The move towards an education based primarily on meeting standards and earning high test scores is tricky. On one hand, you need standards and test scores to be able to measure what students should learn and what they are learning, but they also can never accurately give us information about what students and even teachers are capable of. Nothing is constant in the world of education, things are continually being revised, adapted, and made new. Teachers have to be prepared for the changes that come about and have to experience the learning curve of those changes. Chapter 6 opens up talking about Common Core, which is what teachers are now learning to interpret and make a part of their classrooms. Changes in standards means changes in teaching, and the book's implication of schools potentially moving toward more non-fiction over fiction pieces was concerning. You need both pieces of non-fiction and fiction for a rich English curriculum and I hope that this does not become a reality for students. English classes need stories like Catcher & The Rye, The Great Gatsby, and other novels that while fiction, provide students with the experience of stepping into a different world.
When looking at the different components of how text complexity is measured, breaking it down into the 3 categories of quantitative, qualitative, and reader/text considerations, the descriptions helped emphasize that all categories are inter-related and cannot stand alone. A quantitative measurement may indicate that a book is too high for a student, but reader and text considerations may imply that the student would be capable of reading the material. Looking at the different categories was helpful for me as a future teacher who will be dealing with matching different students to different texts. Especially in special education, students in the same classroom can all be at different reading levels, making matching students to appropriate text challenging.
What I enjoyed most from this chapter was the discussion on "deliberate practice," a phrase I did not know the meaning of until this reading. It encompasses the idea that if you practice something consistently without it ever increasing in difficulty, you will not advance. I liked the comparison to driving as in the beginning driving requires practice, but once you get past the initial stage, you cannot advance further in driving skills unless conditions prove to become more challenging. I also liked the comparison to tennis players and that new players cannot be expected to know how to operate like experts do. This idea of deliberate practice backs up what other readings have been saying about disciplinary literacy instruction and how students cannot just be expected to know how to read complex texts from all subject areas without instruction and practice.
Something that stood out to me was when Hinchman talked about how we cannot assume that talented students will not require the same amount of deliberate practice as others. Thinking of myself, in high school I never struggled with some of the challenging pieces we would read in English. I was the one often explaining the reading to friends who sometimes did not understand what the story was saying. Just because I was succeeding does not mean that I did not need increasingly difficult texts over time in order to continue my reading growth and prepare for college level reading material. I believe that you learn best when challenged, and as teachers we need to never stop challenging students to try something new, because it can give them confidence that they are capable of whatever they set their minds to and that they can always keep going further.
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