Teaching Above Reading Level. I teach 4th grade general education.
I have read several of your articles the last few days because I have a growing frustration regarding guided reading. I believe a lot of your ideas about what does not work are correct, but I don't understand what you believe we SHOULD be doing. I am confused about how to give students difficult text books to read without reading it to them. Text Complexity: Is This Book at Grade Level? An element of the common core I have yet to discuss on this blog but have heard rumblings of throughout the field of ELA is the idea of text complexity, which is best addressed in Appendix A of the CCSS, should you be so inclined for some light afternoon reading :) The need for choosing appropriately challenging grade level texts stems from research showing that although college and workplace text difficulty has risen in recent decades, the level of difficulty in the textbooks we use in our classrooms has steadily declined.
When looking solely at Lexile scores (a quantitative measure of text difficulty based on a mathematical formula), I have heard varying discrepancy levels stating high school texts are anywhere from 100-300 Lexile levels below appropriate grade level complexity. What does this mean for our students? Text Complexity: Simplifying Text Complexity And The Common Core. Teaching Strategies For Analyzing Text: Complete Lesson.