New Revisions to Previously Adopted ELAR TEKS that may impact your curriculum planning

Don't panic. We're going to be fine. But you need to know what's happening. 

At the meeting of the full board on April 3-5, 2018 the State Board of Education held the first hearing for revisions to the ELAR TEKS that had been previously adopted.  This has some implications for your curriculum writing and preparation. 

You can read about the rationale for the changes and review the changes presented at first reading here: 

https://tea.texas.gov/About_TEA/Leadership/State_Board_of_Education/2019/April/April_2019_Committee_of_the_Full_Board_Item_6/

If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, you will see Attachment 1 (ELAR TEKS) and Attachment 2 (SLAR TEKS) .  These documents show the proposed changes.

The SBOE is accepting pubic commentary about the revisions: 

PUBLIC COMMENTS: The public comment period on the proposal begins May 3, 2019, and ends June 7, 2019. The SBOE will take registered oral and written comments on the proposal at the appropriate committee meeting in June 2019 in accordance with the SBOE board operating policies and procedures. A request for a public hearing on the proposal submitted under the Administrative Procedure Act must be received by the commissioner of education not more than 14 calendar days after notice of the proposal has been published in the Texas Register on May 3, 2019.

THINKING in the New ELAR Standards

Thinking, contrary to some comments, is NOT gobbledy-gook. But what does it look like with our instructional materials and pedagogy? People always ask my what in the world I'm talking about when I say that our approach must consider thinking. ELAR is a PROCESS. There is almost ZERO content after you address phonics and basic grammar. Our content IS thinking. And I'm not just talking about memory techniques like mnemonics. And I'm not just talking about cognition, short-term memory and long-term memory. And I'm not just talking about consolidation, storage, and retrieval.

Here's a tiny example:

From Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

In my young years I took pride in the fact that luck was called a lady. In fact, there were so few public acknowledgments of the female presence that I felt personally honored whenever nature and large ships were referred to as feminine. But as I matured, I began to resent being considered a sister to a changeling as fickle as luck, as aloof as an ocean, and as frivolous as nature.

The phrase "A woman has the right to change her mind" played so aptly into the negative image of the female that I made myself a victim to an unwavering decision. Even if I made an inane and stupid choice, I stuck by it rather than "be like a woman and change my mind."

    The old way of working through this text would be to ask questions about the content of the text. What is Maya Angelou saying about being a woman? But that does NOTHING to teach a kid how you would actually know that. Keeping our questions focused on the text itself without a focus on thinking turns our work into teaching the text and not the reader. I say that all the time, but no one really knows what I'm talking about.

     We certainly do not want most of our questions to be text-specific/dependent. ELAR standards are process based. Some of our questions need to be about what your brain does to make sense of text. For example, what do I do to monitor for comprehension when I come across something in the text that does not make sense? That is not a text-specific question, but it is definitely one we need to ask. Consider what our brains do here that should be taught that can transfer to any text.

    When Maya Angelou states that she does not want to be associated with something “as fickle as luck” in Wouldn’t Take Nothing for my Journey Now and we don’t know what she’s talking about, what should we do? 

     Well, we look at idioms, personification (luck is a lady), definitions of fickle. We research. We talk about it. Then we think about what it literally means. We think about connections to ourselves, the world, and other texts. Fickle as luck – luck is not knowing whether or not you will win or lose. Fickle people keep changing their mind and you can’t tell what they are going to do. And remember that song, Luck is a Lady? Now we have to connect back to the text. What is Angelou talking about here in terms of being a woman and her journey? Well, we have to go back and think about our connections. Why is not knowing whether or not you will win or lose an insult to being a woman? I have to connect to myself: Do I want people to always wonder whether I’m going to be nice or mean? No. I want people to enjoy my company, not fear it. Do I want to be the kind of silly woman that changes her mind for no reason? Absolutely not. And so on. 

   Some of our work with texts is about recording what we are doing with our brains so we can do it next time we come across something that doesn’t make sense. We have to show kids how to THINK and what to DO. If this was my classroom, I'd model my thinking for them as I read and we'd have an anchor chart of things they could try. Then, when they were reading in shared, interactive, collaborative settings, they'd have some ideas of how to make sense of actual gobbledy-gook.

Here’s a list of what I did and the questions I asked that were not connected to the text:

• ·         I stopped when I realized that I didn’t understand what she was saying. What does this text mean?
• ·         I did some research about what fickle means. What do I do to figure out what words mean?
• ·         I looked up the idiom of fickle as luck. Might there be a figure of speech here that I am not familiar with? How can I find out what that means?
• ·         I thought about what luck personified would be. How can I visualize what that’s like in life, literally?
• ·         I made connections to my own life, the world, and other texts I have read or heard. What have I experienced and what do I know that might give me a hint here about how this is being used?
• ·         Then I thought about what the author is saying – the theme or message. Why is the author using this language here? How does this language help her communicate her purpose and message?
• ·         I asked myself how that example is connected to the text and the author’s meaning. How is this example connected to other ideas in the text?
• ·         And if we are really getting to our standards – what does this inspire me to do in my own writing? Where can I used a similar technique to connect with my reader.

     We MUST consider thinking in selecting our instructional materials and pedagogy. The example above, I hope, explains what we should be looking for. And this is just ONE example. I'd really like to know what YOU THINK! Or am I still speaking gobbledy-gook? 

NEW ELAR TEKS: Why Looking at Just Your Grade Level is A BAD Idea

This question came today: Quick question- do you know if a document exists with just the new 6-8 ELA TEKS?  I have the K-12  document and the Lead4ward document, but I simply want to look at a side-by-side of grades 6-8.

And I heard some Kinder folks complaining: I don't need to know what you are doing in 12th grade. I don't even know how to spell rhetoric. We don't do that in kinder. 

Uhhh. You should. See Literary Analysis for the Littles.

Yes. The document is long. No. You don't teach that grade or skill. I get it. But here's why, Dear Reader, you should get over it and keep your ridiculously large printout of the TEKS intact with grades K-12 all on one page.

First: I would recommend that you do NOT look at 6-8  without the other grades. The standards are written in learning progressions with the terminal outcome at the end. You cannot understand where you are aiming if you are not looking at the whole row, especially the end of the row. Imagine a plane that is off by one degree but flies 700 miles along that trajectory. They will never arrive and will be further away from their destination than from where they began. 

For example, if you are looking only at 2nd grade 10F - identify and explain the use of repetition, you miss WHY we would want to do so. That entire row is about building capacity of students to analyze author's purpose and craft in a way that leads them to understand repetition rhetorically - especially in how that repetition impacts how they comprehend as well as how they compose. Basically – each row in the standards add collectively to a central idea/thesis that you may miss if you are not looking at what the whole row is about. All the grade levels work together to culminate into that purpose/thesis.

Second: The standards are written in learning progressions that clearly articulate the gentle slide from one grade to the next as well as defining the floor and ceiling of each grade level. A 6-8 might be ok for 7^th, but they’d still miss the terminal objective and perspective. For the example mentioned in the previous point, the rhetorical use of repetition required in 2nd grade has morphed into explaining the purposes of hyperbole, stereotyping, and anecdote. If the 6th grade teacher (or curriculum writer) is not aware of where the fifth grade ended and does not connect the purpose, use, and craft of those devices on comprehension and composition...moving to 6th grade to talk about the differences between rhetorical devices and logical fallacies will be like opening a can of potato chips only to find a... 

and then being surprised that kids don't understand and have never heard of such a thing. Might as well blame those elementary teachers like we always have.  In reality, kids don't understand because planning the connection between the grades without understanding the trajectory and purpose of this row will actually cause gaps in student performance. Teachers MUST be aware of where they kids have been as well as where they are going. Remember - you learn new stuff by connecting it to the old stuff you already know. Known to the new. 

Third: Since the standards are written as learning progressions, the standards help us identify gaps and prepare for tutoring, RTI, SLO, etc. And maybe even ABC,123. I’m hearing Michael Jackson, but I digress. If your kids don't understand the rhetorical devices such as direct address, then you can look to see if they can do the things required by the previous grades. When you find out where the understanding breaks down, you teach from there and quickly scaffold students up to where they need to be. "Remember in 2nd grade when you talked about how nursery rhymes like Hickory Dickory Dock have rhythms that sound like what they are describing? When you read the poem aloud, you almost hear a clock ticking. Writers do that on purpose. Now in 6th grade, we are learning about a new technique that writers use to help readers see, feel, or believe their words. Just like the writer nursery rhyme used rhythm to help the reader visualize the clock, this writer talks directly to the reader to get his attention. Listen to this example: 'But here's why, Dear Reader, you should get over it and keep your ridiculously large printout of the TEKS intact with grades K-12 all on one page.' In 6th grade, we call this writer's tool a Rhetorical Device. The direct address to the reader is a rhetorical device that helps the writer emphasize his point to the reader.'" (Note also the rhetorical purpose and effect of sarcasm - all in fun.)

Fourth: If you still want to see just 6-8, the TEKSRS system will have a simple before grade, the current grade, and the next grade chart. Not sure when.  The best I can recommend for you right now is the work from Vicky Gibson. She's prepared some Big Sheets – that might be more of what you are looking for as a supplement to the K-12 vertical alignment... and possibly avoid the problems I've described above.  Gibson explains how you can use the documents here.Just be careful about being too focused and myopic on only grades 6-8. After all, ABC, 123 isn't much good without the rest of the letters and numbers. Neither are our TEKS. 

STAAR Writing: Elaborate that!

Right now, most of you are in the final push for STAAR writing. In most of the papers I am reading right now, teachers are asking kids to give specific examples for their reasons. They ask kids to give an example from their own lives, from a book or movie, or from history. While there are other things to say about that, the problem remains that kids state those examples and that's about it. We tell them to elaborate and explain them fully, but the reality is that they don't.

What exactly does that mean...elaborate? Explain fully? And HOW does one do that? It's not enough to tell kids to explain so that Joe Schmo down the street can understand.

Explicit and concrete strategies help students know HOW to elaborate.

Here are my favorite go to strategies:

Five Whys

Prove It

Depth Charge

Pitchforking

Ba da Bing

Cafe Squidd

Starring

Double-Take

Just a glimpse, for a few short seconds
Both of them -  there in the round mirror
Grandmother's face and mother's visible
With my eyes flashing from their morphed visage

Just a glimpse, but many moments of reflection
Both of them - there inside of me
Grandmother's faith and mother's strength
With their hopes double-exposed within

Assessment Changes Instruction: Flat-lined Reading Scores

Assessment Changes Instruction. Yes it does. Like nothing other. And the changes are not always good. 

So here's a thought about flat-lined reading scores. 

My good friend Judy said it simply: "The smaller the 'piece' you try to measure, the less the measure reflects the performance you aim to measure." 

Assessing reading standards is NOT like assessing math. It's a "collective" kind of thing for measuring comprehension and not an isolated measurement of each standard. If you are trying to assess and measure each individual standard and see how it's progressing over time, you might not be measuring what you think you are. For ELAR, the level of difficulty in the passage and the reader's background knowledge are the key factors and NOT the individual questions/standards.

So here's one thing I think is happening. Students are focusing on the micro elements of the text - like inferences or main idea - and are not thinking about the macro elements of the text. They are not reading the passage to understand it as a whole. They are only looking at the pieces. Because that's what we are training them to do and to value by our weekly CFA's on main idea or inferences. We forget that we never master main idea or inference and can't cross that off our list like multiplication facts and dates of the Civil War. 

We forget that reading is about using main idea to help you monitor your comprehension. We forget that inferences are tools that help us understand the author's message and to devine the purpose. These subskills are not products to be assessed, but skills that we use to build knowledge, make meaning, apply understanding, and curate meaningful contributions to ourselves and the society around us. 

Is STAAR Too Hard to Read?

Are STAAR passages too hard to read? I've read several articles and blogs about people complaining about how hard the passages are. I both agree and disagree. Apparently, the state government is getting enough flack that they are going to listen to some testimony about it on Tuesday. There's some problems here that go further than just putting the passages in a readability formula  in Microsoft Word.

TEA conducts external reviews to allow teachers to vet the passages. At those sessions, teachers review the passages. They can make comments on the sentence length and make choices about softening the vocabulary. But there are NO resources available to test the readability. (And when I did my original study on readability, TEA staff told me they didn't use readability measures and relied on the teacher opinions in the external review process.) During the external review, the passages have already been selected and reviewed by TEA staff and testing company developers. When I went to a prompt review study in April, I learned and wrote about measures that they use to evaluate texts before submitting them for review. It was the first time I'd heard about how staff and developers vet readability. Perhaps I am behind the 8 ball...

Yet, we've (teachers) known for a long time that these passages were always a problem for readability. I wrote about it for my master's thesis Math Problems Don't Read Once Upon a Time. In this text, I shared quantitative data that math problems on TAKS were written significantly above the level for the equivalent grades's reading passages. (It was published in the R&E Journal. This one had the editor's comments, so it's pretty fun to read for other reasons too. Thanks, Jill Aufil and Joyce!) 

There are TWO major problems here that need to be considered: 

1. No SINGLE quantitative readability measure will be able to pinpoint the reading level of the passage. 

2. HIGH STAKES testing and accountability to rate schools is a key factor in how this stuff plays out with kids in classrooms and on test day.

I lied. THREE: 

3. There are qualitative features of text complexity that must be considered along with culturally relevant features that reflect our diverse population. 

Quantitative Features: 

The quantitative features of each readability measure differ. The one you use depends on your purpose. And you should ALWAYS look at how these formulas are derived and ask yourself: 

• Does this formula capture meaning and complexity? 
• How are "they" making decisions about "unique" words and other features? 
• What's behind the math? 
• How does this match what I know about the text and my readers? 

More practically, it's powerful to think about these questions: 

• What does this analysis tell you about your TEKS? (Curriculum)
• What does this analysis tell you about what you need to teach? (Pedagogy)
• What does this analysis tell you that readers will/won’t need? Can or can’t do? (Students Reading and Processes, Schema and Background)

So I took the first 722 words of Animal Farm and put it through its paces in several readability formulas. 

Lexiles: 

Lexiles measures mean sentence length and average word frequency. Long sentences tend to be hard to read. Shorter ones tend to be easier. The more diverse words you have in a text, the more difficult it tends to be. Makes pretty good sense. But sometimes sentences are long and NOT difficult. (Ahem: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. And that's just a title.) Animal Farm has a Lexile measure of 1300-1400. When you convert that to grade level (and you should probably know what's behind that math) the book falls at the 11th or 12th grade level. (Ask your fellow English teachers what level that book is usually taught.) It has a mean sentence length of 25.79 words. It has a mean word frequency of 3.61. 

Here's the thing: When you look at the actual text, what makes this hard to read really has nothing to do with the sentence length or the word frequency. Here's the first sentence: "Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes." That's a long sentence. Nothing hard about it, even for kids in 3rd or 4th grade. I've never heard of popholes. Have you? But I can pretty much tell what that means because I've had chickens. Now I know that this is just one sentence. The demands of the text are collective. But I think you can see that there are some features of complexity in this text that have nothing to do with the math behind the 1300-1400 rating. 

Fry: 

Good ole Fry. I got to sit next to him during a round table session once. Felt like I'd met Elvis. Fry takes the average number of syllables per 100 words and the average number of sentences per 100 words. Some fancy division and plotting on a graph and you have a grade level. Animal Farm plots out at about the middle of 9th grade. 140 syllables per 100 words. 4.1 sentences per 100 words. 

Already we have a huge discrepancy in grade level reporting. Is this text 9th grade? Is this text 12th grade? That'd be pretty important when assigning a text to a particular grade level for high stakes testing. There's some people out there writing about how far off the STAAR test is from grade level. Depends on what measure you use. And all of them are flawed. I'm pretty sure that a book about Pokemon would come up high on the number of syllables count. And still as sure that it's nowhere near the complexity of Animal Farm in any fashion, even if the sentences are long. 

Ragor has one too, but it's not purported to be as accurate as Fry. 

Flesch-Kincaid: 

This measure is the one that I see most people using. It's pretty important that you know the reasoning and the math behind the rating. There are actually TWO Flesch-Kincaid scores. Reading Ease and Grade level. 

Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease

This scale works with average sentence length and average number of syllables per word. It's pretty popular and used by the US Department of Defense for its documents. Florida uses it for all insurance policies. Between 60-and 70 is considered an acceptable standard. Animal Farm comes out at 65.5 for Reading Ease. That's supposed to describe a text written in English plain enough to be understood by 13-15 year olds. That's 8th and 9th grade.  

Ah. Now we have justification to put Animal Farm in 8th grade. We might even put it on a test for accountability. But y'all. Look at the math behind this booger. I know that I'm a literacy person and allergic to math, but this doesn't make any sense about how in the world you could justify how these numbers tell you how difficult a text is to read. I'm going to write it in words to emphasize the ridiculous nature of the math. Sorry. Take the total number of sentences and divide them by the total words. Then multiply that to the result you get when you subtract 1.015 from 206.835. Then, take the total number of words and divide that by the total number of syllables and multiply that times 84.6 and subtract that from the number you got from your first set of calculations. That's how hard it is to read. What???!!!! Where did 1.015 come from? And 205.835? I know there is a reason psychotically complex and all, but seriously...we're getting pretty far away from how readers make meaning with text here. 

Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level

The scale works similarly to the Reading Ease math, using different numbers. Animal Farm comes out to a 10.5 reading level. 

But look at the math. The total number of sentences are divided by the total number of words and divided by .39. That result is added to the result of the total words divided by the total number of syllables multiplied by 11.8. Then you take that result and subtract 15.59. Um....Ok. Lots of problems here. The formula itself privileges sentence length over word length. And grade levels can be hundreds of times higher than 12th grade. How does that help us peg a grade level for our kids and assign a rating for a high stakes test? In addition, we now have a fourth grade level added to how we might quantify this text. 

Accelerated Reader

AR uses ATOS. The formula uses word count, average word length, sentence length, and average vocabulary level. It pegs the text at 7.7 grade level. 

So now the text is appropriate for assessment at 7th grade? I know that's not what we do, but seriously - it points out flaws in what we are looking at to assign texts to kids and to evaluate how we assess students. Note also that the average vocabulary level is "3". We should be asking how they derive that number and look at the list (and the research behind that list) they are using to make that decision.

The Guardian Posted this article today about Mr Greedy and Grapes of Wrath.  I like what they say. 

Multiple Features:

I looked at some others too. Gunning Fog uses sentence length, percentage of hard words, words with three or more syllables, jargon, compound words, no suffixes as a syllable, and disregards proper nouns. The resulting scale is supposed to show how many years you'd need in English education to understand on a first reading. Animal Farm for Gunning Fog is 12.6 - hard to read. Be sure to ask yourself how they determine hard words. 

The Coleman-Liau uses the number of characters in a word instead of syllables. Some funky math here too: 5.89xACW-0.3xsentences/(100xwords)-15.8. It's supposed to tell you what grade level you must have achieved to be able to understand the text. Animal Farm's Coleman-Liau is 8th grade. 

SMOG is another one that's supposed to tell you  how many years of instruction you need to comprehend a text. It takes the number of sentences and words with more than three syllables. It uses a square root of polysyllabic count. Uh...square root y'all. For comprehension. I don't get it. Animal Farm's SMOG is 8th grade. 

Here's a site that will give you a summary of multiple measures. 

High Stakes and Readability

We are NOT going to find a SINGLE readability measure to evaluate the complexity of the text. We might be able to use T-Units to help us measure how well the text grow from one grade to the next in terms of complexity, but I think that's still flawed, as there are MULTIPLE measures that constitute text complexity. In terms of readability formulas for quantitative purposes, it's important to consider multiple measures. It's important to consider the qualitative and cultural measures in terms of how reading intersects with our humanity. It's important to think about how these measures are used and for what purpose.  If we are going to have a psychometrically valid assessment, I'm not sure that the field of research and study has developed a valid measure of text complexity that justifies how we are using the results to measure student progress or the effectiveness of schools in their instructional programs. 

Qualitative and Culturally Responsive Measures

The lowest measure of Animal Farm that I found pegged the text at the 7th grade. It's not a good choice for a 7th grader. And you know it. There are rubrics out there to evaluate the qualitative features of texts. We should be using them. But here's something else I want to leave you with. I was listening to Kylene Beers yesterday. She described a scenario where a student was reading a state assessment passage about a volcano. The student skipped a question about the lava cascading down the mountain. They asked him why he skipped the question. He said something like this: I just couldn't figure out what dishwasher soap had to do with lava. Cascade. 

For high stakes assessment, we are NOT going to be able to find texts that are at the right grade level for each kid. Our language is too rich. Meaning is too nuanced. Words are to dependent on context, language of origin, regional characteristics and use, personal knowledge and background, etc. Assessing a kid with a text is more about what the kid DOES with the text than what the text is on its own. Find a way to measure that and fix the ways we are picking texts for assessment. Until then, let's back off the high stakes and let kids read and write. I think you'll find that they can and will. At much higher levels than you can ever measure. 

Note to Legislators: You will continue to receive criticisms about text complexity until other issues are resolved and developed.  It doesn't matter what readability formula or machine you use. People can put the texts into any of them and come up with numbers to refute what grade level the assessment appears in on the state assessment. For right now, 1)understand what is implied by each formula 2)increase transparency at the agency during external review - provide multiple statistics/readability results for passages in review so teachers can see them and use them as resources for making decisions 3)call for more research and development in how we can better select and measure the complexity of texts students are exposed to for assessment purposes.