According to Common Core Students Are Expected to Read More
Why I Support the Common Core Reading Standards
This English professor thinks the program's arroyo to reading could fix the problems she sees among her higher students.
The text of the Gettysburg Address on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Common Core proposes having students study the structure and content of such texts in detail, reading for comprehension before emotional connection. (Reuters)
"I have reading comprehension." She whispered information technology, as though information technology were a communicable affliction. The young woman and I were chatting exterior the meeting room at a prestigious university where an education symposium was taking identify. She was a higher sophomore, bright, talented, and confident. With a bit of pressing, I verified that what she meant was that she had poor reading comprehension skills and had struggled with reading throughout all of her school years. Having learned that I was an English professor, she wanted me to suggest books for her to read; she wanted to savour reading more. I readily provided, along with some slight condolement.
"Many of my college students accept trouble reading," I told her. "And it's non your fault or theirs. Students just aren't beingness taught how to read anymore."
She nodded emphatically. "I don't feel similar I've always been taught how to read well," she said.
She is far from alone.
When I was invited recently to attend a 2-day conference with David Coleman, president of the College Board and the main architect of the Mutual Cadre Land Standards, I was skeptical. With seven years of experience in secondary pedagogy and over twenty years in higher instruction, I've seen a lot of so-called reform. The purpose of my coming together with Coleman, who'd assembled a small group of scholars, writers, and, educators, was to explore the state of reading today and the opportunities offered by the Mutual Core literacy standards for improving reading skills. Afterwards two days of give-and-take with stakeholders united by a love of linguistic communication and a desire to increase the level of reading comprehension at all learning levels, I was convinced. The Common Core's "deep reading" approach to literacy and language arts is desperately needed, and volition give students like the one I talked to at the symposium the tools to exist prepared for college, career, and life--tools they currently lack. I know because I meet these unprepared students in my higher classroom.
About ten years ago, I started requiring the students in my full general education English classes at the academy where I teach (primarily freshmen and sophomores not majoring in English) to sign a "contract" during the first calendar week of the class. They must agree, among other things, to obtain the required textbook and bring it to each grade. It might seem odd that in a college class I would take to brand such expectations and so explicit. But in the past decade or so, I have constitute that students are seldom if e'er held accountable for or even actually expected to read the assigned texts. Years of their so-called "reading" is spent "making connections" between themselves and text or the world and the text, only the foundational step of really reading the words on the page is neglected often to the point that actually reading the assignment isn't necessary: Students become skilled at responding to leading questions that solicit merely their opinions or experiences. And they manifestly get decent, or fifty-fifty splendid, grades for doing and so.
Getting my college students to ain and use a literary text hasn't been the only claiming. I have found that, increasingly, I have to teach students to read, really read, the words on the page in order to be able to answer simple questions about the text. I have to railroad train them to wait down at the words rather than looking at me or up at the ceiling or into their hearts in social club to comprehend the meaning of the language. I accept to remind them to cite passages every bit evidence when they answer questions, something more than and more of them are unaccustomed to doing. I have to exhort them to utilise dictionaries to expect upwards words they don't know because the arroyo to "reading" they are and so familiar with does not depend on knowing the meanings of words. Instead, they have been expected just to offer "reader-response" answers to questions that prompt readers to react superficially to the text rather than to encompass it. This subjective approach emphasizes loose, personal reactions to texts and interpretations that can not always exist supported the text itself. So, for example, when I teach William Blake'southward poem, "The Tyger," many of my students are erroneously convinced, based on reader-response style impressions, that the tiger in the poem is a "symbol of evil" when nothing in the text offers such evidence. A colleague of mine recently had a grade of students insist with no textual support that Samuel Becket's 1953 existential drama, Waiting for Godot, is most gay marriage. Even English majors, I'm finding, rely more than and more on Spark Notes summaries considering years of lively classroom debates most vague literary themes take overtaken attention to how authors create worlds through language.
It's not every bit though the students at my establishment are an bibelot: My university enrolls high- and low-achieving students and enough in between, resulting in a student body that closely reflects national averages. Plenty of figures confirm the validity of my own anecdotal evidence about reading. Co-ordinate to a written report past ACT in 2008, merely 10 percent of 8th graders are on track for college readiness by the time they consummate high school. The National Assessment of Educational Progress indicates that only 38% of 12th graders performed at or above the Proficient level in reading in 2009 (the latest year available for this measure). A 2011 written report by Harvard'south Program on Education, finds the overall rate of proficiency in reading for U. S. students to be 31%. This places the U. S. 17th among the nations, far from globe leader status. (American higher education, on the other hand, continues to set the global standard.) M -12 teachers, meanwhile, vastly overestimate their students' learning and preparedness for college. Equally reported this week in the Chronicle of College Didactics,
while eighty-9 percentage of high-school instructors in a just-released ACT survey described the students who had completed their courses as "well" or "very well" prepared for first-year, college-level piece of work in their discipline, only nearly one-quarter of college kinesthesia members said the aforementioned thing about their incoming students.
This is why as someone whose life centers on reading and who is witnessing firsthand the furnishings of unacceptably depression reading proficiency rates, I applaud the reading standards adopted by the Common Core.
The language arts and literacy standards of the Common Cadre emphasize careful reading--the shut reading of texts to ensure comprehension. These are exactly the skills about of my students lack upon entering college. This means that rather than teaching literature from the diluted reader-response approach so pervasive today, the emphasis will exist showtime and foremost on understanding what the text actually says.
Reading comprehension skills are not unlike physical muscles: Exercise increases strength. Hence the Common Core reading standards also emphasize the quality and complexity of texts that students read. Instead of a steady nutrition of watery kiddie lit, the Common Core requires students to grapple with a wide variety of content-rich, loftier quality texts from beyond a multifariousness of cultures, eras, and genres. Such texts model for students college, however reasonably attainable, models of thinking and writing, better preparing them for career and college. A student volition develop more than reading comprehension skills during one 50-infinitesimal period spent examining one paragraph from the Declaration of Independence than a calendar week of classroom time spent discussing rad themes in the latest immature-adult novel.
Many teachers themselves have not been taught to teach this fashion; indeed many of them have non been taught to read this mode themselves. (I know this because these teachers take been in my classroom.) But the Mutual Core Standards for reading include sample questions especially to accost this gap: The questions are designed for the teachers to use to cultivate the students' deep-reading skills.
Not surprisingly, some teachers are resistant. They themselves were taught using the old practices--the practices that have dominated the academy for the by few decades, and that have sacrificed reading comprehension to the politicized responses to literature. One teacher recently complained in a post on The Washington Post's website that the CCSS exemplar "narrowed whatsoever word to obvious facts and ideas" contained in the Gettysburg Accost. But it is misguided to think that much in such a rich and complex a text would be "obvious" to a high school student; this view may perhaps stem from the instructor'southward own superficial reading. Paying attention to a rich text, no matter how unproblematic the questions seem, always opens upward insight. Even examining how the significant of the word "dedicate" unfolds in the Address ( expect again: practice you notice he uses it vi times?) gives students access to the motility of Lincoln's thought. The Mutual Core might seem tough-minded and heavy-handed to some, but when the freight railroad train is dangling precariously off the cliff, it takes ingenuity and musculus to brainstorm to set it aright.
The frustration teachers feel at the constantly changing standards is understandable, equally is the sentiment of ane teacher that his profession " no longer exists": when restrictions pile on height of i another, information technology seems that there is niggling freedom for the teacher to exercise his or her own judgment and expertise. Yet, the fact is that the freedom to teach literary texts was appropriated long ago by politicized special interest groups who would rather interpret Shakespeare, Milton, and Twain using the agenda du jour rather than really read and understand starting time what Shakespeare, Milton, and Twain are saying. Invisible ideological tails have been wagging the dog of daily classroom educational activity for so long that we don't even know what the freedom to read looks like.
The Common Core standards in reading restore liberty, the freedom of students to exist able to read and embrace a text on their own upon leaving the classroom because they have gained the skills to do so without the mediation of a teacher-facilitator. The Common Core standards in reading are designed empower students to read, and to read well, the very foundation of success for college, career, and life.
According to Common Core Students Are Expected to Read More
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/why-i-support-the-common-core-reading-standards/275265/