There is No Complex Text Without a Reader: Parsing the Common Core & Mass Testing

 I. Down the Rabbit Hole - What Is Complex Text?

In the Common Core's  40-page Appendix A, the word complex appears 153 times, the word complexity appears 109 times, and the phrase, complex text, appears 16 times. The idea of text being complex is a central tenet to the Standards and I argue here is foundational for the logic that says mass testing of every public school child in the nation every year is appropriate, doable, equitable, and necessary.  The CCSS authors assert that during the last 50 years the texts used in K-12 schooling are in decline with regard to 'complexity' and that it is necessary to read 'complex text' in order to become college and career ready. The subtext to this might well be: "Truly those managing schools cannot be trusted to get this right. Look what they've been doing for the last 50 years." They contend all of this without clearly defining the central phrase, complex text.  If it's so critical then why don't they define it clearly? Here's what they do say.

So, what exactly does the phrase, complex text, mean? What are the CCSS authors ascribing? They begin Appendix A by writing:

One of the key requirements of the Common Core State Standards for Reading is that all students must be able to comprehend texts of steadily increasing complexity as they progress through school. By the time they complete the core, students must be able to read and comprehend independently and proficiently the kinds of complex texts commonly found in college and careers... In brief, while reading demands in college, workforce training programs, and life in general have held steady or increased over the last half century, K–12 texts have actually declined in sophistication, and relatively little attention has been paid to students’ ability to read complex texts independently (p. 3).

Ok. So the writers conflate a few terms without actually defining the phrase and it is important to note that comprehending texts of steadily increasing complexity is not the same thing as complex texts.  The first references a reader--someone is comprehending while the latter does not. Saying that complex texts are like the ones adults read at college or in their careers is ambiguous.  For example, undergraduates studying with me read the opening chapter to Bakhtin's Art and Answerability. Certainly not common reading material for K-12--nor should it be.  Next is the reference to sophisticated texts.  Should we assume that these are the same thing as complex texts?  What is meant by sophisticated and by whose standard?  Why such obfuscation?

So without establishing a clear explanation of what is meant by the phrase, complex text, the focus shifts to citing a 2006 report from ACT, Inc. (Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals About College Readiness in Reading). ACT, Inc. is a nonprofit organization that generates revenue by selling tests and testing programs to students, schools, states and companies.

In the report, the authors write: 

Texts used in the ACT Reading Test reflect three degrees of complexity: uncomplicated, more challenging, and complex (p.14).

Act modifies the word complexity by stating that the texts used in their test can be arranged along a continuum.  They add (see chart below from page 14) and then follow up with an explanation:

As shown in Table 1, the three types of texts represent a continuum of increasing complexity with respect to the following six aspects (which can be abbreviated to “RSVP”):

• Relationships (interactions among ideas or characters)

• Richness (amount and sophistication of information conveyed through data or literary devices)

• Structure (how the text is organized and how it progresses)

• Style (author’s tone and use of language)

• Vocabulary (author’s word choice)

• Purpose (author’s intent in writing the text) (p. 15)

So how is the presentation of text analysis from ACT, Inc. different than labeling texts complex by CCSS? ACT references specific, known texts  for a specific audience: high school seniors taking the assessment. From a known field of selected test passages they sorted these into three different categories based on their RSVP method and named those categories: Uncomplicated, More Challenging, and Complex. This represents a method and establishes a context in which that method will be used. Further, there is an implied reader: the high school senior taking the test. They could and did make a case to say: Within the testing passages, these differences among the texts based on our six aspects (RSVP) could be applied and one could argue that these are examples of complex text can be seen. They also provide detailed annotation of two passages to illustrate their schema. The CCSS authors adapted the ACT work by removing the context (specific testing passages for high school seniors) and applied the result to K-12 education. 

Next the CCSS authors reference a quote from Marilyn Adams (2009) and offer it  as an explanation for what complex text (from this text). They write:

"As Adams (2009) puts it, 'There may one day be modes and methods of information delivery that are as efficient and powerful as text, but for now there is no contest. To grow, our students must read lots, and more specifically they must read lots of ‘complex’ texts—texts that offer them new language, new knowledge, and new modes of thought' (p. 182)" (p. 4).

Adams makes the connection between the reader and the text insomuch as the word, new signals a reader and a context.  Again, the idea of complexity is connected to human activity. In contrast, the CCSS authors tend to situate complex text as autonomous--something one could point to that is independent of reader or context.  Brian Street (2000) explains that the autonomous model of literacy "disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it and that can then be presented as though they are neutral and universal"( p. 7). 

Autonomous text is situated as being ideologically-whole--something ready to be used alongside the logic of mass testing.  So if complex text exists independent of context, and being able to read such texts as measured by tests produced by PARCC, Smarter Balance, ACT, ETS, or Pearson (who know what complex text is because they say so) then validation of ELA performance becomes limited to those who sanction what's complex text and not.   The test measures the algorithm not the reader. The writers state:

Being able to read complex text independently and proficiently is essential for high achievement in college and the workplace and important in numerous life tasks (p.4).

How can we know if students can read complex text independently and proficiently?  That is left unanswered directly.  However, there's a logic here that says if schools could not select the right texts during the last 50 years--years in which the text selection got worse and worse, than can educators now be trusted to do so? Can we risk this?  How can we know children and young adults are proficient readers if this is left to local hands?  Enter mass testing at national levels. In a parent handout from NY State (EngageNY) they explain to parents when asked if the CCSS will mean more test by responding:

No. The Common Core State Standards do not mean more tests. But there will be different, and better, tests. 

If local educators cannot be trusted to select the right texts that are complex enough, can they be trusted to measure learner's reading? And so it is not surprising that alongside the CCSS, PARCC, and Smarter Balance is the rhetoric that supports the use of Automated Essay Scoring (AES) --a fancy phrase for machine-scored writing.  This too takes the measurement out of  imperfect human hands. (Note NCTE's objection here.)  Alongside the publishing of the CCSS, a joint paper by ETS, Pearson, and College Board heralding the use of AES was published.  The authors state:

One possible mechanism for scoring the CR items is with human graders. However, years of research and practical experience with human graders reveal a number of challenges. There is a substantial and expensive logistical effort in supporting human scoring through recruiting, training, monitoring, and paying human graders. The process also takes considerable time to accomplish and can make it difficult to report scores quickly. Finally, even under the best conditions, there can be limits to the objectivity and consistency of human scores, despite using multiple human graders for each response.  

Human scoring is not the only option for scoring CR items. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and computing technology, paired with research over several decades, have yielded a number of systems in which computers assign scores to CR items. Both the availability and acceptance of automated scoring systems have grown substantially in recent years, with year-over-year expansion of operational use in both high- and low-stakes assessments. 

Last, the CCSS writers situate static print as primary and privileged. They write:

"In particular, if students cannot read complex expository text to gain information, they will likely turn to text-free or text-light sources, such as video, podcasts, and tweets. These sources, while not without value, cannot capture the nuance, subtlety, depth, or breadth of ideas developed through complex text" (p. 4).

The underlying (and I would contend faulty) assumptions here are legion, but beyond the limited scope of the word, text, and the act of reading, it does offer us an understanding that the CCSS authors understand worthy-for-students-to-read-text as being static print. Further, we can see again the CCSS authors situate such worthy text as autonomous--ideologically-whole. 

I  want to contend that there are no complex texts without readers.  It is the relationships between reader and text that allows for definition of simple and complex to be applied.  In the world of text, sans reader, we'll find simple (one way through) and complicated literary works, such a hypertexts, as they offer a reader multiple pathways through.  Complexity occurs in the transactions made by a reader and a text.  

Let's delve a bit.


II. An Interlude. A Quick Experiment (for you)

Take a minute to look through these screen shots taken while I was reading Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue.  I chronicled my first opening reading moves in this hypertext novel below.

I read the word, BEGIN, and I felt a lot like Alice. I recalled a book I scribbled in as a young child and thought for a few seconds about the marks I made with crayon and then I clicked, BEGIN and tumbled into this next screen. 

I was captivated by the visual graph and then read the William Gass quote which had me thinking about what I've read by Gass. With a little help from a google search of Gass, I recall the story, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" and get sidetracked by a review of the book from 1968 in the NY Times. I read the review recalling the title story too. I'm not sure I read anything else. I check to see if there's a pdf of the text available and find mostly reviews and study guides. Amazon has the book and an ebook of it will be available October 7 of this year. Do I want to wait that long? Is this a book I want to hold and turn physical pages?  Hmm. I'll wait on this. Back to the story.

I'm scan the page and I'm feeling impulsive, thinking about the randomness of meaning and how things gather around lint and go with number 2, a favorite number, I think. I click on 2.

I'm immediately seduced by the opening words and pay scant attention to anything else. 

Each river flows two ways for at least an instant, whether a gasp at the source, the spring half lapsing before going on, or a watery wavering at the uncertain edge which joins her to sister or the sea. Nonetheless the long sigh of the estuary is something different, the Hudson easing swollen and recumbent upward halfway to Albany, plumping in her banks like the bluish flesh of an oyster, pregnant with pearl sheen even when no stone forms. 

Huh?  I love what I don't immediately grasp. I read on and finally latch on to a subject--a she, feeling like I'm no longer in that river moving two ways without aim.  A subject. I reread the paragraph.

Instead she gazes on the samples with a neutral eye, labwise and detached as a river in December. In the microscope there is no difference between the birth of an infant savior or the death of a crone at year's end. Life is a river that flows both ways, it doesn't do to get caught up in the threads the water weaves. So the men taught who tutored her in these alchemies. Even so she sees dreams in algae, lotus blossoms in saline solution, a sister in the oyster.

Who is she?
Why are these men who have tutored her?
What alchemies? Alchemies are more about magic and yet she sits at a microscope.  There's so much tension here (in the text and in me). I'm loving the uncertainty (well, sometimes). I'm forming tentative theories.  Okay back to reread and I tackle what I don't get:

The violet stain is like no color in nature. Alkali. Kali. Queen. 

I query Alkali. Kali. Queen and I find it is a reference is to the book The Queen's Printers' Aids to the Student of the Holy Bible and I'm piecing together that what she sees (as I now there is a she) is a violet stain on the slide that is unnatural and yet it has been taken from the river. Yes?  Here's what I find in that book on page 51:

This is unrelated but earlier this evening Rob and I mentioned Richard Powers' novel, Gain--a book we each have loved and taught.  And I'm connecting that novel to this screen and wondering about those lifeforms the girl/woman could spy on the slide.  Thinking about chemicals from factories and rivers that carry so much along its currents.

 I press on the hyperlink and am taken to this screen:

Hmm. Okay I can recall photographing shorelines of the Hudson River in summer. Up near Bear Mountain. One afternoon, I'd taken a bumpy road  on my way north to Newburgh, NY and found lots of places to stop and make images. This reminds me of what I recall seeing. I want to enlarge the image and press on it and I get taken to this screen:

I'm falling in. River. Text. Self. The language is so much more than I had imagined I would find.  It's a poem.  I say aloud:  "Yes, everything can be read." (and I say this in the voice I imagine to be like Molly Bloom's. (Think breathy for is this passage nothing less than a full declaration of living?) This is the written poem.  The image, a visual poem. There's cohesion to that I think quickly and I select a colored line to the left of the words and click it loving how the image reminds me of my mother's knitting bag and the loose yarn that collected there and I am anticipating there will be some explanation to what I've read.


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III. Meaning Making is Complex, Physical Texts May be Complicated

I stop here for now I want to take a few minutes to parse together what complicated text might be. Joyce's hypertext offers us a concrete example of a complicated text as it is co-made by the reader's decisions, impulses and fancies as s/he reads.  A complicated text has multiple ways through. This is physically evident in the Joyce text. Even though there are multiple ways through the Joyce text, the pathway(s) a reader constructs can be physically traced, but the reading cannot be duplicated.

The meaning a reader composes while reading a physical text is complex.  The physical text is complicated.  These are not minor differences. If you or I were to follow the screens I read, the meaning made would be different from what happened a little while ago.  

Wolfgang Iser (1974) writes that the literary text “activates our own faculties, enabling us to recreate the world it presents. The product of this creative activity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the text, which endows it with its reality... The virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it is the coming together of text and imagination” (p. 279, emphasis mine). 

Complexity refuses to be confined to a traceable path.  It's inherently nomadic. It cannot be tested using paper and pencil or the computer version of paper and pencil. 

Guided Reading and Common Core: Can They Co-Exist? Thinking About Text

At the beginning of the lesson, children previewed the text and recorded what they noticed and wondered as partners. They continued this practice throughout the reading as well. 

Qualitative Analysis of Text & Planning

As I sat down to write this post about the co-existence of guided reading and the Common Core, I was reminded of work I did as a consultant in March with 4 second grade children from Newark, NJ.  I have worked with these children since they began first grade, so I was able to use what I know about them to help me create a multi-day set of 'guided' literacy lessons designed to engage students with the text, Stitchin' and Pullin': A Gee's Bend Quilt authored by Patricia McKissack and illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera. The text has neither a guided reading level, nor a lexile level. Now I must confess that when I think of the term, guided reading, I think of it as small-group intensive teacher-led work in which I have selected a text that students will likely not be able to manage initially and will need my guidance in order to comprehend.  I rarely spend much time thinking about guided reading levels or lexile levels as these are not the measures I often use when thinking about text selection. I focus instead on the qualitative aspects of a text, the readers I will be working with, and most importantly I think about the curriculum the children and I are making together as we learn. (See here for a post about curriculum as complicated conversation.)

During a previous meeting with the four second grade teachers, they said that the children were having difficulty naming and supporting theme across multiple texts. I have worked with these teachers for more than two years and will continue to work with them next year too. This continuity of working together builds trust.  I have failed in front of them, beautifully and we have learned together. I respect the work they do with children and their deep commitment to learning.

On this day, the teachers indicated that they were concerned that their students were not attending to the text closely enough and were settling for responses based on unimportant or incomplete details. They had spent the prior week reviewing data and this was the big take away. RL.2.9 and RI.2.9 were concerns.  They had asked if I would design a few lessons that they could observe where I taught students how to attend to closely to details and begin to name common themes across texts. I asked each teacher to observe and make notes about one student during each lesson so that their notes could help us to think about next instructional steps.  Just as I wanted the children to build community knowledge, so too did I want us to do the same.  The lesson was an hour. (These engagements are longer than typical small-group instruction).

Stitchin' and Pullin', a picture book, tells the story of Baby Girl who grows up  during the late 1950s and 1960s in Gee's Bend, Alabama learning how to quilt alongside her grandmother and the other women from the community. The text chronicles Baby Girl's maturation from toddler to young woman during the Civil Rights era and includes historical information about the women quilters from Gee's Bend and the art they make, a time Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Gee's Bend to preach, voter suppression, and how African-Americans registered to vote.  The text is told through a series of free-verse poems and includes outstanding illustrations that I knew would help students to problem solve figurative language.  When I previewed the text I thought a lot about the genre and knowledge demands and decided that I would design lessons that used community knowledge as a way to build interest and scaffold learning.

Skylar & Isamar's notes while previewing and reading.

The Lesson

At the beginning of the lesson, children previewed the text and recorded what they noticed and wondered as partners for about 10 minutes.  These children are practiced at listening to and reading beautiful, culturally relevant, and interesting books (see these post1, post2 for lists of books used at 2nd grade). Building world knowledge through high quality text is very present at this school. 

I wanted the children to talk to their partners and make meaning together.  So although each child had a book, they had only one chart paper per partner. I prompted this process by noticing what they were talking about and recording and at times posing a question that required them to look again at an illustration or poem or asked for clarification. At the end of previewing the text, I reshuffled the partnerships so the children worked with a new partner and asked them to discuss what they thought they might learn. I then asked them to connect what their partner had said to what they said and to then write a statement in their notebooks. Isamar was partnered with Aiden who had said he thought he would learn about knitting in the old days. Isamar told him the book was about quilting and showed him a few pages in the book that showed quilts.  She too thought she would learn about life in the old days.  When I asked them what old days the text suggested, they both said slavery. When Isamar wrote her note she wrote: 

"I think I will learn that even if you are a different raise (race) you can let yourself fly free."

After sharing what they thought they would learn, the children and I read the first poem, "Gee's Bend Women." I read it solo and then we read it in unison. We had fun reading the poem as line-around.  I wanted them to hear the poem as poetry is first , an oral art. 

After the children referred to the stanza as a paragraph, I asked the them to learn three key terms (stanza, line, and speaker) that would help us talk about the first poem. They were able to quickly understand the similarity between a speaker in a poem and a narrator in a fictional story and after sampling a few poems where there were multiple stanzas they were able to understood line and stanza. Aiden summarized for us that stanzas were the way poets organized poems.  I taught only what was necessary so that we could speak about the poems as needs arose.  I had prepared explanations for terms I thought we would need and did teach subject, tone, and theme.  

My notes & explanations

It was critically important that we begin to think about who was telling us about Gee's Bend women in the first poem. Who is the me in the poem? The children studied the lines and the illustration and many thought it would be the little girl. In order to confirm, we read on. After the third poem, I was able to release greater responsibility to the students. They identified Baby Girl and her grandmother and with lots of rereading the children were able to name that this was a book about Baby Girl growing up. I pushed them to reread the 3rd poem, "Beneath the Quilting Frame" and to find the lines that helped us to know literally what Baby Girl was doing in the poem.  We had to reread and study the illustrations to figure out what the poet meant by the phrases: "nine-patch" and tented playground.  One student spontaneously acted out what the poem described which led to another child reading it aloud again.

Third poem in the text. 

Illustration on facing page of "Beneath the Quilting Frame"

When I asked them about the tone of the poem, they were baffled, not so much by what the term meant, but how they might determine tone from the poem. I agreed with them that this type of work is tricky and Kiyara told us that we needed to reread.  So, I asked them to partner, reread, and to quickly say in two words what attitude they felt while rereading the poem.  We had practiced this strategy before. They said things like: loving family, girl loved, singing family.  

We agreed after hearing all of our two-word phrases, that loving family best described the tone. Next, we reread again and marked the words that showed this tone. Skylar was able to make the large leap from what was on the page to what was suggested by those words when she told us that Baby Girl must have been loved because she got to play beneath the table and learn from her mama and grandma by listening to them. Isamar added that she also got to sleep there and that she fell asleep by her mama singing to her. Aiden told us that meant she was safe. 

I asked the students to think about which poems they would like to read next.  They browsed and then marked with a post-it, two more poems. I asked them to read them during their reading time and/or at home. I reminded them that they would need to reread the two poems several times for the poems to make sense.  

Debriefing the Lesson

After the children returned to class, the teachers and I met and they shared their observational notes. Whereas everyone was pleased with the children's attention to detail as a result of rereading, inferring, and using illustrations to support meaning making, we also identified the need for the children to understand historical time. During the previewing we learned that the children thought Dr. King has lived during the slavery period in the United States. This knowledge demand allowed me to refocus the next lesson on building a physical timeline with the children (we used adding machine tape so we could roll out the paper) beginning with their current age, birth, and then moved back in time.  I wanted them to see the distance between the current day and the time when the text is set and the text setting and slavery. The rolled out paper helped them to begin to grasp this. The second issue we planned for was how to privilege writing during the reading.  The teachers indicated that they had lots of children who wrote at very different rates and the annotation process which we all agreed was important took so long as they waited for everyone to finish before moving on.  They had noticed that I invited the children to write at will throughout the lesson using the two column chart. I did not need to have every child paying attention to me throughout the lesson. In fact I wanted students to become so immersed in their thinking and writing that they shifted attention to these acts.

When I planned, I knew that I wanted to deepen children's knowledge about the Gee's Bend quilters and of the historical time the text is set so I brought two very different books with me for the next class--books I left with the children and their teacher. I brought Paul and William Arnett's art book, Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt. I wanted the children to see photographs of the actual quilts as they wondered about why Baby Girl was at a museum. The second book, Belle, The Last Mule at Gee's Bend: A Civil Rights Story, a children's book was one that I read aloud and then left with them for rereading.  This second book helped us to name the time period and to fill in our timeline with more specific information and dates.  This text chronicles Dr. King's visit to Gee's Bend, voter suppression, and how the Gee's Bend residents stood up and registered to vote. Throughout the read aloud, the children were able to make important connections between the poems and the story.  

Writing While Reading

Back of Kiyara's Response Sheet

Front of Kiyara's Response Sheet

In order for the children to connect what they were learning from the different sources, I provided them with a response sheet that asked for three kinds of information: wondering, predicting, and something the author didn't tell me (inferring). On the back of the sheet, students recorded big questions they would like to answer. Whereas, Kiyara was very quiet the first day, she led the group on the second day, and made great use of the reading response sheet generating a full page of questions she wanted to research mostly about race relations.  The children wrote while I read aloud Belle, The Last Mule at Gee's Bend: A Civil Rights Story.  Their writing and talking led us back into the poems and the children read the poems they selected to their partner.  I asked the children to reread their response sheets and the notes they had made about the poems and to think about what messages Patricia McKissack might have wanted us to learn from her book. The children reread, talked and then wrote responses that mostly discussed trying and not giving up (persevering)--a theme one could well support with this text.

During the subsequent weeks, the teachers returned to the important task of helping the 2nd graders connect textual details with themes in literature and textual details and main idea in non-fiction texts. We modified and used David Wray and Maureen Lewis's writing frames. Guiding the children's writing (a part of the guided literacy lesson) took several weeks for students to grasp, especially as the children wrote in response to multiple  literary and non-fiction texts. By the end of the year most of the students in these classes were able to read two texts, compare themes or topics, make assertions and support those assertions with some text evidence.  Closures were still a bit rough. This is hard work in 2nd grade.

Selecting Texts

Guided reading and the Common Core can co-exist and do so in primary grade classrooms where teachers attend to the emerging and often times divergent needs of learners.  The issue between the use of leveled texts and what the CCSS authors call, complex texts, need not limit this instructional practice especially when beneath guided reading and close reading of 'complex texts' rest planning questions that allow us to analyze a text qualitatively and to think about the children we are teaching. Here are some questions I consider depending on the text and the context.  (BTW: I would love if you comment if you add some questions you think about while planning or provide a link to a post with your questions.  Perhaps we could crowd source this?!)



Text Questions: 

When I review potential texts I ask myself some of these questions. These questions shape the planning I do.

1. What makes this text easier to read and for whom? (i.e., syntax, known vocabulary, known sight words,  relevant prior knowledge, prior experience with text structure & genre, familiar author, familiar story, pictures match text...)
2. What's tricky about this text and for whom?  (i.e., knowledge demands, text structure, author style, genre, length of text, syntax, vocabulary, sight words, split dialogue, inflectional endings, unusual format, literary text, multiple text structures, multi-genre, full pages of written text with little picture support, intended ambiguity, figurative language...)
3. Are there requisite knowledge demands that I need to scaffold? What naive understandings might my students bring to this text?
4. Are there terms students need to know in order to manage the content?
5. Will students misunderstand concepts in the text and if so how might I address that?
6. Is it important to couple related texts together in order to help students build deeper understanding of a key concept?
7. What genre is the text? Are children familiar with that text structure and can they use that knowledge to help the comprehend the text? Is there something here I need to pre-teach?
8. Are there multiple expository structures in the text?  If so, is that a consideration for me to think about when planning?
9. Can any key terms be defined contextually?
10. If I preview the text with students, what words, phrases, or concepts might I anchor?
11. Based on notes I have about the high frequency words the children know, which words in this text will children most likely know? Which words do I need to anchor?
12. Are there important sections of text that students will need to reread in order to comprehend? 
13. What textual gaps are there as I read the text that I fill in?  What textual gaps do I think my students might experience? 
14. Are there key text features that students can rely on to problem solve?
15. What task will students be doing and is this text a good match for that activity? Does form and content match?

Reader  & Pedagogy Questions

1. Which students do I think can read this text individually or with a partner?  Which students need more assisted instruction? How might I structure this?
2. What reading behaviors are well controlled by these students?  Which behaviors are they learning? Is this text a good match given what I know?
3. How might I chunk this text? What would make sense for these learners?
4. Do I need to introduce this text and if so, what would make sense to say? 
5. What purpose will I establish for reading this text or is purpose self-evident?
6. What do students already know that will help them comprehend this new text?
7. What resources might students need while reading to aid their comprehension?
8. How might I complicate the children's reading?
9. Given this text, what strategy might I model that will help children when they are problem solving?
10. Would an audio recording I make be helpful for some learners to listen to (match voice to print) as they reread? Would partner reading be beneficial?
11. Are there previous experiences with problem solving that I want to call to the students' attention before reading?
12. Is there a specific coding of the text that would be most helpful that I want to highlight? Have I modeled this clearly? Do students need support with this practice?
13. What role will talking play? What role with writing/drawing play? Is this a text that can be physically enacted?
14. How will I make note of the ways children problem solve at points of difficulty? What and/or who will I want to focus on?

These questions are of course, incomplete. Depending on the learners and what stage they are as readers, I am cognizant about different aspects of text.  I have found that Fountas and Pinnell's reading behaviors are useful when teaching emergent and early readers and I like to have on hand a set of leveled texts (1-12 or A through G) as potential books. Specifically, I tend to privilege stories (not informational text during the beginning levels), books with overt use of sight words, and ones that children can use their knowledge to problem solve. I have often used Lee & Low's Bebop books and Rigby's PM Readers with beginning readers. As children mature as readers, the text selection process becomes much more varied.  For example, these 2nd graders learned science largely from Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading (they actually would cheer when it was time for science). The collection of texts from that series were books the children loved to read and these were used in small group and partner reading. Additionally, as the children became such fine readers many of the read aloud texts were refashioned for small group work.

The Use of Quantitative Information

The ways we scaffold children's learning--the thinking and planning we do prior to instruction and the revision we do during instruction-- are significantly more important than adhering to guided reading or lexile levels of text.  We need to analyze the texts we plan to use with students, as well as the tasks. Readability information can be helpful, but it is not as critical for learning as the qualitative analysis we and our peers do. This has always been the difficult and necessary work of teaching. Having a lexile level to me is akin to having a guided reading level--as each offers an incomplete understanding of a text read.  

Most readability formulas rely on a measurement of syntax length and vocabulary. The longer the sentence and the more rare the word, the higher the lexile level. Yet, this method does not always hold up as matters of dialogue, content vocabulary, ambiguity, and art disrupt such formulas giving false lows and highs. For example, William Faulkner's The Sound and the the Fury, Toni Morrison's Beloved, James Joyce's Dubliners and Arthur Dorros's picture book, Rain Forest Secrets, all have similar lexile levels (870 - 900). I've read, enjoyed, and taught with these texts. The first two were with high school seniors (and boy did we struggle), the third was with English majors, and the last was with primary grade children. It doesn't take much to notice there are important differences among these texts. Simply open them and read the first page. And perhaps that is where we most need to start. Reading. Talking with each other. Planning together.

So is there a use for quantitative information, such as lexile levels and leveled texts? Yes. Lexile levels and other readability formulas afford us a general sense of text difficulty. But quantitative measures alone are very, very incomplete. Frankly it worries me when I hear principals, teachers, and district leaders talk about text selection based on lexile level.  P. David Pearson and Elfrieda Hiebert (2013) in an important paper, "The State of the Field: Qualitative Analyses of Text Complexity" write:

qualitative analysis will necessarily trump quantitative analyses of texts, and second, the analyses we engage in for structure and task will be focused on the goal of making texts more accessible to the broadest possible range of students. Such a focus will also put quantitative analyses in proper perspective, for we will recognize that the key elements of quantitative inquiry, long words and complex syntax, are nothing more than symptoms of challenging content. Armed with that knowledge, we will be better positioned to figure out how to help students manage that content, which is our most important job as teachers (p. 28). 

So during guided reading, text choice needs to be a thoughtful and negotiated process hopefully with a child, not for him/her especially as readers mature with an eye to how we are supporting leaners as they learn from texts. What is most important is to be mindful about the text we have selected, the reading tasks a child will be undertaking, the text difficulty (relationship between text and child), and how we are planning to support the child to problem solve at points of difficulty.  This is important and doable work.