Borderland

Since I may be one of the “smattering of yoga/raga/tofu/mojo/mantra folks” Garrison Keillor mentioned in his wrongheaded critique of reading teachers, I’ll go along with Ken Goodman, who says, “NCLB is not about reforming schools. It’s about making public education look like a failed ideal.”

Rather than dwell on that discussion, though, we should talk about how effective reading teachers do get the job done. Being a good reading teacher is mostly about having a broad instructional repertoire. An International Reading Association position paper, Excellent Reading Teachers, outlines what we know about effective reading teachers:

• They have a strong influence on students’ motivation to read.
• They see reading as a complex system for making meaning that requires strategies for connecting vocabulary with background knowledge and personal experiences, as well as the ability to decode unfamiliar words.
• They use a variety of assessment tools, including student conferences, oral reading, samples of written work, running records, observational checklists, written notes, and student self-assessments. They combine this information with their knowledge of each student’s literacy background to make instructional decisions.
• They use a variety of instructional materials and strategies, including flexible grouping.
• They’re good reading “coaches” and provide help strategically, as needed.

And from an article in The Reading Teacher, “The Effective Teacher of Reading” (Blair, Rupley, and Nichols, 2007), we are reminded that “…one cannot expect students’ reading achievement to improve simply by increasing the frequency of assessment.” Good assessment techniques provide information about the skills and strategies students need help with.

Skills might be word-level routines that require phonetic or structural analysis. Or they may involve contextual analysis, sequencing, identifying the main idea, author’s purpose, etc. Using an index, and reading a graph are also examples of necessary skills. Strategies such as making predictions, summarizing, making inferences, and reacting critically to texts require more abstract thinking. Each type of learning requires a different instructional approach. Skill learning requires more practice and teacher direction. Strategies are more student-directed. Explanations, modeling, and guided practice help students learn how and when to apply the various skills and strategies they are learning to use.

Putting all of that together is a tricky business, since no two kids need exactly the same kind of help, and there are a lot of kids in the classroom.

I’m thinking about this now because I’ve reorganized my schedule to have an extended period for a reading-writing workshop each afternoon. The kids like to read, and they settle in and really do read when they have time. I read aloud each day so we have a shared book that I can use to model comprehension strategies, and the students will have time to read independently or in small book discussion groups. They have notebooks to write and draw in, and they can use computers for research and publishing. A retired English teacher was recently hired as an aide, and he’ll be coming in every day for the last hour to help me conference with the kids. This is good.

Blair, T.R., Rupley, W.H., & Nichols, W. (2007, February). The Effective Teacher of Reading: Considering the “What” and “How” of Instruction. The Reading Teacher, 60(5), 432–438.