book discussion-Chapters 4 and 5 "What Really Matters for Struggling Readers"

Book discussion-Chapters 4 and 5

Tracy, Ryan and I discussed repeated reading increases fluency and that it can be developed.  Teachers should not interrupt readers and continuously prompt and reassure as students, especially those that struggle, come to expect it and it makes their reading more “choppy”.  We, as a school, need to make sure everyone, including aides are trained in the approach to take when a reader produces a mispronunciation or simply stop while reading aloud.

We all agreed, with Dr. Allington, that we need to encourage more real conversation between students about what they have read.  We should not just be asking them questions to which we already know the answer.

We discussed ways of increasing background knowledge for our students.  One idea that we discussed is for each grade level to identify a field trip that would help with this.  Some of our students who are at a high poverty level rarely have the opportunity to take these types of trips, otherwise.

We are certain that teachers work hard, but often they are not teaching the right way for students to learn.  One example of this is that schools purchase boxed intervention programs that help with decoding skills.  Dr. Allington states that only about 10% of struggling readers need this type of instruction.  In reality, they are having difficulty with comprehension, so teachers must be able to ask the right questions to effectively teach comprehension strategies.

Benton Elementary is focusing on many of the strategies that Dr. Allington discusses for teaching vocabulary.  We are even putting more of an emphasis on implementing this for the upcoming year.  We are in agreement with his idea that students need to have vocabulary instruction.  Another thing that we can improve on is allowing students to become part of the “decorating” of their classrooms.  Instead of purchasing pre-made bulletin board cut outs, allow more input and participation by students.  An example is a list of different adjectives that are displayed on a wall.  If students are encouraged to invest in the making of the display, they are highly more likely to make use of it.  Our school is making great strides and must continue to implement effective teaching strategies for our students.

Theoretical discussion group discussion

Our theoretical discussion group discussed the 3 articles written by Laura S. Prado, Paul Neufeld and Katherine A Dougherty Stahl.  We all agreed that one main point from the articles, which definitely aligns with our thinking, is that limited background knowledge is a major problem in reading comprehension.

We agreed that comprehension is a difficult skill for teachers to teach as well as for students to learn.  We think that Laura Pardo’s article was right on the mark.  We discussed some important areas to work with and focus on to help students stay on track with their comprehension skills, such as giving background knowledge so that the student can better make sense of what they are reading.

Some things that teachers can do to help are as follows:

Teach decoding skills, build fluency, help build and activate background knowledge, teach vocabulary words, motivate students and engage them in personal response to texts.  Text structure is important.  Teachers should be sure to teach and model strategies and give students independent reading time to develop these strategies.

 Stahl states that, “ children who actively engage in particular cognitive strategies are likely to understand and recall more of what they read.”  (Stahl, page 598)  The key to children acquiring these strategies is the instructional techniques that the teacher uses.  Several of these strategies, which we discussed within our group and how they would be useful, in our classrooms, are as follows:

·      Use of story grammars/story maps/literature webbing (useful with folk tales or other narrative text structures)

·      5 finger retell

·      Question answering and question-answering instruction is important to prompt thinking at all levels.

·      Reciprocal teaching helps gain more meaning from text and helps with student self-monitoring

·      Literature webbing is proven effective with first graders using predictable, narrative texts

·      Text talk

·      Use of video to help with limited background knowledge

Book club meeting-week 2

Tracy, Ryan and I met and discussed many points from Dr. Allington’s book.  Some of the main points we discussed are listed below.

Chapters 2 and 3 from What Really Matters for Struggling Readers

How much reading is enough reading?

*Students who were assigned more reading time in school performed as well or better than students who did not have the additional time.

*The average higher-achieving students read approximately three times as much each week as their lower achieving classmates.

*Difference in amount of reading provides powerful explanatory evidence for differences in student vocabulary growth and vocabulary size.

*Struggling fourth-graders may need as much as 3-5 hours a day of successful reading practice to hope to catch up with more proficient peers.

*No core reading program contains enough reading material to develop high levels of reading proficiency in children.

*Schools can foster reading growth during summer months by providing children with books to read.  Benton Elementary gave every K-1 student, 10 books, on the last day of the school year, to take home and read over the summer break.

What should kids be reading?

*Appropriateness- a study found that only 1 of the 18 elementary science and social studies books they examined had readability levels at the grade level of intended use.

*Choice-it is important that students have easy access to interesting texts and ore provided choices over what to read, who to read with, and where to read. We should provide students with books that are of high interest.

*Text complexity- it is important that students have good teaching with effective modeling and demonstrating useful reading strategies.  There are different methods for determining text complexity.  Benton Elementary uses Fountas and Pinnell’s alphabetic system of leveling books A-Z

What can we do to enhance access to appropriate books?

*Library-a study found that children from lower-income homes especially need rich and extensive collections of books in the school library and in their classrooms.  Libraries must be available on an as-needed basis to be truly useful.

*Book room-school book rooms should have a collection of books that span the grades in the school.  Books may be organized by genre, author, or topic.  At this time, the BES book room is organized by reading level and in bins that separate fiction from non-fiction.

*Magazines-a rich classroom supply of magazines should be a staple for every elementary school.  In an ideal world, each child would have one or more magazine subscriptions of their choice. 

*Series books, junk reading series books offer a commonality in text structure and are of high interest to many students.

*Putting books in kids bedrooms-different programs exist to ensure that students not only have access to books at school, but also have access to appropriate books outside of school.

*Building and displaying classroom collections-The worst plan of displaying books in the classroom is to put them on a shelf with their spines facing out.  Classroom displays should be arranged to make it possible for the students to see the front cover of the book.  Teachers should have at least 500 titles in their classroom book collection and preferably even more.

With all of this said, the most important thing that we must do is train our teachers to be the most effective possible, so there is no wasted time and they model the correct way the first time. 

Theoretical discussion-week 2

Marilyn, Ryan and I discussed important points made from the articles below.

What I’ve Learned About Effective Reading Instruction  (Allington, 2002)

Behind Test Scores: What Struggling Readers Really Need  (Valencia, Buly, 2004)

These articles reiterate how important it is to have good effective teachers in every classroom. Dr. Allington explains that exemplary classrooms share six common features (six T’s of effective elementary literacy instruction). They are as follows:

1.     Time: an exemplary classroom has students actually reading and writing as much as half of the school day.

2.     Texts: children need a rich supply of books they can actually read. Much research supports supplying children with books of appropriate complexity.  Students of all achievement levels benefit from exemplary teaching but the lowest achievers benefitted most.

3.     Teaching: exemplary teachers gave direct, explicit demonstrations of the cognitive strategies that good readers use when they read.  These teachers use effective modeling techniques.

4.     Talk: There is a fundamental difference between nature of classroom talk in the exemplary teachers’ classrooms and the talk reported in classroom observational studies.  Exemplary teachers fostered more student talk that was purposeful and posed more “open” questions.

5.     Tasks: exemplary classrooms had greater use of longer assignments and less emphasis on filling the day with multiple shorter tasks.  Tasks often involved student choice that was managed choice.

6.     Testing: exemplary teachers evaluated student work and awarded grades based more on effort and improvement than simply on achievement.  In effort and improvement grading, teachers must truly know each of their students well in order to assign grades.

Allington stressed they observed almost no test prep in the exemplary classrooms because teachers believed good instruction would lead to enhanced test performance.

Enhanced reading proficiency rests largely on the capacity of the classroom teachers to provide exemplary reading instruction, so we must create schools in which every year, every teacher becomes more expert.

Valencia and Buly article:

One size instruction does not fit all children as there are different types of learners.

Teachers need to conduct diagnostic assessments to help identify students’ needs and use the information to inform instruction.

The evidence also points to the need for multilevel, flexible, small group instruction.

Students need good material-a wide range of books and reading materials.  The teacher must model and explicitly teach comprehension strategies.

We must provide struggling readers with what they need and that begins with ensuring that every student has effective teachers.

Book Club Chapter 1

Tracy, Ryan and I met to discuss Chapter 1 of Dr. Allington's book, What Really matters for Struggling Readers". We discussed three main questions:
1. What must we do to combat the research that shows parent educational levels and family income are closely related to achievement? Isn't this out of our control?
Research shows if mom and dad don't have high school education, child will more than likely struggle in school.  Also, children from poor families are more likely to struggle, but on the other hand research shows that a child from a single parent home where that parent is educated, does not struggle.

2. What should schools do to create more students who "do" read instead of who "can" read?  This was one of the 3 challenges that Dr. Allington discusses as being issues facing U.S. education. We must find ways to capture the interest of students in what they are reading.

3. How do we give struggling students everything they need in the regular classroom and then pull them for 30 minutes extra instruction? Do we pull them from math? Science? Social Studies? etc.... "Pulling" a student from instruction during the school day fragments the day and causes instructional time to be lost.
Dr. Allington states that there is reasonably clear evidence that we can teach virtually every child to read and have most of them reading on grade level by the end of first grade.  We found it interesting that Dr. Allington stated in a paper that he read (Scharlach, 2008) "reported that two-thirds of the teachers studies did not believe they could teach all children to read", so therefore they set lower expectations for their students and came up with excuses as to why those students could not learn to read.  We all agreed that many different programs can be bought and implemented, but a particular program will not work for every student and every school.  The success greatly depends on the effectiveness of the teacher in the classroom.

Theoretical Discussion-Fitzgerald and Duffy articles

The title of the article by Gerald G. Duffy and James V. Hoffman is "In pursuit of an illusion: The flawed search for a perfect method".  Ryan, Marilyn and I agree with the writers that there is no one perfect method of teaching reading. Focusing on a single method leads to theoretical distortions and undesirable practices (Macginitie 1991).  We all realize that children learn in different ways, therefore teachers must use a variety of strategies when teaching.  Differentiating instruction is extremely important in order to address the needs of all students. No one program or method can work for all. In order to be knowledgeable of a variety of methods, teacher education must be ongoing. 

The article by Jill Fitzgerald, "What is this thing called 'balance'?" addresses the question of what really constitutes a balanced approach to reading. Most important reason to thinking about balance as a philosophical outlook is that many teachers are trying to implement balanced approaches to reading.  This means teachers, teacher educators, and principals need to know what it is so they can help implement it.  We discussed how Benton Elementary more so fits Cunningham's definition of a balanced approach. Last year, we implemented guided reading school wide and every class has time for self selected reading choices by the students

Information from both articles enforces the importance of keeping up with current issues in education.

What Makes YOU a Reader?

What makes YOU a reader?

What do you read most often?
I prefer to read magazines, newspapers and journal articles.  Books about education ideas interest me, but I do a poor job of sitting down and reading for lengthy periods of time. it seems that when I take the time to start reading, I end up falling fast asleep!

What do you read for fun?
I do like to read novels when on vacation. Especially, if the vacation is to a beach or on a cruise ship! To be honest, those times are about the only time I even attempt to read novels.

What do you hate/avoid reading?
I don't really think there's anything that I really hate to read and the only reason I avoid reading is for reasons already mentioned.

When do you read?
I read the newspaper or a magazine before going to bed. It's my way of relaxing after finished things up for a day.

Who do you read to/with/for?
When my children were younger, I always read books to them.  My daughter was a willing participate and would sit while i read book, after book, after book to her!  My son, on the other hand, would maybe make it through one book before he was ready to play some more.

What's your earliest reading memory?
I vaguely remember reading from basal readers when in 1st grade.  I could always read very well when in school and had excellent grades, however my comprehension skills weren't very well developed and as I got older, I realized that I needed to work on comprehension strategies for myself.

Do you remember learning to read?
I don't remember learning to read, but do remember the "Dick and Jane" stories as being some of the first ones I read.  I know The Snowy Day and Where the Wild Things Are were some of my favorite books. I can remember reading those over and over.  I'm sure I was taught letter sounds by some means, but have no recollection of being exposed to reading in that way.