(Page 25) “…if language arts and English teachers are the only ones teaching reading, students aren’t going to learn how to read different types of texts.”
I think as we all read this book, we’re beginning to realize that we read different texts in different ways, and it would be impossible for an English teacher to teach a student how to read all of the texts that are out there. How I read a YA novel is definitely not the same way I read the directions of how to put something together. Reading a word problem requires different skills than reading and interpreting a graph. It’s often forgotten that English teachers have their own content (language and literature), and they’re no more trained to teach reading than any other content area teacher. Every class requires some type of reading; as teachers we have to determine what students need to be able to read to be successful in our classes and how we are going to teach them to read that material.
(Page 40) “I also need to remember what it feels like to read something for the first time.”
We teach in our content areas because we enjoy the content itself; texts related to it are generally enjoyable for us and fairly easy to read. We just need to remind ourselves that our students don’t always have that same ease and can have difficulty when we they first read something. Last night I took a sewing class and completely felt like one of my struggling students. Actually, my first struggle came over the weekend when my mother tried to teach me how to thread and use her sewing machine. She told me to make sure I had the directions out and to just follow them. Sure, that’s easy…as long as you understand the parts of the machine and the vocabulary in the text. Bobbin? I thought that was something you did with apples at Halloween! My mother tried to walk me through it, but I was just so overwhelmed…I knew I had made a mistake signing up for the class. Mom would show me the directions in the book, show me how to do it on the machine then she’d let me try it myself. I was getting so frustrated because it was really difficult for me but so easy for my mom. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to do this again on Tuesday for my class. I told my mom I was slow and that they were going to have to have a remedial class for me. She assured me that after I do it a few times, it will be much easier and I’ll get the hang of it. Of course, I didn’t believe her.
I think as we all read this book, we’re beginning to realize that we read different texts in different ways, and it would be impossible for an English teacher to teach a student how to read all of the texts that are out there. How I read a YA novel is definitely not the same way I read the directions of how to put something together. Reading a word problem requires different skills than reading and interpreting a graph. It’s often forgotten that English teachers have their own content (language and literature), and they’re no more trained to teach reading than any other content area teacher. Every class requires some type of reading; as teachers we have to determine what students need to be able to read to be successful in our classes and how we are going to teach them to read that material.
(Page 40) “I also need to remember what it feels like to read something for the first time.”
We teach in our content areas because we enjoy the content itself; texts related to it are generally enjoyable for us and fairly easy to read. We just need to remind ourselves that our students don’t always have that same ease and can have difficulty when we they first read something. Last night I took a sewing class and completely felt like one of my struggling students. Actually, my first struggle came over the weekend when my mother tried to teach me how to thread and use her sewing machine. She told me to make sure I had the directions out and to just follow them. Sure, that’s easy…as long as you understand the parts of the machine and the vocabulary in the text. Bobbin? I thought that was something you did with apples at Halloween! My mother tried to walk me through it, but I was just so overwhelmed…I knew I had made a mistake signing up for the class. Mom would show me the directions in the book, show me how to do it on the machine then she’d let me try it myself. I was getting so frustrated because it was really difficult for me but so easy for my mom. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to do this again on Tuesday for my class. I told my mom I was slow and that they were going to have to have a remedial class for me. She assured me that after I do it a few times, it will be much easier and I’ll get the hang of it. Of course, I didn’t believe her.
When I got to class last night and it was time to thread my machine, I did what any other struggling student would do—I relied heavily on the teacher’s help. I actually had her do it and just watched…I didn’t want to look stupid in front of everyone else doing it myself. Since every machine is different, the instructor read the directions; but she put the thread on with such ease that it amazed me. As she was threading, I did remember parts of it, and thought my mother is right—if I keep on practicing, I think I will get better. And the same is true of our students reading our content. At first some things are going to be really hard for them; they’re going to want to give up and rely on us as teachers. We need to make sure that we give them the guidance (and time) they need to master the reading, so they can be successful when there’s no one around for assistance. Maybe in a few months I’ll be able to thread the sewing machine as quickly as my mother and the class instructor!
9 comments:
On page 28, Ms. Tovani gives us the three bears story. This is a great puzzle, and it reminds me of the variety of dialects I hear in the lunchroom, in modern songs, in movies...in other words, we are challenged to listen carefully. In my experience, I understood the story when I read it aloud. On a good day in my classes, students will read aloud--but more often they are afraid of the reaction of other students. How can we merge the techniques? They listen to, they comprehend, and they instantly memorize songs that sound foreign to me. How can we create an atmosphere of risk-taking so that the most reluctant readers or those with learning disabilities can experiment?
It’s a pretty risky thing for a poor reader to try to read in front of his peers. If he messes up one word, the others may “bring him out,” especially if it’s an easy word. Jeanette, you bring up a good point about those song lyrics, but let’s think about that for minute…students don’t memorize those words or are able to “sing” along the first time they hear the song. It’s after repeated exposure to the song that the student is able to fluently sing it by himself. The same is true with reading; that’s why it’s important for students to hear what good, fluent reading sounds like. If the student repeatedly hears good reading on a regular basis, it will transfer into his own reading…hence the reason why we should read aloud to our students every day! And I think there are some students who wouldn’t mind reading aloud to the teacher one-on-one…it’s much easier to take that sort of risk if it’s just the teacher present and not in front of a crowd of 20-30 teenagers!
Both of these chapters have a wealth of information for us to think about and use. On page 25, I agree with Tovani's quote,"The problem is that if language arts and English teachers are the only one teaching reading, students aren't going to learn how to read different types of texts. Language arts and English teachers are just as burdened by an over-abundance of content as teachers in any other discipline. Teachers of any subject are going to help their cause by teaching their students to be better readers of their content." When I was at Fulmer, I mostly taught language arts, but a few years there I taught an occasional math or social studies class. Many students who are strong readers still struggle in content area classes, because they don't understand the specialized vocabulary for that particular subject or they don't know how to read informational text or a textbook. As I work with students in my Academic Support classes this year, I see them reading from their textbooks or a worksheet with an expression on their face that says they have no clue what is being said. I think sometimes we are quick to say a student can't read when the real problem is they don't know how they are supposed to read something that is not written in narrative form. I would love to partner with a teacher from science, social studies, math, or any other class to develop some reading and vocabulary activities where we teach the students how to read a certain type of text or how to understand words that are specific to a discipline.
At the same time that we try to teach students how to read different types of text, I think it is important that we use what Tovani calls accessible text (p. 39). When some of us attended her workshop earlier this year, she modeled some of her activities with newspaper articles, articles from the internet, and even primary source documents. There is plenty of text available to use these days that students can more easily connect to than what is in their textbook. Also, many of our textbooks seem to be shallow in the information they provide particularly science and social studies textbooks. Again, I think we could help each other out by putting copies of articles in each other's boxes (Diane already does this with the Special Ed Dept.) or emailing each other when we see something that pertains to another teacher's content. I have lots of stuff that might be useful to another teacher, but I don't know if and when you need it. I would welcome emails from other faculty members who were looking for something specific to use with their students.
On pages 41 and 42 Tovani discusses her interaction with a student who is reading To Kill a Mockingbird. When Tovani talks with the student after she “finished” the book, she quickly realized that this student did not understand any of what she read but the student continued reading and “finished” the book anyway. I think our students do this daily on tests, homework assignments, and assigned readings. It is hard for me to even consider “plowing” through a book or assignment when I do not understand what I am reading and then not going back to reread or ask questions. It appears our students missed an important lesson in school or in life, on the importance of rereading, asking questions, and truly understanding what it is they are being asked to do. I see a very carefree attitude in many of my students and that carefree attitude is what may push them to just get it done, right or wrong. Unfortunately I wonder how often students seemingly float through classes and never really grasp what is going on. This is definitely where the modeling comes in, showing our students that it is okay to not understand it the first time and what strategies they can use to better understand.
Holy Moly, Monica! 125 vocabulary words in one chapter?!? And I thought the health classes had a lot of vocabulary...
Piggybacking on a comment from Jessica....what do y'all think about starting a sort of accessible text "catalog" of articles and such that would be available to all the teachers at Airport???
I found myself able to relate to Monica in regards to the technical nature of some of the computer coursework as the written instructions may as well be written in Greek as far as I am concerned. I also felt the same way that Diane described when I bought an embroidery machine last year and took the classes required to operate the machine and found that what the 80-year-old ladies considered basic written instructions were actually beyond my comprehension. In both scenarios at first glance it was similar to Tovani’s example of the Three Bears (on page 28) in that it appeared impossible to read but once given guidance and skills into how to decipher what you were reading the written material actually made sense.
I also found enlightening how teachers from different disciplines approached a reading excerpt (page 27). For example, the math teacher naturally reads the entire word problem and looks for real world connections where the science teacher goes straight to the bottom of the author to check credentials or data and the English teacher starts at the beginning and reads straight through. If we as teachers read texts in a variety of ways imagine the students who are reading the content for the first time around (page 40). What skills have we given them to enable them to quickly understand as they analyze a piece of literature.
In my social studies classroom I probably do need to model reading skills a little more and identify what my students are struggling with in their reading. My students are given a journal time with a variety of tasks from the newspapers each day during the bellringer time but other than comments written in response to their journal it hasn’t been used to identify reading problems but has had a great impact on making history relevant to the student’s lives.
Due to the point that Tovani herself points out on page 37-38, too much content to cover and too difficult a textbook, some of our students aren’t being given the opportunity to construct meaning for themselves. I think with all of the end of course testing we have begun to focus on coverage and teaching our curriculum which loses the thing we love most, teaching our students (page 42).
If you get a chance, check out this article Andrea found online:
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/package.jsp?floc=ns-tos-feat-b-01&name=fte/reading/reading
The first sentence reads,"When it comes to academic collegiate success there is one skill more than any other that separates the A students from the C students: the ability to handle complex reading."
These two chapters gave me great insight into what reading a difficult piece of text must be like for my students. I loved the example of the industrial tech teacher and reading a blueprint. I struggle with reading anything technical, mainly because it doesn’t interest me. (How many times have I heard that from a student?) The piece on “The Three Bears” helped me understand why my kids give up so easily on reading something that they don’t understand at first. I used to think it was just because they were lazy, but now I realize that sometimes it might be frustration. Tovani says, “Often students jump right into completing science projects or constructing responses to literature without reading the directions.” (p. 25) I recently bought a combo DVD/VCR and didn’t even mess with reading the directions until I couldn’t get it to work correctly. I expect more of my students than I expect of myself sometimes. Guess I should work on that. I also need to work on modeling reading for my students. I thought Tovani gave some excellent examples of that. I really loved the one with the teacher who only realized that a certain graphic was used to introduce a new mathematical property once Tovani was confused by the graphic. We as teachers need to be extremely familiar with the layout and structure of the texts we use so we can explain that to students. I’m at that point where I’m ready for the school year to be over so I can start fresh with new students. I plan on teaching a lot differently next year.
If there's too many pages to photocopy for textbook readings, you can give students post-it notes to write their thoughts on. They can just stick it next to the passage in the textbook.
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