Reading

University of Minnesota

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When this piece airs, or does whatever an online article does when it actually goes online, I will have been at the University of Minnesota for 29 years, having been hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Secondary Education in September 1970. A lot has, of course, changed in those 29 years -- at the University of Minnesota, in the world of reading, and in the world of learning more generally. At the university, the Department of Secondary Education has been absorbed into the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. In the world of reading, skills management systems and scope and sequences have disappeared, while whole language, literature-based instruction, the reading wars, phonemic awareness, balanced instruction, and a host of other concerns, causes, and conflicts have emerged. And in the world of learning, the cognitive revolution and schema theory are now part of the old guard, while constructivism, situated learning, and sociocultural concerns are just a few of the new features of today's learning landscape.

But one thing has not changed. Reading for secondary students -- in fact, reading for students beyond the primary and lower elementary grades -- gets relatively little attention. Here in the United States, as elsewhere around the world, there is widespread acceptance of the importance of higher levels of literacy for students, levels that can only be achieved across the years of elementary and secondary school -- and beyond. Yet despite this acceptance, most educators, researchers, and policy makers focus their attention on the lower grades. For example, the report on reading most often cited in the U.S. literature at the moment, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), concentrates on preschool through third grade; the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, the national reading research center funded by the U.S. federal government, focuses on beginning reading; and the most recent "What's Hot, What's Not" poll in Reading Today (Cassidy & Cassidy, 1999) lists phonemic awareness as the hottest of hot topics.

The amount of attention given to secondary students is not, of course, going to be hugely influenced by this brief commentary. Nevertheless, two contemporary constructs that have the potential to change the way secondary teachers teach seem well worth highlighting. These are the "teaching for understanding" approach and the concept of scaffolding students' learning. I will address the first of these topics here and the second in an upcoming commentary.

Teaching for Understanding

Over the past decade or so, several groups of educators and researchers have given considerable attention to teaching for understanding. These include John Bransford and the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (in press); Ann Brown, Joseph Campione, and colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley (Brown & Campione, 1996); Fred Newmann and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin (Newmann, Secada, & Wehlange, 1995); Grant Wiggins and his colleagues working with the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (Wiggins, 1989; Wiggins & McTighe, 1998); and David Perkins and his colleagues working with Harvard's Project Zero (Blythe, 1998; Perkins, 1992; Wiske, 1998). Perkins' approach is the one that has been described most completely in the literature, the one I am most familiar with, and the one I will describe here. However, I would stress that each of these approaches has a number of exciting and innovative features and is well worth serious study.

A large part of understanding Perkins' notion of teaching for understanding and its importance is the realization that in some ways schooling is not going well even for our best students, that all too few students attain the deep level of understanding critical in today's world (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Bruer, 1994; Perkins, 1992; Resnick, 1987; Ryder & Graves, 1998). Recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress strongly support these scholars' contention. For example, of the 12th graders tested, only 6 percent reached the advanced level in reading (Donahue, Voelkl, Campbell, & Mazzeo, 1999), only 3 percent reached the advanced level in science (O'Sullivan, Reese, & Mazzeo, 1997), and only 1 percent reached the advanced level in history (Goodman, Lazer, Mazzeo, Mead, & Pearlmutter, 1998).

Understanding, explains Perkins (1992), enables a person "to