In the last two week of school, a decision from higher up was made to test all the students, grades four through six, on their reading fluency. Someone would show up in my room, armed with their beeping timer, grade level passages, and a class list and start pulling students away, one at a time. On the second to last day of school I was given the results. All but three of my students met standard. Two of the three students had IEPs for reading and were making good progress. The other student was a slower reader because he “thinks too much” while he reads. I wasn’t too worried about him not meeting the fluency standard, as he has the most important part of reading down – the comprehension. I’ll have to admit that I was pleased to get these scores. All the green highlighted names looked pretty good. But, let’s not be fooled. Jordan and several others still can’t decipher the main idea of a paragraph, many of my ELL students don’t have the vocabulary to understand the meaning, and over-confident, yet creative Savannah is still making up her own story to parallel the one written on paper. I had some struggling readers in this group.
As I reflect on my year, the year I began blogging and the year even more decisions about my classroom were made for me, I’ve come to appreciate dialogue. More than once I’ve tried to engage in dialogue about the importance of oral reading fluency and reading comprehension, and each time I’m met with a mantra from our literacy specialist about the research that links oral reading fluency with success in math and reading tests. OK. I don’t discount that there’s a link, but maybe a dialogue about why my fluently reading students aren’t comprehending what they read might be worth our time? But, as mantras go, the statement is repeated. There’s no discussion.
I’m not exactly sure why dialogue is avoided about some topics in schools. We’ll dialogue about what will happen on field day, but having a conversation about what’s best for students in terms of the type of instruction they receive is discouraged. Teachers who try are met with the sigh, followed by eye daggers, a terse remark, and occasional eye rolling. Some even get a comment like this embedded into their evaluation: “…needs to support the ideas of her peers.”
I recently finished Diane Ravitch’s book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. She writes about how school districts across the nation implemented reform, without dialogue. In one chapter, she described how some mandatory trainings came with video cameras trained on the teachers, rather than the instructors, to catch reactions by the staff, on the lookout for those who might not buy into the program. Reading the book made me grateful to teach in Washington, where it still feels that teachers are part of the conversation. But elements that she describes are encroaching in schools, and this makes me nervous – elements such as a lack of dialogue about how we teach our students.
Could we maybe remember why we claim to value dialogue? Dialogue is necessary for a democratic society. It keeps us honest and challenges us to support our thinking with sound reasoning. If there are holes in our thinking, respectful dialogue can help us to fill them with more information or better ideas. We all know the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. An absence of dialogue may make for shorter meetings and quicker decisions, but it’s not likely to produce the best decisions.
I’ve appreciated the dialogue that has resulted from everyone participating in the Stories from School blog. It has helped to make me a more thoughtful and informed teacher over this past year. A heartfelt thank you goes to everyone who has joined the conversation. I’m truly looking forward to continuing the dialogue next year. Maybe then, you can help me to keep dialogue open in my own school setting. Best wishes for a relaxing and rejuvenating summer break filled with experiences and new ideas to add to the dialogue for the 2010-2011 school year.
Like you said, there is a link, but it is correlational and not causational. There are so many other factors involved. Every day I have more evidence that high oral fluency does not necessarily mean good comprehension and low oral fluency does not necessarily mean poor comprehension. In the end, reading is decoding and understanding. One without the other is not reading. We are doing the kids and the school a disservice when all we test is oral fluency (especially when we do it every two weeks). RTI – another scheme to solve the supposed “crisis.”
Well said. I feel like teachers – at least those I’ve worked with – are really good at dialogue when everyone agrees, but are terrible at it when the result might mean someone doesn’t get what he wants.
There is so much compromise in public education, and because we change captains every few years without ever being able to leave the river, the compromise feels incomplete and sloppy.
I remember reading aloud to my eighth graders one year, earning myself a bad evaluation because the “research shows students learn most when they read on their own.” I said, “But when I read to them, they start to love reading, and then they start reading on their own,” but my real-life experience wasn’t worth as much as the research. Maybe that’s why there’s such an ongoing, frustrating stalemate between those of us who teach and the specialists who decide what we need to teach and how we should teach it.
That dialogue, between those who have the luxury of time to do research and those of us who spend our time with students, should be one of the most invigorating, exciting parts of our profession, but it’s not. I wonder how that can change?