Sunday, August 2, 2015

The Complexity of Text


During the third week of July, I ran a Reading Institute at the college where I teach.  This is a week-long graduate class that is a bit like summer camp for teachers.  I can’t even sufficiently put into words how great the experience is for all of us, including this lead learner.  The week is filled with fantastic speakers, lots of learning, professional discussion, hard work, and much book-buying.  We leave at the end of the week exhausted, yet energized – excited for the fresh school year that stretches in front of us. 

There is much talk in schools these days about rigor, high expectations, and challenging text, so Tuesday afternoon of the Institute was dedicated to digging deeper into the idea of text complexity – what it is and what it isn’t.  Because we are in Pennsylvania, I made use of some of the materials and wording suggested in the ELA training modules that are available from our PA Department of Education.

To get the ball rolling, we discussed this question, “What makes a text complex?”  The table groups came up with an abundance of factors: topic, vocabulary, type of text, background knowledge of the reader, writing style, etc.  Next, I had them work together to rank these texts that would all be appropriate in an upper elementary classroom (4th/5th grade) from least complex to most complex using only the books and their teacher brains.  



Each table group had a set of the books to peruse and discuss and they wrote their rankings on chart paper.  From there, we moved into taking a look at the Text Complexity triangle which describes the three components of text complexity: qualitative factors, quantitative factors, and reader/task considerations.  


This is fully described in Standard 10 of the Common Core State Standards.  After learning about and discussing each part of the triangle, we then spent more time analyzing the six texts by looking up their Lexile score (this is a readability formula) to get a quantitative measure and assessing the qualitative factors of text using this rubric for literary texts and this one for informational text.  Table groups then looked at their initial rankings and discussed whether they would now change their rankings based on what they discovered.

To be honest, I thought that most of this topic would be “old news” to the 40 teachers enrolled in my course, but I quickly found out that it wasn’t.  Many had only been told by their districts that “students need to read in their defined Lexile band” and most had never seen the Text Complexity triangle before.  The conversations were rich and thoughtful and people had a lot to say on their daily reflection sheet.  I’ve summarized the most frequent remarks here:

1.  “There’s a lot more to text complexity than I realized.”  The most surprising thing the teachers realized was that having a high Lexile score didn’t necessarily mean the text was more complex.  For instance, Diary of a Wimpy Kid has a Lexile score of 950L, while Esperanza Rising has a 750L.  Every single table group felt that the content of Esperanza Rising was much more complex than Diary, and they were shocked to discover that “classics” such as Of Mice and Men (630L) often have very low Lexile scores.

2.  Numbers aren’t everything.  This is a bit like #1, but it bears repeating:  Using a readability formula as the sole determination of whether or not a book should be in your classroom library is not a supported practice.  In the example above, Of Mice and Men would be in a second-grade classroom library.  This made the second grade teachers in my class laugh raucously, BUT we were able to have a rich discussion of how tempting it was for the table groups to want to re-rank the books according to their number.  Most couldn’t wait to go back to their district and share this information.

3.  Professional judgment often works just as well as rubrics and formulas.  In order to evaluate books along all the dimensions of the Text Complexity Triangle, teachers need to know books and know their readers. I selected books that are commonly used in classrooms for the purpose of this professional development session, but in order to avoid making decisions “by the numbers,” teachers need to read lots and lots of books and they have to be in tune with the unique needs of each reader in their care.  

As it turns out, the table groups didn’t make a lot of changes to their original rankings after using the rubric and formula to “dissect” the text.  They were pretty pleased with that discovery.  One participant summed it up like this, “Thank you for helping educators to realize that their professional judgment is important and is needed for determining text complexity within the qualitative dimensions of text.”

Have a great school year!



Thursday, January 15, 2015

A Gentle Push

Happy New Year, 2015!  And welcome to my inaugural blog post.  “Like we need one more blogger on the Internet,” you’re probably saying.  And while you might be right, I’ve got to give this a go.  I’ve been thinking about it for years!  So why not? And why now?

Well, it all started with One Little Word.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that people were posting on Facebook about “their word.”  Huh?? I thought and then didn’t think much more of it.  Then my friend Beth wrote a blog post about her word that linked to this blog post by Ruth Ayres.  And that’s where I found out that OLW (One Little Word) is an actual thing.  And apparently it’s BEEN a thing for years (Heck, Ruth has already collected a decade’s worth of words – A DECADE!) and I’m just getting into the loop now. And then my friend Kellee posted HER word, and then Cindy….and well, you see where this is going.  

Everyone had a word, but what would be MY word?  And how in the heck does anyone ever choose a single word to live with for the whole year?  So I did a little more research (aka: Googled It) and found this pretty cool blog by Ali Edwards (Creating Keepsakes flashback, Scrapbook fans!)  who offers a yearly course on it for only $31.00, so – yeah- I signed up and I did what she said – I “listened to my life” and thought about my word.   I mulled it around in my mind. I thought about it while I switched the laundry from washer to dryer.  I pondered it while I dried my hair after the shower.  I went to the gym.  

And then it came to me:  

It came to me while I was doing – you guessed it – push-ups.  Not my favorite, but boy do those things have a great pay-out.  I was listening to the instructor say, “Only four on your toes,” and I thought, “I can do four on my toes.”  And I almost died, but I did it.  We went back to our knees for a few and then he said, “Four more on your toes.  Push it.”  PUSH IT!  There it was.  Right in front of me; not exactly written in the beads of my sweat, but you get the picture.

So, this year I am going to:

PUSH limits
PUSH boundaries
PUSH out of my comfort zone
PUSH back (but nicely. Maybe.)
not be a PUSH over
PUSH through (because there are days like that)
PUSH it.  (“Push it good….p-push it real good!”  You saw that coming, right?)

and see where the year and my OLW take me.  

Looks like this was just the PUSH I needed.