Teacher Tech: Six Elements of a Highly Effective Reading Program

There are any number of publishers who claim that if their materials are used with fidelity, the result will be a student who will make adequate progress in reading. 

When my first child was a toddler, one of her favorite activities was story time.  She loved to hear her stories over and over as well as explore new books.  Without explicit reading instruction, we found her able to read these books based on memorization and picture clues.  Then something wondrous happened; she began to read new books as well.

When kindergarten started, she entered as a reader.  Then came the reading program.  She was given a workbook and told to sound out unfamiliar words.  This slowed her down and her comprehension and confidence plummeted.  It wasn’t until fourth grade that she began to view herself as a competent reader despite keeping up with grade level expectations from first grade onward.

Sometimes students progress in reading because of what we teachers do and sometime they learn despite our actions. 

Now in America we are at a place where teachers are under pressure to close the achievement gap between middle class and impoverished children.  No Child Left Behind imposes severe and ineffective sanctions on schools which fail to produce adequate yearly progress.  The response by many policy makers is to buy a packaged reading program and insist teachers implement it with fidelity.  Nearly all these programs treat reading instruction as a series of skill lessons. 

When teachers see all the skills, recognizing hard and soft g for example, they respond by pretesting the class to see who already knows the skill.  Then students are broken into groups for instruction.  This system often degrades down to abilty grouping.  This may sound reasonable, but we need to ask: Is a skill-based reading program the best approach?

Studies are showing highly effective reading teachers do six things well: provide opportunities for children to select their reading materials, teach children to read accurately, make sure the children can understand what they read, insist that children write about something that is meaningful to them, make sure students talk to peers about their reading and listen to an adult model fluent reading.

I’m not a fan of skill-based reading instruction.  It clogs up what should be a nearly magical process for children and often results in the highly destructive practice of ablity grouping.  To find out more about the six elements of highly effective reading teachers, check out this article:

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar12/vol69/num06/Every-Child,-Every-Day.aspx

Teacher Tech: Magic Words

You’ve been taught that the magic words are please and thank you.  These are indeed effective, but teachers need more than just two magic words.  There are certain words that tap deep into a child’s brain and, if used, allow a teacher to be more effective.

Raise your hand if . . .

Many teachers will address the class and say something like, “Did everyone understand?”  or “Anyone remember what we did last time?”  Questions like these do not tell a student how to respond.  Students might wonder if they should call out the answer or raise a hand.  Also, think about the first question, there’s a certain amount a shame involved when admitting that you are not part of everyone.

Show me the correct way to . . .

Contrary to the way many students behave, they are actually hard-wired into wanting to please their mentors.  Not only that, but most children have a need to show-off to the mentor.  When you ask a student to Demonstrate the correct way to line up/pick up supplies/share with a partner, you are tapping into basic needs seated in a child’s brain.

Think about . . .

Think about what a student does during a lecture.  Does the student just open his brain and allow information in?  Kids are active creatures inside as well as outside.  One way to keep their attention during a lecture is to make sure you, the teacher, control the activity in their brain.  To do this, make your lecture active.  Tell your students what to do, think about, draw or write.  Use magic active words like: think about, imagine, picture in your mind, and so forth.

I would like you to . . .

Children can’t help but want to know what would please their teacher.  Some conduct disordered children want to know this so they can do the opposite, but most children just want to know.  When giving directions, use phrases like: I would like you to . . . , It would make me happy if . . .,  I want you to . . ., and so forth.  Be open about what you would like to see happen and what might not please you.  When a student does something counter to what you asked for, you can use phrases like, It makes me uncomfortable when . . ., It makes me unhappy when . . .

When I’m making an observation in a skilled teacher’s classroom, I’ll always hear more than just two magic words.

Policy: School Vouchers

Vouchers, where parents receive a certificate that they can apply towards a private school, have been touted as a way to improve education.  The argument goes something like this; if students take public money and use it to attend a private school, the public school will improve due to competition.  The students benefit because they can leave a failing public school in order to attend a private school that is unencumbered by an elected school board or unions.

What may seem on the surface as a great idea has developed into a disaster for students and public schools.  In Milwaukee, home of vouchers for 21 years, black students in public or private schools have the lowest scores of any city.  The Milwaukee vouchers have not improved schools or given students a better education.  They have taken public money and spent it without the oversight of an elected school board.

Governors Scott Walker (WI) and Mitch Daniels (IN) have pushed through or expanded voucher programs knowing they don’t improve schools.  Experts speculate that their goal was to curry political favors or deconstruct public schools.

Jeb Bush’s voucher program (FL) allows public money to be spent on completely unregulated “schools” that allow “teachers” with criminal records to “teach” by having students do workbooks and watch TV in dingy homes.

Everyone benefits from strong pubic neighborhood schools that are held accountable to elected school boards.  School reform resources should go towards efforts that have proven to be effective like early childhood education, professional development for teachers and a strong, vigorous curriculum.

Policy: Is the Bluebird a Phoenix?

This appeared in Reading Today.

I held her shaking body and cooed daddy/daughter things until she began to relax. When she finally caught her breath, all she could croak out was, “I’m going to be a bluebird.” I mouthed to Sharon, “What’s a bluebird?” Mystified, I held my despondent daughter until she could breathe normally.

It turns out; Lindsey had read poorly with Mrs. Richardson that day. Afterwords Lindsey convinced herself that she would be moved into the low group: the bluebirds. We assured her, as teachers ourselves, that first grade teachers would not move a student just because of one mistake.

After school the next day, Lindsey chirped that she was still a red bird. Parent/Teacher conferences were coming up, and we put this issue on our talk-list. At the conference, Mrs. Richardson explained that she grouped the students according to their ability to read so she could better meet their needs. We were stunned when she told us that none of the students knew which group was high or low.

When I was student teaching, my master teacher showed me how to teach reading. I learned about the three reading groups, placement tests, the basal reader and workbooks. I was told that if I followed the teacher’s manual, my students would become strong readers.

By the time my daughter entered Mrs. Richardson’s class I had long abandoned ability grouping when the weaknesses of the practice revealed themselves to me. The low students, who needed to do the most reading, actually read less. Middle students were trapped in a group that lacked the spark of the high kids. The high readers, since they were usually independent, got less teacher-time than they deserved. It just didn’t work.

I remember looking at my low group and musing that, although they shared a similar score on the placement test, that was about all they shared. Roman was bright, but recently arrived from Mexico. Margaret had low cognitive abilities, but her parents refused special education services, Jimmy had attention problems and couldn’t seem to function well on a test even though he loved to read. Ricky puzzled me. He did fine in math, but struggled to read fluently. The other members of the group also appeared so diverse, how could one lesson be appropriate for all?

Another element of ability grouping that irked me was when I noticed that, in order for my students to work independently, I needed to spend precious group-time teaching them how to do the workbook pages or seatwork. As a result, when I got a group back to the table, we would discuss their seatwork from the day before, then I would show them how to do the next pages, and finally, we would use the last few moments to try to learn a skill.

My teaching colleague, Mary, told me to teach them how to score well on the placement test so I could get them out of the low group. This logical idea seemed counter to the notion that I should be teaching them to be better readers, not better test-takers.

My principal loved to schedule morning assemblies that seemed to occur just when we were doing reading groups. When an announcement about the latest assembly came over the PA system, I noticed that my students seemed happy to miss their reading groups. Worse, I noticed I was happy to miss it, too. I realized that reading was the one subject my students and I didn’t enjoy.

Later, we had a three-day week due to Thanksgiving. Too short a period to run my reading groups. Instead, we began a whole class literature activity with a short story written just above the ability of my average student. After providing motivation and preparation to read the story, we had a fabulous lesson where my lowest students actually read more words in a day than they typically did in a week. The high kids loved the well-written story.

We decided to do literature the next week as well. I found it interesting that the whole class groaned when an assembly was announced. My students and I were enjoying reading.

Something was going right. Even though I witnessed obvious progress by all my students, I remained uneasy about bucking the ability-defined-three reading-group model; I looked to see what research said about the topic. Slavin’s research seemed to be the most thorough look at the subject, and I found it supported what I was doing. It surprised me that years later, Mrs. Greenseth hadn’t gotten the message.

Now my daughter is a confident, capable educator herself. I’m passionately loving my 36th year of teaching and still meeting the needs of my students without using ability grouping. Still, countrywide, classrooms are full of sincere, well-intentioned teachers like Mrs. Richardson, who attempt to diversify instruction by ability grouping.

Policy makers and educational leaders are tacitly or openly approving an ineffective strategy that outwardly meets the instructional needs of a diverse population. Publishers print materials that support ability grouping in response to the buying habits of these educational consumers.

New teachers look around at what their more experienced colleagues are doing and assuming that, despite what they learn in their education classes, ability grouping seems to be the right way to teach reading. Robert Marzano, in his 2001 book, Classroom Instruction That Works, points out that research does not support ability grouping and that it’s probably less common than in the 80’s.

However, I’m seeing pressure on teachers to resurrect this grouping strategy out of its own ashes. Educational leaders need to give teachers permission to abandon this ineffective teaching strategy. Leaders need to provide their teachers with materials and research that will help the Mrs. Richardsons make good educational decisions for their students. We need to put an end to the bluebirds.