Benton Mac-Kaye. In 1921 he wrote an article about how people needed a nearby place where they could enjoy nature and take a break from work. He thought the Appalachian Mountains would be perfect for this.

FIRST QUESTION, DEALS WITH MAIN IDEA:

This article is mostly about1. how the Appalachian Trail came to exist.2. when people can visit the Appalachian

Trail.3. who hikes the most on the Appalachian

Trail.4. why people work together on the

Appalachian Trail.

WHAT IF YOU ARE A FOURTH GRADER

Who knows nothing about hiking? Doesn’t know the Appalachians from

the Himalayans? Doesn’t know where Maine and Georgia

are? Can’t grasp what “to enjoy nature”

means?

RESEARCH FOUNDATIONS ARE WEAK

• For claims that scores on such tasks are improved by practicing strategies such as questioning the author or finding the main idea

• Subject matter knowledge decisively trumps formal skill in reading

• Proficiency at one reading comprehension task does not predict success in another

READING COMPREHENSION IS DOMAIN SPECIFIC

Teaching students to read Shakespearewill be unlikely to make them better at reading geography texts or science textsCCSS assigns responsibility for teaching literacy to all academic teachers. Students are to improve reading and writing science in science class and reading and writing history in history class.

FLORIDA TENTH-GRADE TEST

The origin of cotton is something of a mystery. There is evidence that people in India and Central and South America domesticated separate species of the plant thousands of years ago. Archaeologists have discovered fragments of cotton cloth more than 4,000 years old in coastal Peru and at Mohenjo Daro in the Indus Valley. By A.D. 1500, cotton had spread across the warmer regions of the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa. Today cotton is the world’s major nonfood crop, providing half of all textiles. In 1992, 80 countries produced a total of 83 million bales, or almost 40 billion pounds. The business revenue generated--some 50 billion dollars in the United States alone -is greater than that of any otler field crop. Most of the five billion pounds that U.S. mills spin and weave into fabric each year ends up as clothing.

A READING TEST IS A KNOWLEDGE TEST

1. Apart from “what is cotton?” or “what is a bale?” it helps to understand the domestication of plant species.

2. Success requires familiarity with the subject the test covers.

3. The fundamental “gap” between kids is a knowledge gap

A manifold, contained in an intuition which I call mine, is represented, by means of the synthesis of understanding, as belonging to the necessary unity of self-consciousness, and this is effected by means of the category. This requirement of a category therefore shows that the empirical consciousness of a given manifold in a single intuition is subject to a pure self-consciousness a priori, just as is empirical intuition to a pure sensible intuition, which likewise takes place a priori.

From Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason)

1. Without a manifold, one cannot call an intuition “mine.”

2. Intuition must precede understanding3. Intuition must occur through a category4. Self-consciousness is necessary to

understanding

The main idea of this passage is

Typical “reading strategies” struggling readers are compelled to practice:1. Try to find the main idea2. Try to summarize the main idea3. Try to clarify the main idea4. Try to “question the author”—What is Kant

trying to get at here?

SELECTED FINDINGSFREDDIE D. SMITH, “THE IMPACT OF THE CORE KNOWLEDGE CURRICULUM, A COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL REFORM MODEL, ON ACHIEVEMENT” (PHD DISS., UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, 2003).

Students who remained in the Core Knowledge school from kindergarten through sixth grade outperformed peers at the control school as measured by mean scaled scores on the Stanford 9TA tests, which are standard grade-by-grade reading assessments used across the nation. Core Knowledge students outperformed control students in all subjects tested and for both of the two cohorts of students examined. The Core Knowledge advantage was statistically significant for reading (p ≤ .029, p ≤ .002) and math (p ≤ .002, p ≤ .014).

 Both advantaged and disadvantaged (free lunch) students in the Core Knowledge school outperformed students in the control school on the Stanford 9TA tests. Again, this was true for all three subjects and for both cohorts examined. The disadvantaged students in the Core Knowledge school showed statistically significant advantages in reading (p ≤ .017 for one cohort and p ≤ .030 for the other). Core Knowledge thus promoted fairness in schooling by providing educational opportunity to disadvantaged as well as advantaged students.

Core Knowledge helped narrow the achievement gap on the Stanford 9TA test between advantaged and disadvantaged students. The achievement gap, as measured by the Stanford 9TA tests, was narrowed for one Core Knowledge cohort and eliminated for the other. The achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students remained large for both cohorts at the control school.

Core Knowledge helped students achieve much larger gains on the Stanford 9TA tests over two-year periods, from fourth to sixth grades. Both advantaged and disadvantaged students made larger gains than their peers in the control school in all of the twelve cases evaluated. Among disadvantaged students, the edge to Core Knowledge was deemed highly significant in all three subjects (p ≤ .001, p ≤ .001 for reading; p ≤ .001, p ≤ .001 for math; p ≤ .001, p ≤ .002 for language).

COMPARISON OF FIFTH GRADERSNew York City Schools, 2007 Report on Charter Schools:Chart shows average percent of students who read at proficient or advanced levels. “Proficient” is at grade level.

All schools have similar demographics: nearly 100% disadvantaged students.

The KIPP (Knowledge is Power) schools emphasize discipline and hard work.The Core Knowledge schools emphasize a coherent content-based curriculum.

LITERACY TEAM RECOMMENDATIONS (DRAFT)

1. Establish district-wide conversation regarding curriculum: Focus on curriculum

2. Recognize that student time and professional staff time are the limiting resources: Focus on teaching and learning

3. Do not assume literacy teaching can be done effectively without adequate prep time: Focus on good lessons

4. Eliminate remedial reading classes: Focus on reading and writing in every academic class

5. Use professional staff to teach core content classes Focus on teaching

6. Provide literacy labs (with their English teacher) at school for students who do not succeed with homework: Focus on reading and writing

CCSS (ADOPTED BY MONTANA)(COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS)

1. Literacy Standards included in Social Studies and in Science

2. 70% of student reading is to be done in informational texts

3. English teachers will still teach fiction, drama, poetry, and other literature. Most of the informational reading is to be done in other classes. More frequent tests (online) in more subject areas

Think of literacy as a spine; it holds everything together. The branches of learning connect to it, meaning that all core content teachers have a responsibility to teach literacy.

—Vicki Phillips and Carina Wong,

The Bill and Melinda Gates

VIDEO 24 MINUTES

Davd Coleman Literacy Discussion

http://neric.welearntube.org/?q=node/147