Running on Metacognition

Orchestrating Cueing Systems

Beginning readers sometimes need help tying the shoestrings on their Nikes, but try they must if they are ever to learn to put their shoes on by themselves and go for a long read.

Nike reading, a metaphor for skilled processing during reading coined by David Pearson during informal discussions with designers around the creation of the Common Core standards over a decade ago, indexes the kind of reading that experienced, expert readers do when they are processing printed text at the speed of sound.

As a former garden variety marathon runner, I have considerable experience on the road in Nikes. The thing I miss most about running, now that my plantar fascia refuse to cooperate, is the gradual release of consciousness from its daily grind.

During the first mile of a training run, I routinely conjured up the image of a bird 🦅 flying in the sky. An invisible cord attached to its feet came from the sky and connected to the top of my head, holding its weight in a sweet spot, helping me sustain posture and balance. At some point the bird flew away, and I found myself moving in an effortless flow.

Somehow, I was alert to the pavement, to people around me, to street signs and automobiles, especially to wild dogs in the countryside, especially during inclement weather. One dark morning on an access road I ran within a few yards of a skunk 🦨. A low level warning system was operating just beneath consciousness, demanding attention at the point of need, overriding the flow, protecting me from a brutal episode. I slowed and steered a wide berth.

For over thirty years I ran every day if I could, long stretches of 300+ days without a miss, 60 or 70 or 80 miles per week. In the early days I took a hard fall that kept me off the road for a spell. But I came back stronger for it, more determined to assess the terrain within five feet of footfall.

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I ran first thing in the morning. I rolled out of bed, got into my running clothes, laced up my shoes, and hit the road within minutes. If I was out by 5:00 a.m., depending on the scheduled mileage, I would be home by 6:10 or so. I still have a collection of steno notebooks with dated records of distance, time, and assessments about the run. I look longingly at them sometimes.

Somehow, I needed this executive in my mind to keep me on track. I experimented quite consciously—running on different surfaces, asphalt, cinder, artificial turf, concrete, grass, sand, trails; eating different food, high fat, high protein, high carbohydrate. I kept records of caloric intake and looked for a relationship between pace and fuel. I tried different shoes but always came home to Nike.

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My neighbor during the first five years of my running life, Jerry, trained with me during the buildup to a marathon. Jerry kick started me as a runner. Five weeks before the big day of a marathon, on Sundays we did long slow distance. One Sunday, it was 12 miles, the next Sunday it was 14 miles and so on until 20 miles and then the penultimate Sunday when we rested.

My favorite marathon? It’s a toss up between Napa Valley and San Francisco.

Here’s where collaborative metacognition kicked in—I read Runners World, I read Covert Bailey, and once I understood the goal I worked at becoming a better-butter-burner. Science had discovered that the blend of fuel the body uses during running changes as a function of speed and distance.

Sprinters burn glycogen, carbohydrates stored right in the muscles immediately accessible to fuel explosive bursts of energy. Burning glycogen is like listening to speech. Once glycogen begins to deplete, once speech becomes print, the body switches to a blend of glycogen and fat (print), which is stored in depots in the buttocks, the abdomen, the back of the arms, and other choice spots.

The body learns to adjust the proportion of the two fuels gradually until around the 20 mile mark, runners hit the wall. They learn what the body feels like running on fat alone. No speech at all. Me reading German. My marathon pace routinely dropped from seven minute miles to twelve minutes, and it was ghostly silent on the road.

Training the body to give up its stores of fat in the service of demanding physical activity—that’s the object of daily running. That’s why you train. You run. You read. Every day.

Like becoming an expert runner, becoming the best runner you can be, becoming an expert reader demands intense personal commitment in a collaborative setting where everyone is different. Without personal agency, without buy in to a goal, and without sustained intentional effort over many years, peak experiences are elusive.

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I started smoking cigarettes when I was thirteen years old—Marlboros and then Viceroys, filter tips, during the Vietnam War, It was perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve ever done (talk about not taking a hint, my dad, a Camel smoker, died much younger than I am now of a heart attack a year earlier). By the time I graduated high school, I was pack a day and kept right on going. I tried again and again and again to quit with no result. Any executive function I had was awol.

At twenty-eight, I decided to add exercise to my daily grind and started walking around a nearby park in the morning. Soon I tried jogging and walking and after two months, I was running a nine-minute mile, smoking a cigarette afterwards for a reward.

One day I decided to experiment. I would not smoke for a few days and see what would happen to my running. Lo and behold, after a few days, I sliced a full minute off of my pace. Eight minutes. The heavens parted. I tasted air again.

I stopped cold turkey that day and have not wanted a cigarette since. The mind is a wonderful thing though it can be tough to change once habits set in, especially those rooted in the body, the brain, and the surround. I worry about overzealous early reading instruction that robs children of the opportunity to build effective habits of mind.

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It is a privilege to support young children as they learn to run in literacy’s marathon. The impulse to protect them, to guide them, to make it easy for them may be instinctive. The danger, of course, is overprotection, sheltering, hiding the skunk and the wild dogs out of altruism.

The single best predictor of reading achievement, easy to measure and research, is consciousness of phonemic data ordinarily operating in the background like glycogen in muscles: Metalinguistic awareness.

I suspect a deeper, less quantifiable predictor—metacognitive agency, the personal drive to get out of bed, lace up your Nikes, to engage, to work harder than you thought possible because you want to be a full participant in life’s offerings. Decodables might even be interesting to a kid with high levels of agency—in the way that statistics became riveting to me in my doctoral program.

I’m not seeing how micromanaging the print-to-speech match does the job. It may increase scores on targeted tests of discrete tasks, but that’s not reading. You can’t control what happens during each step in a practice run and expect the runner to learn to run. But you can observe, coach, inform, model, talk, demonstrate, structure opportunities, offer paths to participate with others.

There are all manner of runners, fast ones, slow ones, young ones, old ones. No matter, runners have to run stride by stride on their own. Most of them make it to the finish line they set for themselves if given half a chance.