What Really Matters: Kids Need to Read a Lot

(Page 36) “More recently we found the volume of reading students did during school to be one of the important differences between children’s experiences in more and less effective classrooms.”
I can’t imagine reading this chapter and not realizing the importance of having students read during school. I’m one who used to think that teachers who had students do independent reading in their classes were just wasting time because they didn’t want to teach, or the teacher had too much other stuff to do, so they had the kids read. (And I realize that is the reason some teachers do independent reading, but if done correctly, it is invaluable.) But the thing is if kids (especially the lower-level ones) don’t read at school, chances are they aren’t going to do it at home either. Some of them just rather do something else at home while others really are too busy to read. (How many of us know kids that work every night to help pay the bills at home? How about the kids who are pretty much in charge of taking care of their siblings?) Many of y’all know that’s one of the things that I miss most about being in the classroom—getting to read for 90 minutes every day with my students. I love to read, and I still have a hard time finding the time once I leave school. By giving students the time to read at school, they can learn the joy of reading while improving their skills simultaneously.

A handful of y’all attended Tim Rasinski’s seminar last week on “Effective Teaching of Reading: From Phonics to Fluency.” On the first page of his handout he had a list of factors that discriminate the highly effective schools and less effective schools in literacy achievement. This was an international study involving over 30 countries. From over fifty factors, numbers two and three on the list were amount of reading done at home and amount of reading done in school. (Number one was parent involvement.) How ‘bout that? It doesn’t matter where in the world you live—reading is the primary thing that will increase a person’s literary achievement. I wonder if that would work in sports? (Excuse the sarcasm.) Do you think if a person practices more they’ll actually improve their athletic skills? Did you know that Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school varsity team? But he went home and PRACTICED and he got better at basketball. (I put that in there just to aggravate you, Pam!) If we give students time to practice reading in school, they will get better at it.

NCTE Principles of Adolescent Literacy Reform

(Page 8) “…the academic achievement levels of students who are taught by good teachers increase at greater rates that the levels of those who are taught by other teachers…well-prepared teachers raise the achievement of all students, not just those who were already doing well.”
While I don’t necessarily agree with the No Child Left Behind definition of a highly qualified teacher, I do believe agree that it’s the teacher that makes the difference in student learning. Even though my daughter isn’t even close to being in school, I’m all concerned about how I’m going to make sure she has the best teachers once she does go. Sure, I’ll do my job at home, but I don’t know that that can make up for a poor teacher.

So what makes a good teacher a good teacher??? I have my thoughts, but I’d like to read yours first! In addition to the response you planned, please write a little more about what you think the qualities of a good teacher are.


(Page 8) “Without additional training, teachers at the secondary level remain largely unable to take up the task of enhancing adolescent literacy.”
I’m sure all of us took the one required reading course in college, but how many of us can say that that course prepared us for teaching students how to read our course content? Even as a special education teacher, I left school not really knowing how to teach students to read. For my ONE reading course for SpEd certification, it was a K-12 class, and the professor focused on reading at the elementary level because that is what she had taught. I can remember thinking, “If they can say the words, they can understand what they’re reading. How is that any different than listening to someone talk? And how can they get to high school if they can’t say the words?” Oh, my ignorance! It wasn’t until I started taking classes, going to workshops, and hearing the same thing over and over that I began to figure out how to teach my students how to read. I honestly used to think that teachers who did SSR in their classes just wanted to keep the students quiet and not have to do anything else. I can’t imagine teaching resource without SSR now. I thought I was doing a good job in the classroom because my students liked me and I was able to help them get through all of their classes and graduate. But were their skills really any better after they graduated than before? I wish I could get them all back and really teach them!

Subjects Matter: Pages 99-113; When Kids Can't Read: Chapter 6

(Beers, pages 73-74) “Dependent readers are dependent in part because of their passive reading. The challenge we face is to get them thinking about the selection and how they will read the selection before they begin the text.”
I tend to think of pre-reading strategies like the trailer to a movie. Do we ever plop down $7 to see a movie that we know absolutely nothing about? I know I’m too frugal for that! Even on the rare occasion that my husband wants to see one, I at least find out what it’s about before I go. I some sort of connection. The trailer is designed to get us interested in the movie and think about what might happen, so that we’ll want to see it. We aren’t shown the minute details or resolution of the film…just enough to pique our interest. That’s exactly what a pre-reading strategy is meant to do—get students interested and thinking about the text before they actually read it. If we don’t get our students involved in the text before they actually begin reading it, then how can we expect them to be remotely interested in the text itself? Yes, there are times that I’ll go see a movie just because who is in it (can anyone say Matthew McConaughey?) but that’s kin to liking a favorite author…how many of our struggling readers have a favorite author? Not many…which is why we have to get them interested in reading the text some other way! Using a pre-reading strategy is the first step into making students active readers! Once we get them started, we have to keep them going…we’ll talk about that on another thread!

Okay, the readings this time are chock full of pre-reading strategies. What would really be cool is if you try one of the strategies mentioned by Beers or Daniels/Zemelman with your students and write about the experience. That is, of course, if you’re a classroom teacher!

Subjects Matter: Chapter 3; When Kids Can't Read: Chapter 3

Subjects Matter
(Page 40) “They (textbooks) are intentionally ‘content-overloaded’ with facts, dates, formulas and taxonomies. They introduce vocabulary and concepts at a blind rate. They are overly structured and highly orderly, packing information into labeled slots, as densely as possible.”
Amen! When we’re familiar with the content, the textbook doesn’t seem that difficult to read. But have you tried picking up a textbook lately from a content area that you’re not very familiar with? For the last two instructional moments I’ve done for the faculty, I’ve grabbed some textbooks from the bookroom so that that I could show how the strategy could be used in various contents. It was certainly no picnic! I had a very hard time reading some of them, and by most people’s definition, I’m a pretty good reader! There was vocabulary that probably would be considered basic to the content area, but I wasn’t completely sure what some of the words meant, so I had a difficult time making sense of what I was reading. Can you imagine what are students who aren’t such great readers go through when they’re assigned pages of the textbook to read???

When Kids Can’t Read

(Page 36) “…we can’t fix the reading problem by buying a particular program; instead, as teachers, we must learn how to teach students to comprehend texts.”
It certainly would make things easy if there was a magic program that we could administer to all of our students to make them great readers, but that just isn’t going to happen! Or, how about if we could just hand students a worksheet and they could do it?!? I think the operative word in Beers’ statement is how. Students can do the work if they understand how to do it. I just met with a middle school administrator the other day who wanted to know if I knew a reading series that one of his self-contained teachers could use with her class. I told him that there really isn’t anything effective where the teacher will just be able to give it to the students and be done with it, but what will work is putting some authentic literature in the students’ hands and have the teacher use best practices with it. Good teaching is hard work! If we want our students to become successful readers and writers, we’re going to have to look at the individual students to see what we need to work on. (Hmmmm…this sounds a little like differentiated instruction!)

Subjects Matter: Chapters 2 and 9

Chapter Two
(Page 24) “As a mature reader, your mental strategies have become mainly automatic and unconscious.”
Although she wasn’t talking about reading (and we won’t get into what she was talking about!), I’ll borrow a line from Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman: “I’m like a robot. I just do it.” So many of us are like robots when we read our content…it just seems to happen without much work. I think this is why it’s so hard for us to teach our students HOW to read. We are so familiar with our material that it’s hard to break down our thinking and what’s going on in our heads when we do read. But think about when you teach something you’ve never taught before. Is it as easy as teaching a book or concept you’ve taught before? How much better to do understand a text after you’ve taught it a couple of times? Or how easy do you think it would be to read a biology textbook? (That would be too scary for me!) We need to remember that even though we’re familiar with our material, our students are not, and we need to break down our thinking for them so that they can understand how to read text in our content. This will help not only in our class but other classes in the same content area as well as those dreaded standardized tests.

Chapter Nine
(Page 202) “Book Clubs help…differentiate instruction in (the) classroom…by using temporary kid-driven forms of grouping and re-grouping.”
Ah, the magic word: differentiate. Book Clubs really are an easy way to achieve differentiation. The key is that the students get to choose what they want to read, so they can’t complain about it too much! Even though the students are reading different texts, you’re still able to cover the same concept and all of the students are able to get something from it, not just those who always do their work.

Something for y’all to think about with our class book clubs: Do you want to experience the book club as the students do where you each have a “role” when you come to class, or would you rather conduct it as an adult book club where everyone just shares their thoughts? Or do you want to do a little of both? Think about it! If you have strong convictions about one way or the other, you may want to post it on the blog to help sway your colleagues. We’ll make decisions in our next class!

SCRI Study Group

Welcome to our SCRI study group! Please respond to this post so we'll know everyone is able to get on. Just click on the "comments" button in the bottom right hand corner and write something to let us know you're able to post. (Feel free to write any comments about our first class together!) If you have any difficulty getting on, just let me know and I'll come by to help you. I enjoyed our first class together...I think it's going to be a fantastic year!

Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Chapter 9 and Final Thoughts

(Page 121) “I think most of us became teachers because we love our content so much…We love this content so much, we’ve dedicated the better part of our lives teaching it to others. I don’t see how we can be teachers of this content without spending at least some of our time with students helping them learn how to read about it.”
I think this statement from Tovani pretty much sums up why, if we really love our content area, we need to teach kids to read in our classrooms. Tovani makes it clear that it is impossible for the English teacher to teach students how to read everything…content area teachers are the expert readers in their subject areas. I really enjoyed this book because it is easy to read and has so many practical strategies that are fairly easy to implement.

I’ve really enjoyed reading your comments on this blog. Thank you for your thoughtfulness in your responses. As your write your last post, please give me some feedback on how the book has impacted your classroom or approach to teaching as well as your thoughts on the blog itself. Is this something you’re interested in doing again? What did you like about it? How do you think it could be made better?

I hope this was a rewarding experience for you!

Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Chapters 7 and 8

(Page 92) “We (did) something called a fishbowl in front of the class…we would sit in front of the students, modeling what we wanted them to see, while they watched and then talked about what they saw.”
I loved how Tovani and her colleague acted as if they were in a group working together in front of the students. The students were easily able to pick out what were and were not good practices while working in a group. It was obvious to the students what was expected in group work after a demonstration and discussion of it. It took me a while as a teacher before I figured out just how important modeling is. There were times when I just told students to do the work but never showed them HOW to do the work. Once I figured out I really needed to model to them exactly what to do, their production greatly increased.

(Page 103) “The aim of assessment is primarily to educate and improve student performance, not merely audit it.”
So often we get caught up in the cycle of teaching the material then testing the students on it, but who does that help? (Other than helping us have something to put in the gradebook, of course.) Really, how often do we have to take tests in the day-to-day activities of being an adult? If we spent more time looking at where kids are performing and how we can get to them to the next level, they will be better served. I heard Ellin Keene (Mosaic of Thought) speak in January, and one thing she said that really resonated with me was “Kids who think well test well.” I think if we really concentrated on finding out where our kids are and teaching them how to think (more modeling!) then we wouldn’t have to worry so much about end of course tests and HSAP because they would be good thinkers and do well on those tests without us freaking out about them.

Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Chapters 5 and 6

(Page 56) “She decides to create curiosity by building some background knowledge for students and explains a few key terms…”
I think establishing background knowledge and creating interest are two of the most important things we can do to improve students’ reading. After all, if a student is interested in a topic, he or she is more willing to read about it. Hence the reason students are so interested in reading the driver’s manual. Do we really think they care about all of those technical rules? Heck, no! But they have an interest in it because they want their licenses. Many of my reading strategies focus on pre-reading because I feel like if we can get them hooked initially in the book/topic, then we can maintain the students’ interest throughout the book or unit of study.

(Page 84) “I once saw a poster in a middle school classroom that read, ‘Individually we are smart. Collectively, we are brilliant.’”
I love this! When I first read this, I thought of our blog. I think we all are smart people, but we’re able to learn so much more when we get together and share our thoughts. The same holds true for our students. When we have class discussions about what we’ve read, we’re able to get so many more perspectives. There are so many ways to have students do this…they can do it through written conversations (many of you are familiar with this strategy; if you’re not and are interested in learning more about it, just let me know!) or they can mark the text as Tovani describes then trade papers and respond to the comments. Students (and teachers!) get so much more from the text when they have the opportunity to collaborate on what they’ve read.

Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Chapters 3 and 4

(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.

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!

Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Chapters 1 and 2

Tovani makes some awesome points in the first two chapters. I’ll just choose a couple of quotes that really stuck out to me and reflect on them.

(Page 5) “One critical concept embraced by both researchers and literacy specialists is that learning to read doesn’t end in the elementary grades. Reading becomes more complex as students move into middle and high grades, and teachers need to help students understand difficult text.”
It’s so easy to think that since kids were taught the fundamentals of reading in elementary school, they should know how to read by the time they finish fourth grade. After that they just need to learn new vocabulary, right?!? Ugh! It amazes me that I used to think that by the time kids got to high school that as long as they could say the words they would understand what they were reading. It’s so much more complex than that. I should have known from my own experience with trying to read tax documents and car manuals that reading is not always easy…even as an adult. South Carolina has really raised the bar—our kids have to tackle some really tough text to get through our standards. There’s no way that one discipline can possibly teach how to read all the different types of text out there. May I be hokey for a minute?!? (Too bad if you said no!) With apologies to Hilary Clinton…”It takes an entire school to raise a reader.”

(Page 12) “It wasn’t their fault that they were making stupid connections. It was mine, because I hadn’t showed them how a meaningful connection could deepen their understanding of text.”
In response to this one, I’ll have to borrow a quote Allison Norwood, whom many of you know, said a couple of weeks ago: “An activity has no purpose. A strategy has a purpose.” Oftentimes we get caught up in having students do something but don’t stop to think if they’re actually learning from it. I think when Tovani started out with the sticky notes, it was just an activity…it gave the kids something different to do. But when she took it a step further and had them elaborate on it, it became a strategy. The students were then able to deepen their thinking. Maybe we should pause before our next assignment and ask ourselves, “Is this an activity or a strategy?”

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