Rejecting “Leveled Reading”
Posted: January 6th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 3 Comments »
This is provocative.
Consequently, I have sought studies that would support the original contention that we could facilitate student learning by placing kids in the right levels of text. Of course, guided reading and leveled books are so widely used it would make sense that there would be lots of evidence as to their efficacy.
Except that there is not.
….The problem with guided reading and similar schemes is that they are focused on helping kids to learn with minimal amounts of teaching (something Pinnell and Fountas have stated explicitly in at least some editions of their textbooks). But that switches the criterion. Instead of trying to get kids to optimum levels, that is the levels that would allow them to learn most, they have striven to get kids to levels where they will likely learn best with minimal teacher support.
It’s by Timothy Shanahan. He teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and used to be literacy director for Chicago Public Schools.
His blog is here. I found him via a recommended reading list from Achieve The Core.
I read some more of his stuff. He writes:
I’ve written often in this space about the need to ramp up text difficulty. But in doing that we need to be sure not to overdo it.
In contradiction to past theories of how someone learns to read effectively, I have put forth the idea that students probably benefit more from working with a range of difficulty levels (much as athletes train at varying intensities and distances).
Rigor is the new black.
I.e., he believes students should frequently be asked to read above their “reading level,” while acknowledging the challenges therein.
Thoughts?
I’ve taught at the community college level for 32 years, many of my classes developmental, and I would agree with him very much. You have to be vigilant about who’s getting it, who needs help, when to scale back and go paragraph by paragraph, of course.
But a lot of it depends on what you do with the text. We do a ton of critical lens work, sometimes with just one-sentence lenses, sometimes with second-text lenses of length, and what we find is one or the other can be tough but not both. You could take a fairly easy primary text and use a deep lens (like a comment from philosophy) to look at it, or take a tough primary text and use a fairly straightforward lens to get the students into it. In fact, that kind of guided reading done up front can totally unlock a challenging text for students.
Another angle is that Lexile scores, for example, only tell part of the story sometimes. I could give you a fairly low-scoring poem that is filled with subtlety and nuance, and therefore quite tough. I had a friend who said when she had studied poetry for some years, she finally felt ready to tackle the great haiku. I never forgot that.
All the best.
Nodding along with both posting and comment. Lexile scores only tell you what they tell you — they don’t indicate anything about a kid’s initial interest level or about the ability of any level of reading to spark interest or great discussion.
I’ve seen kids who really think they hate reading — because it’s all about the level and the multiple choice questions and it’s like school is trying to make a book into a highly uninteresting computer game.
When I tutor for the SAT, I can tell the difference between kids who read for pleasure (and/or attend the one or two schools that actually emphasized developing a love of reading early on, along with a lot of close reading in small groups in the lower grades) and those who only read what they are made to read for school.
The latter group, even when they are smart kids who read fairly extensively for school (in AP or IB classes), is not nearly as adept at getting the big idea, at paraphrasing what is said in a specific line or two into their own words, or even just being able to give an overall meaning to what was read.
They are often very good at giving their own impressions about what is said, but really have only a surface understanding of what the author was saying.
I second the idea that the students’ motivation for reading a particular topic is pretty important, and can make them reach farther. The classic example is boys who read enthusiastically about adventure and only with great reluctance about feelings and social drama. That’s a stereotype, of course, but I have found it to be true in many individual cases. And I can remember telling my son’s history teacher that she should allow kids to choose term paper topics that energized them and that social and political history wasn’t doing it for some of the kids. I asked if she would allow papers on the history of technology (meaning everything from gunpowder to celestial navigation to the McCormick reaper to Steve Jobs) and she would not.