By Mark
- A while back I posted a short piece inspired by my revelation to my freshmen that Jersey Shore was in fact not real. (I was nearly burned at the stake for my heresy…luckily they forgot quickly.)
- A colleague of mine shared with me this article from Educational Leadership (ASCD), provocatively titled "Too Dumb for Complex Texts?" which points out evidence that students lack the skills (and patience) to work through difficult texts, and are thus scoring more poorly on college entrance exams and undergraduate coursework.
- And then there's the NPR piece about the "Incredible Shrinking Sound Bite" (which I always thought was spelled "byte," go figure) that points out the amazing lengths, or shorts, that statements which function as "news" have achieved…thus reducing communication about highly complex issues to what amounts to less than nine seconds of spoken words, or approximately the length of a twitter post if it were spoken aloud.
Together, these three are speaking to me, more loudly than ever, that we need to change our approaches to literacy instruction in public schools–especially at the secondary level if not earlier. The first, my ruminations about "reality" and the Jersey Shore, have to do with increasing kids' literacy about how messages are constructed. The latter two though suggest that perhaps the media has conditioned people to not do precisely the thinking I want my students to do about the Jersey Shore.
So here's the big question: what does it mean to teach someone how to read?
This represents one of the two great frustrations I had about my teacher preparation program. To be fair, I earned my MAT in a very intense, very good pre-service program, and I do not for a minute regret my choice to attend that institution for my degree and license. However, during my methods course and ever since, I've never really been satisfied with the lessons I learned or the reading I have done about the teaching of reading (or writing, for that matter) at the secondary level. Too often, instead of learning how to teach reading, I learned about how to assign reading and assess comprehension–which are different than teaching reading.
And I think my situation is not uncommon: when I ask secondary teachers how they teach reading, they usually tell me what books they assign. And if I press harder and say, no how do you teach reading, they'll tell me they give quizzes over what the kids read, or maybe they read aloud in class so they can explain the text as they go. Those are not the universal responses, but are what I tend to hear. I think the earlier grades tend to be more well versed in how to teach reading, with read-loud strategies, text-interaction activities, or other similar kinds of active approaches. But something seems to start happening in the higher grades where we start to focus less on teaching the process of reading and more on assessing comprehension of reading.
So back to the NPR piece and the ASCD article… if sound bites are getting shorter, and we're losing our capacity as a society to think critically and deeply about what a complex text is communicating, where does that leave us as a democracy? It leaves us easily manipulated, for one.
What can we do to better arm kids with the cross-curricular critical literacy that the real world demands but the media world de-values?
Here’s another: the plight of the endangered tree octopus, and the plight of the elementary school kids who bought the story hook, line and sinker just because it was on the internet:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110202/ts_yblog_thelookout/tree-octopus-is-latest-evidence-the-internet-is-making-kids-dumb-says-group
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/01/prweb5010934.htm
It took me a bit to get through that long article as my attention span only gets me through one paragraph at a time and I had to keep checking facebook.
I was just having a similar conversation with myself in the shower after I graded my freshman first semester final in-class essays. I noticed that my students were getting the picture I painted for them regarding the themes or conflicts in the book, but they were missing the small details of the book which led me to think about whether they were really comprehending the entirity of what they read. I decided that I needed to go back to teach them how to read but as I made this decision, I drew a blank because my teaching bag of goodies in regards to teaching HOW to read is rather small. I decided I’d first assess their ability to comprehend while reading the novel on their own, which is what I did today. I then wondered what I should do next? Tell them to quit the mindless TV and video games and pick up a book? Teach them how to take notes in various ways? Today I realized that I needed to further research what to do with my students.
I agree with Mark, teaching HOW is hard, teaching the WHAT is easy. Most of us are not prepared to teach the HOW and what may even be sadder is that many teachers might not care that their students ever learn HOW to read.
I spend about half of every day teaching reading. We start off as a whole class with direct instruction of a particular skill or strategy.
Today it was distinguishing fact from opinion.
Then we break into three groups. One group works with me, as we go trough a book that I choose, bit by bit, focusing on decoding and comprehension. Another group has silent reading, with a book that they pick. (although I have veto power) Another group works on fluency by reading along with a computer program called raz-kids.
Each group cycles through the three activities; 20 minutes at a time.
In the afternoon we have “word study,” which is basically a glorified spelling/vocabulary lesson. I also read aloud to them while they practice their cursive writing.
Then during social studies we focus on research skills.
Hopefully, after seven years of that, they enter middle school with the basics down pat.
That stop sign picture makes me think of Aretha Franklin.
I’ve been thinking about teaching literacy at the high school level as well.
I’m starting to get students who have come up through reader’s workshop, and I’m noticing some differences in their skills. I haven’t quite been able to pinpoint exactly how I’m going to have to shift my instruction, but one big difference is that they haven’t read all-class novels, and they haven’t worked through a text they didn’t like at first. If they didn’t like it, they chose another book because RW was about choice.
Now, of course, the big thing is college-readiness. Well, in college you have to read a lot – you have to read (and here I’m shuddering with memories of one particular poli-sci class) stuff that’s dense, badly written, and that you do not enjoy. College courses may be about choice, but course content is not.
So, I’m having to feel my way with how to teach kids the skill of approaching all kinds of text.
I have made good progress using well-written, current non-fiction. I try to go for a mix of long and short – short is good because you have a quick jump in skill, long is good because it builds endurance and forces them to catalog more evidence and track a writer’s lengthy argument or story.
With each piece, I try to teach a skill I’ve noticed lacking in whatever we’ve read last – big ideas, purpose, bias, context – then we read for and work on that skill.
Some kids have really low decoding or fluency skills – for them I like Kylene Beers’s When Kids Can’t Read and I loved this article – http://www.cdl.org/resource-library/articles/older_read.php
One year I had a whole period of really struggling readers. I printed out a list of sight words – http://www.mrsperkins.com/dolch-words-all-printable.pdf
and we spent about 5 minutes twice a week with kids speed reading these to each other. I really had no idea what I was doing, because high school teachers aren’t taught this, but I figured speed counted. I don’t get far reading the Spanish newspaper because I’m so slow I get bored to death. So, they partnered up and hammered them out and eventually got faster. I’m pretty sure it made a difference, though I don’t have proof. They were sure better reading Othello in May than they were at reading Romeo and Juliet in October, that’s for sure.