We need to start by acknowledging the 12,000-pound elephant in the room. The fact is that for a variety of reasons testing in some form is going to be with us for the foreseeable future.  Last fall at the NCET convention in St. Louis, I had the good fortune to be at the session where a number of top literacy experts talked about a variety of literacy issues. Lucy Calkins was among them.  I think Lucy’s comments around testing are especially useful for the current topic.  After acknowledging that testing is going to be with us for a good long while, she told how she and her colleagues in New York successfully lobbied to change the statewide testing to a form that had better face validity (my term not hers) than previous testing.

I think Lucy is on to something here.  My undergraduate degree was in political science/history.  I spent 2 years as a student body president at a university, 5 years teaching political science & history and 6 years as a small-town alderman.  Politics is often a 0-sum game. Everyone is looking for part of the scarce resources allocated by the political process.  However laudable the cause of education is; the fact is that we are competing with many equally deserving groups for a piece of the pie. We need something more than just our good word that the resources allotted for education are being put to used effectively. There are many ways to demonstrate that e.g. graduation rates, employment rates, independent reading rates, testing et al.  When testing is used, the trick is in making sure the reading test used meets face validity. In my opinion tests that measure mainly decoding skills do not. Tests that measure both meaning making and decoding skills do.  By the way, we can and should teach decoding skills in a way that leads to and enhances meaning making skills.  Here are some practical suggestions around the topic of testing and the literacy world.

You can begin by limiting the “test taking” instruction for students to the amount needed for those students to get used to the testing format employed in their state tests. I’ve seen situations where literacy instruction becomes one ongoing and eternal series of lessons in test practice instruction. Such an approach usually yields a bump in test scores as the students learn the nuances of the testing form. This is followed by an eternal plateau of test scores with little or no gains. This is because the time taken to teach test taking precludes time being taken to teach the meaning making that is the heart of the reading process.

One of my fellow bloggers, Lori Robb recently used a powerful quote from Margaret Mead. Mead said, “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think”.  We are in an era of knowledge explosion.  Gains in our knowledge base that used to take centuries now happen in the course of a single generation.  In such an age, focusing our teaching on how to think, how to learn new things, makes perfect sense. That kind of learning is best taught in teaching students to problem solve on their own. That includes learning how to problem solve their own words. They should also talk about and write about their ideas and, of course, read about new ideas from others. For that to happen we must “prime the pump”.  That means providing time and opportunities for students to discuss, interact, write about, think about what they discuss and finally, teaching them to make meaning out of the text.  In a workshop setting in a Title 1 building in an urban neighborhood where I worked for 18 years, I saw students as young as 1^st grade “talk big about little books”.  These are the selfsame students who helped that district gain the distinction of being a Secretary’s Initiative Award winner placing their Title One program in the top tenth of 1 percent of Title One programs in that era.  That happened twice while I was there.

I think too often in the world of literacy instruction we suffer from what I have come to call the “skip to the end” phenomena.  For instance, back in the day many educators came to the realization that 220-300 words made up a majority of all the words a child needs and that most adults know most of those words by sight. Based on this, some educators moved to an implementation of the sight-say method where those students learned those words early and quickly, usually by rote. The First-Grade studies concluded that this Sight Say method was ineffective.  Why did that happen? After all, the children knew the most important words by sight, just like the grownups.

Here is what I think happened.

What happened was that unlike the grown ups who developed their collection of sight-words through wide reading, learning words as they went along by figuring out unknown words and then remembering them, the sight-say students often learned only one strategy for figuring out words. Repeat them many times and memorize them.  The resulting level of word knowledge worked in texts with highly restricted vocabulary. However, once students moved to more complex, less controlled text, they lacked any way to figure out their own words or think about what they read. Little or no time had been spent constructing meaning around the text or learning methods of problem solving their own words.  You see by “skipping to the end” the educators had inadvertently left out the most important parts of how the fluent readers became fluent.

So back to the current topic. Teaching students how to “handle” multiple choice questions about main idea or inference will do no good if the students haven’t first gone through the rich encounters of dialogue and thinking about text that skillful readers use to unpack the meaning of text and make meaning from text.

So…, teach more, test less. Don’t overdo test practice. When you teach your students, scaffold them into deeper thinking. Teach them how to problem solve their words though a variety of methods including both synthetic and analytic phonics.  Give them text that is relevant to them. Give them at least some choice in what they read and write about. Teach them how to think and problem solve on their own. Do all this and the better test scores will come. That leap of faith might seem a little scary, so I want to leave you with a little allegory to consider. It’s based on an old folk tune from the sixty’s, Desert Pete.

Desert Pete was close to dying of thirst. Needed water. Came to a pump in the desert. A very tempting bottle of water had been left near the pump. There was a note. Use the water to prime the pump.  What to do? What if the pump didn’t work? Why not just drink that water? That would get Pete at least one more day to survive.  Or should he prime the pump and get water enough for all his needs (plus enough to fill the bottle for the next traveler!). Here is a link to a YouTube version of that song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08kEFELCb3I

So, it is really your choice. I personally choose to prime the pump, to teach students how to think.  I choose to give them at least some choice of what they read and write about. I choose to teach them about decoding using whichever method best works for them.  I choose to scrutinize state tests carefully to make sure they have face validity and like Lucy and her colleagues in New York, to lobby for change if they don’t. Most importantly I choose to become more skillful at scaffolding readers into their next level of thinking.  So, readers what’s you pleasure? Drink the bottle of water or prime the pump? Something to think about in the coming weeks as we near the time for annual testing.

Happy Reading and Writing

Dr. Sam Bommarito

Aka Desert Sam

Copyright 2018

Sam Bommarito

 NEW READERS PLEASE FOLLOW THE BLOG- WE’LL BE EXPLORING MORE ABOUT THIS IN DEPTH. NEW POSTS EVERY FRIDAY.

As promised, this Friday’s blog posting is done by Dr. Williams Kerns:

I look forward to the dialogue about literacy on this site. It is my hope that the conversation fosters a type of community of practice in which we each share a commitment to highly engaging and effective literacy education. As a guest bogger, I will discuss a diverse range of topics but in general my blog topics will coincide with issues raised by Sam. In my first blog I’ll start by simply start by introducing myself.

Sam and I met through our mutual passion for literacy including the promotion of programs such as Read and Feed initiatives, providing literacy education, books and food for children in Title I schools. We’ve become friends. Yet, I also believe that our differences of approaches will also prove fruitful for readers of this blog site.

You see, I tend to operate within a nexus of worlds that are known for sometimes clashing. I prefer my life this way. Life is far more interesting when in the tension of making sense of ideas that might clash, I learn new ways of viewing the world. For example, finding new understandings between cultures is a daily part of my marriage to a beautiful and brilliant woman who was born and raised in Northern China. She’s rightfully proud of her Chinese heritage. In many ways we have built a nexus that draws upon differing worlds as expressed in foods, traditions, daily habits, or conversations about education, music, holidays, politics and economics.  I’ve grown as a result.

A pattern can be seen in my life that informs – and is informed by – my teaching philosophy.  I want students to have the opportunity for discovery of new ideas and new ways of relating to one another with care, and to develop a lifelong habit of inquiry which contributes to joyful lives. Beyond this, I also hope that students will come to view education as a process of living in which they can contribute to the building of a more caring and just society. In turn, inquiry into the consequences of actions contributes to the development of what John Dewey called reflective morality. The demands of reflective morality include ongoing analysis into social conditions and the way one’s individual actions impact others. Reflective thinking is foundational to my approach to striving to build a more just society. Reflection provides a basis for actions of moral integrity, because of the dialogic way that knowledge and teaching practices are linked through reflection.

Drawing on Mohandas Gandhi’s understanding of satyagraha, I strive to become the change I wish to see in the world through my career as a teacher and as a researcher. After all it is futile to wish to see changes such as increased kindness and fairness if I do not commit myself to teaching and living in a manner that is consistent with truthfulness through a rigorous process of self-scrutiny through inquiry into my own actions. This means that as an educator and an individual living in society I’m “proud to be maladjusted until the good society is realized” to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King. I have no wish to be well adjusted to injustices in the lives of students or in the wider world. Further, the concept of agape love also informs my approach to teaching. Teachers risk pain and rejection when they commit whole-heartedly to caring for the needs of students and a community, but teachers have a responsibility to care for students even if there is pain.

The valuing of students needs to be rooted in concrete experience rather than a mere philosophical determination to be caring. A fundamental aspect of my teaching philosophy is the commitment to draw on the knowledge and resources available in students and in a community to inform curriculum and to help make learning increasingly meaningful to students. I am committed to an approach to pedagogy that stresses engaging students in activities that are personally and culturally meaningful.  Development of the student’s capabilities is the primary aim of my teaching. I strive to establish learning environments that promote exploration through a curriculum that is responsive to the needs and interests of the student based on careful inquiry. The instruction I strive for is also tied to the hope that teachers and students alike will work together and dialogue together, with presence to one another, becoming lifelong participants in efforts to build a more caring and just society.

Hmm…. Notice something so far?

What about talk of synthetic vs. analytic phonics?

Yes, skill development matters. Drawing on Paolo Freire I believe that reading the world helps foster in students the ability to read the word.   But the careful reader might also notice another way in which I operate within a nexus of worlds that sometimes are better known for clashing. While living in Central Florida prior to entering higher education, I worked as a high school English teacher and a Reading teacher as well as a reading specialist. My Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Clemson University focused on English Education, but I keep my feet in both the English Education and Literacy communities. Professors of English Language Arts and Literacy don’t always get along. There are those in English Language Arts who view the field as strongly grounded in the humanities and resist perceived efforts to ground English Language Arts in Literacy. Arguments drawing on the work of James Moffett and Peter Elbow maintain that English Language Arts should focus on holistic personal growth as students immerse themselves in literary worlds while engaged in rich reading, writing and dialogue. Concerns are sometimes voiced in English Education that Reading Education will emphasize decontextualized skills – even “skill and drill” – thus denying to students the potential joys of exploring literary worlds.

I’ve come to recognize that such a clash is not necessary, though it can also be a valid concern depending on approaches to instruction that are emphasized. The so-called simple view of reading defines reading comprehension as the product of decoding and listening comprehension, and instruction grounded in the simple view of reading clashes with approaches of those favoring the influence of Freire, Moffett or Elbow in English Language Arts. However, I find that reading instruction that also values social aspects of learning can be motivating and engaging for students. Literacy curricula need not deny to students the joys of exploration in the humanities and literature that English Language Arts teachers seek to support.