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Text Complexity: Raising Rigor In Reading (2012)

by Douglas Fisher(Favorite Author)

3.82 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0872074781 (ISBN13: 9780872074781)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

International Reading Association

review 1: Since I began teaching, figuring out how to appropriately match students to texts has been a big struggle. In a high school english classroom, I have students reading anywhere from an early elementary level to a college level, and it is my job to engage them all with grade level standards and improve their reading ability.In my teaching context, there is much emphasis placed on providing students with leveled texts based on readibility formulas as the most appropriate way to support students' reading skills. This is obviously a great instructional practice for guided reading and an important part of teaching students to read in the primary grades. It is also an important instructional strategy for students who enter the secondary grades reading far below grade level. So... moreme teachers I know have gone so far as to re-write texts to make them more accesible to students reading below grade level. I always struggled with this idea, becacuse a)that is an egregious and unsustainable amount of work for a teacher and b)I know that students are able to extend beyond their reading level to engage with different types of texts, based on my experiences with students. Also, once students graduate high school and move on to college, they will be expected to engage with many different types of texts that are well beyond their level and teachers will not change those texts to suit students' individual needs. At the secondary level, consistently providing leveled texts seemed unrealistic and inappropriate as a primary instructional strategy. Also, saying that students can only engage with texts at their "level" seemed like an overly reductive way of understanding students and their capacity. So, needless to say, I spent many hours worrying and wondering about which instructional materials are appropriate for my high school English classroom.Text Complexity helped me think about the many ways that texts are complex, some of which can be measured by readability formulas (such as Lexile), some of which cannot. There is also a discussion of the way the readability formulas can obscure the actual complexity of a text and can be misleading to a teacher. In this book, Fisher, Frey and Lapp argue that teachers should teach complex texts to students of varying reading levels but should provide pathways to engage with the different aspects of complexity that may confront a student when reading a text. In short, the problem is often not the complexity of the text, but it is rather instruction that does not provide students with the ability to access the text. I appreciated the thoughtful discussion of the various factors of text complexity and will undoubtedly reference it when choosing which texts to use with my class and how to teach them. As teachers, we should constantly be analyzing text for complexity and teaching our students the same. If we provide enough support as teachers, we can work with our students to access complex text (ones which may be well beyond their "level") and to construct meaning out of these texts. As students engage in this process with the help of a teacher, they are then able to apply these skills to their independent reading and can raise their level as independent readers.Though I would have liked to read more practical application strategies for the secondary classroom, the framework for analyzing complexity when choosing materials to study in class was very helpful to me. I would recommend this book to teachers thinking about how to engage students coming from a broad range of reading abilities in the study of complex texts.
review 2: I thought that this book was a more detailed explanation of the appendices version from the Common Core Standards. I agree that we need to expose our students to the complex thinking that readers need to do in order to make sense of text. I also agree that students need to ground their thinking based on the text. Having said that, I fear that with all of this emphasis on going back to the text, that educators will miss opportunities for some of the highest levels of thinking. Evaluating and creating are the highest levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. I hope that we are not forgetting to teach our students that it is also okay to think creatively and have opinions that differ from what an author intended. less

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