This week we are thinking deeply about the strategies commonly used to introduce students to new texts and the ways these practices may collide with the recommendations around the Common Core State Standards and/or our visions for students as proficient, independent readers of texts that make them think. Today, we look at the second of three dimensions of before-reading instruction: using pre-reading strategies. In his video series on EngageNY, Bringing the Common Core to Life, full transcript, p. 13, David Coleman generally addresses the various pre-reading strategies that are now hallmarks of literacy instruction. As a point of example, he refers to his model lesson with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter From a Birminham Jail. Coleman explains:
Number two, pre-reading strategies. So then there’s a lot of work you can try to do before the letter like you might try to predict what he’s going to say or where he was or you might try to compare it to other prison letters. You might to try to do several pre-reading type approaches. Forgive me, but I am asking you to just read. To think of dispensing for a moment with all the apparatus we have built up before reading and plunging into reading the text. And let it be our guide into its own challenges. That maybe those challenges emerge best understood from the reading of it. (p. 16)
Later in the video (and transcript) Coleman responds to a question from the audience and again refers to pre-reading strategies. He explains:
This is a change of the spirit. It’s a change of what we think about kids and practice every day, of moving from a world where we’re trying to protect them from the things we think that are hard, to help them embrace and encounter those things that are hard, to practice them, as an aid to them rather than an attack on them, so it is a moral and ethical move. I’ll tell you what’s very interesting. I think we live in a world where everyone is sick of what’s going on and they’re looking for someone to stop the madness. So I just met with one of the three largest publishers of K-5 educational materials. And by the end of the meeting, there was almost a very emotional like you’re saying where he said, “We’ve built up all this pre-reading stuff. We never let kids read everything. There’s all this associated material.” He wasn’t proud of it. He’s the publisher of it. He feels he’s been forced to do it by the marketplace. The marketplace then feels forced by the standards. (p. 26)
In reading these quotes and assimilating them with all our other reading and thinking about the Common Core State Standards in general, and pre-reading strategies specifically, we have a few thoughts. 
1. Coleman speaks in extremes and exaggerates, presumably to persuade. We don’t think that he thinks that we never let kids read or that we need to get rid of all the structures that support readers.
2. Coleman has a point. With the research on what “good readers” do, with the revolutionary influence of Mosaic of Thought, even with the paradigm shift that came from Durkin in 1978, publishers and educators (Which is chicken and which is egg?), including us, have let the work around reading encroach on the work of actually reading. It is worth considering the state of comprehension instruction before these influences, however, lest we lose ground. There were national concerns about comprehension that predate these instructional strategies; all was not hunky-dory in comprehension land before teachers began using pre-reading strategies. Perhaps, we need to note the literacy politics of the day that precipitated this series of changes to comprehension instruction, lest we fall once again into a huge pendulum swing. Nevertheless, there seems to be reason to rethink pre-reading strategies and the extent to which they are used to supplant actual interactions with text.
3. What seems to be missed in conversations about pre-reading strategies is that the work around these strategies is about habituating that which is automatic for proficient readers. So, while stopping to predict or compare before reading a text is automatic for those of us who always read for meaning, it is practiced explicitly in classrooms with the intention of developing these habits in less proficient readers. So, while we might dispense with some of the apparatus of teaching pre-reading strategies, the in-the-head apparatuses of reading can’t be dispensed with. Proficient readers immediately begin to predict, compare, and engage in a host of other automatic, meaning-making strategies, which will, of course, continue. And David Coleman wants these to continue, even if he doesn’t know it. The distinction is along the gradual release of responsibility and figuring out how to support students in developing automatic strategies for monitoring and understanding without setting up permanent structures that create dependence and intrude on time in text.
4. Coleman is studied in literature. Sometimes in his writing and speaking he exhibits voice that makes us say, “Here, here!” Usually, this is around a point which we think the field of education really needs to hear, even if from a non-educator. Read again what Coleman wrote about pre-reading strategies:
Forgive me, but I am asking you to just read. To think of dispensing for a moment with all the apparatus we have built up before reading and plunging into reading the text. And let it be our guide into its own challenges. That maybe those challenges emerge best understood from the reading of it. (p. 16)
The language of this persuasion is nice. The apparatus we have built up … plunging into reading … let it be our guide into its own challenges … best understood from the reading of it. We find real merit in the authenticity of grappling with the problems encountered in the reading of the text as they emerge rather than in anticipation of them. If we spend less time predetermining problems, then the reading process practiced in classrooms is better aligned with our vision of our students as readers who solve problems on the run, so to speak.
5. While the model lesson in the video transcribed above was for high school students, the Common Core author’s concerns about pre-reading strategies appear equally heavy for elementary classrooms. This is indicated by the quote above where Coleman references his meeting with publishers of K-5 materials.
6. There seems to us a bit of irony in Coleman’s reference to current, published materials that evolved in response to earlier standards and research trends, even as he, the lead author of the newest standards, meets with the “three largest publishers of K-5 educational materials” and appears to have heavily influenced the pending designs of materials for schools. Raise your hand if you are using your comprehension strategies to compare and predict as you read this paragraph?
