Great Habits, Great Readers: A Practical Guide for K - 4 Reading in the Light of Common Core / Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, Aja Settles, Juliana Worrell

Q&A With the Authors

Let’s start with the big question: How will Great Habits, Great Readers help teachers prepare students for Common Core-level rigor?

That word “rigor” is really the key. As educators, we all want our students to be able to thrive in a rigorous learning environment where they-- not we--do the heavy cognitive work. And the Common Core standards only take us halfway to that goal. They’re a big step towards rigor, because they require students to master more complex skills by younger grades than ever before. But whether we actually reach rigor still depends on how we measure those standards. For example, the Common Core says third graders need to know how to identify character traits. But the third-grade teacher who asks “Did the brother really mean it when he said he was okay?” isn’t giving her students such rigorous instruction as the teacher who asks “What is the brother feeling?” It’s the second question that forces the student to do the thinking. So, in this book we’re bridging the gap between what the Common Core says on paper and how it looks in the classroom. We’re saying, here’s how to build classrooms that do what that second question does.

You mention in the book that while the Common Core requires a greater focus on informational texts, it doesn’t say we should stop teaching narrative texts. Can you tell us more about that?

One of the most dangerous myths about the Common Core is that it asks teachers to devote half of their literacy block time to informational texts. While the Common Core does support the NAEP distribution of literary versus informational texts--which asks that fourth-grade students split their time 50-50 between both--it also points out that this doesn’t mean we need to take literature away from our classrooms. A much better solution: support literacy in other content-area classes by using informational texts to teach science and social studies. You’ll fulfill—probably exceed--the NAEP’s 50% informational requirement, drive student learning in content-area classes, and still have plenty of space to teach students the narrative reading skills they need.

Literacy-driven content-area instruction is a vast topic--one that merits another book on its own! But, in brief, it would require students to read a text in order to understand specific concepts. Reading would also be the key to building new vocabulary: students would learn new words by reading increasingly complex texts, not by being assigned stand-alone vocabulary lists. It may sound like a tough order for elementary students, but in our own work in the classroom, we’ve been amazed by their ability to use their existing knowledge base to tackle more and more complex reading in every subject.

The book puts a lot of effort into showing teachers how to implement the Reading-by-Habit model--you’ve included videos, sample lesson plans, a chapter on scheduling with variations for the resources different teachers might have available, and so on. Do you believe that any teacher can use the model detailed in the book?

Absolutely! What’s most magical about great reading instruction is that, in fact, it’s not magical at all: it’s based on concrete actions that are replicable by any teacher, at any school. This is epitomized by the Guided Reading Prompting Guides we include in the book. When you see a master teacher prompt during a reading lesson, that teacher often looks like a mind reader--or, at the very least, like someone with years of teaching experience. But when you take a closer look at exactly what our most successful teachers say when they prompt, we come up with a comprehensive guide that any teacher can use to anticipate where students will struggle and plan how to help them back on track. We believe all students have what it takes to learn to read, and we believe all teachers have the power to get them there, too. It’s all a matter not of inborn talent, but of learning the right things to do.