OP-ED: Reading Is About More Than 'Evidence' aka the problem with CCSS RS #1

[Ryan Goble]

I liked this op-ed in ed week - it could be titled "the big problem with CCSS reading standard #1."  Here is a cool excerpt...

What does the evidence say? Would this question have sounded normal to my ear three years ago, when I last taught? Back then, my students and I discussed, perhaps, pulling evidence from text to support interpretations. But this equation of text and evidence—this interchangeability of the terms—struck me as a new phenomenon.

Anyone teaching or learning in K-12 classrooms must accept the primacy of textual evidence. The "Reading: Literature" section of the Common Core State Standards for English/language arts directs students to “cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.” I don’t dispute the letter or the spirit of this, but it seems like our focus on evidence has altered the way we see text. We’ve come to see text as evidence, and only evidence.

After that first moment of strangeness, similar moments began to fall like rain. My colleague, a former science teacher, asked me to explain how reading teachers use “think-alouds” (a teacher’s narration of her thinking about a text) to impart comprehension strategies. He asked if their purpose is to present the evidence that supports the teacher’s claims about a text. For a moment, I was tempted to accept this explanation, but I realized that, if I did, I’d be assuming that our thoughts arrive in our minds as claims, and words arrive on the page as evidence. I clarified that the purpose of a think-aloud is to show what the text makes us think as we read it and how, through this thinking, we make sense of its meanings.

I suspect that this confusion of terms [evidence vs. information] is unintentional. But if our ways of speaking about text have seeped into our students’ ways of thinking about it, if they’ve come to think that text’s raison d’etre is to serve as evidence, their experience of reading has been fundamentally changed.

The trouble is that when students read in this way, they don’t recognize all that text does and can do besides serving as evidence. The first standard doesn’t acknowledge the way text elicits thinking and draws out new ideas, curiosities, frustrations, causes, and sometimes even pursuits.

Read the rest of the blog HERE.