Literacy Builders

For the Love of Learning

Text Complexity

Shorts

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First, watch this short, Bastille, from a collection of shorts about love and Paris called Paris, Je T’Aime (Paris, I Love You).

Bastille, in a little more than five minutes, gave me something that has stayed with me since I saw it in our local, independent theatre in 2007. This story of a man rising to an occasion and becoming his “best self” by pretending his way into it has become a metaphor for finding my way through changes I want to make in my life (Denton, 2007, p. 21). I have thought of this short a few times a week for the last five years, although I have only watched it three times (including the viewing just before linking it to this blog.)

The man in the short became who he needed/wanted to be by pretending. He imagined what the man he wanted to become would do in the same circumstances, and then he practiced that. I can translate this strategy into any dimension of my work on myself. To have a cleaner house, I can ask myself what people who maintain routines for sustaining an orderly environment do. Then I can copy them and practice these routines until I become someone with an orderly home. To become a better mother, I can look at the language of intelligent mothers and consciously assume their vernacular, practicing until I can own this vocabulary myself. If we become our habits, then we become new people by creating new habits, and we create new habits by first imagining them.

When I saw Bastille, its message of pretending toward becoming was not a new idea to me; I have read it in many places. The strategy, however, found a resting place in my thinking after this short became a metaphor for anchoring this paradigm for practice to my daily life. I think about this short all the time and anyone I talk to at length hears about it.

In their session at IRA a couple of weeks ago, David and Meredith Liben recommended using short, complex texts with students as we support them in developing stamina and proficiency in more difficult material. Kim and I have been thinking about short texts vs. longer pieces, and questions have arisen: Can we communicate the power of text with short texts? Can we develop readers using short texts? Can we sustain them or, better yet, teach them to sustain themselves? We think so.

As educators, Kim and I have both appreciated the advantages shorter texts offer, i.e. students can read through the entire piece in one lesson, students can reread them in even less time, short texts are less threatening than longer texts, and brevity can actually increase complexity (consider the haiku, for example). We hope the Common Core encourages educators to give themselves permission to broaden their ideas about what constitutes texts, especially short texts. A painting is really a short text. A video clip is, too. And how would readership change if middle and high school teachers used some of the more profound and/or clever picture books with their students? I would love to sit in on a high school discussion of Jon J. Muth’s The Three Questions, which would naturally connect to reading Tolstoy.

We can say with confidence, however, that the unintended side-effects of abandoning novels, of missing opportunities to connect ideas across longer texts, and of diminishing stamina for reading texts that require patience, are not the intention of the Common Core crafters. We recommend that you embrace short films, short stories, novel and article excerpts, etc. as viable opportunities for students to learn new ways to dig into text and think about ideas. We also recommend that you hang on just as tightly to longer texts, to novels, to read alouds connected over days and weeks, and to intricate ideas that unfold in connections that make a thinking reader whisper, “Wow!”

Coixet, Isabelle. (Director). “Bastille.” Paris, Je T’Aime. Ossard, Claude & Von Schenk,

Burkhard (Producers). (2006). Paris, Je T’Aime. First Look Studios: Thousand Oaks, California.

Denton, Paula. (2007) The power of our words: Teacher language that helps children learn.

Turner Falls, MA: Northeast Foundation for Children.

Liben, David and Meredith Liben. (2012). “Text Complexity and the Common Core Standards:

What’s a Practitioner to Do?” IRA 57th Annual Convention, Chicago, April 29-May 2,

2012: Celebrating Teaching.

Asking “Good” Questions

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In a recent presentation at the Nassau Reading Council/Long Island Language Arts Council Spring Conference 2012, Kate Gerson, Senior Fellow with the Regents Research Fund in New York, spoke in depth about text-based questions and the need for close readings of text. In her presentation, she explained, “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text.”

To give context to her assertion, Kate invited the educators in the audience to explore the impact of text-based questions by sharing a series of questions about Abraham Lincoln’s The Gettysburg Address.

One set of questions she posed was this: What does Lincoln mean by “four score and seven years ago?  Who are the “founding fathers?”  The footnote on the handout defined “score” as twenty, and there was buzz in the room as people talked about their responses.

But as people talked, I went back to Kate’s comment: “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text.”

Once everyone had done the math and listed the founding fathers, the conversation stopped dead in its tracks. “Where are we supposed to go from here?” I wondered.

So I asked Kate to clarify the thinking behind this question because to me, while it is based on the text, it seemed rooted in background knowledge that some readers may bring to the text, but others may not.  She disagreed, she felt that this question lent itself to a rich discussion about Lincoln’s intentional choice to refer to this historical event—and that’s when I thought again about Kate’s words, “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text.” And it occurred to me that Kate’s intent may have been good but she didn’t really ask the real question. Based on her response, she seemed to be asking “Why is mentioning ‘the founding fathers’ important to Lincoln’s message in the Gettysburg Address?”

Asking “good” questions is hard work.  Few would say that it comes naturally which means that if we aim to develop “close read” units of study for our students, then we must change the way in which we plan and prepare.  We can no longer pull books off the shelf a half hour before we intend to use them or come up with questions off the cuff as we share text with students.  Close reads require thought, reflection, intention, and revision.  To add to Kate’s comment “A good question is one that allows you to stay with the text,” I would say, too, that a “good” question is borne in the company of colleagues and unless we are working collaboratively with others to develop “good” questions, we may find we aren’t asking the questions we intended. Perhaps, instead of “good” questions, we should work together to ask “better” questions.

Everything in Moderation

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Today I visited a fourth grade classroom.  In this fourth grade classroom, there is a girl who is currently reading below grade level at approximately a Level L/M.  We’ll call her Danielle.   During today’s lesson, I presented Danielle with a grade level complex text (lexile: 840) titled Smoke and Mucus. 
During the course of this lesson, I watched this reader mark up her text with a highlighter as she noticed captions and photographs.  She engaged in animated discussion with her peers.  In fact, at one point, another girl raised her hand to question the validity of the title wondering out loud if it should really be called Smoke and Mucus because it seemed to her to be more about smoking.  When Danielle heard this, she cocked her head slightly to the side and raised her hand to disagree.  She said, “Mucus is related to coughing and in this article they talk about that a lot.” With that statement, she buried her head in the text and proceeded to reread and share three different examples in the text that backed up what she was saying. 
As I watched, I thought to myself, This is a below grade level reader? Because at that moment, she did not appear to be.  What’s more, I couldn’t help but hear the echo of David Coleman’s words addressing the importance of children reading grade level complex text.  When I first heard him speak of allowing children the opportunity to experience dissonance, I was skeptical.  I am a firm believer in the reading tenet that says that in order to become more proficient, most of children’s reading should be at their instructional level.  But here I could see what he was talking about.  This text was within Danielle’s zone of proximal development—harder than what she would read in guided reading but yet not so hard that she couldn’t wrestle with it and use what she knows to piece together meaning and experience the satisfaction of successfully completing a hard task. 
I think the lesson for me here is an important one: good reading instruction depends on teachers striking a balance between presenting children with instructional level and grade level complex text.  If children are to be successful on their reading assessments, and more importantly, “college and career ready,” we don’t want their first (and only) experience with grade level complex text to be the day of the test.  And conversely, if children only work with grade level complex text in preparation for the test, we risk creating situations where children do not read eagerly and voluminously and that, too, would be counterintuitive to the idea of “college and career readiness.”
So where this leaves us as teachers is trying to puzzle out what our instruction should look like.  What percentage of a child’s instructional time should be spent with independent text?  What percentage of time should be spent with instructional text?  And how much time should be spent should we spend working in whole groups with grade level complex text?  The Common Core is still new to all of us and I’m wondering if you are grappling with this too?  What do you believe is the right “balance”?