Deliberate, Effortful Strategies under Conscious Control become Skills under Automatic Control

Judy Wallis: And what we hope is these deliberate, effortful strategies under conscious control become skills under automatic control. 

 I'm always honored when Judy Wallis reads and considers my efforts. She always seems to dive into the basis and research underneath what I'm experiencing. And when she references an article, I know that it is something worth serious consideration. 

My friend Bama Coward used to say: A strategy is not something you do with a pencil. As usual, Judy has the research at her fingertips. Clarifying Differences Between Reading Skills and Reading Strategies is a must read for practitioners of critical and transformative ELAR pedagogy. Afflerback, Pearson, and Paris nail important considerations about how we initially teach and what our goals are for helping kids internalize and use those strategies in ways that become automatic skills in their comprehension and composing processes. Where are my kids on the continuum of strategies and skilled reading? 

Here are the main points I am considering from the article. 

Definitions and History:

• Skill and Strategy are not synonyms: Knowing the difference between a skill and a strategy makes you a better teacher and a more aware learner. 
• (Political subcontext: Knowing this distinction is an important part of regaining my humanity and professionalism when I encounter programs and mandates.)
• Our definitions of skill and strategy must clarify the distinctions and relationships between them. 
• Skill -"proficiency of a complex act"; strategy - "associated with conscious and systematic plan" (p. 365). 
• I like this phrase: "manipulating information mentally" (p. 366). 
• Psychology and education researcher think/talk about skills and strategies differently because of their research focus. 
• Psychology - focused on information processing and how to load up the short-term memory and move it into long term. (No difference between skill and strategy). Focused on motor skills and how we learn through practice. Rote and automatic.
• Educational researchers - focused on developmental progress and how kids deliberately used mental and physical responses to remember and think. (Specific focus on strategies, yet, little focus on intentionality)
• "We agree with Alexander, Graham, and Harris (1988) that strategies represent intention: A reader who is strategic intends to use strategies to work toward a goal, be it comprehension of a textbook chapter, appreciation of a poem, or understanding instructions for assembling a bicycle. Intention, however, does not describe what the actions are, how they are learned, or how they can be taught" (p. 366) SWOON. Love that quote and it's implications. 
• OMG - the Goals of the 1925 Yearbook! I love these ideas:  "elevating student's thinking power and tastes...developing motives and interests" to the point where readers use the following habitually: "recognizing units of thought...reading hygiene...and oral and meaning interpretation." I'm wondering about reading hygiene in the digital age. 
• Authors then follow skills and strategies through isolate4d reading skill instr5uction of the 70's, whole language and lit based reading in the 80's and balanced literacy of the 90's until NCLB brought us back to a focus on standards, programs, interventions, etc. At this point, strategy instruction is common but the way they are posed in materials is "positioned alongside skills as a supportive but independent line of instruction." Ah. There we go. Making skills separate from strategies confuses folks. 

The Solution: 

Reading Strategies	Reading Skills
Deliberate attempts	Automatic actions
Goal directed attempts	Often without awareness of components or control
Selects a clear path/process/goal
Awareness and deliberate control; volitional
Control and modify decoding, word meaning, and construct meaning	Result in decoding and comprehension with speed, efficiency, and fluency
Prevents distractions/preserves commitment to goal
Examines strategy, monitors effectiveness; revises goals if necessary=deliberate decision making	Operate without reader’s deliberate control or conscious awareness=automatic
Flexible; adaptable; slower	Habit; automatic; faster
Not always successful or “correct”

• NOTE: In most situations a skill is something that is practiced until you can execute it the same way in all situations and get the same result. It is how SKILL and STRATEGY work TOGETHER in ELAR differ: you cannot always do the same thing and get the same results. The skills and strategies have to work together - consciously and deliberately when something goes awry with the skills: a "deliberate, conscious, metacognitve act" (p.368). Read the concrete example they give there. 
• "When it becomes effortless and automatic (i.e., the student is in the habit of asking "Does that make sense?" automatically), the reading strategy has become a reading skill. In this developmental example, skill and strategy differ in their intentionality and their automatic and nonautomatic status" (p. 368). 
• The important distinction is that strategies and skills are a progression. Do we stop too short with our "strategies" as end goal instead of continuation until they become reading "skills?" "...across time movement from deliberate and effortful to fluent and automatic is a good thing" (p. 368). Am I teaching my kids to know where they are on this continuum? When can they celebrate their automaticity? 
• "A crucial part of reading development is the shifting control for using strategies - first in response to others (modeling explicit strategies) and later as self-initiated strategies" as they are needed (p. 369). 
• We have to teach kids WHEN they need to go back to the strategic approaches - situations where "difficult words, convoluted syntax, unfamiliar topics, or if a reading task is too challenging" (p. 369). I like these words too: Toubleshooting, problem solving, cognitive monitoring and repair...(p. 369)
• Metacognition must be explicitly taught "so a learner becomes aware of the parts, understands how they work together, and practices combining the parts into the skilled performance that is reading" (p. 369.)
• The author's suggest that professional development be more about "defossilizing" a skilled action by scripting out the task analysis of what it means to think that way. I think that's what I was trying to do with my think aloud with Micah. The authors go on to emphasize that when we teach this way, we also need to tell kids when and why we are using the strategies. 
• Bottom line: explicitly teach both skills and strategies. It starts as a strategy and becomes a skill. You really need to read the specific examples under Implications. Great stuff. 
• "Readers never outgrow their need to consult the strategy repertoire" (p. 371)
• Hmmm....work on this: "teachers are rarely trained to assess children's reading in a strategic mode...That's why asking students to explain their thinking during or after reading provides such important insights for both teachers and students" (p. 371). Kasey: We should be talking about these specific errors and our response during PLC's. 
• "At the heart of accomplished reading is a balance of both - automatic application and use of reading skills and inte4ntional, effortful employment of reading strategies - accompanied by the ability to shift seamlessly between the two when the situation calls for it" (p. 371) I'm wondering if we need a poster of this in the classroom. Students can identify when and where they are on the continuum. "I am good at this and I can work through the tough spots" (p. 372). 
• They give four points at the end, but this one has me really thinking: "...we can acheive a certain curricular economy if we regard skills and strategies as two 'sides' of any given process or task; this perspective of 'commonality' could limit the proliferation of 'standards' to teach and measure that often results when we add more independent elements to any curriculum"(p. 372). I think this is really what I mean when I say that these benchmarks aren't assessing what you think they are. What we really need to be teaching is the cognition and strategic approach to our tasks.