ExtraOrdinary Districts

In this episode, ExtraOrdinary Districts co-hosts Karin Chenoweth and Tanji Reed Marshall chew over what they heard and what they learned from five previous episodes that explored different aspects of reading instruction. They connect the question of reading instruction to our historical moment in which we as a nation are deciding whether to be a democracy in which all citizens are equal or an autocracy in which some citizens are marked to be members of a lower caste. If we are to be a democracy, all our citizens must be educated. At the very least that means able to read.

The podcast’s extended look at reading instruction was prompted by the Council of Chief State School Officers’ call to states to improve reading instruction.

When Tennessee showed no progress on the last results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and Massachusetts actually declined, both states were spurred to make some major changes to improve the reading instruction in their states.

In this episode, Dr. Lisa Coons, chief academic officer of the Tennessee State Department of Education, Dr. Heather Peske, senior associate commissioner, Massachusetts Department of Education, and Katherine Tarca, director of literacy and humanities in the Massachusetts Dept. of Education, discuss what those two states are doing.

Coons describes a statewide effort that is being driven by the governor, legislature, and state department of education to provide training for aspiring and existing teachers and school leaders, curricular resources, and tutoring services for students who are not proficient in reading. “This is pretty comprehensive. It is pretty intense,” Coons said.

Social media, she said, has helped spur efforts within Tennessee to ensure that all children learn to read well. Part of that is a series of podcasts by American
Public Media’s Emily Hanford, which has brought an intense scrutiny on reading instruction and the training teachers receive in their teacher preparation programs. The podcasts were cited by the Council of Chief State School Officers in its call to states to improve reading instruction, a call which prompted ExtraOrdinary Districts to produce a series of episodes on reading instruction.

In Massachusetts, a new campaign called Mass Literacy is focused on providing grants, creating resources, and providing information about evidence-based reading instruction to educators in the state’s 400 school districts. “We’re trying to promote the idea that all our students have the right to learn in a culturally responsive and affirming environment,” said Tarca. “All students deserve to read wonderful literature. And all students deserve to be taught to read fluently and pull the print off the page. And none of those things are mutually exclusive.”

Although the Massachusetts effort is much smaller in terms of budget and scope than Tennessee, “One of the messages you’re hearing from us,” said Peske, “is the importance of coherence within the state agency and using the available levers to us whether it’s licensure, educator preparation, in-service professional learning, access to high-quality instructional materials.”

Most elementary schools teach reading with either a basal reading program, a teacher-developed curriculum, or a balanced literacy program like Fountas & Pinnell or Teachers College Units of Study.

But the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), in calling for a national improvement in reading instruction, has called upon all state superintendents and commissioners to encourage schools and districts to adopt the high-quality materials that have been developed in the last few years to line up with both Common Core state standards and with the science of reading.

In this episode, experts Carol Jago and David Liben talk with Ed Trust’s director of practice Tanji Reed Marshall and writer-in-residence Karin Chenoweth about the difference using high-quality materials at both the elementary and secondary levels could make in helping students learn to read.

Jago is a longtime English teacher and a former president of the National Council of Teachers of English, as well as a prolific writer, including a widely used high school English textbook. She has been awarded several career awards, such as the International Literacy Association’s Adolescent Literacy Thought Leader Award. Liben, also a longtime teacher, was deeply involved in the development of state standards for reading and has served as a consultant in the development of several of the English Language Arts curricula which are considered “high quality.”

“When I go around to schools using one of these high-quality materials,” Liben said, “the teachers almost always say they never thought their struggling readers would be this involved in what they’re doing.” The reason, Liben said, is the bulk of the day is spent on rich grade-level texts so that even the weakest readers are “Playing in the ball-game. They’re part of it.”

Liben said that too often when people talk about the “science of reading” they are simply talking about teaching phonics. That is important to teach, he said. But he talked about the need to understand additional sciences—of vocabulary development, building background knowledge, mastering features of complex text, and standard of coherence—to have a more integrated understanding of reading science. In addition, when students write about what they read, Jago said, not only do they clarify their own thoughts but they also provide a “window” for their teachers to understand what young learners are understanding. That helps teachers to “craft instruction in response to that.”

“The National Reading Project,” she said, has been helpful in showing teachers how to better teach and assess writing. (Chenoweth mentioned a project in the UK that is working to help teachers assess writing with something called “comparative judgment.”)

The elementary programs that Liben, Jago, and Marshall consider to be “high quality” are Great Minds’ Wit and Wisdom*; EL Education; Core Knowledge; American Reading Company; and Bookworms. At the secondary level, Jago said, most teachers continue to teach novels and said English teachers need to help their students “interrogate” the novels they teach rather than stop teaching them because of problematic content. She also mentioned that Student Achiev...

The last results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed no progress and some indicators even declined, meaning few children are reading at an advanced or proficient level.

Partly because of those disappointing results and partly because of a series of podcasts by American Public Media’s Emily Hanford, a growing number of educators, parents, advocates, and policymakers have become interested in incorporating the “science of reading” into reading instruction in hopes of improving the reading ability of American children.

And the science of reading forms a large part of the call of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) to state superintendents and commissioners to focus on reading instruction. The CCSSO especially asked state superintendents and commissioners to ensure that teachers understand how to incorporate the findings of the National Reading Panel Report, published in 2000. That report said that research supported teaching five elements of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies.

But this is a complicated topic. The science of how people read, which is the province of cognitive science and neuroscience, doesn’t always translate seamlessly with the science of reading instruction.

In this conversation, Karin Chenoweth and Tanji Reed Marshall talk with nationally known reading researcher Timothy Shanahan, who helped lead the National Reading Panel, and neuroscientist Donald Joseph Bolger about the tension. “Translating the research findings into practice,” Bolger said, is “difficult for people who want to know what to do and how to do it—who want a silver bullet.” That, he said, “is not the world that scientists live in.” Instead his goal at the University of Maryland School of Education, he said, is to “make teachers aware of all the components of reading” because they will need to be able to diagnose whatever struggles students have with learning to read.

Shanahan said the fact that almost all methods of teaching reading will result in some students learning to read has confused the question of what the best method of teaching reading is. Everything “works” to some degree, he said. “What we mean when we say ‘it works,’” he said, is that “when kids get explicit teaching on that particular thing, on average they do better.”

In other words, reading research works for improvements on the margin. “About 35 percent of our children are proficient in reading,” Shanahan said. “It doesn’t have to be that way, but it does mean we have to make an effort to get those marginal gains, because that’s what we mean by ‘it works.’”

But, he cautioned that there is more to reading instruction than just the science. For example, schools are often organized so that the students who need the most thoughtful instruction are provided the newest, least prepared teachers who, once they gain experience and expertise, often leave those classrooms.

“The kids are fine,” he said. “The problem...is that they are not in supportive environments.”

Shanahan says he hopes the CCSSO report will help educators figure out ways to accelerate learning following what is sure to be some drops in reading proficiency during the school building closures during the coronavirus pandemic.

This is the second time Shanahan has been part of the ExtraOrdinary Districts podcast. The first time was when he was on a panel discussing the reading instruction in Cottonwood and Lane Oklahoma, which was part two of Season 2, a season in which we focused closely on the kind of reading instruction three successful and improving districts provided.