GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Something not often included in discussions of administrative reorganizations and mayoral control is what actually sets New York City classrooms apart from those in other school districts. One defining characteristic: Teachers here are pushed to encourage “accountable talk” in their classrooms by requiring students to justify their claims and relate them to statements made by others.

The conversation strategy, which is available for school districts to purchase as a set of professional development tools, is meant to teach children who don’t have complex conversations in their homes how to discuss ideas in a respectful, academic way. But the approach has its shortcomings, at least according to a teacher at Brooklyn’s PS 108, Diana Senechal. On the Core Knowledge blog, Senechal writes that accountable talk can actually stifle conversation:

In education, “accountability” suggests a wrongdoing: we are made “accountable” so that we can no longer slip by with poor practice. Why, then, must a good class discussion be called “accountable”? Shouldn’t it be driven by something deeper, like desire for truth, curiosity about the subject, and respect for others? Accountability should not be our highest ideal; it has value and meaning only when higher principles are in place. Those principles present, a class discussion needs no special name. Accountable talk could help us out of a bog; but once we can breathe and walk, we should make full use of our faculties, using the words and phrases that seem best. One does not have to be “accountable” at every moment; there is room, in a good class discussion, for exclamations, tangents, and incomplete ideas.

Senechal’s entire essay, which includes riffs on trademark law and clumsy language, is worth a read.

A few weeks ago, I passed on some readers’ questions about the Core Knowledge Reading Program to Matthew Davis, who is coordinating a pilot of the program in New York City elementary schools. He got back to me today with some answers.

Ira asked whether the program addresses syntax, since he finds that his students are very weak in understanding grammar and sentence structure.

Matthew Davis: In the Listening and Learning strand, the children will be hearing sentences with a lot of syntactical variety, including longer sentences than they would generally encounter in early reader type books they read on their own. We hope this oral experience of the language of books will help the students develop a sense of syntax. Also, beginning in grade 2, the Skills strand will address grammar and syntax explicitly. We expect to do some sentence-combining type of exercises to practice syntactic expansion. Details are being refined as I write.

Smith wanted to know how content is selected and sequenced, and how this program differs from what elementary teachers do already. (more…)

Yesterday, Michael Shaughnessy of EdNews interviewed Dr. Matthew Davis, who is leading the implementation of the Core Knowledge Reading Program pilot in New York City. Much of the interview covers basics of the program which we’ve discussed here already, including the two-strand approach to teaching reading and comprehension and the body of research supporting this method. What the interview highlighted for me are the contradictions of researching a program while trying to decide whether to continue using it, especially when real children are the subjects.

Davis says that the pilot will begin this year in kindergarten classes at 10 high-needs schools, then add grade 1 next year and grade 2 in 2010-11. But the continuation of the pilot “will be contingent on success in year one and a continuation of funding,” he says. Sounds fair: a program should prove itself before people (in this case, the Fund for Public Schools) invest further. Davis describes the plan for assessing the program:

Within the next several weeks, students in both sets of schools will be administered nationally standardized reading assessments in order to establish a baseline performance. These same tests will be administered again at the end of the kindergarten. In addition, there will be formal observation of all teachers in the pilot classrooms to ascertain any possible correlation between the level of implementation of the Core Knowledge program and the level of student achievement. In addition, specific case studies will be conducted by the NYCDOE in three pilot schools to provide additional qualitative information.

As far as the test are concerned, we hope to see a significant difference in word attack, word reading, decoding skills, and spelling by the end of the kindergarten year — because the program has what we think is a very strong way of teaching the mechanics of reading. Background knowledge and vocabulary take a bit longer to build, and gains don’t start to show up on some tests until later, but, by the end of the three-year period, we hope to see the front end of what we think will eventually be a very significant difference in vocabulary, oral comprehension, and reading comprehension.

So although the survival of the program may rest on a single year’s results, the promised impact of the program — increased vocabulary and content knowledge — may take three years to show up. At least three years: (more…)

Discussion of reading instruction — which started with a look at the Core Knowledge Reading Program (CKRP) being piloted in NYC this year — has really taken off, with commenters raising important questions: How does the content in CKRP differ from what’s being read now? What about helping children understand syntax? Does vocabulary development in Science differ from other subject areas?

While I look into those issues, here’s a technique one Queens teacher uses to help her students learn new words. Katie Kurjakovic, an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher at P.S. 11 in Queens, illustrates the problem with an anecdote:

A second-grade teacher was preparing to read a story about George Washington’s wife, Martha, to her class. She anticipated all the unfamiliar vocabulary she thought they would encounter. She told them what colonies and colonists were. She spoke of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. Then, shortly after she began reading, a girl raised her hand with a puzzled look on her face. “What’s a wife?” she asked.

Kurjakovic uses a six-step process to explicitly teach vocabulary to her English Language Learners. Before reading a text, she identifies and introduces (“previews”) new vocabulary for her students, then she reads the text, uses the words in the context of the text and then in a new context, and finally gives her students an opportunity to use the words. (more…)

In response to yesterday’s post about the Core Knowledge Reading Program, reader Smith asks,

Is he saying their is a core set of content that would prepare a student to understand a randomly selected reading passage on a standardized test? Could someone explain this idea to a non-ELA teacher? I’ve always assumed those reading passages could range from “The Mysteries of Ancient Egpyt” to “Sally’s Bad Day at School” to “Roger’s Time Machine Adventure”. How is content selected?

Great question. It’s true that the content of test reading passages varies, and I don’t think anyone believes that a child can be prepared with content knowledge specific to every possible topic.

Rather, some children enter school knowing thousands more words than others, and this difference compounds over years of schooling in a “rich get richer” scenario called the “Matthew Effect” by researchers. (Don’t take my word for it: this study, one of many, found that by age 3, children of parents with smaller vocabularies not only knew fewer words, used fewer words per hour, and used a smaller variety of words per hour, “but they were also adding words more slowly.”)

Hirsch summarized this effect in a 2006 article in American Educator:

Many specialists estimate that a child (or an adult) needs to understand a minimum of 90 percent of the words in a passage in order to understand the passage and thus begin to learn the other 10 percent of the words. Moreover, it’s not just the words that the student has to grasp the meaning of—it’s also the kind of reality that the words are referring to…. When a child doesn’t understand those word meanings and those referred-to realities, being good at sounding out words is a dead end. Reading becomes a kind of Catch-22: In order to become better at reading with understanding, you already have to be able to read with understanding.

(more…)

A week after Sol Stern argued in City Journal that New York City should create an office of reading improvement and provide low class sizes and scientifically-based reading instruction in high-poverty, low-scoring schools, the DOE announced a new reading initiative: teachers at 10 pilot schools will implement the new Core Knowledge Reading Program (CKRP) in grades K-2.

Education historian Diane Ravitch wrote in favor of the program in the Post on Monday, saying it’s a smarter choice than the “unproven” Balanced Literacy curriculum that Klein introduced in 2003. “Balanced Literacy doesn’t stress content knowledge, vocabulary or phonics. And we now know that it didn’t work,” she says, citing flat reading scores on the 4th and 8th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

What will the new reading program look like? (more…)