Excerpts or Whole Books?

In a post last week, Timothy Shanahan has some worthwhile points to make about literacy, reading, and excerpts versus whole works. But in the end, we come back to the same old problem (spoiler alert: it's testing).

In "Whole Books or Excerpts? Which Does the Most to Promote Reading Ability," Shanahan notes that the excerpts vs. whole books debate keeps busting out. He starts out by questioning the premise of one side's claims of a "purportedly damaging shift" from books to excerpts.

I say “purported” because the claim seems to be that in the past teachers were teaching their kids to read books, and now they aren’t. I’ve been around quite a while, and I don’t remember the past that way.

That's fair. Shanahan says he's been worked on various textbook reading programs for fifty years, so he would correctly remember that most basal literature texts generally relied heavily on short works, a few excerpts, and probably one full play and one full length work. When my department decided to incorporate more complete works, we had to move outside the basal text. Our AP track required students to read 7 or 8 novels, but even in the "general" track, we covered a couple of books a year. I would expect your mileage may vary depending on your local teachers. Shanahan later argues that the lack of complete books has been particularly true for K-5, though a first grader's "complete book" is a far cry from Moby Dick.

But I think Shanahan is missing part of the concern here. In my last decade of teaching under test-and-punish policies, it's not just that I was directed to use more excerpts, but that the excerpts were of particular low quality. Like innumerable teachers across the country, I was handed a stack of workbooks, typically with a few paragraphs on one page with four or five multiple choice questions on the facing page. To make room for all this drill, something had to go (of course, administrations tend to add items to teachers' plates without any direction on how to make it fit). 

We did all this, of course, for test prep. The Big Standardized Test asks students to read a short, context-free excerpt, and answer some multiple choice questions about it. So that's what we practiced. Shanahan says that "it would be the rare program that presents reading instruction as a series of random excerpts," and I would agree if we were only talking about basal texts-- but that's not what much of the "excerpts are killing us" crowd is talking about.

And the Big Standardized Test hangs over Shanahan's whole discussion.

I’d love to say that “Smith and Jones (1998) found that teaching reading with books increased reading levels by 26 points over what resulted for the excerpts group.” Or vice versa.

The problem is that there is no such research.

This is unsurprisingly correct.  But it's also the heart of the problem with his main question. Shanahan is treating "reading ability" and "scores on a reading test" as synonyms. And no reading test I've ever heard of tests for things like "read an entire novel then reflect and develop and understanding of the major themes and how they are set forth and connected over the entire length of the work. There's a level of literacy that is imply impervious to standardized testing because that level of literacy requires depth and time. It's the level of literacy that, for instance, helps you understand that The Great Gatsby parties are meant as a demonstration of using excess to try to drown out the inner wailing of sad, empty lives and not as an example of the kind of cool party that people should want to imitate. It's the level of literacy that is able to grapple with the ambiguity that enriches rather than demanding that every question about a piece of reading must one and only one correct answer. 

I don't know how you test for that level of literacy, especially the level that pays off throughout one's life as a grown human person. But it is precisely that level of literacy and comprehension that is needed to navigate a complicated modern world, and yet we have engineered a system that focuses schools' energy on Not That. Are we paying a price for it as a country and a culture? Aspects of our current national situation might point to "yes," but can I cite actual testing data? I cannot, because there is no test checking for that kind of reading ability. And as long as we keep treating "reading ability" and "score on a Big Standardized Test" as synonyms, we will not have such evidence.

Shanahan argues that reading a full book to students is not helpful, and I agree (he says that lots of whole book fans think Reading To is fine, and I disagree-- I have certainly met those people, but they were a minority among professionals I have known). 

Shanahan speaks in favor of building "reading stamina" but says we don't need to go whole text to do that. And at some points in his post, I'm not really sure what Shanahan is trying to say:

My point isn’t that there is no cultural benefit to be derived from having read The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, or Beloved in their entirety. Those are wonderful books and the more kids who know them the better. However, I also think it’s wonderful for kids to get to know Steinbeck, Salinger, Morrison, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hawthorne, Melville, Lee, Knowles, Crane, Golding, Dickens, Homer, Frank, Bradbury, Wiesel, Twain, Atwood, Doerr, Lowry, Kesey, Keyes, Smith, Hinton, Updike, Orwell, and so on. There are so many fine authors and wonderful books, stories, plays, and essays, that a whole book curriculum is certain to be deficient when it comes to familiarizing students with this range of voices.

 So... full novels are swell but have no benefit? Because we can't full novel our way through a full range of writers, why bother? I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure that there are benefits to reading some of these works, even if the variety is limited. Those benefits would include 1) there are a wide range of rewards and understandings that come from full immersion is a large-scale work and 2) there are many different voices out there and you will like some and not others. 

Shanahan lists five concluding, and his last is his most solid:

There is no reason why schools cannot combine both excerpts and whole books in their English Language Arts instruction – fostering both depth and breadth.

Sure. And I would add that it is helpful if these works have some sort of depth or merit to them. Yes, we will argue until our tongues can no longer wag about what works truly have depth and merit, but as long as we're trying to steer by those values, I'm convinced that we will end up some place more rich and rewarding than we get with somebody's super duper test practice workbook sheets, even if our test scores don't go up on the way.