Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives: How Students' Reading Achievement Has Been Held Back and What We Can Do About It

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Professor Timothy Shanahan. Professor Shanahan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He served as the Director of Reading for Chicago Public Schools, is the former president of the International Literacy Association, and served on the advisory board of the National Institute for Literacy under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In 2007, he was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame. And you probably know him as one of our profession's foremost experts and authorities on reading.

[00:46]

And he is the author of the new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives. How students' reading achievement has been held back and what we can do about it.

[00:55] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:57] SPEAKER_00:

Professor Shanahan, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[01:00] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you for having me, Justin. I'm pleased to be here.

[01:03] SPEAKER_00:

Let's get right into the title. I believe that comes from a quote about the impact of leveled reading on students. Tell us a little bit about that quote and about why you chose that for the title of your book.

[01:15] SPEAKER_01:

The quote is from a former student of mine, Alfred Tatum, and it's a bit of a paraphrase of it. So I changed it up just a little bit. But basically his point and a big point in the book is that teachers, educators have for a very long time been trying to teach kids at their level with the idea that that's going to improve their lot in life, they'll learn more and they're going to be much more successful and they'll be happy in school and all that. Unfortunately, the research doesn't support that. We've actually been holding kids back and preventing kids from getting to the levels of literacy that they could actually accomplish. And given that this is probably the most popular and widely used approach to teaching reading in the United States, that is significant.

[02:04]

So that's the whole point. If teaching leveled reading, this notion of teaching everybody at their level is leveling their lives in that not that they don't learn to read. Most kids in the United States learn to read. They're just not learning to read as well as they could. And that has incredible significance for their lives in terms of health and income and future education opportunities and so on and so forth.

[02:35] SPEAKER_00:

As a principal in the late 2000s in Seattle, where we were all in on balanced literacy and the readers and writers workshop units of study and leveled libraries and teaching students at their instructional level and having students read just right books from leveled book bins. I've watched. Thank you so much for having me. And now looking back, realize was holding kids back. So let's get into some of the levels a little bit. We have a couple of ideas about reading that we talk about in a common sense way that there is grade level, right?

[03:25]

My kid reads at an eighth grade level. There is the independent reading level. There is the instructional reading level. Talk to us about what the research says about those levels, like what's real and what is and is not a good idea to do with those levels.

[03:40] SPEAKER_01:

Well, why don't we start with the grade level notion and then we'll get into what we've been trying to do instead of that and why that's not such a wonderful idea. The idea of grade levels and having texts set up for each grade really goes back to about the 1840s. So it's not a new thing. But in the 1840s, of course, 1840s is when you first start getting graded schools in the United States. You start that notion that We're going to move kids up through this set of grades. They're going to get a more gradual education than in the past.

[04:13]

And we'll just match kids to these grades by their ages. And that's going to be a wonderful, welcoming thing for kids. And publishing companies up to that time, you know, usually they'd publish one or two or sometimes even three reading books per but they weren't necessarily sequential. It wasn't clear what the sequences were. Everybody was kind of doing whatever they wanted to. Schools were mixing and matching.

[04:39]

They'd use one company's first book and somebody else's third book and all that kind of stuff. Well, when grade levels come in, publishers go, this is great. Instead of selling one, two, or three books, now we can sell six or seven books. And they start matching books to grade levels. And I've gone back and done readabilities on those, you know, kind of informally. And I can tell you, generally, the lower books are easier than the harder, you know, the older books, you know, they really do have a sequence to them.

[05:12]

Unfortunately, nobody at that time wrote about, here's how we're going to do that, or, you know, There wasn't a preface in the books explaining that. But they did emphasize the notion that kids were going to gradually learn to read by taking on harder and harder text as time went on. And that notion has certainly been there for a long time, but it's always been pretty arbitrary. And one publisher might have harder books than another one and so on. In 2010, with the Common Core State Standards, probably the most disruptive thing they did or potentially disruptive thing they did, no reading standards up to that time had ever set text levels for each grade. In fact, they'd gone out of their way not to do it.

[06:01]

And the reason they didn't do it was because of the notion that there's a reading level that kids have that's different than grade level and that we have to respect that. And so we don't want teachers trying to teach kids to read their grade level books. Well, Common Core comes along and says, well, if you're in third grade, you've got to learn to do some of these skills and answer certain kinds of questions and so on. But you have to be able to do that with books that are in this range of difficulty. wow, you know, talk about something that should have been scary, but states didn't really promote it. Nobody really made much of a deal out of it.

[06:38]

Um, And so nothing really happened with it, except books did get harder. And now I think the critical part of this is to understand how Common Core set those levels. They did something that hadn't ever existed before. They looked at what level a high school kid would need to reach if they were, say, going to go to college and take on a freshman English textbook. How hard would you have to, you know, how hard a text would you have to be able to handle? What if you want to get into the military?

[07:15]

How hard should you be able to have a text? Should you be able to read and so on for the workplace? And then they backed it down. So, OK, this is what we have to graduate kids with. So when we say to a youngster that we're going to teach you with fourth grade material, if you're in fourth grade, that's terrific because that means you have a chance of getting to where we want you to be. When you leave high school, you're going to be able to participate fully in the society and get the benefits.

[07:42]

Of course, if you say to a youngster, well, you're in fourth grade, but I'm going to teach you at second grade level. that pretty much means you're never going to get to where we want you to get to. So that's the basics of what the states have put in place. I know many states have gotten away from the Common Core, but in fact, most of them have kept that notion that kids should be reading certain levels of text, certain ranges of text by certain grade levels. So that's the basics of how that's all set up and what grade level means these days. Okay, now we go to say, well, what about, you know, we hear that kids have a reading level or that they have an independent reading level and an instructional reading level.

[08:25]

What is all that about? That actually is a 20th century thing. In the early 20th century, they figured out that just because a youngster was in fifth grade didn't mean that he was equal to all the other fifth graders. Some kids were doing better. Some kids were doing worse. They got really interested in how can we differentiate teaching?

[08:48]

How can we make things go for particular kids the way that they should? And I said it wrong. I said that they looked for a way to adjust teaching. They really didn't. What they looked for was how do we adjust the curriculum? And so you and I are at different levels.

[09:04]

I want to teach you different stuff than we're going to teach me. You know, that was the basic notion of it. And as far as I can tell from looking at the historical record, no one ever thought of, yeah, but we want them all to learn the same thing. Maybe we need to adjust how we do it, but we have to, you know, everybody should have an equal chance to get there, right? Throughout the 20th century, there is almost a nationwide search for we need a method that will allow us to teach everybody at their level. And these aren't just coming out of the universities.

[09:41]

These are coming out of the school district, the Berkeley plan and the Joplin plan and the Albany plan. Everybody's got a scheme of how they're going to get kids to their levels. And the one that catches on, the one that people buy into, comes out of the 1940s. a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a fellow by the name of Emmett Betts, he publishes what becomes sort of the textbook of his generation. And he says that all readers have three levels. They have an independent level, which means that they could take on texts of that level on their own without any assistance.

[10:24]

They wouldn't need a teacher's guidance or anything like that. There's an instructional level. which Betts claimed if you taught kids at that level, they would make maximum gains. That would be the best. So that means you don't worry about what grade level the kid's in. You have to test them and match them to books based on the criteria that he sets.

[10:46]

And there's a frustration level. And the frustration level, he believed, was so hard that even with the supervision of a good teacher, The kids wouldn't learn very much, maybe wouldn't learn at all. And therefore, you have to avoid frustration at all costs. And of course, there are other costs to it. The kids will be tense. They're going to get crazy.

[11:07]

They're going to act out in the classroom and so on. So it's not just going to be a learning problem. It's going to be a classroom management problem. So the basic theory has been if you teach kids at their instructional level, you're going to get, or their instructional reading level or their reading level, all those terms mean the same thing, basically. If you do that, you're going to give kids the best chance they have of progress. And if you don't do that, if you try to teach kids at their independent level or their instructional level, at their frustration level, there won't be much to learn.

[11:41]

At the independent level and at the frustration level, they won't learn at all. And so we really have to Test kids, make sure we've got all those books in the bookshelves and all the books and all that stuff that are not put in the wrong levels. And you did it as a principal. I did it as a classroom teacher. I tested every one of my boys and girls. I knew everybody's levels.

[12:04]

I had different books go on for three, four different groups. And I was just as stunned as you were to look at the research on this and go, oh, what I thought was so terrific. And I thought people were telling me I was a good teacher. And I think I thought it was due to that kind of stuff. And now to look and go, yeah, those kids could have done better. You were kind of holding them back.

[12:31] SPEAKER_00:

I have to say, I didn't know where that idea came from, but it's definitely one that I've heard all along. And it's both intuitive and easily linked to other dominant ideas in our field, like Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which I was reading about recently that perhaps we've gotten wrong in the West. Carl Hendrick has a great article on Vygotsky. kind of understanding what Vygotsky really meant by what he wrote. But this idea that, yes, we have to teach kids what they are ready to learn so it doesn't either bore them and just repeat things they already know or go over their heads. There's this idea of schema and this idea of background knowledge and how we have to build on what students already know.

[13:12]

There's this idea of decoding and this idea of comprehension and it certainly seems so powerfully intuitive that we shouldn't give kids stuff to read that they can't read and we shouldn't give kids stuff to read that they don't need to read so since this idea sounds so right where does it go wrong why doesn't that work well it doesn't work for a number of reasons really um

[13:39] SPEAKER_01:

You know, again, the basic idea is you're absolutely right. It's appealing. Everybody wants to do best by not just the group, but by every individual in the group. And so the notion that we're going to meet each child's needs, we're going to go right to where they are. And we have over the years, whatever the popular psychological theory of the time was, somehow people kind of reinterpreted at the instructional level to fit with that. And so whether it was readiness or whether it was, you know, things like program learning where kids were supposed to learn little bits along the way or frustration theory.

[14:21]

And most recently, yeah, Vygotsky's notions, which I have a whole section in the book on showing, gee, he must be spinning in his grave over what Americans are doing to his theory because he didn't believe this idea that you had to match kids to anything. He believed that A little more complex idea that's actually probably more in line with what we should be doing, but we can get to that. Essentially, I'll say there are three basic reasons why it goes bad. One basic reason is to make it work, you have to test the kids and get them to the right level. And Betts came up, his criteria were kids would, you'd have them read passages aloud, graded passages, and you'd keep track of how many oral reading mistakes they made.

[15:13]

And you would calculate their accuracy. And what you were looking for was accuracy between 95 and 98%. If the kids missed more than that many words, frustration, don't do it. So 95 to 98%. And you wanted comprehension to be 75 to 89%. So you'd ask the kids questions about it.

[15:34]

And if they could, let's say you ask them 10 questions, they can answer eight or nine of the questions, you know, you got the right place for them. And there are variations on that. Faunus and Pennell have adjusted it and other people have adjusted it. But The adjustments are all pretty minor when you get down to it. They're all someplace in the 90% on accuracy and they all want really high comprehension. One of the problems that's been pointed out over the years is that you've got a fairly narrow range you're aiming for, and the tests you're gonna use have a larger standard error of measure than that span, which means if you test kids and say, oh yeah, this kid would be instructional level at say third grade, You can probably say with accuracy that kid's instructional level is someplace between the second and the fourth grade.

[16:29]

And with some tests, it might be first grade and fifth grade. I'm sure he's someplace in there. For most kids, the standard of error of measurement for them includes their grade level, right? So we're going to move a youngster out of his grade level simply because we have a test that says pretty unreliably, you know, he belongs over here. So the testing isn't anywhere near as accurate as it would need to be. Secondly, you need to place kids in techs that are just at their level.

[17:03]

Well, the best measures that we have of text difficulty, and they do a reasonably good job of putting text on a continuum. But when you get down to, so is this a third grade text or a second grade? What you're going to find is that a given text will have a large number of passages in it. And each of those passages will really have different reading levels. And usually what we're really asking kids to do is, oh, we're going to put you in this fourth grade book. And that means the passages range from first grade to about 12th grade.

[17:36]

And so a good deal of the time, you're not going to be working at your level because we don't know how to do that. We're not that accurate. Well, that's kind of a problem. So we're not, you know, and again, if you said, well, how would that play out? Well, you know, we can say with great uncertainty that this book is second, third, fourth grade level someplace in there. Which is also why the state standards set ranges that kids need to be able to read because they can't do it very exactly.

[18:05]

And the ranges are about what you'd consider maybe two grade levels and they overlap grade to grade. And so we're going to place kids at exactly their level. And then the third piece of it is you have to teach kids with books at their level, which typically in a classroom means we're going to have to divide the groups up like I did in my classroom. And you're going to have to have three, four or five different groups of kids going, which means that you're reading instruction time just shrinks dramatically. So this instruction had better be really powerful to overcome the big loss in amount of instruction that you're going to face. And the studies say that it usually doesn't work for the most part.

[18:50]

Small group instruction, when it's balanced off against the loss of time. doesn't really add anything. And even worse, it particularly penalizes certain kids. It penalizes African-American kids. It penalizes kids from single-parent families. It penalizes kids from low-income families.

[19:14]

That those kids, you know, Beth's idea was everybody would be at their level and they'd all grow like they should. Everything would be terrific. Everybody would be making progress. Well, actually, the kids in the lowest groups tend not to make very much progress. And so it's more like the high groups maybe go ahead, but the lower groups actually are held back by the notion. And so you get this differentiated outcome that isn't at all what's been promised or what anybody would actually want.

[19:44]

So it's got these three basic premises that you've got to do these three things and none of them work.

[19:51] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, the small group thing is really interesting because, you know, it is explicitly positioned as a way to differentiate, as an equitable way to meet everybody's needs. And yet at its core, there's a fraction problem, right? I'm taking a lesson and I'm chopping it into, let's say we have four or five groups. I'm chopping that instructional time into four or five. And then the student is hopefully getting something better in that now one fourth or one fifth of the time that they're really getting with the teacher. But is it four or five times more impactful?

[20:23]

Are we getting the same bang for the buck? And you had an op-ed recently with Mike Schmoker in which you argued that that's just not happening.

[20:30] SPEAKER_01:

That's exactly right. Certainly, there are things that you can do that can improve the odds. For example, let's say you have more adults available to do the teaching. Perhaps you can do smaller groups, but without losing all that time. That certainly is an improvement. Studies on small group instruction and reading tend to say The groups have to be really small, you know, like two, three, four kids.

[20:58]

In most classrooms, you know, if you've got 25 kids, you're probably going to end up with three, four, five groups, which means your groups are always going to be bigger than than what the research says is effective. It's a little different with a tier two pullout kind of a program. Unless you pull the kids out of their reading instruction class to get reading instruction, then now you're trading time again. So now it's this notion that this gives kids a big benefit. It can. There's absolutely no question that teaching kids in a very small group gives the teacher much more control You get higher attention and so on and so forth.

[21:39]

And yet, like you say, it's got to be four or five times as powerful. And it very rarely is.

[21:46] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned actually getting kids to pay attention because that was one of the number one things that teachers mentioned on social media when I talked about your article with Mike Schmoker. The idea that in a small group, at least I know everybody is with me. Everybody's paying attention. And you're saying, you know, even though that's true, kids do pay much closer attention in a small group and you've got them right there. Often they're only inches away from you at a kidney table or similar.

[22:09]

But it's not four to five times better. It doesn't make up for it. Is that right?

[22:13] SPEAKER_01:

That's exactly right. And in fact, you know, I think if we would spend as much time with teachers instead of trying to pressure them into doing a lot of small group stuff, if we would spend the time trying to provide them the training of how can you increase attention in a whole group? How can you increase the amount of turn taking in a whole group and so on and so forth? You know, there are methods that allow you to to not entirely overcome those problems, but certainly to reduce the difficulties that a whole class instruction can. Of course, you also with small groups, you have that constant problem of what happens away from the group that the teacher is working with. And what research says there is if the kids are disturbing the higher groups, teachers really step on that problem.

[23:05]

But if they're disturbing the lower groups, it's not really as much of a problem. They don't worry about that. They allow it because, well, the smarter kids, those better readers, you know, if they interrupt, it must be important. There are management problems on both sides of it. I think for most teachers, it's probably easier to manage the whole class and to keep attention during that than it is to do that alone. when you have, you know, 20 other kids running around the classroom.

[23:35] SPEAKER_00:

I'm glad you mentioned that there are a lot of ways to approach that to, you know, to make that whole group instruction more engaging, more turn taking, as you said, because I think a lot of people think, well, if I'm not doing a small group, then I'm doing, you know, Charlie Brown adult want want lecture the entire time. And I can't lecture first graders for 50 minutes. So I might as well break the class into small groups. But there's a lot that can be done to make better use of that time.

[23:59] SPEAKER_01:

You're mentioning first grade is really important. You know, I'm arguing that we should be teaching most kids, maybe almost everybody with grade level materials, not with supposed reading level materials. And I do that on the basis of research. And I want to be very clear. The research on this goes from second grade through high school. There aren't any studies with kindergarten and first grade kids.

[24:23]

And there are good reasons to believe that it's important to keep text relatively simple with beginning readers so that they can learn to decode. That, as my first graders used to tell me, what makes reading hard is the words. So, you know, you want those beginning books to be decodable. You want a lot of word repetition, that kind of thing. Making those beginning texts more complex means you repeat spelling patterns less often. You repeat words less often.

[24:58]

You're instead of really making sure that the things that have to happen are happening, you reduce the chances of that. That's not a good idea. So what we're really talking about here is from the time kids can, let's say, decode as well as an end of year average first grader. That doesn't mean they have all their decoding skills. It means that they they have the basic idea of it. They know some of the patterns and so on and so forth.

[25:27]

The research says at that point, teaching kids with grade level materials is actually more effective. And so it's like we took something that maybe makes great sense when kids start out. And we've generalized it across the next 11 or 12 grades. So when I'm saying that we need to have everybody at their grade level working with their grade level texts, I'm really talking grades two through 12.

[25:53] SPEAKER_00:

That brings me to what I think of as kind of the Bart Simpson problem. I haven't watched The Simpsons in many years, but there was an old episode where The Simpsons moved to a new town and Bart is placed in a remedial reading group. And the teacher points at the board and it has the letter A or something, you know, like a single letter on it and says, this is what we're focusing on this week. And Bart says, wait, we're behind the other kids. So we're going to catch up to them by going slower. I think that's so much of how we've approached this, that if we have kids who are say in third grade, but not reading at a third grade level, we approach them not with the grade level material, but with material that is at their level and, I mean, is BART right?

[26:37]

Is that basically what happens, that, you know, they end up going lower?

[26:41] SPEAKER_01:

There was a study done last year, and it's only a correlational study. You know, you can put some weight on it, but be careful. The schools that serve, their average is below grade level. So, you know, these are challenged schools. And they've looked at 28,000 schools in the United States that have that kind of a student makeup. And then they look to see, you know, how many of those schools are actually catching kids up, you know, just trying to solve the problem you were just describing.

[27:10]

And out of those 28,000 schools, it's about 1,300. It's about 5% that actually manage to improve the kids' performance each year or catch them up. Fairly tiny percentage. The only thing that they could find academically that made these schools differ from the others was they don't try to teach their kids at their levels in English and in math. They don't do that. You know, you come into fourth grade, the teacher doesn't go, time to put you back in the second grade curriculum.

[27:44]

She teaches them with the fourth grade curriculum. And guess what? More kids are moving up than in the past. The research studies that I put more weight in are these experimental studies where you take kids for a school year and you either teach them at their instructional level or you teach them with frustration level materials. You teach them with art or text. You teach them with grade level text in most cases.

[28:09]

And what those studies again and again find is that the kids either, that there's no difference and therefore you're holding these kids back and getting no benefit. Or in a number of the studies, actually the kids who are placed in frustration level make bigger gains than the other kids. And it's not a little bit, it's some of these gains are sizable, like three quarters of a school year. It Everybody's learning. But boy, this group really jumps forward. And so the fact is appealing is the idea is of teaching everybody at their level.

[28:43]

It doesn't actually give kids the benefit. And that's not just true of regular classroom kids. That's even true of kids who have IEPs, who are learning disabled, who, you know, we have a lot of concerns for. they're not getting any big benefits. So I talk to those kids and their attitude is, well, then teachers shouldn't do that. You know, why do we have to be in the dumb books?

[29:06]

You know, you're cutting them off from their friends. You're cutting them off from rich content, rich language and so on. It just doesn't make a lot of sense that we do it given the research, which is why I wrote the book, trying to, hey guys, you know, we're not doing this quite right. And I think that the problem isn't that ideology that we want to meet everybody's needs. I think our notion of doing that by, I'm going to teach you different things, is where the problem is. What we should be doing is saying, okay, we have to teach everybody the fourth grade book.

[29:40]

How can I adjust my instruction to meet kids' needs? I'm going to have some kids in here who can already read the fourth grade book, or they're going to read it easily. I'm not going to worry about them right now, but we can... do other things with them if we want to, but taking them through this won't hurt them.

[29:57]

It just won't necessarily propel them forward. But these other kids, how do we adjust our teaching to make sure that they succeed? And that's a hugely important question and one that If you look at any books on the teaching of reading until now, they don't tell teachers anything about, well, here's what you do. And the reason they don't tell is because we've always treated it like it's malpractice to teach kids with frustration level texts. And so if you do that, you're not a good teacher and we're not going to give you any ideas on how do you make that work. And so the teachers are kind of lost.

[30:37]

I mean, and that's not just true of reading teachers. That's true of the science teacher and the social studies teacher. Anyone who's got textbook-centered instruction, I've got kids in here who don't know what to do with this text. They can't read it very well. So we just tell them what it says or we read it to them. We have all these workarounds.

[30:57]

But never, well, how would you actually get the kids to read that successfully and gain from it? And so that's really where we should be. We should be looking for those and training teachers in what we do know about that. And so that's really what I'm hoping will be one of the outcomes of this book, that instead of everybody just saying, oh, yeah, challenge is good. wait, how do you make challenge work? What do you have to do in a classroom when you've got 25 kids sitting there and they're at four or five different levels?

[31:30]

And well, there are things we can do, but it's not, let's put everybody in different curricula and hope that when they leave school, they won't mind not being as skilled as some of their classmates.

[31:42] SPEAKER_00:

That brings us to the issue of scaffolding as one of central concern for teachers who want to teach grade level material, right? They don't want to reduce the, you know, the standards, the content to a lower grade level. They want to actually teach students what they're supposed to learn in their particular class. And yet reading skills are not there. Maybe the vocabulary is not there. So sitting a student down on their own with the text is not going to result in, you know, a high level of comprehension.

[32:08]

And I know we can't get into every strategy for scaffolding, but what does some of the research say about what works in terms of scaffolding grade level text when it's going to be at a frustration level for the individual?

[32:19] SPEAKER_01:

Sure. Well, as you point out, there are a lot of different things that can actually be tripping kids up. Even if they have basic decoding skills, that doesn't mean they can necessarily read this text fluently. And therefore, they're going to make a lot of word reading mistakes. And then, you know, where are we going to be? There are vocabulary problems, but also sentence comprehension problems.

[32:42]

How do you deal with the grammar? As texts get more complicated, so does the grammar. And on and on. I've got a list of maybe 15 or 20 different things that might be making a text difficult for somebody. And I'm not claiming that's the whole list. It's just there are a lot of different things that can trip you up as a reader.

[33:02]

So let's take one or two of these and just to give people examples of the kinds of things that are possible. There are a number of studies where they intentionally put kids in text that they know they cannot read at that supposed instructional level. And what they've done is some really crazy things like having the kid read the text twice. Because on the second reading, the reading improves without instruction. The reading improves dramatically. Can you imagine having kids read a text more than once?

[33:37]

That's, oh, talk about child abuse. Well, that isn't child abuse. That's a good thing to do. Yeah, the studies, it's very interesting. You might have a youngster, let's say they, You have them sit down and read a part of this text to see if they can handle it. And the kids make 20 mistakes in it, in 100 words.

[33:56]

Wow, it's 80%. Clearly frustration level. Clearly a level that you wouldn't want to teach kids with, right? I mean, that's the claim. OK, what if without any teaching at all, without any teacher guidance, you just say, read that again? And the youngster goes through it a second time.

[34:15]

The number of errors usually falls by about 50 percent, which, hey, wait a minute. You're putting that kid in the range of what people are saying is their instructional level. You're saying having them read it twice is better than holding the kids back an entire year? you're crazy. Why would you do that to kids? And so I would argue that one way to use your intervention teachers or parent volunteers or every school has different stuff.

[34:42]

So, you know, it's always hard to, you know, gee, next week we're going to be reading this story or this chapter in science or whatever. What if you take those nine kids in your class who are going to be disfluent with it and you have somebody take them through it once. Let's not worry about comprehension. We're not going to get into all kinds of discussions and writing. But we're just simply going to make sure that when they come into class on Monday, They're closer to the level of everybody else. They're more likely to be able to participate, which kids love.

[35:15]

Gee, in the past, I couldn't really do this in the classroom. And so that would be an example of the kind of thing that a teacher can do. And it could be, well, you know, we work on fluency. What I'm going to have these kids doing is working on fluency for the next text so that when we all read that together, they can take on the comprehension and then we can worry about the vocabulary and the sentence complexity and the cohesion and the text structure and all the stuff that gets in here. So that would be one example of what I'm talking about. Another example, you mentioned vocabulary, which is clearly a meaning issue.

[35:52]

You know, we're not just talking about, oh, I want the kid to be able to read that word. I want them to know what it means so they can make sense of the text. Most reading programs, most actually at most any kind of program that has a textbook will always give you a list of words to pre-teach, to introduce to the kids before they read. I got to say, I don't always agree with what the publishers select or what the teachers select. They tend to select what they think is the most important words. But quite often those words are actually defined by the author.

[36:25]

They're in the text. It'll tell you what the word means. And I don't see any point to telling kids that stuff ahead of time. Those become good comprehension questions. I want to see if the kids understood those words, could read those definitions. But frankly, we don't let kids read those definitions.

[36:43]

We tell them ahead of time. I was just looking at a study done about a year or two ago with college students, so not kids. And it was something like 92% of college students couldn't recognize a scientific definition. they just lost because they never get to do that in school. We don't allow it. We're going to tell you what photosynthesis is.

[37:05]

Now, you can read the definition, but you're just going to tell me back what I told you. You're not going to use the text. So I don't think we should be pre-teaching words that are already defined by the author. I think we should be making sure kids are getting those definitions. That's different. But what we should be doing is I think we should be telling kids words that we could block their comprehension, but that you couldn't get from the text.

[37:31]

You couldn't get from the context. And I think we should be doing a much better job of quizzing kids on words that the author used that the author didn't define, but that you should have been able to get the meaning from the context. And if kids aren't getting that, I want them taken back into the text. And initially the teacher should show them how to do that. And over time, of course, the teacher should be guiding kids to do it themselves and over time, holding them accountable for doing that. And so we can do things like that with sentences and other aspects of the text that actually allow kids to figure the text out.

[38:14]

It's hard. It's not, oh my gosh, you know, everything's easy. But the fact is the kids walk away more skilled, They're dealing with harder, richer language, harder, richer content. They're not being insulted by being put a year, two years, three years below their grade level and separated usually from the rest of the kids, segregated from them. So it's really a much better way to go.

[38:42] SPEAKER_00:

You say in the introduction of the book that we've essentially been protecting children from complex text. We've seen that grade-level material as something that we need to protect kids from. And in the book, you're making the case that we need to do the opposite, to connect them with it rather than protect them from it.

[39:01] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes the best solution isn't to go around something, it's to go through it. And in this case, I think by avoiding... the demands of those texts, we make sure that there's very little for kids to read.

[39:16]

I mean, think about it. If the youngster can read 97% of the words in this text, you know, he's going to miss 3%. And his comprehension without teaching, without any intervention, would be 75% to 89%. There's almost nothing there to learn. There's almost nothing to get. And so even if kids are picking up that last few percent of words and are, gee, there was one question I couldn't answer there and now I can answer it.

[39:46]

The fact is they make so little gains with this that you almost guarantee that they can never get where you want them to get to. There was a wonderful study. I think I'm the only one who's ever cited it. It was a patient done a very long time ago. They went in and not an experiment. Again, a correlational kind of study.

[40:05]

The researcher goes in and he tests the boys and girls to find out what their reading levels are. He doesn't tell the teacher. Teachers get to put the kids at whatever books they normally put them in. And so some of the kids are going to be placed at instructional level. Some of the kids are going to be placed at frustration level. But he monitors this across the school year and then looks to see how much reading gain the kids made.

[40:28]

So which kids make the biggest gains? Well, according to the theory, it should be those kids who are in those relatively easy texts with high comprehension, with a lot of accuracy. What he found is the kids who made the biggest learning gains, these were second graders, the kids who made the biggest learning gains had actually been like down in the low 80% on the accuracy. And their comprehension starting out was like 20, 30%. But those kids made the biggest reading gains over the year. They learned more than their classmates who were just at the right level.

[41:04]

So what we've done is we've minimized the opportunity to learn. And usually the minimization is at its greatest with the lowest performing kids. So we really do guarantee that if they're low now, we're going to make sure they're low at the end of the year.

[41:23] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives, How Students' Reading Achievement Has Been Held Back and What We Can Do About It. Professor Shanahan, if you could look a couple of years into the future and, you know, assuming that your work in this book has the impact that you want it to have on the profession, how do things look different five years down the road?

[41:45] SPEAKER_01:

Oh, five years down the road, I think you would see much less small group instruction in schools, especially for reading comprehension. That would be something that would be good. I think you might see teachers not trying to shift most of their kids out of grade level. A reading group would look different. There'd be more kids in it. They'd be reading a text that, man, this was hard.

[42:11]

We had to read it twice. Or the teacher had to show us how to answer certain questions. Or, wow, there was this sentence in it that none of us could make sense of, but I think I know how to do that now. It would be much more about how do you figure out a text? How do you break it down? How do you take on something that you can't do well now and make yourself successful with that there'd be a lot more of that kind of teaching going on which i think is a much better mindset for kids to have not oh gosh if there's a problem we need to avoid it but if there's something difficult we need to learn how to surmount it we need to know how to beat it and i think we should have much more of that kind of teaching You know, I think instructional look less like a performance when it comes to reading and more like a real workshop where you're really trying to figure things out and solve problems.

[43:03] SPEAKER_00:

Mr. Shanahan, if people want to follow your writing in real time, I know you have a blog where you regularly share insights like this. Can you tell us where to find that online? Sure.

[43:13] SPEAKER_01:

I have a blog and I have a podcast. If you go to shanahanonliteracy.com, I do my best to make sure that anything I put there is really connected to the research. And I try to make sure that folks know what that connection is. On the occasion when I get into opinion. I point that out to make sure that people see that there's a difference between my opinions and what we really know.

[43:35]

There's nothing commercial there. There's no bad language. There's no politics, thank goodness. So it's actually a pretty good professional source that a lot of people use. Shanahanonliteracy.com.

[43:48] SPEAKER_00:

Tim, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. Been a pleasure. This was fun.

[43:51] SPEAKER_01:

I appreciate it.

[43:53] Announcer:

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