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SHIFTING TO COMPLEX TEXTS
Text complexity, as the next three chapters make clear, has upped teaching complexity. For students to read and understand grade-appropriate complex texts independently and proficiently, high school teachers must be more intentional about selecting what students read, more conscious of when they expose students to certain texts, and simply better at how they help support students’ understanding of these texts. Without a shift in teaching commensurate with the new demands for text complexity, it is unlikely that students will be college and career ready in accordance with the new criteria (Williamson, Fitzgerald, & Stenner, 2014). Texts and teaching, in other words, must both be up to standard in order to foster learning capable of meeting these new demands.
The fundamental difference between next-generation standards like the Common Core and previous iterations of state learning benchmarks is the expectation for what and how students read; it is now an actual standard, and students will be tested on it. That standard, Reading anchor standard ten, is the critical outcome of your work during a given year: it represents students’ ability to comprehend—“independently and proficiently”—appropriately rigorous texts with the appropriate intellectual rigor. This is at the core of the work, no matter the content area, but it is also a benchmark for daily instruction. What texts you select and how you support students in meeting the demands of the content are what many of the grade-level articulations of Common Core Reading standard ten defines as the “scaffolding as needed” to enable all students to engage in and do work that is up to standard (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). This is complex work, but the two principles underlying text complexity are themselves quite simple.
1. What you ask students to read must, as often as possible, be at or above what is deemed appropriate for their grade level.
2. Such texts should contain ideas and language that, beyond simply being grade appropriate, both challenge the reader and contribute to his or her intellectual growth.
Good texts are rich in language, enabling students to practice with texts in the respective grade-level text-complexity band. They are also rich in ideas, enabling students to practice learning and applying the knowledge and skills of other reading standards in your framework. By design, such texts push the limits of students’ existing comprehension and fluency skills. They require meaningful instruction and learning opportunities for comprehension. They are, then, very deliberate teaching tools, not only for their content but also for the way they may support students’ abilities to understand that content.
The Complex Text in High School
What does it mean for a text to be rigorous high school reading? Lexile scores, the measure of a text’s sophistication in terms of its vocabulary and sentence structure, give us a starting point to determine rigor: students should enter high school ready to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s (1963) “I Have a Dream” speech (roughly scored at 1070L) and exit at the end of twelfth grade capable of independently reading passages of philosophy, theory, and criticism, such as that of Stephen Jay Gould (science), Jared Diamond (social sciences), and Leslie Fiedler (English), all of which typically score above 1300L. If such a progression appears daunting, consider how dangerous the status quo has been: the typical college-bound senior leaves high school having engaged entirely or predominantly in texts 150–200 Lexile points below the range of readings they are likely to experience in college coursework; that’s the equivalent of one to two years of reading exposure they have not experienced! (See the CCSS appendix A [NGA & CCSSO, n.d.a] for a description of how and why that gap came to be.) A critical aim of next-generation standards is to narrow this gap, hence the recommendations to not only increase the level of text complexity in each grade or grade band but also to establish a range so that students experience a coherent progression of complexity across grades. Figure 2.1 displays the text-complexity ranges for all grade bands both before (light gray) and after calibration (black) with the Common Core.
Source: Adapted from NGA & CCSSO, n.d.a.
Figure 2.1: Comparison of old and Common Core–aligned Lexile ranges.
To put it in the most basic terms: high school students need to increase their reading capacity by some 200 Lexile points between grades 9 and 12, and a full 130 Lexile points more than previously expected. In fact, the difference between the old and new expectations for grades 9–10 reading is almost 200 points alone–the low end of the old range is now the high end of fifth grade (Williamson et al., 2014).
Of course, numbers alone only provide a target or a range; they are not sufficient for determining what should be taught. Considered solely for quantitative text complexity, Ralph Ellison’s (1952) mid-20th-century masterpiece Invisible Man would be classified as a seventh-grade text and the works of Toni Morrison could be taught every year of middle school. What makes high school and college-level texts so complex is in the reading required to understand them, what Jeanne Chall (1983) speaks of as reading for multiple viewpoints and to construct a worldview; what William Perry (1999) calls multiplicity; and what Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Goldberger Tarule (1997) refer to as constructed knowledge. Such readings involve multiple levels of meaning, the use of figurative or rhetorical language, the complex structures meant for a particular purpose or discipline, and so on—they involve not simply the text but the task of reading them closely. The rigor of what students must do with the text, obviously, cannot be captured in a quantitative analysis of a text’s complexity.
Thankfully, the standards expand on these ideas and provide some guidance. According to the Common Core, complex high school–level literacy experiences in science, English, and social studies involve “multiple sources of information” (RST.11–12.7) or “multiple interpretations” (RL.11–12.7) with “uncertain” (RL.11–12.1), “conflicting” (RST.11–12.9), and “unresolved” (RST.11–12.6) components or implications; possess vocabulary with “figurative, connotative, and technical meanings” (CCRA.R.4); demand analysis and evaluation of the author’s premises, claims, and evidence; and include “particularly effective” (RI.11–12.6) uses of language and structure to achieve a purpose (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). At least a third of the Common Core Reading standards in all three subject areas incorporate these components, and the Writing anchor standards and Speaking and Listening anchor standard one do so significantly (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). The word complex is repeatedly used to invoke “ideas” (W.9-10.2); “process[es], phenomen[a], or concept[s]” (RST.9-10.2); and the structure of primary sources (RH.9–10.5; NGA & CCSSO, 2010).
As is stated in the introduction to the Common Core State Standards, high school students should be reading to literally and inferentially understand (per the Reading standards) the text itself, but they should also go beyond them to “comprehend as well as critique” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). Rosenblatt (1994) speaks of the mature reader as engaging in two kinds of reading: efferent, reading to understand the content of the text (to learn the what), and aesthetic, reading to understand the craftsmanship of the writing (to learn the how). Note that study of craftsmanship is not just for the analysis of literature; it can also refer to precise use of vocabulary or a well-sequenced argument in nonfiction texts, too. That’s why all strands in the CCSS have a domain titled Craft and Structure. Teachers should address both efferent and aesthetic reading in all content-area instruction, since they are interwoven, rather than isolated, concepts. For instance, Reading anchor standards one, two, four, five, six, and eight ask students to look at the text while focusing on specific kinds of meaning. Students also must be able to extend their analysis of texts into critical judgments. “Evaluate authors’ differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors’ claims, reasoning, and evidence” (RH.11–12.6; NGA & CCSSO, 2010), for instance, includes both the understanding of the text (the point of view, the argument) and how it is constructed (assessing the quality of the argument).
Quality, in short, matters. So too does the volume (the amount) and the range (text types) students read, of course, but it is critical that students have plentiful opportunities to read works that display, in the words of the two lead writers of the Common Core ELA standards, “exceptional craft and thought”—and to do so in all content areas (Coleman & Pimentel, 2012, p. 5). Social studies and science teachers can’t just rely on primary sources or technical documents (such as lab reports); they must also utilize texts that express sophisticated ideas in sophisticated ways—essays, critiques, journalistic pieces, memoirs, and even literary fiction. Students must read for information and to argue and critique, analyze, and aesthetically appreciate language and ideas.
Students have to construct their own meaning with, but not necessarily solely within, the text. Several of the Common Core standards in each of the content areas make clear that the text assists students in pursuing answers and making decisions. For grades 11–12 social studies, for example, this includes “determin[ing] which explanation best accords with textual evidence” (RH.11–12.3), “evaluat[ing] multiple sources of information … to address a question or solve a problem” (RH.11–12.7), and “integrat[ing] information … into a coherent understanding of an idea or event” (RH.11–12.9). Thus, a significant purpose for why (and how) students are to engage with complex texts in your content area is to solve meaningful intellectual problems—the same kinds of questions that make professionals read texts closely, such as, “Was the American Revolution really revolutionary?,” “Do we need theme?,” or “What is the future of the universe?”
This shift is why text complexity has upped teaching complexity: it’s not just about putting a more difficult text in front of students—it’s about making strategic, deliberate choices about the content you choose and how to ensure students can access it in ways that match the rigor of the standards. For students to comprehend as well as critique, there can’t be just one type of text, nor can there be one single way to engender proficient readings; in fact, multiple ways of integrating, understanding, and applying texts are needed to meet the standards.
Further details on the new text and teaching demands for each content area follow.
English
The high school English classroom remains the nexus for extensive fiction and literary nonfiction reading. The amount of literature to include and the focus on analyzing texts have not changed. The difference is that the Common Core State Standards are, in several areas, quite specific about what students should read in English coursework. For grades 9–10, they recommend “a wide reading of world literature” and “seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance” (for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”; NGA & CCSSO, 2010). In grades 11–12, they recommend “seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance” (for example, the Constitution), “seminal U.S. texts” involving “application of constitutional principles and use of legal reasoning” (for example, in U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions and dissents), “eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature,” and “at least one play by Shakespeare and one play by an American dramatist” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). The assigning of foundational and seminal nonfiction documents in English is not to remove the responsibility of their teaching from social studies teachers; rather, the idea is for students to analyze and evaluate these works as literature, looking beyond their historical context or importance and at the work itself for, as one standard says, their “themes, purposes, and rhetorical features” (RI.11–12.9; NGA & CCSSO, 2010). This opens up the possibility that students could read the same work in multiple courses, with different purposes for reading in each.
Guidance from PARCC (2012) indicates that students should read at minimum one book-length work per quarter, at least one of which should be nonfiction with the primary purpose to explain or argue. A strong memoir, such as Binyavanga Wainaina’s (2011) One Day I Will Write About This Place, can supplant a work of literary fiction. Students should read Shakespeare, whose works range between 1200L and 1400L and obviously are qualitatively rich in complexity, at least once in both the lower and upper grades of high school. While English teachers will need to devote at least one of their literary or dramatic works and some of their poetry to classic American literature (such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lorraine Hansberry, and T. S. Eliot), the best way to fully address the standards is with contemporary fiction, whose complex accounts and multiple points of view, uncertain resolutions or messages, and intricate characters best reflect the standards. Short story collections from Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies), Daniyal Mueenuddin (In Other Rooms, Other Wonders), and Louise Erdrich (“The Red Convertible”) can serve as anchor texts, or individual selections can be paired with nonfiction works or used as supplements to other literary works. Finally, students need repeated opportunities to read and respond to five-hundred- to one-thousand-word excerpts from high-quality literary nonfiction (particularly theories, critiques, analyses, and so on, in the areas of aesthetics, the humanities, and sociology), not only to access and experience college-level texts but also because the ACT, PARCC, and SBAC assessments all feature passages of this length.
Social Studies
Social studies teachers have no lack of complex texts from which to choose: most of the seminal and foundational documents of American history identified by the Common Core (such as Common Sense and The Federalist Papers) are at the high end—if not beyond—the text-complexity range for high school; many of the most well-known and highly regarded historians (such as Jared Diamond and Henry Louis Gates Jr.) are beyond the complexity as well, though more popular writers of society and culture, such as Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns) and Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City), tend to fall at the lower and middle ends of the range. Given the surfeit of quality texts, it is incumbent on social studies teachers to attend to volume and range, offering students repeated opportunities to view both primary and secondary sources of historical phenomena—speeches, essays, autobiographies, visual media, historical fiction, and so on. As with English, social studies teachers should provide many chances for students to read and respond to five-hundred- to one-thousand-word excerpts from secondary sources that reflect the readings students will see on the PARCC, SBAC, and ACT; these should be tied to—or logically connected with—the focus of study at the time of the reading.
Given these demands, it is essential that social studies teachers have a long-term vision for infusing their curriculum with literacy; this requires a consistent structure for how students engage with complex texts in the classroom. Some suggestions:
о Read a book-length text each semester—For example, you could choose to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Haley, 1965) or a collection of essays, first-hand accounts, and historical analyses of the Civil Rights era. Truly excellent historical fiction, such as Cormac McCarthy’s (1985) Blood Meridian or E. L. Doctorow’s (1975) Ragtime, is also appropriate.
о At least once a quarter, if not during each module or unit, include an anchor text that provides a conceptual or theoretical foundation from which students can analyze and evaluate the historical phenomena they are studying—Examples include Arthur Schlesinger’s (1986) The Cycles of American History, Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, and Jared Diamond’s (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel. Students should first study excerpts from such texts so they understand the core tenets of the argument, and then they should apply the key ideas or arguments of the text to examples from the textbook or other readings.
о For each topic or area of study, develop an inquiry by using a balance of primary, secondary, and textbook sources—For example, a U.S. history course could address westward expansion by looking at primary sources of the era, such as John Gast’s painting American Progress and John O’Sullivan’s (1839) “The Great Nation of Futurity” editorial, and secondary sources from a century later, such as Anders Stephanson’s (1995) Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right, and Henry Nash Smith’s (1970) Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth.
The website Reading Like a Historian from the Stanford History Education Group (http://sheg.stanford.edu/rlh) is a valuable resource for social studies teachers when identifying primary sources.
Science
The challenge for science teachers when selecting and integrating complex texts into their curriculum is addressing the literary side of writing in their discipline. With their technical vocabularies and formal tones, the most common texts of the science classroom—textbooks, lab reports, and technical accounts—are often complex because they are, to borrow a word commonly used by science educators, dense with information and technical language rather than because they feature sophisticated arguments, explanations, or uses of language. Teachers need to make a very intentional effort, then, to locate and implement texts that help students analyze, synthesize, and evaluate (per the standards), and not just comprehend; they’ll also need to think critically about how to pair doing science with reading science, as the CCSS do not separate the two.
The following four shifts in science instruction tied to the Common Core standards will help science teachers integrate appropriate texts.
1. Read and review texts during laboratory exercises: At least three of the Reading standards for science (RST.9–10.3, RST.9–10.6, and RST.8) specifically address conducting or evaluating procedures and experiments in response to what is written in a text. Others (CCRA.R.7, CCRA.R.9) discuss integrating multiple sources of data, from texts and experiments, into solving problems (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). But simply reviewing a list of steps is not enough—the expectation is that students will read on-level material when engaging in the doing of science, so students will need exposure to the foundational logic of the experiment or question under investigation, such as via the original study (for example, Gregor Mendel’s [1865] “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” for an introductory focus on genetics) or the methods section of a scholarly article. Such pieces are also good for addressing vocabulary standards.
2. Increase the complexity of current event or real-world application articles: Science teachers commonly share readings that relate to current or recent areas of study. These often are discovered by chance, from not particularly intellectually charged sources, and are utilized in a spur-of-the-moment fashion. Sourcing deliberately from more intellectually rigorous materials, however, is a logical way of helping students use textual evidence (CCRA.R.1) and summarizing complex concepts (CCRA.R.2). The websites of Science, Discover, and Seed magazines all feature articles on the latest science news that are written for the scientific community. Editorial and feature reporting in the New York Times or the Economist may also suffice. Such works are equivalent to the ideas and rhetorical complexity of the texts students are likely to see on the PARCC, SBAC, and ACT assessments.
3. Provide frequent opportunities for students to understand the core questions, arguments, and advances of key scientific concepts: To integrate complex texts more seamlessly into your curricula, focus reading opportunities on the intellectual development and complexities of key concepts, not on their historical background or practical uses. What makes the writing of scientists like E. O. Wilson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Stephen Jay Gould more literary is their inquiry into what is known and unknown in science and their interest in the ethical and philosophical implications of such knowledge. Texts of this quality are particularly good for defining central ideas (CCRA.R.2.), defining technical vocabulary (CCRA.R.4), considering the author’s purpose (CCRA.R.5, CCRA.R.6.), and evaluating arguments and explanations (CCRA.R.2). Because such works tend to be rich in thought and intellectually heavy, they need not be long in length. A brief excerpt, sometimes only a paragraph or two, may suffice (NGA & CCSSO, 2010).
4. Synergize texts: Reading anchor standards seven and nine ask for students to synthesize information from multiple kinds of texts—prose, visual texts, and quantitative texts—and science teachers can respond by constructing tasks centered on analyzing a range of texts that help students solve a scientific problem (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). For example, in a biology or environmental science class, students might study population decline by reading a theory or technical account of the phenomena and then, using quantitative data and an article on a particular species’ decline, identify the cause of the decline, compare it with other species or scientific explanations, and suggest or evaluate solutions. Reading a range of texts—from a complex explanation of theory to a chart to a newspaper article—and engaging in exploration and analysis of data emulates the work scientists do when attacking problems in their field.
Next Steps: Three Implications for Instruction
Looking at the suggestions for all three content areas, it’s clear that students need to be reading authentic texts—the same kinds of texts professionals in the discipline study and rely on when posing questions and solving problems. They also need to be engaged in authentic tasks—the same kind of problems that professionals in the discipline experience or attempt to solve. Rigor, after all, is not just upping the quality and complexity of the content but also equally enhancing the quality and complexity of how teachers and students engage in it. Thus, three implications for instruction are clear: you must (1) ensure text quality is high, (2) ensure reading is a practice, not an act, and (3) make practice deliberate.
Ensure Text Quality Is High
The emphasis on text complexity in the CCSS and talk surrounding the CCSS stem from a report from the testing company ACT (2006), which finds that students’ ability to read complex texts independently is the key difference in determining a student’s college readiness; at least half of all graduating high school students, the report finds, aren’t ready. The big reveal of the report, though, is curricular in nature. The problem is as much one of access as it is outcome: the sophistication and language demands of high school textbooks and student opportunities with and exposure to complex texts in high school have been on the decline for decades.
You’ve heard the phrase “every teacher a reading teacher”; the Common Core is taking it a step further, suggesting that every class is a reading class. In this new reality, the text itself plays a crucial role; more than simply a vehicle for content, a rich text is a vehicle for both teaching the standards and for building student capacity to be proficient and independent readers.
Ensure Reading Is a Practice, Not an Act
The CCSS tell us only what students are to understand; instruction must be the source of how they understand. Research tells us that the two essential factors affecting a reader’s capacity to understand a text are knowledge and cognitive strategies—that is, what a reader knows about the subject matter, language (including vocabulary), and structure of a text and what the reader undertakes mentally to form a coherent representation of a text, such as by rereading, visualizing, generating questions, and so on (Cain, Oakhill, Barnes, & Bryant, 2001; Liben & Pearson, 2013). These factors work together to help the reader connect language and ideas within the text and across texts or prior knowledge (Magliano, Millis, Ozuru, & McNamara, 2007). If and when comprehension fails, the expert reader has the capacity to monitor and correct as needed in order to establish or reestablish basic comprehension. This ability to grasp the literal and inferential meanings should look familiar—it’s Reading anchor standard one, and the student is expected to engage in it during every single class, every single day.
What’s radical about these ideas—developing knowledge, utilizing comprehension strategies, building schema, and so on—is that they are hardly radical at all. The research supports them, and the individual pieces are probably already immersed in your school’s curriculum, if not your own. But it’s no longer only the English teacher who teaches reading strategies, the history teacher who teaches content, and the science teacher who teaches vocabulary. Everyone has to teach everything all of the time. It’s a practice, rather than a solitary act. Content, skills, metacognition, and self-efficacy are intertwined and interdependent. A student cannot, say, apply what he or she might have learned about mass in a previous lecture to a Science article on the composition of space if he or she is unable to read highly technical scholastic writing; likewise, no set of strategies will be sufficient to understand a primary source account of the French Revolution if a student has no background knowledge on the context, people, or historical significance of the French Revolution. Only through the synthesis of supportive instruction, curriculum, and learning environment can students comprehend complex texts and be ready for the literacy demands of college and career.
Make Practice Deliberate
Selecting texts and attending to the comprehension needs of students is not, however, enough. To ensure student literacy is up to standard, it is crucial to connect intentionally frequent and meaningful experiences with what students are expected to learn—what has been referred to as deliberate practice (Ericcson, 2002). The concept, perhaps most widely known as the conceptual basis for Malcolm Gladwell’s (2008) 10,000-hour rule for developing expertise, rests on the idea that frequency or repetition of a learned concept or activity alone is not enough to ensure mastery; learners must instead be deliberately engaged in the skill in terms of what they are learning, and when, how, where, and with whom they are learning it. The activity of reading is no different: students must not only be exposed to a variety of texts, they must engage them in a variety of ways—to solve different kinds of problems and to engage others around solving them—if they are to demonstrate increasing independence and proficiency with content that is itself increasing in complexity. The task, not just the text, then, becomes an essential lever for supporting high-quality student work.
The following principles suggest a major shift for educators, particularly when planning instruction. These principals alone are not enough to ensure instruction is up to standard; however, together they provide a foundation for up-to-standard instruction.
о Teachers must develop curricula centered on daily engagement with high-quality texts.
о Teachers must support engagement with high-quality texts through assisted development of comprehension skills, background knowledge, and metacognition.
о Teachers must sequence and scaffold instruction over time so they increase in complexity and autonomy.
Building such a foundation is key to selecting the right texts, aligning standards to literacy pedagogy, and facilitating student engagement with and understanding of rigorous material.
Textbook Supplementation
You’ll find no argument here for the elimination of the textbook. By its very nature, however, a textbook alone is insufficient for helping students demonstrate proficiency in the Common Core standards. Mastering a standard requires students to engage with texts rich in thought and language—features a textbook lacks. A student can’t analyze where a textbook “leaves matters uncertain” (RL.11–12.1) or “analyze the author’s purpose” (RST. 11–12.6; NGA & CCSSO, 2010). The Integration of Knowledge and Ideas domain of the Reading anchor standards, requires working with ideas across multiple texts and different kinds of texts, which is something that textbooks, with their discrete chapters and sections, are not set up to do well. Textbooks lack the extended anchor texts students are expected to read in all content areas; many do not feature enough short excerpts of analytical writing that students will need exposure to in order to prepare for the PARCC, SBAC, and ACT assessments. Even if passages used in a textbook are rigorous, reliance on the instructional materials included with the selected text in the teacher’s edition of the textbook is likely to be insufficient in helping students demonstrate comprehension that is up to the expectation set by the standards.
