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:
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