Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

08.03.13 On Text Complexity and Reading: Part 1, The Five Plagues of the Developing Reader

The Common Core standards, as you probably know, push teachers to read harder text. Specifically, the designers have suggested increasing difficulty level of the average text by two years.  We’re with them on the idea of harder texts but how to measure text difficulty is a challenge. Common Core uses Lexiles, a quantitative measure of sentence….