Balancing
Authenticity and Strategy Awareness P. David Pearson Michigan State University Linda Fielding University of Iowa It is a confusing and frustrating world out there in the curricular trenches. It must be difficult to try to read the current debate about how to teach reading. If it is any consolation, it is jut as difficult from where I stand. Part of the confusion stems from the hostility, the acrimony, that surrounds the debate. The adversaries in the debate, the champions of whole language and the defenders of direct instruction, have gathered their forces and readied themselves for the contest over curriculum control. What I find interesting is how each side feels obligated to build its case on the ashes and coffins of its adversary. Whole language folks never compare whole language to really positive and engaging examples of direct instruction. Instead they portray skill teaching as some god-awful, joyless, regimented skill and drill on their way to arguing for how wonderful, child-centered, supportive, and meaningful whole language is. But just as surely the defenders of the honor of phonics and direct instruction do not portray responsible versions of whole language in pressing their own case. Instead, they paint a picture of whole language as loosey goosey, chaotic, anything goes, let’s just throw good books at them and pray approach. Educational hardball, methinks. 1 This is adapted from an article by Fielding & Pearson, published in 1994: Fielding, L.G., & Pearson, P.D. (1994). Synthesis of Research: Reading Comprehension: What Works. Educational Leadership; 51(5), 62-67. Let’s examine what has happened to us in the last decade, as whole language and literature-based reading have gained ascendency. Let me begin by saying, as clearly as I can, that the ascendency has, for the most part, been a positive force for improing the teaching and learning of reading. But there have been some costs and casualties, which I will get to in a moment. But let’s begin by looking at what has happened in this acendency. In reading, the enabling features of reading instruction—phonics skills, word analysis strategies, vocabulary knowledge, and explicit comprehension strategies—have been relegated to a cameo role while reader response to literature has won the lead. This has led to a curricular approach in which we rely on highly idiosyncratic personal responses to the reading of high quality literary texts as the primary vehicle for developing reading skill (even if, as has been observed in some well-meaning literature-based programs, the teacher has to read TO students). The presumption seems to be that through meaningful encounters with the great ideas of good literature, most, if not all, of those skills that we used to regard as prerequisite to independence in reading will emerge and develop quite naturally, without arduous effort on the part of either teachers or students. In the process of ascendancy, the movement has celebrated and privileged several important principles of literacy learning: authenticity of text and task, curricular integration, student and teacher empowerment, the primacy of constructing meaning, and a recontextualization of learning within a community context. In my view, these have all been positive developments—ones that all members of the profession, quite irrespective of their philosophical dispositions, can celebrate. Still, the controversy between whole language and the conventional wisdom has been likened to a war—a holy war. And, as in all wars, holy and otherwise, there have been some casualties. Let me talk about a few that are relevant to our comprehension agenda for the day. Over the past decade, we have yanked skills off from the center of our instructional stage and sent them to the wings. Even the basals of the first half of this decade put them in the appendix. This has meant that we have accepted the premise that skills are better caught in the act of reading and writing genuine texts for authentic purposes than taught directly and explicitly by teachers. The argument is the same for phonics, grammar, text conventions, and structural elements. These entities may be worthy of learning, but they are unworthy of teaching. We are presented with a serious conundrum as a profession. Our earlier skill instruction, with decontextualized lessons and practice on "textoids" in workbook pages, surely deserved the disdain accorded to it. But I am not convinced that a complete retreat from any and all skill instruction is the answer. The data presented by several researchers who study early reading (see Hiebert & Taylor, 1994), by those who worry about the development of poor children (Slavin, 19xx), and those who attend to the needs of children who have fallen through the cracks of our educational system, suggests that many kids do not catch on by sheer immersion in print or by listening to others read aloud. To the contrary, it seems to require careful planning and hard work by dedicated teachers who are willing to balance systematic skill instruction with authentic texts and activities. This loss has been particularly difficult for those of us who spent the better part of the early 1980s convincing those who control the tools of instruction that the thoughtful teaching of flexible strategies for making and monitoring meaning ought to replace the direct teaching of skills that were taught as though they were only every to be applied to workbook pages and end of unit test items (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991; Pressley et all, 1992). But the strategy lessons that filled our basals in the middle to late 1980s—direct advice from teachers about how to summarize what one has read, how to use text structure to infer relations among ideas, how find distinguish fact from opinion, how to determine the central thread of a story, how to use context to infer word meanings, and how to make and evaluate the accuracy of predictions—were virtually non-existent in the basals of the early 1990s. Again, there is no bias in whole language or literature-based reading against the learning and use of a whole range of cognitive strategies. There is, as with phonics and grammar, a serious question about whether direct, explicit instruction in how to use them will really help. Again, the advice is to let them emerge from attempts to solve real reading problems and puzzles, the kind students meet in genuine encounters with authentic text. There is reason for disdain, even caricature, of what we did in the 80s. But as I suggested earlier, the answer may be revision rather than rejection of these strategies, which I, for one, think are too important to be left to the vagaries of sheer exposure. A corallary casualty of these holy wars is the emphasis on structure that we have only just gained by the mid 1980s. In fact, it stemmed from roughly the same time frame and from roughly the same source (cognitive psychology) from which we found strategy instruction. And this has not just been a rejection of the tradition of formal grammars identified with traditional English classes. The rejection of structure extends to just about any systematic analysis of the infrastructure of just about any structural account of just about any linguistic phenomenon. So story grammars, rhetorical structures, and intersentential relations are as suspect as formal grammar or rules for usage. As with skills and strategies, reformers do not claim that students should not learn these structural tools; they simply claim that, like skills, they are best inferred from reading and writing authentic texts in the process of making meaning. So, the advocates are comfortable in adopting Frank Smith's (1983) admonition to encourage kids to read like a writer (meaning to read the text with a kind of critical eye toward understanding the tools and tricks of the trade that the author uses to make her points and achieve her effects on readers), but they would likely reject a systematic set of lessons designed to teach and assess children's control of story grammar elements (such as plot, characterization, style, mood, or theme) or some system for dealing with basic patterns of expository text. As with skills and strategies, many of us see an compromise alternative to both the formulaic approach (see McIntyre & Pressley, 1997; Calfee, 199x) of the early 1980s and the "discovery" approach of the new reforms— dealing with these structural elements as they emanate from stories that a group is currently reading can provide some guidance and useful tools for students and teachers. The final casualty is reading in the content areas. Content area texts—expository texts in general, but especially textbook-like entries—are not privileged in our new world of literature-based reading. This is not an implicit criticism of the literature-based reading movement, rather it is a comment the reallocation of curricular time and energy that occurs when a movement gains momentum. There is a certain irony inthis development. When I ask teachers about their most serious concerns in literacy instruction, they invariably say—and this is especially true if they teach fourth grade or higher—"Well if you think my kids have trouble with stories, you should come and see what we do with our social studies and science class. That’s where the real fun begins." Our colleagues in the middle school and high school level have worked diligently over the last three decades to convince their colleagues that content area reading instruction, study skills, and attention to text structure is important. It appears to have been destroyed with one stroke of the literary pen. The cost here has been very dear. To enter middle school and high school classrooms in order to examine the role of expository text, is to conclude that it has none. Occasionally teachers assign expository texts for homework, but when students come to class the next day, clearly having avoided the assignment, teachers provide them with an oral version of what they would have gotten out of the text if they had bothered to read it. Most high school teachers have quite literally given up on the textbook for the communication of any important content. While understandable, this approach is, of course, ultimately counterproductive. There comes a time in the lives of students—either when they go to college or it enter the world of work—when others expect them to read and understand informational texts, on their own and in printed form rather than through oral or video transformation. Then there is the question of what sort of curriculum—skills-based versus whole language—will best suit the needs of linguistic and ethnic minorities. On the one hand, there is substantial evidence in our schools that low income and minority students are far more likely to be exposed to a skills-based curriculum than are wealthier and majority students, who are more likely to receive process oriented curricula (Garc’a & Pearson, 1994; Herman & Nolte, n.d.). On the other hand, scholars who have examined curricular issues from a minority perspective (e.g., Delpit, 1988; Delpit, 1991; Reyes, 1992) have noted that majority educators sometimes assume that child-centered, process oriented curricular practices are just what minority students need, when, in fact, they may, in their quest for equity, inadvertently and unintentionally deny minority students access to the power code used in our schools and society. The question that educators must answer is how we can best meet the needs of particular groups of students, as well as their parents. And the very act of asking that question presupposes that we have some idea of what their needs are. That, in turn, assumes the existence of an open system of communication, and that is an assumption that many educators, especially minority educators, would question (e.g., Delpit, 1988). My own suspicion is that when we answer this question, we will end up saying that ethnic and linguistic minorities benefit from a curriculum in which students gain access both to the power code, which may require attention to structure and conventions, and to the “good stuff,” which will surely require attention to the more elusive questions of literature, literary experience, and language use in our society. Having characterized where we are as a field, let me now turn to a plan for reestablishing some balance in our instructional programs for ensuring that students have the tools they need to understand, appreciate, and analyze the texts they encounter in our classrooms. To get ready for this presentation, I began by examining the tradition of comprehension instruction research that has accumulated since the early 1980s (Pearson & Fielding, 1991). To that, I added a healthy dose of knowledge about generic practices that seem to have salutary effects on students comprehension. I then tried to filter those findings through the lens of our current debates about reading instruction, and tried to transform the most consistent findings about effective teaching practices into a set of guidelines that we could use to guide instruction in our classrooms. This process of revisiting and transformation yielded four dimensions, opportunities really, that we believe facilitate comprehension. A successful program of comprehension instruction must include:
A program that provides these opportunities will set the stage for students to be interested in and to succeed at reading; that interest and success will build the intrinsic motivation that all students need to sustain continual learning. Ample Time for Text Reading One of the most surprising, if not shocking, findings of classroom research of the 1970s and 80s was the small amount of time that children in traditional classrooms spent actually reading texts—only seven or eight minutes a day in the primary grades, perhaps 15 minutes per day in the intermediate grades (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985). Children typically spent more time working on reading skills via workbook-type assignments than they spent putting these skills to work reading connected texts, and the skill time/reading time ratio varied inversely with achievement: it was typically the highest for children of the lowest reading ability (Allington, 1983b). Allocating ample time for actual text reading and making sure that students are actually engaged in text reading during that time are among the most important tasks of teachers who wish to help students learn to comprehend. Why is Time for Text Reading Important? The reasons for the centrality of reading for comprehension growth may not be transparent. The first is sheer opportunity to orchestrate all of the skills and strategies that are important to proficient reading--including comprehension. Just as in sports, music, and other areas, practice makes perfect in reading, too. Second, reading results in the acquisition of new knowledge which, in turn, fuels the comprehension process. One of the most consistent findings of research of the late 1970s and early 1980s--that there is a strong relationship between prior knowledge and reading comprehension. Comprehension, in fact, has been called "[the] interaction of new information with old knowledge" (Anderson & Pearson, 1984, p. 255). The relationship between prior knowledge and comprehension ability is reciprocal—the more one knows, the more one comprehends; and the more one comprehends, the more one learns new knowledge to enable comprehension of an even greater and broader array of topics and texts. The first part of this reciprocal relationship was the focus of most of the research of the last fifteen years --developing methods for activating and adding to readers' knowledge base before they read a text as a way of helping them understand and remember text information better (e.g., Beck, Omanson, & McKeown, 1982; Hansen, 1981; Hansen & Pearson, 1983). More recently, though, researchers have emphasized the second part of the reciprocal relationship, the role that actual text reading plays in building knowledge. For example, increases in vocabulary and concept knowledge from reading silently (Nagy, Anderson, & Herman, 1987; Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985; Stallman, 1991) and from being read to (Elley, 1989) have been documented; and the positive statistical relationship found between amount of time spent reading and reading comprehension (Anderson, Wilson, & Fielding, 1988) may be largely attributable to the knowledge base that grows through text reading. Recent research has debunked the typical misconception that only already-able readers can benefit from time spent in actual text reading while less able readers should spend their time on isolated skills instruction and workbook practice (Anderson et al., 1988; Leinhardt, Zigmond, & Cooley, 1981). In fact, a newer and more compelling argument is that the differing amounts of time teachers give students to read texts is what accounts for the widening gaps between more able and less able readers throughout the school grades (Allington, 1983b; Stanovich, 1986). How much of the classroom reading period should be devoted to actual text reading? There is at present no research-based answer to this question, but we feel comfortable recommending that of the total block of time set aside for reading, students should be given more time to read than the combined total time allocated for learning about reading and talking or writing about what has been read. Getting the Most out of Time for Text Reading The equivocal results of sustained silent reading programs throughout the years (e.g., Manning & Manning, 1984) suggest, though, that simply allocating time for book reading is not enough. There are things teachers can do to increase the likelihood that more time for contextual reading will translate into improved comprehension skills. Choice. First, teachers can give children the chance to select much of their own reading material and can guide them in making selections. Although we know of no research that directly links choice to reading comprehension growth, we speculate that choice is related to interest and motivation, both of which are related directly to learning (Anderson, Shirey, Wilson, & Fielding, 1987; Alderman, 1990). Optimal difficulty.. Second, teachers can monitor students' book selections and their own selections for students to ensure that all students spend most of their time reading books that are appropriate in difficulty—not so hard that most of a student's cognitive resources are occupied with just figuring out how to pronounce the words and not so easy that nothing new is likely to be learned. This is especially important for less able readers, who in some classrooms may spend all or most of the school day with materials that are too difficult for them to read. Multiple readings. Third, teachers can honor and encourage rereading of texts because research suggests that rereading leads to greater fluency and that fluency is associated with comprehension (Allington, 1983a). Although most research about repeated reading of passages has focused on improvements in reading speed, accuracy, phrasing and intonation, a growing number of studies have documented improved comprehension as well through direct and indirect measures (e.g., Dowhower, 1987; Herman, 1985, Koskinen & Blum, 1984). Negotiating meaning socially. Fourth, we believe that teachers could loosen tight rules for what counts as acceptable behavior during "silent" reading time by allowing at least part of the time to be used for reading in pairs, including pairs of different abilities and ages (Koskinen & Blum, 1986; Labbo & Teale, 1990). We are taken with the view that reading comprehension is a social as well as a cognitive process; hence the viability of opportunities to socially negotiate meaning. Finally, for the same reason, reading should be accompanied by regular opportunities for readers to discuss this reading with the teacher and with each other. Conversation not only raises the status of independent silent reading from a time filler to an important part of the reading program, it also gives students another opportunity to practice and build comprehension skills collaboratively, a topic to which we return below. Atwell (1987) and Hansen (1987), who offer descriptions of classroom reading programs that consist largely of students reading from self-selected materials, further argue that these conversations help to build the all-important community of readers that is the essence of literature-based programs. Teacher-Directed Instruction in Comprehension Strategies Small amounts of time for actual text reading was not the only surprise of the 1980s; comprehension instruction was equally as rare in traditional reading classrooms. It has been almost 20 years since Durkin (1978-1979) concluded from extensive observations in intermediate-grade classrooms that teachers were spending very little time on actual comprehension instruction. Although they gave many workbook assignments, some of which focused on comprehension, and although they asked many questions about text content, Durkin judged that the assignments and questions mostly tested students' understanding instead of teaching them how to comprehend. In response to Durkin's findings, a large body of research in the 1980s was devoted to discovering how to teach comprehension strategies directly. In the typical comprehension strategy instruction study, readers were directly taught how to perform a strategy that skilled readers seem to use when they read, and their abilities both to use the strategy and to understand a piece of text were measured both before and after the instruction or were compared to the performance of similar readers who were not taught the strategy directly. Explicit instruction is the name given to one widely-researched model for teaching readers comprehension strategies; it involves teacher modeling and explanation of a strategy, guided practice in which teachers gradually give students more responsibility for task completion, independent practice accompanied by feedback, and application of the strategy in real reading situations (Pearson & Dole, 1987). In one of the biggest success stories of the time period, this research showed over and over again that comprehension can in fact be taught. Hansen (1981; Hansen & Pearson, 1983), for example, taught children a strategy for making inferences that involved using background knowledge about key points in the text to predict text events; Ogle (1986) taught students to think about what they already knew about a topic and what they wanted to learn about it as a way to guide their reading of expository material. Palincsar and Brown (1984) combined four comprehension activities typically used by skilled readers--summarizing, asking an important question about what was read, predicting upcoming information, and attempting to clarify confusions--into a strategy called reciprocal teaching that students could practice with each other as they took turns leading text discussions centered around performance of these activities. Strategies that focus on getting the main idea (Baumann, 1984), identifying the sources of information needed to answer a question (Raphael & McKinney, 1983; Raphael & Pearson, 1985), and using the typical structure of stories (e.g., Fitzgerald & Spiegel, 1983; Idol, 1987) or expository texts (e.g., Armbruster, Anderson, & Ostertag, 1987) to help students understand what they are reading are among the many others that have been taught successfully. One of the most exciting results of this corpus of research is that comprehension strategy instruction was found to be especially effective for students who began the study as poor comprehenders—probably because they are less likely to invent effective strategies on their own. In some studies, when less able readers who had been taught a comprehension strategy were assessed on their performance of the strategy, they were indistinguishable from more able readers who had not been taught the strategy directly. Comprehension Strategy Instruction in the Total Reading Program More than a decade of research and criticism from both proponents and opponents of comprehension strategy instruction have helped us understand what quality instruction looks like and how to make it a part of a larger comprehension instructional program. First, the strategies students are taught should resemble, as closely as possible, those used by actual readers use when they comprehend successfully. To meet this criterion of authentic use, the instruction should focus on the flexible application of the strategy rather than a rigid sequence of steps. The issue here is validity. Comprehension strategy instruction should externalize the thinking processes of skilled readers--not create artificial processes that apply only to contrived instructional or assessment situations. Second, teachers should demonstrate how to apply the strategies successfully. They should provide explicit modeling and explanation of the strategy--what it is, how it is carried out, and when and why it should be used (Duffy, Roehler, & Hermann, 1988; Paris, Wasik, & Turner, 1991). The combination of modeling and explanation is important. Instead of just talking about a strategy, teachers need to demonstrate the processes they use by thinking aloud--what has been called mental modeling or what I like to call making your thinking public. Third, a guided practice phase, in which teachers and students practice the strategy together, is critical to strategy learning, especially for students who may be experiencing difficulty. It is during this time that teachers can give feedback about student attempts and can gradually turn over to students more and more responsibility for performing the strategy and evaluating their own performance (Pearson & Dole, 1987). This is also the time when students can learn about each other's reasoning processes--an activity that might be especially important for the less strategic readers in a group. Finally, students must be taught, reminded, and given time to practice comprehension strategies while they are reading everyday texts—not just in specially-constructed materials or short workbook passages. Too often, even when comprehension strategies are practiced with actual texts, the practice comes too late in the process. Workbooks are not the stuff of comprehension. Texts are. Using real texts, we believe, will increase the likelihood that students will transfer the use of taught strategies to their own independent reading--and that, after all, is the ultimate goal of instruction. Embedding Strategy Instruction in Text Reading In the past decade, we have provided students with more authentic texts than were found in many basals (and, by the way, in many earlier trade books); and to a greater extent than previously possible, we are asking students to read and write for real reasons (the kind real people in the real world have) rather than for the fake reasons we give them in school. To put it succinctly, school is often all too school-like. These lessons of authenticity from the whole language movement should be embraced and embraceable to all teachers of reading. One only wonders why we had to have someone come along and point out that our materials and methods were so inauthentic; then again, in education we seem to need to be reminded often that "the emperor has no clothes!" Authenticity is about contexts as well as about texts and tasks. Recent work on situated learning provides us with some hints about what was wrong with our 1980s instruction for comprehension strategies and structural elements of text. We made the same miscalculation for them we did for phonics—viewing them as ends unto themselves. By making them legitimate goals in their own right, we abstracted them from real texts, real problems, and real situations. What goes under the name of skill, strategy, or structure instruction is much more accessible, interesting, and sensible when it is embedded within a real problem, a real text, or a real body of content. There is a paradox here—and this has been the real discovery for me and for others who pushed the earlier, more abstract approach to such instruction—that the best way to help students develop highly transferable, context-free literacy tools is to teach them as if they were entirely context bound. In other words, if you want me to become better at determining the central story thread or evaluating the efficacy of an argument, then don't give me an abstract routine, give me real stories to talk about and real disputes to settle. Working from a perspective generally labeled as situated cognition (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989), learning about comprehension strategies can be embedded in ongoing discussions about texts. The cognitive activities students engage in are much like the ones that have been the focus of research about explicit instruction in comprehension strategies--summarizing, getting the main idea, and so forth. The difference is that the focus is on learning authentic information in the texts—for example, discovering how photosynthesis works by reading a chapter about it—with comprehension strategy learning as a secondary outcome of repeated engagement in such discussions. I single out four approaches for your consideration today, because each, in its own way, achieves this goal of situating what might otherwise seem like empty and formulaic drills on comprehension skills. The first is the work of Pressley and his colleagues in the schools of Montgomery County, Maryland in Transactional Strategies Instruction. The second is the work of the late Valerie Anderson and her colleagues at OISE and in the Toronto schools with students identified as learning disabled using a technique known as Collaborative Strategy Instruction. The third is the work of Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown at the University of Pittsburgh on Questioning the Author. What all three of these approaches have in common is their emphasis on embedding strategy teaching and learning in the context of learning about the content--the information, the theme, the lessons of life—of the text at hand. In all of these highly engaging and well-documented approaches, students learn on the job, so to speak. They function as cognitive apprentices to teachers who take their work as mentors very seriously. Opportunities for Peer and Collaborative Learning We are becoming more and more aware of the social aspects of instruction and their influence on cognitive outcomes. In addition to equity and the sense of community that are fostered through peer and collaborative learning, students have the opportunity to gain access to one anothers' thinking processes. Perhaps the most widely-researched peer learning model is cooperative learning, the increasingly familiar approach in which heterogeneously grouped students work together to complete tasks. Sometimes each student is assigned part of the task (for example, one student reads to discover what the major industries are in a country, another reads about the country's climate, etc.) and is responsible for sharing what is learned with other group members; sometimes students collaborate on a single task (for example, students might work together to use context clues to figure out the meanings of difficult vocabulary words in a chapter). Cooperative learning has been examined in a variety of academic disciplines (e.g., Johnson & Johnson, 1985; Slavin, 1987a, 1987b), with the focus in a few cases on literacy learning, including comprehension (e.g., Meloth, 1991; Stevens, Madden, Slavin, & Farnish, 1987). A synthesis of this research suggests that cooperative learning is most effective when students understand the teacher's goals clearly, when goals are group-oriented and the criterion of success is satisfactory learning by every single group member, when students are expected and taught to explain things to each other instead of just providing each other with answers, and when group activities supplement rather than supplant teacher-directed instruction. At its best, cooperative learning has positive social and cognitive benefits not just for less able children but also for those who are average and above average. Other models of peer teaching also have been investigated. Palincsar's (Palincsar, Brown, & Martin, 1987) variation of her original reciprocal teaching model, this time with students (instead of teachers) trained to teach their peers to engage in the reciprocal dialogues, is especially interesting because it shows that students who were taught by a peer teacher via reciprocal teaching actually learned the activities and comprehended better than comparison students who were taught these same activities by an adult teacher but without the reciprocal dialogues. Time to Talk About Reading Some form of discussion or explication of a text has been a feature of reading classrooms for years, but traditional teacher-student text discussions have been consistently criticized because of their emphasis on teacher control and their focus on learning a single interpretation; critics have tended to advocate student centered discussions around multiple interpretations in order to develop interpretive and critical processes. In fact, Cazden (1986) and many others noted a universal format of traditional teacher-student discussions, what has been called the IRE format--the teacher initiated a question, a student responded, and the teacher evaluated the response before moving to another question. Recently, various forms of teacher-student discussions have been geared toward achieving three goals: (a) establishing more democratic interaction patterns—patterns in which the teacher becomes more a facilitator than the center of the discussion, (b) accepting and building on multiple text interpretations and aesthetic responses to texts, and (c) situating or embedding instruction about how to comprehend texts in the actual act of reading texts as a group. Changing Teacher/Student Interaction Patterns In the traditional recitation format, teacher questions and a single correct text interpretation drive discussions. Teachers choose the topics and through feedback to students control which student answers are viewed as correct and incorrect. One outcome of the role teachers have played in the recitation format is that they talk a lot! As much as or more than all students combined. This is partly because their questions have focused on transmitting the text interpretation they had in mind when the discussion began. It is partly due to the natural monitoring function that teachers perform when they are in charge of a discussion; they feel a responsibility to let students know when they are or not on the right track. Tharp and Gallimore (1989a, 1989b) use the term responsive teaching to contrast effective teacher-student dialogues with such recitations. In responsive teaching, also called instructional conversations, teachers plan instruction by trying to anticipate a range of student responses in addition to thinking about their own interpretations. They then use student input into discussions and student text interpretations to move the discussion to higher levels. Teachers might still nominate topics and opinions for group consideration, but student input instead of teacher evaluation becomes the impetus that drives the discussion forward. Changing the pattern of classroom discussions to allow more student input and control is no easy task. Alvermann and Hayes (1989), for example, found that it was much easier for teachers to change the level of questions they asked (e.g., move to more inferential, evaluative, and critical thinking questions) than it was for them to change the basic structure of classroom discussions. Teachers suggested two main reasons the persistence of the recitation format in their classroom—maintaining control and ensuring coverage of important information and canonical interpretations. But we have learned a great deal in the last decade about how to turn over control to students without giving up responsibility for quality, flow, and content of classroom conversations. In particular, I am most impressed by the work of my colleague Taffy Raphael and her colleagues and their work on Book Club. The operative rule in Book Club seems to be that students have lots of degrees of freedom about the particular process (as long as certain standards of civility are maintained), but that the content focus of the conversation is determined by the teacher--you have to be on topic. Accepting Personal Interpretations and Reactions A broader definition of comprehension, one that includes the possibility of multiple text interpretations and readers' reactions and responses to their reading, is behind many of the changes proposed for discussions in recent years. If texts had only one meaning, then teachers' responsibility would be merely to make sure that everyone "got" that meaning. But we are becoming more accepting of the possibility that because of different knowledge, experiences, beliefs, and traditions, readers can interpret texts differently and respond to them in different ways. This respect for individual response and interpretation has been nurtured by the growth in popularity of the response to literature tradition (Beach & Hynds, 1991). In particular, Rosenblatt (1978) distinction between efferent reading —that from which a reader gets information or basic meaning, and aesthetic reading--the actual lived-through experience of reading and responding personally to a text has allowed us to treat reading experiences differentially. Recently, the process of allowing students to build, express and defend their own text interpretations has become a revalued goal of text discussions. Eeds and her colleagues (Eeds & Wells, 1989; Peterson & Eeds, 1990) have used the term grand conversations to describe literature discussions in which the teacher's role is to be a coequal in the discussion, another person with opinions and interpretations, not the leader of what they call a gentle inquisition. In this role, the teacher can capitalize on teachable moments, help clarify confusions, keep track of students' ideas, and suggest ideas for consideration here and there much as a curator might lead visitors through a museum--pointing out interesting pieces along the way but neither "unloading" everything that she knows on her listeners nor insisting that they be interested in everything she is interested in. A typical concern about such discussions is that students might spend a lot of time talking about personal reactions but come away from the discussion not really "understanding" what they have read or not having taken the opportunity to discuss important text features. In analyses of such discussions of literary texts, however, Eeds and Wells (1989) and others (e.g., Raphael, McMahon, Goatley, Bentley, Boyd, Pardo, & Woodman, 1992; Rogers, 1991) have found that students . . .
In some of these studies, writing also has been an important avenue for text understanding--a way for students to document their original independent thinking before group discussion and a vehicle for synthesizing information and figuring out how their thinking has changed after discussions. A Call For Multiple Approaches to Comprehension Improvement When we teach courses about reading instruction for preservice and inservice teachers, we sometimes hear the complaint that researchers seem to pit instructional approaches against each other instead of exploring how a particular innovation might operate as part of a total reading instructional program. If instructional innovations are viewed as dichotomous, children may end up with instruction that is deficient in some areas. Anything less than a well-rounded instructional program can be seen as a form of discrimination against children who have difficulty with reading. Delpit (1988), for example, asserts that children from nonmainstream backgrounds deserve to be taught directly what their mainstream teachers want them to do in order to read and comprehend texts; Slavin (1987) contends that an important outcome of cooperative learning is that it eliminates the segregation along racial and socioeconomic lines that often accompanies ability grouping; and Stanovich (1986) argues that if less able readers continually are denied opportunities to read actual texts, they will inevitably fall further and further behind—the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. Clearly, then, multiple approaches to comprehension improvement seem to be in order. To use the recent language of the standards debate, a full portfolio of teacher strategies designed to promote a full portfolio of student strategies could be construed as essential in meeting opportunity-to-learn standards. We see no reason why all four of the components described here—ample time for actual text reading, teacher-directed comprehension strategy instruction, opportunities for peer and collaborative learning, and time to talk about what has been read—should not complement one other in the same classroom. Nor do we see any reason why the appropriateness of any component would depend on whether the primary reading material is children's literature or basal readers. We do believe, however, that if our ultimate goal is to develop independent, motivated comprehenders who choose to read, then a substantial part of children's reading instructional time each day must be devoted to the reading of self-selected materials that are within the students' reach. It is through such reading that children can experience the successful comprehension, learning, independence and interest in reading that will motivate future reading. I began this journey today by situating my plea to emphasize comprehension within this false but devisive debate about whole language and skills. Let me end by making two final pleas to you as we strive to make sense out of all of the claims and counter claims in this debate. My penultimate plea is to regard the midcourse correction in curriculum that appears to be playing itself out in our schools with a kind of cautious optimism. Based upon the principles I have espoused and what I have said about the casualties in this war, it is clear that I too see the need for some recalibration. But we should not confuse recalibration with retreat. The principles that guided the evolution and ascendancy of literature based reading and whole language should not be swept aside in the recalibration. What I hope for is that what we can achieve is not so much a REcalibration (with the emphasis on REturning to some former view of curriculum) as a transformation to some higher common ground. Why? Because the political winds I feel point ominously to a retreat. There are some who feel as though we sold our birthright when we let skills and direct instruction die an early death a decade ago. So intent are they on reviving those practices that they may let the pendulum swing as far as it needs to in order to accomplish their goal (cite Parents’ Magazine piece and Atlantic Monthly articles by Art Levine). That, I believe, would be disastrous, for it would destroy any chance to maintain the genuine curricular progress made by our schools and teachers and students when we embraced whole language. My final plea to all of you is to consider becoming a member of my new political party—The Radical Middle. I do not stand alone in this effort. In fact, in making such a plea, I join all of my colleagues on this program today for all of us seek to find a common ground on which we can stand as a profession. But I do not invite you into the Radical Middle lightly or in jest, but in all seriousness. At the outset, I shared my concern that the voices of those who are as sympathetic as they are resistant to both extremes are not being heard. My greatest fear is that if the only voices heard in this debate are those from the far sides of the room, one of them will win. And given what I know about what happens when professional groups go up against well-organized political groups, I would not bet on the profession in such a battle. I think that the radical right is winning control of our statehouses and is doing everything possible to win control of local school boards. I believe we stand a chance of preserving, extending, and refining the good work we have accomplished only by taking a stance that invites more folks under a new and wider umbrella than any we have erected before—so that even more students stand a chance of gaining access to the intellectual freedom that comes with the independence they achieve when they can read for themselves. Read me a book today, and I can respond, and think and feel a little more deeply than I could yesterday . Teach me to read today, and you give me a lifetime of tomorrows in which I can read, and think, and feel—for myself. The motto for the Radical Middle is simple: Better to be helpful than politically correct. Better to be involved that theoretically pure. Better to be searching for common ground than for ideological distinction. Better to be in the middle of a road headed somewhere than stuck in a ditch on either side.
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