M. Kerns, EdD, is a third-generation educator with teaching experience from elementary through the university level and K–12 administrative experience. He currently serves as vice president and chief academic officer of Renaissance Learning.
With nearly twenty years of experience of leading staff development and speaking at national and international conferences, Gene has helped clients that include administrators’ associations across the country, the Ministry of Education of Singapore, London’s Westminster Education Forum, and the Global Education Technology Forum of China.
Gene received his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from Longwood University in Virginia, and also holds a doctorate of education from the University of Delaware with an emphasis in education leadership.
To learn more about Gene’s work, follow him on Twitter @GeneKerns.
Brian M. Pete is cofounder and CEO of Robin Fogarty & Associates. He has followed a long line of educators—college professors, school superintendents, teachers, and teachers of teachers—into a career in education. He has a rich background in professional development and has worked with adult learners in districts and educational agencies throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
Brian has an eye for the teachable moment and the words to describe skillful teaching. He delivers dynamic, humor-filled sessions that energize the audiences of school leaders, teachers, and teacher leaders with engaging strategies that transfer into immediate and practical on-site applications.
Brian is coauthor of How to Teach Thinking Skills Within the Common Core, From Staff Room to Classroom: A Guide for Planning and Coaching Professional Development, From Staff Room to Classroom II: The One-Minute Professional Development Planner, Twelve Brain Principles That Make the Difference, Supporting Differentiated Instruction: A Professional Learning Communities Approach, The Adult Learner: Some Things We Know, A Look at Transfer: Seven Strategies That Work, School Leader’s Guide to the Common Core, Everyday Problem-Based Learning: Quick Projects to Build Problem-Solving Fluency, Unlocking Student Talent, and The Right to Be Literate: 6 Essential Literacy Skills.
Brian earned a bachelor of science from DePaul University in Chicago and is pursuing his master’s degree in fiction writing from Columbia College in Chicago.
To learn more about Brian’s work, visit www.robinfogarty.com, or follow @brian pete or @RFATeachPD on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.
To book Robin J. Fogarty or Brian M. Pete for professional development, contact [email protected].
Preface
Our journey with this book started the moment Gene called Robin and Brian and asked, “Do you have a few minutes? Well, maybe more?” He piqued their curiosity as he began his pitch: “This is about the reading challenges that almost nobody’s talking about.” He was talking about supporting and advocating for a revolutionary shake-up in traditional reading protocols based on re-emerging and newly emerging research evidence. That phone call and exciting news set the journey in motion.
K–12 students in 21st century classrooms face reading challenges that few on the modern school scene are talking about yet. These challenges have only become visible as a consensus of ideas from four voices in education. First, the wisdom of school-improvement expert Mike Schmoker’s (2018) Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning and his plea to prioritize the essentials of teaching and optimize the power of student learning both struck the right chord with the three of us. Second, American educator E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s (2018) tome Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories broke new ground and fanned the flame of knowledge as the quintessential ingredient for reclaiming students’ literacy legacy. Third, Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, and Erica Woolway (2016) advanced a phenomenal approach to instruction in their book Reading Reconsidered: A Practical Guide to Rigorous Literacy Instruction, boosted by, finally, psychologist Daniel T. Willingham’s (2017) The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.
These last two books made us clearly and urgently decide to combine their ideas in ways that matter to teachers. We discovered how their ideas coincide with our aim to revisit common reading instructional practices (which have always included instruction on phonics, or decoding, and vocabulary development) and the critical role of content knowledge. This mingling of ideas contains the essence of a newly formed truth: massive amounts of time for authentic reading are necessary across all subjects in order for teachers to willingly release students to read successfully as a lifetime pursuit.
That’s the story of Literacy Reframed: How a Focus on Decoding, Vocabulary, and Background Knowledge Improves Reading Comprehension.
Introduction
It is impossible to overstate the importance of literacy. Yet nothing so begs for clarity in K–12 education.
—Mike Schmoker
Imagine, in a year devoid of major financial market disruption, you dutifully invested twice the amount you did the previous year into your retirement account only to see that your account balance remained the same at year’s end. You doubled down on your investment strategy, and it made no difference. How long would you continue that same approach?
Or imagine working overtime hours only to find the bottom line of your paycheck remained flat. Would you question the extra time you put in? Of course you would. Would you work overtime the next week? Likely not.
We want to know that our investments of time and energy pay reasonable dividends. Well, it’s time for us to be honest and admit that we have a major literacy problem in U.S. education; we have expended vast amounts of resources and have little to show for it. It appears that our current approach to literacy is flawed, yet we continue to make huge investments that pay little to no returns.
The Massive Literacy Challenge Nobody’s Talking About
As we track the evolution of reading instruction, we can think of it as a journey, a long and arduous experience for those educators who have witnessed its iterations since the 1960s. Teachers have earnestly instructed students in the customs of the day, from the earliest days of the one-room schoolhouse and the McGuffey’s Readers taught by rote reading and writing; to reading instruction that relied heavily on sight words and the look-say method of published pre-primers and primers on the Sally, Dick, and Jane sagas; to the upper-level basal texts, often themed for grade-level interests; to the 21st century’s newest approach, the science of reading. Yet, in all this time, reading performance has barely improved and at times educators have seen catastrophic results (Joyce, Calhoun, & Hopkins, 1999).
Policymakers and educators alike acknowledge that literacy is the key to all learning, and we know that raising a student’s literacy abilities increases scores across the content areas (Cromley, 2009; Martin & Mullis, 2013). This is intuitive and, in addition, English language arts (ELA) and literacy scores have been part of nearly every high-stakes accountability initiative; funding for literacy matches that priority. We educators focus on and fund literacy efforts. But the power of the academic dialogue does not match our results. Why? Perhaps, as Schmoker (2011) suggests, literacy is one of those essential things that we talk a lot about “but we have never fully clarified” or “obsessed over [its] implementation” (p. 9).
Schmoker (2011) suggests literacy is one of those essential things that we talk a lot about “but we have never fully clarified” or “obsessed over [its] implementation” (p. 9).
The perceived remedy was to focus on accountability for poor performance that began in earnest with President George W. Bush’s