Has this ever happened to you? You get in your car to go to work, or the store, or someone's house. You start driving, maybe listening to the radio, maybe thinking about the day's events, or what you're about to do. All of a sudden, you're there. You've arrived without even thinking about how to get there. You remember back to when you first started taking that same drive. You used to have to study a map before leaving, watch for a particular turn that was easy to confuse, or look for the house numbers on the last bend in the road. How does this happen? When do you go from thinking so meticulously about every step to being able to accomplish the task with your eyes closed (not that I'm recommending driving with your eyes closed!)
This is actually because you've taken the drive so many times, you're able to do this with a sense of fluency! Fluency is the ability to do something without much concentration at all, because you've done it so many times. You can achieve fluency in anything you've learned: driving, parallel parking, mowing the lawn, cooking your favorite recipe, playing a song you've practiced on an instrument, tying a boy scout knot, any move in a sport, writing in cursive, typing on a keyboard, anything! The old adage must be true...practice makes perfect!
Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book Outliers that researchers have found that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to really become good, or fluent at anything. 10,000 hours! Mem Fox tells us in Reading Magic that in order for kids' brains to be ready to learn to read, they need to hear 1,000 stories, because then their pump is primed and fluent at how stories go and the relationship between print and the spoken word. Richard Allington tells us in What Really Matters Most to Struggling Readers that in order to maintain a student's reading level, he or she needs to read 2 hours a day.
Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book Outliers that researchers have found that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to really become good, or fluent at anything. 10,000 hours! Mem Fox tells us in Reading Magic that in order for kids' brains to be ready to learn to read, they need to hear 1,000 stories, because then their pump is primed and fluent at how stories go and the relationship between print and the spoken word. Richard Allington tells us in What Really Matters Most to Struggling Readers that in order to maintain a student's reading level, he or she needs to read 2 hours a day.
In reading, there are three parts to fluency. Automaticity is the ease and accuracy with which we read. It's about not stumbling or stuttering. It's about getting the words right. Parsing is about the way we phrase the words. We need to break them up and put them together in groups that sound like the rhythm of spoken language. Prosody is the inflection and emotion with which we speak. Reading has to have the right sound based on the type of sentence, or the mood of the piece.
In writing, there are many aspects to fluency. Students have to be able to spell words without much concentration. They also need to be able to write as they talk, or better than they talk, or they'll realize that they'll write, as many of us speak, in short, choppy fragments. They have to have variety to the lengths of their sentences. While doing all of this, they also need to pay attention to the many punctuation marks they'll use, and how each sentence contributes to the overall meaning of the entire piece.
You can imagine how this fits in other subject areas: knowing math facts, applying mathematical operations, conducting certain scientific processes, finding something on a map, or looking up a word in a dictionary or online.
Yes, fluency is important, but here's the essential question to today's post...Wait for it...
In writing, there are many aspects to fluency. Students have to be able to spell words without much concentration. They also need to be able to write as they talk, or better than they talk, or they'll realize that they'll write, as many of us speak, in short, choppy fragments. They have to have variety to the lengths of their sentences. While doing all of this, they also need to pay attention to the many punctuation marks they'll use, and how each sentence contributes to the overall meaning of the entire piece.
You can imagine how this fits in other subject areas: knowing math facts, applying mathematical operations, conducting certain scientific processes, finding something on a map, or looking up a word in a dictionary or online.
Yes, fluency is important, but here's the essential question to today's post...Wait for it...
Why is fluency so important? Is it just about speed? Some educational packages would have you think so! They market themselves as being able to increase student fluency in reading, writing, or whatever their subject is. Is it just about saving time? Yes, if you know how to cook well, it will ultimately save you time and allow you to do other things. But is that it?
With certain tasks, that is it! We want a mechanic to be able to do an oil change in under 10 minutes, so we can go home. He can then do more oil changes in a day, and make more money. We want the chef in a restaurant to be able to cook our meal quickly, so that we can go home. She can cook the many meal orders that come in at one time. However, is that the point with reading? Is that the point with writing? Is that the point with math, science, exercise, music, art? Not really.
When students can do anything with fluency, it allows them to apply the work to some greater cause. If kids can read fluently, they can achieve deeper comprehension. Writing fluency leads to greater expression. We can move toward greater depth in a process of something through fluency in any of these areas: scientific discoveries, mathematical problem solving, playing an entire piece, or winning at a sport! Fluency leads to a higher accomplishment. It allows them to become engrossed in the process they are undertaking. It gives them pleasure, a rush so to speak, because they're not expending all their energy solving words, remember what 4 times 6 is, or concentrating on every stroke of their paintbrush.
If you've gotten this far in this post, congratulations! You've got pretty good reading fluency, but you're also probably interested in the topic. It's causing you to read and grow ideas. You're reading with fluency to get the words right, but you're also reading with something called flow.
With certain tasks, that is it! We want a mechanic to be able to do an oil change in under 10 minutes, so we can go home. He can then do more oil changes in a day, and make more money. We want the chef in a restaurant to be able to cook our meal quickly, so that we can go home. She can cook the many meal orders that come in at one time. However, is that the point with reading? Is that the point with writing? Is that the point with math, science, exercise, music, art? Not really.
When students can do anything with fluency, it allows them to apply the work to some greater cause. If kids can read fluently, they can achieve deeper comprehension. Writing fluency leads to greater expression. We can move toward greater depth in a process of something through fluency in any of these areas: scientific discoveries, mathematical problem solving, playing an entire piece, or winning at a sport! Fluency leads to a higher accomplishment. It allows them to become engrossed in the process they are undertaking. It gives them pleasure, a rush so to speak, because they're not expending all their energy solving words, remember what 4 times 6 is, or concentrating on every stroke of their paintbrush.
If you've gotten this far in this post, congratulations! You've got pretty good reading fluency, but you're also probably interested in the topic. It's causing you to read and grow ideas. You're reading with fluency to get the words right, but you're also reading with something called flow.
In a theory that has been strongly developed by former University of Chicago professor (and my fellow Hungarian!) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (that might not read so fluently for some of us!) flow is the feeling of utter stimulation that happens when a person becomes engrossed in a task. It's just like when we say that we are "in the zone," performing some task that brings us pleasure.
In Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi writes, "Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person's skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding." There is a connection between effortless fluency in any task and the pleasure that you can achieve, something he calls the autotelic experience, internal motivation that is a reward itself!
Yes, fluency can lead us to deeper thinking. It creates engagement, immersion, and a sense of reward if we push students and ourselves to that deeper level. It's the motivation to do more and to do better! It's the drive that should be leading us down roads to new professional learning as teachers, never really mastering our work, because we're trapped in the four (sometimes fewer) walls of any specific program. We might feel fluent at teaching any one particular thing, but that means we have to do more with it to make our work as rewarding as it was when we started many years ago!
In Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi writes, "Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person's skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding." There is a connection between effortless fluency in any task and the pleasure that you can achieve, something he calls the autotelic experience, internal motivation that is a reward itself!
Yes, fluency can lead us to deeper thinking. It creates engagement, immersion, and a sense of reward if we push students and ourselves to that deeper level. It's the motivation to do more and to do better! It's the drive that should be leading us down roads to new professional learning as teachers, never really mastering our work, because we're trapped in the four (sometimes fewer) walls of any specific program. We might feel fluent at teaching any one particular thing, but that means we have to do more with it to make our work as rewarding as it was when we started many years ago!
I often say that we're in the business of learning. That's our capital. That's the life we have to lead. Whether it's in increasing kids' fluency in reading or anything else, or in our teaching fluency, we have to push to the level of flow to create engagement, motivation, and passion for what is learned. Otherwise, we've only done half of our work!
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