How to improve literacy rates: a simple plan

[Steve Shann]

Our government in Australia is considering a simple plan. To improve literacy you mandate regular high-stakes multiple-choice national testing in our schools. This keeps teachers on their toes and students focused on what matters most.

I’ve just come out of a classroom where literacy rates seemed to have improved quite unexpectedly and dramatically. For eight weeks, a group of 90 postgraduate students, all of them training to be teachers in secondary classrooms, have been doing a course called ‘Literacy across the secondary curriculum’. At the end of the course, the students were asked to respond to the statement ‘My own literacy skills have improved.’ 18% strongly agreed, 39% agreed, 28% were neutral, 13% disagreed and 3% strongly disagreed.

It’s hardly hard-data research, but something of significance appears to have happened. Here are 90 students who have each had at least 15 years of institutional learning, and nearly 60% of them think their literacy skills have improved over eight weeks.

What did we do?

Did we make sure the students focussed on their reading and writing by giving them a test? No.

Did the university tell me that my job was dependent on whether or not literacy rates amongst the students improved? No.

Instead we did what I think much good education has done in the past: we wrestled with an unsettling series of questions, and we tried to get our heads around a challenging body of knowledge. We read a great deal (a textbook and, between us, over 300 shorter texts); we wrote a great deal (each student reported on two significant pieces of original research and most made substantial written contributions to over a dozen online discussions); and we talked a lot in our weekly tutorials. Because the content was, for most of the students, relevant and disturbing, it stimulating a great deal of thinking. A number of the students found themselves mulling over issues as they cooked their dinner or walked the dog or stood in the shower.

The government has a simple plan. Unfortunately it is missing the point about how people learn to read and write.

If we want our young to become better readers and writers, we need to make sure that they do lots of reading and writing. The government’s plan will reinforce current pressures to narrow the curriculum. There won’t be time for wide reading and creative writing. Worse, there will be less and less time for talk, which is where so much fruitful engagement starts, and less time for meandering and mulling. Test scores might go up, but real literacy will be a casualty.

***

In a future blog post I’ll write more about our ‘Literacy across the secondary curriculum’ course. It’s been highly stimulating and intense.

[Teresa Bunner]

Great response, Ramona! My husband is a math/statistics guy. He has often told me that he can help me take the data that I have and make it say whatever I want it to! Too true that data is not the end all be all. How sad and frustrating that that is what folks look for, an easy answer.

[Michael Umphrey]

When reading and writing relate to real purposes, people read and write and get better at both.

Tomorrow I've been assigned to participate in a group to address "reading and writing in the content areas" at my school. It's one of 5 groups meeting simultaneously for half a day. At the end of the half day, all the chatter will be processed into reports that will find their way into our five year plan. When teachers were told the plan, one intrepid soul asked, "What happened to our last five-year plan? Did you just throw it away?" The answer wasn't clear.

We can no longer do simple and useful things that make sense. At least where I am.

[Ramona Lowe]

You know, the number of pages read, the number of pages written, the minutes/hours spent in reading and writing and discourse is also data . . . . we need to take that to our "data conferences and argue back!

[Mark Smith]

All good comments, and very heartwarming to me. And, at the risk of repetition, here it is again in a nutshell:

"If we want our young to become better readers and writers, we need to make sure that they do lots of reading and writing." What a concept.

We don't need no stinkin' "data driven" badges! Steve, thanks for stating the bloody obvious, and I mean that sincerely. The times, "being as they are", tend to drive the bloody obvious away.

[Steve Shann]

Just stumbled across this neat and related exchange between Lisa and Gary.

[Ramona Lowe]

I'd suggest the work of W. James Popham and the (sadly) late Gerald Bracey. Popham has books on assessment and Bracey has a book on how to avoid being "snookered" by educational research. Also, last winter (I think it was the December/January) issue of Educational Leadership was themed "Data, Now What?" and had some great articles, including a a discussion of misuse of data as "the new stupid." The current issue is on assessment and is also very rich.

For those who claim that open-ended responses and essays eliminate the issue of reducing our complex discipline to bubbles, I'd suggest you you fight them with Todd Farley's now book, Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry. After reading that, I think they might as well be using a Ouija board to score tests. (Okay, that's some hyperbole, but it makes me furious)

Overall, I've come to find that people are enamored by things that appear to be scientific or mathematically based. They think there is a validity therein that is otherwise missing, when the truth is that the application "scientific" research is not such a good fit with education. Furthermore, I think that most Americans are math phobic (for sure beyond a certain level) has led to an acceptance of anything statistical. ("It's got to be sound, they used a logistic regression to prove XYZ.) Remember, statistics is a relatively new branch and the old name was "political arthimetic." It still is.

I'm not a math person. I went to school back in the good old days when all I needed was Algebra I and Descriptive Math to get through high school and college. I was fortunate enough to office with a math specialist who was brilliant about both numbers and education who taught me (and later tutored me through nine hours of statistics) what I wish every educational administrator and policy maker knew: in education, data doesn't provide answers. Data produces questions, questions lead to knowledge and knowledge provide answers. Data is definitely critical, but it's not our one-stop shopping. (The very term "data-driven" makes my skin crawl--it reminds me of an out of control HAL from 2001)

[Teresa Bunner]

Steve, let me sift through some things and see what I discover. Anybody else have a suggestion??? I try to avoid reading NCLB if possible:)

It seems ironic to me that when I first entered the field as a literacy specialist, the ideas of whole language that came out of Autralia or New Zealand I believe were all the rage. And it was a good model when used appropriately. Just funny to me that I and others were looking your direction for the path to follow and now somehow folks think that should be turned around!

[J. D. Wilson, Jr.]

I think the most insidious aspect of the "testing mentality" is that it sends the message to students that learning some "bit of information" is what is important, that knowing what an adjective is, for example, is more important than knowing how to use it. I think the message of this is that reading and writing is not important and that what is important is reading and writing "twitter" size bits of text and memorizing "twitter" size nuggets of facts, which are often forgotten as soon as the test is over.

Often this is what teaching to a test comes down to. If the people that peddle this nonsense just asked themselves when was the last time their curiosity was aroused by the prospect of taking a "bubble test" they might rethink their position. Perhaps not, because the issue is not about what is most effective but about what is most marketable and easiest to produce. A bubble test can be mass produced a meaningful lesson or test needs to be tailored somewhat to the individual students in the classroom.

Curiosity is aroused by digging beneath the surface of things and finding all the odd and interesting connections not in looking at the surface where all the most obvious, self-evedent, and mundane things live. For those that want to "reform" education the solutions have to be simple and completed in a connect the dots fashion. I remember watching someone advocating for a longer school day as the way of dealing with our educational problems. He was asked don't students burn out and shut down after so many hours in a classroom in any given day? His response (which was given as a condescending throw away response) was if the lessons are interesting and engaging students will remain involved. But that is the real nub of the issue. It is not easy to develop lessons that are interesting and engaging to the diverse cross section of skills, abilities, and interests that fill a classroom of 30-40 students and counting. Adding an hour or two to the school day is easy, making that hour or two meaningful is very difficult. Most of these people think the problem is solved when the easy part of the solution has been implemented and are dismissive of the more complex aspects of the problem that require real time, effort, and, often, money.

Cordially,
J. D.

[Steve Shann]

Thanks for these responses. Do you have a link to a good summary of NCLB legislation & results Teresa; I googled it and got about 140 000!

It would be good to see good graphs Ramona, or the wide body of literacy research that Elfarran mentions. I'm wondering what data the graphs would be based on? Is it just my lack of statistical know-how or is trying to graph real literacy like trying to graph growing maturity? I suppose I end up, like some of you, just getting very frustrated that what we know so plainly from our own experience (not just with reading and writing, but, as Mardie says, with everything!) isn't as plain as day! And too often my frustration makes me inarticulate; I just fume.

[Ramona Lowe]

We--by which I mean those of us who value real literacy--need to develop a a way to put numbers with the real literacy activities we value. The powers want things in graph form and want to see growth from week to week. They don't get how literacy is more spiralling than linear, and until we can give them the holy grail of data, they'll continue to mandate more NCLB type tests and students and teachers will suffer the collateral damage from them.

Mardie, I agree entirely about how those with a financial interest in programs have been pulling the string. But have you noticed that Scholastic is now touting classroom libraries (for which they are happy to sell you a various sets of books) almost as much as their programs? One of my favorite vendors is the American Reading Company who exist to put books into class libraries. Their catalog is better than some reading textbooks I've seen.
We gotta keep the faith . . . and keep fighting the good fight. (Trying to give myself a pep talk here)