How do children acquire literacy skills?

What is the MAX Teaching Framework?

How can MAX Teaching improve achievement?

MAX Teaching with Reading and Writing: A Rationale and Method

DISPARITY IN LITERACY SKILLS

Literacy is the ability to read, write, speak, listen, and think such that one is able to process information and ideas in ways that are useful to self and to society. No one can deny the importance of literacy skills in either the academic world or in the business world. Yet, schools beyond the early grades do not often see the role they could play in developing literacy skills in students, and so they relegate that duty to others. Standardized tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) produce the evidence of this. A significant portion of middle grades and high school students read at or below the basic level of reading according to NAEP tests.

The poor performance in reading scores that American middle and high school students consistently earn on state and national tests are a result, not of inadequate test preparation, but of lack of basic literacy skills that might, in days gone by, or in certain neighborhoods, have been learned at home. It is no surprise that schools situated in upper middle class neighborhoods consistently score higher than those in poorer rural areas or less-affluent urban areas. The fact of the matter is that children who come from homes in which literacy (the ability to read, write, speak, listen, and think well) is valued and practiced are the ones who consistently score higher on standardized tests. Children who come from homes in which books are commonplace, magazines are found on the coffee table, and a newspaper lies on the driveway in the morning, and whose parents use literacy to learn, communicate, and conduct business are children who score highly on standardized tests. To many of those children, literacy skills come easily. Those who come from homes with little print matter, where there is only one parent (who works in her second job of the day until eleven o'clock at night), and in which the TV and/or siblings are raising the children, tend to score lower on the same tests. Schools can make up for this disparity, but to do so, they will have to rethink how they teach children.

WHAT DO READING TESTS MEASURE?

We must not place all the blame on elementary schools for the job they are doing. Though schools vary in their performance, early grades educators are generally doing a good job of teaching students to decode print through the use of phonics and other methods. At grade four, United States students lead the world in the ability to read (learn). It is by eighth and twelfth grades that a negative disparity is found. The Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress tests show that more than 60 percent of high school seniors in the United States score at or below the basic level of reading (as compared to the proficient and advanced levels). A scan of NAEP's own literature points out that what is being measured in their tests is the ability of students to perform higher order thinking while they read. The manual that NAEP publishes each two years with their report suggests that - when reading materials that are at grade level, students reading at the "basic" reading level should be able to "...demonstrate an overall understanding and make some interpretations of the text...." Students reading at the "proficient" level should be able to "...show an overall understanding of the text which includes inferential as well as literal information...." Students reading at the "advanced" level should be able to "...describe more abstract themes and ideas...analyze...extend the information from the text by relating to their own experiences and to the world..." (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1998). In other words, what the NAEP is measuring is students' abilities to perform higher order thinking while learning. The question is - are we teaching students how to think? Are we creating the conditions in our classrooms in which students are routinely enabled to analyze, apply, synthesize, and evaluate what they read?

HOW SCHOOLS CAN HELP STUDENTS ACQUIRE LITERACY SKILLS

What can schools do to help middle and high school students improve their achievement in learning? The systematic use of reading and writing to help students learn their subject matter is one answer. Students who are placed in an environment in which they are allowed to pursue learning through the means of reading, writing, discussing in cooperative groups, and thus manipulating ideas to construct meaning are finding that learning does not have to be difficult or boring, but rather can be fluid and engaging. What students in such an environment learn is that, despite their background or home environment, they can succeed as learners. A collateral benefit is that, while students in content area classes read, write, and discuss in order to learn, they actually improve the thinking skills directly related to higher performance in reading and writing.

WHAT ABOUT STUDENTS WHO ARE READING BELOW GRADE LEVEL?

Reading involves construction of meaning. Modern views of reading suggest that the reader uses the "set of tracks" left by the author, relating it to the reader's prior knowledge, to construct a message. The good news is that students who are reading below grade level, and who do not at a given time have the skills to read a piece of text independently, can read text at a much higher level than their diagnosed reading grade level, given the support of competent peers and/or a facilitating teacher. Students practicing learning through reading in this way, with well prepared teachers who know strategies to help students interpretively process text and work cooperatively to manipulate the ideas and themes of their course, can read text that is as much as four years above their diagnosed reading levels (Dixon-Krauss, 1996). In addition, students who have previously been frustrated by their lack of literacy skills are able to develop appropriate skills and strategies. In time, through such mediated literacy instruction, employing cooperative learning, students develop the ability to perform literacy skills autonomously. Stated another way - there is only one way to learn literacy skills, and that is by practicing them - and there is only one way to get students to practice literacy skills, and that is to make it easy for them to do so. That is what MAX Teaching is all about.

What does MAX stand for?

MAX is an acronym that stands for the three steps of the teaching framework that any teacher can use to help all students better learn their subject matter and improve the literacy skills of all students. The essential goal of teachers who use the MAX teaching framework is to level the playing field by raising the bar for all students, in a classroom environment that provides skill instruction to enable improved performance while engaging all students in active learning from textbooks and other forms of textual matter. The acronym stands for Motivation, Acquisition, and EXtension.

Motivation:

Each class begins with activities designed to motivate students to become engaged in the learning of content in which they might otherwise not be interested. This is accomplished through the systematic use of both individual and cooperative activities that help the teacher

• find out what the students already know about the topic to be studied,
• help students connect to and see the relevance of subject matter,
• provide for increased conceptual understanding for all students,
• introduce and model a literacy-related skill that the students will use to probe text and gather information for development of new understandings, and
• help students establish purposes for actively probing the text.

It is through carefully guided implementation of all of these components that students who otherwise might not have taken an interest in the learning experience are guided to become curious about subject matter and to have a plan for finding new information.

Acquisition:

Once students have clear purposes for learning, the teacher facilitates guided practice in the learning skill introduced in the Motivation stage of the lesson. (The exact skill to be practiced varies depending on the needs of the students, the structure and/or difficulty of the text, or on other variables.) In the Acquisition phase of the lesson, each student

• silently reads to interpret and gather information in writing for later discussion,
• actively probes text for acquisition of new content, and
• works toward acquisition of expertise in the practiced literacy skill.

Typically, this part of the class involves silent reading by students as they each gather information to be brought to small-group and whole-class discussion after the reading. In some cases, where student reading abilities are uniformly well below the level of the text, the teacher might read all or a part of the text aloud to the class. However, as early in the school year as possible, students should be allowed to practice mature silent reading to gather information through their own interpretations.

EXtension:

The final phase of the lesson framework involves EXtension beyond the text through various activities that might include debate, discussion, writing, reorganizing, or otherwise manipulating the ideas that were confronted in the reading. Students meet in small groups and as a whole class to construct meaning from the text. The teacher, in this phase of the lesson, acts as a facilitator for the higher order thinking that will allow students to perform synthesis of information with what they already knew before the lesson, analysis of new ideas, application-level thinking as to how what they have learned might work in the real world or under other circumstances, or even evaluation of the authors' underlying intent. It is through such higher order thinking that students develop more complete understandings about new content. It is also through such practice in higher order thinking that students develop the skills and abilities to perform these tasks on their own as independent life-long learners.

The principles underlying the MAX teaching framework are well researched over many years. The essential components of the use of cooperative learning throughout the first and last phases of the lesson, and the systematic introduction of skills in which students are given guided practice in the use of language as a tool for thinking combine to help all students learn how to become effective at learning and thinking. In addition, the MAX teaching framework provides a way for upper grade teachers to help compensate for the lack of language skills development that too many children exhibit.

HOW FREQUENTLY SHOULD TEACHERS USE MAX?

All effective teachers use some form of the three steps of MAX. At the beginning of class, most teachers use some form of an "anticipatory set" to get students thinking about the subject matter. The new information is often then "presented" in some format such as lecture, video, teacher-led discussion, etc. The presentation of new information is usually followed by some form of check such as a worksheet or quiz. Thus, the paradigm shift in using MAX as a framework of instruction is easy for most teachers since, with MAX, they now become facilitators of active learning on the part of the students through the use of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking in the middle and final phases of class. The teacher acts as a "master learner" among "apprentice learners" in a classroom wherein the focus is on acquisition of knowledge and skills through guided practice in using literacy skills to process new subject matter.

Using literacy skills to process new understandings can easily become the central focus of a classroom and can be used as a way to learn any new information. The variety of tested strategies available to teachers is enormous. Researched and proven strategies abound. Thus, practicing literacy skills to learn should not be a once-a-week or once-a-month activity. It can become the routine of a classroom in which students are daily engaged in making personal meaning from text and discussion.

WHICH TEACHERS SHOULD TEACH THIS WAY?

Teachers who use the MAX teaching framework do not need to be reading specialists. Academic and vocational teachers from the elementary grades through high school only need to recognize that by using the concrete tools of text and student writing, along with teacher modeling and cooperative learning, they can help their students routinely achieve higher order thinking about their subject matter. Staff development in using these strategies is accomplished through hands-on demonstration and modeling. Any teacher can use these techniques. After receiving staff development in using reading and writing to learn, most teachers are able to use a variety of reading/writing strategies immediately in their classrooms. Recent research has demonstrated that students can improve their reading levels by two or more years over a six month time period when exposed to learning through these strategies (Schoenbach, et al., 2001). Which teachers would not want to teach this way?

TO VIEW A SEVEN MINUTE VIDEO CLIP OF CAREER-TECHNICAL STUDENTS READING ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF MASS PRODUCTION, CLICK BELOW. THE MAX TEACHING PROCEDURE SHOWN IS AN "ANTICIPATION GUIDE." THIS ACTIVITY IS COMPOSED OF STATEMENTS ABOUT THE TOPIC DESIGNED TO ENGAGE STUDENTS IN PREDICTING AND DISCUSSING ABOUT WHAT THEY WILL READ, PROVIDING FOCUS DURING READING, AND GIVING STUDENTS CONCRETE STATEMENTS ABOUT WHICH THEY CAN ARGUE AFTER THE READING. (Obtain a copy of the anticipation guide in the video.)

Click Here for the Anticipation Guide Video

For information, including a bibliography on the concepts and principles behind the MAX Teaching System or availability of staff development opportunities, e-mail for details by clicking on mforget@maxteaching.com or phone 404-441-7008.