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RadicallyRedefining LiteracyInstruction:AN IMMENSE OPPORTUNITY

Students in today’s English and language arts classes typically are not asked to read, discuss, or write analytically. But by emphasizing suchauthentic literacy activities, Mr. Schmoker maintains, we could bring aboutthe results that all our reforms seek: higher test scores, intellectualdevelopment, and a narrowing of the achievement gap.

BY MIKE SCHMOKER

AUTHENTIC LITERACY — the ability to read, write, and think effectively— belongs at the very top of the reform agenda. There is every reason tobelieve that these capacities, if acquired across the disciplines, willchange lives by the millions and will redefine the possibilities of publiceducation. Best of all, the most effective ways to impart these vital skillsare disarmingly simple.

For Vincent Ferrandino and Gerald Tirozzi (the respective presidents ofthe national associations for elementary and secondary principals),

“under-developed literacy skills are the number one reason why students are retained, as-signed to special education, given long-term remedial services and why they fail to graduatefrom high school.”1 They conclude that literacy “speaks to the larger societal issues of accessand equity. In our society, being literate opens doors — and opens them wide.”

If literacy is so important, how difficult would it be to provide excellent literacy instructionacross the disciplines? Mike Rose’s classic, Lives on the Boundary, gives us a clue. Rose grew uppoor in East L.A., in a tiny house where he shared a bedroom with his parents. For years, schoolwas a place of boredom and frustration. He assumed he would never attend college or escapethe conditions that accounted for the “ravaged hope” felt by the adults he grew up around.2

MIKE SCHMOKER is a writer, speaker, and consultant living in Flagstaff, Ariz. His most recent book is Results Now: How WeCan Achieve Unprecedented Improvements in Teaching and Learning (ASCD, 2006). He can be reached at schmoker@future-one.com.

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for the reading and writing assignments. Andthe students did this work in class. As Roseputs it, they merely “read and wrote andtalked” their way toward an education that fewstudents receive in the K-12 school system.Simple stuff. Any teacher can begin to do thesethings. Only later did Rose realize that he and

Then, in the 10th grade, a maverick teachercame to Rose’s rescue. Jack MacFarland taughtin a fashion radically different from his col-leagues. To the near exclusion of all other ac-tivities, he had his students read, discuss, andwrite about record numbers of books andarticles in response to questions he prepared

If literacy is so important, how difficult would it be toprovide excellent literacy instruction across the disciplines?

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his fellow members of the “voc ed crowd” had in fact re-ceived a “prep-school” curriculum. Rose’s personal suc-cess — he is now a professor at UCLA — suggests whatcould happen for students on a grand scale, across the so-cial spectrum.

But his success shouldn’t surprise us. The literature isstrewn with evidence that such straightforward literacy in-struction would have a monumental impact on students’lives. It all begins with close, careful reading.

THE POWER OF DEEP, PURPOSEFULREADING

“No subject of study,” writes Jacques Barzun, “is moreimportant than reading . . . all other intellectual powersdepend on it.”3 Intellectual power and development flowonly and directly from what Richard Vacca calls “strategicreading,” what James Popham calls “purposeful reading,”and what legendary inner-city principal Deborah Meiercalls “deep reading.”4 But this is not the kind of readingmost students now do in English and language arts.

There’s no mystery here: such reading starts with goodquestions and prompts. From the earliest grades, studentsneed numerous, daily opportunities to read closely (or re-read) an article or a chapter in a textbook for meaning: toweigh or evaluate the logic or evidence in a text — or intwo or more related texts — in order to find the answer toan arresting or provocative question.5 We do such readingto test a proposition, such as “Columbus was a great man.”We do it to marshal support for an argument or proposea solution to an intriguing social or political problem.From college on, most of us have done such reading witha pen or highlighter in hand so that we can mark key pas-sages or patterns in a text. College students and adult pro-fessionals read in this way routinely.

But not so much K-12 students. Imagine what wouldhappen to levels of intellectual attainment if we began tomake daily opportunities for this kind of reading? From theearliest grades, students could be given literally hundredsof opportunities to read and discuss the answers to higher-order questions like this one suggested by Richard Allingtonfor first-graders: “Who would make a better friend: spideror turtle?” (The children are reading or listening to theAshanti story “Hungry Spider and the Turtle.”6) Older stu-dents could be asked to read about two successive Presi-dents, say, Herbert Hoover and FDR, and then asked to eval-uate them for their effectiveness. Or students could com-pare and evaluate the character traits of Old Dan and LittleAnne, the hunting dogs in Where the Red Fern Grows.

Many of us have seen how animated and intellectual-ly engaged second-graders become when asked to read

stories like “Jack and the Beanstalk” and then asked toconsider whether Jack is an admirable hero or an ethicallychallenged rascal. We’ve seen how perceptively studentsread when asked to read a story twice — and with a penin hand — as they underline, jot marginal notes, or com-plete a graphic organizer to assemble their thoughts fordiscussion and writing assignments. Accompanied by agood program of vocabulary instruction, such activities willcause test scores to soar.7

This analytical, argumentative approach is exactly whatstudents need to succeed in college. But it is markedly dif-ferent from what students now receive. Moreover, there isgood evidence that this approach would make school emi-nently more interesting to students who now find it boringand alienating.8

At Tempe Preparatory Academy, an open-enrollmentcharter school in Tempe, Arizona, students’ favorite class,year after year, is the daily, two-hour “Humane Letters” sem-inar. Every day, students from seventh through 12th gradesread and write and argue the issues they encounter in his-tory and literature. Boring? Repetitious? Hardly. As TempePrep student Eric Dischinger put it, “I love it! The conceptof forming ideas and opinions about these texts has beeninstrumental for me in learning how to think and explorein other areas of academia. I take the thought processes Ilearned in Humane Letters and apply them in Spanish,chemistry, and math.” He tells me, “I have learned how toconstruct an argument and then defend it.”

ARGUMENT: THE COREOF COLLEGE KNOWLEDGE

There is magic in this simple combination of a good textand a provocative question (given before — not after —students have read a text), combined with the chance toargue and support an interpretation from one or more texts.9

And any teacher can learn to conduct such activities, whichexercise students’ natural intellectual powers and are themodel for the best academic and professional discourse.

It all starts on the playground. As Gerald Graff pointsout, “kids love to argue,” to compare and evaluate the rel-ative merits of their favorite athletes and pop stars. ForGraff, there is no substantive difference between academicwork and such playground polemics, especially if we fur-nish texts that give students a basis for analysis, discussion,and writing.

We can do this — while also building reading, writing,and discussion skills on the foundation of the best contentstandards in every discipline, including such well-knownand highly valued literacy standards as discerning fact fromopinion; comparing and contrasting themes, characters, and

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interpretations; understanding an author’s purpose; or rec-ognizing bias. An important recent study affirms that thisargumentative approach to learning content, in all subjectareas, truly constitutes the “college knowledge” that sofew students now acquire in K-12.10 The recurring theme ofthis study by David Conley is that college success hingeson students’ abilities to analyze texts thoroughly, to cri-tique an author’s position, and then to “advance an argu-ment using evidence.”11

More interesting yet, arguing from close, focused read-ing has been found to be the best basis for effective stu-dent writing, which powerfully extends students’ abilitiesto think and reason across the disciplines.12 It is time wemade the case for requiring preservice teachers to learnto teach writing in this way.

THE UNSUNG POWER OF WRITING

Close, strategic reading is the first step toward deep un-derstanding. But analytic, persuasive writing about goodtexts amplifies and refines students’ critical reasoning ca-pacities even further. Consider just a sample of what re-searchers have found about the importance of writing —which is curiously underemphasized in the K-12 curricu-lum.

For Theodore Sizer, writing is “the litmus paper of thought,”so vital to intellectual development that it deserves to oc-cupy “the very center of schooling.”13 As things stand, how-ever, writing barely shows up on the periphery of school-ing.14 We have to stop offering such excuses as “With somany students, there isn’t time to grade papers.” Many ofus have found highly efficient ways to teach writing wellwithout engaging in conventional — and time-consum-ing and counterproductive — grading practices.15

To get a better grasp on the link between writing andreasoning, listen to what Dennis Sparks, executive direc-tor of the National Staff Development Council, has to sayon the subject. “Writing,” he tells us, “enables us to noteinconsistencies, logical flaws, and areas that would bene-fit from additional clarity.”16 Like close reading, writing isthinking — perhaps in its most powerful and intense form.William Zinsser, a highly respected authority on writing,avers that writing is “primarily an exercise in logic,” whichenables us to “write our way” into an understanding of textsor concepts that previously mystified us. Why make suchan effort? Because “meaning is remarkably elusive. . . .Writing enables us to find out what we know — and whatwe don’t know — about whatever we’re trying to learn.”17

In “The Learning Power of Writing,” R. D. Walshe writesthat we “shouldn’t hesitate to describe writing as incredi-ble or miraculous . . . a technology which enables thought

to operate much more deeply than it normally does dur-ing conversation or inward reflection.”18 Indeed, it is onlythrough writing that students can engage the “upperreaches of Bloom’s taxonomy.”19 Writing, observes JohnFranklin, is the “key to student learning; it directly cultivatesthe most valuable job attribute of all: a mind equipped tothink.”20 Or, as Gene Budig recently wrote in these pages,writing is not only critical to the “crafting of a good edu-cation,” it is also a “fundamental building block for de-signing and achieving professional success and advance-ment.” According to an extensive survey of human re-source directors, employees must now write more than ever.In the fastest-growing industries, those who can’t writewell are less likely to be hired and far less likely to be pro-moted.21

With all this going for it, shouldn’t every aspiring teach-er be learning the case for this “miraculous” technology?And shouldn’t students be given daily opportunities to re-spond in writing to good questions about the content theyencounter in textbooks, articles, and literature? Shouldn’tteacher teams be sharing and developing stimulating ques-tions for everything they teach, in every discipline? Thesesimple, intellectually rich activities (not our ubiquitous work-sheets) are what truly engage the “upper reaches of Bloom’staxonomy.” And, as Douglas Reeves has found, “nonfic-tion” writing, in every subject, correlates strongly with achieve-ment gains.22

For this reason, the report of the National Commissionon Writing calls our attention to the alarming gap betweenour knowledge of the lifelong importance of writing andthe sadly diminished role it plays in most schools.23

LITERACY’S ‘KNOWING-DOING’ GAP

When John Goodlad and his teams visited thousandsof language arts classrooms as part of his large-scale studyof instruction, he found most students enduring Englishclasses in which they “rarely read or wrote . . . they scarce-ly even speculated on meanings or discussed alternativeinterpretations” of what they read.24 Years later, the authorsof The Shopping Mall High School found English classroomsmarked by a “wholesale absence of intensity about think-ing.”25 My classroom observations and interactions withaudiences of educators overwhelmingly confirm this.26

Richard Allington uses an ingenious expression that re-veals a lot about the current state of literacy instruction:he refers to the “reading and writing vs. ‘stuff’ ratio.”27 Inmost classrooms, the majority of instruction consists of“stuff,” with little or no connection to literacy skills. In grades1 through 3, it is not unusual (even in schools with goodtest scores) to find two-thirds of the reading period being

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spent on “color, cut, and paste activities.”28 In the latergrades, students are seldom found discussing or writing inresponse to good questions about interesting texts. Instead,as Lucy McCormick Calkins and her colleagues have ob-served, students are “making dioramas, game boards, posters,or mobiles to accompany a book . . . making new bookswith illustrations . . . [or making] murals or other artwork.”29

She has observed classrooms with a 1 to 15 ratio of read-ing and writing to such “stuff.” Calkins laments this situa-tion as the triumph of “literary arts and crafts” over substan-tive literacy instruction. Sadly, many of us were trained,even encouraged, in these approaches. Such activities —and the culture that tolerates them — may do more to ex-plain the overall achievement gap than any other factor.

AUTHENTIC LITERACY ANDHIGHER TEST SCORES

There are other insidious, if well-meant, forms of “stuff,”all of which reveal the real roots of the achievement gap.In too many classrooms, instead of analyzing and debat-ing the issues in fiction or editorials, students are perennial-ly drilled on such terms as “climax,” “setting,” or “risingaction.” Will we ever wake up to how inane and time-wasting this is? Or students are asked to identify decon-textualized statements as either fact or opinion. Such exer-cises miss the point. But they can produce a short-termboost in test scores.

Then the scores plateau. We have yet to learn thatthoughtful reading, writing, and discussion, in redundantabundance, promote faster, more enduring achievementgains on state assessments than quick-fix approaches.30 AsMichael Pressley recently found, what raises test scores inurban schools is exactly “what works everywhere: inten-sive instruction more driven by the higher-order than thelower-order skills.”31

It is time to embrace and act on the evidence that au-thentic reading, writing, and discussion will promote higherscores, intellectual development, and a substantial narrow-ing of the achievement gap.

AUTHENTIC LITERACY — NOW

We could begin immediately by providing studentswith far more in-class opportunities to read interesting andprovocative texts purposefully, always guided by good ques-tions that stimulate discussion, debate, and effective writ-ing. Such work will assuredly proceed more successfullyif practitioners work collaboratively to continuously share,develop, and refine effective and stimulating questions, writ-ing assignments, lessons, units, and assessments.

In science, social studies, English, and beyond, studentsshould be reading, writing, and discussing their way to-ward deep understanding as they respond to questions suchas these:

• Should we drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Ref-uge? Consider the issue from scientific, economic, and en-vironmental perspectives.

• As we read and study the American Civil War, pre-pare to make the case for the South. (I learned this ques-tion from Theodore Sizer.)

• As you read each chapter in The Catcher in the Rye,look for the answer to this question: What is wrong withHolden Caulfield? (I adapted this question from Grant Wig-gins and Jay McTighe.)

And we should remember to make adequate room forconsidering popular topics, among the best ways to pro-mote both real-world and academic intellectual capaci-ties.32 As I write this, my own daughters have just complet-ed extended argumentative research papers. After carefullyreading several books, articles, and statistical tables, oneargued that the Beatles edge out the Stones as the great-est rock ’n’ roll band of all time; my other daughter arguedthat, historically, Coke’s advertising campaigns beat Pepsi’s.These are the most polished, passionate, and academical-ly worthy pieces either has produced.

Such simple reading and writing activities cultivate pre-cisely those intellectual capacities most necessary to suc-cess in college and careers.33 For what it’s worth, my audi-ences across North America strongly agree with me thatthe worksheet curriculum directly prevents us from mak-ing this critical transition toward authentic literacy instruc-tion — with its predictably marvelous consequences.

Changing to the pursuit of authentic literacy may be thesimplest, most productive, and most enjoyable change wecould make in our efforts to reduce the achievement gapand prepare students for life and learning. In doing so, wewill discover, with Theodore Sizer, that “we don’t knowthe half of what these kids can do.” With so much at stake,with the academic success and life chances of tens of mil-lions of students on the line, there is no good reason to de-lay adopting such practices across the disciplines — start-ing tomorrow.

1. Vincent L. Ferrandino and Gerald Tirozzi, “Wanted: A ComprehensiveLiteracy Agenda Pre-K-12,” advertorial in Education Week, 5 May 2004,p. 29.2. Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989),p. 47.3. Jacques Barzun, “The Centrality of Reading,” in Morris Philipson, ed.,Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 21.4. Richard Vacca, “From Efficient Decoders to Strategic Readers,” Edu-cational Leadership, November 2002, p. 6; W. James Popham, “Curricu-lum Matters,” American School Board Journal, November 2004, p. 33;and Jay Mathews, “Seeking Alternatives to Standardized Testing,” inter-

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view with Deborah Meier, Washington Post, 17 February 2004, pp. 1-10.5. Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, 2nd ed.(Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Develop-ment, 2005).6. Richard L. Allington, What Really Matters for Struggling Readers (NewYork: Addison Wesley Longman, 2001), p. 8.7. Ibid.; and Wiggins and McTighe, op. cit.8. Jacqueline L. Marino, “Between the Lines of Goodlad, Boyer, and Sizer,”English Journal, February 1998, pp. 19-21; and Mike Schmoker, ResultsNow: How We Can Achieve Unprecedented Improvements in Teachingand Learning (Alexandria Va.: Association for Supervision and Curricu-lum Development, 2006).9. Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-sity Press, 2003); Neil Postman, The End of Education (New York: Knopf,1995), p. 73; Theodore R. Sizer, Horace’s School (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1992); and Wiggins and McTighe, op. cit.10. David T. Conley, College Knowledge (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,2005), p. 6.11. Ibid., p. 80.12. George Hillocks, “Synthesis of Research on Teaching Writing,” Edu-cational Leadership, May 1987, pp. 71-82.13. Quoted in Marino, p. 20.14. Edward J. Kameenui and Douglas W. Carnine, Effective Teaching Strat-egies That Accommodate Diverse Learners (Upper Saddle River, N.J.:Merrill, 1998); and National Commission on Writing, The Neglected“R”: The Need for a Writing Revolution (New York: College Board, April2003).15. Readers interested in finding excellent, practical advice on this mattershould conduct an Internet search on the phrase “handling the paperload.”16. Dennis Sparks, Leading for Results (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: NSDC/Corwin, 2005), p. 38.17. William K. Zinsser, Writing to Learn (New York: Harper & Row, 1988),

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pp. 14-16.18. R. D. Walshe, “The Learning Power of Writing,” English Journal, Oc-tober 1987, pp. 22-27.19. Bonnie L. Kuhrt and Pamela J. Farris, “Empowering Students ThroughReading, Writing, and Reasoning,” Journal of Reading, March 1990, p.437.20. National Commission on Writing, p. 11.21. Gene A. Budig, “Writing: A Necessary Tool,” Phi Delta Kappan, May2006, p. 663.22. Douglas B. Reeves, The Daily Disciplines of Leadership (San Fran-cisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003).23. National Commission on Writing, p. 11.24. Marino, pp. 19-20.25. Arthur G. Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David K. Cohen, The ShoppingMall High School (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1985), p. 103.26. Schmoker, op. cit.27. Allington, p. 27.28. Michael P. Ford and Michael F. Opitz, “Using Centers to Engage Chil-dren During Guided Reading Time: Intensifying Learning ExperiencesAway from the Teacher,” Reading Teacher, May 2002, p. 711.29. Lucy McCormick Calkins et al., A Teacher’s Guide to StandardizedReading Tests: Knowledge Is Power (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998),p. 51.30. Allington, pp. 8, 25; David Liben and Meredith Liben, “Learning toRead in Order to Learn: Building a Program for Upper-Elementary Stu-dents,” Phi Delta Kappan, January 2005, pp. 401-6; and Wiggins andMcTighe, pp. 302-8.31. Quoted in Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, “NAEP Results Offer Scant In-sight into Best Reading Strategies,” Education Week, 11 January 2006,p. 14.32. Graff, op. cit.33. Budig, op. cit; and Conley, op. cit. K