UPDATED…Lemov vs. Coleman: Pre-reading activities help or hurt?
Posted: February 6th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 11 Comments »
UPDATE Feb 8: Spoke to Doug L. He says:
I’ll explain in detail Thursday, but for now, there’s no lemov vs common core. I LOVE common core and see 99% synergies with how I think about reading.
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Kathleen Porter-Magee wrote a great blog post for English (and social studies) teachers.
It’s about David Coleman, who is leading the Common Core work in English. He proposes a “focus on reading and re-reading grade-appropriate texts and using effective, text-dependent questions to guide lessons and class discussions.”
Kathleen writes:
The vision is compelling….that said, there is one part of Coleman’s vision—specifically, his rejection of using “pre-reading” strategies to help prepare and provide context to students before they dive in to a complex text—that is likely to send shock waves into reading classrooms around the country, including those who are using the strategies suggested by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion.
I’ve met David Coleman a few times and he seems like a sharp guy. I’ve known Doug since 2001 and I know he’s a sharp guy. So I enjoyed reading the author lay out a debate on technique.
She describes two key disagreements. One is:
1. Lemov suggests that “champion” teachers effectively pre-teach targeted background information, give students pre-reading summaries of the text, and “introduce key scenes before students read them.”
Lemov argues that “lack of prior knowledge is one of the key barriers to comprehension for at-risk students and it affects all aspects of reading, even fluency and decoding, as struggling with gaps soaks up the brain’s processing capacity.”
Lemov does emphasize, however, that these pre-reading mini-lessons should be short, and razor-focused on filling gaps, rather than on generating discussion. “Ten minutes of teacher-driven background and then getting right to reading is usually worth an hour of, ‘Who can tell me what Nazis were?’ Efficiency matters.”
Similarly, Lemov notes that the best teachers use summarizing effectively—they begin a class by summarizing what the students read the day before, and by “front loading” information and scenes that they will encounter today.
This is exactly the kind of practice that Coleman warns against, arguing that it’s precisely these kinds of summarizing and pre-reading activities that effectively give students “Cliff’s Notes” versions of complex texts and let them off the hook for engaging with the texts themselves.
Hmm.
The second issue she raises:
2. Pointing out for students key “focal points” while reading
Lemov notes that students “learn to determine what’s worthy of attention with time and practice. Without years of practice, readers often make questionable or nonstrategic decisions about what to attend to. They notice something of tangential relevance but miss the crucial moment. The trapeze artists are in full swing, and they can’t stop looking at the cotton candy seller. They see three details but fail to connect them to one another.”
To help students hone this critical skill, Lemov suggests that “champion” teachers
“steer them in advance toward key ideas, concepts, and themes to look for. Which characters will turn out to be most important? What idea will be most relevant to the story discussion? In addition, they advise students what’s secondary, not that important, or can be ignored for now.”
I am sure that Lemov and Coleman would agree on the problem—that students need to learn how to determine what’s worthy of time and attention. But Coleman values teachers who resist the temptation to point out key focal points and instead plan very strategic—often very humble—text-dependent questions that force students to go back into the texts themselves and recognize these focal points.
She concludes:
Gap-closing schools have to maximize every moment because every moment wasted simply adds to the already significant achievement gap between rich and poor.
But, in reading class, have schools gone too far in their quest for efficiency and not left the space for students to learn the persistence they will need to do the kinds of analysis that will be required of them in the years ahead?
I think there’s a ladder here of efficacy.
a. Low rungs: very few kids actually doing the assigned reading. Teacher feels choice between constantly summarizing/spoonfeeding or failing tons of kids.
b. Middle rungs: kids generally doing assigned reading, but the pace/energy isn’t so hot. Lots of tangents in class discussions. Lots of confused 8th graders because nobody explained the basics of Nazi Germany before they started reading Anne Frank. Many kids emerge without even a great Wikipedia level understanding of Scarlet Letter a month or two later….
I think this is where Doug is targeting his advice. Middle rungs.
c. Higher rungs: kids reading and understanding the book solidly. So there are tradeoffs, of whether to get kids to move their understanding from solid to excellent (teacher-driven)….
or
whether to have kids engage more of a struggle to find certain meaning themselves…a kid probably ends up with self-generated random nuggets and the value of having done it themselves.
Good problem to have. If you have this problem in a school where kids arrive way below grade level in reading, you’re probably teaching at a high level (and have colleagues doing the same).
Seems like Coleman could say (and maybe he has, who knows):
If you have a classroom (or school) where kids are already consistently doing the assigned reading, and deriving a fairly decent but imperfect understanding of the book’s “basics” — plot, theme, characters, conflict — then you have a choice for “advanced teaching” that involves tradeoffs.
Many teachers in high-poverty schools would stop reading the sentence after “consistently doing the assigned reading.”
What do you make of all this?
Isn’t this just the age-old challenge of correctly calibrating scaffolding? Do too little scaffolding, and students get lost or not able to access the material at the level you want. Do too much of the cognitive work and spoon feed kids and they will not achieve the habits of thought and deep retention of material that comes through making sense of the material themselves. I would make a distinction between the prep work that fills in background knowledge and that which steers kids’ attentions to key things to attend to. I absolutely believe it’s useful to fill in important background info (and key vocabulary) ahead of time. Some of the latter stuff is also useful but can lead to underestimating students, narrowing their thinking, and also dependence on the teacher. It can also limit divergent thinking and creative interpretations of the text–things the teacher might not see in the text. I would think a teacher’s goal should to reduce the amount of this second type of scaffolding over time so that students do more of the cognitive “work.”
This is a great argument to have. I’m curious in your experience with MATCH, where students are in a highly structured environment, have you seen students having difficulty adapting to less structured academic environments. Lemov and Coleman are essentially debating the same issue. I think that KIPP has run aground of this same thing as they see their college persistence numbers not live up to their own expectations. The most interesting question to me is, “spoonfeeding v. failing tons of kids”. As a teacher, I’ve done both I think that I eventually landed on something that worked, but that took 5-6 years of experience and usually involved “failing” large numbers of students at low-stakes markers (i.e. progress reports), being purposeful around explaining to students why they are failing and what they can do to improve, keeping standards high, and identifying what I call “footwork” skills to scaffold. These are specific skills to have students practice which have an impact on many other skills – ala working on footwork in basketball or soccer. It’s important to let kids strategically fail in low stakes ways – to my mind, it’s the only real well to keep expectations high without spoonfeeding everything. In the end, our students need the knowledge and skills, but they have to be able to do it on their own – especially since we can’t always be there for them or control the type of instruction they receive.
I heartily agree with Ed about the difference between providing background knowledge that will enable the students to have a clue what’s going on in general and the laying out of points to look for in the reading.
The first is…teaching. The second is a way of getting kids through material in a way that looks like they are learning, but makes it very difficult to say if that is really so.
If you tell them what to look for in advance, point it out to them while they read, reread those sections more times, focus any work they do on the same few points and then test them on those same exact things — have the children actually read and comprehended or have they listened and filed a few key ideas (not content, mind you, but the themes or ideas presented to them) with which they can likely answer a mostly short answer or multiple choice assessment with a high C or above?
Wow, that’s a long sentence-question!
I can’t help but believe that this sort of teaching (and yes, it’s how we’re all told to do it now), especially starting in grade school, is helping to teach kids to hate reading. Combine that with frequent fluency testing and it’s a recipe for disaster. There are more and more fairly fluent readers out there with zero comprehension. It’s as if I were reading a scientific paper in French. I could do it for you, with a fair degree of fluency, but I’d never be able to use what I’d read, because I wouldn’t understand it!
Reading in many urban public elementary schools isn’t about fun or exciting stories or learning more about a topic you love or branching into something new. It’s about knowing the three main ideas of those three paragraphs so you can fit an answer into the three boxes on the chart that connect to the circle in the middle where you’ve written the main concept your teacher has told you.
Smarter kids quickly learn to game the system — you don’t even have to read hardly at all if you just listen to the previewing and what the teacher asks about. Struggling kids often just write down the things they’ve heard the most — which is usually going to be right.
Turning out kids who can answer questions that have been fed to them repeatedly is really not that great an accomplishment, in my mind. Though of course, as you point out, it’s better than NOT being able to do so! It’s a barely sufficient first step — and I’m not convinced that it’s the best first step or even a necessary first step, either.
I’d feel a lot better if I saw kids who could name some favorite authors, or book series, or even magazines or graphic novels coming out of 5th grade. The kids who understand that reading can be enjoyable and informative (without a teacher actually telling you the information) are the ones with any hope of developing those “higher-order thinking skills.”
A lot of great comments here already that I agree with.
Some other thoughts that relate, maybe only tangentially:
1) Kids, at some point, have to be able to do the work independently and with some level of speed. Our students are exceptionally persistent, sort of like Jen reading the scientific paper in French, except that I think they get more of the point (sorry Jen, not meant as an insult!). They really know how to do well if they take their time (tons), really break down the text, and use various strategies. However, give them a 800 word passage and a reasonable time limit and they are screwed. But c’mon! At some point, good reader can just read a passage and get the main points. I’m sure Pondiscio is gonna jump in and tell us that it’s all about background knowledge (and I agree to some extent).
2) I worry that No Excuses schools are usually working in the middle range because of teacher turn-over and dilution. That’s why Lemov is so popular – he helps you go from meh to solid. I worry, though, that it’s rare to go from “all of those kids rocked the MCAS” to “wow, all of those kids can destroy the SSAT/SAT and make it at a prep school / private liberal arts college.” The higher level skill comes with teacher experience and practice because you need to do more than Lemov to make it happen.
Our kids need to be able to have the motivation, skill, preparation, training, what have you, to be able to do it when a Lemovian teacher isn’t shoving it down his or her gullet. I think we often demand a lot until the kids walk out our door and hope they will be ok where ever they go next. For our survival, we need them to do well in our halls. But maybe they need to fail more, like Robert said, in our halls first.
Look, I want all of my kids to be like the top students in Newton. Maybe that’s unrealistic. But I think our schools can’t rest until we are headed in that direction. And I think to some extent, we can only build to that point by purposefully removing our hand-holding, Lemovian or otherwise, well before they leave us. I guess that puts me in the Coleman camp, at least for my school.
A lot of good points have already been made. That said, the topic is my technical wheelhouse, so I’m going to swing away.
I agree with Rob about the importance of teaching “footwork” when approaching challenging texts. To build off his sports metaphor, I would add the notion of “cross training” (i.e., teaching/reading texts of various difficulties and emphasizing different skills/techniques for each of them). For example, in an early fiction text, I focused my reading lessons on front-loading how to find character traits. I picked this particular “subset” of a skill because the enjoyment of the text was going to come from picking up on the little ways the author hints that the main character grows up from the beginning to the end of the story. By setting my goal as the enjoyment rather than the comprehension of the text, we’re focusing on engaging through building comprehension. Too often we split these goals and resort to teacher gimmicks rather than seeing them as interrelated and possible through targeted engagement with the text.
The above example becomes “cross training” when compared to other ways I taught texts. In a nonfiction text, for example, I focused on explicitly highlighting and discussing the author’s organization of ideas because the style of writing was new to students and often interfered with comprehension. Mapping organization actually became a game the students enjoyed teasing out together and debating. In the final book of the year, however, I removed a lot of the scaffolding and they used (or didn’t use) strategies we had learned over the course of the year.
Scaffolding shouldn’t be a canned set of strategies/chants that you do over and over again w/o variation or consideration of the context; rather, it should serve as a toolkit you customize to mediate comprehension and build targeted skills while also keeping an eye towards students’ eventual independence.
One more point: I’m a strong proponent of strategic pre-teaching (emphasis on the strategic). Not only does it improve students’ reading comprehension; done well, it ratchets up their excitement/motivation for the upcoming reading event (perhaps there’s a correlation here). I would also suggest the importance of post-teaching; that is, having culminating projects that conclude the reading event (and no, that does not mean writing an MCAS open response). My most loved book was my hardest — because we followed it up with a performance of a play based on the book’s events. Students came to the text with the motivation to master because they knew it would help them prepare for the roles they would eventually play on the stage for friends and family.
@Chris K – Absolutely agree with your comment that:
“Scaffolding shouldn’t be a canned set of strategies/chants that you do over and over again w/o variation or consideration of the context; rather, it should serve as a toolkit you customize to mediate comprehension and build targeted skills while also keeping an eye towards students’ eventual independence.”
The crisis in US literacy is in the area of comprehension. Nationally, we’ve actually done a good job of getting kids to decode. Most kids by 3rd grade are very good at decoding. But there is a core group of kids who fail to make the jump to more complex texts, especially nonfiction text, in late elementary. They can “read” the passages, but not understand what they mean, for a host of reasons–vocabulary, lack of background knowledge, unfamiliarity with genre and its conventions. And then in middle school there is another jump in text complexity.
So, we need teachers who are really skilled at designing lessons that have just the right amount and type of scaffolding for students in heterogeneous classrooms. A tall order.
I do worry, speaking as a former history teacher, about the impact of the narrowing of the curriculum on reading comprehension. Ironically by focusing so much on the core disciplines of math and ELA, we might actually hindering the development of key historic and scientific background knowledge needed to understand a variety of texts. Having a set of reading strategies isn’t enough. One also needs to have a strong vocabulary and background knowledge to understand text.
Mike– Thanks again for raising a vital issue in the field. I honestly have not seen enough of Coleman’s writing to know if he genuinely believes that teachers should simply toss students into a text without establishing some context, purpose, and background knowledge, but I am hoping that is not the case. The comprehension process is like a staircase built on background knowledge, which you add to as you go up. You use background knowledge to paraphrase the “text” (whether it’s an essay, a song, a painting, etc.), ask questions about it (again, based on background knowledge), and draw inferences (again, based on background knowledge). The inferences then become more stairs, if you will–more background knowledge–as you continue to climb. You cannot draw inferences without some background knowledge, and even your ability to paraphrase and question depends on this knowledge. All of this is to say that we need to ensure that students have SOME background knowledge when approaching a text. (PS–I will elaborate on this more fully in The Literacy Cookbook, scheduled for publication by Jossey-Bass in November.)
Good thoughts everyone. Hive mind.
I wonder why it has to be one or the other. I feel like a balance is what is needed.
1) You have to fill background knowledge with great social studies and science lessons. Sometimes you choose a selection of texts for reading class that are all on the same subject so that kids can build background knowledge. If you read several texts about adaptations in a row, kids eventually get the idea. In third grade at Brooke, we also teach a unit on nonfiction themes. We read 5-6 texts on each theme (ideas so important that many authors write about them). Then they can recognize those themes in any context. So there is a balance here of kids building understanding from the text (the give them a bunch of texts on the same theme idea) and giving the concept in advance (the teach a theme idea).
2) You have to figure out whether kids can possibly glean what they need to know to understand the text from the clues in the text. If they can, that is a good skill to practice. Sometimes you don’t preteach at all. You want them to find all their clues in the text. Sometimes the author hasn’t left enough clues. Then you pre-teach. Sometimes there is something that is so important in life (like Nazi Germany) that you are going to have to teach it directly. In the case of a novel, I might pre-teach it. Or I might let kids struggle for the first few chapters trying to find their own clues and then teach it a quarter of the way through the text. Sometimes with short articles or stories, I let kids struggle all the way through getting clues from the text (not what do you now about Nazi Germany, but what does the text show us about Nazi Germany and how does that impact Anne). They often pretty much get the idea on their own. Then I just attach the official vocab, dates etc. to their ideas at the end.
3) Kids need to grapple directly in text. They need to be given great questions that force them to dig for evidence. Engaging debatable questions work best. This is to become closer readers, but also to orally develop the ability to argue a point. How can we expect them to write with evidence if they can’t choose and explain evidence clearly with their voices? Brooke added this component this year and it has made a world of difference for my students. They love reading with these questions in mind and will write about them right through snack time. They read carefully and speak eloquently because what they are saying matters to them and to the people around them.
4) Low income kids need explicit reading skill instruction because many have not grown up in literature-rich environments. They need to be told things about text that my 2 year old already knows simply because she spends hours per day one on one reading with literate adults: what a caption does, what a table of contents does, how to connect the text with the pictures, how to recognize cause and effect. Then they need time to use these explicit strategies in books of their own level on their own. And time to read and recognize what strategies they are using, modeling for each other how they think as they read. “Right now I am visualizing the horse leaping over the hedge and splashing mud on everyone’s faces.” “I am noticing a time change here.” This helps them eventually learn when to use each skill that they have been taught.
I try to give my class all these opportunities at different points during the day. (And I haven’t even mentioned phonics or fluency). I don’t know how teachers without extended learning time do it. There is so much that goes into good reading instruction.
testing
What does the research say? Why are we ignoring research on effective reading instruction? Coleman provides only his opinion–unlike what he expects of students. He has no classroom experience to validate that this approach works and as far as I can tell, has no research to support the elimination of pre-reading techniques.
If there is research to support the elimination of pre-reading strategies, I would appreciate a link.