Allow me to let you in on a little secret in education: even the uncontroversial is controversial. Even slight changes in pedagogy can cause an uproar, partly because the philosophies of teaching and learning are so nuanced, partly because the political and economic structures in which we function disincentivize change, whether it’s the imposition of goals from above, or overloaded class sizes, or being denied the time and resources to plan for and implement change…the list goes on.
And yet, there are practices in education that require a substantial overhaul. This was made dramatically obvious with the release of the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s Right to Read report, which demonstrates that the strategies teachers have used to teach children reading over the last twenty years have been at worst detrimental to student learning and at best successful for some, but ultimately inequitable.
It is in this context that I read Thinking Reading: What Every Secondary Teacher Needs to Know About Reading by James and Dianne Murphy. In most ways, the text is as uncontroversial as is possible—but it will certainly seem to be.
Often, educational texts begin by outlining a history of a certain pedagogical approach or a lengthy theoretical backing for a cluster of approaches. Such is the case for works like Cultivating Genius by Gholdy Muhammad, which gives a long history of Culturally Responsive and Relevant Pedagogy through the lens of Black history and instructional practice. Other texts offer specific strategies for instruction and leave it to your imagine how to implement them in books with titles like 101 Teaching Strategies. It is always my hope that texts will provide teachers with specific practices to help support teaching, or at very least a balance of theory and practice. Kelly Gallagher’s Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling and Mentor Texts stands out in that respect as a great balance of theoretical and applicable.
In the short span of Thinking Reading, the authors err on the side of historical and political context, which does prove illuminating—for instance, the fact that 20% of students cannot read at grade level is an alarming statistic. The Murphys do offer some strategies in the middle of the book, but the details often remain hazy—including on a very particular point that I’ll address in due course.
First, though, let’s discuss some of the helpful frameworks the authors provide for learning. For instance, they outline the stages of learning, and the actions teachers need to take at each stage, to ensure learning:
Acquisition, where teachers offer “unambiguous presentation with guide practice and immediate feedback” (121).
Accuracy, where teachers offer “continued, spaced practice with a high accuracy criterion (usually 80%-100%)” (121).
Fluency, where teachers offer “daily timed practice with carefully sequenced practice materials to a high rate per minute” (121).
Retention, which involves scheduled review in a “spaced retrieval” (121).
Generalisation, where students “practice in adapted contexts or in combining the target skills with other previously learned skills” (121).
Adaptation, where teachers offer “opportunities for independent, creative problem-solving” (121).
Thinking Reading presents these parameters as a guide for reading, but I think this framework for mastery is worth considering no matter the discipline. It’s also worth considering how this might revolutionize lesson design. For at least the last fifteen years, we’ve been encouraged to apply a model that is Minds On → Activate Learning → Consolidating Learning. Alternatively, a hook, the lesson, the evaluation. While I’m missing the specific page references here, James and Dianne Murphy advocate for about 70% of each lesson to be review of previous material and only 30% new. This helps students to develop confidence and competency. They also go against the grain somewhat in suggesting that the most fun and engaging parts of the lesson should be placed after the deep learning as a reward for students mastering their knowledge. This flips the entire script of beginning with a ‘hook’ to tempt the students into working. These suggestions would radically change how I structure lessons towards mastery: Review, review, review, little lesson, something fun, something fun.
One thing that’s a little unclear to me is their conception of repetition. They give an example partway through the book that leaves me perplexed. They say that you want to have students practice and review content most of the time. Then, they say, “Repeated quiz questions do not have to be the same every time. For example, the following three questions all require the same knowledge from a student of geography:
-What is the longest river in China?
-What is the third longest river in the world?
-On what river is the Chinese city of Shanghai?
In this way, the quizzes repeat the testing of knowledge without being repetitive” (79).
I’m not exactly sure how the three questions “all require the same knowledge”. To me, it implies that you’d need to know things about rivers in China but also the rivers of the world and also knowledge of cities in China. I’m not convinced that a student would be able to answer all three of those questions with the same bit of knowledge.
Anyway, in a number of ways, the science of reading work that is now becoming re-popularized is aligning well with the culturally responsive and relevant pedagogical learning that is happening, too—it makes perfect sense, since both are rooted in equity work. There are a number of adverse effects for students who are unable to master reading, including increased bullying, poor self-esteem, lower wages, and so on. For society, the effects are estimated in the billions for underfunded literacy programming. The book outlines some premises that prove helpful for reconsidering attitudes towards students. They identify the reification of literacy problems (and dyslexia) as having the following effects:
“It places the locus of the problem within the child, not with the instruction.
It releases teachers and schools from accountability when a student has not learned.
It provides an explanation for the child and their family that is understandable, and which can become part of a positive personal narrative about overcoming disability.
It can be used to lobby for additional funding and resourcing for the student. This advocacy work assures schools and parents that they are doing their best for their child.” (43).
I find these observations astute and force us to reimagine our role as educators, especially with respect to instruction and assessment. In terms of its alignment with culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy, we can see the correlation in that both strive to promote identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy through high expectations. The Murphys refuse to lower reading expectations, which I admit I’ve been guilty of for students that really struggle. They note that “in the past, school curricula have sometimes been under pressure to reduce demands on students because they did not have the necessary cultural knowledge to deal with more sophisticated or challenging texts. The cumulative effect of this process was to disadvantage those who were already disadvantaged by a lack of relevant knowledge” (95). When students are ‘reading to learn’ (rather than ‘learning to read’), students at the receiving end of the service gap have often been given less challenging texts—fluffy stories and articles. There’s an assumption that because they can’t comprehend text well, they can’t comprehend issues—which is something we’ll continually need to fight against. Of course, text needs to be at students’ reading levels lest they get too overwhelmed and disengaged, closed off to learning.
The whole goal here is to make reading automatic: “what seems like attention to context and visual cues is actually the luxury of thinking about what we are reading – created by the automisation of decoding” (35). Framing it this way, it makes sense why students have historically had such a hard time articulating what strategies work for them and why. Yet, given some political changes and funding that verges on the conspiratorial, teachers for the last few decades have been teaching reading through methods that are largely ineffective, including practices like predicting words based on a first letter and context clues. In many ways, what the Murphys advocate here is a return to phonics. One of the disappointments for me with this text is that the it continually gestures towards high-yield Direct Instruction reading strategies, but never fully delineates how the system is achieved. I think it would have been worth the extra 50-100 pages to explain how it all works.
Instead, there are some small, specific tips that pop up throughout the text that I’ve already begun to implement when teaching, for example, poetry. One of their recommendations is to ask students whom “he” or “it” refers to in a sentence because it can “reveal quite alarming gaps in their comprehension” (74). Even in grade 12, I can say, it sure does. They also recommend providing instruction in the structure of words, which I’ve been continuing to reference in incidental ways. They also offer phrases that help encourage students to attempt and not ‘opt-out’ of learning, like telling students, “I’ll give you a minute to think about that and you can try again” (78). As they outline their habits for instruction, they note that their approach is characterized by the slogan ‘low threat, high challenge’ (78). The mantra demands that “For struggling readers, this means confidence that there will be opportunities for them to try things that they might fail at, that they will get reliable corrective feedback, that this will be low key, and that, even in the case of errors, their status with the teacher will be undiminished” (78). It’s a good framework for teaching reading, but also just for being an effective teacher.
A concern that comes up for me with texts like this is when classroom practices come across as utopian, derealized from classrooms. Surely they’re targeting some strategies to a younger, elementary audience, since there are things that will just not fly in a high school context. For instance, they suggest that when students are reading to themselves, you circulate around the room (“while keeping an eye on the rest of the class” (73), of course). They suggest that you have them read aloud to you (“Most students love reading to their teacher, even those who are not confident about reading aloud to the class. Giving them an opportunity to read with you is a gift” (73-74)—I’m skeptical on that one…) and that “as they read, note down the errors they make. Are they recurring, indicating a knowledge gap that can be taught, or are they inconsistent, suggesting inattention to details or a lack of fluency? Also, note how fluently and expressively they read” (74). It’s difficult to imagine mass buy-in where you’re reading over a child’s shoulder while they read to you AND you’re documenting every mistake they make in terms of engagement and demand, it seems a big ask as a regular classroom practice. I’ll try, but I’m not sure yet on how it would look. Thinking Reading reminds teachers to “always remember to praise what they do well, and to give two or three very specific items of feedback” (74), noting that “You can’t do this sort of exercise all the time, but if you have two or three students like this with whom you check in every week, it makes a big difference to them. And, of course, it is likely that they will improve, because they are getting specific feedback and, hopefully, they want to please you” (74).
More likely is that you are able to “Set up activities where students read to each other in pairs” (74). They outline the practice as follows:
“take turns, and tell them that they can work out between them which parts each will read, explaining that slower readers should read less text, focusing on accuracy. Even five or ten minutes of such activities will provide not only much-needed practice, but also modelling from an able peer. Modelling is most powerful when it is provided through someone who is close to the learner in age, status, and skill level. Students will generally take more risks with a peer than they would with an adult. Co-operative learning strategies (structured pair or group work, with clear ground rules to ensure productivity) have a strong track record in the research literature.” (74-75).
The practice is well-founded, of course. It offers some good background, too, of how to establish partnerships. I’m not quite convinced yet, though, that high school students will be more successful when reading with a partner. Most of my students don’t even want to talk to one another, much less read—I can imagine myself saying “go” and there being ten minutes of uninterrupted silence.
Some of these practices may not be quite effective in a high school context without first building school culture in particular ways. What we come to is a chicken-and-egg situation. To their credit, the Murphys recognize that students may be resistant, but they attribute that resistance to a lack of confidence with reading. I’d like to offer a longer passage that characterizes the dilemma:
“[Students] manage teachers in order to reduce demands in lessons — disrupting the lesson, disengaging from the work, or becoming personally challenging. All of these are consequences that are unpleasant and aversive for teachers. If, by contrast, in a lesson with no reading demands the students are much more positive and pleasant, then it is easy to see how a strong (though often unconscious) motivation arises for the teacher to reduce reading or academic demands. This issue has to be addressed openly and explicitly with students: reading is a part of every lesson. Once students realise that this is non-negotiable, and that they are enjoying the benefits of wider knowledge and a broader vocabulary, success begins to create a ‘virtuous circle’. But it may take a graduated process to establish such a system as part of the culture of the classroom” (77).
I think there are two key words here. The first is “non-negotiable.” The idea of there being specific, high expectations is maintained there. It’s very common to succumb to student pressure—everyone wants to be liked!—and to make tasks easier when they don’t do well. However, if we are to maintain the idea of high expectations, there are some things that have to be done. The second piece worth noting is the “virtuous circle.” On that front, it seems a little naive. I’m imagining my classes that are most challenged by reading—reading is not something “cool”, so it’s much more difficult to get students to recognize the benefits for themselves to be led; plus, I don’t think it’s all that likely that students will spontaneously tell each other not to be disruptive and have it work.
Now, let’s delve into some of the more controversial claims. One that I find particularly troubling is that they essentially suggest that dyslexia doesn’t exist—which contradicts the ideas put forward in the Right to Read report. Teaching Reading suggests that people can’t read well, so they get diagnosed as dyslexia. What’s the evidence for dyslexia? That they can’t read. Rather than being an issue of brain wiring, the Murphys claim that with early and effective intervention, dyslexia can essentially cease to exist. It’s certainly a provocative suggestion. While I understand the rationale for their claim—their aim is to improve instruction over and above suggesting fault with students—I would never suggest to a parent that dyslexia is a misdiagnosis.
A controversy I actually really value, though, is the way the Murphys envision literacy within the broader school community. A few years ago, a Learning Support Teacher role came my way where I was able to meet with students in small groups or one-on-one to support literacy. The school board has decided to go in a different direction with the Learning Support role and it has redirected all support into math instruction. That being said, I’ll leave some of the comments from James and Dianne Murphy here without much comment of my own. To support learning, they implore that “students may be withdrawn from any subject for effective reading intervention.” Their rationale is that “if every subject benefits from improved reading, and if reading is a whole-school priority, then it makes sense for every subject to contribute a little of the catch-up time some students need. The condition, of course, is that the positive impact of the intervention far outweighs the negative impact of withdrawal from classes” (94). That’s going to ruffle some feathers, certainly, because—at least in high school—everyone is in their own silos and everyone feels the pressure of curriculum demands. (Luckily, the literacy team at my school has the goal of decentralizing literacy!).
In order to accomplish this, the Murphys also emphasize the importance of assessment. They note that all students at risk of reading failure need to be identified and helped, which can only happen if “the school commits to a thorough, systemic screening process [...] so that no student is missed” (94). This is also controversial in its own way since it requires A) that everyone agree to a particular means of assessment and B) the time and resources to do it. It also requires a level of standardization that inherently gets teachers’ backs up in defence of their professional judgement. That said, they note that “Many schools still rely on teacher identification when allocating support, and this is fraught with error, particularly because many poor readers have developed sophisticated ways of masking their reading problems – for example, disruptive behaviour, playing the class clown, fading into the background, or absenteeism. Thorough, objective screening, followed by prompt and decisive action, is required to ensure that all students are picked up and helped” (94). I think there’s something to be said for this, since there are so many unconscious biases teachers have with respect to what poor reading “seems” like or which students would benefit. I admit to it myself that there are specific ways that attitudes manifest in my mind about what effort looks like. Not only that, but there needs to be assessments like this because otherwise “the only other resource the school has is either to a standardised testing regime, which is far too imprecise, or to a referral system in which the teachers who push hardest get extra resources for their students” (91). I’ve seen that exact phenomenon more than once where teachers (and parents too) take advocacy beyond the bounds of equity and into the realm of ‘make my job easier by getting this student off my hands’.
The trick, of course, is that any standardized approach can be dangerous. The concern is that standardized testing serves to rank and stream students (90) rather than to select strategies that would actually improve performance. In that sense, the recommendations in Thinking Reading and the Right to Read Report align that we all too often conceptualize the issue as students failing rather than admitting that teachers have failed students (not necessarily by their own ill-intent or negligence, but because the system has been constructed in such a way and has trained teachers in the use of ineffective strategies).
Overall, Thinking Reading serves as a nice, accessible primer for the issues surrounding gaps in teaching and learning with respect to reading. It offers broad strokes for a pedagogical framework that promotes reading. In terms of the particulars, the book is not yet quite sufficient for the needs of working teachers. There’s no implementation guide for teaching reading, which is a little bit of a downer. As I mentioned in the opening of this review, the book is as uncontroversial as is possible in a controversial field.
Give it a shot, but I’d encourage some further reading to get a better sense of particular ways of actually helping kids learn to read good.
Happy reading—it’s a gift that is best when shared.
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