By: Harvey Smokey Daniels

The greatest source of tears and heartbreak in our family, over all of our child-raising years, was homework. Like by far. Like 90%. Those unbidden, meaningless assignments, mechanical worksheets, and odd-numbered math problems constantly led to friction, battles, resistance, weeping, and regret. It felt like the school was sending little hand grenades home with our kids, timed to explode just before a peaceful, playful, or relaxing evening could break out. That relentless assault on our family life still feels fresh, even though our kids are now 39 and 33.

        During this time, Elaine and I were both teaching, researching, and writing about progressive classroom practices – one of which was not worksheets. Nick and Marny knew very well what our professional principles were, so they could have called out our hypocrisy whenever we tried to enforce the evening’s dosage of drivel. But they didn’t often use that leverage; they knew we would marinate in our complicity. And we pretty much quit supporting school homework when they reached high school.

        And then there was the perennial pinch of being teacher-parents. You want to be a loyal employee of the district. You don’t want to accuse your colleagues of doing dumb or harmful things to children. And you recognize (or you should) that teachers get even fewer opportunities than normal parents to complain about things at school. When you are an educator, you simply can’t afford to be labeled, “One of Those Crank Parents.”

        If you resonate with these concerns, you may be fondly recalling Alfie Kohn’s entirely excellent book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (2006). Kohn likens homework for kids to the Second Shift for workers at the factory. You come home after eight hard hours and surprise – you have to go back to work! Kohn skillfully deconstructs every official rationale for homework. Decades of careful research studies have shown only negative outcomes for elementary kids and glancing, temporary ones for certain high schoolers. Then he runs through the more likely reasons that homework has been sustained against all evidence: upholding tradition, fostering obedience, providing ritual hazing (we had to go through it, now it’s your turn), developing a tolerance for toxic tasks, keeping kids off the streets, and finally, the redoubt of all scoundrels, the notion that homework “builds character.”

      For all the good work our friend Alfie did a decade ago, unexamined homework is still with us, in arguably more toxic forms. It’s bad enough when homework is menial, meaningless, and repetitive–a mere compliance ritual. But the content of homework-sheets can be even more corrupting than the process. We have just lived through another “Black History Month,” during which millions of kids came home with worksheets, mostly focused on Martin Luther King, (apparently the only African American leader of whom worksheet makers are aware.) This year’s assortment included MLK word-finds, matching exercises, fill in the blanks, word searches, and many more. Among the tasks:

1. Crossword puzzle clue for #7 Across:

Martin Luther King was assassinated during the month of __________.

1. A short historical text about MLK, followed by these instructions:

“Circle ten proper nouns and underline ten verbs.”

1. Freedom, peace, march, speech, Atlanta, minister, equal, dream, boycott, leader.
2. “Read these words and place them in alphabetical order.”
3. True-False: “Martin Luther King was a farmer.”
4. For those ready to further explore black heroes, another worksheet confides that Rosa Parks was “a tired seamstress who politely declined to give up her seat on the bus” because of her fatigue. Needless to say, the profile doesn’t mention that Parks had been an activist and leader of the NAACP for two decades and that she was tired of racism, not sewing.

Just in case you’re wondering, I am not making this up. These and hundreds more worksheets are available on the web for teachers to use, and reuse, and reuse. And these are not just time-wasters: they are desecrations of history and a pretty good example of how ignorance is engineered.

Just last week, a suburban Chicago teacher whom I follow on Twitter bravely began tweeting out photographs of her own young children suffering over the daily load of second-shift misery.

This is the face of my five-year-old doing useless homework when she would rather be playing. Five-year-olds don’t need homework. #ditchthehw

Tonight’s useless homework: track how many words you can read in 1-minute #ditchthehw

Things my kids could be doing right now instead of useless homework:

-reading

-playing with each other

-drawing

-talking to me about their day

-playing with their toys

-relaxing after 8 hours in school

#ditchthehw

So let’s get real. Let’s say you may work in a district where there is a serious Homework Policy dictating how many after-school minutes or hours kids are supposed to labor after school. So, let’s start by changing the categories of what counts as homework. Then, let’s design a time that’s stress-free, that invites kids’ curiosity and choice, and that doesn’t start battles between parents and kids, ruin whole evenings, and sell more Kleenex. Possible ideas for kids:

–Spend some time reading a book or magazine you have chosen.

–Go online to investigate a question that popped up in your life today.

–Interview family members about their work, interests, family-history.

–If you are in a literature circle at school, e-connect with classmates to discuss the book.

–Work on an ongoing “passion project,” something you have decided to look into long-term (animal extinction, volcanoes, the Cold War).

–Watch TV shows with family and talk about them.

–Free write in your personal journal (or work on your novel/poems).

–Pick an adult in the community you want to learn from and apprentice yourself.

Let’s grow this list together. Meet me at #DitchTheHW.

Learn more about Smokey!

Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D. 

For many of you, the title of this blog entry may sound a bit nonsensical — Why teach something and then not use it?  But let me ask you to think a bit more deeply about phonics.  If you are reading this you are likely a proficient reader.  When reading how often do you have to stop and analyze or “sound out” individual words?  My guess is that more than 99.9% of the words you encounter in reading are not analyzed or “sounded.”   Most words we encounter as proficient readers are sight words – they are recognized instantly and near effortlessly.  Phonics is hardly used at all when proficient readers read.

We need phonics and other word analysis skills in order to get words into our heads.  But after a few encounters with analyzing specific words, those words become “imprinted” in our brains as sight words.  We need phonics to get words into our internal lexicons.  But once those words are automatized or made into sight words phonics is no longer needed.

Getting words to the point of automatization is critical to proficient reading.  The problem in reading is that all of us have a limited or finite amount of attention or cognitive energy.  Analyzing words, as is done in phonics, uses up a lot of that cognitive energy.  And that energy that is applied to word analysis cannot be applied to the more important part of reading – comprehension.  So what often happens are readers who can read all the words correctly, but because they are spending their precious cognitive resources on word analysis their comprehension falters.

Carol Chomsky noted this phenomenon in her 1976 classic article entitled “After decoding: What?”  Working with struggling readers, she taught them to decode words. However, despite the fact that they were able to decode words accurately, “albeit slowly and painfully (p. 288),” they continued to struggle with reading comprehension and general proficiency in reading.  The answer to her question of “What?” was helping students develop automaticity or fluency in their reading.  She did this by having students read interesting and challenging materials while simultaneously listening to an audio-recorded version of the text.  In a 15 week intervention period (less than four months), her students made approximately 8 months progress in reading!

Phonics is important, no question about it.  It is a tool that readers use to get words into their internal lexicons.  However, proficiency in phonics should not be the goal. Rather the goal should be to get students to the point where most of the words they encounter are automatically recognized so that their attention can be devoted to making meaning.    

The way to get young readers to the point of automatic word recognition is the same way a person develops automaticity in any activity – practice.  However, the practice needs to be the kind that allows children to move to proficient reading.  Two of the best ways of providing proficient practice is through assisted reading and repeated reading.

Assisted reading is what Carol Chomsky used with her students.  Students read texts while simultaneously listening to a fluent reading of the text.  This can occur by reading with a more proficient partner, reading with a group of others, or reading while listening to a recorded version of the text.  In all of these situations, the assist of another reader provides students with a scaffold that allows them to approach fluent reading on their own.

Repeated reading simply involves reading a text multiple times until a student can read it at a level that approaches proficiency.  When students who struggle in reading read a text, the initial reading is not proficient.  However, when they read it a second, third, and perhaps even a fourth time their proficiency improves until they are able to read it much like a proficient reader.  The “magic” behind both assisted and repeated reading is that the improvement that comes from reading one text with assistance and/or repeatedly transfers to new texts that students have not previously read.  In essence, students begin to pull their reading up by their bootstraps.   

While I don’t want to get overly technical in this blog, I do want to mention that, in this age of scientifically based reading instruction, a good deal of research supports both assisted and repeated reading, especially with students who find reading difficult.  In a recent review of research related to fluency interventions Stevens, Walker, and Vaughn (2017) conclude that “Results showed repeated reading,… and assisted reading with audiobooks produced gains in reading fluency and comprehension” (p. 576). My own research on the Fluency Development Lesson (Rasinski, 2010), a lesson that integrates assisted and repeated reading consistently results in improved performance in word recognition automaticity and comprehension.    

While it is critical that we provide students with solid instruction in phonics or word decoding, it is equally important that we keep in mind that we need to take students to that next level word reading—fluent, automatic, and proficient reading.  

References

Chomsky, C. (1976). After decoding: What? Language Arts, 53, 288-296.

Rasinski, T. V. (2010).  The fluent reader:  Oral and silent reading strategies for building word recognition, fluency, and comprehension (2nd edition).  New York: Scholastic.

Stevens, E., Walker, M., & Vaughn, S.  (2017). The effects of fluency interventions on the reading fluency and reading comprehension performance of elementary students with learning disabilities:  A Synthesis of the research from 2001-2014. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 50, 576-590.

You can find resources for teaching accurate and automatic word recognition (i.e. fluency) at Tim’s own website – www.timrasinski.com

Daily Word Ladders by Timothy Rasinski

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimRasinski1

Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D.

In my previous blog posting for The Robb Review, I focused on what should be the real goal of phonics instruction – to get kids to the point where they don’t have to use phonics much in their reading.  We want students to be so proficient and efficient at word recognition that minimal attention is given to word decoding and maximum attention can be directed toward comprehension.   Staying with this theme of reading instruction goals, I’d like to focus on reading fluency and state right off the bat that the goal of fluency instruction should not be to make kids read fast.    It has been this incessant focus on increasing reading speed, I think, that has unfortunately given reading fluency a bad rep.

What is Reading Fluency?

Fluency has been called the neglected goal of the reading program (and it is) (Allington, 1983); it has also been called the bridge from word recognition to comprehension.     I like that bridge metaphor a lot. Fluency is the critical link to making meaning while reading. There are two components to fluency. The first is automaticity in word recognition – the ability to recognize words so effortlessly that most of a reader’s attention can be devoted to comprehension.   Automaticity is the part of the bridge that links to word recognition.

The other part of the fluency bridge is called prosody or reading with expression.  This is the link to comprehension. When a reader reads with appropriate expression that reflects the meaning of the text, she is striving to comprehend that text.    This is the part of fluency that is often neglected in instruction; yet it is critical for comprehension to occur, even when reading silently.

How Should We Teach Fluency?

As with anything we want to become fluent at (e.g., speaking, driving, golf, cooking), fluency is developed through practice.   In reading we have several forms of practice that can and should be employed. These forms of practice include wide reading, assisted reading where a reader reads while simultaneously hearing a fluent reading of the same text by a partner or recording, and repeated reading where a reader reads a text several times until she achieves fluency on that text (Rasinski, 2010).    In all these forms of practice the goal should be reading for meaning, and if reading orally, to read with appropriate expression that conveys meaning to anyone who may be listening.

How Does Reading Speed Fit into the Fluency Equation?

Reading speed (words read correctly per minute) is an indicator of word recognition automaticity and is often called the oral reading fluency (ORF) score.   The more automatic or effortless you are in recognizing words in text, the faster your reading becomes, AND the more attention you can devote to comprehending the text as opposed to analyzing the words in the text.    Reading speed is an indicator or consequence of the fluency component of automaticity, BUT it is not fluency. Our reading speed increases as our fluency improves, not the other way around. I often say that I want our children to become fast readers just the way I am and all of you reading this blog are reasonably fast readers;  but I want them to become fast the same way we all became fast readers – through lots and lots of authentic practice in reading.

So go ahead and use DIBELS and AimsWeb ORF scores, or Hasbrouck and Tindal’s norms (Words Correct per Minute) cautiously and sparingly as indicators of students’ growth in automaticity, but please please please do not let children think that you are trying to get them to read faster.   The increase in reading speed (as well as improvements in reading with expression) will happen with authentic reading practice, not with overt instruction or implied emphasis on reading fast.

Fluency is More than Automaticity

A few years ago I came across recordings of arguably two of the most fluently read speeches in American  history – Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address “Ask Not What Your Country…”     I subjected the oral readings of both of these speeches to an ORF (reading speed) assessment. In both cases, Dr. King and President Kennedy’s readings of their speeches may have landed them in a remedial reading class based on their very low ORF scores.     I am sure they were both automatic in their word recognition, and they could have read those speeches quickly. But doing so would have taken away from the meaning they were trying to convey. Because they were automatic in their recognition of the words in their speeches they were able to devote their attention to making and elaborating on the meaning they wished to share orally. They raised and lowered their voices, had dramatic pauses, changed volume and tone in order to more effectively to deliver their intended meanings to their audiences.   What truly made those speeches fluent was not the speed, but the expression (prosody) that they embedded in their readings.

For fluency instruction to truly work we need to see the goal of fluency as expressive oral (and silent) reading that reflects the meaning of the text.    When we make expressive and meaningful reading of texts the true goal of fluency (and avoid putting emphasis on fast reading) we will see significant improvements in reading comprehension (as well as reading speed).

You can find resources on teaching accurate and automatic word recognition and expressive prosodic reading (i.e. fluency) at Tim’s own website – www.timrasinski.com

Please see also my new book on reading fluency (written with Melissa Cheesman Smith) – The Megabook of Fluency published by Scholastic.

References

Allington, R.L. (1983).  Fluency: The neglected reading goal.  The Reading Teacher, 36, 556-561.

Hasbrouck, J., & Tindal, G. A. (2006) Oral reading fluency norms: A valuable assessment tool for reading teachers. The Reading Teacher, 59(7), 636-644.

Rasinski, T. V. (2010).  The fluent reader:  Oral and silent reading strategies for building word recognition, fluency, and comprehension (2nd edition).  New York: Scholastic.

By: Jim Burke

At a certain point in our lives, it becomes difficult to remember how awful (and, if we stick with it, wonderful) it can feel to learn how to do anything that does not come naturally to us. I was reminded of the feelings that accompany such learning in an unexpected way and when I least expected it.

I was in Wyoming to work with teachers at a high school there over my spring break a couple years back. The teachers wanted to improve their instruction in the areas of reading and writing, a difficult conversation that not every teacher is eager to have in the presence of others. Colby and Carl, the two department heads who had invited me out, told me when I arrived that the workshop would not take place until after school the following day, then continuing on into the evening till about 8 o’clock. Before I could tell them what would happen to the three of us at my school if such demands and schedule were ever imposed, they said, “Since you don’t have to get to work till late afternoon, we thought we would take you fly fishing in the morning.”

“That is such a generous and interesting offer, guys, but I really need to spend the morning preparing for the workshop,” I told them with a smile that was meant to comfort them, assuage their disappointment.

But this was Wyoming. These two guys, who would have looked right at home in a fancy hipster juice bar sipping a wheatgrass latte back in my hometown San Francisco, were driving Ford F-250 trucks with gun racks in Caspar, Wyoming where they taught English and fed their families on the venison and fish they shot and caught throughout the year. They weren’t having my excuses.

“Just be ready when we pick you up at 7 tomorrow morning, Jim. The workshop will go fine. You know your stuff. And besides, we’ll have you back by lunch so you can have some prep time.”

The following day, Carl and Colby drove me out into the meadowlands that skirted the Platte River, a slender stream that snaked its way across the open prairie shimmering with spring green grasses. There, in the first light of the new day, Carl taught me a few quick basics about casting that were enough to allow me to flop a fly line onto the moving water. Then, having set me up, he walked up river to his own station and set to fishing his own water, leaving me to just enjoy the morning.

I caught nothing, of course. Not even a bite. But there was no shame, no embarrassment, no emotional upset. This is because I was not—yet!—trying to learn anything. Once we start down that road, we confront what Tom Newkirk, in his book Embarrassment, calls the “awkwardness principle”:

Any act of learning requires us to suspend a natural tendency to want to appear fully competent. We need to accept the fact that we will be awkward, that our first attempts at a new skill will, at best, be only partial successes. Moreover we need to allow this awkwardness to be viewed by some mentor who can offer feedback as we open ourselves up for instruction. (2017, 10)

There was no cause for embarrassment that fine Wyoming morning on that distant spring day because I was not trying to accomplish anything, did not really care whether I could do it or do it well. It was not even something I had chosen to do. Everything that would come to represent the difficulty of learning—the different knots, the types of line, the different styles of fly rods, the flies, types of water, psychology of the fish, all the different types of bugs they eat, the seasons in which they eat them—was handled by Carl and Colby that morning, thus protecting me from any feelings of incompetence, any aggravation, any anger, any shame.

Only when I returned home later that week did all those feelings begin, for while I may not have caught any fish that day, I did catch a sense of what standing in a river fishing for trout might offer me. Yet from the moment I decided to buy a fly rod, I felt overwhelmed, ignorant, stupid. Heading off to the casting ponds in Golden Gate Park with the new rod and reel I bought soon after at the local fly fishing shop, I felt ridiculous as I watched my bright line spill into a wet nest on cast after cast. What had seemed, in my head, so simple, so easy, so relaxing, so doable in Wyoming, now appeared to be impossible.

Over the course of the next year, however, after taking classes, making time to practice, reading books and watching all those YouTube videos that showed me how to cast, I improved. But it was incremental, the two-steps-forward-three-steps-back type of learning. I had to teach my wife to ask not “Did you catch any fish?” but “Did you enjoy yourself at the river?” It took me three months to catch my first fish, and even that seemed more an accident than an achievement. And when I caught that trout finally, it slipped the hook, thus leading to another lesson in the language of fishing: I had caught but not “landed” the fish as the men at the fly shop explained to me the following week when I went by to tell them of my progress.

My point in telling this story is as simple as it is important: Nothing has taught me more about learning than experiencing all over the sustained feeling of incompetence that accompanied me through my first year of fly fishing. Whether it is fly fishing or writing an academic essay, the experience made me realize that we must learn the vocabulary (of flies, lines, reels, water, and so on); develop the background knowledge (about water, insects, about  various fly fishing techniques, the fish themselves—who knew fish were so smart!?); acquire the skills themselves, typically with the guidance of someone we have been willing to be vulnerable with as they guide us through that process; and, finally, maintain the patience and persistence needed to learn to do anything of any complexity with some skill.

Even now, after two years of fairly disciplined effort in all these areas, I remain a novice at best—and I love it. There will be time enough to master the craft, but in the meantime, I am learning to be a better teacher of students, of how to read, write, and learn because fly fishing constantly reminds me how hard it is to learn anything—and how good it feels when we eventually do.

Learn more about Jim at The New English Companion Website!

Connect with Jim on Twitter @englishcomp

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