On Reading, Learning to Read, and Effective Reading Instruction

There are several statements in this article from NCTE that ring critical and true with me. The first is, "Learning to read is a life-long process." I think of how I have changed as a reader over many years. My habits have changed, my tastes have changed, and my abilities have changed. I am more able to comprehend complex text than I was as a younger student. My abilities have matured.

The second statement is, "The more children interact with spoken and written language, the better readers they become." Studies have shown how many words the average student comes across depending on the amount of time that he/she reads. It is vital that, as high school teachers, we work to make up some of the time that they have missed. Yet, I think back on my classes that I taught, and I'm not sure how much reading was going on. Were my students playing the same game I did and waiting for me to tell them? How are we encouraging reading habits and text interactions? How are we exposing our children to more words?

Lastly, the word "authentic" is most important to me. As I read more, as I study more, and as I work in more classrooms, I see that we have to relate everything to our students' lives and those lives are changing more and more every day. The world that these students live in does not look anything like the world that I grew up in and I can only imagine how different it is from my parents' generation.

What lines from the article hit home most with you? Do you agree or disagree? Why? How are we implementing the policies that promote learning to read at our school and in our classes?

Remember to post prior to our next class meeting, October 20th.

Welcome, study group members!

This year, the professional reading blog will be used for responses to study group readings. I look forward to reading your ideas!

Final Survey

I just want some information about the process of blogging--since this is our first experiment with it. You can post your responses or place them in my mailbox--whichever you are most comfortable with.

1) We have used book clubs in the past at NHS for professional development. How would you compare and rate this one? Did you prefer the blog or would you rather meet face to face?

2) Would you be willing to participate in a blog again?

3) What topics would you like to see addressed in book clubs?

4) Would you be willing to lead a blog book study?

Ch. 9 Leadership in the PLC

I guess I'll start with Chapter 9, too. I think an important topic was when the author talked about the "learning-centered principal." We are often too focused on the teaching aspect and maybe we overlook the learning, not just for the students but for us as teachers as well. This principal realized the value of learning and told the teachers to focus on the most essential standards. I do think thats a good idea in practice but when our students are tested on the standards, it's hard to overlook a "non-essential" standard. We are having EOC testing now and if you teach an EOC, how can you overlook a standard and then be criticized if your students don't perform well on the EOC? As it stated in the book, it would be great if we could create our own EOC but that's not the case for us so until that happens, I don't see any teacher being able to teach "only the essential standards" because they are all essential since they are all on the EOC.
As for learning, we as teachers can also learn from each other. In the first part of the book, we all read about how we teach with closed doors and don't welcome others into the classroom. But, if we do observe and we do have the PLCs and we do utilize common planning, we all can learn. We want our students to learn... so just as we model SSR, we can model learning.

Ch. 8 PLC

Hey Dianne. I'm thinking you are wanting us to take the initiative and start our own posts now? : ) I know I have no idea if this is going to post or not but I figured I'd go ahead and say a few things about Chapter 8. So, here goes......I do agree that the Professional Learning Communities are more effective than traditional staff developments. For one, there are less people in the PLCs and I think it makes for a better atmosphere. I know in our faculty meetings and staff developments there are usually bigger crowds and usually the same people are the ones that are more vocal. The smaller groups will allow for more in-depth discussions and it allows for everyone to have a say without creating a LONG meeting. Each PLC can have a common goal. The smaller groups also allow for the individual teachers to share their experiences, and we can have follow up and reflection meetings which will be valuable, too. The PLCs seem to encourage more discussion and I believe the PLC can be effective if a common goal is set and everyone in the group is on board for the same purpose.

Chapter 7: Literacy Education

There's a myth in public schools that just because some of us chose English as a major, we must know all about how to teach reading and writing and therefore it should be left up to us. But Schmoker paints a very realistic picture of the college background of English majors--there are classes on Romanticism and Modernism, British lit and American lit, and even AIDS in literature. There are some great classes, but none of them prepare us for how to deal with the student that has made it to the 11th grade and still can't write (or simply won't write) a complete sentence. There's usually one reading class for education majors--Reading in the Content Area--but its not necessarily taught by someone trained in literacy itself. As an English major, I had one class in writing for secondary students, so I can't imagine non-ELA majors had much more. We come to public schools unprepared for what we are going to face, and if Schmoker is hitting the nail on the head, we avoid the situation as much as possible. We don't assign writing to our students. But when you have 150 of them, who has time to assign and grade all that writing?

Instead of examining all the things that are getting in our way of assigning writing to students, let's look closely at what we are doing write and what we might be able to do in the future. This year, sophomores were trained in the HSAP rubric and then graded their own writing in preparation for the test. (I guess we'll see in the fall how successful the experiment was.) What else can we do to move our literacy focus over to incorporate writing? It has to become a community effort, this teaching of reading and writing, if we are to ever see results, so what can we do as a community?

More on Chapter 6

I apologize for my tardiness and glad to see the conversation has continued without me. I've totally let my writing go the last few weeks and I need to get back on track with everything.

I'm very interested in the section on writing in chapter 6. I've studied writing a good bit this year and I'm intrigued on what it would take to get us to move towards more writing in the classroom. How many of us have writing on major tests? (I actually only have writing in the English classes--very little multiple choice questions.) And why don't we have more writing on major tests? Students can finagle mastery when its "multiple guess", as my father calls it. They can even cover holes in their knowledge with oral answers. But they can't get around it in writing. If you truly want to see if your students get it, have them write it out.

So what can we do to incorporate more writing into our classes? Sizer stated that "writing is the litmus paper of thought...the very center of schooling."

Chapter 6 also talks about talk. How often do students bat around ideas just like adults do? How can we set up this scenario in our classrooms?

Chapter 7 is coming soon...I promise not to fall too far behind! And blue sheets will be coming around the 19th.

Just Finished Chapter 6

After reading Chapter 6, I do feel "validated," that what I'm trying to do in my classes is the right thing, but at the same time, I am discouraged. In my "inherited" English 3 class, I have at least twenty students who choose not to read out of the twenty-three students. Perhaps the texts are too difficult; I don't know. I know that they choose NOT to read the assignments even when I scaffold the reading and support it with the audio books. I know that generous amounts of reading, writing, and talking about the reading and the writing are the keys to authentic literacy and intellectual development. I know that education and literacy are the keys to "upward mobility," and the author put it.

My frustration is that I am getting eleventh graders who do not know how to read thoughtfully or how to discuss their reading thoughtfully. I joined the Newberry Middle School SCRI MG group four years ago and met a whole bunch of teachers who are committed to improving literacy and academic achievement. My students this year have had some of those teachers. All of my students have been through two years of the "Janet Allen curriculum." I would think that I would see the benefits and have students who not only knew how to read closely, but also how to discuss the texts. Why are we not seeing the changes in high school?

As I took my notes (yes, I do read with a pen in hand, sometimes even when I'm reading for pleasure), I kept writing "I agree" or "agreed" or some other remark. There is nothing in chapter 6 that I don't agree with, and I am sincerely trying to implement the practices that Schmoker suggests are essential to developing authentic literacy. It's a battle, however. I feel like I'm the "Lone Ranger," although I know that I am not.

Perhaps we are putting too much emphasis on "The Test." We spend so much time preparing students for HSAP, MAP, and other tests that I'm not sure we are teaching students how to learn, how to read, how to think. Give my English 3 students a prompt to consider, they will not try; give them a multiple choice test, they will try. Whether they get the answer correct or not does not seem matter. The thing is that they will complete worksheet-type assignments that require only recall; they will not attempt anything more challenging or anything that requires that they synthesize what they have learned.

Authentic Literacy (Chapter 5)

Generous amounts of close, purposeful reading, rereading, writing, and talking are the essence of authentic literacy.

I have recently started to pay close attention to the buds beginning blossom around Newberry High. Its spring and though the late freeze might have gotten some of them, others are filling out nicely. There's an interesting metaphor here, because what has truly caught my eye is the blossoming literacy practices around NHS. There are pockets of greatness that I'm starting to pay attention to. Sometimes accountability (the freeze) can get them, but most of the time they are strong enough to endure.

There are several teachers that are experimenting with supplemental texts in their content area classes. The human growth teachers are a great example of this--they have truly taken the concept of literature circles and made them their own. Some of the social studies teachers are beginning to dip their toes and experiment with the possibilities that YA lit can bring into a classroom. English I and II teachers have incorporated the Janet Allen curriculum which uses YA lit to teach the universal literary themes that used to be taught through classics that didn't reach a single student.

This is what gives me hope. We are showing promise. We just have to get it to spread. "Literacy liberates." We have to teach our students the value of reading in order to help them leave their current world behind. Schmoker points out that 40% of those born into the bottom economic fifth stay there as adults. Literacy liberates. It is what our students need to break the cycle.

Of course we can't do this alone and it is easy to use the lack of parental support and lack of time as a crutch. As a reason for not trying as hard as we can. But what can we do?

How can we take our pockets of literacy excellence and spread them into other classrooms across the school? What can you do differently?

Chapter 4--Curricular Chaos

There were several different sections in the chapter that illicited a variety of responses from me while I read. Sometimes I felt good knowing that we have moved beyond what is happening across the nation and other times I knew that we were still in need of drastic improvements. Here are some things that caught my eye:

"What is a curriculum guide? A well-intended fiction." When I first started at NHS, my curriculum guide sat unopened on the shelf. Its kinda a scary thing to look at--3 inches thick with seemingly no end in sight to the expectations. However, if there is one thing that HSAP and EOCEP have helped us do, they have helped us follow pacing guides throughout the school year. Each year that this accountability system is in effect, we do more and we do it better.

A research group "found redundancy and inconsistency at every grade level." I'm sure that we are covering material over and over again, but what are we supposed to do when students don't retain what they have learned in the past? When they come to us, its almost tabula rasa--we have to start from scratch.

"The bottom line is that if we taught math, writing, and critical reading effectively, exactly as we know it should be taught, then students would do exceedingly well on state assessments. On a cautionary note, I'm not as sure of this approach in science and social studies." Yet we are still testing our students on 300+ years of history. Hmmmm.

"An inordinate amount of class time was spent completing worksheets." A thought has intrigued me over the last several years--our lower level students love a worksheet. If you ask them to move away from their comfort zone, then, as another teacher put it, all hell breaks loose. But these are the students who need alternative activities the most! How do we balance? I've been struggling with one of the abandoned English classes over the last few months. They were mired in worksheets for 3 months and now I want to do "fun stuff", for lack of better phrasing. Its been a daily battle with them and their behavior. However, I am winning. Slowly, but surely, I am winning.

"Students didn't use and were not taught to understand the state writing rubric." This is not happening at NHS. All of our sophomores have spent a great deal of time with the HSAP writing rubric--looking at examples, studying the different parameters, and even grading their own writing.

I am reminded every day that we are doing some great things at NHS--content area book clubs, writing across the curriculum, reading incentives...the list goes on. The day to day battle is not with the desire to be effective--its with time constraints, parental involvement (or lack thereof), state-mandated testing, too many committees and not enough time, etc. I feel like we all want to be good but feel ourselves fighting all the other outside sources. So what do we do about that? Where do we go from here?

What from the chapter caught your eye?