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.
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!
