**CONCLUSION**

Unidentified Speaker: (in progress) \-- the ideas that they have to help
develop this research even further. This afternoon we\'ll be talking
about the strategic instruction model developed at the University of
Kansas and our panel will be addressing \-- or \-- at first, you will
hear Dr. Keith Lenz explain the model, and then our panel will be
carrying on as usual, giving their comments, responding to your
questions. Please formulate your questions and feel free to ask as many
as you\'d like. At the end of the presentation and the panel discussion,
Dr. Peggy McCardle from NICHD would like to give you a brief wrap-up of
the session and how it\'s gone today to send you home with something
even more to think about. Dr. Keith Lenz.

Keith Lenz: To begin, I\'d like to introduce the panel that will be
responding. I\'m going to go ahead and do that before my session \--
Patricia Alexander from the University of Maryland; Jennifer Economos
Green from the Fund for Educational Excellence; and Carol Olson,
University of California Irvine.

Thanks for inviting me to do this today. I\'m very pleased. I want to
start by saying in 1975 I was 21 years old, and I started teaching my
history class. I began as a student teacher, and I walked in and one of
the first things I said, in my naïve student-teaching mode was, I
thought, a very profound statement. I said, \"You know, one of the
themes of American history is the search for human and civil rights,\"
and I handed a dictionary to a young man in front of me, and I said,
\"Would you please look up the word \'civil\' for me?\" And he struggled
a little bit, and I realized he can\'t find the word \"civil.\" So I
said, \"Here, let me help you.\" So I found out, turned around and said,
\"Here, read the definition. The first one on \'civil.\'\" And he sat
there in silence. Thus began my journeys and adventures in literacy.

I want to talk today about the work that I\'ve been associated with for
almost 25 years, in one way or another, strategic instruction model. The
University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning was founded in
1978. Specifically, one of the original institutes for research and
learning disabilities, gradually evolving a mission for how can we
dramatically increase the performance if a variety of you have
considered have considered at-risk for school failure. We\'ve done a lot
of research over the last 25 years, and we developed an international
training network, most of which are classroom teachers, because we
believe that those trainers should be users first \-- people who know
the interventions and can help teachers, colleagues, in their buildings
and their school districts, to implement these programs.

What I want to talk today is a little bit about a perspective that
we\'ve had on intervention development and some of the programs that
we\'ve developed. Of a broad umbrella, we\'ve tried to move back to a
broader perspective, and a lot of the things I\'m going to be talking
about in the short amount of time I have is about that vision of
inclusive education, making sure that all learners are part of the
journey. Our take on it has been a more strategic teaching, strategic
learning perspective, which really gets that promoting learning over
coverage because, as we\'ve worked in schools, the prevailing idea is
how fast can we get the skills, how fast can we cover the curriculum,
how quickly can we do this in terms of a coverage model?

I want to talk a little bit about the current realities. We\'ve tried to
respond to some of the current realities of the school today, we\'ve
talked a lot about the current realities of what secondary schools are
like. What I would like to, instead of citing some of those things,
there\'s a couple of questions that I think are current realities, which
I think frame what we\'ve tried to deal with over the last 25 years,
and, more recently, within the last five to 10 years. And one of the
questions and current realities is how explicit, responsive, and
intensive can secondary teachers be? How much can they actually move to
the level of explicitness required to get the kind of changes that we
need moving from that coverage model across classes? How, when, and
where can literacy learning take place, and who should be involved? How
do teachers plan for literacy learning, and how do they find the time to
do those things? Those are some of the current realities that I think
are barriers at the secondary level that have to be addressed.

Three key components that kind of are background for the research that
we\'ve done. First of all, based on strategic instruction, the idea of
explicit modeling; explicit instruction; scaffolded instruction; trying
to identify the critical skills and teach them so students are both
effective and efficient and to respond to tasks; but also two big parts
of that are what are the strategies \-- how do we teach the strategies
we want kids to learn, because it\'s not just knowing the strategies,
it\'s how can we ensure that those who need the most we provide the
right kind of instruction to get them those strategies? But the second
is what are the teaching routines that teachers need to use to
compensate for the fact of inefficient strategies that kids have. And
I\'ll be talking more about the difference between strategies and
teaching routines as we go through the day.

I\'m not going to spend a lot of time on this, but we\'ve spent, in our
research over the last 12 years, a lot on teacher planning, on
decision-making, because one of the things that\'s clear is that when
you decide to teach one thing, you may be deciding not to teach
something else. And so how do we balance this issue of planning,
especially if we\'re moving into the content curriculum across high
schools and asking science teachers and social studies teachers to be
part of this journey with us?

Most of my presentation today is going to be spent on what\'s called a
\"continuum of action,\" and how we see a high school changing to
address the literacy needs of students. Most of those things focus on
the teaching routines and learning strategies that we\'ve developed and
supported by teaming, and I\'ll say a few words about that.

One of the things within our research, our participatory research models
within schools, our interventions it\'s how can we get kids working with
kids? How can we get teachers working with kids? How can we get teachers
working with teachers? How do we get teachers working with parents? How
do we get tutors working with teachers? This concept of teaming, not
only from an instructional point of view, but also from a professional
development point of view, and one of the things that we\'ve spent a lot
of time on in the last 10 years is looking at the professional
development implications of improving literacy and literacy learning at
the secondary level. Jim Knight, from the University of Kansas, has got
a huge project in Topeka, Kansas, with instructional collaborators in
terms of how teaming can take place to move whole secondary schools
ahead.

I added this little piece at the last minute in terms of planning, and I
did this because one of the barriers that I\'ve seen, that we\'ve seen
in our research, is this issue of getting a handle on the curriculum of
the secondary school \-- whether we want all students to know, what most
students know, what\'s OK for some students to know. Some of those
questions about making decisions and about where we\'re going to get the
biggest bang for our bucks \-- I would say that if there\'s a barrier in
secondary schools at this issue of not knowing where to spend our time
and energy and how to make decisions about what\'s really critical and
then put our time there \-- whether it\'s content instruction or skill
instruction.

This is the continuum of action I want to talk about. There\'s five
components. This is not categories of kids. These are the services that
we see as an intervention model to move a whole school ahead, and I want
to talk about each of these and a little bit about the research we\'ve
done on each of the levels.

There is a handout that you should have, which lists these components.
It\'s on the back table. And it lists the different strategies and
interventions that we\'ve developed as a reference.

First component \-- we go to a school, one of the things that we ask is,
in terms of literacy, is how are you going to ensure the mastery of
critical content? Because if you have a variety of students who don\'t
have the skills and strategies needed to be successful in reading and
writing and listening and speaking, the question is \-- how are they
going to get the content required for mastery of the curriculum?

One of the things that we try to do is to develop interventions to help,
regardless of literacy levels, how can we ensure the students get the
background knowledge? One of the things we\'ve learned is we can teach
some of the skills and strategies needed to successful, the strategies
for comprehension but you know what? If they don\'t have the background
knowledge to connect and use those strategies to connect background
information, it doesn\'t do them any good. So part of this is how can
you make sure they\'re getting the history content, the biology content,
the literature content to create that contact so that when they learn
the skills and strategies they are connecting it to prior knowledge, to
concepts, to vocabulary?

One of the things we try to do is to develop teaching routines, and
that\'s one of our major intervention components. We\'ll ask schools
also, you can use other things as well. We have tried to look at
teaching routines, specifically teaching routines that often, grounded
on graphics, graphic organizers, because what we found in the secondary
curriculum, it\'s helpful for teachers to move from a verbal
presentation to both a verbal and a graphic presentation, and then our
research has focused on how do we get teachers to effectively use the
graphic organizers to get students to increase their content area
learning.

The other thing we\'ve learned, too, in teaching routines and graphic
organizers is how can we get students \-- teachers to get kids to
paraphrase and use strategies around the content using the graphic
organizers? These are the different teaching routines that we\'ve
developed. We have a specific research paradigm for this. Often we start
off with a controlled study, random assignment, usually pulling kids
after school, random assignment, to two groups. We try the routine. Once
we get the differences between the groups, then we move it into the
classroom and use a single subject, multiple baselines type of design
where we look at the teachers\' implementation but also we identify
something like two high-achieving, two average-achieving, two
low-achieving, and two students with disabilities and track their
performance, because what we want to find out is what\'s the response of
high-achieving students when we do something on behalf of trying to move
something designed for low-achieving students into the classroom to get
conversation and learning?

This is an example of a unit organizer, a graphic organizer the teacher
uses to introduce a unit, and the goal of this is \-- for a teacher, is
when you\'re done with that unit, and you\'re \-- the unit test has been
given, and I\'m standing in the hallway, the question is \-- what would
you like that student to say about that unit? If you were listening to
that student talk, what would be the structure? One of the things that
we\'ve tried to do here, what are the relationships, the thinking
relationships, compare and contrast, cause and effect, the questions \--
and what we\'ve been trying to do is to get teachers to use strategies
around these things \-- these graphic devices.

This is part of the graphic organizer. Here is a reading guide, where
teachers might work with a routine they use regularly in the classroom
to develop a reading guide that the students would use independently.
They would fill it out, and then here is another graphic organizer
around content.

Those are important because now we set the stage of teaching content of
which we\'re making sure they get the vocabulary and the background
knowledge. The second component that we work with in a school is what
are the read or shared strategies across classes? One of the things that
we\'ve learned when the University of Kansas began its research years
ago, we focused on component 3, the development of intensive strategies
taught in small settings to a few students in small groups. One of the
problems that we encountered was that we could do that. We could teach
those strategies, but we had problems with generalization. We had
trouble getting those kids, once they demonstrated the strategy within a
separate class, to move those to history, science, different kinds of
situations.

What we learned is that the general ed teacher and the teachers in the
support classes were talking about the same strategies, sharing the
conversation of strategies, that we were able to create a culture within
the general ed classroom where strategy instruction was valued. Kids had
to see it as valued. It couldn\'t be that we are just going to be
teaching history, and it\'s up to you to figure out how to get it. It\'s
that how we learn history, how we paraphrase, how we ask questions, how
we make predictions, how you get history is just as important as the
history content.

And so we talk about weaving different strategies, embedding strategies
across the curriculum, and we find different teachers like different
strategies. It matches their content \-- not all strategies. But, for
example, one of the strategies we use is paraphrasing, and we find that
many teachers are always asking, \"What did you just read? Tell me in
your own words what you just read in that section?\" It\'s a pretty
abstract, difficult task, OK, but the question is, is that if a teacher
is doing that, and as other students are receiving instruction in it
more intensively, we find that kids will reach mastery sooner.

We\'ve done some studies where we\'ve tried \-- just teachers without
any support classes teaching paraphrasing to, like, entire classes of
30. And what we found is that some students get it, but about 30% to 40%
of the students do not. So 30% to 40% of the students need more \--
within the general ed classroom, within just a weaving in \-- language
arts and history and science \-- that can\'t weave just the strategies
in without sufficient intensive feedback and guidance, and so what
we\'ve tried to do is figure out ways to embed strategies across
different classrooms and provide the supports \-- cooperative groups,
assignments, homework assignments, teacher modeling, to accomplish that.

This embedded strategy instruction starts out with large-group
instruction, where the teacher does it. They present the strategy, they
do it together, and then we ask them to do it in a variety of different
practice activities.

The learning strategies curriculum, which you have the list in your
handouts, is the base from which we work from \-- acquisitions, storage,
expression, demonstration of competence along information processing
lines. If you notice, the reading strategies \-- word identification,
paraphrasing, self-questioning; over the in the acquisition, combined
with writing strategies are how we try to pull that together. For
example, here is a paraphrasing strategy, self-questioning, visual
imagery.

When students don\'t get those strategies within the general ed
classroom, we need support strategy, support classes, and so this is
where more intensive strategy classes are offered. Sometimes its
paraprofessional, sometimes it\'s special classes, sometimes it\'s
remedial, but the issue is, if for those students who need more, how can
we provide that type of strategy instruction more intensively?

We use an eight-stage instructional process, moving through \-- describe
model; verbal practice; controlled, guided practice. Usually a strategy
takes six to eight weeks of instruction, 20 to 30 minutes a day with the
NAA strategy class.

Our data \-- this is one of the things we want to know is, first of all,
do kids learn the strategy, OK? So here it\'s just pre-imposed \-- yes,
we can teach the kid the strategy. Another question is when they
paraphrase does their comprehension increase? And what we\'ve tried to
do is to take on a variety of measures both normative and \-- actually,
we\'ve been looking at statewide assessments \-- how can we improve
comprehension on the strategies? Here is a comparison and experimental
group on a textbook quiz. Many of the models we\'ve used have used
curriculum-based measures because the idea is within specific classes,
how are they learning the content of the different textbooks?

Word identification strategy is a transition strategy, and it\'s a
strategy that focuses on what do you do when you come to a word you
don\'t know? And we\'ve been able to get some nice growth on word
identification strategies when it\'s used in both regular classrooms and
supported by a support class. We\'ve combined this with strategic
tutoring, where not only do we focus on classes, but working with
after-school programs so not only the history teacher, the support
teacher, but the tutor is focusing on the same strategies. It\'s usually
one-on-one instruction. We\'re finding not only are the kids\' grades
improving, but also they\'re becoming more strategic about the
strategies as this language indicates, and we\'re finding that after
tutoring stops, they maintain performance in the strategy.

Component 4 is we don\'t do a lot of work on this area, because what we
usually do is look for \-- most of our strategies begin about a fourth
or fifth grade reading level focusing on comprehension. We usually look
for something like corrective reading or an intensive reading program to
get through decoding, and then we switch to comprehension strategies
within their textbooks to give them a transition from the decoding
strategies to natural reading materials within their own textbooks to
keep motivation up and to have them practice in authentic materials.

And, finally, for those students who need more, we look at the speech
and language pathologists, because, for example, in strategies like
paraphrasing, we have problems with word retrieval problems, issues of
language, and why don\'t kids make progress in some of the language-rich
strategy like paraphrasing, where we need more intensive clinical
options?

OK, I\'ll stop there.

\[applause\]

Unidentified Speaker: Dr. Alexander will now give her comments.

Patricia Alexander: Unless everybody decides to take a break \-- OK. OK,
yeah, that\'s right, you can\'t leave when I am here talking. But,
anyway, can I put this little thing down because otherwise the only
thing you\'re going to see is the top of my head, OK? Hi. All right. Did
I do something wrong? It\'s making noise at me. OK. I\'m just going to
here, and then I\'m going to yell, which I know we have to do.

I actually have two overheads that Michel can put up in a minute, after
he takes care of this for me \-- hi, Michel. But what I\'m going to do
is, because we\'re batting cleanup here, I\'m going to actually be very
quick on talking about this model only and solely, and I\'m going to use
my free time here to pose some questions that I think cross over a
number of the issues today.

Let me just say, to reinforce how strong this program of work is, that
they do it at KU in the CRL. They\'ve been collecting data, good data,
for longer than my undergraduates have been alive, OK? That should tell
you a lot right there. Twenty-five years plus, and so there is a long
history of systematic study, rich data, on which we can draw here. You
can see that they\'re well documented in their success. This program is
transportable and has been transported in any number of ways; strong
teacher involvement; school participation; their transportable phases,
when you read this, are something that we can all use in any grant
proposal, and I must admit I\'ve stolen myself on numerous occasions.
The idea of identification moving all the way through piloting before
one actually tries to do anything in any large scale; and relevant focus
\-- they try to uncover what it is that students need to do and are
asked to do and then use that as a basis for what the intervention is
about.

But, with that in mind, I\'m \-- actually, I want to show you I prepared
these, as I said, but I\'m going to deviate from them slightly. I am
still going to talk about issues of who, what, when, and how, and use it
as a basis for questions that I think we can ponder the rest of this
afternoon and certainly tomorrow. I want to say that some of the things
I\'m going to say have been already said, but I want to reinforce them
and put punctuation marks to them.

The first issue is from today you\'re going to believe several things
that need to be questioned. That is, one of the things that you might
walk away with is the belief system that struggling readers equals
non-strategic readers. In truth, there are many different issues and
profiles as to what is it that makes somebody struggling, and, as a
matter of fact, I think, as a former teacher and still at the
university, I would argue that there is no student I have ever met who
could not be put in a position that would not, in effect, create in them
a struggle to make sense of the world of print.

So one of the questions we must ask, and you\'ve heard it asked in
different ways, is how do we invent the notion of this \-- the reader
that needs a particular kind of intervention and the intensity of that
intervention within the framework of what it is that we want generally
as a successful reader and somebody who is a successful reader from
third grade to fifth grade to eighth grade and onward? And those
different profiles will shift as the demands of reading shift as well.

All right, also, under the issue of who besides \-- and I put
\"normal,\" with a question mark for several reasons, none of which is
I\'m not sure what a normal reader is. I\'m not sure what that would be
in context to. But you\'ll notice that now within the research designs,
in the writings that we do, and in a lot of the interventions that we
do, we back to accepting a medical model; that is, somebody is going to
get a placebo while somebody actually gets the medicine, and we do it in
a controlled sense. I\'m not questioning whether that\'s a legitimate
model, but if we\'re going to accept the medical model, then back to my
\"who\" here. Then I think we need to look at what reading wellness is,
or literacy wellness is, to start with. If you\'re going to create a
medical model intervention, what is this healthy person like, and how
does that health change as the person goes through, themselves, certain
physical and emotional, motivational transformations?

I want to go to the side of the \"what\" here and pose some questions as
well. Again, today, we\'ve heard a lot about strategic \-- strategies. I
remember one time when I was teaching, the student at the school then
called me \"Mom.\" I was only in, like, I think in my late 20s at the
time, but everybody in the building called me Mom. But one kid in my
class said, \"Mom,\" and we were learning fact and opinion, this will
make sense. And the person said, \"Mom, how many people have to believe
something before an opinion becomes a fact?\" I immediately told them
five.

\[laughter\]

Why did I say that? Because we use the word \"strategies\" here so
cheaply in that we know what it \-- maybe we know exactly what that
means, but at what point do we create, or is our aim to create, certain
habits of the mind that are the normal way of processing, of operating,
of thinking, so that how much must something be conscious and
implemented, and how long do we need to work at it until strategies
become skill or, as James would say, are habits of the mind?

So how long do \-- when have we mastered a strategy? I mean, that\'s an
interesting thought for me, because I\'m still refining some of the
basic strategies that I have used my entire career, and so the idea that
a student can master a strategy is interesting to me, which brings me to
the issue of beliefs. In this notion about what we\'re studying here, I
want to know \-- again, let\'s go back to the medical model. The more
intense the treatment, the more likely there are to be corollary
effects, right? We all know that in the medical profession.

So what are the effects as well as \-- not just the positive effects of
what it is we\'re targeting, and I guess somebody said that beautifully
today, and I don\'t remember if it was Doug or not, but this idea, why
are we only looking at reading measures? Could we, in effect, succeed
only to fail? In other words, could we do so well at teaching children
how to follow a certain strategic model that they\'ve come to believe
that learning is just going through some routine procedures? What
beliefs do they leave us with in terms of what it means to read? What
kind of beliefs do we leave them with what it means to be a learner?
What are we doing to them, as we say, epistemologically? What are their
beliefs about knowledge anymore when they\'re done with us? And what are
their beliefs ontologically about what is schooling about? What is all
this really about?

I just say that as a corollary issue, and because my friend, Michael
Camille \[sp\] is in the audience. The other thing about today is we
seem to be focused on something called \"traditional text\" \-- opening
the textbooks, reading school-particular linear processing, but I don\'t
know about you, but more and more of my students are using alternative
forms of text from which to build their view of the world. And where are
those in our theoretical and our research models? How can our students
judge whether something is a valid or invalid source online? How do they
know if they\'re reading something that\'s truly fanciful or tend to be
bounded in evidence? How do they know how to not just make a claim but
to support that claim \-- define information and evidence to back it up?

These are just issues that \-- you know, we can\'t think that the world
of print is the world of print that many of us in the audience here grew
up with. It\'s just not the case \-- right, Michael would say that, but
I\'m saying it for you, Michael.

OK, and also the ideas that we would walk away with are that strategies
\-- and this goes back to my notion about what it means to be a
struggling reader and, in a sense, all of us struggle, is that we get
the idea that strategies \-- and I know this is not true in the models
that we have here, but in terms of the discourse that we\'re having, in
terms of the presentations, the ideas that strategies operate
independently. But how strategic we are, how effective we are, what
strategies we need are tied to so many things that are both our own and
those of the system and the context in which we operate.

The knowledge I have when I approach something is going to determine
what kind of strategies I will employ, need to employ, and how
effectively I employ them. We know that my interests are going to
determine what it is I pursue and the depth at which I pursue them. My
personal goals as a learner will determine \-- in all truthfulness, I
told my students when they took their final on Friday, I said, \"You
know, if you got an A, and you\'ve got three other exams, you know,
it\'s really OK to blow this off.\" No, I didn\'t really say that, but I
mean, in truth, the point is, at what point is it strategic not to be
strategic? Where does that fit into all of this? And also the issue
about \-- I have one minute so I\'ve got to talk even faster.

But it\'s not just the learner\'s knowledge \-- the learner\'s interest
and the learner\'s goals. It also has something to do with the teacher
and this kind of notion about research designs I\'m going to talk about
as nested models. You know, it depends \-- the kind of individuals that
Dr. Lenz and the group at KU work with \-- what kind of learners would
they have been if the programs that had had earlier on really had, in a
sense, taken a lot of what\'s now being done and incorporated that into
the process? Are they doing repair work here for what might not have
been so necessary had we had earlier transitional models, where this is
not something that\'s done because it\'s something you lack but is
something that people at your age naturally are developing? This, again,
is this idea of we\'re repairing, we\'re repairing, we\'re repairing.
Let\'s go for a wellness model where we figure out what in the hell
people really need at certain ages, and our purpose becomes, therefore,
to create in them an ability to think and reason and ponder and rather
than just following scripts that they themselves make some judgments
about what is needed and what is necessary.

OK, so \-- I have one minutes \-- no, I don\'t \-- I relay have 31
seconds, OK \-- the kind of designs, then, are longitudinal studies, we
definitely need those. We need, in terms of research designs
intra-individual studies; that is, let\'s follow somebody across
different time and across different context and see how they play out as
a non-struggling learner.

I have other things, but I don\'t have time to talk about them. We\'ll
talk about them later. Thank you.

\[applause\]

Unidentified Speaker: You can tell the excitement to get the information
to you is high right now. Dr. Jennifer Green, please step forward \--
Fund for Excellence.

Jennifer Green: And I'm no doctor, so \--

Patricia Alexander: You only play one.

Jennifer Green: That\'s right. I only play one for this audience. When
Grace Ayre \[sp\] called me to serve as a respondent today I was nine
months pregnant, and I only agreed because I didn\'t fully understand
the effect of sleep deprivation on the brain. I do now, so I stand
trembling before you and grateful that I had a name tag and have tried
to report thoroughly my comments. So forgive me ahead of time.

Before I begin responding specifically to the model, I wanted to make a
couple of introductory remarks that I think reiterate some of today\'s
earlier discussion. It seems to me that the burden on our model
developers is ratcheting up. It is not enough that these developers
provide us with their theories and their practice and their research for
adolescent literacy, we are also looking to them to have clear theories
of adult learning as well as theories for how change happens in a truly
bureaucratic organization. I think these are important expectations to
place on these model providers, but I also think we should acknowledge
that these are things that we\'re asking of them.

We know the practicalities of embedding a model school-wide, let alone
system-wide. This is a mammoth task at the secondary level. I\'m not
sure what we face as the more difficult task \-- the task of moving
struggling readers to grade or the task of getting adults to change
their practice.

At the secondary level, we have organizational issues that are the most
intractable, I think, of any of our system K-12. Our teachers are the
most isolated at the secondary level, and our principals are, frankly,
the least likely to be instructional leaders, which means where you have
an excellent classroom you have an excellent classroom, and there\'s not
a strategy for moving that school-wide. That\'s a gross generalization
but one that\'s been my experience.

It\'s also necessary not to overreach here but to think about, if we are
truly thinking about scaling up quality literacy models, to think about
transforming central school system practice as well; to move school
systems from being focused in compliance to being focused on increasing
the capacity of their professionals. There is a big context in which all
of this is embedded, and I think that we really need to attend to it.

That said, I was really struck by the richness of material that was
presented to me in the readings. In terms of some strength, the
strategies are based on a clear theory of action that assumes that
quality instruction is responsive. It\'s responsive to the needs of our
students. That is an unusual occurrence in the high school classroom. We
are very textbook-driven, as my colleague said. We don\'t pay a whole
lot of attention to what\'s going on in the classroom, which leads us to
statements like, \"I taught it, I\'m not sure why they didn\'t get it.\"

Quality instruction is systematic, e.g., it is connected so we relate
one idea to another, and it is scaffolded, and it\'s intensive, which
means we can alter instructional time, we have to focus on student
engagement. I was struck by the model also \-- another way to frame it
is as this gradual release of responsibility \-- teacher models, we
share the work together, I release the responsibility to the student for
their independent practice. This is how we learn to ride a bicycle,
it\'s how we learn to cook. We watch people engaging in this behavior,
we get some help, somebody holds the handlebars of the bicycle as we
ride along, and then we have lots and lots of practice on a bike that
fits us or on a stove where we\'re not going to set the kitchen on fire.
So we\'re not given materials where we\'re going to fail.

Another strength here is clearly the set of strategies that have been
developed to implement literacy practices across content areas. This, it
seems to me, is particularly important, given the state and local
standards. As an example, fairly consistently, I think, is this standard
of asking every student to read 25 books a year. Ask any teacher in an
urban area whether this is realistic, and they\'ll roll their eyes. But
if we truly are going to move students to this 25-book standard, then
it\'s not just a job for the reading language arts teacher. Clearly, the
content teachers have to have some role in supporting that, which means
they have to be able to help students learn to read.

This model takes into account some of the global needs of struggling
students. I was reminded, as I read the materials, of something that
Janet Allen said to me once. She is an author of several books on
adolescent literacy. She said that one of the truisms of working with
adolescents is that you never know who is going to walk through your
classroom door. You know, you never know if Henry is going to be angry
Henry or calm Henry, or it all depends on the hormone level and what he
had for lunch and who he just talked to. This model addresses some
consistent needs among students. For example, beyond the literacy
practices, it works with getting students to memorize and recall
information. It asks students to demonstrate competence, particularly
around organizational ideas. If you\'ve ever worked with struggling
readers, you know that one of the problems they have is they can\'t find
anything. So it\'s very \-- you know, they come with that notebook
stuffed full of papers that makes you want to tear your hair out. It\'s
important to give them strategies for organization. This model works
with students on their social interaction and how to work cooperatively.

Another real strength, though, that I saw was this focus on teacher
learning and a real respect for how professionals learn. This model also
made explicit connections between student achievement and teacher
practice, so numerous studies that I read were framed around the quality
of the teacher implementation of a particular strategy and the resultant
student achievement. That helps to move us away from blaming students
for not knowing information and puts the emphasis where it should be \--
on the practice.

Several questions were raised for me as I read the materials and
listened to your presentation, Dr. Lenz. One is an implementation
question. Actually, let me backtrack. One is the massive amount of
professional development that is needed to embed this kind of work in a
school. One question that I had was, who professional develops the
professional developers? At the secondary level, that\'s a very, very
difficult issue and gets back to, I think, Wendy Ranck-Buhr\'s question
of how good is good enough? I think she was talking about the quality of
the people who are working with the teachers in their classrooms.

A second implementation question is where do you dig in? There is such a
range of strategies, how would a school know where to begin? Do you
begin with the reading language arts program? Do you begin with the
strategies that cross school-wide? And, if so, how do you do that? Where
do you find the time to do full faculty staff development? A more
mundane issue is it wasn\'t clear to me, as I read \-- a little more
clear to me as I listened \-- how schools would roll this out. For
example, could they overlay the strategy work on their existing
materials? If that\'s so, and we know that most of our readers are at a
fifth-grade level \-- I shouldn\'t say most, but in Baltimore City our
entering ninth graders read at about a fifth-grade level in our
neighborhood high schools. It\'s very difficult for them to practice
these strategies in inconsiderate text. So what sort of additional
materials and supports to teachers need?

There is a real tension between covering this content you referred to
and teaching these reading strategies. That is food for thought for this
group \-- what is our emphasis on covering content or getting students
to truly understand what they\'re reading.

I had some questions about the nature of the data that was provided.
I\'ll be frank with you, I\'m not a doctor, and I don\'t know data very
well, but I\'ll give you my handful of questions. There were numerous
studies cited, and I wasn\'t clear what the sample size was. So while
there was a lot of research where student numbers were given, the sample
size seemed to range from eight students for a particular intervention
to 160 students. I\'m not a statistician, but I wasn\'t sure what a
necessary sample size would be to give it reliability and validity.

A last question was the efficacy of a pull-out program. Your word
identification strategy was modeled, I believe, if I understood, in a
pull-out program that pulled students out of their reading language arts
classes for six to eight weeks, and I\'m wary of that. I know that the
Title I research at the elementary level suggests to us that these
pull-out programs mean that students lose quality instructional time,
important instructional time, when they\'re plugged back into their
classrooms, they are often further behind than when they left. Although
there were some good gains around this strategy, it raised that question
for me.

Overall, though, this gave me quite a bit to think about, and I\'m eager
to do some further learning. Thank you.

\[applause\]

Unidentified Speaker: And next you\'ll be hearing from Carol Olson,
University of California Irvine.

Carol Olson: There is rule of thumb, and I don\'t know how statistically
or scientifically valid this is \-- that the attention span of a learner
is their age plus two minutes. So if any of you \-- this might explain
some of our trouble in middle and high school, but it might explain if
any of you are now in a little bit of cognitive overload, you\'re having
a little trouble listening, I know my attention span has been \-- my
eyes have been glazing over a little, so I\'ll try to get right to the
point.

There\'s a lot to recommend this model. I think one of its main
strengths \-- Michel, can we hold that for a minute, and we\'ll get to
that soon. You can keep the lights up for a bit, thanks.

One of its main strengths is that it focuses on making visible to
students as well as teachers the cognitive strategies that experienced
writers use when they construct meaning from or with text. It has a
theoretically sound cognitive apprenticeship model that was described by
Keith that is basically an instructional scaffolding model that moves
from a pre-test commitment, describe the strategy, the teacher
demonstrates using a think-aloud, there\'s opportunities for guided
practice, corrective feedback, more practice, opportunities to apply to
new context, and to generalize. It\'s performance-based and looks at
what kids ought to know and be able to do, and I like that idea that
it\'s a model that crosses the disciplines.

Apparently, it was developed with teacher input. I think that\'s really
important, and I like the fact that it\'s not a quick fix. Becoming
strategic is a process that takes time; it\'s not something you can do,
I think, even in a semester or a year. It\'s something that you have to
keep continually learning. I found the strategies that are being taught
to teachers, that teachers then instill in kids, to be very close to
reciprocal teaching, if you know that model. But I do like the emphasis
on visualizing. One of the true hallmarks of experienced readers is that
ability to make a movie inside your head, so I thought that was very
important.

With that, I have some things that I would just like to know more about.
I wouldn\'t identify these at all as weaknesses. We put these people at
such a disadvantage to tell us about their entire model in 15 minutes
that it\'s really difficult to know whether something is just they
haven\'t had a chance to share it with us. But much is made in the
document of developing a repertoire of strategies that student learners
internalize, over time, but it seemed to me that the focus of most of
those strategies were on literal comprehension \-- the word
identification, the self-questioning, the paraphrasing, and there\'s a
process in the document that\'s described as identify, organize,
comprehend, and recall, and it struck me that\'s certainly a foundation
for becoming strategic, but there\'s more to being strategic than being
able to work at what I would consider to be the literal level of
comprehension.

I\'ve been working with 55 teachers and 1,800 kids in Santa Ana Unified
for over a five-year period, and my feeling about those kids is \-- and
this has been echoed throughout the day. It\'s not that they\'re not
able to decode, and they actually \-- even when we give them very
difficult text \-- we\'re working with kids from sixth grade ELD to
twelfth grade \-- even when we give them text like \"The Scarlet Ibis,\"
or excerpts from \"Great Expectations,\" they actually can tell you back
what they read \-- unless they don\'t have enough English, and this is
the highest Spanish-speaking city in the United States and a population
that is LEP \-- second-largest LEP population in California. So it\'s a
high English language learner population. But unless they don\'t have
enough English, they really do get what they read. They know what the
text says. What they can\'t do is to express what the text means to
them. They cannot go to analyzing, interpreting, making inferences,
commenting, evaluating, resisting the text, arguing with the writer, et
cetera. And so I would want to ask Keith is there something in your
model that expands that repertoire? And now, Michel, if you could show
my little model.

We\'ve been working with kids on a range of cognitive strategies, and
what we\'ve been telling them is that cognition means a way of knowing,
or we could just call it thinking, and that strategies are like tactics
or tools that you use to accomplish something. So think of the whole
idea that you have a toolkit inside your head, and teachers I worked
with have brought in real toolkits and said to them, \"Now, you
wouldn\'t take this screwdriver and try to get a board put together with
nails. You would reach in your toolkit and get a hammer. In this same
way, you wouldn\'t try to visualize a word if you didn\'t know the
meaning of that word. You\'d tap prior knowledge and try to look at the
prefix or the suffix or the base word and make sense of that.\"

So we\'ve been trying to teach them this whole range of cognitive
strategies and we\'ve been giving them sayings like, \"At first I
thought, but then I\" \-- or what\'s another one \-- \"This reminds me
of\" \-- or \"I can picture\" \-- to get them started developing
cognitive strategies. And so I would like to know what else is in your
toolkit, Keith?

Another thing that I haven\'t heard much about at all today, and, again,
it doesn\'t mean because it\'s not present in the models, but we
haven\'t heard about it \-- I haven\'t heard much about moving kids from
declarative to procedural to conditional knowledge. Declarative
knowledge, knowing that, there are strategies and procedural knowledge,
knowing how to implement them. We\'ve heard a lot about that. What we
haven\'t heard about is conditional knowledge. How do we get kids truly
be strategic, which means to be deliberate and purposeful about the
tactics that they use to make sense of what they read and write.

And so in that sense, then, how do we teach kids to be metacognitive?
How do we teach them to monitor their own processes as learners to
select strategies and to regulate their own processes as learners? And
so what that leads me to is I haven\'t heard much about metacognition
today. It seems to me that it\'s a fundamental part of the learning
process. I\'d like to show you one example of what I mean by
metacognition, and then I\'ll close with some sort of future research
questions. Michel, if you could show me my example.

This is a little girl named Sarrah \[sp\], and she\'s a sixth grader,
and she\'s been working on these strategies, and she\'s been using some
booklets we developed, and I\'ll be happy to share them with you if
you\'d like to talk to me about it later. But we\'re using these little
\-- they\'re strategy questioning booklets, and we\'ve been using them
like literature circles, somewhat \-- like Harvey Daniels. And I just
want you to see what \-- this is Sarrah\'s explication of what she had
to think about in order to make sense of a text. And she says, \"I
started out by asking\" \-- and this is, by the way, a gut-cruncher of a
story. You know \"The Stolen Party\" by Liliana Heker? It\'s a story
about a little girl named Rosara. She\'s going to a girlfriend\'s
birthday party. The only little hitch is her mother is the maid at the
girlfriend\'s house. She goes, thinking she is a party guest and at the
end the mother tries to pay her \$2 for having helped out at the party,
so she finds out she was actually the hired help.

> So this is what Sarrah has to say \-- \"I started out by asking a lot
> of questions like, I wonder why her mother is so mad? And what has the
> monkey got to do with the story? The beginning of the story threw me
> off because when it started, Rosara was at the party, and then she was
> back with her Mom. That was confusing. I had to use monitoring to
> figure out that the beginning was a flashback. I predicted that the
> mom wouldn\'t let Rosara go to the party, but she surprised me and let
> her go. I adopted an alignment with Rosara because her mom seemed so
> mean at first. Also, I\'ve been to a party where there was a girl who
> was a big brat and was snobby to me. I could really visualize when
> Rosara kicked the blond girl in the shin. I predicted that the monkey
> would be stolen, but I was wrong about that. At first I thought it was
> a stupid story because I didn\'t understand what was going on, but
> then I started to form the interpretation that Rosara was not really
> at the party to have fun but to work and help out. I didn\'t totally
> get that until the very end. I really liked the sentence where the
> author said, \'Rosara\'s eyes had a cold clear look.\' I really could
> see that in my mind. Why did Senora Inez call Rosara her pet? I\'m
> also still not totally sure why the title is \'The Stolen Party,\' but
> the big idea got was that Rosara was really at the party not to have
> fun but as more of a maid like her mother.\'\"

Not bad for sixth grade, huh? So my point, then, is how do we empower
kids to become students of their own learning process; to get to the
point where they\'re interested in what they have to think about in
order to make sense of things.

To close, some of the future research or the questions I think this
brings us too is, first of all, this model seems to use mostly measures
that are test-based, so I assume they have right and wrong answers. How
can we broaden past a test-based measure to look at direct writing
assessment as a measure of reading and writing? How can we integrate the
reading/writing connection more and look at the cognitive strategies
that underlie both reading and writing, and does this model do that?
Another question I have is what is the role of free voluntary reading in
that \-- in your model, Keith, do they ever take strategic approaches to
free voluntary reading? And, finally, the challenge, I think, getting
teachers to buy in. I noticed in your literature a lot of the teachers
were complaining about the amount of time it took. So how do we also
invest teachers in studying themselves as learners? Thanks.

\[applause\]

Unidentified Speaker: I\'d like to invite Keith up to respond to a few
of the observations that people have made on his work.

Keith Lenz: Lots of questions \-- let me start \-- I\'d like to start at
the end and work up, since those are fresh in my memory. The questions
are really great, and one of the things that we tell people who work
with us is that we\'re always changing, and I think that the answers to
some of the questions \-- I try to address how we try to respond to the
changing field, because the field has changed in the 25 years of our
development, as we have tried to catch up with what \-- how the demands
of the test, the thing that we\'re measuring that count for we\'re
measuring as literacy.

First of all, I want to talk about students internalizing the
strategies. One of the things is we\'ve always encased the strategies in
an acronym, and we are sometimes teased about that. But one of the
reasons why we did that was because early on in our research, students
with learning disabilities originally had trouble remembering things and
the whole processing and pulling lots of information together. So we
began to package them into mnemonics and ways that kids could remember
them. Well, we were working with the strategy, and I remember one
teacher coming in one day and said, \"You know, I know that we started
out with the acronym, and we worked on that, and we worked on the
application of the strategy, but a kid I met who was my student two
years ago graduated from high school. I saw him at the mall and said,
\'You know, I remember that strategy. I can\'t remember the steps, but I
do that strategy as I was studying for the manager\'s test at the shoe
store.\'\"

So the idea of internalizing the strategy, we\'re seeing it does
internalize. One of the things we changed in the model about 10 years
ago was we have a phase called \"generalization,\" as one of our stages,
and we added a stage called \"adaptation,\" and basically what we do is,
we start with whatever the strategy is \-- self-questioning,
paraphrasing, and the basic strategy, and we begin to dialog with the
student. So if you know this strategy, how could we change it? Because
all the strategies are really a combination of little strategies, like,
for example, self-questioning is questioning, predicting, pulling it all
together, analyzing, and you do it interactively. Well, within the
adaptation phase, we pull it apart and begin to say, \"Well, let\'s
change the strategy to meet your needs in this class.\"

And that\'s one of the things \-- that once the strategy is taught,
teachers, over multiple years, can come back and build on it and mold
it, and that\'s one of the reasons why \-- it\'s not like we teach it at
this grade or we teach it at that grade \-- it\'s taught but then it may
be revisited and usually when we talk about mastery of a strategy, and
you raised the issue about mastery \-- it\'s \-- we\'ve mastered a
process but the strategy will continue to have to be built and grow and
connected to other information and revisited as new demands are met with
the idea that entail the student somewhat automatically says, \"Oh, I
need to do this.\" So the hope is that they do integrate and become more
metacognitive in that process.

One of the things we\'ve done with trying to move the strategy to higher
levels, as we move the strategy into the core curriculum classroom with
history and science is to get them to try to take the strategy into
context that allow the students to explore strategy, self-questioning
within the context of the situated learning. So hopefully we\'re trying
to help teachers come up with different ways to manipulate the
strategies as they\'re using them in the core curriculum to take it to
that next level.

Free reading \-- the question about free reading \-- I remember once
going into a classroom where a teacher was working on one of the
strategies and said, \"OK, now put away your strategy practice materials
and get your history book out and read.\" That teacher didn\'t get it.
And so part of it is trying to get the students that whenever they read,
whether it\'s in free reading or whether it\'s in text reading, you
should immediately be asking what strategy should I be using or what\'s
the next \-- or how should I be reading this to check to make sure I\'m
understanding and comprehending it, because the characteristic of a lot
of the students, they get to the end of the page, they get to the end of
the next page and get to the end of the next page, and they say, \"I
read this.\" \"Well, what do you remember?\" \"I don\'t remember
anything, because they never stopped and checked their comprehension
anywhere throughout the task.\"

One of the other things, too, is to blend the reading with the writing.
If you notice, within the curriculum, there\'s the writing strategies
and the reading strategies and as we move within the core curriculum,
how can we blend the reading and the writing strategies and the written
expression together so that students don\'t see it as \"I\'m going to
strategy class,\" \"I\'m going to here\", so that it is a more connected
way of looking at literacy and literacy learning across a school.

But I think that we\'ve been down the path, and you asked the question
of the isolated class and the pull-out program \-- for years, we\'ve
been trying to break away from the pull-out program but, at the same
time, we haven\'t found a place within the secondary curriculum where
teachers are willing to spend the time to be explicit and intensive and
responsive enough. The study that you read, the manuscript that I sent,
was this school\'s frustrated effort to say, \"We have to do something,
and let\'s try this.\" And I think that was where a lot of schools are.
How can we, within this implementation environment create classes where
we can provide the intensity within this context of a rigorous, \"We\'ve
got to get through the content\" mindset of a secondary program.

Some of your questions about implementation \-- professional development
\-- I think it is hard. I think it is a rigorous professional
development activity, but I think it\'s \-- one of the reasons why we
worked on the continuum, and Barbara Ehren and I sat down and worked on
this continuum for a number of years. One of the reasons we came up with
that was because we know schools can\'t put it in \-- boom \-- in place
like that. It\'s a period of time. And so often it\'s, \"Well, where do
you \-- we\'ve given you resources and your time and your energy. Can
you focus on that continuum of components? Is it working with content?
Is it working with an intensive class? Is it the strategies? Would your
teachers be willing to embed the strategies across the curriculum? Where
would you like to go?\" But the question is this \-- you\'re not going
to really truly address the literacy learning of kids in your school
until all those levels are implemented, no matter how long it takes. So
how do you want to put your resources now to start today and then we
will work, over a period of time, to get all those components in place.

And so this issue of professional development is we try to, in every
building, every school district, get people who can lead this
professional development, and we often \-- they have to be users first,
we train them, we work with them, and so they can accurately maintain
the fidelity within their schools to get the kind of results but
allowing teachers to shift. One of the things this issue of direct \--
the scripted versus not scripted. The strategy manuals that we have
created are focused. Here is the self-questioning strategy manual.
They\'re scripted. But the reason why they\'re scripted is because when
we first took them out in schools, they were only like six pages long.
Now they\'re like 90 pages long, and when they were six pages long,
teachers kept coming back and say, \"Could you give me an example of how
you would say that?\" And we went back to the research, and as we did
that, \"So how did you explain that to get this to work?\"

And then we finally \-- we put them, and we finally told teachers, \"You
know, we\'re going to give you an example of what we said. But you know
what? You can paraphrase this. As long as you cover the points and you
get the idea of this is what a model would look like, and this is what
an explanation of the steps would look like, there is variability in how
you do it. So one of the things is, we\'ve struggled with that whole
scripted, non-scripted, teacher-ownership kind of thing over the years
as well.

I think the studies in terms of size, we\'ve done, that\'s \-- we are
\-- we are moving into a phase. We first started out with small-end
studies \-- single subjects, small groups, single subjects and the
working to small groups. We are now into a whole class, whole school
model where we\'re looking at whole classes, whole schools, moving the
small group instruction, which we got really robust gains to broader
models. So we try to include different size groups.

Unidentified Speaker: OK, and now we\'ll move to the group discussion
format. Please make use of the microphones.

Michael Camille: Hi, I\'m Michael Camille from Stanford University. I
guess I\'ve been listening all day, and I\'ve been more and more
concerned, and it kind of came to a head here, because, Pat, I thought
you were going to say something about this \-- we\'ve been hearing about
strategies and strategic readers and almost nothing about the content in
which these strategies are embedded, and what we are coming to learn is
that\'s the critical variable; that there is no such thing as a strategy
that cuts across content; that they\'re embedded within it; that they
change is a function of that, and I haven\'t heard anything about that,
and I wondered if those of you could address that.

Patricia Alexander: Michael, that\'s what I was trying to say in my last
29 seconds, when I was saying that strategies don\'t operate in
isolation; that the knowledge \-- and by that I don\'t just mean the
knowledge of the learner \-- the knowledge \-- the disciplinary, the
domain knowledge itself shapes it. So you\'re absolutely right.
Paraphrasing in mathematics is not the same as paraphrasing in history.

Keith Lenz: One of the things that we\'ve tried to do within schools is
we work with the faculty. One of the high schools we\'re working with
now in Seattle, they present four or five strategies to a whole school,
to the faculty, and then the teachers talk about them, and they look at
them, and they change them, and they say, \"How could you make this work
within your classroom?\" But they start with a core of what is, you
know, like, well, what is paraphrasing? How would it look in math? How
would it look in social studies? How would it look in science? With them
coming up with examples of how that would work, and then they talk, as
teams, to see how that would work in their building.

The thing that\'s important, though, that, yes, they are different, but
if you start changing the essence of \-- between the support class, and
it changes the steps and rules in every single class, there\'s a whole a
group of kids who don\'t get the transition. So there needs to be a
thread of commonality that when teachers \-- when a kid says, \"We\'re
going to paraphrase this,\" somebody could say, \"Oh, I know this. I\'ve
done this before. I know these steps. I\'ve practiced this.\" And when
they don\'t do it, someone can say, \"Let me help you do this.\" Or when
someone says, \"Let me teach you a strategy you\'re related to,\" the
kid goes, \"You know, I have to do this in all of my classes. I\'m so
glad I\'m working on this.\" I mean, this whole idea of value and
culture is something needs to go across a common thread; that there\'s a
common language that teachers can reinforce because, unlike the
elementary school, where you create a culture of language, you create a
culture of reinforcement and skills and reading and writing, you know, a
kid goes to a reading class and works in fourth-grade reading skills,
and then they go to tenth grade biology, where do they practice? I mean,
the issue is some kind of common generalization thrust to reinforce it
across a building.

Phoebe Farag: Hi, my name is Phoebe Farag, I\'m from the American
Institutes for Research, and I just have more comments and maybe all the
panelists and presenters can address this in discussing a \-- I\'m sorry
\-- in discussing an agenda for research in the future. There were a few
things that I did hear a little bit about today and things that I did
not hear at all about, so I wanted to bring them up, and the first is
when we talk about the social context of reading, I heard some things
about culturally and linguistically diverse populations. I\'d also like
to hear more about gender, which I didn\'t hear that much discussed
today. I\'d like to see data just aggregated by gender, and I\'d also
like to find out which interventions work better for different genders
in adolescents and which ones work best for all, especially in
adolescents, because gender is a greater factor at this age, I believe.

The second is the definitions of a typical adolescent reading, a
struggling adolescent reader, and an adolescent reader with learning
disabilities. I didn\'t hear that much about learning disabilities, so
I\'d be interested in hearing that addressed.

And, finally, when we talked about the theories governing some of these
interventions, I wonder which ones include more of principles of adult
learning versus principles of elementary school learning and at what age
in adolescence are these different principles more effective. We talked
about a huge range here of ages. We were talking about middle school up
to the college freshman level sometimes, and these are students with
different developmental needs at these different ages and some of these
interventions may work better for sixth graders than they do for twelfth
graders, and that\'s what I\'d like to see.

Keith Lenz: First of all, I think you\'re right. I think we need to take
all of our data and be able to look at which strategies work for
different populations, and we\'ve done some of that. The time we have
here today probably is not into looking at all the sub-populations and
how it works, but that\'s really important that we do that.

The work that we\'ve tried to do related to strategy instruction
originally started with students with learning disabilities. I mean,
that was \-- students who just weren\'t getting it over a number of
years, and then as we moved out, we began to \-- well, this is working
with other students as well, and look at this \-- and even getting
greater gains for other students. So at the heart of that is that work
with the really disabled reader.

The other thing is, is in terms of age, you know, we\'ve worked with the
Bridges to Literacy, the National Institute for Literacy\'s adult
literacy initiative in terms of applying strategy instruction to the
adult literacy population, and so we found a lot of carryover in terms
of strategies for specific tasks to help meet adult needs. One of the
things that it\'s important about a piece of the work, our work in
strategic tutoring started with work with college students who were
athletes at the University of Kansas, trying to keep them eligible to
play whatever \-- basketball, football \-- and the demand was is that,
you know, they needed not only the strategy, but they needed to get
through assignments. And so the idea is, how can we co-construct? And so
a model for strategic tutoring is, given a demand, how can we start the
task but pull out the strategy while we\'re completing the task so that
when we\'re done with the task, the student sees the strategy, and then
when they come back to the tutor again, they can say, \"Well, remember
that strategy? Let\'s try it again.\"

So the idea is the co-construction over a period of time, and the older
we get, the more important that co-constructive process becomes as the
learner owning the strategy. But one of the things we know, though, and
this is the problem \-- the tutor, the teacher, has to know a lot of
strategies. It\'s not like you can just sit down and, you know, with \--
just put any adults or any person with someone in co-constructive
strategy. You need to know what is the basis for reading comprehension
and the strategies and all of these things so that person needs to be
really rich in understanding the strategies and, as you work with older
students, you need to become more sophisticated in being able to help
that individual learn the best strategies to complete the task.

Nancy McKinley: I\'m Nancy McKinley. I\'m the owner and CEO of Thinking
Publications and also have speech language pathology in my background
and as a passion and practice in that for many years. My question
relates to the preparation for this conference implied that computer
literacy is part of our definition of literacy, and I\'ve heard
amazingly little comment made on computer literacy. So it\'s directed at
you because you\'re the last panel, but really it\'s for the entire
group \-- a working definition, how it factors into your learning
strategy\'s approach, et cetera \-- any comments you care to offer.

Keith Lenz: Yeah, like I say, it\'s text, it\'s print, it\'s \-- I think
it\'s how the computer is used to replicate the intensive response and
explicit instruction and how can designers \-- instructional designers
\-- be able to do that, and I think that\'s a research development
question that instructional designers in the technology field are
struggling with.

Patty Grayner: Hi, my name is Patty Grayner \[sp\], and I\'m with Casey
Family Programs in Seattle. Our focus is kids in care, kids in foster
care, and, oddly enough, I\'m also connected to this program from the
University of Kansas. But I wanted to say two things. First of all, all
the presentations today, as a former middle school teacher, as a former
high school teacher, we need a model. You know, to have a lot of theory,
to have \-- to know what best practice is, is not enough, because as a
former secondary teacher, I\'ve got kids for 50 minutes, I\'ve got them
for 100, maybe, days. And I need a model to at least get me started. So
I'm really heartened to know that there is an examination of what can be
possibly recommended, because if teachers don\'t have a model, they\'re
going to do what they\'ve always done, and it\'s just to mushy.

The second thing is that, from the concern of kids in care, is that
looking at these models, I\'m thinking about, like, the portability of
it. Casey has 23 divisions around the country, and most of them west of
the Mississippi \-- I\'m a former East Coaster, and I don\'t remember
east and west in relation to oceans now. Being able to support that
portability, we have these divisions, and we have education specialists
at each of the divisions, which is very interesting for a social work
organization. But we know education is king and that kids have got to be
literate.

So for our education specialists to support this, outside of a school
district that may not support it, is very important to me. So that\'s
just kind of a question to bring.

Keith Lenz: One of the things that we\'ve been concerned about for a
number of years, working with kids in foster care, is this issue of the
role of the family and how can families be supportive, and one of the
things that \-- you know, in tutoring and after-school programs, you can
tutor someone in something really well, but it could be the wrong thing,
and so communication between the tutor and the teacher through
technology \-- the tutor writes a report, it automatically gets e-mailed
to the teacher or it gets e-mailed to the parent if the parent has
e-mail. But the issue of how do we inform the parent and the teacher and
create that communication for kids who are somewhat disconnected because
they are in foster care, and they\'re not really connected, maybe, to a
family, and they don\'t trust adults, becomes a real big issue in terms
of trying to promote literacy.

Patricia Alexander: I wanted to react to that, and maybe it\'s not a
direct reaction just to that, but what you said was resonating with me,
and I was visualizing \-- I want to go back to Doug Buell\'s
presentation where he did the kind of nested \-- kind of a
Broth-and-Brenner \[sp\] sort of model, those of you who study
development know what I mean. It\'s the student within program within
the school within family within community, and it seems to me that one
of the issues that was raised before by Hugh was this idea of \-- if we
at least script a lesson, we know what we\'re getting, and it seemed to
me that even a program that\'s delivered extremely well and delivered
with fidelity, in a sense, if the program is strong and powerful, but
it\'s nested within a school that\'s full of holes and think about it as
that area is shaded and flawed, and it\'s nested in the family support
system that can\'t support it, it\'s not the same. Do you understand
what I\'m saying? The same program nested in differential of these
context \-- your thing just made me think about what that\'s like, and
what was just said is not the same \-- it\'s not the same program for
the child. Does that make any sense what I\'m saying? And I think
that\'s why I was thinking of nested models. Somehow we have to
understand that what\'s generalizable, at least we may have a sense of
what that \-- the clarity of what the program is, and there really are
very few models as well supported as the one we are hearing about this
last time.

But it\'s like taking a pill that you know exactly what it\'s supposed
to do, but you take it in context with a poor diet or with other
medications \-- it\'s not the same thing, and I think that\'s an issue
we have to tackle.

Unidentified Speaker: I love the strategies, I love teaching them, but I
had a big aha in thinking about these problem-solving people down in
Nashville who do such wonderful work that we have all these solutions,
but if the kids aren\'t identifying the problem, where do the solutions
\-- where do they apply them? So I\'m wondering where in this model kids
identify the need for the strategies? Is that a part of it?

Keith Lenz: It\'s really funny you ask that, because in our work we\'re
trying to have, like, teach strategy classes. A problem with this model,
a problem with any model that tries to teach strategies is that a kid
needs to know that he needs it. And he needs to have a place to apply
it. Meaning, a number of years ago, we had 12 kids where we\'re teaching
a textbook usage strategy, and eight of the kids were getting it, and
four were not. And eight kids were using it and began to use it and four
kids who couldn\'t figure it out, because we kept beating her over the
head to learn this textbook usage, and we\'re, you know, should have
learned it compared to the characteristics and found out those four
kids, when we went to the teachers, none of those teachers required the
kids to use their textbook. And so teaching the strategy with, \"Well,
maybe someday they\'ll need it\" doesn\'t fly. The student has to need
it. You have to say, \"This strategy will help you meet this demand.\"
It can\'t be just a strategy just for the sake of having a strategy.
It\'s got to meet some kind of need, and the teacher needs to say,
\"Let\'s talk about what the demands are in your school day. Let\'s talk
about how we can learn things that\'s going to help you meet those
demands,\" and that connection is right up front in terms of the
commitment of the student and understand \-- you call it pretest but I
really \-- I mean, it\'s pretest because people like pretest. So I call
it, \"Well, let\'s just get the student on board, let he or she know
that this strategy could help you meet some of the things you have to do
across your classes.\" And that becomes really important.

Jason Rigas: Hi, I\'m Jason Rigas \[sp\], Carnegie Corporation in New
York. One of the things that we\'ve heard today, and I don\'t mean the
last panel to necessarily get at this, but some of the issues that we do
understand is that the learners, or at least the readers that you are
getting at ninth grade, that you\'re having difficulties with, we know
that we can pretty well identify them by the third grade in the
elementary school. And so what I want to encourage you all to think
about in terms of the research agenda or at least thinking through it is
not just to think that at the ninth grade that this problem emerges at
the ninth grade but, indeed, that issues around middle child, sort of,
middle children\'s development around the third and fourth grade as well
as early adolescence, around sixth and seventh grade, are also where we
need to start getting at some of these issues, and I think that\'s
really critical.

The graph that Doug Buell suggested from Reading for Understanding,
it\'s really around that fourth grade slump or hump that people talk
about around the fourth grade, and we know that we can track that all
the way through. What are we doing to serve children, at least at the
elementary schools, and some of the strategies that we\'re trying to
think through there?

Keith Lenz: That slump is fourth grade, tends to be the grade where
content starts appearing on tests, studying, taking notes. It\'s where
content first start becoming important within the school curriculum. It
begins to shift. And so the idea is, with the idea of issue of
comprehension, processing, good strategies, how do we organize, how do
we think about instruction, and that\'s kind of about the level we say,
you know, in terms of modifying the strategies, about fourth grade on
up, is where we begin to see the need for direct, explicit strategy
instruction for some kids.

Eileen Landay: I\'m Eileen Landay from Brown University. One of the
things that we like to teach our students is the issue of
perspective-taking, but I\'ve been sitting here for about the last hour
wondering how well we, ourselves, accomplish that task of taking
perspective, and I think I want to bring us back to the point that Gil
Garcia made twice this morning, and that is how does this really all
look from the standpoint of the students?

I mean, you were talking about the issue of purpose, but you\'re talking
about the issue of purpose for accomplishing goals in schools; for
accomplishing \-- for doing well with the social studies textbook. It
seems to me that we have to go a lot further than that, and we have to
ask the question, and I\'d really love to hear all of you, the panel,
especially, respond to this. How do we think about how purpose looks
beyond school and from the standpoint of the individual student? And is
it really reading instruction that we\'re looking at or is it the
question of the purpose that students put reading instruction to in
their lives and in the lives that count for them? And one more point,
and that is that we\'ve touched on this computer literacy thing, but we
haven\'t touched on it from the standpoint of the student. We haven\'t
looked at how well students comprehend \-- I\'ve watched high school
students do things that I don\'t comprehend on the computer. So I\'m
wondering whether or not we\'re even defining comprehension
appropriately. So that\'s a very provocative set of questions for you
all.

Carol Olson: I\'ll try first \-- I was just thinking about sort of a
lens with which to look at all the models we\'ve seen today, and, to me,
a very helpful lens is the work of Judith Langer and Arthur Applebee and
their work on instructional scaffolding. They went out and looked at
hundreds of language arts classrooms and came out with five components
that were the hallmarks of effective instruction across those
classrooms, and one of the centerpieces of what they looked at was
ownership, and I think that\'s part of what you were getting \-- I mean,
it was ownership, appropriateness, structure, collaboration, and
internalization. But one of the reasons I brought up this idea of free
voluntary reading is that I do think that kids need to be enfranchised
in school. They need to feel like they\'re viable, authentic
participants. They need to be given opportunities to pursue some of the
things that they are interested in.

Jeff Wilhelm just did a study of middle school boys who won\'t play
school. They just won\'t do anything. And one of the big things that
came up was the kid that said, \"She\'s not interested in my stuff, I\'m
not doing her stuff. If she wants to hear about worldwide wrestling,
then I\'ll listen to her tell me about this strategy stuff,\" or
whatever. I think we need to work to find ways to value the things that
kids are interested in. One of the things in the project I\'m involved
in is we got every single kid, 1,800 kids, their own magazine
subscription, and they got to pick. Now, a lot of those magazines were
above their independent reading level, but, by God, they come to their
homes with their name on them, and they read every single page.

Somehow, we have to find a way to empower kids to be participants in a
learning community.

Patricia Alexander: I want to back to something I alluded to earlier,
and that\'s the issue of beliefs. In the educational psychology
literature, which I know for some people is a dirty word, but in the
educational psychology literature, more and more we\'re understanding
the critical importance of looking at underlying beliefs. In many ways,
what we\'ve been talking about today it sounds like changing students\'
knowledge. But it has a lot more to do with changing their beliefs about
themselves is learner. Hopefully, it changes their beliefs about what it
means to read. In our research alone, my beliefs about what I know,
about what I\'m capable of doing, are far better predictors of what I\'m
going to do than what my actual knowledge is.

So my beliefs drive much more about what I engage in and my degree of
success, then, should be predicted by any degree of my demonstrated
knowledge and actual behaviors.

And, related to that, it goes to the idea of teachers\' beliefs as well,
and how so very critical all of this wraps around teachers\' beliefs \--
even to the silly notion about teachers believing that they\'re not
teaching reading when what they\'re doing is teaching students how to
look at primary and secondary sources in history classes, for example.
Beliefs are critical determiners, and I\'d like to see us add to our
very complex set of models, the notion about beliefs, and part of those
beliefs go to the issue of \-- and, again, I know we haven\'t talked
about it, but it\'s something near and dear to my heart, and Michael\'s,
is this issue of online text, or the way we process online. Students
don\'t believe that is reading and, therefore, when they make judgments
about their own competence, they ignore all what it is they are very
capable about doing in these non-linear text environments.

Jennifer Green: That was helpful for me, those questions. I think that
there have been a lot of assumptions that need to be put on the table
today. One set of assumptions being what set of outputs are we looking
for from students, but also there are lots of different assumptions that
each of these model providers come with about the inputs \-- what is
happening with struggling students? Is it a question of they\'ve got
difficulty with decoding; that they have difficulty with automaticity
and decoding; that they have broader fluency issues or that they lack
strategies, comprehension strategies? So I think that we need to step
back and take a look at the assumptions of what does a struggling reader
look like and what are the kinds of different struggling readers that we
face before us.

Unidentified Speaker: Before people run away, we have a couple of last
things to say. So while you listen to me thank the people who really did
make this workshop happen, I want to give you the e-mail address, and it
should actually be NICHD hyphen <adolescentreading@NIH.gov>. So Michel
was good enough to make me a PowerPoint slide, but \-- I\'m not going to
edit it on the screen in front of you here, but I do want you to e-mail
your suggestions, if you haven\'t looked at the research priorities
document yet, it\'s on this very complicated website, but you can get to
it from any of the sponsors\' websites and just click on all these
numbers and letters.

The synthesis document, the draft of Mary Beth\'s paper, is there. You
can download it; you can print it off. That\'s probably going to change,
over time, because she had some very good suggestions about that. And I
think we want to do a little more with that. There is a summary of the
last workshop, and we especially want your information on the research
priorities document.

I want to acknowledge the people who really worked very hard on this,
and I\'ll start that with a confession. I left last week. My husband was
in the hospital last week, so I was in San Diego for the last half of
the week, and if it weren\'t for Grace Ayre \[sp\] and Tanya Shye
\[sp\], we wouldn\'t have had a workshop. They worked tirelessly all of
last week while my attention was elsewhere. And I know, because I got
little e-mails on my wireless. They kept me posted, but they really did
the work. I want to thank Sandra Bromberg \[sp\] and the people from
Capital Consulting Corporation, because they did a great job on
logistics. I want to thank Barbara Lynch, who is sitting over there, and
the army of science writers, one soldier of whom you see over there,
because they covered the last workshop and did a really wonderful job,
and they\'re covering this workshop, and when you see a summary
document, it will be because they are here. That has made life for all
of us a lot easier.

I want to remind you that \-- you know, here it comes, the commercial
advertisement \-- that we had a lot of co-sponsors, and I think it\'s
one of the reasons that we had so many different people here is that not
only we had major underwriting by the office of vocational and adult
education for this particular workshop, but it was also co-sponsored by
all of the people, the organizations, that co-sponsored the first in the
series of workshops. So it included the Office of Special Ed and Rehab
Services at the Department of Ed; the Office of Educational Research and
Improvement; and the Office of Elementary and Secondary Ed at the
Department of Ed; of course, NICHD; but also the American Federation of
Teachers; the American Speech and Hearing Association; the International
Reading Association; and the National Education Association. And last
time as the workshop wrapped up, I said, you know, this has never
happened before, and I can\'t say that now, because it really has
happened before because we did it once before, and I hope that this is a
partnership that will go on and help to reinforce communication and
dialog between researchers and practitioners, among researchers and
practitioners so that we can continue to not only show you practices
that we think are really good and seem to be working and brainstorm
about; if they work why do they work, but if some of these don\'t work
for some kids, why not, so that we have a good, solid research base to
give you from which to practice.

And just to reassure you, yeah, we\'re going to be looking at basic
development and change in adolescents in their reading and writing
skills, over time. I was impressed with the notions that scripting is
like a sliding scale, it\'s like beginning with scaffolding for teachers
on new topics or for new teachers. I don\'t think scripting is really
bad, and I don\'t think it\'s something you have to do. I think it\'s a
tool and, you know, we shouldn\'t damn it, we shouldn\'t say it\'s the
only way, but it\'s a tool just like these strategies are for our
students and for our teachers. And I\'m just delighted that people came,
that people were constructive with their comments and their questions,
and I\'m sure that you\'ll have more thoughts about this. Please use the
e-mail address \-- remember, it\'s <NICHD-adolescentreading@NIH.gov>,
and the reason it says reading is I had to pick a topic, and it\'s long
enough already, OK? Yes, literacy in adolescence is reading and writing,
and we do know that, and we are going to remember that. Send us your
other comments on what you want us to remember.

And I want to thank all of the speakers, the model presenters, all of
the panelists \-- they did a lot of work to get ready for this, and
they\'re not done. They are coming back here tomorrow morning \--
please. We will actually give you coffee at 8:30. At 9:00 we want those
of you who are conscripted for one more day to be at the Baltimore
Ballroom, Salon A, and they\'re going to be taking a lot of what got
said today and incorporating it into the research priorities document.
So if you didn\'t get to say something, write it down and leave it with
us today or send it to me by e-mail, and we will be incorporating all of
those things into the document.

Thank you so much for coming, thank you for staying to the bitter end,
and good luck driving home \-- be safe.

\[applause\]