Getting outside the four corners
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The Reading Wars are a series of debates about how best to teach reading to small humans, and while the intensity of the debates themselves ebb and flow, the dates have been raging for only slightly fewer years than the printed word has existed.
One of the fronts in the debate has been the phonics vs. “whole language,” recently stirred up again by phonics advocate Emily Hanford. But that debate feeds into a broader one, an aspect of the conversation might be called skills vs. content.
The skills camp views reading as a suite of teachable, transferable skills (making inferences, fluency, decoding), while the content crew leans toward that it is rich content knowledge that makes the whole business of reading work, but which is not transferable (just because I can read a high-level book about dinosaurs doesn’t mean I can also read a high-level book about knitting).
The “war” framing can seem awfully overblown to actual classroom teachers. While reading warriors may frame the choices as “either-or,” actual classroom teachers more often think in terms of “how much of this gets used with how much of that.” But the Common Core Standards and the standardized test accountability movement came down heavily on the “suite of skills” side. The skills view lends itself more easily to standardized testing, while content advocates like E. D. Hirsch have declared, “There is no such thing as a reading test.”
Common Core may have, at least, gone into hiding, but many pieces of its approach still persist, and still do damage.
For a specific example, let’s look at one piece of direction from Common Core ELA Standards creator (and now chief of the College Board) David Coleman. Coleman famously decreed that students should stay within “the four corners of the text.”
Staying within the four corners means that, for instance, students should be dropped into the Gettysburg Address without any introductory lessons about Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, slavery, the Battle of Gettysburg, or the political situation in late 1863. Coleman wrote several examples of sample lessons from within the four corners, and they are… not very good.
That is not surprising, because both research and common sense tell us that prior knowledge is critical to reading. An oft-cited study by Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie showed that low-ability readers who understood baseball could out-perform high-ability readers with no baseball knowledge on a reading test built on a selection about baseball. This is not really a shocker; most readers can remember both breezing through a book on a subject they knew and cared about as well as the experience of plodding through reading about topics they neither knew nor cared for. Even at the phonics level, sounding out a word is more difficult if you have never heard of the word before.
But many teachers, particularly at the elementary level, are still pushed to use the four corners model (it’s now enshrined in many textbooks). This leads to a variety of unproductive practices. For instance, classes may reread the same short piece over and over for a week, poking and prodding at every word but not discussing how any prior knowledge or understanding of the world might connect. Comprehension will be checked via multiple choice questions and not more personal approaches such as having students retell the same story in their own way.
This seems like a method guaranteed to make students dread reading, both because it’s boring drudgery and because there’s nothing to suggest that this is how students actually learn to read. Instead, it’s like dropping students into a ten-square-foot patch of cleared ground in the middle of acres of cornfield, then telling them to harvest corn–but without going outside the four corners of their small patch.
We know that connecting new information to prior information is fundamental to learning. But the four corners frame views reading as the exercise of skills in a sort of intellectual vacuum. It’s wrong, it’s counter-productive, and perhaps most importantly, it’s not even possible. If you’ve been reading this thinking “How could staying within the four corners even be possible”– it’s not. Students could not function within the four corners if they did not bring in prior knowledge of what the words are and what they mean (Skills advocates sometimes try to sidestep this by calling “vocabulary” a skill). Nor can they leave behind their own experience how humans behave.
In Coleman’s essay, “Cultivating Wonder,” two issues jump out. One is that most of his questions do, in fact, require us to move outside the four corners. The other is that he rarely envisions more than one “correct” answer, even in cases, such as the structure of Huck Finn, where scholars are sharply divided. His idea of staying within the four corners looks more like prepping for a multiple-choice test and less like a rich, deep examination of the reading and how it connects to the world outside those four corners.
Reading involves a relationship between the reader, the page, the reader’s understanding of the world, and all the reader’s prior knowledge. Some of these connections can be surprising, unexpected, varied, even exciting. The four corners approach seeks to sever all those connections and leave the reading floating, isolated and disconnected from everything that gives it meaning. It is long past time to tear down the walls drawn around the four corners.
There is one other important implication here. The more students know about the world outside the four corners, the better readers they will be. Over the last decade or two, schools across the country have cut science and social studies and the arts to make room for more reading classes and more time to teach reading skills. That was probably exactly backwards; if we are going to help students become better readers, they need to spend more time outside the four corners, not less.
