Reflections on Teaching Literacy : Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early [1 ed.] 9781617355462, 9781617355448

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Reflections on Teaching Literacy Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early

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Reflections on Teaching Literacy Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early

Edited by

Willa Wolcott Foreword by Ben F. Nelms

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC. Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Early, Margaret. Reflections on teaching literacy : selected speeches of Margaret J. Early / edited by Willa Wolcott ; foreword by Ben F. Nelms. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-61735-544-8 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-61735-545-5 (hardcover) -ISBN 978-1-61735-546-2 (e-book) 1. Reading. I. Wolcott, Willa, 1942- II. Title. LB1050.E196 2011 418’.4071--dc23                           2011028009

Copyright © 2011 Information Age Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America

In loving memory of Margaret.

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Contents Acknowledgments........................................................................................... ix Preface............................................................................................................. xi Foreword: Margaret J. Early.........................................................................xiii Ben F. Nelms Chronology of the Professional Career of Margaret J. Early..................xxvii 1 In the Catbird’s Seat............................................................................... 1 California Reading Educators, October 1974 2 Anew Each Day..................................................................................... 13 NCTE Presidential Address, November 1974 3 The Pleasure Principle: Making it Work for Reading........................ 21 Midwest Wisconsin IRA, September 1977 4 Issues in Teaching and Learning Language...................................... 31 Concordia College Reading Conference, June 15, 1978 5 Developing a Friendly Attitude Toward Print.................................... 47 Utah IRA, October 6, 1978 6 Educational Priorities in a Technological Society............................. 57 Honors Convocation, Syracuse University, January 30, 1979 7 Is Illiteracy the Disease? Is Literature the Cure?............................... 65 Raleigh, North Carolina, March 2–3, 1979

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Contents

8 What’s News in Reading?..................................................................... 79 Wisconsin Spring Conference, 1980 9 Shared Responsibilities for the New Literacy..................................... 87 Iowa English Council, April 11, 1980 10 Acting on Insights from the Research Base: 1956–1980................... 97 St. Louis IRA, May, 1980 11 Reading as Access............................................................................... 107 Baltimore College Reading Association, October 30, 1980 12 What We’ve Learned from Where We’ve Been.................................117 NCTE Selected Papers, November 1985 13 Knowing What to Do—And Doing It............................................... 125 Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, June 20, 1988 14 Literacy: Emerging, Developing, Reaching New Heights............... 135 Cincinnati, October 26, 1989 15 Clock Watching................................................................................... 145 Convocation, University of Florida, May 3, 1990 Afterword Part 1—“Literacy Is a Means”: Margaret Early Today............ 151 Jane S. Townsend References...................................................................................... 158 Afterword Part 2—Literacy as a Practice: Margaret Early and English Language Arts Today..................................................................... 159 Barbara G. Pace Appendix: Readings for Children or Young People Cited by Dr. Early................................................................................................... 165 Index of People/Organizations................................................................ 167 Index of Topics........................................................................................... 171

Acknowledgments

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  would like to thank Sandra Nimrick, Dr. Early’s heir, for granting me use of these papers. Without this access, the book would not have been possible at all. I would also like to express warm gratitude to Dr. Ruthellen Crews, Dr. Early’s friend, colleague, and personal representative, for her graciousness of spirit in guiding and assisting with this project in many ways, including providing me with photographs, speeches, Margaret’s journal entries, and other invaluable research materials. My heartfelt thanks go as well to Dr. Ben Nelms, Dr. Barbara Pace, and Dr. Jane Townsend for their willingness to write the Foreword and the Afterword. Their contributions have situated the speeches in a larger context of the English profession in the past and the present. I am especially grateful to my sister, Dr. Sharon Buckley Van Hoek, who provided valuable perspective as an outside reviewer of early drafts. I am further indebted to Suzanne Brown, Barbara Gunderson, and Marilyn Ochoa, librarians at the University of Florida, and to my friend Dr. Minta Napier for their help in tracking down particularly elusive references. A special note of thanks goes to my husband, Edward, for his encouragement and support during this project and his assistance with my computer struggles.

Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, page ix Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Preface

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he numerous addresses that the late Dr. Margaret J. Early gave during her distinguished career represent a rich legacy. Warm and chatty, the speeches strongly reflect her voice, blending together anecdotes, references to research, quotes from cultural contemporaries and, most of all, thought-provoking ideas. As the following Foreword, written by her esteemed colleague and longtime friend Dr. Ben Nelms, indicates, Dr. Early was an outstanding educator in her lifetime and a highly sought-after speaker. Thus, her speeches are addressed to a wide variety of audiences in many different states, ranging in concerns and topics as she occasionally alters the prescribed focus of a particular conference to share information she deems important. Her speeches are frank and sometimes critical, but throughout, she conveys empathy for teachers and a deep understanding of their problems, an understanding that derives both from her own work with students and from years of observations in classrooms. Several speeches contain specific suggestions for classroom teachers at different educational levels; others focus on long-term solutions to present problems (such as her “reading-to-others programs” to reach future generations) as a means of enhancing not only literacy opportunities for all students but also the profession in general. She values and advocates change—the word “new” appears in more than one title—but generally she seeks balance, often cautioning against going too far in any one direction.

Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages xi–xii Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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The selected speeches span two decades, addressing issues that were— and still are—relevant and timely. Thus, many of the themes she targets, from the roles of technology and testing in the classroom to the importance of content-area reading instruction for adolescents, resonate today. The speeches likewise reflect her concern with young children learning to read, with middle schoolers encountering informational text, with high schoolers struggling with the demands of content-area reading or writing, and with teachers growing in literacy and teamwork. The Afterword by two of Dr. Early’s friends and current faculty members at the University of Florida—Dr. Jane Townsend and Dr. Barbara Pace—serves as a counterpoint to explore the extent to which similar issues dominate today. With the exception of her address as NCTE President in 1974, “Anew Each Day,” Dr. Early’s speeches were given orally, long before the day of PowerPoint presentations. Most were never intended to be reproduced in written form (hence the occasional repetition of an anecdote). I have identified in footnotes the occasional study or name that might be unfamiliar to today’s readers. In addition, because a number of her quotes were given without citations, I have attempted to track down these references. Sometimes I have succeeded in finding the original texts or publishing information applicable to the date of the speech. In many other instances— when a given author has written widely or is a cultural figure—I have been able to find only an approximate source for a given quote or passage, and sometimes I have not found an exact page. The lack of thorough documentation, while not detracting from the power of her ideas, thus remains a limitation of this text. This flaw notwithstanding, Dr. Early’s speeches, which are arranged chronologically, give historical insight into important literacy issues not only as they pertained to the seventies or eighties, but also as they currently relate to the field of English education. The ideas contained in the speeches are certain to elicit questions and comments, thereby enjoining us all as readers to engage in similar reflections about what it means to teach literacy today. —Willa Wolcott, Editor

Foreword

Margaret J. Early Ben F. Nelms

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he profession that survives does so in part because of its articulate spokespersons and agents of transformation. From time to time, a profession must study itself—its origins and history, its basic principles and responsibilities, its very reason for being. If it is to maintain its integrity and, at the same time, renew itself in accordance with a changing knowledge base and social context, it must appreciate how it has defined itself through the years. It must examine both the processes and principles that have become established in practice, some that have evolved through the years, some that have remained fairly stable for a long time, some that are still very much at issue. Such study requires an examination of critical documents, public and scholarly writings, recorded events, and the ideas expressed by its leaders. Now, early in the 21st century, we are in the midst of a period of intense self-examination for virtually all professions: medicine, the sciences, law, Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages xiii–xxv Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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finance, architecture, journalism, and especially education. The profession of English is no exception. As the National Council of Teachers of English celebrates its first centennial, this relatively young profession should use the occasion to look closely at itself. This applies equally to college departments of literature and language, of rhetoric and composition, and of mass communication, and to the teaching of language arts in the elementary school, but especially to high school English. As a subject, high school English was first clearly defined by the Committee of Ten in 1894. It has changed considerably, albeit gradually, through the years; however, its basic emphases are still the same: communication arts (reading, writing, speaking, listening) and literature (improvement of literary taste, acquaintance with a recognized canon, and development of critical perspectives). As interesting as our professional documents, scholarly studies, and research reports have been during this first century of high school English, one of the most illuminating sources for professional self-study lies in the careers of those who have professed English as their life work, who have been our articulate spokespersons and agents of transformation.

A Teacher Educator for the Times Margaret J. Early (1924–2008) was active in the profession of English for over 60 years. As a nationally recognized leader, she spoke to and for the profession during several decades of critical changes (the 1950s, the 1960s, and especially the 1970s and 1980s). Accepting an award as an alumna of Boston University in 1994, she listed just a few examples of “the ferment in education” during her career: Brown v. Board of Education, Sputnik and the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), Project English and the model curriculum centers, the First Grade Studies of her mentors Don Durrell and Olive Niles, Chomsky’s “deep structures” in linguistics, the development of cognitive psychology, constructivism, Sesame Street, Head Start, theories of multiple intelligence, teachers as researchers and as a political force, ethnographic research, authentic assessment (with portfolios, for example), cultural literacy and civic literacy—not to mention behavioral objectives and mastery learning (“they’ll be around again”). As tempting as it is, I shall not allow myself to include here a biographical sketch of Dr. Early. But just to give a sample of her diverse roles, let me refer you to a little 16-page document called “Margaret Early Talks about Reading,” published in 1969. At that time, she was a professor at Syracuse University involved in the direction of the Reading and Language Arts Center and the graduate program in English Education. She was also vice president of NCTE (to succeed to the presidency in 1973), past president of the National Conference on Research in English, a trustee of the Research Foundation of NCTE, recently on the

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board of directors of the International Reading Association (IRA), and coeditor of the Journal of Reading. (Appended to this essay you will find a chronology of her professional career, which also includes just a few of the major events that took place in English education during that time.) In all these professional roles, Dr. Early made her mark. Her contributions have been widely influential and will be long remembered by her colleagues, advisees, students, and those whom she generously mentored and supported. Re-reading Dr. Early’s speeches in this historical context is interesting—partly, of course, because of her ability to articulate issues and synthesize research, and partly because of her reflection of the times she faced and her influence on the professional organizations she served. But perhaps the main reason her works are still so engaging lies in her warm awareness of the classroom teacher’s tasks—the problems they face day to day, the conflicting demands on their time and attention, and the effectiveness with which many of them deal with these problems and demands. She recognized and shared their ideals; indeed, she inspired many of them with her own work. But she also was keenly alert to tensions and dilemmas they had to contend with in their daily work. She reflected both on the ethos of her profession and on the heroic efforts of its practitioners. Once at a conference on current issues in literacy education, she turned to a young colleague and exclaimed, “What a great field you’ve entered— you’ll never run out of problems, you’re always going to be needed.” Problems, she insisted, yield to sustained effort. That confidence undergirds a continuing willingness to try something new and to engage in thoughtful inquiry. At that time, and indeed throughout her life, she commented on the outcomes of such experimentation—and, indeed, expressed admiration for “an energizing atmosphere” but also for (and here one sees Dr. Early’s elegance as well as her professional commitment) “a joie de vivre,” “a glamour in teaching” and “a social grace.”

The Reading Teacher and the Teacher Reading In the late 1940s and 1950s, a generation of teachers began their careers in post-World War II America with the assumption that elementary schools were supposed to teach youngsters to read; secondary schools were supposed to teach them what to read: literary classics and challenging documents in history, science, government and economics, and the like. But in actual classrooms where these young teachers found themselves, many of the students did not read. Some of them simply would not read. Many others could say the words and mouth the sentences, but they did not understand or appre-

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ciate the meaning. And, to the teachers’ surprise and horror, a significant number could not read at all. They had reached the ninth or tenth grade, even the eleventh or twelfth, with the reading ability of, say, a fourth or fifth grader, if that. What were they to do, these teachers wondered. Margaret Early was among the pioneers in tackling this problem of reading among American adolescents in a generation when all would be expected to finish high school and more, and more would go on for higher education or into jobs demanding a mature literacy. All students, in all subjects, she realized, had to be taught to read—to comprehend, analyze, and critique—the kinds of texts they were encountering for the first time. The more sophisticated the text, the more sophisticated the comprehension skills required. And the more difficulty youngsters had with reading and comprehension, the more skillful the teacher had to be to achieve success. She was determined to help teachers in this situation. After having worked for a publisher, dealing with sophisticated authors and their exciting new books (John dos Passos, Mary McCrary, Ann Petry), she had begun her own teaching in mill towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts. She was the daughter of parents who had come to Boston from England (who themselves modeled and promoted a commitment to learning and to serious reading) and a graduate of Boston University where she had majored in English with honors. She had hedged her bets by taking some education classes, but avoided student teaching as not germane to her immediate interests; nevertheless, she soon found herself teaching children of working-class parents, high school students who knew they would enter the workforce immediately after graduation. Indeed, she was shocked to discover that many of her students, assigned to read Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, were actually reading at the third-grade level, absolutely unable to cope with 19th-century literary prose. She became especially interested, as she said later, in “the youngster who, in those days, didn’t go to college and who was pretty much forgotten.” She explains that “In New England in those days, college preparatory courses were sacrosanct, but nobody cared about those other kids; you could do what you wanted with them.” This led to her involvement, first, as a participant and later a leader, in the Warren English Project, “which was set up to investigate ways of helping teachers working with these kids to do better by them, to do more kinds of interesting things with them, . . . to acquaint teachers with books that were not on the classics list, junior novels, that sort of thing” (Interview with Alfred Grommon for the NCTE oral history project, pp. 7f). Recruited into the doctoral program at Boston University, in her dissertation she explored “these kids’ attitudes and opinions of English and the teaching of English.” Curiously, she found that “the goal in English . . . these

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kids most approved of—most wanted to achieve—was an enlarged vocabulary,” but ironically, “the teaching practice that they disliked most was the traditional ‘Here are 10 words, look them up in the dictionary and use them in a sentence.’” Furthermore, she discovered that “those kids were very practical in their goals for themselves, the things that they wanted. They wanted to learn to speak better; they were much more interested in oral English than they were in writing.” More surprising, however, was that there were almost no significant differences between these students and their college-bound peers. For instance, college-bound students had no more interest in writing than these youngsters who had no intention of attending college. There simply were no major differences between the two groups’ attitudes and opinions about English. As a consequence of her own experience and research, Dr. Early quickly became an advocate for the integration of the communication arts— reading, writing, listening, speaking—with a special interest in improving the competence of adolescents who had little ability and less interest in reading. Her first article published in a professional journal was “Suggestions for Teaching Listening” (Journal of Education, December 1954), and her second (with Olive Niles), “Give Them a Reason for Reading” (Journal of Education, May 1955). Probably the most prestigious of her early publications was the article on “Communication Arts” in the Encyclopedia of Educational Research (Macmillan, 1960), the purpose of which was to show how the language arts were related in elementary, secondary, and college programs. A paragraph from her introduction still serves well as a summary of this perspective: Use of the term communication arts can be justified on the ground that it describes the goals of language instruction more accurately than did either language arts or English. The newer term points up the nature of language as a means of receiving and expressing ideas. More effectively than language, the word communication suggests the social process through which ideas are transmitted. Communication takes place when meanings that have been clarified in the mind of the speaker or writer are expressed in such a way that they are identified by the reader or listener. Expression and reception of ideas are affected by the setting in which communication takes place and by the media used to transmit ideas. Although broader concepts of communication include nonverbal media, such as art and music, most instructional programs recognize writing and speaking, reading and listening, as the chief tools of communication. (p. 307)

With her appointment to the faculty of Syracuse University in 1954, her commitment to the integrated language arts, with special attention to

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reading and learning, became the basis of years of professional service. She has candidly acknowledged the influence of her senior colleague there, Professor Helene Hartley, particularly in her emphasis on working directly with classroom teachers and in creating materials for classroom use (cf. the Grommon interview, p. 15). Eventually, Dr. Early’s book, Reading to Learn in Grades 5 to 12 [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984]), of course became a standard in the field, pointing the way to young teachers who would work with exactly the same kind of reluctant readers that Miss Early had encountered in the mill town in New England. The fact that she was added to the Reading Hall of Fame almost exactly 30 years later, that she received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Council of Teachers of English and the William S. Gray Citation from the International Reading Association, that she served as President of NCTE and of the National Conference on Research in English, that, with Harold Herber, she co-edited the Journal of Reading, now known as the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy—all these achievements surely indicate the significance of her leadership in this field. But the real evidence of her success, of course, lies in the hearts and minds of those young teachers all over the country, faced with nonreaders for the first time, who have found guidance in her articles, monographs, books, and in her presentations like those collected in this volume—or, without even knowing her name, from teacher educators whom she recruited, mentored, and prepared for their professional roles. Learning to read was one thing; finding joy and personal satisfaction in reading all kinds of texts was another matter. As a reader and teacher of children’s and adolescent literature, Dr. Early modeled enthusiasm for reading a great variety of texts, from the New Yorker and the New York Times to the Booker Prize winners of the British Commonwealth, from teachers’ own stories to political debates and reviews of the latest books and Broadway plays (not to mention Hollywood movies, which she took in regularly, eagerly, and critically). Probably the essay of Dr. Early’s that is most often cited and reprinted is “Stages of Growth in Literary Appreciation” (English Journal, 1960), the stages she identified being unconscious enjoyment, selfconscious appreciation, and conscious delight. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young teachers were helped in the teaching of reading by Margaret Early, but thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of youngsters grew from unconscious enjoyment to conscious delight as they progressed through her Bookmark Reading Program (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970). Beginning with Mr. Fig in the pre-primer, A Magic Afternoon, on through Ring Around the World and other titles in the series, children found pleasure and personal satisfaction in “once upon a

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time” stories, poems, true adventures, and informative essays. Hidden away among the titles were always some skills lessons (main ideas, inferences, questioning the text, and the like), but the focus was always on delight. She wanted youngsters to learn to read and to read to learn, but mostly she wanted them to want to read! In one World Library listing, some 500 titles were ascribed to Dr. Early in one form or another, but she once said that the only one she had kept in her own personal library after retirement was the pre-primer with Mr. Fig. The sophisticated, critical Dr. Early took delight in what she found for children to take delight in.

Tensions in the Profession But the importance of Dr. Early’s work goes well beyond her influence on a generation of young teachers and young readers. When Dr. Early was invited to speak to professional meetings and teachers’ workshops, as she often was, she was particularly adept at identifying and addressing tensions that challenged her profession, issues that divided or united teachers, problems that troubled them, new developments and movements that excited them, questions that provoked them, and classroom successes that inspired them. These continuing, unresolved tensions are perhaps endemic to the profession, certainly as prominent in today’s professional landscape as they have been during the past half century.

Reform vs. Renewal Accepting an alumni award from Boston University, Dr. Early began by saying (with a subtle facetiousness often characteristic of her talk), “What I learned here prepared me also for the amazing intractability of schools that do not change in spite of new students, new technology, new world orders— prepared me, that is, for decade after decade of school reform movements” (Ida M. Johnston Alumni Award Acceptance Remarks, p. 1). Speaking to prospective teachers at Slippery Rock State College (September 1992), she said, “I came into education on a wave of reform. There has been such a wave in every decade this century.” As examples, she enumerated the progressivism of the 1930s and after, the post-Sputnik curriculum reform movement of the late 1950s, a siege of idealistic reforms in the 1960s (free schools, open classrooms, phase electives, teaching the “disadvantaged,” the Other America, “the outsiders”), then the behavioristic reaction of the 1980s (behavioral objectives, accountability, competency testing) which led eventually to Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind—with a bow in the direction of E. D. Hirsch’s cultural literacy and Nancie Atwell’s reading/

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writing workshop in the early 1990s, and of course “whole language.” In a convocation address to College of Education graduates at the time of her retirement on May 3, 1990, she said, “You’ve already learned that you have entered a profession in need of restructuring. . . . We are still fumbling with what that idea means.” She assured these young professionals, “You will go beyond us” (Ch. 15, p. 148).1 So why is change so slow? Dr. Early asked. One principal reason was that teachers were rarely involved in reform; it was imposed on them so that they tended to meet each new proposal with passive resistance and apathy if not outright mutiny. The alternative? For Dr. Early, it was the continuous renewal of teachers in their classrooms, the continuous redefinition of English in relation to one’s students—their needs, interests, concerns, abilities, previous experience. In perhaps the most important speech of her career, her NCTE presidential address (which she delivered in printed form so that the limited time in her session could be devoted to teachers’ discussion and prioritizing of current issues)—in this speech, entitled “Anew Each Day,” she concludes, “Anew each day—or at least each year—we have to determine what is English for these students, for this one; for these teachers, for this one, for me. English cannot—ought not—escape the pendulum swinging that is typical of our society and of education as a whole. . . . What English teachers bring anew each day into the classroom is a reassembling of the familiar; much of what students must discover anew is what others have discovered before them. . . . We rearrange the periphery, but the center holds” (English Journal, 63(8) [1974], 12) She was fond of quoting her mentor, Donald Durrell: the first sentence of his best-known book was, “There is no one best way to teach reading.” Dr. Early expanded this insight: “There is no room for dogmatism in the search for better schools” (Ida M. Johnston Alumni Award acceptance speech, p. 1). What should be the focus of this continual renewal and redefinition? To Dr. Early, learning to use language—to read, write, listen—was virtually synonymous with learning to learn, to think critically, to acquire information and ideas, to comprehend and adapt them, to share them clearly and effectively with others. She wanted students to understand themselves as learners, to find joy in learning, “to value learning as a way to stave off boredom and chaos” (English Journal, p. 12). In a practical sense, she saw this as civic literacy, necessary to prepare enlightened citizens, “more careful consumers of language, more honorable users of it” (English Journal, p. 11). Working out the details of such reform/renewal involved Dr. Early in a significant number of other professional tensions of the era. To list a few: 1. Chapters refer to Margaret Early’s speeches in this volume.

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1. Excellence vs. Equity. An honors student herself, she was always supportive of programs that challenged the best and the brightest, and she was also pleased that national lobbying led to programs that would meet the needs of special, disabled learners. But her continuing interest and focus were on the great middle: students who fell in the middle of various ability ranges, the children of the working middle class, the neglected non-college-bound, the apathetic, even hostile students, and especially youngsters in the middle grades, between primary and senior high school. 2. Curriculum vs. Teaching. As committed as she was to the development of sound teaching materials (like her Bookmark reading series) and to curriculum development, she felt that the emphasis in the late 1950s and 1960s had been too much on curriculum, not enough on teaching strategies. The day-to-day interaction of teachers and students in classrooms was the focus of her research and of her advocacy for reform. 3. Research vs. Inquiry. As devoted as she was to the analysis and synthesis of sound educational research findings, she was skeptical of its practical value for the classroom teacher. It was rarely communicated so as to be understood and applied. Teachers who are careful observers, who take notes and ask why, are involved in research. “I used to think it took a master’s degree or a PhD,” she said. “What it takes is an inquiring mind. . . . If you don’t have one, you don’t belong in teaching” (Slippery Rock, p. 6). She admired teachers involved in John Goodlad’s Centers of Inquiry and Ted Sizer’s Essential Schools; in Deborah Meyer’s shared decision making in District 4 in New York City; in Eliot Wigginton’s Foxfire project in Raban Gap, Georgia; and the network of similar schools across the country (Slippery Rock, p. 8f). “Many ideas for research percolate in lively classrooms,” Dr. Early maintains; “and, of course, we hope that teaching and learning practices can be modified and enriched by what research tells us.” Teacher educators must be “willing to replicate studies in our teaching centers,” and to “initiate studies of significance” (Ch. 1, p. 9). 4. Testing vs. Assessment, or in more technical terms, summative vs. formative evaluation. According to Dr. Early, teachers should use every tool at their disposal, especially their own acute observations, to determine students’ needs, their strengths as well as their limits. Though she expressed contempt for some of the “picayune” tests that were mandated to inform the public of students’ growth in learning and to “grade” schools, she worked with NCTE

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and other professional agencies to assure that well-made tests would be available for teachers’ use; for example, the STEP test of listening (Educational Testing Service), the Stanford Achievement Test in language arts (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich); and especially, A Look at Literature: A Test of Critical Appreciation (NCTE, 1968). Good standardized tests should approximate real-world situations as much as possible; for instance, reading exams should not consist of brief excerpts taken out of context but should use full-length passages with tasks based on authentic situations. She speaks with approval of several examinations; for example, of the Degrees of Reading Power test, part of the New York state competency testing battery, which was influenced by the Cloze Procedure. However, she opposes the use of narrow criterionreferenced tests to impose a narrow curriculum on the schools. She decries “the overregulation of the schools from the outside by parents and school boards, by state legislatures and governors’ commissions, by federal policymakers and secretaries of education.” She continues, “Teachers don’t teach reading as well as they know how because they are not allowed to. They are overregulated” (Ch. 13, p. 129). 5. Didactics vs. Heuristics. Both the public and the profession have wavered in their expectations of teachers. The proverbial pendulum swings. In eras of “back to the basics,” uniformity and conformity are emphasized. Teachers are expected to follow instructions— teachers’ manuals, curriculum guides, specific unit plans—and to adhere to rigorous, but testable, standards. Curriculum is defined in terms of explicit (“behavioral”) objectives, well-defined “scope and sequence” charts, and a nationally recognized body of knowledge (“cultural literacy”). These are manifestations of didactics. On the other hand, in eras of challenge and reform, ingenuity and creativity are lauded. True professionals are expected to exercise great flexibility in determining what to teach to which students and when, to choose among a number of competing instructional strategies, and to adapt to individual students, or at least to the context in which they are teaching. Furthermore, they ought to be well informed about why they teach, why their subject matter is important, and why students respond as they do (or don’t). These are qualities encompassed by heuristics. Teachers practicing didactics are likely to emphasize rules and regulations, well-defined competencies from phonics to grammar to the “five-paragraph essay.” Teachers practicing heuristics are likely to

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emphasize processes (comprehending, composing, communicating) in “real-world” situations. Legislatures and bureaucracies tend to prefer didactics; professional organizations, heuristics. Elementary schools often, but not always by any means, reward the former; colleges and universities almost always, the latter—except sometimes for adjunct faculty. Middle schools and high schools fall between the two extremes. Some teachers (and some of their students) feel more comfortable with the former; some teachers (and some of their students) identify only with the latter. Dr. Early concludes, “A professional teacher is one who knows why a certain learning strategy is appropriate for some children and inappropriate for others. A nonprofessional is one who . . . can follow a prescription or a basal manual lesson. The nonprofessional knows how and what but not why” (Ch. 1, p. 3). 6. Literature vs. Literacy. Though Dr. Early never wavered in her support of literary classics in the curriculum, she also knew that if students were to develop lifetime habits of reading for pleasure and personal satisfaction, a great variety of other texts, including junior novels, current fiction, even bestsellers, should be used. From primary grades on, children must develop proficiency in reading if they are to succeed, but they must find personal pleasure or satisfaction in reading if they are to continue to read throughout their lives. Many of those students “in the middle,” about whom Dr. Early has always been so concerned, “have the idea that reading literature is an elite, intellectual activity beyond their reach.” They have had to make the leap from Dr. Seuss to Shakespeare. She cites one teacher who argues that teachers must “demystify literature”; they must show them that reading literature for personal pleasure does not require “arcane rituals practiced only in the presence of the high priests and priestesses of LitCrit” (Ch. 7, p. 73). Furthermore, from very early in her career, she insisted that students be taught to read informational texts and opinion pieces from the popular press as well as the textbooks required in high school and college courses other than English. She would have regretted as much as John Willinski did the situation he referred to in his book titled, The Triumph of Literature/The Fate of Literacy (Teachers College Press, Columbia U., 1991). One of the distinguishing features of her own textbook series was the balance between “literary” and “informational” texts, and the focus on comprehending and critiquing both, as well as finding personal

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satisfaction in each. Students must discover—and believe—that they can learn, and “to associate reading and learning with pleasure, with satisfaction, with feelings of accomplishment” (Ch. 3, p. 29). “Apathy,” she insists, “is the blight of the secondary school—far more damaging to students and teachers alike than mere skills deficiencies” (Ch. 3, p. 27). 7. Teacher preparation vs. Teacher Education. The dilemma for teacher educators has always been whether to “prepare future teachers for schools as they are” or to educate them so that they feel confident in making decisions on their own. At one time, colleges of education had tended to emphasize theory and research, but follow-up studies of two such programs (which discouraged the overuse of basals) found that “students in both programs once they were in the classroom relied heavily on basals,” following “the guides quite mechanically, without really understanding what they were doing” (Ch. 13, p. 130). Nevertheless, she concludes, “we can neither show nor tell future teachers all they need to know, but we can instill habits of thinking critically and constructively about the different environments, school populations, and instructional approaches they will find in the schools that will hire them” (Ch. 13, p. 131). Dr. Early discusses with considerable approval the self-confidence of British teachers. She attributed this, in part, to the British system of preservice education—intensely vocational, with concentrated field experiences from the very beginning, with methods courses in the chosen curricular area. However, she also focused on two kinds of “content” courses: (a) educational theory and a knowledge base in such areas as language acquisition, the psychology of reading, and children’s and/or adolescent literature; and (b) what the British call a main course, “a discipline of the student’s choice . . . which he will pursue in-depth for his own personal development rather than for strictly vocational purposes.” She sees his “main course” as highly important in developing self-confident teachers at all levels: “When it gives a student the feeling of mastery in one area, no matter how narrow, it bolsters his self-confidence. If he is a scholar in one field and also a teacher, there is a greater chance of his infecting his students with a love of scholarship” (Ch. 1, p. 7). Margaret Early’s awareness of these tensions as well as her zest in seeking to resolve them will be apparent in the speeches in this volume.

Foreword    xxv

The Unfinished Teacher Learner As you peruse these speeches, you will see Margaret J. Early as an advocate and as an inquirer; as a leader and as an observer of her profession; as an enthusiast and as a skeptic; as one who answers many significant questions for her audiences and one who questions many established positions among her colleagues; as one who loves literature, from classic novels to the most recent movie she enjoyed a few days before; as a teacher herself and as a teacher educator; and as a learner herself—always a learner. Of course, she learned from reading and research, from her colleagues and from her students, from professional leaders whom she admired in her past, and from newcomers and neophytes whom she had just encountered. Perhaps the best way to describe her in action is to use her own words: Good teachers understand the process of learning through reading, and excellent teachers help students to become aware of that process. In learning the process yourself, in teaching others about that process, you begin to feel the full impact of a word we use freely in educational circles: developmental. It means becoming. Both students and teachers remain “unfinished” so long as each continues to learn and teach. In the successful relationship that began when [the 23-year-old teacher] and [the 13-year-old student] bumped into each other in Room 109, they exchange roles often; both of them are learners and each, on occasion, teaches the other. (Reading to Learn in Grades 5 to 12, p. 75)

References Early, M. (1954, December). Suggestions for teaching listening. Journal of Education, 137(3), 17–20. Early, M. (1960, March). Stages of growth in literary appreciation. English Journal, XLIX(3), 161–167. Early, M. (1960). Communication arts. Enyclopedia of Educational Research.Macmillan. Early, M. (1970). Bookmark reading program. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Early, M. (1974, November). Anew each day. English Journal, 63(8), 10–13. Early, M. (1984). Reading to learn in grades 5 to 12. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Early, M. (1992). A good time for becoming teachers. (Unpublished speech.) Slippery Rock: University of Pennsylvania. Niles, O., & Early, M. (1954, January).Give them a reason for reading. Journal of Education, 136(4), 102–104. Willinski, J. (1991). The triumph of literature/The fate of literacy. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Chronology of the Professional Career of Margaret J. Early

1942

As a high school senior, worked for her hometown weekly newspaper the Dedham (Massachusetts) Transcript and adopted as her role model Marguerite Higgins, a journalist reporting from the front in World War II; she graduated as the top student in the college preparatory program of the high school in Dedham.

1945

Graduated from Boston University with a BA in English and certification to teach (“I hedged my bets and took the necessary courses in Education.”). Named an outstanding student and added to permanent honor roll.

1945

After graduation, “landed” a job with Houghton Mifflin publishing company, and was “bowled over” by such authors as John Dos Passos, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and Ann Petry.

1947

International Council for the Improvement of Reading established, later to become the International Reading Association (IRA).

1948

Received MA in English from Boston University. Began working as a high school English teacher in New England (1948–1952), the first year at Killingly High School in Con-

*  Items in boldface = major professional events from mid-1940s to 2000. Chapters in this book are designated in boldface as speeches. Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages xxvii–xxxi Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. xxvii

xxviii    Chronology of the Professional Career of Margaret J. Early

necticut, then at Walpole, Massachusetts, continuing to work in the summers at Houghton Mifflin. 1949

Conference on College Composition and Communication organized within NCTE.

1952

Participated in the Warren English Project, a two-week workshop held at Sargent Camp in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where she became associated with Donald Durrell, Olive Niles, and Agnella Gunn, who recruited her into a doctoral program at Boston University. (Durrell, Dean of the College of Education at Boston U. (1942–1952) and nationally recognized scholar became her lifelong mentor and friend.)



Began work as a Warren Research Fellow at Boston University, where she finished her doctorate in English Education and reading in 1954

1954

Brown v. Board of Education.

1954

Accepted a position in the School of Education at Syracuse University, where she served for 31 years, teaching a number of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Reading in the Secondary Schools, Children’s Literature, Methods and Curriculum in Teaching English, Adolescent Literature, Psycholinguistics and the Study of Comprehension, Reading and Writing in Elementary School, and the like.

1956

IRA became a nonprofit, global network committed to worldwide literacy.

1957

Sputnik launched.

1958

NCTE co-sponsors Basic Issues Conference with MLA and other college-level organizations.

1958

Began work as the associate director of the Reading and Language Arts Center at Syracuse (1959–1977), working with William Sheldon.

1960

Article on communication arts in the Encyclopedia of Educational Research.



“Stages of growth in literary appreciation,” a seminal article in reader-response criticism, published in the English Journal, March 1960.

Chronology of the Professional Career of Margaret J. Early     xxix

1961

National Interest and the Teaching of English published by NCTE to make the case for the inclusion of English in federal funding under the National Defense Education Act (NDEA).

1961–62 Served as visiting professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. 1962

Project English and curriculum study centers begin; summer institutes in English sponsored by the College Board.

1962–63 President of the National Conference on Research in English. 1964

Reading Instruction in Secondary Schools, monograph published by International Reading Association (IRA).



Began six years’ service as trustee for research foundation for National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), which she chaired in 1969.

1965

Senior author for Insights into Literature, a volume of the Houghton Mifflin high school literature series; continuing work on other volumes in the series, which had begun in 1957.

1966

Anglo-American Seminar on the Teaching of English held at Dartmouth University (popularly called simply the Dartmouth seminar).

1966

Visiting professor, University of Hawaii, NDEA institute, summer of 1966.



Began three years’ service on board of directors for IRA.

1966–67 President of the New York State Council of Teachers of English. 1967

With Harold Herber, co-edited the Journal of Reading (1967– 1971), which focused primarily on reading in secondary schools and had recently been renamed after seven years as the Journal of Developmental Reading (currently the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy).

1968–70 Phase electives in English adopted by many secondary schools. 1969

“What does research in reading reveal about successful reading programs?” in What We Know about Reading, edited by M. Agnella Gunn, reprinted in the English Journal, April 1969.

1969

“Margaret Early Talks about Reading,” published by Harcourt, Brace and World.

xxx    Chronology of the Professional Career of Margaret J. Early

1969–70 Vice President of NCTE and program chair of the annual convention. 1970



Named Centennial Professor at Syracuse University. Bookmark published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, an innovative reading series for the elementary school, focusing on literature and reading across the curriculum (new editions in 1974, 1979, and 1983). NCTE Commission on Reading (1970–1972).

1972–73 Sabbatical in England, studying teacher education. Speech: “In the Catbird’s Seat,” California Reading Association, October. 1973–74 President of NCTE. Speech: “Anew each day,” NCTE Presidential address, November 28, 1974. 1975

Public Law (PL) 94-142) enacted by Congress, requiring schools to provide equal access to children with physical and mental disabilities.

1977

Accepted appointment as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Education at Syracuse, serving until 1984. Speech: “The Pleasure Principle: Making It Work for Reading,” MidWest Wisconsin IRA, September.

1978 1979 1980

Visiting professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, January–June. Speech: “Issues in Teaching and Learning Language,” Concordia College Reading Conference, June 15. Speech: “Developing a Friendly Attitude Toward Print,” Utah IRA, October 6. Began service on board of directors for the National Society for the Study of Education (1979–1981, 1982–1985). Speech: “Educational Priorities in a Technological Society,” Honors Convocation, Syracuse University, January 30. Speech: “Is Illiteracy the Disease? Is Literature the Cure?” Raleigh, North Carolina, March 2–3. NCTE Distinguished Service Award. Speech: “What’s News in Reading,” Wisconsin Spring Conference. Speech: “Sharing Responsibilities for the New Literacy,” Iowa English Council, April 11.

Chronology of the Professional Career of Margaret J. Early     xxxi

1983

1984 1985



Speech: “Acting on Insights from the Research Base: 1956–1980,” St. Louis IRA, May. Speech: “Reading as Access,” College Reading Association, Baltimore, October 30. A Nation at Risk, report of President Reagan’s Commission on Excellence in Education, contributed to the sense that American schools are failing miserably. William S. Gray Citation as teacher educator in Reading, IRA. “Choices,” speech to honors students, May 11, 1983. Reading to Learn published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, recognized as a standard text in the field. Named to the Reading Hall of Fame. Appointed chair of the recently reorganized Department of Instruction and Curriculum at the University of Florida, with responsibility for PROTEACH, an innovative five-year certification program, culminating in a master’s degree (1985–1990). Speech: “What We’ve Learned from Where We’ve Been,” NCTE Selected Papers, November.

1987

English Coalition, an update of the National Issues Conference and the Dartmouth Seminar, focusing primarily on a rebuttal to E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.

1988

Speech: “Knowing What to Do—And Doing It,” Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, June 20.

1989

Speech: “The Gains We’ve Made—The Challenges Ahead,” Illinois Reading Council, March 18. Speech: “Literacy: Emerging, Developing, Reaching New Heights,” Cincinnati, October 26.

1990

Retirement from the University of Florida. Speech: “Clock Watching,” Graduation Convocation, University of Florida, May 3.

1992

“A Good Time for Becoming Teachers,” Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, September.

1994

Goals 2000: Educate America Act enacted by Congress and signed by President Clinton. Ida M. Johnson Alumni Award presented by Boston University. No Child Left Behind.

2001

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1 In the Catbird’s Seat California Reading Educators October 1974 In this speech, Dr. Early explores possible approaches for improving the quality of preservice and in-service education and touches upon new research trends.

I

want to talk today both as a reading teacher and an English teacher. First, I’d like to consider the opportunities we have to do a better job of helping teachers at both elementary and secondary levels to teach reading. I’d like to consider the problems as well as the opportunities. Then I’d like to cast an eye on where we’re going in research. Finally, let me share a few movements within the National Council of Teachers of English [NCTE] which impinge, I think, on our role as teachers and researchers in reading.

Preservice Education We have never been in a better position to improve the quality of preservice education. In contrast to the ’60s, when superintendents were hiring anyReflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 1–11 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

1

2    Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early

one with a bachelor’s degree, when some were choosing teaching to avoid the military and some were choosing teaching as a creative outlet rather than a serious profession, we now have self-selecting processes at work. Today, fewer undergraduates will choose teaching as a security blanket or a whim. We’ll get more applicants who are truly dedicated and realistic about their chances, willing to spend an apprenticeship in the boondocks, tough enough to survive the least-attractive ghetto post. And we’ll become more selective. I hope we’ll choose many undergraduates from the experienced volunteers and teacher aides now in the classroom. At Syracuse, our graduate courses are bulging. We can afford to be more selective at this level, turning down the unemployed BS who ought not to have been provisionally certified in the first place, discouraging the weak from aspiring to a specialist’s degree in reading. And, of course, we must be stringent with standards for the PhD and EdD since the vigor and intelligence of teacher trainers and researchers are essential to long-term improvements in elementary and secondary education. In the next few years, I expect we shall develop more minors in Reading Education for doctoral students in science, math, history, guidance, administration. Science educators, for example, will be preparing to teach reading to future science teachers, to science teachers in the field, and occasionally to teach secondary reading courses at the university. For the demand for reading courses is on the increase throughout the country. I am confident that nationwide we shall soon see at least one reading course required for all secondary teachers. Right now we in New York State, as you are here, are wondering how we can assure that the requirement of six hours for elementary teachers can be filled in the most meaningful ways. That 6-hour requirement is niggardly, but it is a beginning. I would prefer every elementary teacher (let’s say through grade 4) to be prepared as a language arts specialist. As a minimum, I’d want a course in language acquisition, merging into one in the psychology of reading, one in diagnosis of reading and language development, and one in children’s literature. All these I would consider content courses, concerned with substance more than method. They would precede how to teach, an experience to be reserved for real classrooms. Are you surprised that I attempt to separate content and method? Let me explain. The four courses (do let me use that old-fashioned word course, but if you feel more comfortable, substitute “module” or unit of learning) these four courses—language acquisition, psychology of reading, diagnosis of language development, children’s literature—are all concerned with children’s learning and therefore must involve observations of and interac-

In the Catbird’s Seat    3

tion with children. But not in classroom settings, not yet. These four courses are going to require students to study books as well as children, to find out first what others have learned through years of research and study. The most efficient way to learn this is through reading, discussions, lectures, film viewing, video tapes, and planned observations. Take children’s literature. The first need is to become acquainted with books. You might think this could be best accomplished through a reading list and a well-stocked library. But more is needed. Students must have a chance, too, to sample other people’s critical reactions to books for children and to try out their own reactions on their peers and teachers. Subsequently, they will go into the schools with a solid beginning acquaintance with children’s literature. Then to this knowledge they can add how children react to the books they (the preservice teachers) already know. Or take language acquisition. Teachers—preservice or in-service—can learn more about how children learn language from studying Courtney Cazden or Paula Menyuk or Roger Brown [professors whose research has focused on the linguistic development of children] for a semester than from the same amount of time in unprepared observation of children. Given a selective group of students, I would begin with how children and adults read. Frank Smith’s Understanding Reading doesn’t teach how to teach, but it would be a natural follow-up to the course in language acquisition. So would some of the writings of Kenneth Goodman. Then I would have students examine various theories of teaching reading as exemplified in basal reader manuals, in materials like DISTAR [Direct Instruction System for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading from SRA/McGraw Hill], in books by Stauffer and others on the language experience approach. Maybe I could use a text like Spache and Spache. Some students would need modules on phonology, semantics, and grammar. Similarly, the course on diagnosis would involve detailed study of testing and test theory and observation of the diagnoses of children from various language backgrounds. Experts would model diagnosis and interpretation. Then would come supervised diagnostic teaching of individuals and small groups. I’m talking about preparing professional teachers. I realize that we also prepare nonprofessionals. A professional teacher is one who knows why a certain learning strategy is appropriate for some children and inappropriate for others. A nonprofessional is one who works to rule. He or she can follow a prescription or a basal manual lesson. The nonprofessional knows how and what but not why. The nonprofessional may be highly competent, but in narrow areas.

4    Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early

Which brings me to the strengths and weaknesses of competency-based teacher education. The strength lies in the hope that we can specify what good teachers do as well as what they know. Just as behavioral objectives can force reading teachers to think through their purposes and specify, so far as we know them, the processes and skills of reading, so competency-based teacher education forces us to specify purposes and processes. In theory, the specifying of purposes should reduce mindless behavior. Apprentice teachers will know what they are doing and why, not mindlessly follow the dictates of supervisors, or basal manuals, or the local curriculum guide with its endless list of behavioral objectives. To the degree that teaching reading is a science, not an art, competency-based procedures can work well. We can, for example, specify competence in the administering of diagnostic tests and, to a lesser degree, in the interpretation of results. We can specify competence in making an assignment, developing a study guide, following a basal manual lesson, or eliciting sentences for an experience chart. But teaching reading is also an art, and just as we worry about the effects of behavioral objectives on elementary and secondary teachers, we must be wary of the mechanization of our own teaching. In The Real World of the Public Schools, Harry S. Broudy writes: Most of the current rage for behavioral objectives makes sense in the mastery of skills. . . . Teachers trained to the rule-following level could manage this aspect of instruction, and they could be trained to this level with probably no more than two years of post-secondary work and paid accordingly. They might constitute 85 to 90 per cent of the school staff. The other 10 to 15 per cent of the teaching staff might include graduates of schools designed to train professionals in teaching . . . From this group would come not only the overseers of the paraprofessionals and the designers of didactic teaching, but also whatever more subtle and personalized teaching a public school system can hope to offer. (1972, p. 60)

(I agree, except that Broudy’s timing is wrong. We won’t go back to the two-year training school pattern. The economy dictates that schooling take longer these days. It will take the master’s degree to produce a professional teacher.) Broudy also notes: The latter type of teaching one might subdivide into (a) heuristics, or teaching the pupil to discover for himself what didactics presents to him readymade; and (b) philetics, in which the teacher concentrates on emotional adjustment of the pupil. Both heuristics [sometimes called Socratic teaching] and philetics necessitate encounters between the teacher and pupil as

In the Catbird’s Seat    5 persons; encounters of this sort cannot be programmed, mechanized, or mass-produced. (Broudy, 1972, p. 60)

Apply Broudy’s three types of teaching to yourselves. As you move into competency-based teacher education, how much of your methods courses in reading can be reduced to didactics—and therefore programmed, or modularized, or translated into competency checklists? How much time do you allow for heuristics? How much time should you? And what have you done lately for the emotional adjustment of future teachers? Lest we sandpaper ourselves too severely for not individualizing our instruction sufficiently, listen to these words of common sense also from Broudy: “The blithe idiocy with which we repeat the refrain, ‘Treat every pupil as an individual’ is revealed only when we ask how many people does anyone treat as an individual human person.” How many? He suggests that a half dozen is about par for most of us, reminding us that contemporary novels often depict our failure to reach even this small number. Parents are berated for not treating their own children as individuals. Husbands are accused of not treating their wives as persons in their own right. How often did you as a graduate student, or a teacher in elementary or secondary school, complain of not being treated as a person? Broudy is willing to classify more of learning to teach reading as a didactic exercise than you and I may be. But perhaps there are parallels between learning the skill of reading and teaching the skills. What we can reduce to behavioral objectives in the learning process we may be able to reduce to competency checklists in the teaching process. I am not prepared to throw out all behavior or performance objectives in order to glorify the mystique of teaching. But I want to reduce the packages. We must look for some resolutions to the current craze for behavioral objectives and criterion-referenced testing. Diagnosis of reading, or of teaching, is more often observing and understanding than it is making up limited skills tests, with too few items to be reliable, and with so much specificity that the whole reading process dissolves in a shower of atoms. It is our responsibility to reform behavioral objectives and thus to preserve the old-fashioned virtues of purpose and meaning which they support. If we don’t rerform, the backlash will sweep away all our strides toward making teaching and learning purposeful. Reform should take the direction of composing holistic goals and testing skills in combination since that is the way readers use them. Similarly, we must cluster competencies, not attempt to atomize the process of teaching, about which we know almost nothing for sure. (Consider how little real research we have on what happens between teachers and learners.)

6    Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early

We can see the reform movement starting. Test makers now urge us to consider, not criterion-referenced tests, but domain referenced. I spoke of the need for observation and understanding in diagnostic teaching of reading. These are the significant elements also in the education of teachers. Right now the largest share of this responsibility is left to the cooperating teachers in the Center. Both students and teachers complain about this arrangement. It is our biggest problem. Observation is the subtlest skill in teaching. Surely we are supposed to be more adept in it than the classroom teacher. But I frankly, don’t know how the university faculty is going to find time for observing and critiquing and following up and demonstrating to the extent that students need and desire our help . . . not if we are deskbound writing modules or trapped in committees back on campus. Surely of equal importance to mastering didactic skills is the element that Broudy refers to as philetic. How a teacher feels may be as important— as, not more—as what he or she knows. What struck me most forcibly in the English schools I visited a year ago was the self-confidence of their teachers. It was this self-confidence above all else that seemed to me most enviable in English schools. It was what made it possible for an infant teacher to take on 40 children in an outmoded classroom and arrange for them to work on their own or in twos and threes and to have a dozen or more activities going at once. To generalize sweepingly, I sensed a higher degree of self-confident professionalism among teacher groups in England than I do here. The degree of self-confidence seemed unrelated sometimes to the teacher’s competence or intelligence or background. It was characteristic of teachers of all hues, from the young and radical to the middle-of-theroad traditionalist. They were sure of themselves, or at least able to assume an air of knowing what they were about and why. Self-confidence—real or pretended—is a powerful asset in teaching. It communicates itself to the students. It may be why English children generally like school better than American kids do, why they feel reassured, why they respect their teachers, and why they show respect to each other more often than not. Teachers who are interesting persons and self-confident professionals are enviable assets, and the American visitor must ask: Where does this selfconfidence come from? Why don’t more of our teachers have it? I would guess that part of the Englishman’s self-assurance and some of the American’s uncertainty stems from the national character, and it’s great fun to speculate about the effects on British teachers of insularity and the securities of “knowing one’s place” in a class-conscious society; and with Ameri-

In the Catbird’s Seat    7

can teachers, on the basic insecurities engendered by an immigrant society and class mobility. But aside from these influences, and more important certainly, another great part of it must have to do with the different ways in which we treat our teachers. In England, the head selects his teachers carefully and trusts them enormously, giving them pretty much free reign with both curriculum and methods. In the United States, we are more likely to trust the supervisor and the curriculum maker and the textbook writer first and the teacher last. In England, teachers have had time to make mistakes, to muddle through, to correct their own errors. (“It’s just a matter of common sense, isn’t it?” was the only explanation one headmaster would offer for the excellence of his primary school.) In the United States, teachers are constantly having the rug pulled out from under them as yesterday’s fad gives way to today’s miracle solution. Given the slower pace of English society (still slower, though accelerating on the American gradient), and the greater confidence placed in teachers by parents as well as school authorities, one must still wonder to what extent teacher education is responsible for the British teacher’s self-assurance and for the American teacher’s insecurities. Assuredly, self-confidence is rooted in competence. But competence in the sense that we are using it here in competency-based teacher education was unheard of in England last year. But I found in teacher-education colleges other ideas for sustaining competence and confidence. For one thing, the 3-year colleges were intensely vocational. Student teaching was a characteristic of every year. Surely there is no substitute for field-based experience starting early and continuing unabated through 4 years of undergraduate preparation in this country and on into the graduate programs. At the same time, English preservice teachers pursue a curriculum organized into three major strands: educational theory, basic professional subjects (i.e., methods courses in the curricular areas), and a main subject. The latter is a discipline of the student’s choice, usually a major he has worked on at the O or A levels, which he will pursue in-depth for his own personal development rather than for strictly vocational purposes. It is the main subject which interests me. When it gives a student the feeling of mastery in one area, no matter how narrow, it bolsters his confidence. If he is a scholar in one field, and also a teacher, there is a greater chance of his infecting his students with a love of scholarship.

In-Service Education Having spent too much time on preservice education, let me turn to another reason why I’d say we’re in the catbird’s seat. There has never been a bet-

8    Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early

ter time for teaching reading in the secondary schools. Teachers are more ready than they have ever been for staff development, provided it can be done on school time. But they are even willing to spend some of their own time, if not money, in pursuit of know-how. NCTE conducted four institutes this spring on reading for English teachers and they were oversubscribed. Secondary teachers are coming in larger numbers to IRA [International Reading Association] national and local conventions. To be sure, most of them are English teachers who are coming out to conferences; or consultants or supervisors who are moving into middle, junior, and high schools. As an English teacher, I believe the English department can and must take the lead in secondary programs. For the immediate present, I see a large part of secondary reading instruction taking place in short intensive elective courses which will be taught largely by English teachers. Surely the remedial programs needed in many high schools will be taught by former English teachers. For preservice teachers, for the certified and unemployed English teachers, we need student teaching—call it field experiences—in reading classes. For secondary teachers, one course in developmental reading is scarcely enough. Not enough certainly for teaching reading and study skills electives or for expanding the program across the curriculum. For the role of the English teacher is not to bear the responsibility for every other teacher but to get whole programs started and flourishing. We need to consider schemes for staff development such as ◾◾ team planning in the middle school to divide the task; ◾◾ training teachers (for example, a small number of English or social studies teachers) and assigning each to a team with an untrained teacher; and ◾◾ workshops on school time, tied to learning centers for students. The Right to Read puts us in the catbird’s seat, even though its funding is still severely limited. Right to Read has won considerable attention, and its public relations is probably one of the factors that makes it easier and more exciting to teach reading these days. I wish Title VII, the National Reading Improvement Program, gave stronger direct support to preservice and in-service secondary school programs, but if we can influence local education agencies, we shall have opportunities for in-service in grades 4 to 14. Beginning with 30 million in fiscal ’75, the funding rises to 93 million in fiscal ’78. Assistance to the states amounts to 293 million dollars spread over 4 years.

In the Catbird’s Seat    9

These funds will go to preschool, elementary, and secondary programs in schools having large concentrations of students with reading deficiencies. Each state or school system receiving a grant must prepare a comprehensive reading improvement plan, including diagnostic testing, teacher training, parent participation, and periodic evaluation. Other sections of the National Reading Improvement program provide for ◾◾ 70 million to local education agencies for special emphasis projects to determine the effectiveness of intensive reading instruction for reading specialists; ◾◾ 3 million in fiscal ’75 for reading training on public television; and ◾◾ 32 and a half million for the next 4 years for reading academies for out-of-school youth and adults. I wanted to say a few words about research trends, but I’m afraid that the amount of time I’ve reserved for research in this hour is symbolic of the time that teacher educators have for research in their busy lives. Most of us are too busy with teaching to do much researching. Nevertheless, we are the chief agents of transmittal—both ways. Many ideas for research percolate in lively classrooms; and, of course, we hope that teaching and learning practices can be modified and enriched by what research tells us. So, working with preservice and in-service teachers, we must be aware of research trends, willing to replicate studies in our teaching centers, and able, too, to initiate studies of significance. A research trend that I heartily endorse is the focus on comprehension in the middle school years (grades 4 to 8). There seems to be rather general agreement that major emphasis should shift away from beginning reading, where the dust is beginning to settle on such false dichotomies as decoding versus meaning and methods versus teacher influence. This focus on comprehension is not unexpected. We see psycholinguistic research turning now, at last, from phonology to the more intricate and difficult components of the reading process—the grammatic and semantic. Some of the most probing research along these lines is coming from Canada, from the University of Alberta under Marion Jenkinson, and from the research team at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which includes Frank Smith. An example from Canada that has been intriguing our doctoral fellows this month is Ross Latham’s dissertation from the University of Alberta, in which he explores the relationship between comprehension and the way readers synthesize grammatical elements.

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An NIE [National Institute of Education] study group urged the possibilities of exploring comprehension through computer science wedded to cognitive psychology. A much less sophisticated idea that intrigues me is to examine the relationships between nonverbal and verbal comprehension. Another major area of concern is the effect of nonschool influences on reading. We have long known in rough, general, intuitive fashion the effect on reading of motivation, environment in and out of the classroom, and instructional strategies. Can we pin down some of our hunches perhaps through emulating anthropological approaches to the study of families and communities? I think we can be encouraged by the changing emphases in small-scale doctoral research. These emphases, repeated on the national scene, are taking us away from methods research, where we pit one instructional strategy against another, very often unable to control satisfactorily the many variables that impinge upon experimental classroom research. (We’ve had the 1st-grade studies; they were useful and important but limited by their grand scale, their lack of detailed focus.) We still need to know who learns best under what conditions. Now we need close views of how people manage little bits of the reading process. We need hundreds of case studies and diaries, ranging from prereading to responses to literature. We must see how children learn to read in various settings. We must examine the reading process in a variety of subgroups: children, youth, adults at all ages and stages, from various English language settings determined by social, regional, and family language backgrounds. Much of this research will come—as it has in the past—from California professors of reading.

References Broudy, H. S. (1972). In the real world of public schools. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. *Cazden, C. B. (1972). Child language and education. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. *Cazden, C. B., John, V. P., & Hymes, D. (Eds.). (1972). Functions of language in the classroom. New York, London: Teachers College Press. Jenkinson, M. (1957). Selected processes and difficulties of reading comprehension. (Doctoral Dissertation). Illinois: University of Chicago. *  No specific citations were given for these authors, but possible texts are listed to which Dr. Early may have been referring.

In the Catbird’s Seat    11

Latham, R. (1973). Cognitive synthesis and the comprehension of written language. (Doctoral Dissertation). Canada: University of Alberta. *Menyuk, P. (1971). The acquisition and development of language. New York: Prentice Hall, Current Research in Developmental Psychological Series. *Spache, G., & Spache, E. (1964). Reading in the elementary school. New York: Allyn & Bacon. *Stauffer, R. G. (1965). A language experience approach. In J. A. Kerfoot (Ed.), First grade reading programs, perspectives in reading, No. 5. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Smith, F. (1971). Understanding reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

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2 Anew Each Day NCTE Presidential Address November 1974 Margaret Early’s presidential address, which focuses on the definition of English, was originally published by the National Council of Teachers of English in The English Journal, November 1974, Vol. 63(8), pp. 10–13. Reprinted by permission of NCTE.

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own the corridors of the small high school in Connecticut, the question pursued me: What is English? I took refuge in the pragmatic. To me that first year, English was lesson planning and grading papers until midnight; it was five periods a day of exhorting, cajoling, assigning, performing, very little teaching really, one period flat out in the Faculty Room, 20-minute lunches and corridor duty, the school newspaper, and the yearbook. Whatever it was, I was consumed by it. But as the papers piled up and the books tumbled over, as the grades got recorded one marking period after the next, I began to realize that none of the paraphernalia—textbooks,

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themes, grades, department meetings, my certificate to teach, the classes themselves—added up to a solid answer to what is English. By the end of February, I was convinced that my students would improve in reading and writing only in the context of something they wanted to learn. Alas, what they wanted to learn was not what I was prepared to teach. I was convinced that a teacher of any other subject in the curriculum could teach English to these kids far better than I. Another year, another situation. The principal was asking for a fullfledged course of study. The departmental wrangling began. Was not English five parts literature study, two parts composition, three parts grammar? The answer for me, I decided, was to catch the 5-year-olds, teach them to read, and let others worry about what might come after. The superintendent laughed when I asked for a transfer to grade 1. I stuck to what was loosely labeled my specialty: the teaching of whatever English is. I found the National Council. Imagine my dismay to hear reverberating from one smoke-filled room to the next the question I’d started with. I took some comfort from Archibald MacLeish, who reported in the Saturday Review (December 6, 1961) that having been appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, he thought to ask what he was supposed to teach. Both the provost of the university and his department head implied it was an impertinent question and quickly showed him to the door. Along the way, it occurred to me to ask a sampling of students like those I had taught in New England mill towns and working-class suburbs. It was a long exercise I put them to, sorting out and commenting on the many bits and pieces that went into the English curriculum then (and now). What they wanted from English classes was help in saying things that were important to them in ways that others could understand. That’s not quite what articulate council members were saying in the next several years. From the Basic Issues right through the Dartmouth Seminar,1 strong voices in the council were declaring English to be a tripod: language, literature, and composition. There were, of course, dissenting voices, some speaking for the interrelationships of reading, writing, speaking, and listening; others saying with earnest emphasis that these were skills that supported the tripod. Then in retreat from the tripod, some urged us back to the com 1. Albert Marckwardt compares these conference results in his paper “From the Basic Issues Conference to the Dartmouth Seminar-Perspectives on the Teaching of English” in ERIC ED016683.

Anew Each Day    15

munications models of the late forties. And some cautioned us not to ask if it’s English, so long as students are “examining their experiences meaningfully and critically through the medium of language” (Hillocks, 1973). We are still asking. At Executive Committee meetings this year, as we sought to determine the most crucial concerns facing the council, there it was again: Define the discipline of English. I should have been neither surprised nor disheartened; I was both. But now I realize that at both philosophical and practical levels our search for identity as a discipline must be continuously renewed. Energetically, creatively, overcoming fatigue and boredom, we must go back over old ground to rediscover the obvious and to find new dimensions. You can see why I chose renewal as the theme for this year’s convention. For the long-distance English teacher, the fear is not of loneliness but of ennui. The thing about teaching is its dailiness. Renewal is as necessary for the 1st-year teacher as for the veteran, not just once a year but every 24 hours. Casting about for an elevated expression of this theme, I found in a long intricate poem, Pangolin, by Marianne Moore, lines which say to me what it feels like to be a teacher. Not that Moore was writing about teachers. Her subject, of all things, is the pangolin, and having described that “armoured ant-eater made graceful by adversities, conversities,” she turns to “the being we call human, writing-master to this world [who] writes error with four r’s.” Most like a teacher. “Not afraid of anything is he, and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle at every step.” Is this not an English teacher? “Curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done.” Yet is this not an English teacher, also, who “says to the alternating blaze, ‘Again the sun! Anew each day; and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul’”? In what follows, I won’t propose this year’s answer to what is English. Rather, I shall argue against the possibility of a definitive answer and say why it is essential, nevertheless, to continuously renew our definitions. For while we are asking ourselves what is English, we are surrounded by persons and circumstances that are defining English for us. I should like to examine to what extent and in what ways we can interact with those outside forces. I shall end with a personal view of what else I want students to learn as they are learning their language. If we cower forth, tread paced, to meet the task of defining English, it is because we are bored with the saying, not the doing. Each in our own way, we define English by what we do in the classroom. Our frustrations arise with having to explain why, with having to justify many decisions that

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must be made on hunches and “intuitive leaps.” Yet I see no alternative. If we are to maintain our right to shape the discipline we claim to be ours, we must describe it in words that are understood outside our classrooms and conventions, beyond our publications. We should speak with one voice, even though consensus on matters where proof is lacking is not only hard to achieve but probably dangerous. The answers to what English is don’t belong exclusively to English teachers. An inescapable example is the effect of zero population on the future of the profession. We have an oversupply of English teachers, declares a society that determines “oversupply” as more teachers than it is willing to pay for through taxes or tuition. How do we persuade people to consider other factors, such as optimal ratios of learners and teachers? Probably through redefining jobs in English teaching, recognizing how other disciplines are related to English, and working within realistic economic limitations. Society, which foots the bill, specifies an educational system that serves its institutions. In that context, we must emphasize the social usefulness of English. Should we say that we teach for total literacy? That is a goal that society values and that English teachers can pursue without perverting their faith in humanistic education. “Total literacy” is an educator’s phrase; it’s an honest one because it signifies the terrible complexity of our goals. But average parents crave simplicity. They want to know: Are kids learning to read and write? In answering that legitimate question, we have an opportunity to define English as a set of goals that can be measured objectively and another set that can be judged only subjectively. If we keep our lists of goals short, both the public and we will be better able to interpret and act upon the results. (At the 1974 convention, in response to a resolution passed in 1973, a council task force will present a policy statement on external testing which should say clearly what we can be held accountable for and how our accountability can be measured.) That’s one way that the council says what English is. Another way is through the Committee on Public Doublespeak, which says that English is the study of what human beings do with language and that the result of such study must be more careful consumers of language, more honorable users of it. The council also informs the public of what English is when it protects the professionals’ right to select books for classroom and library without fear of censorship. The council can work most effectively on renewing the discipline of English when it works in cooperation with agencies within the educational establishment whose priorities affect ours. For example, among state de-

Anew Each Day    17

partments of education, current priorities include preschools, career education, postsecondary or community education, concern for reading, development of bilingual and multicultural programs, and the education of the handicapped. None of these priorities clashes with humanistic goals; all of them concern language development, some exclusively so. Through assuming a measure of responsibility for the directions these movements take, the council and its affiliates may identify more roles for English teachers. What, for example, should the Conference on English Education say about the education of teachers for the handicapped? What responsibility should English teachers have for the certification of specialists in treating learning disabilities? Another state-level priority that will shape the future of English is competency-based teacher education. What dismays many of us is the language of the movement (all that systems jargon from business and industry), the competency checklists, and the red tape that clogs the pathways between university and school. But who can really argue against placing student teachers in schools as early and often as possible, so long as they learn what to teach and why as well as how? To preserve quality experiences in the schools, to preserve the discipline of English against the inroads of “generic competencies,” to extend to teachers in every subject field knowledge of language and skill in its use, we should stomach the jargon for the time being and plunge into redirecting the movement. It’s a matter of renewal; it’s a real chance to specify what English is. In considering the groups that influence English teaching, I’ve had to omit many. I cannot leave out the students. The fact that English was different at the end of the sixties from what it had been at the beginning was due less to the Dartmouth Seminar than to the youth explosion. All those kids between 14 and 24—their ranks increased by 52% in one decade—created their own culture: music, books, language, art, dress; their own attitudes toward work, war, politics, each other, their elders. Relevance was their shibboleth and with it they killed off Silas Marner and David Copperfield and the traditional anthologies. They stretched standard English, revivified poetry (of their own kind) and succumbed to the electronic media. They, as much as their elders, integrated some of our schools and most of our textbooks and declared their multi-ethnic allegiances. They flocked into teaching, finding it a creative outlet and an escape from Vietnam, and from the other side of the desk they furthered their attack on the English that was. They? Another stream of overstatements could remind us of kids less affluent, more resistant, out of the mainstream, for whom we should have altered our concepts of English but whom we tended to leave to the Job Corps and Title III “remedial reading” or to the locker rooms and drag

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races. Gestures made toward tracking and remediating resulted in a flood of “high interest, low vocabulary” products from the publishers, but too few of us really articulated what English should be for the uninvolved. And now the seventies have brought us groups that seem subtly different from their older siblings, more conservative, I’m told, less sure of themselves, more skeptical and even more in need of something to believe in. Anew each day—or at least each year—we have to determine what is English for these students, for this one; for these teachers, for this particular one, for me. English cannot—ought not—escape the pendulum swinging that is typical of our society and of education as a whole. In just 5 years we’ve been in and out of transformational grammar, back to general semantics, out of myths and archetypes and into the educated imagination, out of lesson plans and into LAPs [Learning Activity Packages] into media ecology, gaming, and interpersonal communication (what kind?). This year’s curricular insight may be humankind as maker of metaphor; next year we may be demonstrating the social usefulness of language as play. For the long-distance English teacher, the recycling of ideas is an affirmation. What English teachers bring anew each day into the classroom is a reassembling of the familiar; much of what students must discover anew is what others have discovered before them. We rearrange the periphery, but the center still holds. The center, I take it, is the students. What they are doing in English at every level is learning about themselves, especially about themselves as language makers and consumers. Not English as narcissism, of course. How do we learn about ourselves except as we take our measure against others? I want students to learn about themselves as learners. I want them to be confident that they can learn and to find joy in learning. I want them to develop their own learning powers from understanding how others have solved problems, discovered ideas, made sense momentarily of life. I want them to value learning as a way of staving off boredom and chaos. (I might have said as a uniquely human way until I read last month of a zoo in Portland that has found that animals prosper in captivity if they learn new skills.) I want students to hold onto that zest for learning that they had before entering school. I suppose there is nothing more disheartening to a teacher than the apathy that descends in the second decade and that spreads, in many people, through each ensuing decade. If children have anything to learn in school, it is how to escape boredom, how to invoke purpose. Maslow called the search for purpose “self-actualization.” An English novelist and self-taught psychologist named Colin Wilson calls it the search for “peak experiences.”

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I don’t mean to suggest that English is the only vehicle for learning how to live, nor do I wish to propose lofty purposes for teaching reading and writing where ordinary practical ones would do. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the best way to help kids to know themselves as learners is to teach them the tools of learning. Suppose McLuhan is right (I don’t believe this for a minute) and reading goes out of style in the next century. Still, through learning to read, students will have learned how to learn; they will have acquired skills they can apply to other media. Also, they will have learned the values of purpose. I was delighted to find Colin Wilson in The Philosopher’s Stone (where he’s exploring purposeful learning as the key to longevity) using the reading process as an analogy for understanding intentionality. “Ever since Husserl,”2 he writes, “we have realized that consciousness is ‘intentional’—that you have to focus it or you don’t see anything . . . Consider what happens if you try to read when you are very tired. . . . Your mind is like a pencil-flashlight beam that travels over the page. But as it illuminates each new sentence, the rest of the page falls into total darkness. [But when your attention is focused] it is as if your mind had two hands, one of which picks up new meanings as it travels over the page, the other one of which continues to grasp the old meanings of previous sentences” (Wilson, 1969, pp. 96–97). As an act of the mind, reading, like consciousness, is not only intentional but relational. Thus, in teaching reading, we help students to see the importance of purpose in grasping relationships. These days, I assume that a large part of teaching English is teaching how to read. I made no such assumption in my first years of teaching. I used reading, I required it, but I never thought to teach how to read. It dawned on me in the middle of Great Expectations that for a good third of my tenth graders, the pencil flashlight of Wilson’s metaphor was not turned on at all. It took the Gates Reading Survey to convince my principal and to get us started on teaching reading in that high school. I won’t enter the argument here as to how much of English should be devoted to learning how to read (in any case, the proportions would differ from school to school, from class to class). Or how much print versus nonprint. Or how much expressive versus receptive language. Suffice it to say that the great thing about English as a vehicle for learning how to learn is that the materials, the activities, can be as various as teachers wish, as stu 2. Edmund Husserl was a major philosopher of the 20th century whose ideas influenced related fields.

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dents demand. They can be selected from hundreds of sources, representing the best quality of their kind by a dozen different criteria. Perhaps no other discipline affords its teachers so much freedom or saddles them with so much responsibility. And so we redefine English continuously. In a society that evaluates education in terms of process and product, we display the social usefulness of English. At the same time, we dramatize the roles of English in humanistic education, where joy in learning is not only a means but an end.

References Hillocks, G. (1973, April). Speaking of choices, Part I of a two-part discussion of alternatives in English. Curriculum Report, 2(4). Washington, DC: National Association of Secondary School Principals. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 088047) Moore, M. (1935, 1941). The pangolin. Collected Poems. New York: MacMillan Company. Wilson, C. (1969). The philosopher’s stone. New York: Warner Paperback.

3 The Pleasure Principle: Making it Work for Reading Midwest Wisconsin IRA September 1977 In this speech to regional members of the International Reading Association, Dr. Early discusses practical ways through which teachers can help students (as well as parents) associate books with pleasure.

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ou notice that I’ve managed to get “work” into the title of this talk: work as well as pleasure. I don’t want you to think that I’ve totally abandoned the work ethic in favor of the pleasure principle. I’m rather like one of my friends who is trying to get over his old-fashioned notion that hard work never hurt anyone. But the best he can do in trying to adapt himself to the pleasure principle is to say, “I’m working at it.” The pleasure principle simply says that human behavior is motivated by the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Most of the time, when we

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have a choice, we choose whatever gives us the most immediate satisfaction. And if that’s true of us mature types, it’s even more true of children. Given a choice, they’ll find time for what they want to do. How do we make the pleasure principle work for reading rather than against it? How do we get children and youth and adults to switch off TV and pick up a book? To practice reading as much as they practice shooting baskets? That’s our assignment for the next 40 minutes or so—to think of ways of associating reading with pleasure. And your assignment for this year ahead, of course, is exactly the same: how to make reading and learning and studying—yes, studying—a satisfying experience, an experience that kids associate with pleasure, not with pain. Associating books with pleasure begins at home. I visited a young family not three weeks ago, and before mother took supper from the oven and put baby to bed, she read to her year-old infant from this book: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (1970). Now, how much Laura understood of the story is beside the point. She was being conditioned (yes, even in the Pavlovian sense) to associating warmth and love with turning the pages of a book. The reading session was very short but surrounded with pleasurable sensations, and it happened every night. Chances are that Laura will grow up choosing books—at least as often as she chooses television. This young mother won’t ban television, though that new book by Marie Winn, The Plug-In Drug (1977), has given her second thoughts. That book is a polemic and it goes too far, but parents need that kind of alarm when you remember that children spend more hours watching television before they enter first grade than they will spend in college classrooms. That’s all well and good, you say, but how do teachers influence these vital first months of life, before children reach nursery school, or kindergarten? We seldom see the parents we need to talk to at the PTA meetings; the ones who habitually use TV as a babysitter (Winn says as a drug, like gin and laudanum) don’t come to the School Open House. If we’re going to get the message to young parents and parents-to-be, the place to do it is in high school, in the caregiving [life skills] courses. These courses should include strong units on children’s literature and many opportunities for practicing reading aloud to children. I don’t have to belabor the point that reading to younger children is a pleasurable way of getting in practice at reading levels that older but less proficient readers can cope with. But even when parents realize that books are as essential as vitamins to children’s growth, they often lack two things: time and money. How can we help? With today’s prices, most parents—most middle-class work-

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ing parents—can’t afford to buy books. Only maiden aunts and affluent grandparents can afford those beautiful new books at $6.95 and up. Thank heavens there are paperbacks, and really we shouldn’t wince at $1.95 for a 32-page copy of a work of art. Nor should we be supercilious about the supermarket’s Golden Books. They’re at hand when a busy mother can grab one along with the week’s groceries, and that does more for the future of reading than whole libraries of the greatest unread literature. Of course, there are the libraries. But, alas, they’re not overcrowded, and it’s a rare town where they are decently budgeted. We need to get books out of the libraries and into the places where children are: the swimming pools, the parks, the street corners. Bookmobiles do it—they get to kids and parents who won’t go to the libraries. The best idea I’ve heard in several decades (and it’s several decades old!) is the Tennessee factory that set up a lending library of children’s books in its employees’ cafeteria. So it’s up to the schools to send books home. Early. Long before the children can read. In preschool, kindergarten, and first grade, and in the upper grades for summer reading, teachers are sending books home in sharing packets. [The 40 to 50 packets consist of] pairs of paperbacks when possible that include ◾◾ Directions to parents or older siblings; ◾◾ Something to do; and ◾◾ [Suggestions of what to ask for] when the packets are returned. Let me emphasize a point that I may have gone over too quickly. The most important thing we can do for children and their parents is to get first graders into books as early as possible. Don’t prolong the readiness period. Parents—especially those who have the least education themselves and the least financial resources—these parents, especially, know how crucial reading is to success. They believe that learning to read is what school is for. And it’s not just nonreading parents who think so. The novelist John O’Hara wrote about his youngest child who returned glumly from his first day in first grade, announcing with equal parts of despondency and disgust that he’d been there all day and still hadn’t learned to read. So send children home with the simplest kind of books that they can read—the kind that they have helped to write themselves. For instance, one teacher makes little books by binding together six or eight pages collected from as many children who have drawn pictures of what they like. On each page (a ditto sheet really) she has printed, I like to __________________ or I like to eat __________________ or I like to play with __________________ . The child

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draws a picture and tells her the words that complete the sentence. There must be many varieties of this simple approach to experience charts. While we are thinking of ways to connect reading with pleasure, we might consider the physical setting. Teachers are making use of all kinds of special spaces for pleasure reading. During the first week of school, when the newspapers were looking for human interest items about schools (to offset the scare headlines about budget deficits and teacher strikes and declining SAT scores), the Syracuse Herald Journal featured on page one a picture taken in a Houston elementary school. Did your papers carry it, too? It showed an old-fashioned bathtub set in the corner of a classroom, decorated with bright designs on the outside, padded with a rug on the inside, and delighting in this unusual reading space were two second graders. I know a librarian in an elementary school who has constructed an out-sized toadstool, using a patio umbrella basically, to dramatize the reading space. (It’s high and isolated.) Open classrooms have shown us the need to satisfy that I-want-to-be-alone feeling, so teepees and magic umbrellas and refrigerator cartons proliferate. For older kids, nooks in corridors and libraries need only pillow furniture and chairs that sag and sprawl. Someone said once that high school libraries should be furnished with beach chairs. The power of SSR [Sustained Silent Reading] is that it advertises the pleasure of reading. Here is one time in the school day when everyone reads— not to answer questions, not to prepare reports, but because it’s a pleasurable activity; pleasurable for teachers, secretaries, janitors, librarians, even for principals. But for many children, we need to remember that SSL is also acceptable—Sustained Silent Looking. A reading teacher tells me that she has no real problems getting her kids to do the exercises and games that focus on word skills or the worksheets that test basic comprehension skills. But she’s not been so successful in moving them into books for SSR. Then she discovered wordless books. She collected a dozen or so and displayed them invitingly on her reading table. “Now,” she said, “when you finish today’s worksheet, I want you to choose one of these books for reading.” She said nothing about their being of the wordless variety, and their size and shape did not betray her secret, for they ranged from Bobo’s Dream by Martha Alexander (1971) to a very sophisticated wordless novel by Lynd Ward: The Silver Pony (1973). As the children finished the word games and moved reluctantly to the books, the teacher soon observed them giggling and nudging each other and whispering with delight: “Hey, there ain’t no words in this one!” “Hey, look at this!” “Here’s a good one.” (It might have been Ah Choo [1976], Mercer Mayer’s latest.) Two of their favorites were The Magic Stick by Kjell Ringi (1968) and Look What I Can Do by Jose Aruego (1988).

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Are these real books? Or am I also selling out to the nonprint media? Not at all. There’s a world of difference between the art in The Silver Pony, for example, and the Saturday morning cartoons on TV. And they are real books. Children from bookless homes have to get used to the feel of real books, to turning their pages, learning to observe minute details. The RIBET [Reading Is Bringing Everyone Together] program illustrates the point that even in an affluent elementary school, with an excellent librarian, making books available is not enough. You must also excite children’s interest and give them reasons to share their reading with you and each other. Teachers in the small town of Manzanita, Oregon, wanted something more than a free reading program. They had tried individualized reading approaches and found they were unable to keep up with the children’s choices in a way that permitted real conversations based on mutually shared books. So they developed what has come to be known as the Manzanita Program. The features are ◾◾ Three teachers in grade 5 (for example) select nine books; ◾◾ Children select among these nine choices; ◾◾ They apply the five finger method [to determine the book’s readability]; ◾◾ Groups are formed (three to a teacher); and ◾◾ Teachers interact, raising questions, guiding the discussion. A planned comprehension program results. The Manzanita Program is one approach. It is not a total reading program; neither is it a high intensity skills or a systems approach; neither is it an individualized program of the self-selecting, self-pacing, conferencing variety. We have been reminded this past year from several different sources of one very powerful human need that may be turned to a reason for reading. It is the human need for story—the need for myth and fairy tale. The most eloquent reminder comes from the psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Uses of Enchantment (1977, now in paperback) which makes the point that children need the old fairy tales—unadulterated fairy tales—to enable them to “confront essential developmental tasks and feelings and to work through (in fantasies) the difficult, and universal, emotions of growing up.” Of course, the need for story can be satisfied—and most frequently is satisfied—by television rather than reading. Certainly, television is for the

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most part an unending parade of fantasy and fairy tale, interrupted by commercials that are often more fantastic than the dramas. But TV fairy tales are all wrong for Bettleheim’s purpose. He wants children to know the fairy tales as human beings the world over developed them out of their most basic psychological needs. He doesn’t want them prettified for Disney audiences. Bettleheim’s message is “read to kids” and let it go at that. Read from The Juniper Tree—Grimm’s tales retold by Lore Segall and Randall Jarrell (1973) and stunningly illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Read from the Andrew Lang series now available in paperback. Read and share with children and help them to read for themselves modern retellings—dozens of them from Marcia Brown’s Stone Soup (1947) to Duffy and the Devil by Harve and Margot Zemach (1986). From infancy to twelfth grade, perhaps the most pleasurable association we can bring to children and youth is to read to them. I’m going to keep saying that reading aloud is the single most important thing you can do to develop that friendly attitude toward books. And you’re going to keep asking where you can find the time. ◾◾ You can read aloud during arts and crafts while the kids are drawing or cutting or sewing or pasting ; ◾◾ Read during lunch. Read when your feet hurt. Read when children need to be quiet; ◾◾ Read on tape. Get help. Aides. Volunteers. Children from upper grade levels; ◾◾ Invite librarians who come into the classroom not to teach library skills but to let children know what’s in books for them; ◾◾ Finally, read aloud during basal reading time—because you’re teaching comprehension skills when you are reading aloud and children are following along. Remember to read aloud from nonfiction, too; and ◾◾ Read for fun. I’d like to stop right here, but my devotion to the Puritan work ethic won’t let me. I cannot in good conscience stop before we have considered the harder task we set ourselves: how to make study-type reading a satisfying experience for more children. It’s one thing to associate reading with pleasure when we trade on children’s love of story, when we surround them with beautiful picture books, when we take advantage of TV tie-ins, and when we read aloud from the great tales which children probably will not read for themselves, appealing to that love of fantasy that you’ve seen exploited this summer in Star Wars but that can

The Pleasure Principle: Making it Work for Reading     27

be satisfied, too, through literature, from the Narnia chronicles, from Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain cycle (1964–1968), to a stunning new series The Dark Is Rising [by S. Cooper] (1973), right up to Tolkien in high school and college. But we also know that reading skills must be developed, a taste for learning must be developed, an ability to read critically in exposition and argument and persuasion must be developed. It cannot be fun and fantasy all the time. Fortunately, psychology works for us here too. Children have not only a need for story but also a very strong need to know. We can, from the very beginning, develop their abilities to read in the content areas. And do so in ways that demonstrate that learning can be a satisfying experience. I would even go so far as to say that our total commitment in the elementary school must be to two corollaries to the pleasure principle: learning is fun and I can learn. Teachers in the upper grades have a right to expect coming to them from the elementary school pupils who have acquired the basic skills, yes, but far more important, pupils whose curiosity is lively and whose self-confidence is intact. In short, children should learn in elementary school that learning is fun and that they can learn. Instead, far too many youngsters enter school convinced that they cannot learn. Apathy is the blight of the secondary school—far more damaging to students and teachers alike than mere skills deficiencies. The high school teacher can cope with pockets of ignorance in students; he can even tolerate, though he’d rather not, certain deficiencies in reading and study skills. What he finds intolerable, what is utterly frustrating, is students’ boredom, their lack of motivation, their refusal to find relevance in anything textbookish. One way that the pleasure principle works for us is that learning a skill can bring the same kinds of satisfactions as playing a game. Think of the games that man has invented—the card games; the board games like checkers and dominoes; sports like tennis, skiing, and football. Most of them involve some kind of risk because the thrills come from surmounting the risks. Think of Monopoly. If it were just a matter of luck, and had nothing to do with knowing when to invest the play money, it would soon grow dull. A game to be interesting has to be hard enough to excite tension, but not so hard that you never have a chance of winning. Let’s see if we can use these principles of gaming in teaching to read. 1. For instance, no game is any fun if you don’t know what the rules are. So an excellent teacher of reading makes sure that students, at every

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level, become aware of process. Part of the process is discovering the rules of encoding and decoding, of moving from speech to print, and from print to meaning. First-grade teachers arrange for children to discover these rules in many ways. Languageexperience approaches help beginning readers to see that words they say can be written down, that letters stand for speech sounds. Teachers at upper grades often have to remind their students that reading and writing is a coding process. 2. A game is fun when you know whether or not you’re winning. Skills exercises should be self-correcting; the child should compare his answers immediately with a model. He should know immediately when he is right or wrong, and he must have the right to be wrong. 3. But in games, you don’t expect to win all the time. You’re willing to take risks. Learning to read requires you to take chances, to check your hunches. You must be allowed to make mistakes without fear and frustration, to recognize errors and correct them yourself. 4. A game is fun when you’re participating, not sitting on the sidelines. So we look for techniques that permit everyone in a group to respond at once, perhaps through cards of different colors, or letter or number cards, or more simply through appropriate finger signals. How many syllables do you hear in puppy, in octopus, in hippopotamus? Finger signals can be adapted to multiple choice items and are as useful in upper grades as in beginning reading. I recall a 9th-grade history teacher using red, white, and blue cards for critical reading, as pupils responded agree, disagree, or I don’t know to certain statements. Every-pupil-response techniques tell children immediately whether they are right or wrong. They learn from each other’s responses. So don’t worry if Kevin hesitates a moment to see which card Lisa puts up before taking a chance himself. You notice his hesitation and later you can explore the reasons for it. 5. While it’s fun to know immediately whether you are right or wrong, it’s more fun to be right. Skilled reading teachers know that it’s easier to help children avoid errors in the first place than to correct errors once they are set. I’m referring especially now to how we can promote accurate decoding and cut down on wild guessing. As we said, reading is a matter of constantly checking your hunches. That is what context is for—so we never isolate phonics, always teach decoding in contextual setting. But assuring chances for success— this also is illustrated by the directed reading lesson—a strategy that applies as well to 10th-grade history as to 1st-grade reading.

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6. Reading is a guessing game at every level, not just when you are at the beginning, or decoding stages. Reading as reasoning demands a great deal of guessing or predicting or hypothesizing. Reading is the reduction of uncertainty. I’ve been suggesting that learning to read can be a game, a game that is so much fun that the experience of learning to read underscores what children know instinctively anyway—that learning is fun. Learning is what keeps us alive. Reading is a pleasure in itself—an end as well as a means. When we read for pleasure only, we can even feel pleasurably guilty, those of us still belonging to the work ethic generation. I’ve an old friend of 91 who loves to read, though she must have sight-saving print, and the books are almost too big for her frail old hands to hold. She says, “Oh, how I love to read a good book, but never in the morning, oh no, I can never allow myself to read until the afternoon when the chores are all done.” But reading is more than a pleasure. It is an instrument for learning, and everyone who can use that instrument easily, fluently, has acquired the cheapest means of learning there is. Reading is a pleasure worth working for. I hope you’ll keep thinking about the pleasure principle in the next weeks. Several times during the day you might ask yourself: Are the kids learning to associate reading and learning with pleasure, with satisfaction, with feelings of accomplishment? If so, that will be your pleasure, too.

References Alexander, L. (1964–1968). The Prydain cycle. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Alexander, M. (1970). Bobo’s dream. New York: Dial Press. Aruego, J. (1988). Look what I can do (reprint). New York: Aladdin Paperbacks. Bettelheim, B. (1977). The uses of enchantment: The meaning and importance of fairy tales. V. 265. New York: Vintage Press. C. 1976. Brown, M. (1947). Stone soup, an old tale. New York: Scribner. Carle, E. (1970). The very hungry caterpillar. Cleveland, OH: Collins World. Cooper, S. (1973). The dark is rising. New York: Atheneum. Lang, A. (1966). The red fairy book. New York: Dover Publications. Lines, K. (1964). Fifty favorite fairy tales, chosen from the color fairy books of Andrew Lang. New York: F. Watts. Mayer, M. (1976). Ah-choo. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers. Ringi, K. (1968). The magic stick. New York: Harper & Row.

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Segall, L., & Jarrell, R. (1973) (translation). The juniper tree and other tales from Grimm. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Ward, L. (1973). The silver pony. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Winn, M. (1977). The plug-in drug. New York: Viking Press. Zemach, H., & Zemach, M. (1986). Duffy and the devil. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux.

4 Issues in Teaching and Learning Language Concordia College Reading Conference June 15, 1978 Emphasizing the importance of the teacher’s role, Dr. Early highlights the issues involved in literacy education and provides some examples of ways to enhance language learning at all levels.

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s you know, I was supposed to talk to you tomorrow morning on the mysterious topic: The Past is Prologue. We can blame Northwest Airlines for rearranging the program, but I have to take the blame for changing the topic. What I meant to talk about under that title were some issues related to reading as means of learning something new. I meant to tell you how impressed I am with the message I find in David Olson’s essay “From Utterance to Text,” (1977) which suggests to me that reading science and history and philosophy (or what he calls “text”) is quite different from reading literature or narrative or the kinds of discourse most frequently found Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 31–45 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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in reading programs. I intended to tackle a major controversy in reading circles these days: Is reading basically the same process for everyone, beginner to adult, and for every kind of material? But between last August and this June, the urgency of the issues has changed dramatically, and I’ve taken the woman’s prerogative, and the male’s, of changing my mind. I want instead to talk about issues that reside not so much in learning as in teaching, not so much with pupils as with parents, not so much in what we are learning about the language of children as with what we are learning about the roles of teachers. There are several reasons why I want to talk about teaching. One is that I can talk with you only as a teacher. I’m not a psychologist, I’m not a linguist, nor a psycholinguist. I’m not a sociologist nor a philosopher. Like most of you, I come back each day to defining the role of the teacher by what we do, not what we say. But it sometimes helps to have others articulate our role for us. Jimmy Britton catches my sympathy when he says in a recent yearbook chapter that we teachers have to be pragmatic—we are always looking for methods that achieve results. But it is not enough to ask: Does it work? We must go on to ask Why. Why does it work and why does it not work? Thus, teachers are also theorizers, and as Britton puts it, “working by hunch, (we) have to assume answers to many of the questions that basic research has scarcely begun to tackle” (1977, p. 2). We cannot wait for the social scientists to verify our hunches. At the IRA in Houston last month, I was pleased to hear psycholinguists grappling with the big questions, like how children comprehend various kinds of discourse. But the research in discourse analysis still has a long way to go before it catches up with teachers who have for years been helping children to identify patterns of discourse and to follow the author’s organization. What amused and annoyed me was to hear the same notion referred to as respectable theory when it came from the psychologists, but as mere intuition when it came from teachers. No, Britton is right when he says that to understand how children learn in school, we must have both kinds of theorizing: the social scientist’s and the teacher’s. A 1st-grade Toronto teacher, L. K., writing for a newspaper, made the same point more sharply: “A teacher can deal with most theorists by leaving them to handle the class alone for ten minutes.” I want to talk about teaching because there have been some doubts cast in recent years about whether teachers make much difference, especially in how children learn to read and write. These doubts have arisen largely through misinterpretation of studies that seemed to say that the kinds of homes children come from have more effect on how much they learn than

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do the schools themselves. More recent studies show that teachers make very real differences, and I’ll report on one of those later. But here, let me simply echo Christopher Jencks, who reanalyzed some of the earlier studies in his book Inequality (1972). He asserts, and I agree, that what makes the difference between success and failure for most children is not redistricting or busing or overhauling the curriculum, but the minute-to-minute interaction between teacher and pupil. The way a teacher looks at a student can have more effect than mountains of manuals and guidelines. I want to talk about teaching because I’ve a promise to fulfill. It’s one I made to myself upon reading the journal of one of the teachers in my class this spring. You have your students keeping journals, too, and you know that you sometimes learn from journals things you’d be safer not knowing. My young teacher wrote of her despair after attending a conference like this one. As the words flowed over and around her, she wrote, she grew numb in spirit as well as in certain parts of her anatomy. “Is there nothing that we teachers are doing right?” her journal cried out. And raised in me a heavy lump of guilt. Are we not, in the profession, always haranguing teachers—for not teaching enough phonics or teaching too much; for allowing too much guessing, or not enough; for requiring too little creative writing, or too much; for ignoring spelling and punctuation, or for overcorrecting; for paying too little attention to study-type reading, or for killing literature in our pursuit of facts. I vowed that at my very next opportunity (and this is it) I would celebrate good teaching. So this morning, I’ll try not to avoid the issues but to discuss them in terms of what teachers are doing that is right. Jerome Bruner was at the University of Toronto this spring, and he gave me an additional reason for emphasizing teaching as the issue in language learning. He was talking about the role of the mother in language acquisition, and he said one is impressed with the enormous amount of teaching involved. Now, that phrase alone is arresting, because we’ve been led to believe that children learn language almost biologically, that a mysterious Language Acquisition Device takes over. (Bruner said that with that hypothesis, Chomsky tried to replace the improbable with the miraculous.) Some people like John Holt have tried to use the psychologists’ still unproved notions about language acquisition to draw disparaging contrasts between the way children learn to speak and the way they are taught to read. But here was Jerome Bruner emphasizing the mother as teacher. Then he sharpened the nature of the mother’s teaching. It does not focus on language so much as on the intentions of the child. The adult’s interaction is regulated according to the child’s progress; it is always in accordance with the child’s intentions, his purpose, his sincerity, and with the conditions imposed by the contextual setting; that is, by the real world. “The moment one explicitly

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teaches language as a set of rules,” Bruner warned, “the enterprise seems to go badly wrong.” Which is what we sometimes do in teaching phonics or grammar. We know it doesn’t work, and the psychologists are helping us to see why it doesn’t. So, with this cue from Bruner, let’s move now to the role of the teacher after the child has left the natural learning environment of the home, where cooperative learning on a one-to-one basis has been the rule, and now that child moves into a classroom where 30 or more children demand the individual attention of one adult who must never lose her temper—or her place in the timetable. And as if these conditions weren’t bad enough, the child now has to get into the toughest part of language acquisition— reading and writing—which are far less vital to his needs than speaking and listening have been. Because time is short, I’m going to perpetuate the myth that only teachers teach how to read and how to write, but of course we know that our children’s teachers include many more than that one in the classroom who gets all the credit, or all the blame. Television has more effect on what children write about than teachers do; children’s peers have more influence on how they speak than do teachers and parents combined; children learn more about beginning reading from the print surrounding them on the highways and shopping malls than from the primers and workbooks. But today, in the interests of time, we’re going to focus on the teachers in the classroom. I said I would comment on a study of teacher effectiveness. . . . This was a study of teachers who had between 3 and 31 years’ experience. It impresses me because it relies chiefly on participant observer research in almost a hundred 2nd-grade and 5th-grade classrooms. The observers concentrated on how much time children were engaged in learning; in actually reading, for example, instead of waiting for their turn to read. It is only fair to point out that at both grade levels, pupils who read better at the beginning of the year were still the better readers at the end of the year. In this study, as in others, what accounts for most of the learning is what pupils have already learned. But the second most important factor was what the teachers did— that accounted for about 20% of the gains. And what did teachers do that made a difference? They varied their methods. They didn’t teach reading in groups all the time. They didn’t teach the class as a whole all the time. They didn’t individualize reading instruction all the time either—whether that individualizing was a very free style based on children selecting their own reading books, going at their own pace, and conferring with teachers, or whether individualizing meant a more restrictive contracting, programming, and skills-oriented approach. The impor-

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tant finding of the study was that none of these methods of organizing the class, used alone, was as effective as a pattern which included all three. No matter what pattern was used, however, the investigators found that real learning increased in proportion to the increase in direct instruction time. Instruction by teachers direct to pupils—not interaction with aides or with other adults in the classroom—but direct instruction by teachers was the key to improving learning. So how do we increase the amount of time for teacher-pupil interaction? In a class of 30 to 35, will I see more of the children as individuals within groups of 5 or 6, or if I try to reach them one by one in individual conferences? Pupils are also engaged in learning when they are reading or writing, so I need to increase the opportunities for both—probably by cutting down on teacher-talk. That is why the Ontario ministry guidelines for the intermediate years recommend that more than half the class time be given over to actual reading and free writing, rather than answering questions about what has been read, or filling in blanks in a workbook, or doing skills exercises that are only tangentially related to reading and writing. The best teachers of reading I know divide time equally between skills instruction and personal reading. By the way, when I refer to skills, I am not talking exclusively about decoding skills. I am more likely to be referring to strategies like perceiving the author’s organization, inferring meanings, identifying the author’s tone and purpose. Direct instruction, for example, may mean the teacher is helping students to compare what they already know about a subject with what the author of this particular article is likely to tell them. One of my friends, a reading teacher in grade 4, tells me that her problem is not in holding the children’s attention during this part of the class period but in the personal reading time. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? You would think the kids would reject skills instruction and look forward to choosing their own books and reading for their own purposes. Ah, but I forgot to tell you that this teacher is working with the less-able readers in grade 4. These kids see some hope that they will complete the skills exercises, especially with the teacher’s help. But a whole book? Oh, no. For these children the enemy is the book. Then my friend discovered wordless books. . . . Another finding from the McDonald study is that what works in grade 2 does not necessarily work in grade 5. For example, a greater variety of materials seemed right for grade 2 but not for grade 5. In the upper grades, good teachers sustain teacher-pupil interaction around a shared reading experience, when the teacher thinks with the pupils about what they have read, what it means to them, and how it relates to other ideas.

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That finding reminds me to raise a question with you about SSR [Sustained Silent Reading], which is sweeping North America these days. We used to call it USSR but that sounded like a Communist plot in upstate New York, so we dropped the U. I much prefer the acronym I’ve picked up in Ontario: SQUIRT [Sustained Quiet Uninterrupted Reading Time]. Does SQUIRT or SSR work? As a public relations gimmick, yes. In elementary school, where everyone from the principal to the custodian stops what he is doing at 11:15 every day and picks up a book, its great value is sheer propaganda. It’s a public relations gimmick that says to children: Look, everyone enjoys reading something that he chooses for himself. (But don’t expect every child to be able to choose a book without a bit of guidance. And for some children, it has to be SSL [Sustained Silent Looking].) Now, does SSR work equally well in first grade and in tenth? I don’t think so. It will work better in tenth grade, but not under the same conditions. In K to 2, I’d rather spend the time on storytelling or on creative dramatics or having the teacher reading aloud, or partnership reading, where one child reads to another or each reads aloud the alternate pages of a shared book. If the whole school is turning on to reading at 11:15 every day, I’d plan something special for the first graders and reserve the standard SSR treatment for grades 4 to 8. I know junior high and middle schools where SSR as originally conceived works very well, even with classes departmentalized. But when I mention SSR to English teachers in grades 9 to 13, they usually give me very peculiar looks. OK, so you can’t go the whole way. Consider variations. One 10th-grade teacher developed enough confidence to do two things early in September that made the rest of the year a joy. The first thing was to do her own assignment. Instead of asking students to write an autobiography, she prepared one on herself, coming up with a kind of sound and light show that included pictures of herself and family from babyhood through marriage, bits of music, transcribed conversations, reading from books that had shaped her growing up—a 15-minute production that communicated several messages to her students. One: She trusted them. She could be open with them. So they could trust her, and be open with her. The second thing she did was to adapt the SSR idea. She took the first two or three weeks for immersion reading. So long as they read nonassigned texts, they could choose what they wished and read every day in her class. She did not spend her time reading, however, but used those first two or three weeks to circulate, discussing with individuals their choices, learning more about their interests and abilities. Those first two experiences set the tone for the rest of the year. She was able thereafter to introduce texts for whole-group and small-group

Issues in Teaching and Learning Language     37

reading, which the kids could accept much more easily because she had at first given them free choices and good reasons to trust her. A major issue in literacy education is class size. Of course, taxpayers demand: where is the research that shows us what is the right class size for optimal learning? There is no reliable research on that question, nor is there likely to be. . . . because a few excellent teachers will demonstrate that they can teach superbly in classes of 40 to 50 and a few poor teachers will show that they can be dull and lifeless in classes of 12. But good teachers can do twice as well with half the numbers, and parents must realize that their children’s chance to reach high levels of literacy decreases in every class that exceeds 25. Teachers’ unions must negotiate for smaller classes not because the teaching profession may benefit but because students will be better served. Teachers will win taxpayers’ sympathies only as they convince them that they are negotiating on behalf of better education. I was encouraged to note in Toronto papers last week a feature story on private schools which are flourishing in that city because parents have decided that small classes are more vital to their children’s growth than are the superior material facilities of the public schools, where the teacherstudent ratio has increased enormously as faculties are reduced. Katharine is head of an English department in a suburban high school. She is a traditionalist and a scholar, and she prefers to teach gifted collegebound 11th and 12th graders. But she took on a group of 12 failing tenth graders—kids who had been ignored for years. One was a girl so impressed with her own inadequacies that she had had nothing to say in class or on paper. Patiently, Katharine began with group compositions, a variation on the language experience approach so familiar to primary teachers. She graded no papers until she had helped pupils to make them worthy of B’s and A’s. The thing about a small class is you can assure that students understand their assignments. Making a good assignment—one that students understand thoroughly and whose purpose is clear to them—is the hallmark of excellence in teaching, the essential competence. Did Katharine succeed that year? Yes, and she knew that she had when the other teachers began to say to her: What’s come over Margery? She’s writing reams in my class. A conscientious teacher, given 12 or 15 youngsters, can help even slow learners to express themselves with force and clarity and sometimes even with poetry. Not just slow learners—all learners benefit when good teachers have smaller classes. Class size is only one of several issues in language learning that could profit more from PR and propaganda than from research and logical argu-

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ment. Why is it that the public equates literacy with “correctness” in spelling and punctuation and social dialects, instead of with clear and honest communication? Is that what we taught the public when they were in our classrooms? Is it because, when they wrote compositions for us, we responded to how they spelled and punctuated rather than to how they thought and what they felt? Teachers resort to correcting the mechanical errors when large classes drive them to mindless and perfunctory responses. Acting like a proofreader instead of a teacher becomes a habit that’s hard to break. One teacher threw away his red pencil and got a yellow highlighter instead. He highlights the words, phrases, ideas he likes. Another teacher responds as often as she can to children’s oral reading of their stories and essays and reactions to what they have read. They read into a tape cassette, and she takes the tapes home and listens to them. Listening to what the children mean is good for the teacher; it protects her from spelling errors and runon sentences; and reading their written work out loud helps the children to correct such errors themselves. We should help the public to see how relatively unimportant matters of transcription are, but we should be careful not to convey the idea that spelling and the conventions are of NO importance. I think some of us may have swung too far in that direction in recent years, and it’s a bad political mistake—more of a mistake politically than pedagogically. At the AERA convention in March, the keynote speaker was Senator Eagleton, who sits on two committees in congress that control federal spending on education. He was saying all the right things until someone asked him about “back to the basics.” “Oh,” he said, “we need that push on the basics. My 19-year-old-son doesn’t know what a semicolon is. Law graduates that I interview in Washington can’t write or spell.” How do we educate the public? Zora Rashkis, an energetic English teacher in North Carolina, does it by inviting the parents to coffee klatsches, sometimes to lunch, and getting them to grade papers using holistic impression techniques. The aim is to read a paper in a minute or two and sort it into one of four groups from excellent to poor. From time to time, the group of readers stops to discuss reasons for their impressions. This is one way to educate parents to the fact that conventions follow ideas that kids feel the need to communicate. If the senator’s son doesn’t know what a semicolon is, it’s because he’s had no compelling reason to use one. How do we educate the public? Ghernot Knox does it this way. He teaches 11th-grade English students in a vocational high school. He has them write letters of application for real jobs; then he takes the batch over to the personnel manager in the plant across the street. She sorts them into

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two piles: the ones she would follow up and the ones she would throw in the wastebasket. How do we educate the public? I visited a Toronto elementary school last month where the principal knows how language develops, knows her children, knows parents. As soon as you step into that school, you know it is a place where children have the best chance to develop as learners and as human beings. Children’s art is everywhere displayed and that art includes the art of language. In the displays in the corridors, which are frequently traveled by parents picking up children from the daycare center, the exhibits include samples of children’s writing that are genuine and that therefore contain departures from the standard dialect. But each example is accompanied by a brief comment from the principal explaining what the lay person needs to know about language development. The public needs to trust teachers. There has been a steady decline in the respect accorded teachers, which is part and parcel of society’s rejection of authority figures generally, a very complex issue that I don’t mean to discuss today. We must rebuild that trust in teachers. By the way, what impressed me about schools in England five years ago was the remarkable self-confidence of the teachers: Good, bad, and indifferent, from the most traditional to the most open, they all seemed so much more confident about their decisions than do many North American teachers. And that confidence spilled over into their children’s attitudes toward themselves; the children were confident they could learn independently and help each other when in need. When I sought reasons for the contrasts that I seemed to be seeing, I was, like most travelers, sweeping in my generalizations. But it seemed to me that a major difference is that in North America, we trust reading consultants and basal reader editors and supervisors and professors of education and psychologists and almost everyone else in the school establishment long before we trust teachers. In England, on the other hand, the heads selected their teachers with utmost care and trusted them enormously. Trust begins at home. But the point I wanted to make is that we teachers can begin to rebuild the public’s trust in our judgments so far as language learning is concerned. We know how language develops, and we know how we can best interact in that development. For example, we can trust children to seek meaning. We know that intention, purpose, having a reason for learning, is the essential ingredient in language acquisition and in reading acquisition. We can quote Frank Smith or we can quote the Red Queen [from Alice in Wonderland]. “Take care of the sense,” she said, “and the sounds will take care of themselves.”

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Trusting children’s capacity to learn is not always easy. In a Toronto first grade in March, I admit that I worried a bit about whether the kids were at sea (forgive me) in a unit on fish. But the teacher knew what he was doing. He had a filmstrip on salmon, struggling upstream to spawn. I’m sure the filmstrip index said fifth or sixth grade. But as he showed each frame, he read the caption, sometimes translating it into easier vocabulary, allowing plenty of time for the children’s comments. I listened to the language of these 6-year-olds. They marveled at the salmon leaping against the torrent of the waterfall. “Why,” said one little girl, explaining the phenomenon from her own experience, “it must be just like trying to climb up a very slippery slide.” “Like running up the down escalator in the mall,” said a boy. When the filmstrip showed fish ladders built to help the fish upstream, a child commented, “Now that is very thoughtful.” The issue of intention, of purpose, in language learning is an old story to teachers. Mr. Knox, whom I mentioned before, not only recognized its centrality in language development but built his whole teaching style on that principle.1 When he was lucky enough to get a job teaching English in the 11th grade, even though he had hated English in high school and really wanted to teach social studies, his principal said, in effect, here are the books, here are the kids, put ’em together. But Knox started to think about what he was doing, and why. He promised the kids that he would not ask them to do anything that they couldn’t see a reason for. He was 9 years into this position when I visited his classroom, and saw 27 boys who usually hate English, all engaged in learning, in a workshop setting. Walking into his classroom, I couldn’t find the teacher at first. He was at the upright files, adding articles he’d clipped from current magazines. Knox was no starry-eyed idealist; he set very rigorous standards and saw to it that students observed all the rules. Everyone worked on contract and everyone earned a few points for spelling, taking a weekly test by putting on headsets and listening to a dictation tape made by a fellow student. Then he took his test to Mr. Knox’s second assistant for correction. Spelling was not important enough for either Knox or his chief assistant to bother with—the assistants were students in the class, of course. On this contract learning plan, there was a good deal of self-correcting and proofreading each other’s work, and Knox had a rack of red and blue pencils for such purposes. One day, a couple of pencils were missing and Knox said, “OK, you fellows obviously can’t work on your own; it’s back to the textbooks.” (The set of composition texts had been assigned to the closet since 1. Mr. Knox graciously granted permission for his instructional approach to be discussed in detail here.

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his first weeks in the job.) The kids put up with the boring drills for a couple of days, and Knox admits he was regretting his loss of patience, when one of the boys asked if he could conduct a class meeting and would Mr. Knox be good enough to step out of the room. He was soon called back and told that the class would guarantee that there would never be any missing pencils again if they could return to the workshop setup. At the end of the year, the student told Knox what had happened at that class meeting: they had taken up a collection and appointed one boy to keep the pencil rack filled from the supply they bought. Knox worked hard, but not in the classroom. Methods are my hobby, he’d say, and he spent hours of his own time figuring out better ways of permitting the kids to learn. But he never let them know about these after-hour sessions. These boys were going to enter trades where the pay was by the hour, and they respected people who commanded high wages. So Knox always talked to them in terms of his hourly rate, saying, “Your parents aren’t paying me 10 dollars an hours to drill you on unimportant matters. They want results: Can you read? Do you read? Can you explain to a customer why her kitchen cabinets are going to cost $45 more than she expected?” The kids did a lot of role playing. Perhaps the major tool of instruction in that class was the tape cassette; the boys kept a half dozen in constant use. Another major tool was the telephone—yes, Knox had wangled an outside line. Among other things, the kids used it to make appointments with townspeople; for example, officials and political candidates they interviewed on local issues, using their cassettes and their interviewing skills. The next step was to have the kids publish their own urban variation on Foxfire. If I had time, I could tell you of a dozen other English teachers who have helped students publish magazines similar to Eliot Wigginton’s Foxfire (1972), though not as famous. Did Knox’s methods work? Better than any paper-and-pencil evaluation of his objectives was Knox’s own yardstick. That lavish hourly rate he earned in teaching wasn’t enough to support him in the style he wished to become accustomed to. So he supplemented his income spring through fall by running concessions at the local ballparks. He hired kids to help him. The difference between his kids and the ones he hired from the other high schools in the city was that his kids didn’t stand around waiting to be told what to do. They had learned to think for themselves, to trust their judgment, to size up a problem and move to its solution. At this point, I want to let Patricia Graham interrupt me. In a speech to AACTE [the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education] this year, she defined literacy as “Being able to read, to write, to manipulate symbols, to develop independent means of making judgments and deter-

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mining action—in short, to be literate—is to be able to partake of the world as broadly as one’s talents permit. We as educators help people to do that. We are chagrined by our failures. But we must take pride in our successes and in the significance of our enterprise.” When I talk about the good teachers I know, I have to include Sheila— and I include her because she exemplifies what we mean by cooperative teaching/learning, what Bruner means when he describes the mother as teacher, cooperating with the child in the child’s pursuit of meaning. How does the teacher function in the role first played by the mother? How does he or she respond to the child’s uses of language—helping him to expand, extend, refine, shape, control his language to fit his purposes? Of course, it’s important to stimulate talking and writing. As Britton says, you cannot shape a trickle. You have to get the flow started first. But having done that, how does the teacher respond? It is not simply a matter of setting up an environment where children have reasons to write or reasons to read. Not that that’s a simple matter, in any case. But you’ve thousands of ideas available to you for stimulating the flow. And Kenneth Koch has rediscovered many of them for you and set them down in two lively books: Wishes, Lies and Dreams (1970) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973). I want to tell you about Sheila, one of the best teachers I know, and let her illustrate how teachers help children to shape the flow of language. After three years teaching high school math, Sheila had come into my office and said she wanted to study reading. I always ask why and she gave one of the best reasons I’ve heard: “Listen,” she said, “I’ve been sitting in the staff room for three years listening to those English teachers complain about their dumb kids. I know those kids aren’t stupid. I have them in math, and they’re bright when it comes to computation and problem solving. They just can’t read very well.” So Sheila stayed in graduate school for a while, becoming more and more interested in younger children, and then she found herself a job in third grade. That first fall, she couldn’t understand why her back ached so. Sheila studied children. She kept notes of them and sent many of them to me, which is why I have so many Sheila stories. One day, a child came to her with a poem he was working on. Mark had a conglomeration of ideas about a snake in the grass, the wind, a big field, silence, things that stand still moving around. He had on paper: “The snake goes through the grass like the wind and it makes the tall grass seem like it’s the one that’s moving.” “Only,” said Mark, “that’s only approximately the idea.” So Sheila began to help him to order his ideas, to give them shape.

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She asked if the idea was essentially about the snake or the wind. “It’s the wind slithering,” said Mark.

Teacher: What was there about the grass? Was it green, was it swamp grass?



Mark: No, it’s that tall brown grass that grows in a dry field—like wheat. Maybe I mean wheat.



Teacher: Where are you? Looking down from a plane? On a hill? In the wheat?



Mark: It’s towering over me, but I’m not really there at all.



Teacher: So far you have: The wind slithering through silent towering wheat.



Mark: No, silent isn’t right. Teacher repeats, omitting “silent.”



Mark: Motionless it waves. Later: The word in the second line is “lonely.”

Another major issue in language teaching is finding time to respond. You’ve got to use the other teachers in your classroom to help you; that is, the children themselves. Here’s Sheila’s account of doing just that: “I’ve been trying to get them to put together what they know about writing poetry and what they’ve learned about story forms from reading, and working toward writing short stories as an art form. I didn’t expect, naturally, that they would articulate all these things overnight, but old high I.Q. Lars did just that. He handed me a beat-up piece of paper with this story on it, and asked, ‘Does this story mean anything to you?’ I asked him to discuss the story with the class. First he pointed out that ‘the I in the story was not himself but just some I made up to think what I wanted him to think.’” Sheila continued, “Two interesting comments were made by kids about Lars’s story: One said it reminded him of “The Highwayman” because of the way the end of the story led back to the beginning ‘and seems to make it go round and round.’ Basil, who rouses himself periodically to say something brilliant, then added, ‘Well, the whole thing goes round and round, but inside the story goes up and down, in and out, backwards and forwards, like everyday living, and I think that’s what Lars means: just an ordinary day of living.’ This seemed to make sense to everyone, including Lars, so I let it go at that. But later in the week, one of the kids commented to me that Lars’s story wouldn’t be very interesting if it didn’t mean something because nothing very exciting happens. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘it’s only exciting because he’s right.’”

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Here are these children not only learning from each other how to write but how to read and respond to literature. Surely, creativity and appreciation are two sides of the same coin. I want to share one more of Sheila’s student’s poems, but before I do, let me summarize what I have identified as issues in literacy education.

Summary I’ve tried to demonstrate that the issues lie more in teaching than in learning. I reminded you of Bruner’s point that language acquisition is a cooperative process between child and adult, with the pair interacting about a shared purpose, a shared reality. I’ve extended that concept into the classroom, showing how teachers cooperate in children’s learning language and how they arrange for students to cooperate with each other. I’ve reiterated that teachers make a difference—a positive difference when they vary their methods, keep students engaged in learning, and keep the dialogue going between teacher and pupil. I’ve said teachers have to trust children, and that the public has to trust teachers. I’ve said educating the public is a major issue. I’ve said class size is a major issue. So is time. Through effective classroom management, good teachers cope with the issues of size and time. They make use of the other teachers in the classroom—the students who provide feedback for each other, as they learn to use language for real purposes. I’ve said that, in educating the public, advocacy is more effective than research. And finally, I’ve tried to make the point that teachers do more than provide the right environment. They listen hard to catch children’s meanings; they assist in the birth of sincere expression, of authentic writing. Here’s Sheila again, acting as midwife, helping an 8-year-old to compose this poem: A bird with an elegant gift For singing sweetly sang—and swift The wind stole the bird’s song; I fear That no one else was there to hear. —Ann Browning, 3rd grade

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It belongs to us now as much as to Ann Browning. So while Ann probably never thought of it this way, I see in her poem a metaphor that suggests that the bird’s song may be children’s poetic impulses. We must see to it that their songs are not lost in the pursuit of trivia in the classroom.

References Britton, J. (1977). Language and the nature of learning: An individual perspective. In J. Squire (Ed.), The teaching of English (pp. 1–38). 76th yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. *Bruner, J. S. (1978). Acquiring the uses of language. Canadian Journal of Psychology/Review of Canadian Psychology, (32), 204–218. *Bruner, J. S. (1978). The role of dialogue in language acquisition. In A. Sinclair, R. J. Jarvella, & W. J. M. Levelt (Eds.), The child’s conception of language. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. *Bruner, J. S., & Watson, R. (1983). Child’s talk: Learning to use language. New York: W. W. Norton. *Graham, P. A. (1981, Summer). Literacy: A goal for secondary schools. Daedalus, 110(3), America’s schools: Public and private (pp. 119–134). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jencks, C. (1972). Inequality: A reassessment of the effect of family and schooling in America. New York: Basic Books. Knox, G. (1962). English for living. Haverhill, Mass. Trade School. 6 v. Koch, K. (1970). Wishes, lies, dreams: Teaching children to write poetry. New York: Chelsea House. Koch, K. (1973). Rose, where did you get that red? Teaching great poetry to children. New York: Chelsea House. McDonald, F. J., & Elias, P. M. (1976). The effects of teaching performance on pupil learning. Beginning teacher evaluation study, Phase II, Final Report, Vol. I. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. McDonald, F. J. (1976, Winter). The effects of teaching performance on pupil learning. Journal of Teacher Education, 27(4), 317–319. Olson, D. (1977). From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review, 47, 257–281. Wigginton, E. (Ed.). (1972). The foxfire book. New York: Anchor Imprint, Random House.

*  The exact source of this citation could not be identified. Instead possible sources are cited in which the referenced author discusses similar ideas.

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5 Developing a Friendly Attitude Toward Print Utah IRA October 6, 1978 In this speech, Dr. Early suggests multiple ways in which everyone concerned about literacy—parents, teachers, administrators, and taxpayers—can help students develop a positive attitude toward reading and writing.

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t’s good to be at a convention that emphasizes what’s right with education. It’s good to declare what’s right with reading. We have never done a better job of teaching to read than we are doing right now. Today, more of the children in primary grades are learning to read well, and nationwide test scores support this statement. We are doing so well, in fact, that we have raised the ante on literacy. To be literate these days means more than being able to read. A literate person, says Alvin Toffler, the Future Shock man, is the one who can reason, the one who can use reading to arrive at decisions. PatriReflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 47–55 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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cia Graham, director of the National Institute of Education, says that to be literate, you must be able to read, to write, to manipulate symbols (that takes care of the old 3 R’s)—but there’s something more: A literate person, in her definition, is capable of making independent judgments and determining action. To be fully literate, you must think for yourself, make your own decisions. A literate person not only knows how to read but chooses to read—even during prime-time. A literate person knows that TV is all right for the here and now, but for learning about the past and speculating upon the future, print is the medium with the message. A year ago at a New York State meeting like this, Isaac Asimov entertained the audience with the story of a bet he made that he could invent a medium better than television—something smaller, more compact, something that the user could control, getting the programs he wanted when he wanted them, producing images he wanted— the book. A literate person switches off television now and then; she reads at home, not just on airplanes; he reads at home, by choice, not just in classrooms under pressure. How many of you read a book last night—one that you chose yourself? Who has not looked at TV in the last 24 hours? You can see why I set such a modest goal for us today—developing a friendly attitude toward print. At an upbeat convention like this one, I suppose I should have declared our purpose is to develop a passion for print. I’ll settle for a friendly attitude. Without that friendly attitude, children may become barely literate. With it, they’ll go on. I invite you to agree with me that book-learning is still what school is all about. Now let’s all agree that wanting to learn—believing that they can learn—is what determines more than anything else, whether children succeed or fail. And let’s agree also that teachers have considerable influence on children’s motivation—but so also do parents, administrators, and taxpayers. Think with me this morning about how each of these four groups— parents, teachers, administrators, taxpayers—can help children to develop a friendly attitude toward print.

What Can Parents Do? Obviously, parents have the first chance and the best chance to inspire eagerness to read. A young couple invited me to dinner recently, and while Dad tossed the salad and heated the rolls, Mother got the baby ready for bed. And that ritual included cuddling 10-month-old Laura and reading to her from Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1970). Mother turned the big colorful pages and read in soft, soothing tones of how the caterpillar ate

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through one apple on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, and so on. And Laura poked her baby fingers through the holes. Now, that child was being conditioned to associate warmth and love with turning the pages of a book. And the conditioning was daily—associating reading with pleasurable sensations. Chances are that Laura will grow up choosing books, more often than she chooses television. This young mother won’t ban TV, but she knows that TV can act as a drug, can stifle a child’s imagination, can provide too-easy access to someone else’s images. So she won’t use television as a plug-in babysitter, something to keep the kids quiet and out of the way. Laura’s mother is an exception, of course. Oh, in some ways, she’s typical. Like most young mothers, she also works outside the home, but she has a husband who is a partner in housekeeping and caregiving, she herself was brought up loving books, and she has energy and enthusiasm to spare. Many parents don’t have partners, don’t have time, don’t have energy, don’t do much reading themselves, don’t know where to find good children’s books. Once their children get to school, we can help those parents by sending books home in sharing packets. And we can get books out of the libraries and into the places where parents and children are: the shopping malls, the supermarkets, the swimming pools, the parks, the street corners. A factory in Tennessee set up a lending library of children’s books in its employees’ cafeteria. We are reaching some nonreading parents through television. A whole lot is happening with today’s parents, and that’s good, but I have greater hopes for success with the next generation of parents. They are in our classes now. We don’t have to go out and drag them into the School Open House. They’re here. The more of them we infect with enthusiasm for reading the more their children, in the 1980s, will come to us with friendly attitudes toward print. The best place to reach young men and women who will soon be parents is in the Family Services courses in high school. Many young people in these courses hate to read. Many of them read very poorly. For them, the enemy is the Book. But all over North America I see teachers getting these 16-yearolds, whose attitudes definitely are not friendly, to read easy, colorful, kids’ books—old ones like Green Eggs and Ham (Seuss, 1960), newer ones like The Stupids Step Out (Allard, 1974) or George and Martha (Marshall, 1972). They are willing to read—and they spend time practicing good oral reading— because they have a reason for doing so. They are reading to the children in preschool, kindergarten, the primary grades. They are learning to be parents. They are learning to care for others. They are feeling needed.

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I don’t need to belabor the point. This is a way to help poor readers in the upper grades. The youngsters who read aloud improve their skills. The listeners learn to like books. But maybe the real value lies in giving these adolescents a chance to feel needed.

What Can Teachers Do? The most important thing we can do for children and their parents is to get first graders into books as early as possible. Don’t prolong the readiness period. We begin to dampen children’s enthusiasm when we keep them too long in skills practice. You know, the youngster who goes home after the first day in first grade and announces glumly that he’s been here the whole day and still hasn’t learned to read. Of course, he’s ready to read. He can read McDonald’s. He can identify the call letters on the TV channels. So send books home. The simplest kinds are the ones that children have written themselves. A 1st-grade teacher makes little books by stapling together six or eight pages, each one contributed by a different child. The teacher has a few words printed at the bottom of a blank page; maybe it is “I like to ______________ ” or “I like to play with ______________ ,” or “I like to eat ______________ .” The child draws a picture and then tells the teacher the words that complete the sentence. With the pictures as clues, children can read each of the whole sentences. When you send books home, make sure they are ones that children have already read all the way through, probably several times during partnership reading; that is, when one child reads to a single attentive listener. Help any listeners in your classroom and help parents, too, to listen politely and to allow the reader to read to the end of a whole little book. Don’t interrupt to correct a miscue. (We want the reader to monitor his own miscues.) By the way, we should never forget that parents are teachers. Even if they never read a book to a child, never listen to their children reading, they have taught those little ones who entered your classes last month all that these children can bring to their first experiences with print. And that is a very great deal. Some people in our profession make snide remarks about how, if children learned to speak the way they learn to read, we’d have legions of remedial talkers in the schools. They assume that children learned to speak without teachers. How mistaken they are! Listening to Jerome Bruner in Toronto last spring, I was impressed at how much his latest research emphasizes the role of the mother as teacher. Children don’t learn language biologically. They don’t learn by simple imitation. They learn because they intend to, and the mother is there

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focusing on the intentions of the child. The child says “cookie” and the mother regulates her response in accordance with the child’s intentions, his purpose, his sincerity, and with the conditions imposed by the setting. The mother knows whether when a child says “cookie,” he means give me a cookie or what kind of cookie is that, whether he really wants one or is testing the limits of her patience, whether he is describing or informing or asking is that a cookie? Or can you get that down from the top shelf? Children have been exploring their world intentionally since birth. When they get to school, trust children to focus on meaning. They learned to speak because they had reasons to do so. Speech develops instrumentally, intentionally. So does the ability to read. Of course, you’re going to help children to figure out the way language works when we print it instead of speak it. You’re going to help them to understand the rules that govern print; that is, letter-sound relationships, or phonics. But just as the mother doesn’t try to teach children the rules of grammar, you don’t focus on rules as such. Instead, you give children lots of opportunities to figure out the rules themselves in real words, the words in meaningful phrases or sentences—even when children know so few words that the sentences you use have to be mostly oral. What you do is to select the words that illustrate a useful principle and present those words in meaningful context. Actually, you find books that do this—pre-primers and primary readers, also books from the library. But don’t overdo phonics. Too many children learn how to sound out words, how to fill in blanks in workbooks, and by second grade they read with accuracy but with almost no comprehension. Take care of the sense, said the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, and the sounds will take care of themselves. A good motto for reading teachers. When I talk about developing a friendly attitude toward print, of course, I mean the print that is found in books. By the time they are adolescents I want kids to be willing to read something besides the jacket on the latest recording, or the label on a beer can, or the graffiti on a T-shirt. Even in primary grades, children should be learning that books can do more than entertain you; they also tell you things you want to know. So teachers look for books that will provide readiness for reading in the content fields. So many to choose from: The Quicksand Book (1977) Diary of an Early American Boy (1962) Can 1st-grade teachers work with informational books, with real content? Yes, indeed, they find their children have an “insatiable curiosity” about real people, real animals, the real world about them.

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What primary teachers do is to confirm children’s ideas about themselves. We want all children to leave the primary grades convinced that they can learn, and that learning can be the most satisfying experience in all of life. Benjamin Bloom has recently published a book called Human Characteristics and School Learning (1976). Research tells us that three things determine how much and how well children learn: first, is what they bring with them (what they already know) or what Bloom calls “cognitive entry behaviors.” The second is how they feel about their ability to learn. And the third is the quality of instruction: what their teachers do in the way of planning and choosing materials. That second factor, which Bloom calls motivation, is pretty well determined by the end of third grade. By the time they are eight or nine, children have decided whether or not they can learn. Have you ever worked with a nonreader who did not want to be able to read? Any teacher who has worked with [disabled] readers knows that they want to learn to read, but they have no hope that they ever will. But even kids who can read often don’t read. There are so many other things to do. Such was the case in one elementary school in Rochester, Minnesota. What do you think of when I mention Rochester? The Mayo Clinic? Doctors? Affluence? The school I visited was located in the part of town known as Pill Hill. These kids had all the advantages, but they weren’t reading. The reading resource teacher (Margaret Schaefer) had diagnosed the problem there as an alarming increase in “won’t read” kids, especially in 5th grade. She attacked the problem with the energy and skill of a Madison Avenue account executive. She began with the slogan RIBET, an acronym for Reading Is Bringing Everyone Together. She enlisted parents’ help in providing books that fifth graders could read to third, and books that third graders could read to kindergarteners. The media specialist provided assistance, and froggie prizes were used to give a little extrinsic motivation. Even the superintendent visited her class. In another instance, when teachers of fifth graders in Manzanita, Oregon, found their enthusiasm for basal readers flagging, they tried a wholly individualized approach, but they found they couldn’t keep up with the children’s reading sufficiently well to teach basic comprehension skills. So they tried a modified plan. Three grade 5 teachers would each select three books that they could teach with enthusiasm and pitch to all the fifth graders. The nine books would range in difficulty and include nonfiction as well as fiction. The children could choose, applying the five-finger method [in which children de-

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termine the appropriateness of the reading level by counting off the number of unfamiliar words they initially encounter in a text]. The teachers would prepare for discussions to enhance comprehension .

If your aim is to sell reading, try another Madison Avenue approach. SSR [Sustained Silent Reading]. Or, as the Canadians call it, SQUIRT— Super Quiet Uninterrupted Independent Reading Time. How many here are doing SSR daily? Weekly? The point of SSR is to sell reading. It is not needed where kids are already doing so. It doesn’t replace a planned program in reading and study skills, however.

What Can Teachers Do to Develop a Friendly Attitude toward the Print in Textbooks? Help children to get into and out of books fast. What does the popularity of Guinness’s Book of World Records tell us? That kids like their information in bite-size morsels. They are channel-switchers. Success in content reading depends on knowing how to use a text easily. Begin with the whole book. Unfortunately, the brightest of students in high school and college often begin to read a book on the first page and slog all the way through. Instead, they should begin by examining the whole book, looking for how it is organized, what its major topics are, what its dominant themes are. They should approach a chapter the same way. You demonstrate the survey step in reading classes, apply it to the next assignment in history or science. Use informational books as well as textbooks to teach lessons in using the Table of Contents, the index, the illustrations, the maps, charts, and graphs. Teachers model the proper use of informational books by showing how they select them—you’re seeking information, you’re looking for answers to questions you’ve raised; you go to more than one book. You read to students bits you’ve selected, whetting appetites for more. You apply the DRA [Directed Reading Activity] to reading in the content fields. Build background, set purposes, teach vocabulary before children read. Why? Because experience over the last hundred years has shown that we can learn only that which we half know already. But new research is confirming what we have known for these many years. The National Institute of Education (NIE) is reporting on a study of how fast two groups of adults could comprehend an article describing a wedding in India. Both groups read in English; one group consisted of Americans, whereas the others were natives of India. Of course, the Indi-

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ans—even though reading in their second language—comprehended more fully and faster than the Americans.

What Can Administrators Do? I am increasingly convinced that whole-school reading programs can succeed only if the principal cares. A caring and knowledgeable administrator ◾◾ Recognizes that learning to read—and reading to learn—is the first priority; every other learning objective follows this one; ◾◾ Understands that reading is part of total language development and of language policy through the school; ◾◾ Supports her teachers’ efforts but hires and keeps on staff only teachers who care about language; ◾◾ Knows that the place to teach reading and study skills is in the content subjects and realizes that this is where teachers in elementary, junior high, and senior high school need help; ◾◾ Develops creative schemes for in-service within the school day, not after school. For example, in one high school, the principal figured out how to shave a few minutes off class periods so that the Reading Coordinator could work daily for 30 minutes or so with three or four teachers in each subject area; ◾◾ Knows what to do with Title I monies. He doesn’t hire a reading teacher and abandon her; and ◾◾ Knows that kids who cannot read need one-to-one teaching and does not overload the remedial teacher. I could go on. . . .

What Can Taxpayers Do to Insure that Readers Will Choose to Read? ◾◾ Support libraries as generously as football teams; ◾◾ Recognize that children will learn the basic skills only when they see reasons for doing so. Content subjects, art, and music are the reasons, not frills; and ◾◾ Adjust class size. I understand that taxpayers in this state have gotten the message. Children learn more in smaller classes. I’m sure that here, as everywhere, taxpayers have demanded where the research is that shows what the right class size is for optimal learning. There is no reliable research on that question, nor is there likely to be because a few excellent teachers will demonstrate that they can teach superbly in classes of 40 plus, and a few poor teachers will show they can

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be dull and lifeless with groups of five or six. But common sense says good teachers can do twice as well with half the numbers. In Toronto, private schools have been springing up because parents have decided that small classes are more vital to children’s growth than are the superior material facilities of the public schools.

Time to Summarize I’ve said our best hope for the future of book learning lies with future parents—the ones we are teaching now. Parents’ input is the most important factor because so much depends on what children bring with them. I’ve urged teachers to capitalize on children’s need to know and to be aggressive in their selling of books that inform because motivation is the second most important factor in school learning. I’ve emphasized informational books today because they provide readiness for content reading. Because the third factor that influences learning is quality of instruction, I’ve urged administrators to support teachers in their need to know; that is, their need to know how to teach reading in the content fields. And because the quality of the school depends on a society that cares, I’ve congratulated Utah taxpayers for caring enough to support smaller classes. Finally, I’ve said we should set modest goals. Maybe only a happy few will enter a lifelong love affair with books, but almost all our children can develop a friendly attitude toward print.

References Allard, H. (1974). The Stupids step out. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Bloom, B. (1976). Human characteristics and school learning. New York: McGraw Hill. *Bruner, J. S., & Watson, R. (1983). Child’s talk: Learning to use language. New York: W. W. Norton Carle, E. (1970). The very hungry caterpillar. Cleveland, OH: Collins World. de Paola, T. (1977). The quicksand book. New York: Holiday House. Marshall, J. (1972). George and Martha. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Seuss, Dr. (1960). Green eggs and ham. New York: Random House. Sloane, E. (1962). Diary of an early American boy, Noah Blake 1805. New York: W. Funk.

*  The exact source of this reference could not be identified. Instead a possible source is cited in which the referenced author discusses similar ideas.

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6 Educational Priorities in a Technological Society Honors Convocation Syracuse University January 30, 1979 Decrying the ineffectiveness with which technology has been used in most classrooms, Dr. Early explores in this speech not only why progress has been so limited but also how technology can be better put to work on behalf of education.

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his technological society has warped my sense of time. I expect everything to happen faster than it can. My reaction to the last manned flight to the moon was: What’s taking them so long? But even at my most irrationally optimistic, I don’t expect that in 2 hours we’ll have time to identify the right questions, never mind suggest answers, on so complex an issue as educational priorities. For my 15 minutes, I’ve chipped all the early school years and will leave to you and Professor Daub all the rest of the prolonged life span that technological society promises us. Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 57–63 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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As a teacher concerned especially with the early school years, let me ask the same question of the technologists that I asked of the astronauts: Why is it taking so long? For 25 years, at least, we have been promised that computers, talk-back TV, interactive teaching machines will free teachers to engage students in humanistic studies, free students to learn through their own discoveries, to learn through gaming with computers, through reading, to learn how mankind has inched forward. In 1968, George Leonard—the same George Leonard of the Human Potential Movement, once the education editor of Look magazine—was predicting that children would master spelling and syntax, reading and writing, by age 3. The systems engineering people would make possible so much efficiency in learning during this decade (now almost over) that teachers wouldn’t know what to do with all the extra time. All of the computer-assisted instruction that Leonard predicted was possible even then, but 10 years later, I see very limited use of technology in the classrooms I visit. Instead of more time for humanities, teachers complain that they have barely enough time for the basics. (A recent book-banning spree in California was explained by the chairman of the School Board: “If they teach grammar properly, they will have no need for further books, nor will they have time for them.”) I don’t mean that technology hasn’t touched education. We see the uncontrolled effects of technology—good and bad, more bad than good— in every classroom, but too few of the benefits. (We’ll say more about the effects later.) But the use of computers is pretty much limited to testing and scheduling. Children and teachers make more use of electronics outside the classroom than within it. To be sure, Marian the Librarian is now the School Media Specialist, but except for occasional films and filmstrips, most of her equipment stays in the closet. In place of the late 60s vision of joyful learning—joyful because everyone has mastered the rudimentary tools of learning and can get on with the real reasons for reading and writing and manipulating symbols—instead of 10-year-olds dramatizing scenes from Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian Wars (as Leonard imagines they might be), we find elementary schools so busy with the basics that they have created a disastrous imbalance between means and ends. Instead of using computers, where appropriate, to teach basic skills quickly and effectively, teachers are devoting most of the curriculum to skills instruction in a test-teach-retest cycle that is rarely individualized—which means, by the way, that some kids go through the same paces faster than others.

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Why is it taking so long to put technology to work for education, instead of against it? The basic reason, I think, is that teacher resistance—based on fear and ignorance [as] academe fosters the notion that teaching machines are dehumanizing—continues almost 20 years after C. P. Snow’s popular attempt at rapprochement between “the two cultures.” Teacher resistance is, of course, only a first layer of causation—and only a bit surprising. We might expect unionized teachers to push machines out of their work place, but unlike earlier Luddites, teachers’ whole lives outside the classroom are dependent upon machines. (That’s not an unusual irony these days when your casual companion of the 747 munches natural foods and notes the read-out on his pocket calculator while plugged into the stereo.) But teachers’ resistance to machines is far more subtle than the Luddites’ and more pervasive. The stereotypes children pick up in elementary classrooms last a lifetime. Isaac Asimov wrote a short story in 1951 called “The Fun They Had,” which he intended as irony easily recognizable (he thought) by kids in today’s schools. In a story set in the 22nd century, two children find an old book that tells how things were when kids went to school to human teachers. And [as] the child of the 22nd century goes home to her own teaching machine, she thinks a bit wistfully about how kids must have loved school in the old days. The real irony of Asimov’s story is that it appears frequently in elementary textbooks and is used as a warning against the perfidies of education by machine. Recently, I asked fifth and sixth graders and a sampling of elementary teachers to predict what schools would be like in the next 200 years. The teachers’ essays were filled with visions of cozier classrooms, more intimate teacher-to-pupil instruction, less management by objectives, less computermonitored testing, less emphasis on product (notice the language of technocracy). The children, on the other hand, wrote of robots, teaching machines, instant learning, rapid transit in ideas as well as in field trips to the planets. But the kids were only half serious. I suspect they’ll grow up to be technophobes. They’re all around us. Last week Erma Bombeck was writing in her syndicated column, “At Wit’s End,” that she’d learned somewhere— probably from John Holt—that half a million families will soon be schooling their children at home. She views this prospect dimly but realizes that it was only a matter of time before she’ll be replaced by a box, a beep, and two dry-cell batteries. I commented in a speech recently on that miraculous machine that reads aloud to the blind, saying that the letter-sound relationships are regular enough so that the computer’s voice reads English with only a slight

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foreign accent. Afterwards, an irate 1st-grade teacher accosted me with: “If you think it’s a miracle to teach a machine to read, you try it with 28 sixyear-olds. Teacher resistance perpetuates the predominance of print and is, in turn, kept alive by the book industry, which invests millions of dollars annually in producing instructional materials that teachers will buy. (We will have to pass quickly over the irony that almost every major textbook publisher today is owned by a communications conglomerate like CBS or IBM or Xerox.) A school system the size of Syracuse, which may invest $160,000 in a single basal reading series, is not going to change its approach very readily, and anyway won’t have much money left over for teaching machines. Tight school budgets are just one reason why educational technology stands still. Insufficient software is another reason. About 10 years ago, a friend who had retired from a School of Education where he had been dean, was leafing through Time magazine and came across an ad for a Borg Warner teaching machine. Intrigued, he wrote the company asking what they had to put in the machine to teach kids how to read. The reply was nothing, and would he be interested in a contract. He was. And he’s spent an active retirement creating programs. The people who will produce the software are in today’s elementary classrooms. Will most of them be infected by our negative attitudes? I am sure that I promote that antimachine attitude among the teachers I serve. After all, I was an English major as an undergraduate, a publisher’s apprentice before I began to teach English myself, and I came to Syracuse University as a reading specialist. I’m responsible for one set of those basal readers that I’ve been intimating are used as barricades against the teaching machines. So I am more than a bit uncomfortable in seeming to be questioning the ascendancy of print. But that’s just the point. One seems to be against books if one is for teaching machines. Nothing could be further from the truth. Literacy is the goes-without-saying educational priority of a technological society. Right now we are so bogged down in the effort to teach the basics by the oldest, most discredited methods available to us, that we are pushing out of the curriculum the very reasons for reading and writing. We learn to read and write in order to be able to make independent judgments, to choose wisely, to figure out what we’re doing and why we are here [emphasis added]. Our technological society has made it harder to teach in the public schools than it has ever been before. The media have distorted the truth that we are doing a better job of teaching basic literacy than we did in easier times. Better, but not good enough.

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I don’t have time to expand on why teachers burn out faster these days—you may want to raise that issue later—because I want to push on to the priorities beyond literacy. I’ll mention first the one I have been aiming at all along. We must learn how to live with machines. That’s so obvious that I would be embarrassed to repeat it except that the evidence all around us is that we have not learned. The place to begin is in primary grades where machines and books can live side by side and contribute equally to developing friendly attitudes toward print and nonprint. But the machines won’t get into kindergarten unless people like me accept them. Let one of my colleagues in English Education [Edmund Farrell] illustrate the common attitude: “Our attention is being distracted and our will power dissipated by an unending assault upon our senses, by the creation of false needs, by the glitter of baubles spilling from America’s technological cornucopias, by news that isn’t, by forced decisions on matters that don’t matter” (Farrell, 1978, p. 27). Children must begin early to learn how to live with technology. Computers and talk-back television sets in elementary classrooms would lead them to understand the limits as well as the powers of these tools of learning. Children are in elementary schools to learn, first of all, that they can learn and then to learn all the ways of doing it. It follows that literacy is a top priority, but so is the understanding that literacy is a means, not an end. Infants know that language is intentional— that’s how they learn to speak in the first place—but as children in school, they may forget the reasons for reading and writing if they seldom get to use these tools for their own purposes. Whatever we can do to shorten the time on skills practice (shorten, not eliminate) will leave more room for real learning. Another priority: It isn’t enough to learn what words do for you and to you: You must also learn the grammar and rhetoric of film, what the images on the TV screen do for you and to you. Children know they are the pupils of TV. They should also learn that they don’t have to be its victims. In a recent interview (Ryan, Newman, & Johnson, 1978), Larry Cremin points out that we learn through print how to be critical readers and that, similarly, we must learn through the nonprint media how to be critical viewers and listeners. Public television, he thinks, should be responsible for audiovisual literacy ultimately, but until Sesame Street takes on its own medium, the public schools will have to do it—of course. Children must also grasp the essential reason for learning. (“The best thing for being sad,” Merlin advises the young King Arthur in The Once and Future King (White, 1958), “is to learn something.”) As an antidote for sad-

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ness, then, learning doesn’t end with high school, or college, or graduate school. One way to teach this is the study of work and leisure, growing old and dying. But to keep these issues in the curriculum, we have to overcome tremendous skepticism on the part of parents and grandparents who contend that the only education worth paying for is basic skills. I began with a comment on my own warped sense of time. To resist the timetables of technocracy, to preserve one’s time (which is to say to preserve one’s self) or to spend time and self is, of course, the ultimate priority. But our lifetime, and our sense of it, is being shaped from the beginning. Today, teachers tell me, they must match their lessons to children’s TV time sense: seven minutes and then the commercial. They tell me kids still want to know, but they want their information in bite-size morsels. They want to learn how to get into and out of books fast. And I think we must teach them how to read faster—and also when not to. For in learning how to learn—which is the goal of the early grades— children should learn that many kinds of learning can be accomplished only by going into books and staying there for as long as it takes. (Actually, that’s another idea that little children know—and we cause them to forget it. Notice how little ones want to be read to out of the same book over and over again. And notice how soon we begin to count numbers of books read and how deeply into the university that nasty habit of quantification penetrates.) One more reason that I want to balance print with nonprint media from the beginning is so that we can identify those students who will preserve the past as well as those who will advance technology. Everyone will learn to read, but only a few will learn to read deeply, especially in the languages of the centuries before this one. We are in danger of losing some of those few by insisting on the same diet for everyone. So another educational priority that we must observe is teaching children to respect different appetites, different capacities. Children learn to respect human differences only by experiencing them, which is why schools promote mainstreaming, multiculturalism, learning in more than one language and more than one medium. I shudder at that oversimplification—and all others in this telegraphed message. My excuse is that this short talk itself demonstrates the bitterest lesson of all for living in a technological society: We cannot simplify. We cannot back out of the age of telecommunications. The best we can do is to help kids [to use a phrase from John Ciardi’s] find the courage of their confusions. Some will find that courage through books, if they learn not only how to read but to choose reading—even in prime time. So what if reading in the future involves pressing buttons instead of turning pages.

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You’re not surprised to have me conclude that the highest educational priority of all is Professional Education itself—adapting the old disciplines to the new vehicles of transmission, putting into the computers something worth taking out, books and machines working together to produce new learning, to dispel ignorance. Let Isaac Asimov say it: “There could be a steady, synergistic interaction of man and machine, each learning from the other, and each advancing with the help of the other. The distinction between the two varieties of intelligence may grow dimmer, and the discovery and refinement of knowledge . . . may be carried on at a faster rate by both together than would be possible by either alone (1976, p. 103).”

References Asimov, I. (1976, September). His own particular drummer. Phi Delta Kappan, 58(1), 99–103. *Ciardi. J. (1972). John Ciardi. In A. Comire (Ed.), Something about the author (Vol. 1 pp. 128–129). Detroit, MI: Gale Research. Farrell, E. J. (1978, September). Wading for significance in torrents of trivia. The English Journal, 67(6), 26–33. Leonard, G. (1968). Education and ecstasy. New York: Delacorte Press. Ryan, K., Newman, K., & Johnston, J. (1978, October). An interview with Lawrence A. Cremin. Phi Delta Kappan, 60(2), 112–115. White, T. H. (1958). The once and future king. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

*  The exact source of this quotation could not be identified. Instead, a possible source is cited in which the referenced author discusses similar ideas.

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7 Is Illiteracy the Disease? Is Literature the Cure? Raleigh, North Carolina March 2–3, 1979 In this speech, Dr. Early explores the changing definitions of literacy and the impact new standards of literacy have both on the teaching of English and on the students themselves.

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s illiteracy the disease? No, no, no! You’ve got it back end to, said a letter to the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education recently. Except that the writer [Joseph Voelker] was an English professor, so he said it more elegantly: To say that illiteracy is a disease inverts the truth of things. Actually, illiteracy is man’s natural happy state and literacy is the disease. Literacy is something that infects only some of us. It is carried by close contact with those already infected; its worst outbreaks occur in crowded, urban conditions . . . Man in his natural state does not suffer from it and will make sensible efforts to avoid it. (Voelker, 1978, p. 18) Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 65–77 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Choose your metaphor. English teachers are either the Typhoid Marys of literacy, or they are white-coated medics fighting epidemic illiteracy. Either way, it’s a tougher fight than it used to be because our standards for literacy have shot way up. Teaching English takes more energy and artistry today than ever before because we are demanding more of ourselves. Society is demanding more of us also, of course. Let’s quickly remind ourselves of why we have raised the ante on literacy. The reasons are tinged with irony. One ironic reason that our definitions of literacy have changed is that we are doing a better job of teaching reading than we have ever done— beginning reading, that is. Throughout the nation, but especially in the Southeast, test scores in primary grades are rising. In this case, the average first grader at this time of the year is scoring about 10 months ahead of where the average 6-year-old was performing 15 years ago. That’s not surprising. Today’s children are being taught by teachers who are better prepared, who know more about language development and have better instructional materials. And children today are better prepared for becoming literate—they are better fed, healthier, more advanced in language than in the good old days. Television is not all bad. I don’t mean that we’re over the hump in teaching beginners to read, but we’ve made enormous gains just as we expected to. After all, we’ve spent more money, more time and effort on the development of reading materials, on language research, on Head Start programs, etc.—we’ve made heavier investments in the early years of education than anywhere else along the line. We need more, not less, money, time, and talent directed at the early years. Prevention is still better than remediation. But we need equal investments beyond grade 3. We should remember that teaching children how to read in the first three grades is no guarantee whatsoever that they will choose to read, or that they will read wisely, in all the years thereafter, when reading is just one of the tools of learning and not an end in itself. Our changing views of literacy are crystallized in Alvin Toffler’s prediction in Future Shock (1970): the illiterate of tomorrow will not be the person who cannot read but the person who cannot reason. Toffler knows that everyone will learn to read in the sense that Flesch defines reading: the lowest-common denominator sense of sounding out words. We can teach machines to sound out words. (There is a machine that reads to the blind.) Processing information when it reaches the brain—ah, that’s another matter and that’s what we really mean by reading. Consider another irony in our changing standards of literacy. In the good old days, literacy was a frill, a luxury, for the great majority of people. In the textile mills of New England in the 1800s, Sunday schools were set up—not for religious instruction but for reading and writing—offering the

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workers, mostly children and women, something extra, a luxury, a refinement. What did our working parents use reading for? Chiefly for entertainment, for pleasure, for keeping up with the news in weekly or at most oncea-day newspapers. Do most people need reading today for entertainment? For news? And writing? What was writing for in the good old days? An occasional letter to relatives or friends. “The greatest cultural villain of our times,” says William Safire (1980), “has a motherly image: Ma Bell . . . Instead of writing, people are calling; instead of communicating, they’re staying in touch.” He cites these statistics: “The volume of first class letters has doubled since 1950, but over 80 percent is business-related. Another ten per cent is greeting cards and Christmas cards; only three per cent is from one person to another, to chew the fat.” Safire’s view of the uses of writing is, of course, limited, and I’d like to come back later to this persistent notion that writing is for communicating. But suffice it to say here that some of our reasons for reading and writing have been greatly diminished by television and telecommunications. At the same time, technology has made literacy essential—for everyone. Illiterates cannot survive in a technological society. That’s why we have appeals on radio for volunteers to teach reading and writing to [those with intellectual disabilities]. One can scarcely exist without being able to read signs, contracts, advertising, Medicare forms, TV guides; hence, our emphasis today on survival skills and not just for the least able. But there’s still another twist to what technology is doing to us English teachers and to the society we serve and form a part of. As a technological society grows older (look at England, look at us), the basic jobs in industry become less attractive. (Think of the textile industry, of agribusiness— which used to be farming; think of mining, of the service trades. Think of where the strikes are.) Technological advances take away many low-skill jobs (How many migrant farmworkers will be replaced by machines this year?). At the same time, technology creates not so many new positions that demand high levels of thinking and creativity. (Who will program the computers? Read the printouts?) And in an affluent society, the need for services greatly increases. (Who will slap together the Big Macs, slide the crepes off the Magic Pans? Who’s doing it now?) And never mind the fastfood establishments. Now, having glanced at the jobs our society offers, think about who’s going to fill them. Three quarters of the children who enter first grade stay to graduate from high school. And 50% of these go on to college.

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In my first year of teaching in a mill town in Connecticut, probably a dozen out of the seniors went on to college. For the nation as a whole, the figure was about 20%. So in my short teaching lifetime, the dimensions of change are enormous. The difference between 20% then and 50% today are the “new” students who are the focus of an excellent collection of essays new from NCTE and entitled New Students in Two-Year Colleges, Twelve Essays edited by Walker Gibson. The students these 12 teachers are describing are your students, your average students, the kids in the middle, the ones you send on to the 2-year colleges. The first essay begins this way: We teachers have a lot of names for them, and those poured out in faculty offices are usually not complimentary . . . open admissions students are seldom like your old (college) classmates. Possessing varied backgrounds and ages, they commonly lack the familiarity with written language and literature expected of college freshmen. . . . They score in the lowest third among national samples of young people on the traditional tests of academic ability. . . . There is a high correlation between low testing and low socioeconomic status (a lovely euphemism, that); and it’s difficult to get beyond high school if you’re working class, a poor tester, a woman, or nonwhite. Open admissions policy has made it easier for some of these people—at least opened the door. Now what are we going to do with them? (Doherty, 1979, p. 1)

Where you teach, in elementary and secondary schools, it’s always open admissions. You have to answer that question not just for the 50% who make it to college, but also for the 50% who do not. What are we going to do for them? For the 100% who will be literate and the 50% and more who will enter college? Probably not what the kids and their parents expect. What they want is strictly vocational, strictly utilitarian. But career education (is that also a euphemism?) won’t do. Technological society doesn’t promise everyone the kinds of careers and lifestyles that television commercials and situation comedies have inspired everyone to expect. The author of this first essay argues, persuasively I think, for a humanist education for all students. His colleagues then go on to describe a new kind of humanism for new students. I am going to suggest that this “new humanism” is contained in Patricia Graham’s definition of “What’s basic.” (She’s the director of the National Institute of Education.) “Being able to read, to write, to manipulate symbols, to develop independent means of making judgments and determining action—in short, to

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be literate—is to be able to partake of the world as broadly as one’s talents permit” (1978). To get an idea of life’s possibilities—surely that is the purpose of a liberating education. That’s what most people want for themselves, for their kids. The basics they keep talking about are a means, not an end. And so are the consumer goods of a materialistic society. The microwave ovens, the mink coats, the Cadillacs, Pete Rose’s salary—these are only tokens of what people are after. These things, which possess us, are how we attempt to say who we are. Lewis Thomas looks about at psychiatrists, faith-healers, gurus of one kind or another, and says the problem is that we are dumb. What unsettles us is that we don’t know where we fit in the universal scheme of things. Is there a cure? Dr. Thomas thinks of Merlin counseling the young King Arthur: “The best thing for being sad is learning something new.” Learning something new about ourselves and others—that is the goal of a new humanism. Goals are easy to agree on. What’s not easy is how to reach them—that’s what we should be talking about at this conference. Or is it? My colleague at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education last spring, Bryant Fillion, reminds Canadian teachers of English in a recent article that there is no end to the practical, useful ideas available to teachers of writing, and I would add that this is triply true of the teaching of reading. “Our problem,” says Fillion (1981), “is making sense of the contradictions in all the advice we receive.” So we have to keep asking ourselves, “What is English for?” even though I hate the perennial question and prefer to deal with simple solutions. I don’t know any, of course, but I feel obliged to try. I wish I could ignore speech titles and conference themes. The smartaleck titles we send so glibly over the telephone wires in November come back to haunt us in March. Is illiteracy the disease? Is literature the cure? I told Denny Wolfe on Monday that no one would notice the title if we kept mum. But of course I can’t. Having said , no, illiteracy is not the disease, I’m about to say yes, literature is the cure. Yes, we can cure illiteracy through literature, but I don’t want to make the same wild claims for literature that the public seems to be making now for competency testing. Last month at the American Association of School Administrators, a superintendent pointed out that the public thinks “a bare-bones curriculum supported by a vigorous testing program should end drug abuse, vandalism, and teenage pregnancy.” My hopes for literature are more modest. I don’t expect literature—or schools—to cure every evil.

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I expect literature to help us to spread literacy. In spite of everything I’ve said about our growing success in primary grades, I know that learning to read and write isn’t easy for kids whose parents don’t read to them. About all that 6-year-olds have to bring to the printed page is what they have learned about language. By age 6, they have learned a great deal— about whatever oral language that surrounds them. But oral language, especially the language of nonstandard dialects, is very different from the language of books. I sound as if I were talking only about kids who are different or disadvantaged or poor. Listen to what the English department of Baylor School, a private school for boys in Chattanooga, said again and again in a letter to parents. “Read stories to children.” “If parents read, kids will.” “Parents should read to their children at first and with their children later, but they should read together all the time.” If you have to send pleading letters home to affluent parents, how in the world do you get the message to parents who have no books, no energy, no time? How do you reach working parents, single parents, the ones who don’t make it to Open House or the Up with Education night? I don’t mean to sound a note of doom; there’s much we can do. We can send books home in sharing packets in preschool and primary grades; we can set up lending libraries of children’s books in the places where parents are (e.g., the factory cafeteria); we can send bookmobiles to where kids and parents are (the street corners, parks, swimming pools, wherever); we can infiltrate TV with good literature. In Syracuse, the schools are trying to reach the parent slumped before the TV set with 30-second commercials on how to read to kids, how to talk with them. But our best bet for reaching parents is to catch them now—before they become parents—while they are still in our high school classes, in caregiving classes, in parenting course, in English classes. Many high school kids hate to read. Many of them read very poorly. For them, the enemy is the Book. But all over North America, I see teachers getting these 16-years-olds, whose attitudes toward print are definitely not friendly, to read easy, colorful, kids’ books—old ones like Green Eggs and Ham, newer ones like the Clown of God. They are willing to read—and they spend time practicing good oral reading—because they have a reason for doing so. They are reading to the children in daycare centers, kindergarten, the primary grades. They are learning to be parents. They are learning to care for others. They are feeling needed.

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Let’s talk about children’s literature in the high school. Let’s extend the case for it beyond the ulterior motive of improving this generation’s skills at parenting, of improving the next generation’s chance to be literate. Let me make a plea for children’s literature in the high school for its own sake. Just as college English departments offer courses in children’s literature, so do many high schools. But not enough to satisfy a real need. My course in children’s literature at Syracuse University is aimed at elementary teachers, but wandering into it this semester are art students, English majors, wouldbe journalists, and TV producers, and a major in corporate finance. What these young men and women are seeking (besides three easy credits) is what they missed in childhood and what they are missing now. What Bettleheim says is in the old unadulterated fairy tales: “the chance to work through essential tasks and feelings, the difficult universal emotions of growing up.” It’s better, I think, if they get the chance before they are 7—by being read to—but obviously the need is still there in adolescence and adulthood. Fantasy is our magnet. For fantasy, as Ursula Le Guin points out, crumbles the categories of Juvenile and Adult. The idiom of fantasy, for all its intense privacy, is one we all seem to share, whether we speak English or Urdu, whether we’re 5 or 85. The witch, the dragon, the hero, the night journey, the helpful animal, the hidden treasure . . . we all know them, we recognize them (because, if Jung is right, they represent profound and essential modes of thought).

And elsewhere she says: Sophisticated readers are accepting the fact that an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce an improbable and hypothethical art. At this point realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.

Unfortunately, very few fantasies are shelved in both the children’s room and on the adult shelves. (Lord of the Rings may be an exception.) Many books published for children are far too mature for average readers in elementary school but would be quite right for teenagers, if only an adult would break into the Children’s Room and drag out titles like Susan Cooper’s magnificent five-book series The Dark Is Rising (1973), which is a complex study of the struggle of good and evil. Much simpler is Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting (1975), whose theme is the old one about the shortness of life, the fountain of youth. How would

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you like to live forever at the age you are now? Or to be 17 forever? Ms. Babbitt explores her theme through a lively plot involving kidnapping, murder, and escape from jail. When Mae Tuck kills the man in the yellow suit who would have packaged the waters from the magic spring, she is sentenced to hang. If the hanging takes place, the secret will be out, so Winnie must help her to escape. What will Winnie do with the water which 17-year-old Jesse has told her to save to drink when she, too, is 17 and he can come back to get her, marry her, and literally live for ever after? A new fantasy by a young Canadian Ruth Nichols, a doctoral student of religion and philosophy at MacMaster’s University, is winning the attention of critics but probably not falling into the hands of many teenagers. The Song of the Pearl (1976) begins with the death of 18-year-old Margaret and travels with her in an afterlife where she meets herself in reincarnations that include a young Elizabethan wife, an Indian slave, a girl of ancient Babylon. It is a feminist novel, exploring the role of woman through the ages, and it has echoes of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. By the way, one of the valuable uses of children’s literature in secondary classrooms is to point up comparative treatments of theme. You can think of dozens of young versions of mature themes. I’d like to teach “The Lottery” again, only this time use as a companion piece the short allegorical novel by Julia Cunningham called Dorp [sic] Dead (1965). I’ve recently come across accidentally and almost together The Child of the Owl (1977) by Lawrence Yep (for young readers) and Warrior Woman (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston. Both tell of being Chinese in California, both draw upon Chinese fairy tales that are part of the fabric of life for these children alienated from birth cultures, growing up surrounded by white ghosts. Not the least of the values of children’s literature in the secondary classroom is its comparative brevity. If we must choose books for others to read (and I think there are times when reading in common is appropriate), at least we can choose short works. If we are going to make mistakes, let them be brief. The college teachers of the “new students” in Walker Gibson’s collection of essays refer repeatedly to those students’ need for the personal, the subjective. Susan Blau writes of “demystifying literature.” Many of her students, she says, have the idea that reading literature is an elite, intellectual activity beyond their reach. These kids have been required in the preceding six years to make the leap from Seuss to Shakespeare (as Charlotte Huck puts it), but of course many of them never had the benefit of Seuss. No wonder they feel dumb. No wonder Blau has to show them that reading and

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understanding literature are not “arcane rituals practiced only in the presence of the high priests and priestesses of Lit Crit” (1979, p. 34). But years ago, with the old college student, with the elite coeds of that ivy league institution (Sarah Lawrence) that Mary McCarthy used for her roman a clef, The Groves of Academe (1974), the need for a personal approach to literature was just as apparent. So Mary McCarthy has [a faculty member lecturing a colleague] like this: Tolstoy’s method, the method of Virginia Woolf, the elucidation of Mann’s symbols, the patterns of Katherine Anne Porter. All appropriate enough for criticism, but it isn’t what the student reads for. A student reads an author for his ideas, for his personal metaphysic, what he calls, till you teach him not to say it, his “philosophy of life.” He wants to detach from an author a portable philosophy, like the young Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist—a laudable aim which you discourage by your insistence on the inseparability of form and content. (1952, pp. 209–210)

Can literature lead to literacy? (Notice that I’ve reversed your conference theme.) I think our only hope for literacy at any level is through literature’s appeal to the personal, the subjective, the universal longing to know ourselves and—just as important—to forget ourselves and to understand others. Only through reading will children pick up the dialects of written language. No, not only through reading. Much more of that familiarity with the written word will come through listening . . . being read to from infancy through grade 12. I have only four points to make tonight and I want to be sure to make them, whether or not they fit under my title or your conference theme. These three I’ve made: ◾◾ It will take a generation or two to achieve universal, high-level literacy. Let’s give the next generation a head start by making their parents readers of children’s books; ◾◾ Add children’s literature to high school English; ◾◾ Develop students’ ear for the written dialect. Read to them. The fourth point will take a bit more time to develop and is directed to the people back home. If we are to achieve those goals we all fervently believe in, we English teachers need help, not from parents only, but from every teacher on the staff who teaches in English, from everyone in the school who speaks English, writes it, and reads it. That, we hope, includes the principal. Especially, we need help from the principal. We can get a school language policy working across the curriculum only in schools where

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the principal is convinced that reading and writing are every teacher’s responsibility, not the English teacher’s alone. We need support from the top: principal, superintendent, school board. At that AASA [American Association of School Administrators] meeting last month, Graham Down of the Council for Basic Education told the superintendents: “Don’t be too cheap to pay for in-service. Don’t overlook that 6 weeks summer course.” (That was in a Back-to-the-Basics debate, by the way, that had the superintendents overflowing the auditorium.) I’m all for in-service, of course, and six weeks’ summer sessions, but I’ve taught enough of them to know that the high endeavor of July can flicker out in the post-Christmas slump. What we need is the kind of continuous staff development that can be daily—the kind that does not depend on after-school workshops or weekend conferences or summer courses or even summer work sessions in the local school district. All of these are OK for starters, but not for the development of a whole-school language policy which every teacher understands, believes in, contributes to, and puts into effect in his or her classes. Nothing less than a whole-school language policy can bring us within sight of universal literacy. That takes leadership. In South Carolina, the state education department has just reported on a study of schools that achieved higher-than-predicted levels in reading and schools that fell below predicted levels. A diligent search for how the two types of school were different resulted in one significant bit of evidence. The overachieving schools were ones in which the principals and staff understood what they were teaching and why. That’s what I mean by a language policy. To achieve a commitment to literacy, to language development, on the part of every teacher, we need to find time in the school day when teachers can reason together, when they can study together, when they can help each other with teaching. Many schools use team planning. In one middle school divided into three houses, the five content teachers who share the same students have the same team planning period every day. One is the reading teacher. During this time, they can share diagnostic information, tell each other what they’re assigning, correlate English with science and social studies and math, plan integrated units across subjects. Teacher centers are the chief instrument for staff development in three other schools in our area. Many of the teachers in these schools are sensing their need to understand the process of reading and writing in themselves as the best means of helping their students. One of the most attractive features of the Bay Area Writing Projects across the country is their emphasis on the teacher as writer.

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In Ontario, the language-across-the-curriculum campaign is off to a promising start because of the initial efforts of consultants like Nancy Martin and Jimmy Britton and the follow-up of Ontario Institute staff and local English coordinators. What consultants from England bring to in-service is a style that makes teachers the center of their own learning. Just as we talk about a student-centered curriculum, we must have teacher-centered in-service. For instance, we might begin with a seminar about what writing is for. There would be no lectures. We would do a bit of reading about what other teachers think. We would do a lot of writing. The purpose of this writing is not so much to share ideas as for the writer to get his ideas sorted out. You know: How do I know what I think until I see what comes out of the typewriter? A group of Australian teachers who were working with Nancy Martin a year ago published a journal of what they were learning and how they were changing their styles as teachers. Its title is From Bunbury to Perth—centers where the first and last workshops were held—and the first essay begins: “From Bunbury to Perth is a hell of a long way,” suggesting how much this teacher had changed. But the essence of staff development is daily interaction of two professionals in the teacher’s own classroom, with the teacher’s own students, materials, equipment, lesson plans. Suppose one professional is the expert on reading, or writing, or speech. The other is the content teacher. That’s pie-in-the-sky. We’d never get that many language consultants, unless every English teacher were to teach English just half the time they do now and the other half of their time become language consultants to their colleagues in the content fields. How about it? Would you be willing to teach your English classes three days one week, two days the next, or three weeks on and three weeks off? In that time, you’d teach theme-centered units, what your colleagues might think of as literature only. Of course, all the language skills would be in full use centered on the students’ purpose in studying the unit. But you would spend the other half of your time teaching writing and reading in cooperation with the content teachers. For instance, for the three weeks when you’re “off” English and have no classes of your own, you team teach with the social studies teacher, developing your kids’ abilities to read social studies and to write about social issues. Working together, you and the social studies teacher would be concerned with skills needed in expository writing and in reading history. Are you worried that your students would be devoting half as much time as they used to devote to English? Not really. The time they used to spend in your English classes they could now spend in directed study, probably in writing workshops or in reading centers.

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Obviously, this proposal needs far more detailed study than we can give it tonight. But think about it. It is a step toward team teaching. It moves cautiously toward breaking down curricular barriers. It would make every English teacher a resource teacher for the rest of the staff. Of course, it wouldn’t work everywhere. Of course, it would require very careful planning, a faculty willing to experiment, and committed to a language policy. But its strength is this: For schools that cannot afford reading consultants and English coordinators, this plan would add services without adding personnel. Well, that’s my fourth point. Do you remember the other three? Let me simplify still further. My message tonight is that we should ◾◾ read to kids; ◾◾ get kids to read to little ones so that they will learn to read to their children when the time comes; ◾◾ bring children’s literature into the high school; and ◾◾ establish a language policy that involves every teacher. Along the way, I think I’ve implied that our standards of literacy are rising and that we teachers are rising to the challenge of educating the young, not just for survival in a technological society, but for learning, for learning about human lives, their own and others, and how these lives might be lived in harmony and justice, with an understanding of the past and with hope for the future.

References Babbitt, N. (1975). Tuck everlasting. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Blau, S. (1979). Traditional literature for nontraditional students. In Walker Gibson (Ed.), New students in two-year colleges—Twelve essays (pp. 33–41). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Cooper, S. (1973). The dark is rising. New York: Atheneum. Cunningham, J. (1965). Dorp dead. New York: Pantheon Books. Doherty, J. (1979). Three ways of looking at an open door. In Walker Gibson (Ed.), New students in two-year colleges—Twelve essays (pp. 1–10). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. *Fillion, B. (1981, January). Reading as inquiry: An approach to literature learning. The English Journal, 70(1), 39–45. Graham, P. (1978, March 21). Unpublished speech to American Educational Research Association, Toronto. *  The exact source of this citation could not be identified. Similar ideas are conveyed in this more recent article.

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Kingston, M. H. (1976). The woman warrior: Memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts. New York: Knopf. *Le Guin, U. (2006, December 18). Imaginary friends. New Statesman. McCarthy, M. (1974). The groves of academe. New York: New American Library. Nichols, R. (1976). Song of the pearl. New York: Atheneum. Safire, W. (1978, May 12). Commencement Address (unpublished). New York: Syracuse University. Toffler, A. (1970). Future shock. New York: Random House. Voelker, J. (1978, November 20). Literacy as a disease: Raising it to plague proportions. [Letter to the editor.] Chronicle of Higher Education, XVII(12), 18. Yep, L. (1977) Child of the owl. New York: HarperCollins.

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8 What’s News in Reading? Wisconsin Spring Conference 1980 In this speech, Dr. Early addresses in depth what the real news is in the development of reading, news that is not always accurately reported in the headlines. She reminds teachers that the public concern with literacy is, in fact, heartening.

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eople sometimes ask me to talk about what’s new in reading. Since not much is new, but reading is always in the headlines, I’d rather talk about what’s news in reading. What old ideas are being recycled these days? How are the headlines affecting us in the classrooms and the clinics?

Twenty-five years after Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955), Rudolf Flesch is back in the news warning a Senate investigating committee that America is “lapsing back into illiteracy.” He’s writing new articles for the supermarket magazines, telling nervous parents that their kids can’t read because their teachers aren’t teaching phonics. This is an outrageous distortion of the truth, and terribly ironic, because Flesch can credit himself and his 1955 book with causing a complete turnaround in how we teach reading. Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 79–86 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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You cannot find a major series today that does not teach phonics . . . and basals are still the instructional program in more than 95% of primary classrooms. The truth is, test scores are rising in primary grades—all over the country. Yet Flesch’s testimony makes front page headlines . . . along with dozens of other false witnesses. “50 to 60 Million Americans Illiterate” was the headline that announced the publication of a recent study of adult reading. When you get beyond the headlines, what do you find? That people find the income tax forms hard to understand or they can’t figure out their bills from Master Charge. In another note from the newspapers, Clifton Fadiman urges us to “act at once, in the short time that remains before all of us become incapable of reading and writing.” He makes illiteracy seem like a disease we’re all in danger of catching. One college professor, tongue in cheek, says Fadiman has it back end to. “Illiteracy is man’s happy natural state,” says the professor, “and literacy is the disease. . . . It is carried by close contact with those already infected. . . . Man in his natural state does not suffer from it and will make sensible efforts to avoid it” (Voelker, 1978, p. 18). More seriously, a college president writing in Harper’s last fall describes the literacy crisis affecting college students. He says that “despite superior high school grades and test scores” and despite “verbal facility,” many entering students are “chronically unable to retain what they read, to absorb arguments or facts in their heads long enough to make them their own” (Botstein, 1979, p. 34). He’s not complaining that college students can’t read, but that they cannot learn through reading. He’s very close to Alvin Toffler who says that tomorrow’s “illiterate” won’t be incapable of reading and writing; tomorrow’s illiterate will be the person who has not learned how to learn [emphasis added]. Today, then, literacy means “ability to read and write in a sophisticated and critical manner.” Today, literacy means learning through reading. This is a far cry from Rudolf Flesch’s idea of reading, which is limited to figuring out what printed words say. In 25 years, Rudolf hasn’t changed, but everyone else has—teachers, kids, parents, administrators. If you define reading as Flesch does, you can teach a machine how to read, and a couple of young geniuses at MIT have done just that, inventing a remarkable computer that makes phonemes out of graphemes and sounds like a Swede reading English with a heavy accent. But if you define reading as we do today—as information processing—then, of course, the machine isn’t reading; it’s the blind listener who is reading.

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Raising the ante on literacy has had two effects. First of all, it has increased the demands of the public. Where once they were concerned, like Rudolf Flesch, with phonics, now they couldn’t care less so long as their kids learn to read—and in due time can read high school textbooks and college textbooks. Art Buchwald (1977) put it this way: The Timkins have just received a bill from the college where they are paying $7,000 tuition for their daughter Laura. Now there’s a bill for an extra $250 for remedial reading. “I thought Laura learned to read in elementary school.” “Oh, she can read—it seems she doesn’t comprehend.”

Public concern for literacy has resulted in competency testing, and your newspapers, like ours in Syracuse, are probably running sample test items and syndicated articles on how to help your child pass the tests. All this attention to minimal competency testing further heightens the anxieties of teachers, who are already insecure enough in these days of excessing teachers or closing schools. Last week at the Massachusetts IRA, teachers were coming into meetings after having just given the first round of tests, and their main concern was: How do we coach for the tests? “I care not who the poets of the nation are,” said the wise man, “so long as I know who the test-makers are.” Competency testing contributes to mediocrity, says Willard Wirtz, who chaired the panel on declining SAT scores, because the emphasis is on minimum competency. However, I think we’ll see the minimal levels rise; they are already doing so in New York State, where competency testing has proved both a carrot and a stick. In Syracuse schools, for example, [a mandatory] eighth grade reading level for graduation from high school was instituted in the early 70s. By 1978, without a serious rise in the dropout rate, almost no seniors were being denied diplomas for failing to achieve in reading. I don’t know how many can read 8th-grade science textbooks or the local newspaper, but something’s happening. The kids are responding not simply to the threat of testing but to the fact that administrators and teachers care. Since the mandate, there’s been a changed climate toward the importance of reading throughout the secondary schools. As in many other cities, concern for competency in reading has created secondary reading programs where none have existed before. At the same time, the overemphasis on skills, the focus on underachievers has in other situations proved a real setback. Resource teachers, who ought really to be serving content teachers in their classrooms, have once again become “pull-out” teachers. That’s the inelegant title in central New York; it’s “withdrawal” teachers in other places. The semantics are bad and

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so are the implications. Support for the content reading program—the real heart of secondary and elementary instruction—has been cut back in many systems. Developmental reading classes have been lost in budget cuts. (I would not deplore this loss; in fact, I’d rejoice in it, if the reading teachers were retained to work with content teachers, but this is seldom the case.) In the elementary schools, the threat of competency testing is pushing the whole curriculum out of whack. Reading and math skills are taking over. What’s news in reading? Mostly that Americans either can’t read or don’t read. At least that’s what you learn if you do read—the newspapers. But a recent survey showed that 55% of American adults claim to be book readers, that 39% said they read only newspapers and magazines, and only 6% reported reading nothing at all. How’s that for lapsing into illiteracy, Dr. Flesch? But how was this news reported? “They’re Still Reading Books Out There Survey Finds” (Education Daily) “Study finds Nearly Half in U.S. Do Not Read Books” (New York Times)

What’s really news in reading is that we’re trying to figure out how people do it. To be sure, we’ve been trying to find out for about a hundred years . . . but in the hundred years of reading research, the focus has been on why children fail. Now what’s news in reading is a shift of focus—away from why children fail to how children succeed. For example, listen to this description of a 5-year-old Black child from a working-class home who has learned to read before going to school: When he did not understand what he was reading, he slurred over it, skipped words, converted it into something that was normal for him to say or just rejected the task of reading it. He never did anything remotely like sounding letter by letter a sequence that wasn’t a word he knew or calling word by word a sentence whose meaning escaped him. (In short) he read as though he always expected it to say something understandable.

As you listen to children read, listen for their grasp of meaning. Don’t worry about guesses that make sense. Don’t throw out phonics, but do worry about wrong guesses that result from sounding out words instead of thinking about meaning. You know, research shows that as kids learn lettersound relationships, their errors in oral reading change. They are more likely to make senseless errors reading horse when the text says house. Before phonics, they might have “read” “kitchen,” but it would have made sense. Remember what the Red Queen said to Alice: “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”

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An old idea hit the front page of the New York Times two Sundays ago. Mastery learning is sweeping the nation—again—or so we are led to believe by the Times writer. Actually, he was reporting on a few schools that have acted recently on the insights contained in Benjamin Bloom’s compilation of research over the past 20 years that investigates how children learn in classrooms. Like many good researchers, Bloom has rediscovered the obvious, and like a good teacher, he reminds us what we already know. His is an important voice that needs to be raised against social scientists like Jencks and de Lone, who suggest that children’s success in school depends almost completely on their parents’ education and ambition. Bloom’s studies of human characteristics and school learning (that’s the title of his book [1976], by the way) show that learning depends on three factors. The first is cognitive entry behaviors. That’s a fancy way of saying that what children have already learned is the best predictor of what they will learn. The second is motivation—especially as it relates to selfconfidence. How children feel about their chances for success is a powerful factor. Bloom’s studies show that by the end of grade 3, most children have decided whether or not they can succeed at academic learning. (Don’t confuse wanting to read with expecting to learn how. Our biggest job with remedial readers is reviving their hope that they can read.) And, the third and most important factor is quality of instruction, because how you teach can make a difference in the children’s cognitive entry behaviors and in their expectations of success. Bloom claims that, done correctly, mastery learning will enable 80% of students to master 80% of the material. Perhaps what is news about mastery learning, which has been with us since I was in elementary school a long, long time ago, is that we’re pretty good at determining what kids haven’t learned but not so clever at providing the second chance or the third or the umpteenth. The danger is focusing only on the mechanical skills where mastery learning seems to work most easily—on basic reading skills, on the conventions of writing. Also, it’s easier to find out what skills kids have mastered than it is to find out what their “world knowledge” is. The danger is that the whole of reading instruction becomes the Wisconsin Design. Mastery learning is an idea whose time has come again and again; let’s make it work this time. What is the real news in reading? It’s concern for how children use reading in learning in the content fields. How can we help them? First, let us concede that children can learn from textbooks only that which they half know already. [Think of] Bloom’s cognitive entry behaviors.

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Second, let’s admit that reading is the efficient way to learn only if you know something about the subject already—and if you are familiar with the language of textbooks. The language of textbooks is different from the language of stories, which is a bit like the language we speak, but not an exact match. We know that learning to read is an extension of learning to speak, so it helps if you learn to read in the same language you learned to speak. That’s why Spanish-speaking kids are learning to read first in Spanish. But whether it’s Spanish or English you’re learning to read, the language of books is different from the language 6-year-olds speak. That’s why we have to start with children’s oral language in language experience approaches. It’s also why we have to do a lot of reading to children—to make the transition from oral dialect to written dialect easier. Now, as we’ve said, there’s a closer match between oral language and the language of stories because story was originally oral. Because children are familiar with the language of stories (especially if they have been read to a great deal), we start them reading stories—and we overdo it in primary grades. By concentrating on reading stories, we have neglected the language of exposition, of argument, of persuasion; in short, we have neglected the language of text. So what can we do to correct this imbalance of narrative and textbook prose? Well, from the beginning, we can read to children from informational books as well as from stories and fantasies. We can balance fiction and nonfiction in basal reading materials; we are now doing that much more effectively than ever before. But for content reading, the basal is only a beginning. In content reading, readiness is all. But it’s more than the DRA [Directed Reading Activities] applied to science or social studies texts. Readiness is the long-term build up over the months and years that keeps children interested in ideas. The way to take advantage of kids’ curiosity is to read to them, because the level of their interest in ideas always exceeds their ability to learn something new through reading themselves. But the other important reason for reading informational books to kids is to get them used to the language of description and explanation and argument—the language of the content textbooks. So, content teachers are news in reading. Who else is news in reading? Administrators are. It is increasingly clear that reading programs succeed only if the administrator cares—cares enough to learn about language development, cares enough to learn that the place to teach reading and study skills is in the content subjects, and knows that this is where teachers need help.

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A caring administrator develops creative schemes for staff development that can take place within the school day, not after school. For example, in one high school, the principal figured out how to get an extra 30 minutes of free time into the schedule so that the Reading Coordinator could work daily with three or four teachers in each subject area, taking each content area for several weeks. A caring administrator knows what to do with Title I monies. She (the administrator) doesn’t hire a reading teacher and abandon him. A caring administrator knows that kids who cannot read need one-to-one teaching at least some of the time. She knows that means 15 or 20 daily preparations, each one different; that’s a lot of preparation. We talk about teachers who make a difference, but in one study after another, the real differences are due to leadership. In four inner city schools where achievement was high in spite of predictions that it would not be, the main factor was strong leadership. Three characteristics of schools with excellent administrators were these: The school climate was orderly but not repressive. There was strong emphasis on acquiring, developing, assessing reading skills. The staff held high expectations. A second study showed that in low-achieving schools, teachers were more likely to attribute children’s reading problems to nonschool factors beyond their control—you know, home background, parents, IQ, poverty.1 Who is making news in reading? Parents are. We are learning how important to school success are the first five years of life. Schools all across North America are reaching out to parents. In Syracuse, we are aiming television spot “commercials” at parents whom we cannot lure into the schools, showing them why and how to talk to preschoolers. In Trenton, New Jersey, parents are being brought into the schools to teach beginning reading to their own children under the guidance of teachers. In Dallas, in Milwaukee, in Syracuse, and a hundred other cities, the school district is sending home books with games that can be played to strengthen a child in his weakest areas. Isn’t it a relief to admit at last that children learn as much at home as they do in school—and to welcome parents as partners? What’s news in reading? Television is. Increasingly, parents and educators are coming to realize that television is a competing curriculum that usurps our children’s time and attention. Learning from the competing 1. This study possibly refers to the State of New York (1974). School factors influencing reading achievement: A case study of two inner city schools. Albany, New York: State of New York Office of Education Performance Review.

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curriculum is so effortless that there is a decline in kids’ capacity to learn anything demanding. So this story from the New York Times is really about reading: “How Do Prominent Parents Govern Their Children’s TV Habits?” In it you find that Tom Brokaw—it turns out—allows his three children (who are 14, 12, and 10) to choose three—just three—favorite programs per week, and they frequently have a hard time filling their quotas. The running gag in the Brokaw family is that “Television makes your brain go soft, and Dad must have a very soft brain because he works at it.” Prominent parents avoid the forbidden fruit syndrome, says this article, but one way or another, their children are subjected to above-average restrictions on television viewing. If teachers are to compete with the alternate curriculum, they need parents on their side. An article like this one deserves widespread attention. Finally, we might reflect for a moment on the pluses and minuses of the news about reading that our newspapers print. Much of it is inaccurate, headline-grabbing, inimical to teachers, pandering to the Proposition 13 mentality of taxpayers. But, on balance, the attention accorded to education today is heartening. In spite of some evidence to the contrary, this is a nation that cares about literacy. This is a nation where newspapers remind us daily of the esteem in which reading is held. If, as reading teachers we sometimes blink in the glare of the spotlight, we know it’s better to be scolded than forgotten.

References Bloom, B. S. (1976). Human characteristics and school learning. New York: McGraw Hill. Botstein, L. (1979, September). A proper education. Harper’s, 259(1552), 33–37. Buchwald, A. (1977, October 17). Learning the three R’s. Ottawa Citizen. de Lone, R. (1979). Small futures: Children, inequality, and the limits of liberal reform. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Flesch, R. (1955). Why Johnny can’t read and what you can do about it. New York: Harper & Row. Jencks, C. et al. (1972). Inequality: A reassessment of the effect of family and schooling in America. New York: Harper & Row. Voelker, J. (1978, November 20). Literacy as a disease: Raising it to plague proportions [Letter to the editor.] Chronicle of Higher Education, XVII(12), 18. Wirtz, W. et al. (1977). On further examination: Report of the Advisory Panel on the Scholastic Aptitude Test score decline. New York: College Entrance Examination Board.

9 Shared Responsibilities for the New Literacy Iowa English Council April 11, 1980 Stressing the need for teachers to pay particular attention to students “in the middle,” Dr. Early advocates that secondary teachers across the curriculum use a team approach in teaching literacy.

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he English teachers who stay for lunch on a spring Saturday are the serious ones—the never-say-diet types who can face not only a serious calorie intake but a speaker burdened with such a heavy title as “Shared Responsibilities for the New Literacy.” Good grief! This is the time of the year to be shedding responsibilities, not taking on new ones. But if we can’t get rid of them, maybe we can redistribute the load so that we are not the only teachers in the school concerned with how kids write and whether they read and how they use language to learn about themselves and others.

Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 87–96 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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To spread our goals across the curriculum means we must reorganize our energies; it means not fewer responsibilities but a different assortment. When I asked Judy Beckman who would be coming to this luncheon, she said: “Why all the responsible people; the ones who get things done. This is your chance to raise important issues.” I’m so relieved that Judy asked me to worry you, not to entertain you. I worry more easily than I breathe, and I can’t tell a story to save my life, so Judy’s advice put me at ease. I’d happily share all my worries with you, but since time is short, I won’t mention Reagan’s budget, burned-out teachers, tuition tax credits, declining enrollments, plummeting SAT scores, or minimum-competency testing. All these things worry me, but I can make a shorter list of what I’m not worried about: ◾◾ I am not worried that television and computers will make print obsolete; ◾◾ I’m not worried that kids will lose their natural curiosity, and I’m confident that many of them will turn to books to satisfy their need to know; ◾◾ I’m not worried about the gifted and talented. Instead, I’m worried about future teachers; ◾◾ I believe that humanities will survive even during this period when most college freshmen think of them as prerequisites for unemployment; ◾◾ I’m not convinced that electives have disappeared, never to return; ◾◾ I’m not really worried that reading and writing will drive content out of the curriculum or that teachers will forget what reading and writing are for; and ◾◾ I’m just a mite nervous about consultants spending more time writing proposals for additional state funds than they do in improving services to teachers and students. I’m not worried about illiteracy. We have today the largest number of readers—and the most discerning—in our history. I agree with novelist John Cheever, who says it’s foolish to conclude that the reader is vanishing. But enough! I’m not here to congratulate us all for being part of an educational system that works, and works well, most of the time, that embraces almost everyone in this society, that cares about kids’ chances in the world. I know a story that says it better. An American journalist was challenged by a Russian to explain the American dream. “What is all this about the American dream?” asked the Russian. “Tell me in just one word.” “That’s

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easy,” said the American, “the word is access. Everything else is commentary.” That’s it—access—that’s what the schools are for. But I’m not here to congratulate you. I’m here to worry you and so I will. Chiefly, I am worried about how we can deploy our limited energies and resources so that the 50% of high school graduates who go on to postsecondary education are all sufficiently literate that they can absorb the ideas contained in college-level textbooks, so that they can express what they learn with clarity and conviction. And for the other 50%—the ones whose formal education ends with high school—for these youngsters, especially, we want something more than basic skills. It’s in our classrooms that these kids have to glimpse life’s possibilities and feel the power of selfhood that literacy promises. We have in the United States the resources to achieve universal literacy at the levels I’ve suggested—at least half of our high school graduates literate enough to learn in college, everyone else sufficiently literate for life in an electronic age. We are not faced with the dreadful choice third-world countries must make: whether to provide primary schooling for all their people knowing that this cuts off the possibility of higher education. Nevertheless, we also have hard choices to make. With shrinking budgets, if we spend our efforts in one place, we have to cut back somewhere else. I want to argue that the time has come—that it has long since come—for us to concentrate our efforts on the middle. I mean that we should put our money, our brains, our physical energies into the kids in the middle of the age and grade sequence—after age 8, before they’re 16, in the middle of the achievement range, not beginning readers, not mature readers; in the middle of the IQ range, not the gifted, not the remedial readers—the kids in the middle. Our resources must go first into applying what we already know about how early adolescents use reading and writing to learn in every field. We know a great deal, for example, about how unevenly adolescents develop in language skills and how erratically they apply these skills to learn science and history and literature. I think there are reasons why teachers generally have not begun to apply what we know. Perhaps our first priority is to remove those reasons. But let me put it this way instead: Our first priority is to get kids to read and write more—more first, better later. Our second priority is really part of the first: to improve the teaching of reading and writing in every subject, not just in English. Our third priority, much lower on our list of needs, is research; but not the kind of research that isolates students and employs artificial assignments, but research that examines what’s happening in classrooms.

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When I refer to priorities, I am talking, of course, about national, state and local budgets. I am saying that the biggest share should go to the middle years of schooling. Let me explain why as simply and briefly as I can. For nearly a hundred years—and this is still true today—our major efforts have been aimed at beginning reading. The reason, we have been told, is that prevention is better than remediation. True, but not the whole truth, as any administrator will tell you who compares test scores in grade 3 with scores in grades 6 and 9. Still, no one can deny the importance of getting children off to a good start. OK. So let’s use that argument as a reason for shifting our concern to the adolescent reader. The more attention we pay to reading in junior and senior high schools today, the better start in reading the next generation will have. And the better they read in primary grades, the better will be the students we send on to college. The children who learn to read most easily are the paper-and-pencil kids, the ones from “educating homes.” The importance of the home curriculum hit hard in the ’70s, and efforts to improve it have become a major focus of schools, professional organizations, and the media. This bumper sticker from the Michigan State IRA comes right to the point: Kids Who Read Were Read To. However, transforming parents into readers and listeners will take enormous effort. And as with Sesame Street and the preschool movement generally, these efforts will reach middle-class parents before they reach the ones we’re really after. Improving the home curriculum is much like in-service for teachers: it works best when there is a preservice foundation on which to build. That’s why I propose to reach the next generation through today’s teenagers— before they are parents. I don’t need to remind you that the birth rate is highest among poor teenagers, lowest in the middle class where women’s careers postpone childbearing. We are going to have more poor children in public schools in the next decade. The time to get them off to a good start is now, before they are conceived, while future parents are still in school, where we can reach them through parenting courses, through family services and caregiving courses, and also through reading and English courses. I said that my first priority is to get adolescents to read more first, better later. I meant that. Average readers need far more experience than they typically have had with reading easy books, especially easy books that supply them with information they want. There are plenty of those books available, but they are in elementary libraries. You can’t get a teenager into the Young Adult section of the library let alone into the children’s room where the oversized books are stacked on the lower shelves.

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You can tell me about many programs that use preschools and kindergartens as learning places for high school parenting courses. We have many such situations. We need more. If I had to select just one focus for the Title I reading teachers in a given junior-senior high school, it would be to mount a reading-to-others program that would give teenagers a chance to consolidate their own shaky skills and at the same time learn the lesson of the bumper sticker. Although I mentioned Title I, I don’t mean to imply that my concern is for the below-average reader exclusively. Most teenagers need to read more before they can learn to read better. I have proposed the use of good thinkbooks as readiness for content reading, as supplements to the five-pound content textbook, and as necessary for most of the kids in the middle. Now, who is going to find for the high school science teacher books like Seymour Simon’s Animal Facts, Animal Fables (1979) or for the high school history teacher books like Jean Fritz’s Where Are You Going, Christopher Columbus (1980)? You are. This old idea of getting adolescents to read more first, better later, is just one illustration of applying what we already know. We haven’t applied this bit because it takes more energy and know-how to find good informational trade books than to use the prepackaged programs of the textbook publishers. It’s easier to use workbooks, skills cards, and (shall we call it) instructional technology. It’s less effective but it’s easier. Why must teachers seek the easier route? That’s not a rhetorical question—you know the reasons—but I’m going to move on to the second priority—improving teaching—even though I’m aware that I’ve stopped with “reading more.” Of course, that’s the merest beginning; reading better is the real issue. But move on we must, since it’s unlikely that many adolescents will read or write better unless their teachers also improve. Surely to help their students to become more literate, teachers must themselves grow in literacy. That begins when teachers are themselves high school students. I’ve said that we should teach kids in the middle to become parents who read to their kids. Let me make a parallel point with respect to their becoming teachers. It is from the middle ranks of today’s adolescents that we will draw tomorrow’s teachers. Oh, of course, we shall lure a few of the best minds into teaching, but to be realistic about it, we will draw most of the teaching force in the years to come from the kids in the middle, from the “new” students in our colleges—the ones who are the first in their families to make it, the immigrants’ kids, the minorities, the girls who didn’t used to merit the privilege—these are the ones who account for some of the decline in SAT scores: the minorities, women, kids from the working class. For years, the first rung on the ladder of upward mobility has been teach-

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ing. Teachers are the first college graduates that poor kids get to know, their first role models. To be sure, this situation is changing somewhat, both because there are fewer openings in education and better opportunities elsewhere. Especially for women. As women get the chance to become captains of industry, bankers and lawyers, physicists and film producers, they stay out of Schools of Education. All of which is great for women and terrible for education, for while we used to attract to teaching the very best of the women, the present candidates are likely to be no better than the men, which is pretty sad. We don’t need the autumn issue of Phi Delta Kappan to remind us that some teachers read very little and write very badly.1 Now, my premise is that teacher education begins in kindergarten and ends with retirement. That makes all of us responsible for quality in teaching. Future secondary teachers are learning how to teach when they are themselves in high school. And of course, they should also be learning how to read and write. So whatever we can do to improve reading and writing in high schools will feed back into the system. I’d like teachers to use language more precisely and powerfully and to be careful of their spelling. But then I’d also like editors to spell correctly, and lawyers to mind their nouns and verbs, and the Secretary of State to show more respect for the language. Still, teachers’ literacy is a cause for worry since (to dust off an old cliché) you can no more teach what you don’t know than come back from where you haven’t been. Teachers’ literacy is important, but it’s a side issue. The central issue is how to get secondary teachers to work as a team to enhance students’ learning skills. For at least 40 years, we have been saying that literacy— good English—is the shared responsibility of every teacher whose discipline requires reading and writing. But we’ve been saying this mostly to each other, at conferences like this one, or in reading courses where almost every student is an English teacher planning to abandon English and become a reading specialist. Our success in spreading reading and writing across the curriculum has been something less than total. Why have we failed? Perhaps because we have put too much stock in methods courses that tell teachers what they ought to do instead of showing them how. Perhaps because we still have to learn what that fine phrase “continuous staff development” really means. It certainly doesn’t mean just another in-service course. Somehow we must find ways of doing in teacher education what we ask teachers to do in their classrooms. It’s popular to 1. Dr. Early might be referring to W. Timothy Weaver’s article “In Search of Quality: The Need for Talent in Teaching,” published in Phi Delta Kappan, September 1979, Vol. 61 (1), pp. 29–32, 46.

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talk about the student-centered curriculum. It’s time we emphasized teacher-centered in-service, which begins with teachers examining the process of reading and writing in themselves, which involves them in much talking and writing, not so much listening to the “expert,” and leads the whole faculty to set down what they believe about language development and how language affects learning in the content fields. The Bay Area Writing Project was right on target since it emphasized teachers writing. It reached only English teachers, however, and too few of them. It’s not an easy task to get teachers to work together, but team teaching is how secondary schools function. Wherever we have one teacher teaching social studies, another math, another language, we have students being taught by teams of teachers, whether or not those teachers operate as a team. Usually they do not. Until they do, I see very little hope for improving reading and writing for kids in the middle. Teams work when they have leadership. Over the years, very good secondary schools have attempted to buy that leadership by hiring a reading consultant. But well-trained consultants are hard to find in the first place, are almost always spread too thin, burn out quickly, and spend most of their time writing proposals, evaluating textbooks, explaining test results, writing curriculum guides, diagnosing kids, and repeating as in-service courses whatever methods they learned at the university. They have almost no time to spend in helping teachers in their classrooms; yet this, I am sure, is the only kind of “staff development” that really works; that is, when two professionals share their observations of kids’ learning and then pool their ideas for motivating and responding to learning. I don’t mean to paint too bleak a picture, but I think we must admit that a full-time learning specialist (as I would prefer to call her or him) is a rare jewel, one that few schools can find or afford. Most secondary schools make do with Title I teachers who are overworked, underrated, unsure of what they are doing and why. Competency testing has diverted funds to the remedial and basic that should go to developmental reading and writing across the curriculum. Are there solutions? I would pin my hope these days on the administrator who is responsible for instruction, not administrivia, and can do three things: promote a climate for learning that is orderly, but not repressive; make clear to teachers and students that learning how to learn is central and paramount; and can manipulate schedules so that teachers can plan together and sometimes teach together. We can get a school language policy working across the curriculum. We need support from the top: principal, superintendent, school board.

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That support must be directed toward continuous staff development— the kind that does not depend on after-school workshops or weekend conferences, or summer courses, or even summer work sessions that teachers are paid for. All of these are okay for starters. But they won’t get us the whole-school language policy which every teacher understands, believes in, contributes to, and puts into effect in his or her classes. To achieve this kind of commitment to literacy, we need to find time in the school day when teachers can reason together, when they can study together, when they can help each other with teaching. For instance, we might begin with a seminar about what reading is for, what writing is for. There would be no lectures. We would do a bit of reading, maybe Frank Smith’s Understanding Reading (1971), maybe some chapters from the Singer and Donlan book, Reading and Learning from Text (1980), certainly all of Eileen Simpson’s Reversals (1979), which is a moving autobiography of a dyslexic that every high school teacher should read. Anyway, we’d do some reading and talking. We would do a lot of writing. The purpose of this writing is not so much to share ideas as for the writer to get her ideas sorted out. You know: How do I know what I think until I see what comes out of the typewriter? Studying together, reasoning together, writing for themselves and for each other—this is a part of what I mean by staff development. But mostly I mean the daily interaction of two professionals in the teacher’s own classroom, with the teacher’s own students, materials, equipment, lesson plans. Suppose one professional is the expert in reading and writing—the language consultant. The other is the content teacher. That’s pie in the sky, you say. We’d never get that many language consultants, unless we think of ways to get English teachers to team-teach with content teachers. There are many schemes for doing this. Would you be willing to teach your English classes three days one week, two days the next; or three weeks on and two weeks off? In English classes, you’d teach theme-centered units, what your colleagues might think of as literature only. Of course, all the language skills would be in full use, centered on the students’ purposes in studying the unit. You would spend the other half of your time teaching writing and reading in cooperation with the content teachers. For instance, for the weeks when you’re “off” English and have no classes of your own, you team-teach with the social studies teacher, developing your kids’ abilities to read social studies and to write about social issues. Working together, you’d concentrate on skills needed in expository writing and in reading history. Are you worried that your students would be devoting half as much time as they used to devote to English? No, the time they used to spend in

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your English classes they could now spend in independent—that is, directed—study, probably in writing workshops or in reading centers. You can think of a variety of schemes, none of which would work everywhere. All of them require very careful planning, a faculty committed to a language policy and willing to experiment. But we must be imaginative about schemes that would add service without adding personnel. For instance, suppose that every English teacher teaches four periods on his own but on the fifth period joins a science teacher, and together they figure out how to help kids learn from the science text. Maybe you’re worried that run-of-the-mill English teachers—the ones who stayed home this weekend—are not capable of advising their colleagues on how to teach reading and writing. Remember how much the tutors learn when eighth graders teach fifth graders. I’ve as much confidence in teachers learning from each other as I have that students can learn from each other. After staff development on my priorities list comes research. Of course, trying out schemes for staff development is a kind of research. Surely we need to examine thoughtfully whatever we do in classrooms. But given the elastic yardsticks we use to measure results, and given our propensity for interpreting statistics to prove what we want to believe, we’d best hold off on the controlled experiments and give ourselves more time to tinker and to muddle through. Research enjoys prestige in certain narrow circles, but it doesn’t carry much weight. Researchers talk to each other. We can find traces of psycholinguistic influences in today’s textbooks, but the big changes reflect society’s concern for minorities, women, and the handicapped. The overload of skills exercises in today’s materials reflects the public’s concern with competence. Publishers and school people listen to advocates, not researchers. Does research influence teachers? There have been a great many syntheses of research in this decade, but when we ask teachers if they read these syntheses, they say that they read a lot of them when they were in college but they don’t have time for them now, and anyway, research doesn’t “really relate to what is going on in their classrooms.” That’s true. For every good reason, researchers are reluctant to advise on testing or grouping (for instance) or to say that sentence-combining leads to improved reading and writing. As Jimmy Britton says, teachers “working by hunch have to beg many of the questions that basic research has barely begun to tackle” (1977, p. 2). Research is a rich man’s game, and these are hard times. Few of us can afford the time that research takes—and time translates to money—and the payoff is pitifully small in terms of changing classroom practice.

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So, in a tight economy, when we have to set priorities according to usefulness, research takes third place. I worry about that. After all, I’m a college professor, and no matter that research says little to teachers, it speaks volumes to promotion and tenure committees. The hope is that even on tight budgets, teachers and researchers will be able to move research into classrooms. The hope is we’ll examine how kids develop their language when they interact not only with books but with teachers and with each other. Thank you for sharing my worries, for letting me remind you of our responsibilities, and for holding fast to your optimism. As you work to influence how public monies are spent for education, as you set your own priorities, I hope you’ll remember those kids in the middle.

References Britton, J. (1977). Language and the nature of learning: An individual perspective. In J. Squire (Ed.), The teaching of English. 76th yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I. (pp. 1–38). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fritz, J. (1980). Where do you think you’re going, Christopher Columbus? New York: Putnam. Simon, S. (1979). Animal facts, animal fables. New York: Crown Publishers. Simpson, E. (1979). Reversals. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Singer, H., & Donlan, D. (1980). Reading and learning from text. Boston: Little, Brown. Smith, F. (1971). Understanding reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

10 Acting on Insights from the Research Base: 1956–1980 St. Louis IRA May, 1980 Note: A cryptic comment on the top of this speech indicated that the paper had been submitted at a later time, but searches of multiple databases did not reveal any publication of this paper. This speech explores the links between research and practice as efforts are made to address the causes of poor reading.

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rom 1965 to 1980, poor readers have been almost continuously in the spotlight, and as public voices have demanded to know why there should be so many of them, practitioners and researchers have made haste to respond. The practitioners have responded in two ways: by questioning the tests by which society defines “poor readers,” and at the same time, by stepping up efforts that are essentially aimed at teaching to the tests. Two kinds of responses also have come from researchers. On the one hand, many social scientists have accepted definition-by-test-score and looked at Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 97–106 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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who the poor readers are, sorting out family, community, and school-based factors to determine why there are “so many.” Psycholinguists, on the other hand, have said the standardized tests are limited and inaccurate and have inquired directly into the processes by which children learn to talk, and by extension, to read and write.

What Influences School Practices? The social scientists have captured public attention more readily than the cognitive psychologists and linguists. And since practitioners are more sensitive to headlines than to research reports, changes in practice over the last 15 years have reflected changes in public attitudes more than insights from research in language, cognition, and process. When books like Christopher Jencks’ Inequality (1972) dramatized the fact that the children of the poor have the most trouble learning to read, inner-city kids got large doses of DISTAR [Direct Instructional System for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading] and economy-brand phonics. When people like Silberman and Holt—advocates, not social scientists—charged teachers with mindlessness and extolled the virtues of open classrooms, a good many practitioners put aside, temporarily, the reading groups and the phonics drills and hoped that children would learn to read if they were surrounded by books and good will. When economic recession and concomitant conservatism led to demands for accountability, we stepped up skills instruction in reading, writing, and math, squeezing science, social studies, the arts, and literature out of the elementary curriculum, turning poor readers over to “pull-out teachers” for still more emphasis on skills. Now, as school populations decline, energy bills go up, schools are closed, and teachers are excessed, how do poor readers fare? Many of them are in classes that are larger than ever, taught by teachers who are insecure about their jobs and unlikely to risk innovation. Moreover, those larger classes are more diverse than ever as mainstreaming stretches the range of learning styles.

Does Research Influence Materials and Methods? The last 15 years have brought amazing changes in the volume and variety of instructional materials, which often determine the practices teachers use. Since basal series remain the chief instrument for teaching reading in more than 95% of primary classrooms and nearly 90% of middle grades, changes in these materials are particularly significant. Phonics, under the guise of “code emphasis,” has become an essential ingredient. Can we credit research? Only in part. Chall’s evaluation of phonics research in The Great Debate (1967) lent respectability to a movement that received

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its most powerful impetus from Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955). We can find traces of psycholinguistic influences in the teachers’ manuals, but the most visible changes in the basal series of the early ’70s reflect our concern for minorities, women, and the handicapped. In the newer editions, the overload of skills exercises reflects the public’s concern with competence. Not research but advocacy moves producers and buyers of basal texts. Does research influence the choice of instructional materials and, thereby, the methods teachers use? There have been a great many syntheses of research in the past 15 years, but the editors of a very recent one say that when they ask teachers if they read these syntheses, “they usually reply that they read a lot of them when they were in college but that they [don’t] have time for them now,” and anyway the research doesn’t “really relate to what is going on in their classroom” (Weaver, 1978). Teachers tell us that they become enthusiastic about new ideas and adopt new practices as the result of their voluntary attendance at weekend workshops sponsored by publishers. Innovations are seldom the result of university courses or professional development provided by school districts. Basic research in reading—research on language, cognition, and process—doesn’t speak directly to classroom practice. For very good reasons, researchers are reluctant to advise administrators about testing and grouping, for instance, or to tell the remedial teacher that subskills must be mastered sequentially or that sentence-combining leads to improved reading and writing. Britton remarks that “working by hunch, [teachers] have to beg many of the questions that basic research has barely begun to tackle” (1977). And by way of example, he notes that a group of researchers say that neither reading nor writing is well enough understood to enable us to say whether they are interrelated; nevertheless, says Britton, teachers everywhere know that each process is in some way related to the other.

Interpreting Research in the Classroom The research that speaks loudest to me and, I think, to other teachers, is that which is conducted in real settings, particularly classrooms. That’s why I am greatly encouraged by Benjamin Bloom’s comment that research has moved away from “a study of the characteristics of teachers and students” and toward direct observation of learning “under specific environmental conditions” (1980). I find Bloom’s advocacy of mastery learning heartening for the same reason that school people turn to it in this era of competency testing. He urges us to look at how we can alter the conditions of school learning; to make real his promise that 80% of the students can master 80%

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of the material. His is an important voice that needs to be raised against social scientists like Jencks and deLone, who suggest that children’s success in school depends wholly on whether their parents have made it into the middle class. Bloom says that in both educational research and practice we should concentrate on the alterable variables, and he contrasts these with the ones we can do nothing about. He names as alterable variables: time-on-task or engaged time; cognitive entry characteristics (i.e., what the child has already mastered); formative and corrective tests (i.e., feedback); quality of instruction, the curriculum and teaching style of the home, which some studies show can be modified by home visitors; special courses for parents; parent involvement in the schools; and sending home books, games, audio-visual equipment to encourage home learning (Bloom, 1980). Bloom’s summary of research studies over the past 20 years in Human Characteristics and School Learning (1976) leads him to endorse mastery learning, an idea whose time has come again, bringing with it as much chance for disaster as hope of success. The trouble is that test-reteach schemes work most easily with minimal skills: decoding, spelling, arithmetic, for example. It’s a whole lot easier to find out what skills children have mastered than it is to find out what their “world knowledge” is. Moreover, we are pretty good at determining what students haven’t learned but not nearly so clever at providing a second chance for learning the same skills in a new way. According to Bloom, “Cognitive entry characteristics . . . represent particular content and skills that may be learned if they are absent, reviewed if they have been forgotten, and learned to a criterion level if they have been learned to a lesser level” (1980, p. 392). His “may be” is hedged by two other factors: motivation and quality of instruction. Bloom’s assurance and his endorsement of “mastery learning” methods needs to be balanced by Duckworth’s cautionary optimism: What one can assume, without any diagnostic tests at all, is that in any group of thirty children—no matter how much one has tried to homogenize them— there will be enormous variations in levels of understanding and in breadth and depth of knowledge already developed. Certainly we want each child to have the occasion to work at his or her own level. The solution for the teacher, however, is not to tailor narrow exercises for individual children, but rather to offer situations in which children at various levels, whatever their intellectual structures [or their cognitive entry characteristics], can come to know parts of the world in new ways. It is not an easy job but how much more interesting a human enterprise it is. (Duckworth, 1979, p. 311)

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To oversimplify, what those two points of view say to me is that in classroom or clinic, we must see that children are engaged some of the time in carefully structured sequential lessons and more of the time provide carefully planned opportunities to learn ideas by whatever routes individuals can take. For example, the child with reading difficulties needs brief but regular drills in recognizing words automatically balanced by plenty of time to practice reading words in context of whatever kind: racing forms, menus, trashy comics, PAL paperbacks, the sports page, the headlines, the TV guide. But there’s another essential balance: the learning-to-read time should be matched by time for learning about the world through whatever nonprint media we can provide.

Assessment Significant here is teachers’ growing realization that in order to affect reading acquisition, they must assess children’s oral language development and that games and simulations are a good way to do it. In a primary school in England, teachers have what they call a “talk trolley,” laden with games that stimulate talking. On one game board, the layout of a farm faces one child, and hidden by a screen, the identical layout faces his partner. From a box of toys, the talker takes a tiny sheep and says, “I’m putting the sheep near the pond.” The listener must do the same thing. At game’s end, the two farms should match, or the players should explain why they don’t, while the teacher listens. Joan Tough has used similar tactics in assessing children’s language, and her studies are interesting not only for their finds but for techniques that teachers can replicate. Her probes into children’s thinking as revealed through language have led her to identify the uses of language that 5-year-olds from “educating homes” have developed more extensively than children without “home advantages.” Here, greatly simplified from Tough’s findings (1977) are five uses of language that all young children need for school learning but that many will not have developed as “cognitive entry skills”: ◾◾ ◾◾ ◾◾ ◾◾ ◾◾

To collaborate toward agreed ends; To anticipate and predict; To suggest possible alternatives; To explain how and why; and To play and imagine (p. 169).

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A New Test of Reading Power Without going into the pros and cons of competency testing, which are neatly summarized in the leaflet, Minimal Competency Standards: Three Points of View, let me mention briefly one part of New York State’s competency testing battery, the Degrees of Reading Power test, which has been influenced by recent research on Cloze techniques and holds considerable promise for the classroom teacher who wants to match reading achievement to readability. To measure reading as a whole process rather than an aggregation of subskills, the test presents passages at increasing levels of readability, and the test-taker is asked to restore a deleted word by selecting from four alternatives. Only words of high frequency in English discourse have been deleted from the gradated reading selections, and the options for filling the blanks are similarly controlled for familiarity. Thus, the test avoids measuring vocabulary and instead measures the ability to comprehend meanings conveyed within and across sentences and within and across paragraphs. To the extent that the DRP gives an accurate estimate of the readability levels at which students can comprehend whole messages, it promises to be an invaluable aid to teachers who can then provide instructional materials at these levels. The State Education Department is developing a data bank of readability scores for textbooks in current use which promises to multiply the usefulness of this criterion-referenced test which compares students’ comprehension against the readability of texts rather than with other students’ performance.

Comprehension Although reading comprehension depends on rapid and accurate decoding and on understanding word meanings and syntax, I shall omit these components from this review of how teachers are using insights from research, and deal here with the language and organization of content textbooks, the development of questioning strategies, and the role of prior knowledge.

Textbook Learning The language of textbooks is different from the language of stories, which is a bit like the language we speak, but not an exact match. So children who are familiar with the language of stories have an easier access to beginning reading than children who miss this essential prereading experience. Naturally, but unfortunately, in early reading instruction, we have emphasized the language of narrative and conversation and neglected the

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language of exposition. So children meet the language of textbooks quite unprepared. It is a new dialect, unlike the language of story and quite unlike the way children talk. To correct this imbalance of narrative and textbook prose, we can, from the beginning, read to children from informational books as well as from stories. We can balance fiction and nonfiction in basal reading materials, as indeed most series do now. But for poor readers, these beginnings must be greatly expanded. For one thing, they must have a longer period for consolidating beginning reading skills, years and years in which they read widely in easy narratives and easy informational books before we ask them to learn from content textbooks. And while they are reading easy books themselves, we must read to them from the hundreds of excellent informational books that stock our libraries. We must continue to read aloud to junior and senior high school students from trade books that relate to the topics of content textbooks that these students can use only for their pictures and special features. Poor readers must also read to others. One reason is that books which will give them practice in consolidating basic skills are far below their interest levels. The best way to get poor readers into the books they need is to have them read to young children. A natural vehicle for this is through Family Services courses, where many of those teenagers who are most likely to be parents soonest can learn the message of this bumper sticker from the Michigan IRA: Kids That Read Are Read To.

Organization of Texts Not only the language but the structure of content textbooks baffles poor readers. While research on discourse analysis and text organization mounts, teachers must go on helping students to cope with textbooks as they are, not as they might be. As Roger Brown pointed out in his address to the National Council of Teachers of English in November, 1979, even nonreaders know the structural codes of narratives because they have been brought up on TV dramas; they know how a plot should turn. Brown hoped wistfully that we could get them from television to TV tie-ins, and that they might pick up the structures of exposition from the bits which are included in most novels, even in James Bond thrillers. He is more optimistic than I. A better bet is to introduce reluctant readers to the thin book of information, and to call their attention to its organization. Similarly, in introducing content textbooks to average and good readers, focusing on the whole book first helps them to

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grasp its organization, to see how the parts are related, to get a map of the territory, and to understand the author’s purpose and plan.

Questioning Strategies “Prediction,” says Frank Smith, “means asking questions—and comprehension means getting these questions answered.” You really understand a selection, according to Smith, when you get to the end of it with no unanswered questions. But many students get to the end of a chapter without any unanswered questions and without any understanding either, because they haven’t asked themselves any questions, or they’ve asked the wrong ones. Surely, an insight from research and theory that many teachers welcome is the renewed interest in questioning. An important element in this renewed interest is emphasis on helping students to ask the right questions. In tutorial situations, teachers have used Manzo’s ReQuest technique (1969, 1970) or the interspersed questions Durrell suggested in the 40s (1956). More recently, Harry Singer has offered good counsel in an article whose title sums it up neatly: “Active Comprehension: From Answering to Asking Questions” (1980). His advice is to begin where most teachers are now, asking the questions, using the ones in the book, improving on them, providing better models; then gradually teachers phase out their own questions and lead students to raising questions instead of answering them.

Prior Knowledge And what about prior knowledge, or what Smith calls nonvisual information and Bloom calls cognitive characteristics, or what Henry David Thoreau meant when he said we can learn only that which we half know already? I have never felt the impact of Thoreau’s insight as sharply as I have this spring when examining the data from two studies currently underway at Syracuse. The first study [by Lorraine Dagastino, 1981] looks at the silent reading strategies of 21 ninth grade boys identified as average or better readers by a standardized reading test. For two short stories and two science selections, their oral recall was scored according to the Goodman-Burke scheme (1972), yielding scores that can be converted to percentages. On both stories, two thirds of the boys achieved more than 50%. In marked contrast, on the science passages, two thirds of the boys earned fewer than 25 points, although the science passages were equivalent to the short stories in length and readability indices. Only six boys earned more than 25 points, and none earned more than half the possible points. For both story and

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informational prose, the boys generally recalled specific details and failed to mention themes or major concepts. In the second study, the researcher [Marianna McVey, 1981], examined above-average 9th-grade readers, all boys, on their concepts of volume, density, and mass, using a standardized group-test based on Piagetian techniques. One group was at the stage of formal operations; that is, according to the test, they understood the concepts. The others had not yet grasped them, scoring at the top of the concrete operational stage. They all read the same article on the Archimedes principle and then recalled it for a listener who himself had scored at the concrete operational level. From their retelling protocols, also scored according to Goodman and Burke (1972), it was clear that the group who understood the concepts recalled more of the passage. The difference in mean scores was modest (40% compared to 57%), however, because students at the concrete operational level recalled specific details as well as the more advanced thinkers, and neither group, as a whole, retold major concepts fully or accurately. A second measure requiring the students to apply the principle differentiated more sharply between the groups. Among the concrete thinkers, 63% presented an incorrect solution. Among those at the formal operational level, 65% gave the correct solution. The fact that the students who read the passage scored significantly, but slightly, higher than the control group when retested on the concepts gives a faint signal that reading and telling had some effect. In these studies, there was no teacher influence. It was as if the teacher had assigned the readings as homework (as, alas, some 9th-grade teachers still do) without any prereading discussion or activities. Can teachers act on research insights about the importance of students’ prior knowledge? Yes. First, they can set more realistic expectations about what students can comprehend from textbooks or from lectures, realizing they cannot compensate for lack of prior knowledge by merely telling students what is in the textbooks. Beyond that, they can use book ladders, providing easy steps to understanding whatever topic their curriculum calls for. [In addition], and very importantly, they can help students to remember important concepts through such study techniques as mapping and outlining. In the last analysis, however, the best that teachers can do is to keep alive the desire to learn by showing students that they can learn something of importance.

References Bloom, B. (1976). Human characteristics and school learning. New York: McGraw Hill.

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Bloom, B. (1980, February). The new direction in educational research: Alterable variables. Phi Delta Kappan, 61(6), 382–385. Britton, J. (1977). Language and the nature of learning: An individual perspective. In J. Squire (Ed.), The teaching of English (pp. 1–38). The 76th yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I. Chicago: NSSE. Chall, J. (1967). Learning to read: The great debate. New York: McGraw. Cooper, C., & Petrosksy, A. (1976, December). A psycholinguistic view of the fluent reading process. Journal of Reading, 20(3), 184–207. Dagostino, L. (1981). An exploratory study of how ninth grade boys read short stories and science selections. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Syracuse University, New York. deLone, R., & Carnegie Council. (1979). Small futures: Children, inequality, and the limits of liberal reform. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Duckworth, E. (1979). Either we’re too early and they can’t learn it or we’re too late and they know it already: The dilemma of “applying Piaget.” Harvard Educational Review, 49(3), 297–312. Durrell, D. (1956). Improving reading instruction. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Early, M. (1980). Teaching reading and writing: The past ten years. In C. McCullough (Ed.), Inchworm, inchworm: Persistent problems in reading education (pp. 222–232). Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Flesch, R. (1955). Why Johnny can’t read and what you can do about it. New York: Harper & Row. Jencks, C. et al. (1972). Inequality: A reassessment of the effect of family and schooling in America. New York: Harper & Row. Manzo, A. V. (1970, Winter). Reading and questioning: The ReQuest procedure. Reading Improvement, 7(3), 80–83. McVey, M. (1981). The role of prior knowledge in ninth grade boys’ comprehension of a concept in science. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Syracuse University, New York. New York State Education Department Bulletin. (1977, September) Degrees of reading power: A technical description of a new kind of reading test. Albany, NY: Division of Educational Testing. *Resnick, D., & Weaver, P. A. (Eds.). (1979). Theory and practice of early reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Singer, H. (1980). Active comprehension: From answering to asking questions. In C. McCullough (Ed.), Inchworm, inchworm: Persistent problems in reading education (pp. 222–232). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

*  The exact source of this citation could not be identified. Instead a possible source in which the authors discuss similar ideas is included.

11 Reading as Access Baltimore College Reading Association October 30, 1980 Dr. Early discusses the challenges involved in ensuring that minority and immigrant college students gain the reading and writing skills they need in order to have access to the American dream.

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n American newspaperman was challenged by a Russian bureaucrat to explain what is meant by the American dream. “Tell me in one word,” said the Russian, “What is this American dream all about?” “That’s easy,” said the American; “the word is access. Everything else is commentary.” That is the theme I wish to speak to. I don’t want to speak of reading as its own reward. I want to speak of reading, and writing, as access. I want to speak of teachers as the agents of access, and I want to use that word to emphasize the challenges that lie ahead of us in what will surely be a demanding decade.

Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 107–116 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Look now at two sets of figures that dramatize access. These statistics from Newsweek remind us that the American dream is in reach of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year. Learning how to teach the children of the new immigrants is not the same task today that it was in the 1920s, for instance, when kids who failed to read English dropped out in sixth grade or eighth grade. Today, we are supposed to teach children to read in the language they speak. Which makes good sense pedagogically and politically, but the practicalities of bilingualism are threatening the resources of many schools. Where are the teachers who speak excellent English and excellent Spanish? Or Chinese, or Polish, or the dialects of the Philippines and Samoa? And can deal also with the learning disabled, the emotionally disturbed, the physically and mentally handicapped in classrooms of 30 or more? These questions remind you of what you know all too well: that access to elementary and secondary classrooms by all the children, the new immigrants and the newly mainstreamed populations, has enormously stretched the already wide range of individual differences that we have not yet learned to cope with. Dealing with diversity remains the major unsolved problem in education in America. It is intensified by the pressures upon us to stick to the basics, pressures which will not diminish in the 80s. For what does access to the schools mean to immigrant parents if their children do not learn to read and write and get ahead? Access to higher education is what [some additional statistics illustrate]. Seventy-five percent of the children who enter first grade remain to graduate from high school. Fifty percent of those who graduate go on to postsecondary institutions. In 1963, there were about 4.8 million undergraduates and graduates combined. In 1979, the figure had risen to 11.7 million. In 1963, 900,000 students were in two-year colleges. In 1979, 4.3 million were enrolled. Who are all these new students? What are they like? The Timkens’ Laura [who has to take remedial reading and writing courses in college, as described by Art Buchwald] wouldn’t have made it to college 20 years ago, but in the 80s, colleges will be scrambling for kids like her—and complaining that the high schools have failed to prepare them. Who are the new students? “We teachers have a lot of names for them,” says an instructor at Onondaga Community College, “and the names poured out in faculty offices are usually not complimentary. Of various backgrounds and ages, they commonly lack the familiarity with written language and literature expected of college freshmen.” And he reminds us of the high correlation between low testing and low socioeconomic status.

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Describing the students attracted to an elite liberal arts institution, [Leon Botstein], the president of Bard, writing in Harper’s last fall, said: “Despite superior high school grades and test scores” and despite “good verbal facility . . . students are chronically unable to retain what they read, to absorb arguments or facts in their heads long enough to make them their own” (1979, p. 34). He’s not complaining that college students can’t read, but that they cannot learn through reading. He’s echoing Alvin Toffler’s warning that tomorrow’s illiterate won’t be incapable of reading and writing; tomorrow’s illiterate will be the person who has not learned how to learn. Among the high school graduates with superior test scores, the ones who can read, are there many who do? A recent survey of adolescents shows that they do almost no reading that is not required of them—during the summer, for instance. When school is in session, they spend an average of 66 minutes a day reading, and over 80% of this time is for school assignments. My pocket calculator tells me that leaves about 13 minutes a day to read for pleasure. Compare that with five hours per day, 365 days a year, watching television. In another recent study, Mary Beth Culp (1977) describes two recent high school graduates of superior abilities. The girl had a 3.4 GPA, scored in the 96th percentile on the SAT, and was entering a three-year premed program. She was an avid reader. The works which affected her most in high school were Flowers for Algernon [by Daniel Keyes, 1966]and The Outsiders [by S. E. Hinton, 1967]. The boy, equally gifted, a major in chemistry, also planning on medical school, said, “In my lifetime, I have read a grand total of 20 books, including textbooks. I would consider myself ‘unexposed’ to most forms of written expression.” Depressing anecdotes and despairing reflections on youth are always easy to find. Let’s quote just one more because it’s current and prestigious. “Many students in schools and colleges avoid broad intellectual development in favor of acquiring immediate job skills,” intones the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities and then goes on to name seven priorities for the 1980s, beginning, of course, with “improve the quality of education in our elementary and secondary schools.” I can understand why a commission composed of college presidents and professors would look to the lower schools to straighten us all out. That’s the way I felt when I staggered out of my first year of teaching tenth graders in a Connecticut mill town. I asked to be reassigned to first grade, figuring I’d catch them before all the harm was done.

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Of course, we’ll be grateful for anything the commission can do to enable schools “to provide . . . significant attention to the humanities.” But the commission might have shown rather more concern for the humanity in public school classrooms. A few days after reading the gist of the report in the Chronicle, I chatted with the principal of an elementary school at the edge of Spanish Harlem. On the surface, she was sweet and gentle, but underneath she must have been made of steel. She is the only professional in the building who does not have 40 children in front of her all day. Her school used to have a full-time guidance counselor, was cut back to one day a week, now has none. She worries about her emotionally disturbed children; I asked about her teachers’ mental health. “Ah, yes,” she said, “the absenteeism among the teachers is already higher this year in October than ever before.” And the children? “We have no middle,” she said; “they’re either very bright, or they’re remedial.” As a matter of fact, that school had a strong humanities program; I especially admired what they were doing a few years ago with units on classical mythology. But this year, teachers won’t have energy for much beyond the skills packages, the basals, and ditto sheets. From schools like this one— some much worse, few that are better—come the “new students” in our college classrooms. What are we doing for them? More, I hope, than what the kids and their parents expect. What they want—or think they want—is strictly vocational, strictly utilitarian. What they need is a glimpse of life’s possibilities. Patricia Graham, late of NIE [the National Institute of Education], puts making choices and deliberate judgments this way: “To be literate is to be able to partake of the world as broadly as one’s talents permit.” The access is literacy. The argument is which comes first: learning to read and write, or learning what literacy is for. It’s a silly argument, in many respects, but it’s an argument that divides reading associations, separates reading specialists from humanists, and determines how school budgets will be spent. The weight of school practice today is on the side which says, you have to have basic decoding and comprehension skills before you can read to learn. On the surface, that side makes sense. In practice, it translates to test-teach-retest schemes which threaten to push content out of elementary classrooms, and, in high schools and colleges, it has brought a renewed emphasis on remedial teaching that may abort our efforts to spread literacy instruction into content fields. It is a silly argument because it pretends to have an either/or solution that will fit all children and youth and all kinds of school settings. It is worsened by misinterpretations of current psycholinguistic research. The

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psycholinguists may well identify a single model of the reading process that fits fluent reading, beginning reading, and whatever lies between. This is important research, but it in no way accounts for the diversity of settings in which people acquire the process, or fail to; or having acquired it, decide not to use reading as access. In the meantime, we must seek solutions and accommodations that are supported by common sense and experience and even by research; but research coming from classroom settings, using real reading materials, rather than from theoretical models and discourse analysis. We also do what we can for the new students in our classrooms. In public elementary schools, the “new” students in the 80s will be children whose first language is not English, most of them poor kids. I don’t have to remind you that the birth rate is highest among poor teenagers, lowest in the middle class, where women’s careers postpone childbearing. Add to this the trend that shows middle-class parents withdrawing their children from public schools because, among other reasons, schools are overdoing the basic skills. This is exactly the situation I was witnessing in Toronto two years ago, where immigration was high, bilingualism was a hot political issue, schools were excessing teachers, and creating bigger classes for those who remained. One effect was the burgeoning of private schools, which were often quite poor in physical facilities, but offered smaller classes and teachers who had time for the “frills”—the libraries and the museums and the learning that literacy is for. The specter of schools where there is no middle class and no middle ranks of achievement is reason enough for us to stop trying to explain away declining test scores and to start teaching instead of testing. There is another, more compelling reason. We had better do a good job with our immigrant children, with the children of the poor, because out of their ranks will come the teachers of the next generation. But the decline in SAT scores, now that more minority and workingclass students have access to higher education, simply says to me that we haven’t learned how to teach children from homes where the parents can’t help. We haven’t learned how to provide in the classroom those extras that educating homes provide: interest in how and what the kids learn, reading to them, talking to them, monitoring the TV diet, involving them in the community’s politics and cultural events. Of course, some “educating homes” may be economically poor, just as many noneducating homes may have material riches. But the correlation between achievement and SES supports what we know: It helps if your parents went to college.

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The importance of the home curriculum hit hard in the 70s, and efforts to improve it have become a major focus of schools, professional organizations, and the media. . . . However, transforming parents into readers and listeners will take enormous effort. Like Sesame Street, these efforts will benefit the ones who are ready for it—middle-class parents more than poor ones. Nevertheless, we should do our best. One idea is to set up lending libraries of children’s books in centers where parents congregate. In a factory in Tennessee some years ago, plant executives set up such a library in the cafeteria. You can think of similar schemes, other settings; in adult basic literacy classes, for instance. Improving the home curriculum is much like in-service for teachers. It works best when there is a preservice foundation on which to build. That’s why I’m so concerned to reach the next generation through today’s teenagers—before they are parents. For the 50% of high school graduates who won’t go on to college, we’d better do it in junior high, chiefly through parenting courses. Reading to children is an essential feature in good parenting courses. Those teenagers most likely to be parents soonest need to learn not only to care for children but how to read themselves. They need practice in easy-to-read books like Hop on Pop (1963), in almost wordless books like Tomie dePaolo’s Andy (1973), even in basal primers—books that they would scorn if the reading teacher proposed them. But reading the same books to little ones makes them OK. But what about the 50% of high school graduates who go on to college, especially the “new” students among them? College faculties now face the bitter question high school teachers faced in the ’50s: Do we water down curricula that were designed for the top 15% so they will “do” for the newcomers? Or do we try to change the students so that the traditional curriculum will be accessible to them? I wish high school faculties had found the answers and could now pass them on to their colleagues in postsecondary institutions. I welcome the new alliances between high school and college faculties. . . . The first question these new committees face is: Who is responsible for improving the literacy skills of underdeveloped college students? Ideally, the answer is the same one we’ve been setting forth for 40 years in high schools—everyone whose discipline requires reading and writing. Practically, though, the answer must be a whole cadre of “new teachers” to serve the “new students.” I mean college teachers whose love of teaching takes precedence over their eagerness for publications. I mean a contingent of teachers to supplement the scholars and researchers who belong on university faculties but have no place in community colleges.

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There is no question that learning specialists are needed in junior colleges and big universities like Syracuse, which, by the way, offered its first “improvement of learning” course in 1924. Today at SU, we have two support systems, one for underachieving students, and another, the Center for Instructional Development, to aid professors in designing their courses. They are separate services, and that’s less than ideal. College teachers of content are even less likely than their counterparts in the lower schools to teach how to read and study, and they’re certainly not going to take kindly to staff development schemes that are anything like the usual effort in secondary schools. That leaves literacy skills to the learning specialists, who like many Title I teachers in secondary schools, are overworked, underrated, unsure of what they are doing and why. By the way, for these people, the conference theme fits like a glove—reading (that is, the teaching of reading) is its own reward, and a precious small one it is! What exacerbates the problem for teachers and students is that learning how in noncredit courses takes much needed time away from learning in the courses that count. I said earlier that the major problem in American education is how to cope with individual differences, a problem that colleges deal with only through diversified offerings. Few college professors deal with individual differences within their classes. College teachers of reading and writing are exceptions, of course. They have to diagnose and prescribe; they cannot lecture; they have to use variations on audio-tutorial methods, and Bloom’s mastery learning. They have to emphasize speed-reading for students who think well but respond slowly to print. For a few, decoding skills have to be emphasized. But having recognized these necessary uses of materials designed specifically for skills practice, I must say that, in college, just as in high school, whoever teaches how to read and study must use content textbooks most of the time. That means that college reading specialists, like high school reading teachers, teach their students how to survey a whole textbook and decide what parts of it they can use. If the humanities text is overwhelming because the student doesn’t have the necessary prior knowledge, the teacher has to go to the library—usually the children’s room in the public library— and find the trade books that will supply the necessary readiness. In addition, the tutor has to teach the student how to learn enough to get by without reading. If you can’t remember how you passed a course without cracking a book, or if you cannot imagine that a nonreader can graduate from a liberal arts college, I recommend Reversals (1979) by Eileen Simpson. I recom-

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mend it to you anyway, and to all high school and college teachers, to all parents, who cannot imagine what it is like to be denied access to the world of books. Let me digress and tell you about this moving autobiography of a dyslexic that reads like a novel. (The difference between this book and all those professional texts you read is that it is written with passion by someone who cares about language.) Eileen is a nonreader who gets by until fourth grade in a new school, where her teacher unmasks her. So every night there are sessions with phonics workbooks and basal readers that always end in tears. Finally, one summer her sister coaxes Eileen into trying this great book about four sisters. With a lot of help from Marie, with a lot of skipping of the hard parts, with a lot of rainy days, Eileen finally makes it all the way through but vows she’ll never read another book by that Louisa May Alcott. Eileen is bright and beautiful and comes from an educating home. Suppose she’s been an average kid from a poor home where English was the second language—only not very often. What would her chances have been? Actually, Eileen makes it through college and falls in love with a young poet. She panics. A man who loves language. She forces herself to send John a note that she dashes off quickly without the painstaking revision she would otherwise make. But John tells her that she must have dyslexia. “Braced for ridicule,” she writes, “it was a moment before I felt the welling up of pure joy. My affliction had a name! I repeated it: Lysdexia!” Eileen was a grown woman before she picked up a book that grabbed her as she began to hear in it the familiar brogue of her Irish relatives. For Eileen came of an immigrant family too. And this incident is another reminder of how important it is for immigrant children—for anyone—to find themselves in a book. Let us return to what we were discussing before I hit the tangent about getting through college without cracking a book. I was saying that I hoped we wouldn’t persevere in our tactical errors as we work with college teachers of content. One error is to talk about reading and writing when we really mean learning. College teachers won’t accept the proposition that they should teach reading and writing. They may accept that the students still have to learn from text. So learning specialists help students discover how they learn best and help professors to understand students’ individual learning styles. That last bit sounds pretty idealistic. More practically, right now, learning specialists help professors do their jobs. One example: At Syracuse, we’ve just launched a Liberal Arts Core which, among other efforts to sup-

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port the humanities, requires students to enroll in certain courses in their junior and senior years that require 4,000 words of writing; that is, a course in history or philosophy or psychology which meet standards in writing-incontent courses. I think it’s a marvelous idea that won’t work unless the professor has help in responding to the 4,000 word quota. Learning specialists might be assigned to teach along with the professor (if we could figure out the budget). Both professor and aide would learn more about writing in this discipline. If team-teaching of this kind can succeed, we will have made a tiny chip in the walls that separate one discipline from another. Since I began with a reference to the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities and may have sounded a trifle disparaging, let me correct that impression. I especially rejoice in their endeavor to reconcile elitism with populism, to recognize cultural diversity and at the same time preserve “a common culture that unites all despite differences in origin, education, and ‘outlook.’” I second the motion to strengthen the liberal arts component in the education of professionals, especially in the education of teachers. I am delighted in their observation that the objectives of values clarification exercises are much better served by the study of literature. And like the Humanities Commission, we in reading also recognize that access to literature comes as well through the nonprint media as through reading. I wish there were time to explore in greater depth these issues as well as our concerns for the new students. I especially wish there were time to delve into the question of how we will prepare many of these new students to become teachers. But these are issues we will explore in the many fine sessions your conference committee has laid out for us. Let me end, then, in midstream, as it were, with a reminder that the challenges of the decade ahead are not simply to educate students for survival, but for learning; for learning about human lives—their own and others; for learning how these lives might be lived in harmony and justice. In short, let’s insure access. All else is commentary.

References Botstein, L. (1979, September). A proper education. Harper’s, 259 (1552), 33–37. Buchwald, A. (1977, October 17). Learning the three R’s. Ottawa Citizen. Commission on the Humanities. (1980). The humanities in American life: Report on the humanities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Culp, M. B. (1977, Winter). Case studies of the influence of literature on the attitudes, values, and behavior of adolescents. Research in the Teaching of English, 11(3), 245–253.

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dePaola, T. (1973). Andy, that’s my name. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. *Graham, P. A. (1981, Summer). Literacy: A goal for secondary schools. Daedalus, 110(3), 119–134. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press. Hinton, S. E. (1967). The outsiders. New York: Viking. Keyes, D. (1966). Flowers for Algernon. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Seuss, Dr. (1963). Hop on pop. New York: Random House. Simpson, E. (1979). Reversals. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

*  The exact source of this citation could not be identified, but a source is suggested that discusses similar ideas.

12 What We’ve Learned from Where We’ve Been NCTE Selected Papers November 1985 In this speech, Dr. Early argues for needed changes at the middle-school level in both the curriculum and the teaching structure in order to improve education for all students.

The Middle School Experience Every November for 75 years, English teachers have come together to ask themselves: What are we doing that is right? How can we do better still? Every year for 75 years, we’ve convened to talk about, and sometimes to act upon, reform in the teaching of English. Now, in our 75th year, we have reasons to hope that before NCTE reaches its hundredth anniversary, we will have achieved many of the reforms we have been espousing for 25, maybe 50, even 75 years. Why should hope quicken in the autumn of ’85 when, in fact, secondary education is being battered by the latest round of reform reports, Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 117–124 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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when we teeter on the brink of a teacher shortage, and are reminded constantly that the brightest and the best shun teaching? Why should we be optimistic when, as James Moffett reminds us in the September Phi Delta Kappan, “more classroom innovation was taking place in the 1960s than is occurring in the 1980s” (1985, p. 50)? Moffett charges that the public subconsciously conspires to prevent children from learning to think. They don’t want kids to be different. They want schools to teach youngsters “to read just well enough to follow directions and to write just well enough to take dictation” (p. 53). An editor in Harper’s last June [Walter Karp] makes a charge more sinister than Moffett’s: “The public schools we have today are what the powerful and the considerable have made of them. They will not be redeemed by trifling reforms. Merit pay, a longer school year, more homework, special schools for ‘the gifted,’ and more standardized tests,” he writes, “will not even begin to turn our public schools into nurseries of ‘informed, active and questioning citizens.’ They are not meant to” (1985, p. 73). This editor finds a deliberate political plot to preserve quality education for the few and to keep most of our 40 million school children passive in mind and spirit. In the April English Journal, Ed Farrell predicts that the current round of reform reports will be no more influential than their predecessors because their priorities fail to “take into account the will, the desires, the interests of the students themselves.” It’s naïve to assume, he says, that “academic achievement can rise in the absence of an emotional commitment to learning” (1985, p. 28). Nevertheless, in spite of the deep pessimism sampled in these quotations, I believe we will achieve the essential goal. That is, to deliver to the majority of students in our schools the very fine education we now offer to the top 15 to 20%. We know now how to teach language and literature, writing and reading. We use that knowledge effectively in our best schools. What we have still to accomplish is to widen our instructional expertise to include the kids below the top 20%. I believe we will succeed in that goal because the reform reports are on our side. Much of what they say merely echoes what we have been telling each other for the last 25, 50, 75 years: that the need is for individualized instruction, for cooperative learning, for more talking, reading, and writing in every classroom, for the study of language as basic to learning in all fields. That groundswell of opinion is backed by recent research in teacher effectiveness, psycholinguistics, and cognitive processes, but advocacy is more powerful than research. Legislators are listening to the reformists. [An example of that] is the Writing Enhancement Program in the state of Florida.

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If we know how to teach and what to teach (and I think we do), what holds us back? Why are we effective only with a few? The answer lies, I suggest, not in what or how we teach so much as where. It’s the structure of the institution that must change if we are to spread the good things we do for a few kids to the many who fill our English classes. I would have little hope of effecting that change if it were not for two other forces which we can capture for our side. Whether or not we bend them to our good, they are here and they will bring about change. One is the force of educational technology; the other is economics. They interact. In each there is potential for great good for the teaching of English, or considerable harm. I’d like us to think this afternoon about how teachers can use the reform reports, educational technology, and the economics of schooling to spread what we know, especially in the middle schools. Time is running out on the reform reports. Before we lose the public’s attention, I hope we can redirect it to the middle years, specifically to grades 5 to 9, where we have the greatest challenges and the least help. It is the kids in the middle who interest me most, the youngsters who occupy what Boyer (1983) describes as “the vast middle ground, where there are no great victories and no great defeats.” Our concern must be for these youngsters in the middle range of achievement, in the middle of the school years, in the middle of the socioeconomic scale, from homes that are likely to propel them toward college because that’s the way to get ahead, not to get an education, from home situations that do not, perhaps cannot, inspire the emotional commitment to learning that Ed Farrell speaks of. These are the youngsters who demand the most of our skills as teachers. Let’s admit it, we are most successful with the kids we have to do the least for, the ones who acquire at home that emotional commitment to learning. For most of the kids in the middle, we have to supply what their out-ofschool environment lacks. One reason I’m so interested in these youngsters in middle school is that many of them are likely to reach college and to drift into teaching, lacking the ease in reading and writing they should have acquired in middle school. Last spring, on leave from Syracuse University, wanting to experience again the dailiness of teaching, I spent considerable time associating with kids in the middle, with youngsters who can read and write, but don’t . . . not very often, not very well. (Associating. . . . I wish I could say “teaching” but “associating” is the only honest verb I can use.) What I learned corroborated many observations of the reformists but left me hopeful, nevertheless. I spent the first part of the semester in a school unit that housed 650 ninth graders, in a largely blue collar community; the second half in a middle school in another district that offered the contrast of affluence.

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Most of the ninth graders I worked with were happy enough to be there, though it meant catching a school bus at dawn, arriving at 7:30, shuffling into a first period at 8. But it’s the hidden curriculum that attracts them— what goes on between classes, not in class. School structures their lives. When I asked, What would you do if you could have tomorrow off, many were at a loss for an answer. They’d shrug and mumble, “Oh, sleep late, go to the mall, watch the soaps.” My overwhelming disappointment from my weeks in ninth grade was that so little had changed in the decades since my first year of teaching in a mill town in Connecticut. So little had changed in the curriculum. So little had changed in me. I found myself reverting to opinions I’m supposed to know better than to hold. I’d catch myself thinking, Who had these kids last year? Why didn’t they learn to read properly in elementary school? What can I do for them in the 40 minutes—much less really—that I have their attention? I wanted to confront the language arts coordinator who knew the whole range of grades while I was shut up in this ninth grade box from 7:30 to 2:45, too harried by the present to worry much about where these kids came from or where they were headed. When I began my observations, these very average 14- and 15-year-olds who hang out at the shopping center or stay home to watch the soaps were reading out loud, unrehearsed, uncomprehended: Antigone. One image I retain of that class is that of Lynn, who, with one eye on the anthology, waiting for her turn, had her other eye on the paperback she really wanted to read: Unwed Mother. From Antigone, we moved to Romeo and Juliet. As we ploughed through the anthology day after day—it was a revision of the same one I’d used as a 10th-grade teacher so long ago, indeed the same one I had used as a high school student—I wondered why there is such a brouhaha today about the common curriculum. Surely, E. D. Hirsch, who lays all educational problems to the twin evils of “process and pluralism,” must not realize that anthologies have long enforced a common literary canon. The teacher’s approach to Romeo and Juliet didn’t allow many opportunities for critical thinking. Only occasionally was I rewarded with a flicker of understanding. Remember Juliet’s soliloquy in the tomb before she takes the potion? After I’d translated it into more or less contemporary English, Meaghan got the point. “That’s really gross,” she said. “How old did you say Romeo is?” Tracy wanted to know. “Oh, 16 or 17,” I said. “Then how can he understand all those big words?” Tracy was thinking critically, but I couldn’t take much credit.

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Another teacher in that school, also working with average youngsters, did much better. She’d set up her classes so that her students had to think. She made no pretense of getting them to read the whole play. Dividing the class into groups, she assigned a carefully selected scene to each and challenged them to make sense of the lines, helping each other, getting help from her, as she moved from group to group. These kids committed the lines to memory (that was their idea, not her requirement), and they performed the scene with whatever costuming and props they could produce after consulting books and other sources that she supplied. So they were encouraged to think, to make meanings, but also to move, act, create, interact, solve problems, consult other sources. Though each of us here might offer similar examples, they represent exceptions rather than the norm. I rarely see small groups in secondary classrooms. Neither did Goodlad, nor Boyer, nor Sizer. The problem is not a new one, neither are the proposed solutions. Retreating from the teacher’s overcrowded classroom, eyeing with envy the reading teacher down the hall with six or eight students in a large laboratory equipped with four microcomputers, I’d find myself reinventing the Trump Plan, with its differentiated staffing and modular scheduling [see Holleman, 1974]. Twenty years after most such schemes as Trump’s have died a-borning, we are ready at last to try them again, with better chances for success this time because union leaders and legislators and reformists support them. More important, we have the technology to make them work. One such plan, described in detail in the November Phi Delta Kappan [see Berman, 1985], comes to grips with two of the more controversial recommendations of the reformists: the common curriculum and merit pay. The Minnesota Plan offers a sensible compromise on the common curriculum through a restructuring that gets rid of the middle school label. Grades 5 and 6 are returned to the elementary school, where in fact they have remained, instructionally, even though they are often housed in the middle school these days. This plan makes grades 7 to 10 the common high school. What makes this curriculum “common” is that there is no tracking in 7 to 10; no program labeled general, honors, vocational, college prep, or Regents. Fifty percent of the curriculum is the same for all—state mandated. Curricular specializations begin in grades 11 and 12, and there students have the option of taking some of their courses in postsecondary vocational schools, community colleges, or universities. In the Minnesota Plan, three rungs of a career ladder are defined. Lead teachers would manage teams of teachers, who in turn would supervise teacher assistants and adjuncts. Differentiated staffing will become an

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economic necessity because we can afford to pay professional salaries only to a relatively few professional teachers, and in any case, we will attract only a relatively few first-rate minds into teaching since other professions must be served as well. We’ll use teaching assistants and technology to take care of a myriad of necessary but low-level tasks in tomorrow’s schools. In the future, says Al Shanker, the realist, we’ll reduce the number of professional teachers (paying them equitably with other professionals) and supplement them with assistants, just as nurses, orderlies, technicians, and aides support physicians. The Minnesota Plan is too detailed for me to describe here. It deserves study, however, not as a blueprint but as inspiration for redesign and as a clue to the forces that are shaping public education. It is significant that this plan was designed by a private consulting firm hired by the Minnesota Business Partnership. The private consulting firm, a growing force in public education since the 60s, will use the research produced in universities, and by their own organizations, and move into curriculum development and in-service education in ways that Schools of Education have not found economically feasible and have therefore scorned as “commercial” and “unprofessional.” Last week, I joined a group of supervisors in a Florida school district as they considered a commercial package guaranteed to make their teachers more effective. The salesman—and I don’t use that word pejoratively (we teachers are also selling ideas)— gave a slick performance and distributed handouts on glossy paper in full color—none of our faded purple duplicator sheets or fuzzy mimeos. He clearly demonstrated that his goal was indoctrination and at least one of his strategies was the mnemonic device. He would come up with an acronym for what he would focus attention on: knowledge, attitudes, skills, habits. No one winced when his acronym appeared as KASH. The superintendent remarked to me later that there’s a place for indoctrination in training teachers. I agree. If we have differentiated roles for teaching personnel, we can decide who needs indoctrination, how much, and of what kind. The strategies the salesman proposed were exactly those that our PhDs in instructional design, using high tech wherever possible, are selling to AT&T, Arthur Anderson, Upstate Medical, and the U.S. Navy. It’s not unreasonable to adapt similar strategies to classroom management, developing teachers’ skills in ways that enable them to break away from whole-class instruction, to use small groups and peer conferences, and to shape curricula in English classes out of the responses of their students.

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By the way, that is what the common curriculum in language and literature means: common themes and goals for all students, but interpreted through a variety of literature—classics and their cousins (to borrow Ben Nelms’ phrase)—allowing students to choose, within limits, those works which most compellingly address the questions they ask of life. But of course, indoctrination in techniques is not the whole story—not for teaching assistants, nor teachers, and certainly not for lead teachers. In the second middle school I worked in last spring, I observed a lead teacher, though that was not her label, and was inspired and invigorated by her results. Anita Pisano is an 8th-grade teacher of many years’ experience who after studying with Lucy Calkins, became excited by the commonsense ideas that Alvina Burrows described in the 1940s in They All Want to Write (1984)—ideas so creatively implemented and enhanced by Donald Graves in the ’70s and ’80s. Anita shared her enthusiasm with her superintendent, and he made her the district’s writing consultant for two years. Now she has returned to teaching two classes in the afternoon but continues to work with teachers in the morning who have volunteered for her workshops. It was a pleasure to talk with fifth graders and eighth graders in that school about writing as a craft we both shared. It was a joy to read the New York State 5th-grade proficiency exams in writing in that school and to distinguish, beyond a quibble, the sets of papers written by classes that participated in Ms. Pisano’s program and the sets from classes that did not. More than 20 years ago, George Leonard, fresh from a well-documented critique of why our children cannot write, published Education and Ecstasy (1968). In it, he described the Kennedy School of 2001, a free-flowing school that embraced the community and the learning place, that fostered drama and creativity in language and the classics in literature—the kind of school where Susan Sontag would, even at 10 or 14, have felt challenged and rewarded. What would make this dream a reality was the computer. Today, Leonard observes that everything about schooling is becoming more expensive—buildings, textbooks, supplies, teachers. Only computers are coming down in price. He calls again for the creative use of computers that will permit students to make wide-ranging curricular choices, to move out of the school itself and into the community, and that will facilitate teachers’ roles in guiding individual leaning projects. We are nearer to the fruition of that dream today though Leonard, wisely perhaps, moves his time frame to 2025. What have we learned from where we’ve been?

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First, that we know how to teach English, how to center the common curriculum in the language of students and in the language of literature. Second, having a good grasp of what and how and why, we can turn now to where we teach and redesign the learning place. Third, taking advantage of the economics and the demographics of schooling, we will educate lead teachers, and we will use technology to train teacher assistants and also to deliver some of the instruction. We will make allies of the whiz kids in high tech that our schools educated in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, forming coalitions between private enterprise and the universities, to create new staffing for the schools that will deliver what NCTE has learned and codified in its first 75 years.

References Berman, P. (1985, November). The next step: The Minnesota Plan. Phi Delta Kappan, 67(3), 88–193. Boyer, E. (1983). High school: A report on secondary education in America. New York: Harper & Row. Burrows, A. (1984). They all want to write: Written English in the elementary school. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Farrell, E. (1985, April). Making connections: Academic reform and adolescents’ priorities. English Journal, 74(4), 22–28. Goodlad, J. (1984). A place called school: Prospects for the future. New York: McGraw Hill. Graves, D. (1983). Writing: Teachers and children at work. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books. Holleman, I. J., Jr. (1974). The Trump Plan and the utilization of the differentiated staff. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 126616) Karp, W. (1985, June). Why Johnny can’t think: The politics of bad schooling. Harper’s, 270(1621), 69–73. Leonard, G. (1968). Education and ecstasy. New York: Delacorte Press. Moffett, J. (1985, September) Hidden impediments to improving English teaching. Phi Delta Kappan, 67(1), 51–56. Sizer, T. (1984). Horace’s compromise: The dilemma of the American high school. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

13 Knowing What to Do—And Doing It Miami University Oxford, Ohio June 20, 1988 Dr. Early defines the principles of good reading instruction and explores how colleges of education, teachers, and administrators can improve the context so that these principles get better translated into action.

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he great debates about how to teach reading are behind us. To be sure, we can still provoke arguments over related issues like testing and evaluation, the instructional materials (Shall we throw out the basals? Can computers teach reading?), who should teach reading beyond primary grades, and when to make the transition from learning to read in the first language to learning to read English. But there is more agreement than disagreement on the goals and content of reading instruction. Thanks to the research of cognitive psychologists, psycholinguists, and reading specialists over the last 15 years, we have a sound knowledge base for teaching reading. We know Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 125–134 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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what to teach and how and why. Now the emphasis has shifted to where and when; that is, to the structure of the educational system, to the classrooms, schools, and communities in which reading is being learned and taught. In the ’70s, the question changed from “what is the best way to teach beginning reading” (with its attendant concerns about the alphabet and phonics) to “how can we teach comprehension” (Pearson, 1984)? While the focus was still on beginning reading, the dominant question with regard to comprehension was “can it be taught?” Comprehension, or more precisely, the products of comprehension, could be tested; and the teaching of comprehension was commonly limited to asking questions and, in Durkin’s view, to “mentioning” skills (1978–1979). But by the 80s, a substantial body of research had shown that the process of comprehension could be taught; that is, demonstrated, explained, discussed, and understood by learners. Pearson notes in the same article another question of the ’60s and ’70s that had all but disappeared by the ’80s: How can a school build a sound individualized reading program? That question diminished, he says, because two kinds of consensus were reached: first, that “progress in reading should be monitored frequently, minutely . . . and individually” and, second, that individualized instruction meant giving children skills exercises to be completed individually. These interpretations of individualizing, Pearson believes, and I agree, are widespread but are nevertheless sources of “serious discontent” among professionals in reading. The discontent results from what research has shown about the process of comprehension: that it can be taught and that we should be measuring process, not product, which is what those tests of minute, specific skills, to which Pearson refers, really measure. In the five years since Pearson’s article, we have moved beyond the “new” question he raised then. We have by now developed consensus about how to teach comprehension and about how readers develop their processes of comprehension. Let me here briefly enumerate some points of consensus before moving on to what I consider the big questions remaining, the questions of context, which I’ve called the where and when questions to parallel how, what, and why. It should be noted that to whom and by whom are also questions of context, referring as they do to students and teachers.

What We Know 1. We should not isolate reading from the rest of the curriculum. We know that reading is a way of learning, a process to be acquired, not a subject to be learned. We know that reading is a means, not an end. We know that it is useless for children to learn how to

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

read unless they learn at the same time to choose to read. We are agreed that children should have practice in choosing what they read, or much of what they read. Since reading is a way of learning, it must be taught, not merely practiced, in all those school subjects that require the assimilation of ideas and information. Since reading is a whole process, not just a collection of subskills, we teach an understanding of process and emphasize approaching a text in accordance with one’s purpose for reading it. One of the best ways to teach an “approach” or a “strategy” is to model it. Comprehension is the reconstruction of meaning; a process that is guided by the text and the reader’s experience or prior knowledge. Therefore, activating prior knowledge is an important teaching step preceding an assigned reading. It is also a habit students must apply to their independent study of texts. (It is one of the purposes of the survey step in SQ3R [Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review].) Textbooks in the content fields are the most common type of reading material we require of students in school. So long as they remain the major source of students’ learning—whether or not they should be, whether or not textbook authors are indeed “inconsiderate” of their readers—we have an obligation to use content textbooks as basic materials for teaching how to read and learn. Over the past 20 years, we have moved in this direction with basal readers, including textbook study sections and balancing literary selections with informational articles related to science, history, math, and other subjects. Good teachers, whether reading specialists or content teachers, frequently use content textbooks as they demonstrate reading strategies. But daily systematic teaching of reading by using content texts has yet to become the norm in elementary and secondary schools. From research and years of experience, we know that the more children read, the better readers they become. Numerous studies, including those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have shown the more children read in school, the higher their achievement scores on standardized tests. Instead of trying to develop comprehension skills by questioning students after they read a text, we help them to examine how they comprehend. To do this, we set up situations in which they consciously question; predict; call up prior knowledge; relate new learning to what is already known, using techniques like Raphael’s

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Question Answer Relationships (QAR), Manzo’s ReQuest procedure, and reciprocal teaching (Brown & Palincsar, 1982). And we teach students to monitor not only miscues but misunderstanding of what the text says. 8. We recognize writing as a way of learning and use it to strengthen recall and to sort out meanings. In practice, this means replacing workbooks and short answer quizzes with opportunities to write extended discourse. 9. We know that vocabulary is a powerful factor in comprehension, that teaching word meanings in isolation is ineffective, that students should learn how their vocabularies expand, that devices like semantic mapping refine and reinforce concepts and the words that label them. 10. We know that comprehension is related to readers’ expectations, including what they have come to expect of various forms of discourse. That is why we refresh their concept of story (e.g., using story grammars) and teach the analysis of other kinds of text. This sampling of what we know about reading instruction may be sufficient introduction to what is the major problem confronting us. These 10 ideas are by no means radical, or even new, though some of them are couched in new vocabulary. They have been common practice in a few good schools and in scattered classrooms in other schools for many years. But their implementation is so infrequent that observational studies like Goodlad’s at the elementary (1984) and Boyer’s at the secondary level (1983) have failed to record very many instances.

Why Knowledge Is Not Applied This decade has reverberated with accusations about the mediocrity of teaching, and blame has been hurled in several directions. One I have hinted at in the previous paragraph is the overregulation of the schools from the outside by parents and school boards, by state legislatures and governors’ commissions, by federal policymakers and secretaries of education. The demand for better teaching has developed into more testing, less pedagogic freedom, according to one observer. “We have entered the greatest era of educational regulation in history,” says the president of the American Federation of Teachers (Shanker, cited in Karp, 1986). A vivid image of the increasing regularization of schools over the decades is suggested by Gerald Grant’s (1988) fruitful metaphor. Whereas the schools of the early 20th century could be compared to an avocado, with

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a firm center of control surrounded by a homogeneous student body and encased in a very thin skin of outside regulation, the schools at midcentury are more aptly symbolized by the cantaloupe with its central mesh of seeds and fibers representing school authority and its thick rind suggesting the external bureaucracy. Today’s schools, says Grant, are in the image of a watermelon: no core of authority; the seeds (i.e., school personnel) scattered throughout; the rind, formidable in its thickness. Teachers don’t teach reading as well as they know how because they are not allowed to. They are overregulated. So the counterattack is to empower teachers, returning pedagogic freedom to them through school-based management. Will the 10 pieces of knowledge about reading instruction I enumerated earlier be better implemented in the schools of Rochester, New York; Hammond, Indiana; Dade County, Florida; the Carnegie Schools Program in Massachusetts; the Century 21 schools in Washington State (Pipho, 1988)? Surely there is reason to be optimistic, to support these experiments, and to evaluate the effects on reading instruction, which is so very basic to “the learning needs of all students.” The goals statement of the Carnegie Schools Program declares that “significant change in meeting the learning needs of students takes place at the classroom level, and the school organization supports this change” (quoted by Pipho, 1988). Or, to give the same idea narrower focus: How we teach reading depends as much on where we teach as what we know. Blame for not implementing the knowledge base provided by reading research is directed also at teacher education. Inevitably, the school reform movement triggered by A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) led to an examination of how teachers are prepared. The Holmes Report (1986) called for preparing teachers like other professionals in a 5th year following the baccalaureate in the liberal arts and sciences. The professions should comprise a hierarchy of novices, lead teachers, and specialists. The Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy in its report A Nation Prepared: Teachers in the 21st Century (1986) addressed the need for a professional environment where teachers could grow in their ability to serve children and where teachers would make the significant decisions about how best to satisfy local and state demands for accountability. These reports are but two of many signs of the spreading awareness that context—where we teach—affects how we teach and that knowing how is necessary but insufficient. The context narrows to a specific school setting, and that setting is shaped by the people who inhabit it and the culture and institutions and events that shape them. The settings are so various even within the same school district that generalizations about how to teach

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reading lose their intended impact. Nevertheless, various though settings may be, they share some common characteristics; so generalizations can be adapted to special circumstances. Let’s look then at three agents—teacher educators, teachers, and administrators—and ask how they can improve the contexts of reading instruction.

Teacher Education The dilemma in preservice education is whether to prepare future teachers for schools as they are or as they ought to be. We should be examining current practices and considering what needs to be changed and how transitions can be made gradually and effectively. As it is, we emphasize research and theory in an effort to develop in fledgling teachers a knowledge of how and why that diminishes rapidly in their first encounters in real classrooms. Researchers at Michigan State followed elementary education students through two years of preservice courses and field experiences in two different programs. One program emphasized that good teaching means “paying attention to students’ thinking and emphasizing conceptual change.” The other focused on the teacher as decision maker and carried the message that following a teacher’s guide is “technical” teaching, not creative. Both programs urged that textbooks be used only as a resource; following a textbook, they implied, was mindless teaching. But students in both programs, once they were in the classroom, relied heavily on basals. Most of the time they followed the guides quite mechanically, without really understanding what they were doing. It is safe to say that basal reading programs, particularly the teachers’ manuals, are still today the primary instrument in training elementary reading teachers. Most teachers internalize a pedagogy of reading through following the scripted lessons in the manuals. Daily use of these manuals provides consistent practice that is far more effective in determining teaching practices than the methods course can be. If basal series were a perfect learning tool for all the different children and teachers who use them, we could be grateful for their impact on the training of teachers. But of course they are not perfect instruments. They must be used cautiously, critically, and creatively. Teacher education programs have a responsibility for developing competent users of basals. This cannot be done by ignoring basals or condemning them. It is as if we banned driver education, assuring the next generation that automobiles would be obsolete, telling them a bit about aerodynamics, showing them a couple of late-model airplanes, and then giving them the keys to rental cars to drive from LaGuardia to Times Square.

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In methods courses, we should instead examine how and if basals are using the research of the last 10 or 15 years. We should demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of basal series and stimulate prospective teachers to ask (and answer) such questions as: Why does the manual suggest this practice? Does it, for example, enhance students’ understanding of how to draw inferences, or does it merely test their ability to make a particular inference? Is the scripted lesson explicit enough for low achievers? How should explanations be modified? What should be omitted—or added— for children who are at a particular level of language development? How can the new teacher successfully fuse ideas such as collaborative learning or writing process approaches with the basal program that the school has adopted? How can beginning teachers collaborate with experienced teachers to loosen the grip of the basal, to include whole language approaches, to assure that study skills are taught in content areas? Because basal series are powerful instruments of teacher education, reading professionals in the schools and in the universities must assume responsibility for improving them. On the one hand, this means helping teachers to know what to ask for, and on the other, making sure that when publishers deliver, schools will respond. Given the pressures of a normal teaching environment, teachers’ dependence on instructional materials is understandable. It is unreasonable to expect them to revise textbooks and manuals as they teach. The most we can expect of teachers is that they use materials selectively and critically. But real reforms in teaching reading will come only when publishers produce materials that assist in whole language approaches, in teaching strategies instead of skills, and in developing understanding of process instead of automated responses. In colleges of education, we can neither show nor tell future teachers all they need to know, but we can instill habits of thinking critically and constructively about the different environments, school populations, and instructional approaches they will find in the schools that hire them and that will influence their continuing development positively or negatively.

Teachers The fact that teachers are shaped by the schools that hire them means that school personnel are also teacher educators. Let me make recommendations for teachers’ on-the-job training in two areas: basal reading instruction and reading in the content fields. With respect to the first, I urge teacher collaboratives focused on the mainline reading program in elementary schools. From a few schools across

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the nation, we’ve learned the importance of support groups for teachers who are learning to emphasize process approaches in writing. We’ve learned that groups of teachers reading children’s books and coming together to talk about them give powerful impetus to their schools’ featuring of children’s literature. We need the same kind of collaborative learning centered on basals. It isn’t enough to install a new reading system, call in the company’s consultant a few times, and then let the program take off. Instead, a basal study group should raise the same kinds of questions I’ve suggested should be included in preservice courses. Think of how much the beginning teacher could learn from discussing specific selections, practices, and materials with experienced colleagues. Think how much a beginner with a good background in reading research and teaching effectiveness studies could add to such discussions. A basal study group could operate concurrently with a writing group and a literature group, but there will come a time when the three groups should merge to consider how to integrate reading, writing, and literature and thus reduce the dominance of the basal in a given school. At this point, teachers should be ready to transfer strategies used in reading groups to the content areas. While I recognize the values of linking reading instruction to literature, my major concern is to emphasize study skills in the content areas. Many schools departmentalize from grade 4 or 5 on, so there are many teachers of content who don’t think of themselves as reading teachers. In schools that are making progress toward “reading across the curriculum,” I find reading-resource specialists demonstrating in content classes, working with content teachers in daily work sessions during school time, supplying content teachers with folders of materials on each strategy being featured, and promoting “witnessing” on the part of content teachers. It is the true believers who testify to the success of a strategy in their content classes who most effectively persuade other content teachers to try it. At the same time, witnessing strengthens the believer’s confidence and competence. The successful reading consultant arranges many opportunities for content teachers to demonstrate and bear witness within their own schools, in schools across the county, and at regional and national conferences.

Leaders and Administrators When I asked a group of 7th-grade reading teachers I’m presently working with to tell me what change in their schools would most improve read-

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ing instruction, the most frequent answers involved the principal’s role. They wanted leadership and moral support in working with content teachers. They wanted improved scheduling and space allocation. Chiefly, they wanted principals to understand why reading classes alone cannot improve students’ learning of content. These 25 reading teachers from as many middle schools in a single school district are, most of them, willing to work with content teachers, but they are tucked away in reading laboratories, serving large numbers of students who are funneled into labs from social studies classes. They are generally ignored by the teachers not assigned to the labs with their classes and resented by the teachers who are, since they consider nine weeks in reading lab as time lost from learning social studies. This outmoded system can be changed only with administrative support. It isn’t enough for the superintendent to say the right things, nor for the district reading coordinator to issue edicts and arrange in-service sessions. Every one of those 25 schools presents a unique set of problems. General solutions won’t apply. It is the building principal who holds the key. Of course, all 25 principals differ in their beliefs about reading, their administrative styles, their hiring practices, their resources and personal energies. Yet here are several steps they could take. They could join teachers in study groups such as those suggested in the preceding section. They could set up a steering committee to evaluate the situation in their schools. They could involve students and parents in studying how to improve learning opportunities. Depending on the reading lab director’s strengths, they could enable her (or him) to make the transition from teaching children only in pull-out situations to working with teachers and students in content classes. They could help to determine the reasonable apportionment of resources between remedial and content-area reading in their school (since this balance will differ among schools in this district). They could make possible the schoolwide SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) that almost all these reading teachers recommend. Administrators can maintain their support of reading instruction even as they deal with larger administrative issues such as school-based management, restructuring the curriculum, using community resources, achieving more flexible scheduling with the help of advanced computer technology. Most important, they can interpret current teacher evaluation systems and work with their teachers on the one hand, and state education officials on the other to make such systems more effective instruments for professional development. Perhaps the most fundamental role for principals is to promote reading in their schools and communities by identifying and rewarding excellent teaching of reading. To do this, they must learn to recognize excellence not

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merely by standardized test scores but by library circulation figures, quality of student writing, students’ and teachers’ attitudes toward textbooks, the academic climate of the school, and the strategies content teachers provide their students for learning through reading. These recommendations for teacher educators, teachers, and administrators require steadfast effort, I realize, but they are possible even within our present inadequate school structures. To the extent that these steps and others like them improve the context of reading instruction, we can shrink the gap that now exists between knowing how to teach reading and getting it done.

References Boyer, E. L. (1983). High school: A report on secondary education in America. New York: Harper & Row. Brown, A., & Palincsar, A. (1982). Inducing strategic learning from texts by means of informed, self-control training. Topics in Learning and Learning Disabilities, 2, 1–17. Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy. (1986). A nation prepared: Teachers for the 21st century. Hyattsville, MD. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 268120) Durkin, D. (1978–1979). What classroom observations reveal about reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 14, 481–533. Goodlad, J. (1984). A place called school. New York: McGraw-Hill. Grant, G. (1988). The world we created at Hamilton High (pp. 124–125). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holmes Group. (1986). Tomorrow’s teachers: A report of the Holmes Group. East Lansing, MI: The Holmes Group. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 270454) Karp, W. (1986, February). Editorial by Albert Shanker. Harper’s. Manzo, A. V. (1969). The ReQuest procedure. The Journal of Reading, 13(2), 123–126. National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Retrieved from www2.ed.gov/pubs/ NatAtRisk/index.html Pearson, D. (1984). Four essential changes in comprehension instruction. In F. W. Parkay, S. O’Bryan, & M. Hennessey (Eds.), Quest for quality: Improving basic skills instruction in the 1980’s. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Pipho, C. (1988, June). Restructured school: Rhetoric on the rebound? Phi Delta Kappan, 69(10), 710–711. Raphael, T. E. (1982). Question-answering strategies for children. The Reading Teacher, 39(6), 186–191.

14 Literacy: Emerging, Developing, Reaching New Heights Cincinnati October 26, 1989 Dr. Early argues that teachers must learn to adapt “mindfully” to their school contexts and balance whole language approaches both with the judicious use of basals and with direct instruction, especially in comprehension strategies, to meet the needs of minority and second-language students.

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hat title suggests that I am going to talk about teaching literacy from kindergarten through grade 12. Well, I’ll give it a try. And the title signals that I believe in a stage theory of reading; that is, that beginning reading is not exactly the same process as fully mature reading. And differences in process from one stage to another mean that there must be differences in instructional emphases for beginners, for developing readers, and for mature students. But I don’t want to be hemmed in by the title. I also want to talk about what’s on my mind these days because I suspect these same Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 135–144 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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concerns may be on your mind, and I want to share reactions to a couple of books and articles I’ve been reading because I suspect you’ve also been reading and talking about them. One of the things I think about these days is preparing young White women from middle-class suburbs to teach in schools like the one I was in on Monday. The Black/White racial mix is 7 to 3. It isn’t a ghetto school. It’s in a pleasant working-class neighborhood of a university town in the rural Southeast. I was there to see two brand new teachers who are graduates of our program and five student teachers, all White females. One of my faculty is conducting a study of how White teachers learn to relate to children of color and how easily (or painfully) these children can assimilate what Lisa Delpit (1988) calls the culture of power. My colleague is Black, and that’s an advantage, but she’s middle class, so she too has some distances to bridge. Her research may shed light on how educators like you and me can help White middle-class teachers to reach Black kids and Asians and Hispanics and Whites, whose common denominator is poverty. Maybe, too, she’ll find out what kind of differences there are between Black teachers and White teachers. Lisa Delpit, whom we’ll talk about later, claims these differences are real and serious. As we wait for research, though, we have to rely on experience—our own and those of others. Our deepest beliefs about teaching spring from our childhood experiences in classrooms going all the way back to what we learned and how we learned in grade school. Unfortunately, as Tracy Kidder observes, teachers’ experiences are typically “both repetitious and narrow and can easily harden into narrow pedagogical theories” (1989, p. 51). Current research holds that teachers get set in their ways—both their good ones and their bad ones—after about four years of learning by experience, and some of the best don’t last four years. How do we fight this hardening of the categories that sets in early and makes us resistant to change? In PROTEACH—that’s our teacher education program at the University of Florida—our aim is to nurture reflective practitioners. We know we can’t prepare teachers, in any definitive fashion, for specific jobs, but we hope to equip them with knowledge and attitudes and habits of thinking that will enable them to cope in whatever classrooms. We want beginning teachers who know the research on teacher effectiveness and think about their experiences in light of that research. We expect them to look for “what works” in a particular context but, more important, to ask why it works or doesn’t. That’s a large order. We try to focus on process— on the process of becoming teachers, not on outcomes. But we can’t escape outcomes altogether anymore than you can. We are accountable for our products, just as teachers are held accountable for what children produce,

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just as your students will be judged by their products, no matter how much we insist on the importance of process. Our goal of reflection in teaching causes painful soul-searching among our faculty. In simplest terms, what we hope to nurture in our students are defenses against mindlessness. Twenty years ago in Crisis in the Classroom (1970), Charles Silberman branded most classroom teachers as mindless. I’ve been angry ever since, but I have to admit that the dailiness of teaching—the repetitive rhythms of the school year, the great need for structure and routine in classrooms that are bubbling cauldrons of humanity—these can push teachers toward mindlessness, toward an impulse to go on automatic pilot now and then. We’ve all encountered teachers who can hardly stay awake as they follow, for the umpteenth time, the scripted lesson of the basal reader manual. So when I heard Ellen Langer talking about her recent book Mindfulness (1989), I hastened to get a copy. It’s not directed to teachers, but it has much to say to us, about how we can fight mindlessness in ourselves and protect our children from it too. It’s easy for all of us to get trapped into categorical thinking. One of my most intelligent friends hasn’t had a banana since she was 4-years-old because she ate one the day before she came down with scarlet fever. She’s the same friend whose daughter was in San Francisco last Tuesday night [when an earthquake struck San Francisco]. What flashed immediately into her mind were scenes from that old Clark Gale/Spencer Tracy epic. It made no difference that the TV analysts assured us that the 1906 earthquake was of a magnitude 30 times this one. Think of the categories that have hardened in a generation like mine brought up on the movies! For more pertinent illustrations, think of teachers who reject basal readers because they remember being bored in grade 2. Or the ones for whom reading in the secondary school means only SRA kits or remedial reading. Teachers who insist on nouns and verbs in grade 3 because they were good at grammar. There is Irene, the teacher I went to observe last week because she had come into my office three weeks into September, burst into tears, and said, “Dr. Early, I want you to know that PROTEACH in no way prepared me for the third grade I have to teach.” She had left us in August convinced that the only way to teach reading was to throw out the basal readers and introduce whole language. She has 27 children in third grade: 20 Black, and 7 nonnative speakers of English. As a mindful teacher, Irene has to re-create the categories she acquired in PROTEACH. She knows what’s right about whole language, what’s wrong with basals. But her categories have been formed out of the context of the school situation she finds herself in. She has to make new categories that

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permit her to adapt what’s right about whole language to a basal series that offers her temporary support while she gets her act together. Her job would be easier, I admit, if she had learned in her methods classes respect for the basal and confidence in her ability to select from it only what her children need. Mea culpa! She learned instead to feel noncreative, nonreflective unless she concocted her whole curriculum from scratch. Like a new bride, she needs to use the package mixes (creatively, of course) while stocking the larder and honing her skills for the gourmet teaching to come. We’ve said a mea culpa or two over Irene, but we’re not so naïve as to take full blame, or credit, for novice teachers. Mindfulness, like learning to teach, is a lifetime process. It begins with all you teachers who are getting those White middle-class Irenes ready for us in Schools of Education and are taking them back again to continue their process of becoming teachers under your tutelage. You begin to prepare reflective teachers in grade 1. The 1,000 hours they spend in methods courses merely put a spin on what they have learned about teaching in 14 years before reaching us. I mentioned Charles Silberman’s rage against mindlessness in the late 60s. I’m happy to report that his wife, Arlene Silberman, who collaborated with him on Crisis in the Classroom, is the author of a new book Growing Up Writing (1989), which is full of praise for teachers who have learned how to teach writing and reading and thinking. This is a reporter’s book aimed at informing parents. It includes vignettes of not-so-good teachers— the mindless ones—but it’s mostly about what teachers have learned and taught each other about focusing on process as they get children to write and read and think. It’s a readable book, but it won’t be as popular as Tracy Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren, which records a year of teaching a typical 5th-grade class in a way that no TV documentary can. Oh, the power of the word over the image! Kidder’s portrait does for teaching what almost no educator can do: capture a big chunk of the taxpaying public and take them inside an alltoo-typical school. It’s a Literary Guild Selection; it’s a bestseller. We should be grateful it’s not a book for teachers, though teachers will read it and take sides for and against Chris [the teacher in the book]. I’m not sure I want my students to read it. I’d rather they read Nancie Atwell or Eliot Wigginton, teachers who tell their own stories and serve as role models. But I admire Chris. The critic who reviewed the book for Education Week faults Tracy Kidder for choosing a teacher “who’s not a winner” (Ohanian, 1989, p. 35). That means she doesn’t fit the reviewer’s model of the liberal progressive educator derived from (among others) A. S. Neill (Summerhill), Frank Smith, and Donald Graves. “Because Ms. Ohanian [the reviewer] is locked into her viewpoint. . . . she doesn’t remember that Chris read Lucy

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Calkins . . . during her summer vacation and then encouraged children to choose their own topics, keep dialogue journals, etc.” I’m quoting from a letter to Education Week by Ruth Nathan, herself the author of an excellent text on teaching writing. Professor Nathan wishes the participants in the Education Summit had read Among Schoolchildren: Things might change [she writes] if the participants realize many children come to school exhausted, undernourished, and smelling of urine because they were too afraid to get up in the night to go to the bathroom and too poor to change their underwear. Our President and many of our state legislators haven’t seen much of this first hand, and, like Ms. Ohanian, might prefer to “get the inside dope” on a winner. (Nathan, 1989, p. 29)

Ethnography, like good journalism, does not generalize, and we find that frustrating. Ms. Nathan says that the author of Among Schoolchildren “has not screamed, as other authors before him have; he has left the screaming to us” (1989, p. 29). This exchange over Among Schoolchildren is a further example of how hard it is for us to create new categories to accommodate new contexts. [It] is echoed in the acrimonious debates that persist—needlessly persist—between proponents of whole language and users of basal readers. It’s shameful the way we educators divide ourselves into opposing factions. There shouldn’t be two armed camps on this issue. There should be a new blending of these two approaches, new every time, dictated by the context of the classroom: What grade level? What kinds of cultural diversity in this classroom, this community? What resources? What kind of teacher, in terms of experience, beliefs, technical competence, etc.? In adapting to particular contexts, we rely on research for guidance as well as on experience. Stahl and Miller (1989) report that the weight of evidence from 51 research studies supports two findings teachers must reckon with: (1) Whole language approaches seem to be more effective in kindergarten than in first grade. (2) Whole language approaches produce weaker effects [than basal readers] with children in low SES classrooms— with poor kids. It seems that whole language approaches are clearly helpful in reinforcing children’s awareness of how talking and writing, listening and reading are related. I said “reinforcing.” For poor kids, our whole language teachers in preschool and kindergarten are starting from scratch to introduce such concepts as print awareness.

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Current research shows vast differences in the amount of exposure to print that children have outside of school. Adams,1 for example, estimates that some children may have 1,000 hours of exposure to storybooks by the time they begin formal reading instruction, whereas other children have none. A thousand hours? That’s an hour a day for three years, skipping two or three days each month. How about 20 minutes on one day for five years? That adds up to about 500 hours, half as much as the best-provided-for children seem to get. Children who have had 1,000 or 500 hours interacting with storybooks, with paper and pencils, come to formal reading instruction already understanding the code more or less. Whole language classrooms give those children the chance to show what they’ve learned, but for children who haven’t had sufficient experience with print, direct instruction is the best way to present new information such as letter-sound relationships. All children must learn to decode. With lots of time to learn—say, 1,000 hours—many figure out decoding on their own. But most of the kids in our schools in the next decade will be poor kids, minorities, children of single parents, children of Asian and Hispanic immigrants. They will need direct instruction in the system, that is, in phonics. Of course, whole language approaches do not rule out direct instruction. We all know 1st-grade teachers who integrate direct instruction in phonics in a curriculum based on children’s literature and lots of personal writing. But as Lisa Delpit puts it, Black children—any children who are outside the mainstream—need explicit information about the rules (You know when you enter a new culture, what do you need to know fast?) for participating in mainstream culture: the linguistic codes, how to communicate, how to present oneself. Explicit information equates with direct instruction: basal series package direct instruction for teachers. Delpit’s concern in “The Silenced Dialogue” is that White liberal educators are not listening to Black teachers and parents whom we think of as authoritarian when they are merely reflecting differences in cultural codes. She quotes Shirley Brice Heath (Ways with Words, 1983) and gives her own examples of how middle-class mothers and teachers disguise their directives. “Is this where the scissors belong?”; “Isn’t it time for your bath?” (p. 280). Black teachers are more likely to say, “Put the scissors on the shelf.” A Black mother says to her 8-year-old, “Boy, get your rusty behind in that bathtub.” 1. This might refer to the work of Marilyn Jaeger Adams, who published the book Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press) in 1990.

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And the Black mother is no less loving than the White mother who translates commands into questions. My White middle-class students have a hard time with the Delpit article. They don’t hear what she says. She says the skills/process debate is a false dichotomy. She says the issue was created not by teachers but by academics (by people like me); that we create categorical divisions—not for the purpose of better teaching, but for easier analysis of research studies that are being rushed toward publication. Delpit concludes that teachers who are most skillful at educating Black and poor children do not allow themselves to be put in a “skills” box or “process” box. “They understand,” she writes, “the need for both approaches, the need to help students to establish their own voices, but to coach those voices to produce notes that will be heard clearly in the larger society” (Delpit, 1988, p. 296). What worries me more than the emergent literacy stage, important though that is, is the period that follows after children have learned the way print encodes the sounds of language. What we fail to understand is how much experience a child outside the mainstream needs with letter-sound concepts compared to children who bring several years’ familiarity with print to first grade. Delpit cites a lesson in a progressive program that introduces the names of M and E, the sounds they stand for, how to write each of these letters, and how they are blended together to produce the word ME. As an experienced 1st-grade teacher, she knows that to assimilate so much in one sitting, the child has to be already familiar with the concepts. For children who aren’t, she suggests that the program that presents the same information in about 40 lessons has a better chance of succeeding. For all children who emerge from first or second grade with a shaky grasp of the code, what is needed is plentiful opportunity to read for themselves, on their own, books they can read. I don’t care whether these easyto-read books are great literature or not. Children who are developing their skill at constructing meanings signaled by print must have materials they can decode automatically, that contain ideas they are familiar with. In grades 2 to 5 for some, in grades 4 to 9 for others, the main goal should be reading to show off how easy it is, reading for the pleasure of knowing how. Reading to learn can come later. In the second stage of developing control over decoding, you don’t expect kids to learn from content textbooks; you have them turn to social studies texts, for example, only after they’ve become familiar with the content through other means: listening, observing, role playing, talking, maybe writing.

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But somewhere in the middle grades, most children are going to have to use reading to learn. They are going to have to learn how to cope with textbooks. If through a literature-based program we limit their experiences with textbooks and with academic writing, we will have weakened their chances for success in high school and college. Direct instruction in how to interact with text is essential. Very few students, even the brightest, learn academic skills on their own; and when they do, the learning is much more difficult and time-consuming than it is under the direction of a skillful teacher. What concerns me about whole language is the danger that teachers who are just beginning to learn how to teach comprehension strategies will find that they haven’t time for the direct instruction that’s required. Modeling, explaining, discussing, walking students through the various processes, showing them how to monitor comprehension as well as miscues, showing them how to relate text information to prior knowledge, teaching question/answer relationships—this is the kind of direct instruction I mean. Teachers who turn their backs on basal readers will miss excellent examples of direct instruction of strategies like predicting, drawing inferences, previewing and summarizing, and perceiving text organization. Sure, they can develop their own lessons on these strategies, relating them to literature. I just wonder how many of them will. And literature-based programs should not neglect trade books related to science, math, and social studies. I just wonder how many teachers will find them and then find the time to develop strategies lessons around them. Teachers will need a lot of help from you reading consultants. In middle school and high school, our concern is to apply reading and writing to the study of content, not to literature only. In schools that are making progress toward this goal, I find reading-resource specialists demonstrating in content classes, working with content teachers in daily work sessions during school time, distributing folders of materials on each strategy being featured that applies, and promoting witnessing on the part of content teachers. It is the true believers, the ones who can testify to the success of a strategy in their content classes, who most effectively persuade other teachers to teach how to learn. We have made great strides in secondary reading over the last three decades thanks to the emphasis placed on direct instruction by people like Olive Niles, Hal Herber and his students, Richard and JoAnne Vacca, and Carol Santa, whose CRISS program [Creating Independence through Student Owned Strategies] is spreading across the country. But there is much still to be done if we are to bring, not just a few, but most students to higher levels of literacy.

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A sign of the times is that city systems like Denver and San Diego are phasing out remedial reading classes. “All teachers will be teachers of reading,” the Denver deputy superintendent says. Of course, that will happen only if there are enough reading resource specialists to serve the content teachers—and enough time for those teachers to learn, time for them to become true believers. Nor will it be easy to implement administrative policies in these school systems that are calling for an immediate emphasis on academic content for all students and curricula that “incorporate critical thinking and problem-solving skills.” I said early on that I subscribe to a stage model of reading development. I hope you don’t infer, however, that I believe that higher-order thinking skills should be postponed to the upper reaches of high school. On the contrary, I believe that we make ready the way for higher literacy from the moment we engage children in emergent literacy. The key to higher literacy is preserving the will to learn that all children are born with. Opening the world of books to children as early as possible keeps curiosity alive. Not just books, but all forms of writing, especially children’s own. Making print easily accessible to all children by directly teaching the decoding skills is part of the plan that leads to higher literacy. Children who don’t learn that code by the end of grade 3 (some say grade 2) brand themselves as losers. In their eyes, the battle is lost, and all too many teachers agree. These kids may think critically, but their thinking will be limited to their own narrow experiences. So in primary grades, we must achieve the right balance between immersion in literature and direct attention to phonics. Balancing literature with direct instruction in comprehension strategies is essential, with the greater emphasis coming after that period of developing ease in reading that must characterize the middle grades. Then higher literacy can truly flourish in the upper grades as wide reading and personal writing are balanced by close reading of selected texts, with discussion stimulated by the teacher, as together students and teacher pursue the author’s purpose. This kind of close reading is described brilliantly by Benjamin de Mott (1984) in “Summoning Readers.” I have been talking about higher order thinking skills this morning whenever I have mentioned mindfulness and the creating of new categories. It is only through wide reading and close reading—both—that we can encourage students of all ages to examine their convictions in the light of new context, new experiences, their own and those of others. George Steiner in last week’s New Yorker, reviewing a biography of Robert Hutchins, tells of the “hammering excitement” that the University of Chicago stirred in him as an undergraduate where, he says, “we sat through

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whole nights arguing Marx or Dewey, analyzing, word for word, a paragraph out of Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’” (1989, p. 142). That’s close reading! “To read, to read passionately, to read ‘in dialogue’” (that is, talking back to the author)—this, says Steiner, is the way to the “disinterested, joyously obsessive pursuit of truth that is the sole authentic purpose of humane learning” (1989, p. 143). And again from Steiner: “A great university is one in which the necessary arts of reading are central” (1989, p. 143). Every child must have the chance to develop those necessary arts. That chance must not be endangered by any of us locking ourselves into boxes labeled either “whole language” or “direct instruction.” Let’s be mindful; let’s fight off hardening of the categories.

References Delpit, L. (1988, August). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children. Harvard Educational Review, 58(3), 280–297. DeMott, B. (1984). The humanities and the summoning reader. In B. Ladner (Ed.), Humanities in precollegiate education: 83rd yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Part II, pp. 130–142. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kidder, T. (1989). Among schoolchildren. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Langer, E. J. (1989). Mindfulness. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. Nathan, R. (1989, October 4). The ‘insights’ of Among Schoolchildren. [Letter to the editor.] Education Week, 9(5), 29. Ohanian, S. (1989, September 6). Searching for the ‘soul’ of a classroom. [Book review of Tracy Kidder’s American Schoolchildren.] Education Week, 9 (1), 35–36. Silberman, A. (1989). Growing up writing. New York: Random House. Silberman, C. (1970). Crisis in the classroom: The remaking of American education. New York: Random House. Stahl, S. A., & Miller, P. D. (1989). Whole language and language experience approaches for beginning reading: A quantitative research synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 59, 57–116. Steiner, G. (1989, October 23). Books: An examined life. The New Yorker, 65, 142–146.

15 Clock Watching Convocation University of Florida May 3, 1990 In this last speech that Dr. Early gave to graduating students at the University of Florida, she touches on why she went into teaching. She received a standing ovation.

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latform guests, colleagues, guests, members of the graduating class: When Dean Smith asked me to speak at convocation, I figured he was thinking of this as my commencement too, though I’m beginning a somewhat different chapter from yours. I rather liked that idea, and I had said “yes” before it struck me that the dean might have been thinking more of my retiring than my beginning. A retiring educator might be expected to have words of wisdom for a graduating class. Good grief! I panicked! Age is no guarantee of wisdom. Experience is the most you can expect.

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So, in panic now, I raced down the halls of memory. Four times I had commenced. Four times a convocation speaker had peppered me with platitudes. Surely I could pluck out of memory one or two to pass along to you. But commencement speeches are eminently forgettable. All I remembered from the last degree was that the sun was hot and the robe was itchy that August day in Fenway Park. But I persisted. And finally I did recall a word of wisdom from the first time I graduated from Boston University. The speaker offered a piece of advice that has served me well over the years. You may find it useful too. Whitney Griswold1 cribbed it from the lid of a Hellman’s mayonnaise jar. “Keep cool. Do not freeze.” Coolness and flexibility. When you’re 21 and jobless, you have need of both. The teaching jobs that year were in little towns in Maine and on what I considered the Western frontier, places in New York State, with names like Holland Patent and Painted Post. The alternative for an English major was publishing, and when I landed a job at Houghton Mifflin, right across from the Park Street subway, I considered myself the most fortunate of all girl graduates. Publishing, like teaching, welcomes women, and for the same wrong reasons. At Houghton Mifflin I found several women in high places and at low salaries. So after a dazzling but ill-paid year, teaching in a mill town in Connecticut looked pretty good. I gave up the glamour of afternoon sherry with John Dos Passos (his reputation has faded faster than Hemingway’s and Scott Fitzgerald’s so you don’t realize that he’d been required reading in my college lit classes). Anyway, I gave up all that publishing chic for five classes of English, two study halls, the school newspaper, and the yearbook. I had my master’s degree by that time, so I could afford to work summers. Or rather, at $2,200 a year, I couldn’t afford not to. So I answered a blind ad for a summer replacement, writing a bragging letter about my great success in publishing. To my embarrassment, the letter went to Houghton Mifflin, but they took me back anyway. At the end of that summer, I had to choose between publishing and teaching. I faced that choice for four consecutive summers, so I had chances to change my mind. But I did not. Why did I choose teaching? It was clock-watching that decided me. In the editorial offices I found myself watching the clock occasionally when the minute hand seemed not to move at all. I clock-watched in the classroom too, of course—all the time, every period of every day. But for the 1. Alfred Whitney Griswold was an American historian and a president of Yale University.

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opposite reasons. There was never enough time in the classroom. The end of the period, the end of the day, always came too soon. I knew I belonged where there was no time for boredom. So there you have it. I went into teaching for all kinds of selfish reasons: to escape boredom; to feel good about myself; to feel needed, if you will; for the challenge in it; for the fun. To be sure, over the years, I’ve learned to complain without suffering. In our profession there’s always so much to be done—it’s hard to leave it. Think of the opportunities for enterprise in education! If you keep cool but do not freeze, you will accomplish more in the next 10 years than we have in the last 50. And why not? You’re better educated than my generation. You know what to teach and how. You know as much as a hundred years of educational research—most of it coming in the last 2 decades—can tell you about why practices succeed or fail. You know enough always to question, to ask why. You know as much as Ed Psych and common sense can tell you about how children learn. But you probably know less about whom you’ll teach than you know about what, how, and why. You can be sure, though, that many of the students you’ll teach will be different from you, different from those kids in the research studies, different from the ones that most textbooks were designed for, different from the kids you grew up with, probably different from the ones you have in mind when you picture yourself in the classroom. You will teach in classrooms where, chances are you will represent the minority culture. In years to come, you will do the research, you will make the discoveries that will show us how children from very different cultures can learn together, can pursue common goals in uncommon ways. What you teach and why, whom you teach and how—all important in the 5 W’s and an H I’ve borrowed from the lesson news writing. But the most important W on your list is where. At first, where you teach will mean only your classroom—your responsibility, a big one but manageable. Then very soon you’ll realize that where you teach is the whole system—a much bigger responsibility, still yours, however, along with everyone else in the system, in the community. Shared responsibilities are tougher. The where of teaching is what is what you’ve been calling the context, the setting, the structure. You’ve already learned that you have entered a profession in need of restructuring. What an opportunity for enterprise! We are still fumbling with what the idea means. In some quarters, restructuring focuses on staffing. In a restructured system, some say, teachers, like physicians, will be specialists. There will be those who diagnose and

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prescribe; those who teach; those who listen and respond as children practice what they’ve learned; those who plan curriculum; those who develop instructional materials; still others who measure and evaluate. Just as physicians have nurses, orderlies, technicians, and assisting specialists, master teachers such as you will work with teams of teachers and aides and technicians, some who prepared in 2-year programs, some in 4. Professionals like you, who go for the master’s degree, will have mastery of content, mastery of research and theory, and, of course, expertise in how-to-do-it. You will know how, for instance, to manage groups and respond to individuals, and how to help other teachers to do so. In other places, restructuring focuses on students, sorting them into new age/grade groupings. In the Minnesota Plan, for instance, students can earn a diploma on the completion of tenth grade. Then senior high school is elective—a specialized experience in, say, high-tech vocational training or preparation for a liberal arts college. Each generation of educators in this century has contributed to change in education. My teachers helped to define the psychology of learning and were concerned with how students learn. My contemporaries have helped to define the study of teaching and are concerned with why teachers act as they do and how they change and grow. You will build on what my teachers contributed and on what your teachers contributed. But you will go beyond us. You will study where you teach, recognizing that a school system is all the people in it, staff as well as students, and remembering that, while people make places, places—that is, classrooms and schools and communities— shape people. I’ve left out one of the 5 W’s—when. And I’m a stickler for closure. So when will you do all this? You may, or may not, spend the rest of your life in schools, as I have done. In fact, I hope many of you will have several careers in your lifetime. Whether or not you continue as professional educators, however, you will continue to speak for education, knowing perhaps better than your neighbors that we get the schools we pay for. The kind of education we want for all our people cannot be bought cheaply. More tax dollars, wisely spent of course, will get us the schools we need, not for children only. But for the middle aged and the elderly, the whole range of taxpayers. When many, many years from now, you are commencing in the same way that I am today, I hope you’ll say: “I’m glad I chose teaching. There was never enough time to do all I wanted, but watching a clock that goes too fast has been the right kind of life for me.” And perhaps you’ll remember, as I did, the words on the mayonnaise jar: Keep cool. Do not freeze.

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Perhaps you’ll say, as I do, the world of education is a great place to be. I hope you can understand that while I say that sincerely, I can, at the same time, rejoice in declaring, with one eye on the clock, “Hey, tomorrow I’m outta here.”

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A ft e r w o r d P a r t

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“Literacy Is a Means”: Margaret Early Today Jane S. Townsend

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etting books—all kinds of books—into the hands of children, parents, and teachers is a central theme in Dr. Early’s speeches. She wanted everyone to experience the pleasure and joy of reading. She also wanted our students and teachers to stretch their capacities for critical and creative thinking. She urged that everyone be granted access to the opening of “life’s possibilities” that literacy offers. And she saw the most powerful resources for that undertaking in our public schools and in teacher preparation programs. Dr. Early wanted to see books in hands no matter what the source. She admired a Tennessee factory “that set up a lending library of children’s books in its employees’ cafeteria.” And she advocated that we “get books out of the libraries [that were overcrowded] and into the places where chil-

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dren are: the swimming pools, the parks, the street corners” (Ch. 3, p. 23).1 She lauded Bookmobiles, and in all these mentions of the multiple contexts where people gather, she took note that reading and writing have real purposes in the world, that people of all kinds can enjoy and benefit from the kinds of thinking and feeling and doing that poetry, fiction, informational books provoke. Repeatedly, she exhorted, “Literacy is a means not an end” (Ch. 6, p. 61). Addressing perhaps what she saw as the most significant challenge for teachers and teacher educators in broadening literacy’s reach, Dr. Early observed that, “diversity remains the major unsolved problem in education in America” (Ch. 11, p. 108) and, as such, persists to this day (Gort & Glenn, 2010). By “diversity,” she meant the many different capacities that students and teachers bring to their work, their different developmental attainments, their different languages and cultures, their different neighborhoods, aspirations, and needs. When she asked “a sampling of students like those [she] had taught in New England mill towns and working-class suburbs” what they wanted from their English class, they told her they wanted “help in saying things that were important to them in ways that others could understand” (Ch. 2, p. 14). Surely that desire is true for most people and is often no easy task. She urged those of us in English education to recognize the importance of continual renewal, asking ourselves on a regular basis “What is English?” and, maybe most crucial for us today, why is it important, confronted as we are by so many naysayers in public and private institutions who advocate shortened and episodic teacher “training” (e.g., alternative, 6-week preparation programs and occasional workshops) in place of the professional, year- or years-long programs and professional identity that Dr. Early sought for classroom teachers. Dr. Early wanted teachers not only to know how to teach but also to know why they make the decisions they do. Indeed, teachers’ decision making in the heat of classroom exigencies is a fairly nonstop undertaking. Responding to multiple students’ comments, questions, activities while working to engage all the students in a classroom productively involves not so much a science of teaching but rather, as Dr. Early often insisted, a kind of “artistry” that challenges the best of teacher preparation programs. We work today in our English language arts teacher-preparation program, much as she did, in developing and nurturing “reflective practitioners,” and as she stated, “We hope to equip them with the knowledge and attitudes and 1. References to Dr. Early’s speeches are identified by the chapter and page number in this volume.

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habits of thinking that will enable them to cope in whatever classroom” (Ch. 14, p. 136). The question, of course, that then arises is what an English language arts teacher needs to know to be an effective practitioner within the complexities of mandated curricula and assessment measures; diverse student backgrounds and abilities; unreliable funding sources; antiquated textbooks; and crumbling, often technologically outdated school buildings. How to prepare teachers for these challenges remains the pressing issue it was throughout the decades of Dr. Early’s career and her own intense interest. And we can glean a number of important areas for this work in her many prepared remarks. One area of special interest for Dr. Early in the preparation of teachers was the need to help teachers develop an understanding of language and literacy development. Dr. Early saw many lessons arising from what we know about how children learn to talk as well as what emerges from children’s early encounters with print. Dr. Early saw “the study of language as basic to learning in all fields” (Ch. 12, p. 118). And she called for research into “how kids develop their language when they interact not only with books but with teachers and with each other” (Ch. 9, p. 96). Perhaps the most significant aspect of early language and literacy development that Dr. Early noted was children’s inborn curiosity, and she maintained that the “key to higher literacy is preserving the will to learn that all children are born with” (Ch. 14, p. 143). Indeed, after decades of research, what we know about early childhood language acquisition is that language development is fueled by what individual children find salient. What strikes each child as interesting and compelling motivates a search for meaning, for the words that express and mentally organize what is personally intriguing. Children’s early and emerging inquiry forms the language of learning as children turn to others for help in understanding the world around them (Lindfors, 1999). And of course, children’s early preschool talk is filled with questions and wonderings. Sadly, too often that ebullient curiosity is quickly curtailed when children enter school. Their filled-with-questions talk is too soon replaced with dutiful responses to the rat-a-tat of teachers’ rapid-fire, test-type questions. Research on classroom discourse overwhelmingly finds teachers asking many questions while the functions of students’ classroom talk are restricted to filling in the blanks of preconceived and prescriptive questions that call for answers quickly deemed right or wrong (Nystrand, 2006; Townsend, 2005). Teachers behave in this way under the duress of high-stakes testing and a classroom “norm” against students’ questions (Dillon, 1982) that persists to this day. And in the face of evermore relentless standardized testing, all

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too many teachers retreat into a skill-and-drill approach to teaching that is mind-numbing for students and teachers alike. In discussing the necessity of professional teacher preparation, Dr. Early observed, “The dilemma in preservice education is whether to prepare teachers for schools as they are or as they ought to be” (Ch. 13, p. 130). Schools—and policymakers—have been firmly resistant to change. Organized from a behaviorist understanding of language development long since discredited by the cognitive revolution of the early 1960s, school culture has remained largely oblivious to the importance of learners’ active engagement in their own learning. However, happily, as Dr. Early observed, individual teachers can make a tremendous difference in countering this culture of passivity and in nurturing students’ enlivening curiosity. Yet, how many teacher-preparation programs include a rigorous course in language development? How many teachers-to-be know why they would assign a task, why they would ask students to do any particular thing except perhaps that it was the kind of thing they were asked to do when they were in school? As Dr. Early urged, we need teachers who are “theorizers.” As she said, it is “not enough to ask: Does it work? We must go on to ask Why . . . and why does it not work” (Ch. 4, p. 32)? How does a teacher become a “theorizer”? Perhaps of most importance is for teachers to understand children’s human, motivating urge to make sense of the world around them. As Dr. Early insisted, “We can trust children to seek meaning. We know that intention, purpose, having a reason for learning, is the essential ingredient in language acquisition and in reading acquisition” (Ch. 4, p. 39). And she called to mind an exemplary teacher who promised his students “he would not ask them to do anything they couldn’t see a reason for” (Ch. 4, p. 40). Too often, our teacher candidates today find great difficulty in explaining why they plan any particular lesson. Perhaps our public school’s scattershot, test-taking system of accountability obscures the real, compelling, and coherent reasons for teaching and learning. As Dr. Early recommended, I want students to learn about themselves as learners. I want them to be confident that they can learn and to find joy in learning. I want them to develop their own learning powers from understanding how others have solved problems, discovered ideas, made sense momentarily of life. I want them to value learning as a way of staving off boredom and chaos. (Ch. 2, p. 18)

What do future teachers need to know about language and language development? For prospective teachers to gain a deep understanding of language and literacy development, they need to know that language is

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purposeful and that language learning is a developmental process, whether in early childhood acquiring one’s native tongue or in adding a dialect to one’s linguistic and communicative repertoire (e.g., gaining prowess in academic English), or as an adolescent or adult in learning a second language (Townsend & Fu, 2001). To understand the over-time unfolding of language development is to know that learning takes significant amounts of time, support, and feedback. Also important for future teachers—and administrators—to know about language is that one’s enlarging ability to communicate with a range of people for a range of reasons in a range of situations requires many such sociocultural experiences. School holds the opportunity for many of those interactions. And meaningful interactions support our intellectual and emotional development in powerful ways (Vygotsky, 1986) as well as add to our store of understandings about the world (Bakhtin, 1986). Furthermore, to think about one’s own thinking is to gain some control over one’s own learning process (Bruner, 1996). To help teachers become reflective practitioners is to help them model for their students what it means to be a learner and to encourage that same kind of reflective practice in students’ own learning efforts. Additionally, an understanding of language and language development may be critically important not only for a basic understanding of learning and what motivates a learner but also for understanding the diverse ways that public school students have for expressing their ideas, their perplexities, their perspectives (Heath, 1983). We privilege a variety of “standard” English in our schools that often demeans and delimits those students who speak and write in ways that are variant, even labeling such divergence as lazy or worse, stupid. We also run the risk that we miss their questions and confusions because their ways with language “sound” different than the language expected in school, and hence, we miss significant opportunities for students’ learning. What do future teachers need to know about language variation (Townsend & Harper, 1997)? They need to know that linguistically, one dialect is not superior to another and that the use of a particular dialect has to do with purpose and audience, with identity, power, and politics. Future teachers need to know that we cannot, nor would we want to, replace someone’s home dialect with another more socially or politically privileged one. What we can do is broaden everyone’s linguistic and communicative competence through authentic discussion and purposeful reading and writing. We can, all of us, add to our language repertoire and become more powerful in our abilities to express ourselves and understand others, a goal that Dr. Early set for English language arts teachers themselves. She also took note that “Perhaps no other discipline affords its teachers so much freedom

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or saddles them with so much responsibility” (Ch. 2, p. 20). While today we are seeing an encroachment of that freedom from externally mandated “pacing guides” and so-called “teacher proof” scripted curricula, we also know that teachers do their best work when they—like their students—can make informed choices about what they read and write and think and say. With the disparities of power and privilege in mind, Dr. Early looked to the power of literature to deepen empathy and cross-cultural understanding: “I think our only hope for literacy at any level is through literature’s appeal to the personal, the subjective, the universal longing to know ourselves and—just as important—to forget ourselves and to understand others” (Ch. 7, p. 73). Over and over in her speeches, Dr. Early reminded us of the liberating power of literacy. And she called on teachers “to preserve the old-fashioned virtues of purpose and meaning” (Ch. 1, p. 5). She recognized that to be “fully literate, you must think for yourself, make your own decisions.” Yet, how often is school instruction focused on students’ own sense of things? How often do students learn to make reasoned choices about what they read and write? Unfortunately, all too often, when the focus of grades and gatekeeping measures is filling in the blanks of someone else’s questions, students learn to read, as Dr. Early observed, with “accuracy but with almost no comprehension” (Ch. 5, p. 51). Dr. Early urged us to “remember that teaching children how to read in the first three grades is no guarantee whatsoever that they will choose to read, or that they will read wisely, in all the years thereafter—when reading is just one of the tools of learning and not an end in itself” (Ch. 7, p. 66). She emphasized repeatedly that “literacy is a means” for opening a life’s possibilities and indeed foresaw that “technology has made literacy essential—for everyone” (Ch. 7, p. 67). Harkening to our age of rapid-fire and ubiquitous communication media, Dr. Early called for teachers themselves to “grow in literacy.” She wanted teachers to “use language more precisely and powerfully” and, highlighting the frequent touches of subtle and twinkle-eyed humor in her speeches, “to be careful of their spelling” (Ch. 9, p. 92). She looked to the future in addressing the need to “learn through the nonprint media how to be critical viewers and listeners” (Ch. 6, p. 61), and she called forth the spirit of John Ciardi in urging us to “help kids find the courage of their confusions” (Ch. 6, p. 62). And indeed, a little confusion can be crucial to learning— the mark of a mind rearranging itself and acquiring a new view. Yet Dr. Early also recognized in this age of growing and questionable dependence on standardized tests for raising our educational standards “that we are pushing out of the curriculum the very reasons for reading and writing” (Ch. 6, p. 60). Helping students learn to reason and discern the valid from the

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vapid may well be the antidote to the inflammatory hyperbole of so much of our electronic media today, yet the time for this kind of attention is often crowded out of the curriculum by our current testing mania. While calling for greater outreach to the public, to the politicians, to educational administrators, Dr. Early recognized that it’s “in our classrooms that . . . kids have to glimpse life’s possibilities and feel the power of selfhood that literacy promises” (Ch. 9, p. 89). She exhorted us to find “words that are understood outside our classrooms and conventions, beyond our publications” (Ch. 2, p. 16) that will persuade legislators and other policymakers to return responsibilities to teachers for developing the curriculum, selecting instructional materials, and assessing students’ learning. As she observed and as sadly remains true today, externally mandated workbooks and standardized tests too often determine the curriculum, removing significant professional responsibilities from classroom teachers. Indeed, curriculum and test making are both now hugely profitable industries and hence, more entrenched than ever. She believed that teachers were “overregulated” and called for teachers to “make the significant decisions about how best to satisfy local and state demands for accountability” (Ch. 13, p. 129). Unfortunately, as Dr. Early observed, “The demand for better teaching has developed into more testing [and] less pedagogic freedom” (Ch. 13, p. 128). And as she noted, “teachers who are insecure about their jobs” are “unlikely to risk innovation” (Ch. 10, p. 98). Equally true under these conditions, students also become less likely to take the intellectual and emotional risks necessary for learning. How can we educate the public? Dr. Early advised that we “strengthen the liberal arts component in the education of professionals,” and she found “shameful the way we educators divide ourselves into opposing factions” (Ch. 14, p. 139). To recognize the liberating power of literacy for the general public could well herald the immense value of reading and writing and discussing for opening minds and hearts to the purposeful nature of public education, to encourage people of “all ages to examine their convictions in the light of new contexts, new experiences, their own and those of others” (Ch. 14, p. 143). Dr. Early’s convictions run against the grain of a public conditioned to believe that taxes are somehow evil; instead, she called for “more tax dollars, wisely spent of course” that she believed would “get us the schools we need” (Ch. 15, p. 148; cf., Newfield, 2010). She knew that the “public needs to trust teachers.” She also knew that teachers, at their best, are well-educated professionals of teaching artistry. Reshaping the political view and expectations of the profession may well be the most compelling educational task before us today.

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References Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dillon, J. T. (1981). A norm against student questions. The Clearing House, 55(3), 136–139. Gort, M., & Glenn, W. J. (2010). Navigating tensions in the process of change: An English educator’s dilemma management in the revision and implementation of a diversity-infused methods course. Research in the Teaching of English, 45, 59–86. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lindfors, J. W. (1999). Children’s inquiry: Using language to make sense of the world. New York: Teachers College Press. Nystrand, M. (2006). Research on the role of classroom discourse as it affects reading comprehension. Research in the Teaching of English, 40, 392–412. Townsend, J. S. (2005). Language arts: Explore, create, discover through inquiry. In R. H. Audet & L. K. Jordan (Eds.), Integrating inquiry across the curriculum (pp. 111–135). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Townsend, J. S., & Fu, D. (2001). Paw’s story: A Laotian refugee’s lonely entry into American literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 45, 2–12. Townsend, J. S., & Harper, C. (1997). What future teachers know and don’t know about language diversity. The Professional Educator, 20 (1), 35–44. Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

A ft e r w o r d P a r t

2

Literacy as a Practice: Margaret Early and English Language Arts Today Barbara G. Pace

T

he privilege of reading Dr. Early’s speeches has provided me with an opportunity to recall her wit and her grace and to observe the common themes that emerge across her impressive career. One of those themes, the importance of language acquisition as a means for literacy, has been addressed in Part 1 of this Afterword in “Literacy is a Means,” an essay written by Jane Townsend, my colleague in English Education at the University of Florida. In this essay, I would like to address another theme in Dr. Early’s work: the idea that literacy is a practice that takes shape across experiences and develops across a lifetime. Many scholars hold to this view today. But when Dr. Early began to speak of literacy in this way, she joined those who recognized the social aspects of literacy. She understood that this view Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 159–163 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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could inform conversations about teaching and learning, and that it could provide new insights into the development and power of literacy in the lives of students and teachers. In 1978, at the Concordia Reading Convention, Dr. Early quotes Patricia Graham’s view of literacy as “being able to read, to write, to manipulate symbols, to develop independent means of making judgments and determining action—in short, to be literate is to be able to partake of the world as broadly as one’s talents permit.” She returns to this description of literacy in at least two other speeches (“Developing a Friendly Attitude” and “Reading as Access”), and the gist of it informs other, in later talks.

Literacy as a Learning to Read, to Write, and to Manipulate Symbols Studies of literacy focused on classrooms were particularly valued by Dr. Early. She saw how those investigations ultimately contributed to the work of teachers and teacher educators. Elevating and honoring teachers, considering how best to support them in initial preparation and in professional development were hallmarks of Margaret Early’s leadership and scholarship. She understood that explicit and supportive teaching was an essential element in helping students to read, to write, and to manipulate symbols. In many of her speeches, Dr. Early showcases teachers. While the teachers in her anecdotes are sometimes overwhelmed by the challenges of teaching well, they are always connected with students, always attending to the development of literacy. They pay attention to what students say and do. They engage students in meaningful conversations. She tells of one teacher who created a multimedia presentation of her life full of light and sound, of another who alters a film on salmon to make it more accessible to his young students. These teachers search for answers and try on methods. Dr. Early challenges her colleagues to support that energy. Today, as those in the profession grapple with how to address new forms of texts and new kinds of communities, the role of the teacher as a guide to literacy development is still vital. The New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut, for example, acknowledges the central role of teachers in preparing students to read online texts that do not follow traditional linear paths. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Henry Jenkins and his colleagues have reached a similar conclusion. In illuminating the challenges posed by an online “participatory culture” (Jenkins et al, 2006), they assert that “pedagogical interventions” are necessary to prepare students for active and skeptical engagement in virtual spaces. These schol-

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ars, and many others, suggest that the role of teacher has not diminished in the digital age, rather it has expanded.

Literacy as a Practice that Develops Thinking Dr. Early observed that literacy promoted the growth of independent thought and action. She considered how understandings of the context and of possibilities for action were nurtured by imaginative stories and by the motivation for reading that stories promote. She cited Bettelheim’s descriptions of how children’s literature informed development. She also spoke of the role that children’s literature has in teaching older students and in preparing teachers. She held fast to the image of the young mother reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to her daughter before dinner was served. She paints a picture of the moment when the child touches the page and imagines that the caterpillar has chewed through the pears. This vignette suggests a metaphor for reading, for the moment when literacy takes root and readers are captured by story and encouraged to reach beyond, to be engaged by the coming together of word, voice, and image. Dr. Early consistently references this experience as an avenue for tapping the joy of reading. She championed sustained silent reading (SSR) because of the pleasure in reading that it could ignite, the sense of story that it could reinforce, and the practice in reading that it could encourage. In the current climate, however, the value of SSR in classrooms is routinely contested, and the role of literary reading is increasingly challenged. SSR emerged as a contentious issue in the No Child Left Behind debates when its role in supporting fluency was questioned by the National Reading Panel. As SSR struggles for respect in the current context of teaching, so does the importance of narrative and the teaching of literature itself. While Dr. Early recognized that literature fosters imaginative thinking and deepens understandings of self and others, literature as a discipline is threatened by high-stakes testing. In considering the shifting role of the English teacher and of English teacher educators, scholar Ben Nelms observes (2004) that informational texts dominate state exams, such as the one in Florida where literary texts comprise only 30% of the passages aligned with reading questions. Unfortunately, this trend has been perpetuated by the Common Core Standards Initiative prepared by the nation’s governors and adopted by 40 states by 2011 (eight additional states will implement them at a later date). These standards list multiple types of texts (i.e., historical, scientific, mathematical, and literary) that will be part of high school exit exams for English.

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Writing in the New York Times, Sandra Stotsky, professor in educational reform at the University of Arkansas, observes that the English Exit Exams are written for teachers and courses “that do not exist” (2009). These changes will surely raise yet again the perennial question “What is English?” Dr. Early addressed this topic in her NCTE Presidential Address in 1974, “Anew Each Day.” At that time, she argued against the “possibility of a definitive answer” and reasoned that English was defined anew each year as teachers learned the needs and aims of their students (Ch. 2, p. 15). Nevertheless, she warned that while we ponder the issue, others outside of the profession define English for us. The Common Core Standards point to the wisdom of Dr. Early’s claim. She cautioned that to “maintain our right to shape the discipline” (Ch. 2, p. 15) we had to describe clearly and often who we are and what we do. Then she sensibly observed that English will not escape the “pendulum swinging” typical in education (Ch. 2, p. 18). An observation that opens a door for both work and hope in the current need to define and redefine English.

Literacy as a Practice for Partaking of the World, in and Out of School These changes and the tensions that fuel current discourse in literacy highlight another aspect of Dr. Early’s speeches: the idea that context, the “where and when” of teaching, shapes the how and what of it. Dr. Early understood that contexts were textured and overlapping. That the changes we negotiated across various spaces made it necessary to adjust, to take stock, and to act. She talks explicitly about schools as located in contexts of community, policy, and public expectations. She is keenly aware of the need to prepare teachers who can negotiate these complexities. Speaking at a University of Florida commencement in 1990, Dr. Early acknowledged the inevitable shift of time as she challenged a new group of teachers. She reminded them of the understandings they had gained from their graduate studies. She advised that when they entered the classroom, they might not find what or whom they expected. She did not suggest that they had all the answers; rather she suggested that what they did have was the good sense to figure out the new contexts, the new students. She had faith that these teachers would bloom, that they would find answers to questions their professors had not even known to ask. She observed that it was their time, that they would move education forward. In short, she believed that these new teachers would get busy doing the very things that literacy makes possible. They would partake of the world that they found as broadly as their talents would permit.

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References Jenkins, H., Purushotma, K., Weigel, M., & Robison, A. J. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Retrieved December 28, 2006, from http://www.projectnml.org/files/ working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf Nelms, B. F. (2004). On the front line: Preparing teachers with struggling schools in mind. English Education, 36(2), 153–167 Stotsky, S. (2009, September 22). More complex than simple English. New York Times. Retrieved October 10, 2010, from http://roomfordebate. blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/national-academic-standards-the-firsttest/#sandra

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A pp e n d i x

Readings for Children or Young People Cited by Dr. Early Allard, Harry G.

The Stupids Step Out

Alexander, Lloyd

Prydain Cycle

Alexander, Martha

Bobo’s Dream (wordless)

Babbitt, Natalie

Tuck Everlasting

Brown, Marcia

Stone Soup

Carle, Eric

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Carroll, Lewis

Alice in Wonderland

Cooper, Susan

The Dark Is Rising

Cunningham, Julia

Dorp Dead

DePaola, Tomie

Andy, That’s My Name

DePaola, Tomie

The Quicksand Book

Fritz, Jean

Where Are You Going, Christopher Columbus?

Hinton, S. E.

The Outsiders

Keyes, Daniel

Flowers for Algernon

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Koch, Kenneth

Wishes, Lies, and Dreams

Koch, Kenneth

Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?

Lewis, C. S.

Chronicles of Narnia

Marshall, James

George and Martha

Mayer, Mercer

Ah-Choo (wordless)

Nichols, Ruth

The Song of the Pearl

Seuss, Dr.

Hop on Pop

Segall, Lore & Randall, Jarrell

The Juniper Tree (retelling of Grimm’s Fairy Tales)

Simon, Seymour

Animal Facts, Animal Fables

Sloane, Eric

Diary of an Early American Boy, Noah Blake

Ward, Lynd

The Silver Pony

Yep, Lawrence

The Child of the Owl

Zemach, Harve & Margot

Duffy and the Devil

Index of People/Organizations

A

Burrows, Alvina, 123

Adams, Marilyn Jaeger, 140 Alexander, Lloyd, 27 Alexander, Martha, 24 Aruego, Jose, 24 Asimov, Isaac, 48, 59, 63

C

B Babbitt, Natalie, 71–72 Bay Area Writing Project, 74, 93 Bettelheim, Bruno, 25–26, 71 Blau, Susan, 72–73 Bloom, Benjamin, 52, 83, 99–100 Botstein, Leon, 80, 109 Boyer, Ernest, 119, 121, 128 Britton, James, 32, 42, 75, 95, 99 Brokaw, Tom, 86 Broudy, Harry, 4, 5, 6 Brown, Marcia, 26 Brown, Roger, 3, 103 Browning, Ann, 44 Bruner, Jerome, 33, 42, 44, 50 Buchwald, Art, 81, 108

Carle, Eric, 22, 48 Carnegie Schools Program, 129 Cazden, Courtney, 3 Chall, Jean, 98 Cheever, John, 88 Ciardi, John, 62 Cooper, Susan, 27, 71 Cremin, Larry, 61 Culp, Mary Beth, 109 Cunningham, Julia, 72

D Dagastino, Lorraine, 104–105 Dartmouth Seminar, 14 deLone, Richard, 83 Delpit, Lisa, 136, 140–141 DeMott, Benjamin, 143 De Paolo, Tomie, 112 Duckworth, Eleanor, 100 Durkin, Delores, 126 Durrell, Donald, 104

Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 167–169 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

167

168    Index of People/Organizations

F

M

Farrell, Edmund, 61, 118, 119 Fillion, Bryant, 69 Flesch, Rudolph, 66, 79–80, 99 Fritz, Jean, 91

MacLeish, Archibald, 14 Manzanita Program, 25, 52 Martin, Nancy, 75 Mayer, Mercer, 24 McCarthy, Mary, 73 McDonald Study, 35 McVey, Marianna Study, 105 Menyuk, Paula. 3 Minnesota Plan, 121–122, 148 Moffett, James, 118 Moore, Marianne, 15

G Gibson, Walker, 68, 72 Goodlad, John, 121, 128 Graham, Patricia, 41, 48, 68–69, 110 Grant, Gerald, 128–129 Griswold, Whitney, 146

H Heath, Shirley Brice, 140 Herber, Hal, 142 Hirsch, E.D., xix, 120 Holmes Report, 129

I IRA, 8

J Jencks, Christopher, 83, 98 Jenkinson, Marion, 9

K Karp, Walter, 118 Kidder, Tracy, 136, 138 Knox, Ghernot, 38, 40–41 Koch, Kenneth, 42

L Langer, Eileen, 137 Latham, Ross, 9 LeGuin, Ursula, 71 Leonard, George, 58, 123

N National Council of Teachers of English, 8 Nathan, Ruth, 139 Nichols, Ruth, 72 NIE, 10 Niles, Olive, 142

O Ohanian, Susan, 138–139 O’Hara, John, 23

P Pearson, David, 126 Pisano, Anita, 123 PROTEACH, 136

R Ringi, Kjell, 24 Rockefeller Commission on Humanities, 109, 115

S Safire, William, 67 Santa, Carol, 142 Schaefer, Margaret, 52

Index of People/Organizations    169 Shanker, Al, 122, 128 Silberman, Arlene, 138 Silberman, Charles, 98, 137, 138 Simon, Seymour, 91 Simpson, Eileen, 94, 113–114 Singer, Harry, 94, 104 Sizer, Theodore, 121 Smith, Frank, 3, 9, 40, 94, 104 Snow, CP, 59 Sontag, Susan, 123 Spache, George, 3 Stahl and Miller, 139 Stauffer, Russell, 3 Steiner, George, 143, 144

T Thomas, Lewis, 68 Thoreau, Henry David, 104

Toffler, Alvin, 47, 66, 80, 109 Tough, Joan, 101

V Voelker, Joseph, 65, 80

W Ward, Lynd, 24 Wigginton, Eliot, 41 Winn, Marie, 22 Wirtz, Willard, 81 Writing Enhancement Program, 118

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Index of Topics

A AACTE, 41 AASA, 74 AERA, 38 Access, 88–89 Provided by literacy, 107 Administrative leadership, 54, 84–85, 93 See also Principal’s Role Assignments in class as essential, 37

B Basals, 98–99, 103, 130–131, 132, 137, 138, 139, 140 Basic skills, 58, 60, 61, 62, 81–82, 83, 98 See also Skills instruction Behavioral objectives, 4–5 See also Mastery learning Books as enemy, 48, 70 Child-made, 23 In public places, 23, 48, 50, 70, 112

C Children’s Literature, 3, 69–72

Children’s motivation to learn, 22, 48–49, 52, 55 Children with reading difficulties, 97–98 Class size, 37, 54–55 Cognitive entry behaviors, 83, 100 Colleges of education, 131 College reading specialists, 112, 114 See also Reading Specialists Common Curriculum, 120, 123 Competency-based teacher education, 4–5, 17 In England, 7 Competency testing, 81, 82, 93, 97–98, 100, 111 Comprehension, 9, 110, 126, 127 Context of teaching, 129, 139, 147–148 Criterion-referenced testing, 5

D Degrees of Reading Power Test, 102 Differentiated staffing, 121 Direct instruction, 35 In phonics, 140, 143 In strategies, 142, 143

Reflections on Teaching Literacy: Selected Speeches of Margaret J. Early, pages 171–173 Copyright © 2011 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

171

172    Index of Topics Discourse patterns, 32 DISTAR, 3, 98 DRA, 53, 84

Heuristics and Philetics, 4–6

Life Skill (Family Services) courses, 22, 48, 70, 90, 103, 112 Literacy definitions, 41–42, 47–48, 60, 66, 69, 73, 80 As means, 61 Life’s possibilities, 89, 110 As priority in technological society, 60, 67 Emergent literacy versus higher order, 143 Universal literacy, 89 Literacy skills of underdeveloped college students, 109, 112

I

M

Illiterates of tomorrow, 66, 80 Individual differences, 100, 108, 113, 114, 126 Influence of youth on English, 17 Informational texts, 84, 91, 103 In-service education of teachers, 7, 93–94 Institutional structure, 119 See also Context of teaching Intentionality in language learning, 33, 34, 39, 50, 101, 118

Mastery learning, 83, 99–100 Middle-school emphasis, 89–90, 119 Mindfulness in teaching, 137–138, 143 See also Reflective Practitioner

L

O

E English, definition, 14–18 As vehicle of learning, 19–20 Purposes of, 69

H

Lack of innovation in teaching, 118 Lack of interest in reading/learning, 27, 109, 118, 119 Language acquisition, 3 Mother’s role, 33, 50 Assessment of oral language development, 101 See also Intentionality in language learning Language Experience Approach, 28 Language, importance of, 37–38, 93, 118 Learning how to learn, 62, 83 Value of learning, 18–19

N National Reading Improvement, 9 Need for story and myth, 25 New college students, 68, 108, 111, 113 N.I.E., 10, 53

Overregulation of teachers, 128, 129

P Parents’ role, 50, 85, 111 Phonics, 51, 85, 79, 82, 98, 126, 140, 143 Physical setting for reading, 24 Pleasure principle, 22, 27, 29, 141 Predictions in reading, 29, 104 Pre-service education of teachers, 1, 130, 136–137, 138 Professional teacher, 3 Principal’s role, 39, 54, 73–74, 85, 133–134

Index of Topics    173 Prior knowledge, 104, 127 Process of reading, 28, 126–127 See also Stage development of reading Progressive program, 141 Public concern for literacy, 81, 95, 99 Public view of teachers, 39 Purposes of English, 69, of writing, 67, 75

Questioning strategies, 104 Manzo’s ReQuest, 104, 128 QAR, 128

Process of becoming teachers, 136, 138 Sharing packets, 23, 48, 50, 70 Skills instruction, 58, 61, 140, 143 Decoding and comprehension, 82, 110, 142 Skills/process debate, 142 SQUIRT, 36, 53 SQ3R, 127 SSR, 24, 36, 53 SSL, 24, 36 Staff development, 8, 75, 85, 92–93, 94, 132 Study skills, 132, 142

R

T

Reading across curriculum, 92, 132 Reading aloud, 26, 49, 70, 84, 103 To younger children, 66, 91, 112 Reading instruction, 8, 27–28 Stage development in, 135, 141–143 Reading specialists, 81–82, 93, 94, 113, 114 Reading in content area, 53, 82, 84, 127, 142 Reading strategies instead of skills, 131, 132, 142 Reflective practitioners, 136–137 Reform reports, 109, 115, 118 Research, 9, 10, 89, 95–96, 99, 111 Response techniques, 28 To literature and language, 37–38, 42–44 RIBET, 25, 52 Right to Read, 8

Teachers’ role, 8, 32, 34, 44, 50–53, 76 Teacher Literacy, 91–92 Teacher effectiveness, 34–35 Teamwork, 74–76, 93, 94, 114–115 Time usage, 35 Technology in classroom, 58–61 Textbook language, 84, 102 Organization, 53, 103

Q

S School language policy, 74, 94 Self-confidence in teaching, 6–7, 39

V Variety of reading methods, 34–35 Vocabulary, 128

W Whole language, 139–140 Wordless books, 24 Writing As craft, 123 As way of learning, 75, 128 journals, 33 Stimulating/responding to, 42, 43