Thank you! This is a great post, and a careful, close reading of the actual curriculum. Very helpful!
I often find that many people in education are sloppy and imprecise in their use of language. (Not you!) So when a phrase like "explicit instruction" becomes trendy, they immediately embrace it, without really understanding what it entails. Hey, we're **all** doing explicit instruction, right? That's why it's so helpful for you to list some of the actual practices that define this approach -- pretty much everything from Rosenshine's principles.
Anyway, great post! I always enjoy reading your work.
Lucy saying she is against “scripted” curriculum and then giving a script, saying she’s always has been for “direct, explicit instruction“ and then doing nothing of the sort is part and parcel of her whole problem, which I don’t think is unfair to say is dishonesty. She also works for Columbia and opens one of her books talking about what humble regular person she is and contrasts herself with those out of touch ivory tower people. She has a gift for knowing what misleading shit will help her sell stuff.
“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.”
We don't need to read beyond this comment. The minilesson, the cornerstone of the workshop model, is a flawed concept. I politely but adamantly pushed back in one of my training sessions, explaining the importance of the scaffolded maxilesson in order to lay a foundation for the skills and concepts necessary for students to work independently.
As is often the case in education, we argue at the extremes--are we a sage on the stage providing direct instruction or the guide on the side facilitating a workshop model? I think of the four different roles I play when I'm teaching a lesson:
1) I'm the Peer in the Rear as I create curiosity for a new topic, often using an engaging video. If I'm not excited, students won't be either.
2) I'm the Sage on the Stage introducing new concepts, skills, and knowledge to students with several scaffolded activities.
3) I'm the Guide on the Side as I circulate and observe individuals, pairs, and groups process the new information in various ways.
4) I'm the Mentor in the Center as I bring the class back together and provide feedback to clear up misconceptions.
The classroom is a big space with room enough for lots of different types of interactions.
My son is struggling so much in his school that uses Lucy Calkins for reading comprehension and writing. He badly needs explicit instruction in these areas. How to help him when he is not taught this at school? Any resources or articles (besides yours!) for explaining to school administrators why kids need more explicit instruction in reading comprehension and writing? Thank you for this article.
Great work! I have struggled with the rubric in my own instruction. I received have shifted to outcomes based grading for a year to see how it works. My school allows me that flexibility. This has involved a pivot towards grading primarily of summarize work, so clearly articulated outcomes, rubrics, and work samples work together to make assessment accurate and to make sure everyone has a chance to achieve mastery. But the ramping up of scaffolding has also has the long term impact of reduced variability, creativity, and individuality, and I don’t know how I feel about that. A decade ago when I was teaching college freshman, my program trainer emphasizes limited all such guideposts including sample layouts and outlines to give students the maximal experience of choice when rhetorically positioning content. It seems over the decade I have traversed from one exterminator to another and I don’t think age of student is the only driver variable. Thanks for giving me a chance to think about all this. The situation only becomes more complicated when we factor in the shadow presence of AI. But that is another discussion and comment.
What a wonderfully complex article. Thank you! There is a lot here to mine, so for now, I'll just post a reminder of what reading comprehension entails. I begin each chapter of my instructional guide (From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense) with relevant research from "Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert". Here's the beginning of Chapter Six, Making Sense of Words We Analyze:
Relevant Research from “Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Practice”: There is general consensus that as people read, they construct a mental representation of the situation being described by the text, linking information from the text with relevant background knowledge . . . Perfetti and Stafura’s (2014) Reading Systems Framework identifies three constructs that underpin reading comprehension. The first is concerned with knowledge, be it linguistic knowledge, orthographic knowledge, or general knowledge. The second describes processes involved in reading, in which they include decoding, word identification, meaning retrieval, sentence parsing, inferring, and comprehension monitoring, along with the interaction of these processes with each other, and with knowledge. The third factor captures general cognitive resources such as memory . . . Alongside lexical knowledge, children need to know how words in a sentence operate together. It is not surprising, then, that performance on tasks that tap syntactic comprehension or awareness of morphology in spoken language is associated with reading comprehension (e.g., Lervåg, Hulme, & Melby-Lervåg, 2017; Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Stevenson, 2004) . . . Poor comprehenders find it difficult to integrate ideas across a text and are less skilled at answering questions that require an inference to be made (for review, see Cain & Oakhill, 2009) . . . Explicitly teaching a strategy helps children to understand the purpose of reading more quickly than they would otherwise, via self-discovery . . . Willingham (2006) also drew our attention to the fact that more consistent effects are seen when strategy instruction is applied in later grades (approximately fourth grade onward in the United States). This probably reflects the fact that a reasonable level of reading fluency is needed before children can benefit properly from text-level strategy instruction . . . Explicit strategy instruction is effective, it can be short (Willingham suggests five or six sessions), and it works best once the basics of word-reading fluency are in place (pp. 25, 26, 29, 32, 33).
Thank you! This is a great post, and a careful, close reading of the actual curriculum. Very helpful!
I often find that many people in education are sloppy and imprecise in their use of language. (Not you!) So when a phrase like "explicit instruction" becomes trendy, they immediately embrace it, without really understanding what it entails. Hey, we're **all** doing explicit instruction, right? That's why it's so helpful for you to list some of the actual practices that define this approach -- pretty much everything from Rosenshine's principles.
Anyway, great post! I always enjoy reading your work.
Lucy saying she is against “scripted” curriculum and then giving a script, saying she’s always has been for “direct, explicit instruction“ and then doing nothing of the sort is part and parcel of her whole problem, which I don’t think is unfair to say is dishonesty. She also works for Columbia and opens one of her books talking about what humble regular person she is and contrasts herself with those out of touch ivory tower people. She has a gift for knowing what misleading shit will help her sell stuff.
“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.”
We don't need to read beyond this comment. The minilesson, the cornerstone of the workshop model, is a flawed concept. I politely but adamantly pushed back in one of my training sessions, explaining the importance of the scaffolded maxilesson in order to lay a foundation for the skills and concepts necessary for students to work independently.
As is often the case in education, we argue at the extremes--are we a sage on the stage providing direct instruction or the guide on the side facilitating a workshop model? I think of the four different roles I play when I'm teaching a lesson:
1) I'm the Peer in the Rear as I create curiosity for a new topic, often using an engaging video. If I'm not excited, students won't be either.
2) I'm the Sage on the Stage introducing new concepts, skills, and knowledge to students with several scaffolded activities.
3) I'm the Guide on the Side as I circulate and observe individuals, pairs, and groups process the new information in various ways.
4) I'm the Mentor in the Center as I bring the class back together and provide feedback to clear up misconceptions.
The classroom is a big space with room enough for lots of different types of interactions.
My son is struggling so much in his school that uses Lucy Calkins for reading comprehension and writing. He badly needs explicit instruction in these areas. How to help him when he is not taught this at school? Any resources or articles (besides yours!) for explaining to school administrators why kids need more explicit instruction in reading comprehension and writing? Thank you for this article.
Great work! I have struggled with the rubric in my own instruction. I received have shifted to outcomes based grading for a year to see how it works. My school allows me that flexibility. This has involved a pivot towards grading primarily of summarize work, so clearly articulated outcomes, rubrics, and work samples work together to make assessment accurate and to make sure everyone has a chance to achieve mastery. But the ramping up of scaffolding has also has the long term impact of reduced variability, creativity, and individuality, and I don’t know how I feel about that. A decade ago when I was teaching college freshman, my program trainer emphasizes limited all such guideposts including sample layouts and outlines to give students the maximal experience of choice when rhetorically positioning content. It seems over the decade I have traversed from one exterminator to another and I don’t think age of student is the only driver variable. Thanks for giving me a chance to think about all this. The situation only becomes more complicated when we factor in the shadow presence of AI. But that is another discussion and comment.
What a wonderfully complex article. Thank you! There is a lot here to mine, so for now, I'll just post a reminder of what reading comprehension entails. I begin each chapter of my instructional guide (From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense) with relevant research from "Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert". Here's the beginning of Chapter Six, Making Sense of Words We Analyze:
Relevant Research from “Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Practice”: There is general consensus that as people read, they construct a mental representation of the situation being described by the text, linking information from the text with relevant background knowledge . . . Perfetti and Stafura’s (2014) Reading Systems Framework identifies three constructs that underpin reading comprehension. The first is concerned with knowledge, be it linguistic knowledge, orthographic knowledge, or general knowledge. The second describes processes involved in reading, in which they include decoding, word identification, meaning retrieval, sentence parsing, inferring, and comprehension monitoring, along with the interaction of these processes with each other, and with knowledge. The third factor captures general cognitive resources such as memory . . . Alongside lexical knowledge, children need to know how words in a sentence operate together. It is not surprising, then, that performance on tasks that tap syntactic comprehension or awareness of morphology in spoken language is associated with reading comprehension (e.g., Lervåg, Hulme, & Melby-Lervåg, 2017; Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Stevenson, 2004) . . . Poor comprehenders find it difficult to integrate ideas across a text and are less skilled at answering questions that require an inference to be made (for review, see Cain & Oakhill, 2009) . . . Explicitly teaching a strategy helps children to understand the purpose of reading more quickly than they would otherwise, via self-discovery . . . Willingham (2006) also drew our attention to the fact that more consistent effects are seen when strategy instruction is applied in later grades (approximately fourth grade onward in the United States). This probably reflects the fact that a reasonable level of reading fluency is needed before children can benefit properly from text-level strategy instruction . . . Explicit strategy instruction is effective, it can be short (Willingham suggests five or six sessions), and it works best once the basics of word-reading fluency are in place (pp. 25, 26, 29, 32, 33).