Leveling: the Shortcomings of a Good Idea

The idea that students should read material that is at their level is a good one. If a text is too easy, the student will not be pushed to the next level and interest in reading could stagnate. If it is too difficult, forcing the student to focus on simple decoding rather than the meaning of the text, interest in reading can be crushed. The problem with leveling, therefore, is not the theory on which leveling is founded, but in its application.

There are a two main problems that I see with the application of leveled reading. The first occurs when levels are strictly adhered despite student needs or interests. In this week's reading, Glaswall and Ford state that, "Readers have the right to be engaged and stimulated and to contribute their thinking to the class community." All to often, however, the students who struggle with reading are provided with predictable and, frankly, boring books that kill enthusiasm. Surely there are books that a struggling child can feasibly read that go beyond "I see the cat, I see the dog, etc." These books do have their place, but they must be supplemented with other reading material and discarded after a time. Paying attention to student interest means not only providing them with interesting books, but also letting them pursue topics and books that interest them. Students should have a say in what they read. If a child has their imagination captured by a book in level D, but is in level C or E, let them read the book! They will still learn from it and their love of reading will be fostered by a text they enjoy. 

One must also consider student needs beyond their level. Glasswall and Ford give the example of a teacher who placed all his lowest readers in the a reading group together without considering the kinds of mistakes they were making or the kinds of instruction they needed. 
"Taylor's oral reading is almost word-perfect, with few errors but poor comprehension. Marita's miscues showed a pattern of using initial letters in words to guess at unknown words, and her attempts at words often resulted in responses that did not make sense in context and sometimes did not sound right in terms of  grammatical structure. Kimber showed a different pattern of problem solving altogether. When she came across a word she did not know, she often predicted from context. As a result, her miscues often made sense and sounded right, but they just didn't 'look right.'" (Glasswell and Ford). 
These students represent entirely different strategies for decoding texts. One uses visual information ("the letters and words. They draw upon their knowledge of phonics as they think about what word looks right"); one uses structural information ("they think about what would sound right (grammatically). They draw upon their knowledge of the spoken language"); and one uses meaningful information ("gained from the picture, sentance context, or story line. They draw upon their background knowledge as they think about what makes sense") (Johnson and Keier, 54). These students would probably be better off in groups of students facing similar challenges as them, even if those readers were on a different level, and kearning alongside them a multitude of strategies for word decoding. 

The second problem with the strict application of reading levels is that it belittles the professionalism and profession of teachers. I understand that the administrators, basal program designers, legislators, and the general populace are concerned about the education of today's youth (and tomorrow's administrators, designers, legislators, etc.). And I agree! Accountability is important and what it means to teach qualitatively is something that should be deeply considered. However, forcing teachers to adhere to strict guidelines is problematic on two levels. It belittles the teacher as a teacher - it shows that they are not trusted to do their job - and it can have a negative impact on their teaching. This is because the teacher will put less of their heart, mind, and soul into teaching if everything is laid out. 
"Commercial materials can contribute to less teacher reflection and a reification of certain reading principles. The design of these materials can contribute to an over-reliance on material and under-utilization of professional judgement… materials become the focus rather than the reader" (Glaswell and Ford, 209). 

 Strict adherence to leveled books can also negatively impact teaching because every moment of instruction is modified by context, and the most successful instruction takes this context into account. This requires the quick judgement of a teacher who is present in the context and aware of its implications, not the theories of a far-off book publisher.
" Leveling systems often ignore that contextual factors play a role in the success of the transaction between the reader and the text. Leveling systems can't assess whether a child is reading in an emotionally safe and comfortable setting or in a high stakes situation" (Glasswell and Ford).

So what to do? 
Leveling books in an excellent idea but, like many excellent ideas, is less successful when taken to the extreme. Do not force teachers to follow prescriptions that ignore the context which surrounds their teaching. Rather, give teachers leveled books as a resource and teach them how to use them! Teach them how to assess not only what level a student is at, but why they are making the mistakes they do and what instruction and texts will push them to the next level. Put the power back in the hands of the teachers, but give them all the help they need.

Comprehension strategies

The readings for this week discussed teaching reading strategies to aid comprehension. Several questions were answered. I will address the following: which students need strategy instruction? Do they need to be metacognitively aware of which strategies they are using? What does integration of strategies mean? How can teachers help students make the leap from guided practice to independence? What is inferring and when is it used?

Who needs strategy instruction? Having access to strategies that help make meaning from text is useful to every reader. However, this does not mean that all students will need the same instruction in using comprehension strategies. I, for example, do not remember hearing about 'strategies' as an elementary student, but I still developed a reading process system to help me decode texts that I find difficult. This is proof that students don't necessarily have to be metacognitively aware of what they're doing in order to be successful. In some cases, asking students to be metacognitively aware of their reading process system will only slow them down! But every reader will, at some point in their lives, encounter texts whose meaning will take effort to decode. The key is to provide students with texts that will push them to use explicit strategies in elementary school, rather than letting them coast until college. They should receive explicit strategy instruction until they no longer need it - this seems obvious, but in actuality requires close monitoring.

What does integration of strategies mean? This simply means that students can move between strategies with ease in order to make meaning. In certain circumstances, using context to decode a word is more useful than making a text to life connection,and visa versa. Students should be fluent in a multitude of strategies, have an instinct about which one to use in which scenario, and be able to move on to another strategy if their first choice did not work. They must also recognize when they need to use a strategy to make meaning from a text (self-monitoring) even if they do not need to recognize when they use strategies automatically.

How can teachers help students move from one guided instruction to independence? Again, this transition must be based on the students' progress. Some students will learn what they need to from modeling, and added instruction will only be boring and pedantic tot hem (the dangers of busy work!!). Other students will need help transitioning. This can take the form of shared demonstration, which is still mostly teacher -guided, or guided practice, which is student initiated with close teacher monitoring and guidance as needed. There is no hard and fast answer to this question. The student must dictate their own progress and the teacher must be ready to assist as needed. Fair does not always mean equal! One quote I found summed this up well: "the teacher's job is not delivering knowledge, but arranging for the problem to be manageable, sustaining the child's problem-solving attempts emphasizing flexibility" (Johnson and Keier, 137).

What is inferring? Inferring is a very broad strategy, which can cause confusion for teachers and students alike. One passage from this reading was particularly useful. "Students can learn to infer at the text level (...new or unusual vocabulary), the text level (predicting what might happen or inferring something about the setting, characters, or plot), and beyond the text level (theme, author's perspective, and so on). Inferring refers to the mulititude of strategies readers can use to "read between the lines"

I would like to conclude with a short anecdote about a student that I was very proud of in Thursday. She's a 6th grader who was reading The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, an old favorite of mine. I asked her where she was in the book and she told me that Edmund had sneaked away from the Beavers' house and Lucy had just noticed. This was the perfect place for a prediction, one of the. Strategies covered in this week'sreading from 'CatchingReaders Before They Fall'. Predicting is one of the inferring strategies. It allows the reader to take what they know about the characters! He setting, their knowledge of human nature, etc, to predict what will happen next, thereby engaging with the text. Part of the reason I was so happy with this particular experience was that I could see  that working with me really helped. In this class, students are expected to write three responses to their Independant Reading per week. This could be any comprehension strategy that they have practiced so far. His girl had been having trouble getting her responses in, not because she was not engaging with the text but because she struggled with getting ideas to write, getting started, and staying on task with the writing component. By. Talking through her ideas with me first and with me helping her stay on task and remember all the points she made, she wrote not one, but 2 excellent predictions. The first was that Edmund would go the Witch's house, but she would be angry he hadn't brought his siblings and his siblings would have to brave her house to rescue him. The second was that he would go to Aslan and his siblings would join him. They would raise an army of animals and defeat the White Witch. Between the two, she predicted almost exactly what would happen! It was great! All she needed was a little extra guidance before moving on to he Independant stage.

"Sounding Out": NOT the 'Be-all, end-all' of Decoding Words

This week’s post is in response to Compton-Lilly’s article “Sounding Out”: a Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading. I found the article to be written weakly; it was repetitive, added a great deal of new information in the conclusion, and included a lengthy and (I thought) unnecessary tangent about how the study’s parent subjects felt looked down upon because of a difficulty or inability to pronounce things in Standard English. This said, I agree with the thesis of the article and thought it included a number of interesting and edifying points. Therefore, I think it will be of benefit both to others, and to myself in the future, to reorganize and sum up the main points below.

The overarching thesis of this article is that the strategy of decoding an unknown word by “sounding it out” is a cultural model. This means that it is a “taken for granted theory” that pervades our culture of learning to read. It “privileges phonetic decoding over other decoding strategies particularly those that involve the meanings of texts and the structures” despite the fact that it is one of the least effective strategies, especially when it stands alone. Because it is a pervasive cultural model, however, it is the most often cited strategy - by teachers, students, and parents alike - even when other strategies are being utilized more often and more effectively! For example, “Ms. Webster tells (her daughter) Jasmine to ‘sound out’ the word and then immediately directs her attention to the picture to help her successfully solve the word.” Young children see the ability to “sound out” words as the mark of a good reader, and Compton-Lilly encourages teachers to fight the urge to use sounding out not as “an excuse when teachers do not have any other strategy up their sleeve to help the struggling reader."

According to Compton-Lilly’s research, people can mean one of two things by “sounding it out”. The first is what I (and Compton-Lilly) was familiar with – making the individual letter sounds and then putting them together. The second is what I believe I have heard referred to as “chunking”: “finding two or more chunks within the words that they recognize and putting these chunks together (read-ding).” Although I think the latter would be a degree more effective than the former, both have problems. “The tendency to vocalize every letter in a word becomes problematic when words have silent letters and complicated letter-sound relationships.”  And Compton-Lilly quotes Ken Goodman in saying that, “sounding out words ‘can only put me in the neighborhood [of the correct word]. Even if I sounded out every letter in sequence, I wouldn't come close, because there's no one-to-one correspondence and because sounds change with the context.’”

There are, as I mentioned, other strategies that children can –and do! – use. Good word decoding, in fact, draws on three main ways of making meaning, the use of Visual information being one. The other two are Meaning and Structure. “The reader uses understandings of what could happen in the world (meaning), and language knowledge of words, structures and sound sequences, and several approaches to phonological information from oral and written sources. He mediates the appropriateness of possible responses through attention to visual information.”

The solution Compton-Lilly presents is a simple one: get the word out! Teachers and students, parents and politicians need to be made aware that “sounding it out” is only one strategy in an arsenal, and a relatively weak and unreliable one at that. Compton-Lilly states that “parent workshops, community forums, and informative websites are predictable solutions that one might expect to encounter,” adding that this might take a while but that the fact that children (the adults of tomorrow) are already using alternate strategies gives her (him?) hope. Not to rain on his (her?) parade - and I certainly see cracks in this cultural model - but I don’t see the unconscious use of alternate strategies as a big leap forward. After all, parents today also unknowingly use and share other strategies, as evidenced by Ms. Wilson, but continue to tout above all else the strategy of “sounding it out”. 

Perhaps this is an odd and disconnected way to conclude my post, but blog posts are allowed to be informal and, in the midst of scrolling through Google Images to find an appropriate image to head my post I happened upon this cool piece of history that I couldn't resist sharing it. If you haven't seen it before, this is the Cyrus Cylinder. It is written in cuneiform, one of the earliest known writing systems, and dates back to the 6th century BC in Babylonia. It justifies Cyrus the Great as the ruler of Babylonia and establishes his heir (nothing unusual there). But it is also cited as the written declaration of basic human rights! It's a good reminder of the power and value of writing (and reading).

Covering the Basics

For this weeks reading, we had two articles – Every Mark on the Page by Casumano and Phonemic Awareness by Rasinski – as well as Chapter 7 “I Thought I Knew How to Teach Reading, but Whoa!” from Catching Readers before They Fall by Johnson and Keier.  Every Mark on the Page was an article intended to inform parents and interested members of the community on children’s development as writers. Casumano states that “Too often. I have seen the fun go out of writing when family~

get involved, especially when they demand adult writing conventions from six- and seven-year-olds.” Instead, he urges parents to look for signs that the child is working to communicate ideas through a symbol system, which is, after all, the ultimate goal of writing.

Too much focus on spelling and grammar conventions at an early age can take the joy out of writing and actually stunt a child’s growth. Also, it is undoubtedly easy to see first all the mistakes a child has made, from rampant misspelling to forgetting capitalization or punctuation, etc. One must remember to take note of the things a child does well, of the conventions they have learned through simple exposure that we have used for so long that we take them for granted.

In the example given by Casumano, a child began with “once upon a time” based on her love of fairy tales. Her 3^rd person narrative had a beginning, a middle, and an end, was written from left to right and top to bottom. Casumano adds that, “The story is about a flag flying, not about the shape of her letters, the spelling of the words, or the lack of punctuation, yet those last three elements may be the first thing an adult notices about the story” (11).

The latter two readings supported what I suspected from the reading The Donut House (discussed in a previous blog). While situating literacy in topics children find personally interesting and rewarding, there is still value in studying the basics. Phonics is an important part of learning to read! It is not the only part, of course, and the “just sound it out” strategy often falls flat because English is not the most phonetically-friendly language. The trick seems to be to balance basic skills such as phonics, phonemic awareness, and one-to-one voice/print match with analytic skills such as thinking strategically and self-monitoring. Please understand that when I say ‘basic’ I do not mean simplistic. These skills can be challenging for some students, but that should not condemn them! They are simply the building blocks, the foundation of reading, and should be made accessible to every student.

            One part of Rasinski’s article that I found particularly interesting was the usefulness of playing with sound from a young age. This can include nursery rhymes, chants, and songs, especially if they include playing with sounds (like Hey diddle diddle). One exercise I thought would be enjoyable (even for me, because I like word puzzles) is called “Hinky Pinky”.  A clue describes an two word object or idea that rhymes. Here are a few examples:

a bashful insect = shy fly


a bed on fire = hot cot


a better cafe = finer diner


a better knife = nicer slicer

etc.

Without sound and word play, it becomes very difficult for children to differentiate between individual sounds, syllables, and words. There is a child in a 6^th grade class I am working in who was having a great deal of trouble writing Haiku. The literacy coach at his school discovered that this was because he did not really understand what a syllable was! Sometimes certain skills fall through the cracks, especially when a child is below grade level and always working to catch up, and this deficiency is now being corrected. He has one Haiku completed and is working on three more. But how much easier would his education up to this point have been if he had understood this basic skill?
After much reading and reflecting over the past year as I journey toward my teaching certification, it seems to me that teaching is nothing so much as a balancing act: teaching convention and encouraging invention, complimenting organization with controlled chaos, filling the role of both social worker and professor, finding time for the emotive, artistic subjects as well as the standards, etc. It's like trying to walk a tight wire and somehow carry 20-some kids along with you.
On a completely different note, I had my first day doing field experience in a new school today and it was great! Such adorable little 1^st graders J I bonded with one girl over falling asleep during the Super Bowl and with another about my earrings. And just in general, they seemed happy to get to know me and I them. I’m looking forward to a wonderful semester with them and, of course, with their lovely teacher! After some further reflection - not on theory but on the actual experience of being in a classroom - teaching is not just a balancing act. It is also everyday interactions with young, energetic, creative minds. It is also fun.