What Really Matters: Kids Need to Read A Lot

(Page 35) “…volume (of reading) is linked to attaining the higher order literacy proficiencies.”
(Page 54) “…one of the greatest differences between college and high school was the sheer volume of reading and writing that was expected in college compared to what had been required in high school.”

I realize the voice of this chapter isn’t nearly as enjoyable as the other texts we have been reading, but I felt the information Allington provides is important for us all to know. I think this chapter would help anyone who doubts our school-wide SSR to understand the importance of the program. Many of our lower-income students have so many responsibilities outside of school that they don’t have time to read; I know I’ve taught those who have to work to help pay bills around the house or have to tend to younger siblings once they go home. But those same students will read if they’re given the time to do so at school. I know I’m guilty of not reading as much since having children (other than picture books, of course) because there’s just so much I’ve got to get done once I get home. I definitely used to be one of those people who thought that teachers who incorporated SSR in their classes were just trying to keep the students busy so they didn’t have to get up and teach something. Boy, was I ever wrong! When implemented correctly, SSR is invaluable; I can’t imagine not having it as part of my regular class routine. My only fear (okay, not my only one, but one of them) about the school-wide SSR is that some teachers will cut SSR out of their classes because they feel like the students have already done it for the day. I think we can see from this chapter that we can’t have students read too much! I remember last year a student coming back from his first year at college (I won’t reveal any names, but this was not one of my resource students—he was an honors/AP student) who said he didn’t feel like he had been prepared to college. Perhaps if as a school we increased our reading and writing expectations, our students will feel more than prepared when going to college. I remember my senior year in high school I had to turn in an extensive essay every two weeks to my English teacher. He told us we would hate him for it at the time but would appreciate it when we went off to college. Boy, was he ever right! (Nicole—did you have this same teacher at Northeast??? He’s still there.) I was extremely appreciative that I had him for a teacher and felt bad for those who didn’t. If only all of my high school teachers had been more demanding of reading I would have done much better my freshman year of college. I was pretty overwhelmed by all I had to do. I’ll save you the abysmal details, but on the bright side I wasn’t put on probation. :-) Do y’all have any ideas as to how you think we could raise the reading and writing requirements for our students throughout the school?

Subjects Matter: Chapter 6; NCTE Principles of Adolescent Literacy Reform

Subjects Matter
(Page 146) “…as we look at our textbook, we need to be asking: what are the really big ideas here, where are the places to slow down, dig in, and “uncover” ideas, not just cover them?”
As I listened to Erin Gruwell (the teacher behind the book and movie Freedom Writers) during the keynote this morning, she reminded us that any teacher that really made a difference with students didn’t just teach the content, she taught the student. One of the keys in teaching the student is relating the material his/her life. If we can take the big ideas from our textbook and relate them to the students’ lives and how they impact them, then the concepts will stick. On the other hand, if we just plow through the book for the sake of getting through it, have we really taught the students anything they’ll remember after leaving our classrooms? Think back to your high school classes…what are the lessons you most remember? Were they the ones where you had to answer the questions at the end of the chapter? Or were they the ones were the teacher made them relevant to you?

NCTE Principles of Adolescent Literacy Reform
(Page 8) “Traditionally teacher preparation programs include little (if any) course work in literacy, so it is possible for teachers to be identified as highly-qualified even though they were not prepared to address the challenges of adolescent literacy.”
I think we all had that one obligatory education course in reading in order to get our teaching certificates. Because I was in a K-12 special ed program, most of the content was geared toward elementary. There wasn’t much of a focus on the high school student, the kids I was planning to teach. I, in all of my ignorance, thought that if the student got to high school, he had to be able to say the words in front of him and if he could say the words, then he could understand what he was reading. After all, if I told him something, he could understand it, so what was the difference??? (Yes, you regular ed folks are reading correctly—most special ed programs only require that one reading course as well—there are no secrets that we were taught and you weren’t.) But the problem isn’t just with special education students. All of us are struggling readers at some point. Think about it: can you pick up ANY text and understand it? I can get through a young adult novel in a breeze, but I’m a struggling reader when it comes to tax documents and technical manuals. That’s because I’ve never had an expert in those fields teach me how to read the material. The skills I use in reading a novel are not the same ones I need when completing my tax return. Because we are the experts in our content areas, we are the experts in reading our particular contents. We just have to build our toolbox of strategies, so we know how to teach our students how to read our content.

Jim Trelease

I hope you all enjoyed Jim Trelease as much as I did (even though he said I’m now classified as a stalker since it was my third time seeing him). One thing that really stood out for me that I haven’t heard Trelease mention before is that seven percent of incoming kindergarteners from poverty score the same on tests as students from high income families, and that is the exact same percentage of students from poverty who are graduating from college each year. I think we’ve all known that income level has a great impact on student achievement (hence the reason why a neighboring district always scores so well on standardized tests), but do you think there’s anything we can do to increase the number of poverty level students going on to college and graduating? What can we do at the high school level to promote lower income families to become more literate? For this post share any ideas you have to answer that question as well as one thing that you learned from Trelease or something that you found exceptionally interesting.

As a side note, if you look under the links on this blog page, you’ll find one to Jim Trelease’s website. He basically has his entire Read Aloud Handbook posted on it.

Subjects Matter: Chapters Three and Nine

Chapter Three
(Page 40) “School textbooks belong in the same category with encyclopedias, dictionaries, and thesauruses…textbooks are designed to inventory huge amounts of information that can be looked up when needed.”
Y’know, when I read these sort of statements, it just makes me want to knock myself upside the head and say, “Duh!” This really is such a common sense thought, but having gone through school the “traditional” way, I never thought about it because the textbook was the curriculum. How much better prepared would our students be if we relied on the textbook very little and used an abundance of other resources, so students could discover different way to find information since they won’t be given textbooks at different points in life? (They certainly didn’t give me a baby textbook after giving birth when I left the hospital a few weeks ago. That would have been helpful, but I’m having to rely on other sources to get information.) When I first started teaching in a learning disabled resource class, I was very frustrated because there was no textbook for me to use, so I had to go out and find things on my own to use to teach the students. But it certainly ended up helping me in the long run because I was able to pull a lot of different resources for class. Of course in hindsight, some of things I used weren’t so great, but some of the things were.

Chapter Nine
(Page 202) “Book Clubs help…differentiate instruction in (the) classroom…by using temporary kid-driven forms of grouping and re-grouping.”

Ah, the magic word: differentiate. Book Clubs really are an easy way to achieve differentiation in your classroom. The key is that the students get to choose what they want to read, so they can’t complain about it too much! It’s generally a bit easier to get kids to do things when they’ve had some say in it. Even though the students are reading different texts, you’re still able to cover the same concept and all of the students are able to get something from it, not just those who always do their work. If you’ve never used book clubs in your classroom before, I think you’re going to enjoy experiencing one for yourself and seeing how they operate.

Devising the groups for book clubs can get a little tricky. You want to give everyone his or her first choice, but this is rarely possible. In dividing y’all into groups, I wasn’t able to give everyone his or her top pick, but everyone did get either their first or second choice. During our next class, y’all will get together with your group and decide what method you want to use lead your book club discussion. Different methods are mentioned on page 207 of this chapter and we’ll discuss them in class. Here are your groups and the book you will be reading:

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things: Ruth Anne, Cheryl, Karen, Anna

The First Part Last (Group One): Nicole, Bill, Stefanie

The First Part Last (Group Two): Lisa, Rachel, Amanda, Deborah

Now don't be one of "those" students who goes and gets the book and finishes it before our next class! Besides, you'll end up having to go back to reread anyway, because you won't know which method of response your group will use.

Subjects Matter: Chapter Two; When Kids Can't Read: Chapter Three

Subjects Matter
(Page 32) “In short: understanding what we do now, we will teach reading, not just assign it…”
I love how Daniels and Zemelman use all of the different reading examples in this chapter to show us what a difference a little background information makes when reading text. I think one of the things we run into as teachers is that because reading something related to our content comes pretty easily to us, we don’t realize how daunting it can be for our students. I would be interested to know if our social studies and science teachers were able to understand the sample passages with their first readings…I know I was clueless when it came to reading these excerpts. It’s so easy to think that it’s the English teacher’s job to teach student to read, but they have their own content to cover: language and literature. There’s no way they could possibly teach how to read everything—lab reports, maps, primary documents from different disciplines, manuals, etc. Besides the fact that they don’t have the time to do that, they’re not experts in all of the subject areas, so they’re not the best resources in teaching kids how to think like scientists, historians, car mechanics, etc. I think Daniels and Zemelman are showing us that while reading is very complex, there are some not-so-difficult things we can do to make text much more understandable for students.

When Kids Can’t Read
(Page 36) “…we can’t fix the reading problem by buying a particular program; instead, as teachers, we must learn how to teach students to comprehend texts.”

There have been times when people have asked me what program they can use to help their students become better readers. It certainly would make things easy if there was a magic program that we could administer to all of our students to make them great readers, but that just isn’t going to happen! If that were the case, everyone wouldn’t be in a tizzy about making sure all students are proficient by 2013 per the NCLB mandate. The key is that teachers need to be knowledgeable about best practices in teaching students how to read and write. Once a teacher has a toolbox of resources, they can decide which one will work best with certain students and topics. Not every strategy will work with every student—I think we’ve seen that in our class; we all haven’t necessarily liked the same strategies. One of the key words Beers uses in this quote is “how.” So often students are just told to read something but they’re never told HOW to read it. Or, they’re given a practice HSAP or SAT test and told to do it and given their scores, but they’re not told HOW to solve the problems. It would sort of be like giving me a test for medical school. I could take it 50 times and get my scores back (failing miserably each time, no doubt), but until someone explains to me HOW to solve the problems, I won’t do any better. There’s nothing that can replace the teacher. A program may have some great features, but it won’t know the student like the teacher does and can’t make judgment calls based on a student’s ability.

Subjects Matter: Chapter 7; When Kids Can't Read: Pages 258-269

Subjects Matter
(Page 167) “We need to make the classroom a community, a place where students feel safe to take the risks involved in learning where they see it connected with their lives, and where they help and learn from one another instead of working as isolated individuals.”
As I reflect back on my freshman year of college, I realize just how important community is. As I sat in class with 150-200 people (and 500 others in geology) in my freshman-level-everyone-has-to-take-them courses, I just went through the motions. I showed up to class and took notes, but I really didn’t feel like I belonged there. The fact that I lived at home instead of on campus (the deal being with my parents that I could stay home and they would pay for it, or I could go off somewhere and pay for it myself) made me feel like I belonged even less. While in high school I made all A’s and B’s, that was definitely not the case my first year in college. I know my less than desirable grades were a direct result of not knowing anyone in class and not feeling like I was a part of anything when I was sitting there. In my upper-level courses where the classes were much smaller and the students actually communicated with each other about course material, I performed much better…because I felt like I could take risks (I would have NEVER asked a question in front of 100+ people in fear of the question sounding stupid) and I learned not only from the instructor but my classmates as well.


When Kids Can’t Read
(Page 260) “And students won’t believe us unless we create opportunities for success…social and emotional confidence almost always improves as cognitive confidence improves.”
Boy, did I ever get a reminder dose of how it feels to be a struggling reader/learner this summer! I participated in an alternative assessment workshop in June for special education where our job was to set the cut-off scores for SC-Alt, the alternative state test for students with disabilities. While I taught special education—LD resource—while I was in the classroom, I participated in the workshop because of my English certification and knowledge of ELA standards. I had never given a true alternate test for special education (my students always had to take HSAP and EOC just like everyone else; they could receive accommodations, but they weren’t completely different types of test…with SC-Alt, we’re talking about tests that have to be administered one-on-one). I was one of many educators there to be able to help with the interpretation of ELA standards. The man leading the workshop apparently did not get the fact that those of us who had never given alternate test were completely confused about how the test was administered and it truly seemed to make no sense—he told us the questions become progressively more difficult though the test, but I found the exact same questions on pages 24 and 96. What?!? My frustration level was rising and I just wanted to leave. None of it was making any sense to me. Had I not committed to being there for three days, I would not have returned. I must confess my attitude was not very pleasant. There was a very nice special ed teacher at my table who had given the test, and she helped me understand it a little better, though I was still a bit confused. When I sat through this workshop and became increasingly frustrated, I kept thinking this is how some of our kids feel in our classrooms every day! How in the world do they stay motivated to even come to school? I couldn't handle it fo one day. How do they do it day in and day out? No wonder some of them drop out when they’re 17 if no one takes the time to get to know them and do everything they can to help them understand the material!

As you reflect on these two chapters, share some of things you do to build community in your classroom. It may be something that is mentioned in the text we read or it may be something completely different. What kind of results have you seen with these practices? If you’re new to the teaching field and are still working on building community in your classroom, what kinds of things are you trying (or what would you like to try based upon what we read in our texts)?

Welcome!

Welcome to our SCRI Study Group blog! I had a great time in our class on Monday and am looking forward to working with you the rest of the year.

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