Radically Redefining Literacy Instruction: An Immense Opportunity

Abstract

Students in today's English and language arts classes typically are not asked to read, discuss, or write analytically. But by emphasizing such authentic literacy activities, Mr. Schmoker maintains, we could bring about the results that all our reforms seek: higher test scores, intellectual development, and a narrowing of the achievement gap. ********** AUTHENTIC LITERACY--the ability to read, write, and think effectively--belongs at the very top of the reform agenda. There every reason to believe that these capacities, if acquired across the disciplines, will change lives by the millions and will redefine the possibilities of public education. Best of all, the most effective ways to impart these vital skills are disarmingly simple. For Vincent Ferrandino and Gerald Tirozzi (the respective presidents of the national associations for elementary and secondary principals), under-developed literacy skills are the number one reason why students are retained, assigned to special education, given long-term remedial services and why they fail to graduate from high school. (1) They conclude that literacy speaks to the larger societal issues of access and equity. In our society, being literate opens doors--and opens them wide. If literacy so important, how difficult would it be to provide excellent literacy instruction across the disciplines? Mike Rose's classic, Lives on the Boundary, gives us a clue. Rose grew up poor in East L.A., in a tiny house where he shared a bedroom with his parents. For years, school was a place of boredom and frustration. He assumed he would never attend college or escape the conditions that accounted for the ravaged hope felt by the adults he grew up around. (2) Then, in the 10th grade, a maverick teacher came to Rose's rescue. Jack MacFarland taught in a fashion radically different from his colleagues. To the near exclusion of all other activities, he had his students read, discuss, and write about record numbers of books and articles in response to questions he prepared for the reading and writing assignments. And the students did this work in class. As Rose puts it, they merely and wrote and talked their way toward an education that few students receive in the K-12 school system. Simple stuff. Any teacher can begin to do these things. Only later did Rose realize that he and his fellow members of the voc ed crowd had in fact received a prep-school curriculum. Rose's personal success--he now a professor at UCLA--suggests what could happen for students on a grand scale, across the social spectrum. But his success shouldn't surprise us. The literature strewn with evidence that such straightforward literacy instruction would have a monumental impact on students' lives. It all begins with close, careful THE POWER OF DEEP, PURPOSEFUL READING No subject of study, writes Jacques Barzun, is more important than reading ... all other intellectual powers depend on it. (3) Intellectual power and development flow only and directly from what Richard Vacca calls strategic reading, what James Popham calls purposeful reading, and what legendary inner-city principal Deborah Meier calls deep reading. (4) But this not the kind of reading most students now do in English and language arts. There's no mystery here: such reading starts with good questions and prompts. From the earliest grades, students need numerous, daily opportunities to read closely (or reread) an article or a chapter in a textbook for meaning: to weigh or evaluate the logic or evidence in a text--or in two or more related texts--in order to find the answer to an arresting or provocative question. (5) We do such reading to test a proposition, such as Columbus was a great man. We do it to marshal support for an argument or propose a solution to an intriguing social or political problem. From college on, most of us have done such reading with a pen or highlighter in hand so that we can mark key passages or patterns in a text. …