Reading Skills and Strategies P' David Pearson UC Berkeley

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Reading Skills and StrategiesP. David PearsonUC
Berkeley
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Why we need to celebrate coaching

• Coach
• Roach
• Reach
• Teach

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Truth in AdvertisingJoint Work
Maryland
Peter Afflerbach University of Maryland
P. David Pearson University of California Berkeley
Scott Paris University of Michigan
Berkeley
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Peter Afflerbach, P. David Pearson, Scott G.
Paris (2008). Clarifying Differences Between
Reading Skills and Reading Strategies. The
Reading Teacher, 61(5), pp. 364373.
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How to think about todays presentation

• Wont pretend to have all the answers, so.
• But if youd like to be involved in sharing a
  public think aloud
• This is the place to be
• A strategic account of the relationship between
  skills and strategies????

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Whats the difference between primary, secondary,
and college teachers?

• Their kids
• Their subject matter
• Themselves

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A little pre-test
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Phonemic Awareness is

• The ability to discern separate sounds in the
  stream of speech
• The process by which a unit of sound can
  experience self-actualization
• Something a person needs to practice a bit more
  IF he consistently says NUCULAR for NUCLEAR.

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Reading Recovery is

• A much missed part of our current portfolio of
  early interventions
• The only early intervention endorsed by the
  federal What Works Clearinghouse
• A 12 step program designed to assist 1st graders
  who have overdosed on Accelerated Reader

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Reading First

• Is the Reading part of NCLB
• Has provided more resources for compensatory
  reading than any previous piece of legislation in
  our history
• Is what keeps us all employed
• Is what you should have done before you walked
  into the wrong-gendered rest room.

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What do you think?

• Whats a skill?
• Whats a strategy?
• How are they different?
• How are they related?

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Some answers we get when we ask

• Skills make up strategies.
• Strategies lead to skills.
• Skill is the destination, strategy is the
  journey.
• We learn strategies to do a skill.
• Skills are automatic, strategies are effortful
  and mediated.
• We use strategies as tools.
• Strategies that work require a skill set.
• We have to pay attention in learning skills, but
  eventually we use them automatically.

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What the dictionary says

• skill n. 1. an acquired ability to perform well
  proficiency. Note The term often refers to
  finely-coordinated, complex motor acts that are
  the result of perceptual-motor learning, as
  handwriting, golf, or pottery. However, skill is
  also used to refer to parts of acts that are
  primarily intellectual, as those involved in
  comprehension or thinking. See also basic
  skills. 2. a craft or activity requiring a high
  degree of competence, as the skill of making fine
  jewelry.
• strategy n. in education, a systematic plan,
  consciously adapted and monitored, to improve
  ones performance in learning.
• Harris, T., Hodges, R. (Eds.) (1995). The
  literacy dictionary The vocabulary of reading
  and writing. Newark, DE International Reading
  Association.

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What we find in school curricula

• Skill Cant find a definition, but we found lots
  of lists
• phonics skills
• vocabulary skills
• comprehension skills
• Study skills
• Strategy
• A systematic plan, consciously adapted and
  monitored, to improve one's performance in
  learning
• Montgomery County Public Schools (MD)

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Desperately seeking clarity

• The rationale for the explicit teaching of
  comprehension skills is that comprehension can be
  improved by teaching students to use specific
  cognitive strategies or to reason strategically
  when they encounter barriers to understanding
  what they are reading.
• National Reading Panel Summary Report (April,
  2000)

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Skills A short history

• There have always been reading skills
• Davis, 1944 Test to validate independent skills
• Where did Davis get his candidate skills to test?
• Reading series scope and sequence charts from
  1930s
• Basal proliferation through the 40s-60s

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Skills A short history, continued

• late 1960s Blooms notion of mastery learning
• identify the components
• measure each
• teach it to mastery and measure it again
• reteach and, if necessary, recyle
• go on to the next skill and repeat
• led to skills management systems
• Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development
• Fountain Valley
• Basals in the early 1970s

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Historical relationships between instruction and
assessment
Skill 1
Skill 2
The 1970s Skills management mentality Teach a
skill, assess it for mastery, reteach it if
necessary, and then go onto the next skill.
Foundation Benjamin Blooms ideas of mastery
learning
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The 1970s, cont. And we taught each of these
skills until we had covered the entire
curriculum for a grade level.
Skill 2
Skill 3
Skill 4
Skill 6
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We rejected this view in the 1980s seductive but
simplistic

• Order
• Simplicity
• Systematicity
• Clarity

• Weak evidence of independence
• Complexity
• Some evidence of comingling
• Weak evidence about order
• Muddiness

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Skills A short history, continued
Skills A short history, continued

• The constructivist response in the
• K. Goodman Who skilled Cock Robin?
• Engage kids in authentic, meaningful encounters
  with text and the skills will take care of
  themselves KIds will become skilled without
  teaching skills.

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Skills A short history, continued
Skills A short history, continued

• Early 1990s Skills took a basal sabbatical for
  about 6 years
• Got moved to the appendix
• Literature ruled the day
• Mid 1990s Balanced Literacy Skills are a means
  to the end of authentic reading and writing
  (still alive in some places)

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Skills A short history, continued
Skills A short history, continued

• Mid to late 1990s Re-emergence of skills as the
  staple of literacy curriculum
• Today Back in the saddle again
• New layer They are now sanctioned by SBRR, in
  Reading First and in our assessment systems for
  monitoring and diagnosis

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Strategies An even shorter history

• 1970s We discovered meta
• Metalinguistics Knowing about linguistic
  elements like word, sentence, phoneme, grapheme,
  syllable, morph
• Metacomprehension Knowing about our
  understanding
• Metacognition Knowing about our cognitive
  processes (the overarching term)
• Metapoker Kenny Rogers

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Instructional research on strategies

• Late 1970s through the early 90s in regular
  education (CSR, Pressley et al, Paris and others)
• Steady stream from late 1970s through today in
  Special Education (e.g., Deshler and
  Graham/Harris)
• General finding if you teach it, they will
  learn it and do it
• Weakness never studied how to curricularize all
  this stuff
• Do you do all four RT strategies for every text
  you read? Forever?

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Why distinguish between skill and strategy

• Why not just moosh them together, teach them all
  to mastery, and be done with the debate?
• They are very different animals

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Comparing Skills and Strategies
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We teach them differently coping with complexity

• Skills
• Remove from context
• Decompose it into a set of component steps
• Teach then practice each step to mastery
• Practice in simple contexts (worksheets)
• Apply to real reading situations

• Strategies
• Find contextualized instances
• Model application through think-alouds
• Guide, scaffold student application
• Gradually release more responsibility
• Ask students to guide application

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One way to bridge the divide

• Think of comprehension processes or tasks that we
  ask kids to perform
• These are largely discerning relationships
  between ideas
• A caused B The wind blew the roof off
• A came after B I did my homework after dinner
• A is a B A dog is a mammal.
• If A, then B If you do your homework, you can
  watch TV.

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One way to bridge the divide
One way to bridge the divide

• Any process or task can be under
• automatic control?a skill!
• or
• deliberate control?a strategy

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Thinking about the curriculum
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A process is likely to be skilled when
A process is likely to be strategic when

• It has been used a lot
• The text is easy
• Knowledge is robust
• Requires little teacher scaffolding

• it is new to the learner
• the text is hard
• knowledge is meager
• requires lots of teacher scaffolding

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Cognitive apprenticeship
But you always have to be prepared to move up and
down this scale. Why because things change
today a skill, tomorrow a strategy
Gradual Release of Responsibility
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Another useful distinction

• Skills (or skilled behavior) are what we do when
  we just do it!
• Strategies (or strategic behavior) are what we
  invoke when the going gets tough.
• So whether they are the same or different doesnt
  matter so much--the context will tell us when to
  do which.

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So.

• If I regularly summarize each page in a science
  text, more or less as a matter of course, then
  summarization is a skill for me.
• If I come to the end of a page and say, My
  goodness, I dont remember a thing! Id better
  get my act together, lets see, how do I
  start?..., then it is a strategy for me.
• Skills just happen but strategies solve problems

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Are skills once upon a time strategies?

• How we learn to sound out initial
  consonantsinvolves strategies of connecting
  print and speech
• We then learn and overlearn this process, the
  strategy of determining initial consonants
  becomes skilled and automatic recognition

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A useful distinction for thinking about
skillsafter Jim Squire

• Growth processes versus mastery processes
• Mastery once you acquire them, we feel good and
  go on.
• Growth processes show me that you have mastered
  the process and Ill show you you havent

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Distinguish between mastery and growth processes
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What do we really need to watch out for?

• Skills
• Assumptive teaching
• Practice makes perfect.
• Strategies
• Metacognitive morasses
• The frog and the centipede

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What are sensible ideas for thinking about skill
and strategy instruction in the service of
helping students achieve in reading?

• We are not likely to expunge skills from state
  and district curricula even if we wanted to
• Even if we had strong evidence that they were
  harmful or irrelevant
• highly entrenched
• Standards
• Assessments
• Basal Curricula
• Old friends!

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What are sensible ideas for thinking about skill
and strategy instruction in the service of
helping students achieve in reading?

• What sort of rapprochement or peaceful
  co-existence could we achieve?
• By no means have we settled this issue today.
• Even so

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Are Skills and Strategies Different?

• More different than alike
• Some processes really do move from effortful to
  effortless
• Breaking the Code
• Some processes seldom reach a skilled stage
• Monitoring and fix-up
• For most processes, we toggle back and forth
  between skilled and strategic application
• context bound (text, task, goal)

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Are skills and
Are Skills and Strategies Alike?

• Two sides of the same coin
• Skills are strategies that have become automated
• Strategies are skills slowed down to a speed
  where we can deconstruct and examine them
  meticulously

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Instruction

• Instruction will vary according to the way we
  conceptualize a given process
• If skill, then practice to mastery to application
• If strategy, then model, think-alouds, gradual
  release, flexible application

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Assessment Processes

• In their skilled aspect
• By just doing it.
• Probably with a task that is pretty comfortable
  for that individual
• In their strategic aspect
• By watching it in action
• Probably with a task that is difficult for that
  individual

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The End

• However we choose to frame this distinction, it
  is important to establish
• the normative characteristics of each
• Automatic
• Deliberate
• the normative approach to teaching each
• decomposition and practice
• scaffolding
• If we are both skillful and strategic in framing
  this distinction
• we will find ways to meet kids where they are
• and move them a new level in their capacity to
  use skills and strategies to cope with the
  complexities of reading comprehension.

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Why we need to celebrate coaching

• Coach
• Roach
• Reach
• Teach

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We can get there in more than one way

• Teach
• Peach
• Poach
• Coach

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The real end

• Something old
• Something new
• Something borrowed
• Nothing blue!