Chapter 4: English Language Arts Made Simple

The best piece of advice Schmoker gives us throughout this entire chapter is that all teachers must incorporate reading, discussing, and writing into their discipline.

This chapter focuses on the importance of literacy and how our current English Language Arts standards are preventing our students from becoming literate adults.

“Adolescents entering the adult world of the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives” (Schmoker, 93).

The first part of this chapter deals with the life changing power of broad, abundant reading. Schmoker defends reading and says “wide, abundant reading is the surest route out of poverty and the limitations that impose themselves on the less literate” (Schmoker, 95). When I read this quote, I made an instant connection to our school because we do have a high poverty rate of students who come into our building, and we have all seen them succeed in not just reading, but math and science also. This just proves his statement. People cannot use poverty as an excuse why students cannot perform. What can we do to ensure our current and future students have as much growth as our past students?

Schmoker then goes on to discuss the different forms of reading and why they are all equally important.
1. Literature: Schmoker introduces the concept of using literature to seek out understanding of ourselves and the world around us, not to recognize tone or structure.
2. Nonfiction and Literary Nonfiction: “Nonfiction books are among the richest sources of knowledge” (Schmoker, 98).
3. Newspapers and Magazines: He goes on to reiterate his passion for reading, discussing, and writing about current articles and opinion pieces.

How can we, as a leadership team, encourage the rest of our staff to incorporate literature, nonfiction, and newspapers into their curriculum whether it’s on the pacing guide or not?

The next part of this chapter talks a lot about reading in elementary and how it is hindering our students’ ability to read for learning, and is instead focused on learning to read. We must provide opportunities for our students to learn to read well by reading a lot for meaning.

Schmoker believes that the killing of reading will continue unless we take a hard look at the standards we have in place now, and minimize them. He suggests we adopt four key standards that could be used in all disciplines and at all levels: argument, drawing inferences and conclusions, resolving conflicting views and documents, and problem solving. “We need clear, simple standards that sensibly specify how much reading, writing, and speaking they will do” (Schmoker, 115).

He ends the chapter by again stressing the importance of reading, discussing, and writing. He describes three schools and explains how they have been successful with student achievement by using minimal standards that everyone can digest and adopt.

Looking at the four standards, is this the direction that we want to go? We have worked so hard at narrowing our focus on summarizing and even though these standards seem easy enough, I am reluctant to throw something new at our staff and not give what we are doing a chance to grow even more. However, I do know that our English Language Arts standards are too much. Looking at the new Common Core for grades 6-12, there are close to 30 pages of standards for English Language Arts. How do we begin to narrow the standards to fit our schools needs?