Is Lucy Calkins Really a Proponent of "Direct, Explicit Instruction"?

That's what she claims, but the lessons in her curriculum don't bear that out.

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Once again, Lucy Calkins has stirred up something of a kerfuffle on Twitter. This time the spark was something she wrote in response to a piece in an Illinois news outlet that was critical of her curriculum.

“I have always been a strong proponent of explicit phonics instruction, and in general, of direct, explicit instruction,” Calkins wrote, in what was essentially a lengthy letter to the editor. “Anyone who knows my work knows I have written literally thousands of minilessons in which kids are taught through the teacher naming, then demonstrating, then guiding kids to practice a skill or strategy.”

To those familiar with Calkins and her background, this claim might sound odd, or at least disingenuous. Whole language and balanced literacy, the movements with which Calkins has been identified, grew out of an education philosophy that sees teachers as “guides on the side” rather than “sages on the stage.” Direct, explicit instruction is generally seen as being at the opposite end of the educational spectrum.

Predictably, the reaction to Calkins’ piece, like much of the debate over her Units of Study (UoS) curriculum, has centered on phonics. I’ll leave that issue to others and focus instead on whether other aspects of her curriculum—namely, her approaches to reading comprehension and writing—actually follow the principles of “direct, explicit instruction.”

Obviously, that’s the kind of term that can mean different things to different people. Many assume it just means lecturing, but psychologists who study the process of learning—and who have found direct, explicit instruction to be highly effective—mean something far more complex and interactive than that.

For example, they generally mean that a teacher:

·         breaks down a complex concept or skill into manageable chunks;

·         begins lessons with a review of what has previously been taught;

·         frequently checks for student understanding;

·         provides models of how to solve problems; and

·         ensures students have plenty of guided practice before they’re expected to perform complex tasks independently

Calkins’ definition includes some of these elements, but an examination of a typical UoS comprehension lesson reveals that some key features of explicit instruction are missing. A basic one—so basic that it isn’t even mentioned in the usual formulations, because it’s just assumed—is that instruction should focus either on a skill that is genuinely transferable, like decoding, or on substantive content.

If you’re using explicit instruction to teach a skill that is largely illusory, it doesn’t matter how closely you follow its principles—it’s not going to work. That’s a problem not only with UoS but with the standard approach to reading comprehension in American classrooms.

A Lesson in Summarizing Nonfiction

To evaluate Calkins’ claim, I chose a lesson, more or less at random, from a third-grade unit on the skill of “summarizing narrative nonfiction” that is included as a sample in a UoS brochure. The teacher does indeed start by “naming” the skill she’s planning to teach. (Even though Calkins is supposedly an opponent of “scripted” curriculum, her curriculum provides a script.)

“Today I want to teach you that when readers read a true story about a person or an event in history, they usually know from the start why the person or event is famous,” the script says. “They know the end of the story. This clues readers into the details that will turn out to be important because they relate to the climactic ending.”

The next step in Calkins’ formulation is supposed to be “demonstrating,” but there’s not a lot of that in this lesson. The teacher is just directed to “cite a person that kids know,” giving the example of LeBron James: if you know he’s a famous basketball player, you’ll recognize that one important detail in his biography is that he was the first high school basketball player to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. A marginal note explains that the teacher doesn’t always need to model a strategy using a “demonstration text.” Here, the note promises, “the active engagement will work to cement your teaching.”

The “active engagement” part of the lesson has the teacher remind students about the demonstration text they read the day before, a biography of Ezra Jack Keats. “Think about what Ezra is known for [i.e., being an artist],” the teacher is supposed to say, “and whether there is also a related second theme that runs through this story.” The hypothetical children in the hypothetical UoS classroom discern that Ezra also wanted his father’s approval. Then they do a “turn and talk” to come up with details relating to both themes.

Now it’s time for the kids to practice the skill, using biographies that the teacher has “channeled” them to read. As usual, the curriculum doesn’t specify any particular subjects for the biographies. The teacher’s role is to gather “high-interest, accessible books” for students to choose from—and to make sure that they can actually read the books they’ve chosen. The UoS text cautions that “frequently during nonfiction units, children hold texts that are just too hard.” Why? Maybe “a preponderance of large colorful photographs … lure people into thinking a book is easier than it is!”

The teacher tells the children to think about why the person featured in their chosen biography is important, and then find details in the part they’ve read so far that relate to what that person ends up being famous for. Then there’s another turn-and-talk, after which the teacher is directed to “celebrate the summarizing work students have been doing.”

The teacher then urges the students to keep reading their biographies and keep summarizing—including “the important details” and leaving out the unimportant ones, aiming for four or five sentences. It’s not easy, the teacher should acknowledge, but it helps to think about “what you know of a story structure”—a character who has certain motivations, encounters trouble, and either gets past that trouble or finds a solution. Then, after reminding kids they should aim to read 20 or 25 pages, the teacher tells them, “Off you go!”

The next part of the lesson is labeled “conferring and small-group work,” but the focus isn’t on summarizing. Instead, the goal is to help students “transfer” skills they’ve learned earlier, when reading fiction. The teacher is directed to sidle up to children while they’re reading and ask questions like, “What sorts of work are you doing at this point, as a reader?”

What’s Missing from This Lesson?

The fundamental problem with the lesson, and with Calkins’ approach to comprehension generally, is that the focus is primarily on a supposed skill rather than any particular content. Rather than having kids learn about Ezra Jack Keats or any other individual, the goal is to have students learn to summarize. But as with all comprehension skills, whether you can apply the skill of summarizing will depend to a large extent on whether you have enough background knowledge to understand the text.

The UoS script itself starts out by noting that when you’re gathering details to summarize a biography, it’s tremendously helpful to know why the person you’re reading about was famous. But it’s unclear whether students will know much about the subjects of the biographies they’ve chosen. They may have picked a book just because they liked the cover. Calkins notes that students often struggle more to understand nonfiction than fiction, but she doesn’t explain the reason: nonfiction texts are more likely to assume background knowledge that children don’t have.

There’s lots of evidence that summarizing can be a powerful way to boost comprehension and retention of information, so we do want kids to learn how to do it. But, once they’ve grasped the basic idea of what a summary is, it works best to have them practice summarizing material they already know something about. Let’s say they’ve been studying the Civil War and have learned something about the role played by Abraham Lincoln. If they then read a biography of Lincoln, they’ll be in a much better position to understand it, discern the important details, and summarize it. In the process, they’ll deepen and reinforce their knowledge of Lincoln.

Another basic problem with the UoS lesson is that while it explains what a summary is, it doesn’t explicitly teach kids how to summarize—and it certainly doesn’t teach them how to create a written summary, although that’s supposed to be the end product. Merely telling kids they should include important details and leave out unimportant ones is unlikely to be enough for most third-graders.

The UoS brochure includes images of a couple of exemplary summaries written by actual third graders. One reads:

Louis Braille wanted to make freinds. But no one even talked to him. Until Louis Braille started talking to people. But earlyier in the story before he moved to france Louis Braille had a lot of freinds. Every one liked him in cluding his brothers and sisters. In the end in France he had freinds.

According to the caption, these examples show students “connecting earlier parts of the text with their theories” about how various parts of the text fit together. But if you don’t know much about the life of Louis Braille—as I don’t, and as the teacher might not—it’s hard to say whether this paragraph really does that. That makes it hard to give a student meaningful feedback.

A More Explicit Approach to Summarizing

Let’s compare the UoS lesson to the approach taken to summarizing by The Writing Revolution. (I’m the co-author of a book by that name, which describes the method.) Before students are introduced to the concept, they will have been explicitly taught how to do things like construct a sentence, if that’s what they need. That doesn’t mean they’re just given a definition or an explanation. It means lots of guided practice, followed by prompt, specific feedback.

Then they learn how to create a Summary Sentence by providing brief answers to a series of question words. Through modeling by the teacher and whole-class practice, they learn how to combine the answers into a well-constructed sentence before being expected to complete one on their own.

For example, let’s take the biography of Ezra Jack Keats that the UoS unit appears to have used as a demonstration text. The teacher might lead the class through a process that would result in something like this:

Who/What: Ezra Jack Keats

(did/will do) What: became an artist

When: beginning in the 1930s

Why: always loved to draw and paint

How: successfully

Summary Sentence: Beginning in the 1930s, Ezra Jack Keats, who had always loved to draw and paint, became a successful artist.

If students have learned how to create a linear outline for a paragraph—which includes instruction and guided practice in generating topic and concluding sentences and writing notes for detail sentences—they can plan a summary paragraph. If they do, the Summary Sentence above could become their topic sentence.

All of this will be embedded as much as possible in content that is part of the core curriculum, ensuring both that students will have adequate knowledge to produce coherent writing and that the writing process will deepen and reinforce the content they’re supposed to be learning.

The bottom line is that schools and districts need to recognize that the problems with Calkins’ curriculum aren’t limited to its approach to phonics. Even if she’s fixed those problems—or if schools using UoS add a “phonics patch” and continue using the rest of it—many students will still flounder.

I don’t mean to single out Lucy Calkins for criticism. The same kinds of problems appear in most other widely used literacy curricula, not to mention in teacher prep programs and professional development sessions. The problem is much bigger than any one individual.

But one individual did say she’s a “strong proponent” of “direct, explicit instruction.” And that claim doesn’t seem to hold water.