In her new book, Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading Vicki Vinton calls for a shift of focus from complexity of text to the complexity of thinking a reader must engage in in order to understand the text.
I propose that rather than using problematic Lexiles and vague rubrics that contain circular reasoning, we assess a text's complexity by how much a reader has to figure out that the writer has conveyed indirectly... If our ultimate goal is truly independence, we need students to do much more thinking that highly scaffolded approaches ask of them-- and students simply can't take on more complex thinking if the text is too difficult at the work and knowledge levels. Also, students build their identity and sense of agency as readers when they're the ones doing the work, and as students have more positive and agentive reading experiences, they become more competent and confident.
In the following video, Vicki talks about one way to start a move toward a problem-based approach in the classroom:
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