**STRATEGIC READING**

Unidentified Speaker: (in progress) \-- the lines that, gee, I wish that
I would have said \-- that it\'s really one of the big pluses for both
of the models this morning, and I think this probably goes for the
models this afternoon, as you\'ll see, is that these folks do have data
to present.

> I was pleased this morning that I didn\'t feel people were being
> critical in a negative way. The comments that were made, I took as
> being constructive. I\'m looking at this as a big brainstorming
> session. What I have said to the model developers is, \"You ought to
> feel like you\'re getting a really big, free consultation on where
> your next steps might be and what else you might be doing or how else
> you might be looking at it,\" and I thought it was nice to see that
> they\'ve already begun to think in those directions as they present
> things. But to have panels that have the mixture of research and
> practice on the ground and people who have been on both sides of that
> continuum, I think, is a very, very valuable bunch of information that
> they\'re getting.
>
> And the questions that are being raised, I hope that you will consider
> as questions that really could be applied to any of these models.
> Someone said to me, \"Why didn\'t you just have all the models present
> first thing and then have all the panels?\" Well, because we need to
> break your day up a little bit, and then once you have time to reflect
> in between, and that\'s what I think is happening. So it is a little
> bit of an iterative process, and there will be similar comments made,
> and you\'ll begin to see a pattern. That\'s what we wanted. We want
> you to see a process of models are developed, evaluation data are
> gathered, and it\'s not easy to gather these data in schools. You have
> to develop a relationship with the school, and you have a lot of
> legwork to do, and analyzing the data is not that easy.
>
> So they\'ve really done a lot of very, very valuable work, and the
> fact that we have a panel here sort of second-guessing them or adding
> to and saying, \"What else could have been done and what else can be
> done,\" is to help those of you who want to go out and develop models,
> to help those of you who are out there implementing models and to get
> those of you who want to do research on them connected with people who
> are thinking in terms of model development, because unless we get
> these kinds of dialogs going, it\'s going to be hard to move the field
> forward both for research and for practice.
>
> So I want to thank you for being so positive and being so constructive
> in your comments and, with that, I think we\'ll just move forward with
> more of it. Barbara.

Barbara Kapinus: Good afternoon. Welcome to Part 2. I\'m Barb Kapinus
from the National Education Association, and I'm pleased to be one of
the sponsors for this gathering. This particular session is going to
focus on a model called \"Strategic Reading,\" and I know I\'ve found it
to be an impressive model when I was doing my background reading. So
I\'m anxious to hear more about it, and I\'m anxious to hear people\'s
responses to it.

So our first speaker who will describe the model is Alta Shaw from the
Johns Hopkins University.

Alta Shaw: Good afternoon. I\'m Alta Shaw from the instructional team at
the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins
University, and strategic reading is a language arts component that\'s a
part of our school-wide comprehensive program. So there are many layers
of support to this program, and there is almost always a sense of
urgency surrounding it, and so that\'s my segue to actually begin our
presentation.

Strategic reading is a piece that is put within a 90-minute block, 4x4
scheduling, and students in the ninth grade come to us reading two grade
levels or more below. The majority of the kids, about 50% of those kids,
according to our data, come in at about fourth or fifth-grade level. As
we looked at programs, we thought, \"What can we do to support these
students who are confronted also with the reading problems, the literacy
problems, in their content areas?\" And so as a result of that, we
decided that we would do something called \"double-dosing,\" and so the
ninth-grade kids who are tested with the Gates-McGinnity, actually in
September, are actually given the strategic reading course.

And, as you notice, our approach to reading takes on the aspects of the
cognitive interaction that takes place between the reader and the text.
So lots of information is given to teachers in the form of ongoing staff
development to enlighten them with that, and many challenges that we
have overcome have basically been the result of the ideas and feedback
that we\'ve received from teachers in the program.

We think that with students it\'s very important to inundate them with
multiple modes of reading and to actually give them multiple
opportunities to read, and the one thing that we found is a lot of the
students actually were used to working with workbooks, used to doing
dittos and that type of thing, and so during this particular 18-week
course, we equipped the teachers with materials based on their feedback
to enable them to take the kids through multiple opportunities to read,
with the whole idea of getting the kids to improve by way of teaching
them strategies with emphasis on how and why and when to use those
strategies, but also ultimately to get the kids to understand the joys
of reading. And as teachers told us in order to do that, they needed to
have materials in their classrooms, they needed the kind of staff
development that we talked about earlier today, and I\'ll address that
as we move through the program.

The characteristics of the kids that we\'re talking about, for us, look
like this. These are kids who are very insecure about the whole idea of
reading. We have found them to be astute listeners \-- kids who will,
while they are not able to comprehend or to read fluently, they have
listened to many things that have happened to them in the past, and so
even though they may be fourth or fifth-grade readers, often that
content base is there, and no one has actually unlocked it. In many
cases, the content or lack of content knowledge to support their prior
knowledge as readers is not there. So we try real hard with our teachers
to enable them to have the high-interest materials but also to give
teachers an opportunity to have a variety of things available to our
students.

Inherent in our program are multiple opportunities to write as well, and
as we move from the first semester to the second semester, the writing
increases, but during the first semester, we take the responsive
writing, we have kids do journals and that type of thing, to enable them
to express themselves. And as stated earlier, we are very concerned
about the voices of these students, and I would certainly like to
comment on what someone said earlier \-- it is inherent in the whole
process of helping these kids, you must be able to meet them a little
bit with what their language looks like, and so we use \-- utilize \--
as much as we can, opportunities for them to explain a little bit about
the way they describe something, and I\'ll talk about that a little bit
later, because we believe that that\'s important.

These are the four core strategies, and there are subsets that go with
those, and these are pretty much framed in what I would call \"before,\"
\"during,\" and \"after\" reading processes. We found, from talking to
teachers, that if we overwhelm them with a lot of technical knowledge, a
lot of them would be a little less, you know, ready to move forward, and
so we take this approach and basically we feel that if the students can
learn these four pieces with the subsets that go with them, that we can
carry them into the second semester with a lot more knowledge.

A lot of the emphasis is placed during this 18 weeks on informational
text because we know that during the second semester, when they move
into English 1, there will be more information around the office craft
and literature. And as I move to the components, you\'ll see that we\'ve
kind of borrowed quite a bit from the lower ranks. We\'ve looked at what
was being done in elementary school with a balanced literacy program. In
Philadelphia, where we have several sites, we followed the idea that the
district was moving the balanced literacy approach from elementary to
middle.

> And so many of these things we have pretty much put together based on
> what we thought kids missed, because in the paper that my colleague,
> Robert Balsants \[sp\] and also my colleague, Dr. Jim McCartland
> \[sp\], who is here today, put together, we found that it\'s what we
> call the \"intermediate skills\" that these kids are missing. The kids
> that we deal with can decode minimally, and we found that the problems
> that surround their reading were pretty much based on their inability
> to infer and to make use of the pieces that are around them.

I\'ll go back a bit here. I\'m trying to keep within the framework. For
reading showcase, we believe that making public the thoughts of the
reader and the thoughts of the reader interacting with the author is a
very key piece. And so voice intonation, yes, that\'s important, but the
most important thing for these kids is for them to observe the teacher
as a reader, and we ask teachers to not just keep reading but to do an
interactive reading \-- to stop and engage in conversation \-- and
sometimes that conversation is very insightful. At some point during the
latter part of the 18 weeks, we invite the students, as teams, to take
on this segment as well.

The other thing that\'s covered during reading showcase is filling in
the content gap, and so we use materials like the \"Century Book\" by
Tom Brokaw, which is given to every teacher to support what was going on
in the 1930s, if you\'re reading something that\'s set in that era. We
use \"Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul,\" which, in some ways, is very
motivational, and we were a little concerned about it at first, because
we thought, \"Does this type of thing meet the needs of all the kids?\"
I can tell you that this is a book that if the teacher puts down, it
disappears almost instantaneously. So we find that kids, no matter where
they come from, have universal needs, and so giving them an opportunity
to listen to the teacher read from these books but also making the books
available for them to read during sustained silent reading is very
important.

The focus lesson segment is 20 minutes, and this is when you actually
hone in on the skills and strategies. And, as I mentioned earlier, there
is always a sense of urgency surrounding us, and so the application is
immediate. So if I\'ve taught my kids to skim and to look at text
features and text structures during the mini-lesson, the next day I will
probably highlight during the showcase piece some of that. And teachers
are welcome to \-- even though we provide a structured lesson plan, and
you\'ll see that in a minute \-- they are welcome to slow that down.
There is a level of flexibility that enables the teacher to save and
keep their good teacher judgment. So we call them \"suggested\" lessons.

The thing that we have found and teachers have told us is the time that
it takes for them to put together a lot of this piece really is so
important, and so as we\'ve made these things available, we have found
that teachers are very thankful.

Student team literature is essentially our traditional way of doing a
guided reading approach for core novel or core text, including poetry as
well, and it is probably the piece that we feel the most comfortable
with, but we realize that with the incoming ninth grade kids being two
grade levels or more below, even with the support of this type of guided
reading approach, the kids still needed extra support. And so we built
the other components around the student team lit piece and during the
second part of that first semester, the schedule flexibly changes, and
as kids move from a shorter text to a longer text into the types of
novels that we\'ve written for, the teachers tell us that this is very
important.

During this time, kids learn how to develop vocabulary skills, they
develop automaticity; we have a unique, cool responding approach to
that. They also learn to write what we call \"meaningful sentences,\"
which embeds lots of context clues and things that will enable them to
support the reading. A major part of what we do here also is pretty much
girded by what we call the \"cooperative learning structure.\" These
kids work in four- or five-member teams, and we believe that discussion
is just as important as the opportunities to reread and reread and
reread. As these kids begin to discuss the language for them comes into
play, and they begin how to understand how to make that language work
for them. So the discussion part of student team lit is invaluable.

The last 20 minutes of our 90-minute block is a little bit controversial
as it relates to high schools, and a lot of teachers said to us earlier,
\"Kids will not do this.\" Well, we\'ve proven that to be wrong. We
actually have three centers. One is a composer square center, which is
the writing center. There is a data central center, which is the center
that contains informational text including graphs and charts. And there
is also a word play center. In the word play center, kids are able to
take a look at different ways of using words, the subtle nuances,
multiple meanings, and, of course, utilizing the tools that the teachers
give them \-- affixes charts, you know, prefix charts, and things like
that.

What we have found is if there is going to be self-sustained silent
reading, usually that is a designated day. So we do not try to mix the
centers and the sustained silent reading. So a typical week for a
teacher, and this is a choice that they make, might be three days of
center activities and two days of sustained silent reading, and that
schedule is flipped during the following week. We develop prototypes for
the activities because teachers have told us that they don\'t have time
to do that, and once we sort of give them a little boost, they will say
to us, \"You know, I\'ve found something that I think works in the
center as well.\"

We have also found, by way of videotaping and watching the students,
that they are very motivated by the differentiation that takes place
within this 90-minute block. Many of them will work through the other
three components because they know that they will be able to make some
choices.

Very briefly I might say, we also collate and compile boxes of
materials, suggested materials, and this is something that teachers have
told us that\'s crucial to doing this and so poster activities have been
written so the kids can reread passages. The classroom reflects the fact
that reading and writing are both message-driven processes, and so
during the center activity, the kids are engaged in not only working
through the center activities but also contributing to the print that\'s
available in those activities in the centers.

The thing that really happens here also is while other kids are working
in their centers and also doing sustained silent reading, individual
teachers can poll students. And so during that time, the teachers are
also to poll the kids, and I\'ll talk about that in just a second.

This is what our suggested lesson plan looks like. We have several
units. Again, we identify, on the left, the strategies that can be
modeled. We also, on the right column, the materials that can be used
and, again, teachers tell us that it\'s very important that we support
them in this way. We also welcome them to slow this down, to add on to
the process themselves, but just in case we have a new teacher who has
never taught reading before or we have a math teacher who has found him
or herself in a reading classroom, this becomes very resourceful. We
make activity suggestions for homework as well.

I think that the one thing that teachers also tell us that they really
like is the use of handouts and also transparencies. We believe that
concert reading, guided reading, is an important process. And so every
one of our student team lit classrooms have to have an overhead
transparency.

How am I doing with time? One minute? Oh, my goodness. OK, just very
quickly, here are some data that show some anecdotal records that
teachers keep, and these kids are interviewed during the self-selected
reading time. This is a reading passage performance record that measures
the number of words. And an invaluable part of this is the coaching, and
I\'m sorry I don\'t have lots of time to talk about this, but this could
not happen without our coaching model. We have coaches who represent the
best of teachers in the districts that we work in, teachers on special
assignment, and so they work to support the teachers in helping them to
make some decisions.

This is our latest study from Franklin High School in Philadelphia and,
just very quickly, I\'d like to say that in nine months, over a
four-month period, we saw nine months of growth, and this is based on a
study using 146 students. There are other studies, and Dr. McCartland is
here. He actually has a data set, so I'm going to move on because at
this time we\'d like to show something that will give you just a very
brief bird\'s-eye view of what happens in our classrooms.

\[video\]

Allison Miller: Third period is a full class, busy class, energetic,
great to volunteer. They work in groups the best, I would say.

\[class interaction\]

Allison Miller: They work well, they ask good questions, they ask
questions, which some classes are quiet. They don\'t say too much.
We\'ve come a long way.

Horace Rooney: I enjoyed being able to teach the students different
strategies for reading. I think teachers sometimes take for granted that
students automatically know how to read and that they automatically to
gain meaning from what they read, and in this type of curriculum, I
think it helps students and teachers take a look at the real process,
which goes on when one reads; the fact that you can\'t simply read
words. You have to connect meaning to the words, and if you\'re not
doing that then you\'re not reading. So I think the curriculum does a
very good job of doing that.

\[end video\]

Barbara Kapinus: Thank you very much.

\[applause\]

Unidentified Speaker: Thank you, Alta. I\'m going to introduce the panel
respondents all together, and that way they can just follow, one after
the other. So, first of all, we\'re going to have Hugh Katz \[sp\] from
the University of Kansas, who is standing here ready to go; then we\'ll
have Lynn Havens from Project CRISS; and last but definitely not least,
we\'ll have Douglas Buell \[sp\] from Madison East High School.

Hugh Katz: Thank you. I come to this task from a couple of different
perspectives. I\'m involved in research that\'s now taking me into
adolescence. I have a longitudinal study of a large group of children
we\'ve been following since kindergarten, and they are now in eighth
grade, we begin to look at adolescent literacy, so I\'m very interested
in the issues that are important with that group of individuals. But
I\'ve also come as a practitioner. I know that many of you are teachers,
and I am a teacher as well. I teach college freshmen.

You often don\'t think of having to teach reading at that level, but
you\'d be surprised at the skills that I find in the classroom \-- or
the lack of skills \-- in reading, at least strategic reading. So I\'m
finding myself going back and actually teaching reading or how to be a
strategic reader to my college freshmen. So I think they could benefit
greatly from the strategic reading program that we just saw.

Now, putting my remarks together, I use a model that I draw on when I\'m
evaluating research that I come in contact with. It looks at four
different aspects of the research \-- content, what\'s being taught, is
it theory-driven? Does it make sense in terms of what it is we want to
change? That\'s certainly a strong part for the strategic reading
program. It\'s unfortunate that in the presentation you don\'t get the
detail that is provided through some of their materials. The program is
quite rich in terms of the strategies that they choose. Many of them, by
themselves, have been shown to be effective in research. Another thing I
like about it is that it\'s done within the traditional high school
curriculum, which is hard to do for research when you\'re looking for
effects, but it\'s quite good in terms of generalized ability.

A second issue is implementation. You know, we\'ve heard that the proof
is in the pudding but, in many cases, especially with struggling
readers, it\'s in how you make the pudding. We\'ve recognized, over many
years of working with kids that struggle in reading, that the
instruction needs to be explicit, systematic, supportive, and intensive.
And, again, I think the strategic reading program incorporates a number
of those principles \-- the think-alouds particularly give the reader or
the student some ideas of what strategic readers do. They also support
it with guided practice and feedback. I think at least the beginnings of
a good instructional model are part of this model.

The main two issues I want to talk about is the effectiveness and the
generalized ability of the program. When I look at effectiveness, I
think about measuring change and how one goes about doing that.
Actually, three different \-- at least three different measurements
might be considered. The first is content-based measurement; that is,
measuring what you\'re teaching. So if you\'re teaching fluency,
actually measuring fluency so that you can gauge whether your
intervention is having some effect or not. There is some of that in this
particular model, but I would suggest that we could do this more
systematically. But something like fluency, that can be measured using a
curriculum-based measurement model, where you look at gains in fluency
over a weekly/bi-weekly time period, and you can actually see if the
children are benefiting from the intervention that you\'re putting in
place. The same can be done with strategy training, looking to see if
the students are actually using the strategies that you taught in the
intervention.

> Standardized testing, of course, is included in this, because what
> standardized testing does is allow us to gauge the treatment in terms
> of what might be expected for a particular grade or age, and I\'ll
> come back to that in a minute.

The final is functional measurement \-- measuring \-- looking at the
outcomes that we\'re really concerned about, beyond just improving
performance and standardized tests. Are the kids reading more? I heard
at one of the breaks, one of the participants talked about measuring
gain by looking to see if circulation in the school library has gone up.
We could also look at out-of-class reading by students. Are grades
improving? They\'ve begun to do that again in the program and,
unfortunately, we didn\'t get to see some of those measures that are
included in this program.

> Back to standardized testing \-- the problem there is choosing the
> index that you want to use to quantify your change. You\'ll see, in
> much of this work, grade-equivalent scores are being used, and we like
> grade-equivalent scores, because they have good face validity. They
> seem to make sense to us. So if we find that a child \-- or student
> \-- has moved from the seventh grade to the ninth grade, that sounds
> like a large change. But actually it\'s not that large of a change. It
> can be quite misleading. But the problem with grade-equivalent scores
> comes when you want to find out if it\'s real change; finding out if
> it\'s change over and above the error that might be expected in any
> activity that you engage in, and what we would like here is a
> measurement of average change against variability in change, or what
> we call \"affect size.\" Grade-equivalent scores aren\'t appropriate
> for that. We want to use standard scores or raw scores, perhaps, to
> gauge that.
>
> If we do find change, the next thing we want to know is it due to the
> treatment? All right, are the gains that we saw in strategic reading
> due to the activities that they put in place? To do that, we need a
> comparison group, we need a comparison prior to the treatment or
> what\'s often done in terms of a control group and again, Dr. Shaw
> didn\'t get to show the data that they have available that compares
> the gains that they make through strategic reading back to other
> schools.
>
> The control group design is best, as Dr. Francis said earlier, is if
> you have random assignment, because one of the problem areas is that
> there are any number of factors, differences between the control and
> experimental group that can explain your differences over and above
> the treatment, and random assignment takes care of that. Well, that\'s
> very difficult to do in a school setting. David suggested ways of
> dealing with that, but what\'s most often done is to use an
> alternative class as to deal with your \-- to gauge whether your
> change is due to the treatment or not, and that\'s quite problematic
> because we\'re never quite sure of what other factors might contribute
> to the difference other than the treatment. But in the initial stages
> of research where strategic reading is, it\'s a perfectly fine thing
> to do to begin a program by looking at alternative classrooms.
>
> I might suggest there is something that I think was mentioned earlier
> is what classroom do you pick? One of the problems is we pick a
> typical classroom. Well, it\'s not surprising to find that students in
> a special classroom or a special program might do better than ones in
> a typical class. So a strategy might be to use the best class that we
> can find in a district or in a school system that\'s comparable, that
> we can match along important variables and look to see if our
> treatment group outperforms that.
>
> Finally, moving to generalized ability, a couple of points here \--
> let me just go to the second one, because I\'m running out of time \--
> one of the tricks here is, when we do intervention research, what we
> try to do is come up with the best possible intervention. I mean, as
> teachers we can hardly resist that \-- to try to find the best that we
> can do to effect change. One of the problems is that when we get to
> the end, is we\'re unsure of exactly what we did to cause that change,
> and I call that the \"bouillabaisse problem.\" We\'ve made a stew
> that\'s got so many ingredients in it, we\'re not sure which is the
> most important ingredients. That\'s not a problem in the early stages
> of research \-- certainly not a criticism to strategic reading. But as
> you move along in a program of research, that becomes an important
> problem.
>
> What we often want to do in generalization is put it another setting
> and in that setting we often don\'t have the time or the money to do
> the intervention exactly the way it was done before, so we have to
> pick and choose, and unless we\'ve conducted a systematic program of
> research to where we\'ve looked at the parts, it\'s hard to tell what
> to take out of the stew.
>
> I\'ll stop there, I\'m out of time. Thank you.

\[applause\]

Lynn Havens: Lynn Havens with Project CRISS, and I\'m kind of glad my
project isn\'t up here, but I\'ve learned so much from all this. I\'m
taking notes like mad. I do know, being a program, and looking at a
research base and data collection, that the data collection part is
really different. It\'s hard. We\'re so excited about getting into
classrooms and seeing things work that taking the time out to evaluate
sometimes is difficult.

I also felt there were lots of strengths with this program, and I\'m
just \-- sort of go through the lists that I have made, again, based
mostly on the reading that we did, although I think also has given some
answers to what I posed here already with her presentation. She, in
certain areas, even though she went quickly, she had a little more
depth.

I like the training part, and I don\'t think this she addressed, but the
training, sounds to me, to be very practical where there are model
situations, teachers are put in a position, first, as being a student in
the class and then as being the teacher. So it seems to me their
training is very practical, with the trainers actually modeling how they
would do the program, and that seems to me to be a good way of doing it,
and it\'s a three-day training program.

The other part of this is they recognize the fact that there needs to be
a lot of support to training and I think they have a wonderful model.
I\'m not sure how you do this all the time. They have a peer in-class
expert, so this is a teacher who has additional training in the program
and, unless I\'m missing this from the reading, it sounds like the coach
is a full-time person in charge of two schools, and I would love that
for my program, but a lot of times that\'s difficult for schools to do.
So if this program is to be going to different audiences in different
locations, that might be something to look into, but I think the plan to
have a coach, at least it would be a half-time coach, full-time at a
building is absolutely wonderful if you can do that. And that coach does
modeling and observing and I think Alta showed us one of the forms that
that coach would be using. So I think that\'s a powerful support and
really necessary.

> The other part, and this wasn\'t addressed either place, I guess,
> enough to help me understand was the role of the university. It
> sounded like they did additional classes \-- this is Johns Hopkins \--
> and also did additional meetings with the coaches, and I guess that
> brought up a question to me that I think if a school is truly getting
> involved with this, they do need to be independent. So I assume,
> somewhere in the process, although I didn\'t read it or hear about it,
> that there is a way where schools take on the program independently,
> but that\'s something I would like to know \-- how the university
> turns over the ownership so a building or a district can be
> independent with the program.
>
> Another part that I don\'t think was addressed up here but I think is
> an important one is their effort to be a program that not only works
> in the classroom but also with the entire school climate, and some of
> the things that were mentioned in the literature were their
> self-contained academies where this occurs within the ninth-grade
> setting. They also have some alternative ways for students that need
> more help. There are onsite alternative programs, which is a
> short-term help. They also have a twilight school for additional help.
> And some students, I think Alta mentioned the double-dose that they
> have with this program, but they also offer a triple-dose for those
> students needing it. So it seems like they have a lot of support for
> students not just for teachers. There also is support ongoing for 10
> twelfth grade students, so I like that part of this.
>
> In the literature it talked a lot about improving the climate. In the
> data collection, I didn\'t see anything on that, and so I guess
> that\'s another one of my areas here. If it\'s important to change
> that climate or the context, has this happened? Possibly even looking
> at things like discipline referrals and attendance, and I think some
> of the earlier programs talked about that \-- might address that. I
> also wondered, as these ninth grade students \-- that\'s the impact
> population that we\'re looking at \-- as they go on to 10th, 11th, and
> 12th grade, are there other teachers using or at least familiar with
> these strategies so that the same language and some of the same
> strategies are being used in the regular. I assume we want to get
> these students into the regular classroom, so are they still being
> supported? So I was curious about that and if that was being looked
> at.
>
> I think my next question was somewhat addressed with this \-- from the
> reading, it seemed to me, although the progression of instruction of
> strategies went from a more direct control to guided practice to
> independent, which would have been the last stage, there still seem to
> be a lot of control by the teacher in the literature, but I think,
> from what Alta was saying here, that there are lots of opportunities
> to get those students on their own. At the beginning, when we talked
> about the reading showcase where the teacher models reading by
> thinking out loud, it sounded that the students would also be doing
> this, which I think is a great opportunity. They student-team
> literature areas where the kids are working together in cooperative
> learning, and I think in that, also, there was in the videos, a
> comment about students asking questions \-- I was afraid that this
> almost maybe was a little teacher-directed, but it sounded like that
> might not be the case also. So I guess my \-- I would be searching for
> that progression to actually get to the stage where the students were
> really independent with it, and I think that may be happening. I
> didn\'t read that.
>
> I had a question about \-- and I guess this comes from my program.
> We\'re feeling that we cannot be very effective if the administrators
> are not fully involved and in the literature I didn\'t see anything
> about training the administrators in this. So I had a question on
> that.
>
> Also, if we\'re looking at next steps, I think a good place to go with
> this would be to address students \-- a broader base of students,
> maybe generalize more, getting to \-- since this was just ninth grade,
> and those with learning problems, and I believe it was in an urban
> setting, so perhaps getting to different grade levels, perhaps being
> from a rural state, Montana, getting into rural settings as well,
> because I think there are a lot of areas getting away from the
> university, and if this is transportable, that might be something else
> that more data collection and research needs to be done \-- moving
> this to other locations.
>
> In research that was provided to us, it appeared that there were
> greater gains in reading on standardized tests than in vocabulary, and
> there were two key areas, so my question is why? Why maybe was reading
> better than vocabulary? What could they do to improve vocabulary
> instruction? What was working in the processes? What wasn\'t, and so
> forth?
>
> I believe the program was looking at reading and writing together, and
> I didn\'t see too much in the data collection on writing samples,
> although I did see one place where it said \"a pre-writing sample.\"
> So those were some things that I thought could be added to data
> collection. Also, little in what was collected, did I see to much on
> attitude. But my feeling was, through the reading and also the video,
> that \-- and I think this is so key is students\' attitudes toward
> learning, and it seemed very positive. I didn\'t see too much data
> that was collected that way, but I think that\'s something that needs
> to be shared and is really an important part of this.
>
> I hope that you will continue a long-term study with those ninth
> graders. I would be curious as to how the program continues to last
> within them. Are they, as they get to be tenth graders, juniors, and
> seniors, are they mainstreamed into the regular classrooms? Is there a
> lower dropout rate for those students? Are there higher college-bound
> numbers? In jobs, how did they do? I think it would be really
> interesting to follow these students for as long as possibly could.
>
> I think that\'s about all I had on that. Thanks.

\[applause\]

Douglas Buell: My attention was wavering between being here and what my
students are supposedly doing back with a substitute, but I\'ll try to
focus in on here instead. I\'m going to preface my comments by making a
distinction between looking at a global perspective on this issue and
perhaps looking at a more specific perspective.

A specific perspective, I think, might be a focus on the reader. What
does it mean to be a reader? From someone who works in a high school on
a daily basis, I would take a step back and ask a more global question,
which focuses on the learner and asks what does it mean to be a learner?
And, more specifically what does it mean to be a learner in this school?
And if we look at the strategic reading model in terms of this more
global type of perspectives, I think it brings out some interesting
issues, and if you look at the graphic that you\'re seeing up here, the
graphic you should recognize, if you\'re familiar with the Rand Reading
Study Report that came out earlier this year, and it tries to present a
heuristic for looking at reading comprehension, which is a very complex
type of an examination of reading comprehension and notice that the
reader, the text that the reader engages with and the specific
activities that the reader is involved with is really deeply embedded in
social/cultural context, and that makes a lot of the things that we try
to do with readers much more complicated. When we look at that reader as
a learner, then we\'re looking at it in a broader context.

So as I was looking at the particular model program that I was asked to
respond to, I think my take is that it has a strong focus on the reader
and not as clear as what the focus might be when you look at it in the
broader context, and I\'ll bring out some specific questions I would
connect with that.

I would echo a lot of the comments that have previously been mentioned
about the strengths of the program. I really like that modeling on the
part of the teacher, I like the think-alouds, I like showing students
what proficient readers do as proficient readers raise questions, as
they make connections with their background, as they make inferences, as
they synthesize material and develop a personal take on it and so forth,
and I think students have to see that, they have to see a reader
interacting with the text, and they have to see how it happens in a
number of situations. So I think that\'s real strength.

I like the model, I like the four stages moving from a teacher think
aloud approach to specifically zeroing in on specific issues that are
important issues to work on with students to having a time to practice
those. In particular, I think that the way that this particular model
looks at many of the issues that struggling high school readers have is
an important one, because it\'s always seemed to me that practice is the
missing variable; that when you see students who aren\'t fluent, very
often you see students who rarely read and rarely get practice and
rarely get practice in settings where they\'re getting feedback and
guidance and support. So I think that\'s also a strength here.

I also echo what Lynn said about the support component, especially the
coaches who come in and work side-by-side with the teachers, who provide
the kind of feedback and ongoing support and staff development that I
think make a program like this potentially successful.

OK, but if you take that step back and look at the broader context, and
you ask questions like what exactly does a program like this particular
program do to help students become more effective learners in a school,
I think there are some additional questions that could be raised.
What\'s interesting to me when we collect a variety of data that is
ostensibly collected to see if students are better readers after we\'ve
worked with them, the data tends to be reading data. We collect reading
tests. Yet the teachers in my school want to know \-- what does this
mean? Does this mean they\'ll be more likely to be able to read my
biology book or my history book or so forth? That\'s kind of the larger
question. So improving on reading tests is one measurement, but do the
students do better on other kinds of measurements that perhaps are
looking students in the face.

\[laughter\]

That was not part of my presentation. Perhaps we should put a new
overhead up. This next overhead is insect-free, and it, I think, starts
to help me put the strategic learning \-- strategic reading program in a
learning context. What you see is a metaphor that we developed in the
Madison schools for looking at working with the group of students that
this particular program targets \-- high school struggling readers \--
and we looked at what do we need to do as a building, what do we need to
do as a school, to help these students perform more effectively across
the curriculum, and we conceptualized it as a three-legged stool.

If you look at the leg that says \"developmental reading instruction,\"
it seems to me that that\'s what this program is attempting to do. It\'s
attempting to provide specific and additional support and instruction
for students who need it, and that it follows, I think, a strong
research orientation and is put together in a way that I think is highly
defensible. But I have trouble seeing the stool stand on one leg, and I
think those other two legs, for me, become the other parts of the issue
that raise some questions.

What is the reality for these students when they are not in this
particular program? What is the reality for these students when they are
in a biology classroom or a social studies classroom or so forth? So
some of the questions that I would say is, is there evidence of transfer
of these core reading strategies into those other settings? Are they
more self-questioning? Are they better able to make connections to their
background knowledge? Do they synthesize better when they are sitting in
a social studies classroom or a science classroom and so forth? I would
really be interested in knowing if that kind of transfer occurs.

Do we have any evidence that construct \-- that these core strategies
will actually have an impact on content learning? And I say that because
I think the larger question, that third leg up there, which says
\"classroom learning strategies,\" students may find that the
instruction that they face in those classrooms isn\'t necessarily
totally compatible with the instruction that they faced in their reading
classroom. I find that a lot when you\'re working with strategic reading
behaviors, and the students says, \"Well, yeah, but if you saw what we
do in social studies, you\'d not be using these.\" Which is a
problematic issue for the reality of what happens in a classroom
setting, OK?

So if you look at that, if you look at this program in that context, I
think that the larger question, for me, becomes how do you integrate a
program that has a successful looking ingredients into a school context
and, again, I would raise some other questions related to that. One of
them is the perceptions of the other teachers who aren\'t involved in
the program on whose responsibility it is to promote the literacy of
their students and in what exactly literacy is and, again, that, to me,
could look at the mismatch that occurs between working with students in
one setting and having the rest of the program not aligned with that
particular philosophy, which I think will frustrate the kids.

The related question, a strength of this program, is students getting a
lot of practice on high interest, accessible types of text, which I
think is something that\'s missing with a lot of programs, but is it
likely that they will have a choice in their other classes that also
reflect where they are in terms of their reading, or will they find
those frustrations to remain without any sort of support?

> And, finally, I think I would raise an issue with the role of the
> coaches. I can just see administrators looking at this program as
> being a highly desirable program in their school and saying, \"The
> thing is, we won\'t be able to afford the coaches part of it, but I
> can really see us doing the classroom part of it.\" For me, that\'s
> highly problematic, so I think part of the research collection, I
> think, needs to establish the relationship between the support, the
> staff development, and the coaches or we\'ll get the part of it that
> makes it work pared away, and we\'ll get a runt program, perhaps, put
> into place that may not be successful.
>
> Thank you.

\[applause\]

Alta Shaw: I\'d like to respond. First of all, thank you very much. I
think that all of us who are here, and I have several colleagues here
today \-- three of the coaches \-- hold your hands up \-- from
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Dr. McCartland. I think that I\'d like to
just share a couple of things, particularly related to the last
discussion. We are school-wide-based reform initiative, and so the ninth
grade academy offers four core programs, and for those students who need
it, strategic reading is there. So we\'ve also something called
\"Freshman Seminar,\" which addresses how kids organize their time,
taking notes, and that type of thing, and there is also transitional
mathematics, which is a transitional piece to take the kids into math.

We work so closely together that strategies, all of the pieces that we
talked about in the presentation \-- and I apologize for sounding like a
motor mouth, but there was just so much to say in a short period of time
\-- we share those across contents. And so we work as an instructional
team to make sure that all the content-area teachers, particularly about
the second or third week of the program, begin to understand what is
happening in strategic reading. We share the strategies that you saw; we
also invite all the content area teachers to voluntarily come to our
training sessions, and many of them do.

The other thing is we try real hard to consider the logistics, and so
the results are an organizational team of facilitators. Those
organizational facilitators work with parents, work with the
administration to enlighten them about what is going on in the classes
as well. So we\'re kind of advantaged in the sense that we have that
comprehensive program.

The other thing I\'d like to mention, and I didn\'t get a chance to say
very much about the coaches, we\'re very particular in making sure that
the coaches are not evaluative in the way that they work with teachers.
We do not refer to the names of teachers. In fact, we have teacher A,
teacher B, teacher C. We rank the teachers and something that we call an
\"implementation study.\" We put together a little tool, and so about
two times per semester we have interviews with the administration.
During that time the math persons as well as the language arts as well
as those persons who are working in the other content areas meet with
the principal so that we rank our teachers high implementer, medium, and
low.

> There is so much more that we need to learn about this, but we do find
> the trend across the school is to look at things like the kid who
> choose to not go to lunch but go to the library and read. We\'ve heard
> that story. We\'ve also been told, in places like Chattanooga,
> Tennessee, that the office referrals are down often during the times
> that the kids are dealing with language arts and with the other
> double-dose courses. So I appreciate all that you\'ve said. I just
> wanted to make sure that we would put those pieces in there, because
> we are school-wide, Dr. McCartland has studies relating to the
> attendance rate. Fortunately, we are looking now at our ninth grade
> kids moving to tenth grade, and so those kids who took strategic
> reading this year will also be involved in a literacy initiative
> called \"Reading and Writing and Your Careers,\" and there will be
> more emphasis on writing. Christine Snee \[sp\], who is the author of
> that piece is sitting here with us today.
>
> We are also having a course written, even as we speak, called
> \"College Prep Reading and Writing.\" So our initiative is focused on
> following the kids through ninth grade all the way through twelfth
> grade.

Unidentified Speaker: Thank you, a great set of presentations, and if
you want to sit where you can respond.

Alta Shaw: OK, I\'ll do that.

Unidentified Speaker: Just a reminder, that if you have a question or
response, be sure to go to a microphone or raise your hand, and we have
someone who will get it to you or help you get it. The other thing is to
be sure and state your name and where you\'re from before you give us
your question or response and, last but not least, again, I want to
remind you that the responses and the questions are to help us begin to
frame a research agenda for adolescent literacy more than critique the
models that we\'re looking at.

So \-- responses and questions? Everybody is digesting lunch, it looks
like.

Diana Harold: I was really struck by \-- this is the first time that
libraries have come up at all in any of the discussion, and one of the
things \-- oh \-- I forgot \-- Diana Harold, Center for Adolescent
Reading, Grand Junction, Colorado \-- I think that \-- you know, these
are very wonderful for the classroom kind of thing, but one of the
things I would really like to look more at is adolescent literacy going
throughout the spectrum of adolescence.

The kids that I work with aren\'t in school, they are not students, but
a lot of them in correctional facilities are becoming readers. And so
anything that will connect with that is of importance to me.

Gil Garcia: Gil Garcia, U.S. Department of Ed \-- I read all of the
Harry Potter books because I wanted to know, for myself, what it was
about them that was getting, especially boys, hooked on reading. And
while I didn\'t necessarily answer that question, it occurred to me that
one of the reasons that Harry Potter \-- at least, for me \-- Harry
Potter was very rewarding because of the adolescent\'s perspective that
the author takes. I mean, Harry is the main actor, but he also teams up
with Hermione and with Ron, and the three of them together and
independently go about solving any number of problems. The three of
them, independently and together, have very good ideas of who the good
teachers are and who the not-so-good teachers are. The three of them,
independently and collectively, know school policies and school
procedures and school rules and what happens when you break them and
what happens \-- what you can do to kind of circumvent some of them.

So perhaps that is one of the reasons that adolescents are identifying
so highly with those books, and perhaps even boys, because he is Harry,
of course. How do stories like that fit into your program?

Alta Shaw: Actually, we had a teacher here in Baltimore who used Harry
Potter, and I think that what we try to do is enable teachers to bring a
personalization to the class. And so this particular teacher had talked
to her kids about being exposed to various types of literature, various
types of genres, and so her kids were very accepting of that. At the
same time, there are other books that would focus more toward females.
But what we try to get kids to understand is, it\'s so important while
you\'re in school that you learn the importance of reading, the
importance of becoming literate, and then you make the choices that you
want to make. And so we try to keep that open. It often occurs, and when
I\'ve watched students, I\'ve watched boys move more toward occasionally
the auto mechanics books but also toward things that are enlightening
them about other cultures. And so giving them a wide variety of choices
often gives the teacher a chance to sort of level that out. So we\'ve
not had any problems with that.

One of the things that has been somewhat problematic is enabling the
students who need to read the low levels of books to feel comfortable
doing that without feeling as though they are reading baby books. And so
we have placed about 50 books that are somewhat controversial in the
classroom, and some of the anecdotal records that we have from teachers
and from working with them, we found that kids will feel much more
comfortable when they find that they can master those things. And so the
kids who fall into that range are very comfortable. But we do have to
usually hide the levels, and so we talk to teachers about doing that.

But I think that the whole idea of providing a range of materials and
really giving kids an opportunity to understand the value of literature
and the ability of the individual to choose and select what\'s important
to them, keeps our teachers pretty much moving in the right direction
with that.

Diane Vagily: My name is Diane Vagily \[sp\] from the U.S. Department
Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation. My thought, my question,
is focused on family supports. Any ideas or plans that have been put in
place or wish to be put in place so that families cannot only support
but begin to build knowledge and skills to help the student, help the
school, help the community?

Alta Shaw: We are at an advantage of Hopkins in that Dr. Joyce
Epstein\'s family partnership program is in place, and so a facilitator
works closely with us in our schools, and we invite parents to come in
occasionally and actually take part in what the kids are doing. In some
of the schools there are projects where ninth grade kids write
children\'s books, and they go to the local elementary school and
present or read to kids. There are also some tutoring types of things
that go on. I think that it\'s an area where we fall short, because
we\'re hard-pressed to find a large number of parents, but we\'re
working in the direction of doing that, and we also offer opportunities
for parents to come in and take a look at the literacy lab, take a look
at what happens in the classroom. So we\'re moving in that direction.

Nick Boke: I\'m Nick Boke from the Vermont Strategic Reading Initiative,
and we\'re about to undertake a statewide initiative, and it is
interesting that, I guess, Mary Beth, in her initial presentation,
talked about how little we know about \-- we know so much about
struggling readers, and we know so little about what you might call
\"mainstream readers.\" And, of course, all the evidence is that our
good readers aren\'t as good readers as they might be. In Vermont, it\'s
the NSRI\'s new Standard Reference Exams that show us that our tenth
graders, something like, you know, 30% of them can analyze and interpret
at or above grade level. So from the standpoint of the research, what
I\'m hearing is all these excellent things for the struggling reader,
and from the standpoint of research, I\'m really hoping that we\'ll pick
up on what she found, and that is what can we do \-- which is what
we\'re going to be watching in Vermont, but I\'m sure others will as
well \-- what can we do to make sure that everybody is really learning
how to read reflectively and strategically so that when they read they
can then walk into the classroom and do something with it rather than
having the teacher simply say, \"Well, I know you read it, but you
didn\'t get it, so, here, I\'ll tell you what it was,\" and then that\'s
what your class is. Thank you.

Alta Shaw: Thank you.

Deborah Taylor: I guess this is the library hour. My name is Deborah
Taylor, and I\'m here from the Enoch Pratt Free Library here in
Baltimore. I\'m really interested in hearing, as we move toward a model
of what normal adolescent literacy development is, that we find out
where it links with normal adolescent development. And what I saw in the
video I thought was so developmentally appropriate because of the social
nature of adolescence and that we can\'t divorce their literacy
development from their own social development.

Alta Shaw: We actually do \-- I know we\'re running out of time here \--
we actually do enable the kids to bring their \"language\" to the
classroom, with certain constraints \-- of course, no profanity and no
gender bias issues. But we welcome them to interpret some of the slang
that they use and it\'s because we found that it\'s very rich in
phonetic nature. So when they talk about Phat Farm, which is a clothing
line, or Fubu or Bling-Bling, which represents jewelry and money, we ask
them, in writing activities, to interpret that, to come up with multiple
ways of addressing it. So in summary, what I\'m saying is we tell
teachers you can\'t expect kids to jump from where they are with
colloquialism into Standard English, and so we try to get teachers to
listen in a little bit, and listen to what the kids say, the way they
describe things. And so we found that in doing that, the kids themselves
feel comfortable enough, particularly with teachers like you saw in the
video, to share with them, \"Well, this is the way we describe this in
our own slang,\" and, in doing so, we try to move them from
understanding that slang is good according to the situation. That, in
fact, in this particular classroom, we\'re going to use what we call
\"the King\'s English.\"

Unidentified Speaker: I\'m going to ask our panel if they have any last
words on this topic for this afternoon.

Douglas Buell: One thing that I think I would still emphasize when we
look at a successful model like this, and it\'s been mentioned in a
number of respects by people today is that the larger issue of all the
students in the high school, I think, need to be kept in a focus,
because when we started this conference in the first workshop, Dr.
Alexander came up with six profiles of students, and I think, so far,
the programs you\'re seeing really are narrowing on one of those groups,
and we\'re really not talking about the kinds of issues that are true
issues across a high school and across the curriculum and across the
content classrooms.

Hugh Katz: I don\'t have anymore about this presentation, but I wanted
to make a comment about the scripted lessons that was raised this
morning. As an instructor, I don\'t like being told what to do in my
classroom, but putting the hat of a researcher on, you have to recognize
that a scripted lesson is exactly what you want if you want to study the
effects of your intervention, at least in the initial stages, because
then you can cut down on the error that\'s introduced by creativity. An
analogy there might be a physician or a drug company who is interested
in the effects of a drug on high blood pressure, and they recommend to
the practitioners that it be taken every three hours. Well, we don\'t
want to create a doctor saying that they\'ve learned in the past that
drugs work better every four hours, and so they\'re going to introduce
it on that particular schedule. So a scripted lesson can actually be a
positive thing in the early stages of research to assure treatment
fidelity, and as you move into further development then you can add the
creativity or your teacher and benefit from that input. But one
shouldn\'t think of it as necessarily a negative factor.

Unidentified Speaker: I\'d like to thank our speaker and our panel, and
we will now have a changing of the guard.

\[applause\]

\[end of recording\]