I don’t have first-hand familiarity with all of them, but the ones I am familiar with are constantly asking kids to do things like make inferences or compare-and-contrast-even if those activities aren’t necessarily identified as “strategy instruction.”įor example, in the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum-the one I’m most familiar with because it was being used in a second-grade classroom I followed through a school year-children were asked to predict who would win the Civil War, after they had studied that topic for a while. That’s the approach taken by the several knowledge-building literacy curricula that have been developed in recent years. That means that instead of choosing books or texts to teach a skill-of-the week-maybe “comparing and contrasting” or “determining author’s purpose”-teachers bring in whatever skills or strategies would help students think about a particular topic or text. And what we are arguing for is an approach to literacy that uses skills and strategies in the service of building and deepening students’ knowledge, rather than teaching them as ends in themselves. This approach to literacy is what I and other advocates of knowledge-building have been arguing against. This regime has left many students-and especially those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum- woefully unprepared to meet the expectations of the high school or even middle school curriculum. That has meant reducing instructional time for an already marginalized subject like social studies, which is more likely to build the knowledge that enables reading comprehension. But instead, in an effort to raise scores, many schools have spent more time on comprehension skill-and-strategy practice. You might think that would lead schools to conclude the approach isn’t working. During that time, reading test scores have been stagnant or declining and test-score gaps between low- and high-achievers have been growing ever larger. And schools have been relying on this approach for decades. Nevertheless, this kind of instruction goes on year after year, repeatedly covering the same round of skills and strategies. Not to mention that in a very simple text, there may not be much content to, say, “make inferences” about.Īnd when students reach higher grade levels, the texts assume much more complex knowledge and vocabulary, Even if students have practiced a strategy like “making inferences” for years, it won’t help them if they haven’t been able to acquire enough of the knowledge assumed by the text to understand it at least at a superficial level. Even if the texts are simple, students may not have the requisite background knowledge to use the strategies they’re supposedly practicing. This approach ignores the reciprocal relationship between knowledge and strategies. In American elementary schools, the average amount of time spent on reading every day is two hours, and much of that time is spent practicing comprehension skills. Then students practice the skill, using texts on random topics that have been determined to be at their individual reading levels, which could be years below their grade level. The standard approach to comprehension instruction has been to focus on a “skill of the week,” which the teacher first briefly models for children, using a text chosen not for its topic but for how well it lends itself to demonstrating the skill. The problem is that American schools have gone way overboard on teaching them-plus a number of comprehension “skills” that Shanahan himself has said there’s little or no evidence for, like “finding the main idea.” Strategy Instruction Has Gone Off the Rails As I’ve argued before, it's not that there’s anything inherently wrong with teaching strategies.
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