Freedom Teaching by Matthew Kincaid

  Matthew Kincaid asks teachers a powerful question: “Do we believe that our students deserve to be in anti-racist environments 10% of the time? 20%? 50%? What percentage of racist policy is it okay for a student of colour to have to navigate on a daily basis?”

He follows it up with an even more powerful question: “What percentage of racist / oppressive policies are we comfortable with students existing in on a daily basis? Is the answer still truly zero?”

I find these two question sets highly provocative. For the first set, Kincaid points to the obvious answer: “in an ideal world, [it] would be 0%” while recognizing that “that is not the case.” The second question points to a fundamental disconnect between our ideals and practicality. While our students deserve to be in anti-racist environments 100%, nonetheless there’s a level teachers are able to accept for the sake of the system; it’s not complacency, necessarily, but there are a number of engrained practices that go unchallenged for a number of reasons.

This is where Matthew Kincaid’s Freedom Teaching comes in. In the book, Kincaid elucidates a liberatory philosophy that strives to make the educational world a more equitable place. I found the book to be thoughtful and empowering and Kincaid addresses a number of concerns that I am still grappling with, offering a framework within which to work. The book offers a balance between offering principles of freedom teaching while recognizing that the individual context of particular schools will have an impact on how the principles are executed.

Kincaid offers the following five tenets of freedom teaching and the book explores how to achieve these different ambitions:

1. Maintain hope that is radical.

2. It isn’t rigorous if it isn’t relevant.

3. Free minds, free kids.

4. Trouble doesn’t teach.

5. Cultivate a classroom that values cultural wealth.

I think that #1 can be a particular challenge, given the current context in which we exist. The government is underfunding public schools out of existence. Artificial Intelligence systems are eroding our relationship to truth and imposing a hegemonic perspective of so-called reality. Politicians are engaging in corruption with impunity. Social media is sapping the uniqueness of kids. There is a lot to find troubling, so having the first tenant be to maintain hope is both a necessary precondition and the kind of thing that can only be achieved through a leap of faith.

The second tenet, “It isn’t rigorous if it isn’t relevant” hits like a suckerpunch to the gut. I think about all of the so-called rigour I was subjected to as a student, and while I don’t regret it, I do wonder why reading six books instead of four and writing three essays instead of two is seen as “rigour.” The deeper point that Kincaid is making here, to me, is that being “rigorous” (i.e. challenging) for the sake of adding challenge is not the same as being rigorous by delving deeply into content that is truly meaningful to students. Kincaid adds to the discussion with more detail. He sees rigour and investment as working hand in hand: “Students are less likely to engage in rigorous tasks that they are not invested in, and tasks that are rigorous, that don’t promote investment, probably aren’t meaningful tasks.” As much as I hate having to justify the value of English as a discipline, it is worth considering how to get students invested in developing their writing skills. Whether that’s the content or the end-goal, there needs to be some reason for students to get invested. 

In terms of #3 and #4, I think we are in a particularly reactionary climate wherein the response to children misbehaving is to resort to more policing. By freeing students’ minds to explore and question, we enable their ongoing success in navigating and challenging societal structures. All of this also leads towards cultivating a classroom that values cultural wealth, where a teacher’s role is not to impose a particular view of how to best navigate our lives, but instead to co-create with the communities in which we operate. A noble goal, indeed.

Ultimately, these tenets have the goal to “create educational environments that liberate students and in turn enhance their ability to make choices that give them control over critical elements in their lives.” I think it would be uncontroversial to accept this as a worthwhile pursuit. If our education isn’t assisting students towards being agents of change in their own lives, what is our purpose, exactly?

As I mentioned, Kincaid makes the case that “freedom teaching requires investment in both theory and practice.” Indeed, it is “about finding the intersection between theory and practice.” The author gives a caution for the book: “Using this text to provide a theoretical framework without engaging in the practice of employing the techniques likely won’t yield the results you want. Engaging solely in the practices without internalizing the theory also will yield incomplete results.” I think this is one that gets challenging for people in the teaching world. We are all so busy, so exhausted. We want to be told “do this” and we’ll do it and fix the world. But, the work is complex and requires examining how our particular practices need to be thoughtfully adjusted in response to the context. As Kincaid points out, “One of the reasons why anti-racism initiatives in schools fail to gain continued momentum is because people find themselves so deep in the theory that they don’t know how to apply it in a practical setting. On the other hand, there are people who [adopt a] three-step guide on how to achieve equity without fully understanding the deep and nuanced theory that provides the foundation for those practices.” I’d like to think I’m somewhere in the middle, but if I truly reflect, I’m more on the theoretical side and still need practice actually acting.

Here’s the other major piece that I think Kincaid has identified in a particularly poignant way. One of the things I’ve seen is people enacting performative change and taking credit for how much they’ve made a difference—but maybe unjustly so. Kincaid writes that in his work with schools, “one of the most difficult barriers to dismantle is the barrier of performative change.” He makes the case that a school might eliminate a racist policy without replacing it with an anti-racist one. He gives a great example here where “a teacher changes the names on their word problems to be culturally affirming, but doesn’t shift their pedagogical approach in the classroom.” I’ve witnessed this kind of thing first hand. As we work to select books that are culturally affirming (i.e. change the content), we make no adjustments to what we do with those texts: we still impose, generally, a prescriptive structure of how to write, what to write, what to write about—all under the pretense of being “academic” and “objective” without valuing individual student voice. Changing the content without changing the form still serves to replicate the structures that are leading to undeserving students. Kincaid elaborates that “a school district undergoes anti-racism training, but does little to shift the policies that incubate racism.” When this happens, the change is superficial—”the very changes that we are championing can actually just reaffirm the status quo.” I couldn’t begin to list the number of so-called changes that have had this effect. The solution, Kincaid writes, is that “if we are going to invest the time, energy, and resources to freedom teach, we have to be committed to doing it all the way. If we are going to be committed to doing it all the way, we first have to train ourselves to believe in, and hope radically for, change.”

In trying to accomplish a truly revolutionary approach to education, there are a number of limiting beliefs that Kincaid addresses. One thing that I hear from teachers—and society at large—is that students need to be ready for “the real world” (by which, in my view, always seems to mean ‘the workforce’). In this conception of education, the purpose remains to reinforce the structures of capitalism. (Why is it that companies don’t pay to train their own employees, again? Why is it that public funds are being used to train employees for private companies? I digress.) Kincaid reinforces my view about the foolishness of the ‘real world’ as a standard for our practices through a slightly different angle: “I have witnessed the justification of several unjust systems because ‘students have to get ready for the real world.’ What this basically amounts to is exposing young people to traumatic experiences in the name of preparing them to navigate the brokenness in our society.” I think about things like holding students to strict deadlines and then deducting 50% of their mark, for example, if they hand something in a day late. I think about things like forcing students to answer questions in front of the class without time to prepare because ‘that’s how the real world works.’ Underlying these practices is the idea that somehow school is not “the real world,” despite students spending most of their time in our buildings. Schools are “real world” and when we defer to some monolithic conception of the real world in the great beyond after graduation, it automatically renders schools second-class to whatever idea we have of post-school. The other objection is one Kincaid takes up: “Freedom teaching instead views the world as malleable and teaches students that they have a say in the real world that they will both shape and inherit.” Teachers and students shape the world, so we have the freedom to shape the world we want while the students are in school to prepare them for the world they’ll want to create. In Kincaid’s words, “Freedom teaching is about creating schools that reflect the society that we want our students to live in rather than reflecting the society that currently exists. For this reason, this book will speak directly about replacing oppressive systems with liberatory ones and expanding the definition of what we consider to be success to include a culturally sustaining education for all children.” I think this, too, is spot on to how I want to approach teaching as I move forward in my career.

The challenges to Kincaid’s philosophy come in the form of limiting beliefs. He enumerates a range of perspectives that shy away from radical hope and instead instill a pessimism towards liberatory practice:

“This isn’t the real world. We need to prepare students for the real world. Culturally responsive teaching practices aren’t going to raise my test scores. Restorative approaches let students off the hook when they misbehave. All of this work that I am doing to make change isn’t going to amount to anything. I do not have enough power. If only I were the principal or a district administrator. I want to engage parents, but I know what is best for their children.

I think about my other recent read, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. In that book, he talks about how youth movements and minor protests are never taken seriously at the time of their enactment, but then lead to the kind of long-term change they seek and we revise our historical memory. I think the same is true here; we could counter these limiting beliefs by taking small actions and moving forward incrementally, even when it seems like it isn’t making a difference.

There’s been discussion in the last few years around the relative merits of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workforce. Under it, there’s an implicit racist assumption that Black people just aren’t as good as white people at being, say, a pilot (cf. I think an old Charlie Kirk clip, I think?). There’s the suggestion that DEI leads to a lowering of standards, but as Kincaid points out, “The absolute worst thing we can do in the name of anti-racism is to stop challenging our students.” Kincaid recognizes that the United States are far from being a meritocracy, but still points to the ongoing value of hard work, focus, and determination—esepcially for people of colour who want to have “a full array of choices for what they do with their lives.” This is why rigour is still encouraged (as long as it’s relevant). Kincaid notes that “we push our students to engage in rigorous tasks because we believe that they can do them. Consistently lowering rigour just reinforces external messages of inferiority.” Returning to a previous point, though, rigour without purpose—“rigour for rigour’s sake”—”can have the same detrimental effect.” He notes that having students repeatedly do hard things over and over without allowing them to experience success is a recipe for disaster. 

Implicit throughout Freedom Teaching is an asset-based mindset towards students. On the topic of whether students can do hard things (i.e. persevere throughout rigorous tasks), Kincaid notes that

“Our kids do hard things all the time. For some of them, just getting to school on a daily basis is hard. Caring for your younger siblings while your parents work is hard. Navigating the devastating effects of institutional oppression is hard. I don’t know if I ever taught a kid who couldn’t do hard things. In fact, many of my students had done more hard things by the time they were 13 sitting at one of my desks than I did in my entire lifetime.”

I think that’s a really positive note to consider. We are always pushing students for success; it would just be great to have a broader conception of what counts as success as we try to help everyone rise to their potential.

Overall, Freedom Teaching is a great outline of some principles that can help us to guide our teaching practice towards something more liberatory. I hope that we’re at the stage where we can incorporate this work and make significant change. I’d like to guarantee that we’re all that stage, but I know there’s still more work to be done. But we’ll do it. We’ll make it.

Stay optimistic and happy reading!

Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Brené Brown has established herself as a prominent figure in the realm of team leadership and building corporate work culture, but her work extends into and resonates deeply with teaching and education. It’s about time that I engage with her work, so here we are with Dare to Lead. I listened to the audiobook, read by Brown herself with some welcome tangents and clarifying remarks that add to the original text. Having finished this book, I can understand why her work is so broadly accepted. She offers clear, insightful, and manageable guidelines for engaging with others as a leader, whatever form that might take.

When it comes to nonfiction books, Dare to Lead is comparatively short but still offers a comprehensive guide for a few core concepts. One of the common threads is how emotional intelligence influences our work as leaders. Leaders require a level of vulnerability when engaging with others and making decisions. In one moment, Brown clarifies how to practice vulnerability in response to a misunderstanding with one of her workshop attendees. After discussing vulnerability and openness, the man came up to her and said he was going to start divulging all kinds of personal information and discuss his doubts in the work and so on and so forth. She clarifies that vulnerability and openness does not divulging everything—divulging everything, especially in a business meeting, could send people into a panic. Instead, it requires a fine balance and sharing only what is pertinent to help enable the team. There’s a closer affinity to accountability than oversharing.

Some moments were more resonant with me as an educator. Within systems, peoples’ values can often clash. We have different visions of how institutions should operate and what our outcomes could be. One section of the book outlines an exercise she does with her audiences where they have to select their core values. She talks about narrowing down to two core values to guide our actions. If we are not able to narrow our values down to two, our scope is too big and we don’t have the focus for our decision making. It’s a little bit cheezy, but there’s an administrator I work with who encourages us on the first day to choose one value to focus on and I’ve gained a new appreciation for that level of intention.

Teaching can often be contentious. Brown presents several ideas for better management and thoughtfulness. One of the practices she holds with her team is that everyone has the power to call a time out during meetings. It’s a smart idea to say “I need time to think about what I’m hearing” and not come to immediate decisions. As we know as teachers, building in “wait time” and giving students time to think increases the depth of thinking, so logically the same would apply for adults. She says that calling a time out gives reasonable thinking time and it cuts down on the “meeting after the meeting” and backchannels, ultimately leading to more transparency and better decision making. I love that.

I also appreciate the way that Brown establishes healthy boundaries while maintaining empathy. One of the passages that really resonated with me is when she writes, 

We can’t do our jobs when we own other peoples’ emotions or take responsibility for them as a way to control related behaviours for one simple reason: other peoples’ emotions are not our jobs. We can’t both serve people and try to control their feelings. Daring leadership is ultimately about serving other people, not ourselves. That’s why we choose courage.

So much of our work as educators requires navigating others’ emotions, at least it feels that way. Whether it’s a student being upset about not getting a grade, or a parent being angry because their child has been accused of cheating, or whether colleagues have different views on which pedagogies are most effective—it can get uncomfortable. Brown gives permission to separate other peoples’ feelings from our decision making. It really is about serving others, not necessarily about making others happy (although it’s a nice byproduct of being transparent, vulnerable, and collaborative). In that vein, Brown also gives advice to people who are trying to demonstrate empathy to others. She says that “empathy is not connecting to an experience. It’s connecting to the emotions that underpin an experience.” I liked that, because I think a lot of people say, “well I’ve never been through that thing” and try to exclude themselves from confronting those hard feelings. It’s well-intentioned, generally, but this gives us the power to maintain connection without imposing our own half-connected experiences. Brown illustrates the example with a personal anecdote involving high emotions in an airport and it was a beautiful demonstration of how to engage with others without owning their emotions or imposing your own experiences.

Overall, Dare to Lead gives a really nice framework for some foundational qualities. I hope it makes me a better leader and decision maker. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Happy reading!

Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

       Comedians say that comedy is not meant to last forever. Humour presses up against its own boundaries, expands them, and then ceases to be relevant. I wonder if something similar is true in the realm of video games. It wouldn’t be surprising, exactly. Pretty much any game genre I can think of has evolved over time to new heights of complexity. Even something like Mario Kart serves as an example here: in the original Mario Kart, you selected a character, but not a kart or tires or flying mechanics. In terms of storytelling, the boundary between video game and animated film sometimes becomes unclear through cutscenes or even mechanics (specifically: Quick Time Events have come and hopefully gone, it would seem). All this to say that Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal, originally published in 2011, offers a thoughtful framework but ultimately seems to be outdated in its specifics—more on that momentarily.

The passage below outlines McGonigal’s central thesis, so I think it’s worth it for me to quote it at length:

"In today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not. And unless something dramatic happens to reverse the resulting exodus, we are fast on our way to becoming a society in which a substantial portion of our population devotes its greatest efforts to playing games,

creates its best memories in game environments, and experiences its biggest successes in game worlds."

McGonigal’s framing of the problem is an interesting inversion that places games above reality. Games offer what reality cannot and we need to reshape our reality more along the lines of games. She offers a number of supporting claims throughout the book, and restates them all in the conclusion as a reminder. Reasons that games are outpacing reality are for reasons like how they offer meaningful work, connecting with strangers, sense of pride, and so on. 

I would like to believe that all the hours I’ve spent playing video games is somehow meaningful in my real life and in the world at large. I’d also like to believe that we can elevate games into a meaningful artform and leverage them to promote social and environmental injustice in the world. I’d like to be an optimist, but I haven’t cultivated the radical belief that all of what McGonigal has outlined is possible—and the fact that a number of projects she discusses are defunct or inaccessible is not encouraging. (But then again, a lot can change in the world of technology and society in the span of 13 years…)

I do think that the principles of gaming can be applied in other domains productively. McGonigal’s section on education gives me a great deal to think about. She describes the Quest to Learn school in New York that has switched to an entirely gamified model and I find it really interesting. Students are encouraged towards group projects where they’re doing “quests.” Students are encouraged to form teams based on particular skill sets—your quest might require someone who is a good verbal communicator, someone who is a good artist, and someone who likes music, for example. Students gain experience points and level up (I really wonder if they’ve been able to escape grading…). Students can even obtain secret quests, like discovering a note in a book that tells them to do something before anyone else. I find all of this amazing. I’ve already started having students group up based on a particular realm of expertise, but I’m trying to envision all of the different branching paths students might take in studying English, like pursuing particular areas of expertise and leveling up in that area. If I could make a network of skills and have paths that cross over with different assignments for different skillsets, I would completely revolutionize my classroom. I’m wondering how I might create a platform that allows students that kind of exploration where they could save their progress in a particular path and a skill tree that they can unlock. Man that would be amazing.

Ultimately, I want to know how we can leverage games to create social change. I believe that that starts at the level of education, but I would like to see some more practical impacts. McGonigal documents projects like FreeRice, with which I was already familiar and very much enjoy. If you’re not familiar with it, you answer questions and for every question you get right it donates rice to the UN. The questions are adaptive and get harder and easier based on what you get right or wrong and advertisers pay for placement on the FreeRice website. I love the project, but it my struggle with where it fits into the broader narrative is that it is not the game itself that changes reality; it still relies on capital to finance it. Essentially, the game is not self-sufficient in changing the world and so the questions are: 1) how revolutionary can it be if we’re still at the mercy of capitalism and 2) how can we scale something like this — it really relies on people playing the same games and that each of those games are potentially financed by more profitable companies. The companies themselves need to have a social conscience, which, as we know, is not something we can likely take on trust.

McGonigal does outline some other projects that sounded very interesting and meaningful, though they did not necessarily stand the test of time. To give you an example, McGonigal described a game where the whole purpose was to do favours for people and create little miracles. You got points for doing good deeds in the real world and getting recommendations and so on. When I went to investigate, it seems that the game no longer exists, which was something that repeated a few more times when I was looking for the games being described. I’m not saying that games have to last forever, but it’s a little bit of a downer.

A lot of the projects in the back half of the book are McGonigal’s own projects, which are generally fueled by psychological principles and geared towards social participation. She describes, for instance, orchestrating a game for the Olympics that was done around the world and was a mix of online activity and real-world activity researching a supposedly lost Olympic game that players constructed together based on artifacts and reenacted in the real world. She describes the Graveyard Hold’em game she developed for people to play poker in graveyards using information on tombstones. She links the ideas to happiness research and it comes across as a little bit cheesy (cf. the “secret dance battle” game). The games seem like amazing projects, but they seem to lack the appeal for other types of games that I think people are more drawn to that are less intellectually demanding.

I think that McGonigal gets a couple of things wrong, actually, and I would argue that it’s the result of time. I think one of the questions is the question of scale. McGonigal outlines a game with a social conscience that had a measurable effect. Players would make their energy consumption public; you would set goals for reducing your consumption and then your friends would either bet on or against you and earn points. There were some measurable improvements for the reduction of energy consumption and I love that. The question to me is how can we do this for more things and how is it sustainable? I’m thinking of myself here: if I gamify my energy consumption and my water and I gamify picking up trash and donating to charities and helping strangers— at some point I am going to burn out. I can hardly deal with notifications for one game let alone a whole array of games. I think we have the capacity for certain types of activities, but we can’t do it all. I suppose every difference is beneficial, but can we scale to something truly revolutionary?

McGonigal also really values the collaborative nature of games and aims to have people do 10, 000 hours of collaboration in games (under the theory that 10, 000 hours doing any one thing creates experts in that thing). While it seems that gaming is more collaborative, I would make the case that gaming is becoming more and more individuated. It seems counterintuitive given the massively multiplayer games like Fortnite where you’re forced onto a team. My question would be how much collaboration games like this really need. It seems to me that everyone has their own role to play, but do they talk? Do they strategize together? Even the fact that people select their own avatars with particular abilities suggests a particular role to play, rather than everyone having similar abilities. I also think that playing with strangers for a match and never seeing them again does not contribute to long-term community. Also, people don’t openly talk about games and what they’ve learned from them; I think there’s still some stigma there that prevents us from actually engaging meaningfully in a more broad sense.

In short, I’m not entirely convinced that our current framework for mass gaming is going to mobilize us towards mass change. Perhaps it will lead us there eventually, but making change is hard—even in gaming. While McGonigal notes that gamers actually like failure, it is still questionable of how much novel failure we can take if we’re striving for real-world outcomes. McGonigal writes, for example, “within the limits of our own endurance, we would rather work hard than be entertained. Perhaps that’s why gamers spend less time watching television than anyone else on the planet. [...] We’re much happier enlivening time, rather than killing time.” I find that claim particularly interesting and persuasive. I do think there’s a propensity of feeling good by taking action and that gaming provides more of a means of doing so. 

One of the strengths of McGonigal’s work is proving the value of games. Whether it’s the discussion of providing meaningful, purposeful work, for example, or the discussion of fiero, an emotional high from overcoming adversity, McGonigal identifies that games have the capacity for these qualities. Some of the statistics that she draws from are particularly incredible in this respect. While some of the games she has talked about have fallen out of favour and some of these statistics would need to be updated, you can imagine how these have gotten even more dramatic. For instance, in gathering the posts on Halo wikis and forums, there are almost as many petrabytes or more of data than the written word from ancient times to now. And, McGonigal notes,

"If you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing World of Warcraft since the massively multiplayer online (MMO) role playing game (RPG) first launched in 2004, you get grand total of just over 50 billion collective hours, or, 5.93 million years. To put that number in perspective, 5.93 million years ago is almost exactly the moment in history that our earliest human ancestors first stood upright. By that measure, we’ve spent as much time playing World of Warcraft as we’ve spent evolving as a species." 

That is incredible to me. Just imagine how much we could do if we spent the same amount of time on real-world problems. It’s a matter of figuring out how to incentivize taking action in a similar way. McGonigal addresses that, as well, in talking about the rates at which players game. She talks about how “many of the most addictive online games have implemented a ‘fatigue system’”. She notes that “these systems are most commonly used in online games in South Korea and China, where the rates of online gaming for men can average up to 40 hours a week.” To combat this gamer fatigue, these games will take measures like this: “After 3 hours of consecutive online play, gamers receive 50% fewer rewards and half the fiero for accomplishing the same amount of work. After 5 hours, it becomes impossible to earn any rewards. In the United States, a softer touch is most commonly employed. World of Warcraft players, for example, accumulate resting bonuses for every hour they spend not playing the game. When they log back in, their avatar can earn up to double rewards until it’s time to rest again.” I find these attempts to engineer human behaviour to keep everyone focused on their own well-being and balance are fascinating. These kinds of details really help to illustrate just how impactful games are on our lives.

McGonigal’s writing is clear and sufficient for conveying information. The focus of the book is not on artfulness, but rather providing an outline of an argument for how to fix reality. I still think there needs to be some more real-world proof of how games can be leveraged into real-world action beyond a general suggestion that we have more collaboration towards climate change. To me, it’s the scale. It always comes back to scale. How do we make the massive numbers of players on Fortnite and get them to stop real-world war? How is it that we can get all of the Counterstrike players to collaborate to solve climate change? We still need a roadmap for making that leap—or perhaps the entire structure of where and when people are able to make leaps needs to be revised.

Ultimately, it’s time to level up. Happy reading!

Teaching Reading: What Every Secondary Teacher Needs to Know About Reading by James and Dianne Murphy

    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:

1. Acquisition, where teachers offer “unambiguous presentation with guide practice and immediate feedback” (121).

2. Accuracy, where teachers offer “continued, spaced practice with a high accuracy criterion (usually 80%-100%)” (121).

3. Fluency, where teachers offer “daily timed practice with carefully sequenced practice materials to a high rate per minute” (121).

4. Retention, which involves scheduled review in a “spaced retrieval” (121).

5. Generalisation, where students “practice in adapted contexts or in combining the target skills with other previously learned skills” (121).

6. 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:

1. “It places the locus of the problem within the child, not with the instruction.

2. It releases teachers and schools from accountability when a student has not learned.

3. 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.

4. 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.