What if every incoming freshman in your high school received the same high quality instruction to optimize her/his reading? What if students who say "I hate reading" met with teachers who could afford the time and care to delve Into the problem? And what if teachers had the luxury of working with researchers on an ongoing basis so that together they could fine-tune what happens when kids read? As long as we‰re dreaming, what if you could set up a program that would take 200 students from reading Charlotte‰s Web to the literacy level required by To Kill a Mockingbird in a single year? Such a program has been implemented and achieved just such results. Test scores jumped in reading from seventh to ninth grade levels across the board. Perhaps even more remarkable, the rate of growth in student reading levels continued after students moved from their ninth grade English and social studies classes where the program was initiated into the next school year‰s classes.
If it sounds like an intriguing solution to what is often viewed as an intractable problem, then the Jossey-Bass publication of Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, Christine Cziko, and Lori Hurwitz, will be a must for your professional bookshelf.
Before strategies or program comes the story. The setting is Thurgood Marshall High School in San Francisco, a relatively new school in a poor community with a diverse minority population. (Stats: African-American, 30%; Latino and Chinese, each 25%, and Filipino and White each about 8%.) The program that made the work possible was the Strategic Literacy Initiative which brought teachers and researchers together to focus on reading. Using a model previously employed by Writing Projects, teachers became researchers for practices that improved reading in their classrooms. A key and unusual element was the fact that all first year students—not just honors or remedial—were enrolled in the Academic Literacy course. (Surely students feel the difference when instruction is systemic and not merely aligned to the knowledge and skill of one instructor, no matter how competent that person may be.)
While strategies were piloted initially in social studies and English classes, from the beginning the purpose was all-inclusive. Program teachers consulted with science, math, and other disciplines so that techniques introduced in the ninth grade would be continued and consistent beyond a single year. Having been taught certain ways to "preview a text" in her ninth grade class, for example, a student would find the same terminology and method reinforced in her tenth grade biology class.
Examining what other content disciplines required for reading, teachers discovered powerful things about the act of reading itself. It is—as students know and as the authors remind us—"not a basic skill." Reading demands not simple concentration, but multi-tasking far greater than what computers do. Reading different kinds of texts requires skills that go beyond variations on a theme. It is highly possible to be a proficient reader in one discipline, but lacking skills for another. Discipline-based knowledge definitely promotes greater facility in finding your way around certain types of texts, but to complicate matters further, different kinds of texts within the same discipline demand dif- ferent reading approaches and skills. If comprehension is to be achieved, reading strategies for different types of text need to be taught in context. What is often invisible—what happens when you read—has to become visible for both student and teacher.
Learning how a text works is key in developing the will to read. For every teacher who has assigned a few pages of reading homework and listened to ensuing groans, the connection between ability to do the job and will to do it is not news. Far more common than teachers like to admit, though, is the practice of "spoon feeding" texts and lightening the students‰ load in the service of coverage of a topic. As a result, many of our students are not confident to tackle the difficulty of what RFU teachers view as gatekeeper texts. Among these are exam texts, job applications, and college texts—reading that prevents or allows students access to opportunity.
Assignments, techniques, and strategies employed throughout the program kept the goal of reading independence for students central.
Many strategies laid out in the book are impressive, coherent, and transparent in their effectiveness. For example, I was tempted to excerpt the Concentration Cockpit—a student‰s self-directed look at concentration while reading—and try it the next day with a class or two. To excerpt bits and pieces, however, does this text and the lesson it teaches a disservice.
Reading for Understanding is a guidebook for reform as much as it is a text about literacy. Present this text in your curriculum committees, share it in your department meetings, and take it to Site-Based Management discussions on test scores so that your school community can begin to examine the real work of literacy.
Though newspapers locate the wars over reading almost exclusively in elementary school battles over phonics vs. whole language, high schools and middle-schools too occupy front lines. Typically, shots lobbed back and forth call for remedial classes which never bring about the desired improvement. Students and teachers remain trapped in the trenches.
Abraham Lincoln was said to have reminded Harriet Beecher Stowe that some books—Uncle Tom‰s Cabin as a prime example—start wars. With the publication of Reading for Understanding, let us hope that books also end wars. If anything could do it, this book—read and taken seriously by educators—could redirect our efforts to produce not only accord among ourselves, but also a generation of more literate, capable graduates.
Reprinted with Permission of California English.
