Reading
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When this piece airs, or does whatever an online article does when it actually goes online, I will have been at the University of Minnesota for 29 years, having been hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Secondary Education in September 1970. A lot has, of course, changed in those 29 years — at the University of Minnesota, in the world of reading, and in the world of learning more generally. At the university, the Department of Secondary Education has been absorbed into the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. In the world of reading, skills management systems and scope and sequences have disappeared, while whole language, literature-based instruction, the reading wars, phonemic awareness, balanced instruction, and a host of other concerns, causes, and conflicts have emerged. And in the world of learning, the cognitive revolution and schema theory are now part of the old guard, while constructivism, situated learning, and sociocultural concerns are just a few of the new features of todays learning landscape.
But one thing has not changed. Reading for secondary students — in fact, reading for students beyond the primary and lower elementary grades — gets relatively little attention. Here in the United States, as elsewhere around the world, there is widespread acceptance of the importance of higher levels of literacy for students, levels that can only be achieved across the years of elementary and secondary school — and beyond. Yet despite this acceptance, most educators, researchers, and policy makers focus their attention on the lower grades. For example, the report on reading most often cited in the U.S. literature at the moment, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), concentrates on preschool through third grade; the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, the national reading research center funded by the U.S. federal government, focuses on beginning reading; and the most recent “Whats Hot, Whats Not” poll in Reading Today (Cassidy & Cassidy, 1999) lists phonemic awareness as the hottest of hot topics.
The amount of attention given to secondary students is not, of course, going to be hugely influenced by this brief commentary. Nevertheless, two contemporary constructs that have the potential to change the way secondary teachers teach seem well worth highlighting. These are the “teaching for understanding” approach and the concept of scaffolding students learning. I will address the first of these topics here and the second in an upcoming commentary.
Teaching for Understanding
Over the past decade or so, several groups of educators and researchers have given considerable attention to teaching for understanding. These include John Bransford and the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (in press); Ann Brown, Joseph Campione, and colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley (Brown & Campione, 1996); Fred Newmann and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin (Newmann, Secada, & Wehlange, 1995); Grant Wiggins and his colleagues working with the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (Wiggins, 1989; Wiggins & McTighe, 1998); and David Perkins and his colleagues working with Harvards Project Zero (Blythe, 1998; Perkins, 1992; Wiske, 1998). Perkins approach is the one that has been described most completely in the literature, the one I am most familiar with, and the one I will describe here. However, I would stress that each of these approaches has a number of exciting and innovative features and is well worth serious study.
A large part of understanding Perkins notion of teaching for understanding and its importance is the realization that in some ways schooling is not going well even for our best students, that all too few students attain the deep level of understanding critical in todays world (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Bruer, 1994; Perkins, 1992; Resnick, 1987; Ryder & Graves, 1998). Recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress strongly support these scholars contention. For example, of the 12th graders tested, only 6 percent reached the advanced level in reading (Donahue, Voelkl, Campbell, & Mazzeo, 1999), only 3 percent reached the advanced level in science (OSullivan, Reese, & Mazzeo, 1997), and only 1 percent reached the advanced level in history (Goodman, Lazer, Mazzeo, Mead, & Pearlmutter, 1998).
Understanding, explains Perkins (1992), enables a person “to explain, muster evidence, find examples, generalize, apply concepts, analogize, represent in a new way, and so on” (p. 13). To teach for understanding, he continues, we must go beyond simply presenting students with information; we must ensure that they accomplish three tasks:
Students must retain important information.
Students must understand topics deeply.
Students must actively use the knowledge they gain.
In order to assist students in attaining such understanding, Perkins and others argue that we need to teach far fewer topics than we are currently teaching but to teach them far more thoroughly than we typically do. More specifically, Perkins suggests that a substantial amount of our teaching should be done in fairly lengthy units with several specific features. He delineates these features in a four-part framework:
generative topics
understanding goals
understanding performances
ongoing assessment
If we are going to teach far fewer topics, then we had better choose those topics wisely. This is where the concept of generative topics — topics that are accessible and central to the subject area students are studying, but can also connect to many other topics both in and beyond that subject area — comes in. Generative topics can be concepts, themes, procedures, historical periods, theories, ideas, and the like.
For example, consider the concept of plot. Plot is central to the study of literature; it is an important element in many types of literature and in many individual pieces of literature. But it also exists outside of literature. Historical episodes — for example, the U.S. Civil War — basically follow a plot, as do our lives.