To Read or not to Read... The choice is ours

I choose to read No More Independent Reading Without Support by Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss because at the school I am currently teaching in we don't actually do independent reading.  We have an SSR time and I wanted a refresher on the difference. 


One idea that stuck with me was that if students don't read at home and they are not given and time to read at school, when will they read?  It is really a difficult task to allow students to have ample time to read since my focus is on science.  I have to get out of the mindset that they will still need to read in science class too.  In my classroom, not SSR as we have our reading time, students will be reading to learn.  During our SSR time the student are learning to read for enjoyment.  Students need to be given a lot of time to read to become proficient readers. 


In my science classroom we read articles, charts, diagrams, and even the dreaded textbook.  Unfortunately sometimes what we have to read in class is not the most entertaining for the students.  Students need to make most of  the time they are given during independent reading and make this time  productive.  Teachers need to equip the students with the tools necessary in order for them know what to do when they are reading on their own.   If we don't equip them, then the students just sit around and don't have a handle on what to do during unstructured time. 

SSR?! DEAR?! R-E-A-D!!!

I am choosing to read No More Independent Reading Without Support by Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss. We have Independent Reading time for 20 minutes a day at our school, so I was very interested in seeing what this book was all about.

I laughed when I first read that the most proficient students were exposed to an hour of independent reading today. An hour?! Where in the WORLD did a teacher get an hour to spare from? Then as I continued reading it saw where they were cutting times and placing reading in instead. Our principal made a good reference this week when he told us to "trim the fat" from our lessons. When we take a step back and look at our lessons and daily schedule, we see how much dead time there is within the day to use. Do I believe we can fit a whole hour in? Not at this time, but I do believe there is wiggle room for more than 20 minutes.

I do believe in giving the students support while they are reading. Often times I see students looking off into space and using their Independent Reading time as more of a brain break. I plan to begin discussions and journals about what we are reading during Independent Reading time. This way students are held accountable and know they need to be reading, but I can also see that students are comprehending and understand what they are reading. I am hoping this bridges the gap between letting students independently choose their own book, and other students not taking their reading time seriously.

Do football coaches run a wing-t offense when they have the players fit for a spread offense? If not, then why do teachers…?

Are there any similarities to coaching and teaching?  From personal experience, I believe there is a lot about coaching and teaching that is similar and overlaps.  You may not see where this is going right now, but I hope it makes sense and gets across a point by the time you have read the entire post. 

I am reading the text, Reading Essentials by Regie Routman.  I was going to focus on the first section of the book, but decided to just focus on the first chapter for this first “segment” because there was so much beneficial information.   The first chapter, Simplify Your Teaching Life, discusses the importance of really concentrating on the important aspects or what the book refers to as the “essentials”, and focuses on really doing things to be a better teacher and get more out of students.   “If we want our students to be excited about literacy, they need to have teachers who love coming to work, who are literacy learners themselves, who find ways to make curriculum relevant to children’s lives, and who can put high-stakes testing in perspective” (Routman 4).  Wow what a comment.  When was the last time so many of us were just overflowing with joy to get to work?  I’m not saying that I do not enjoy my job or coming to work and teaching children, because I do, but when you read that sentence…it makes you think.  Then the next sentence, in the same paragraph, was just as much a wow factor to me.  “None of this is possible if we’re constantly exhausted from an overstuffed curriculum and have no time to collaborate, reflect, and renew ourselves” (Routman 4).  Now, after reading that sentence from the text, how many of you went WOW?!?  Another point that stood out from this chapter was the beliefs and practices of not only using the science backed studies and knowledge, but also teachers using their own personal knowledge and judgement to teach the students that they know best.  “Instead of focusing on ‘Is it right?’ or ‘What’s the best way?’ let’s think about and focus on what’s right and best for a particular student or group of students at this point in time as indicated by what we’ve read, the conversations we’ve had with our colleagues, valid research we’ve consulted, our teaching experiences, and our students’ needs and interests” (Routman 6).  That is taking a lot more factors into action than just science and curriculum, and the suggestion is that you need to take all of these factors into account to get the most out of your students.  It makes me think about all of my time in coaching middle, junior, and high school athletes.  We cannot recruit the players that we want to fit our offensive or defensive styles or playbooks, a lot of times we have to adjust our methods and focus on using the styles and plays that will fit the personnel that we have.  We have to compete with what we have, so fit the plays to get the most and best out of the abilities that our current players possess.  The approach here is to utilize and adapt to get the most and best out of your players, same thing with our students in our classes.  Each year, each class, each student is different, and a “cookie cutter” approach may not be the best way to handle our teaching responsibilities.  “Without devoted teachers to individualize instruction for the students in their classroom, any program – even a scientifically proven one – will be, at best, minimally effective” (Routman 10). 

 

Blog #2- Teach this,Not That....The Research Says....

The second section of No More Independent Reading Without Support by Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss is split into six sections. The first three sections deal with the research surrounding independent reading (IR). The first section deals with student achievement. The next section addresses common reasons for not doing IR. The next section focuses on Common Core.

If your school and district are like mine, they will let you try out many ideas so long as there is research behind it. The research clearly shows that IR improves: oral reading accuracy, reading rate, reading expression, and reading comprehension. This improvement only occurs  “if teachers scaffold by modeling and teaching students to self-select books from a variety of genres at their IR levels, confer with students, monitor and provide feedback to students, and make students accountable for their reading”( Moss 12).  In the age of SLOs, aren’t these goals exactly what every teacher is trying to do? I am thankful that my ELA co-teacher gives our sixth graders time each day to read a self-selected book. Barbara Moss states that “Students read more, understand more, and are more likely to continue reading when they have an opportunity to read.” (Moss 18). Each week I need to ask myself how I can add choice to the content in my classroom.  This week, we are learning about ancient Egypt. Instead of a whole group activity, students will split up into expert groups to learn about one section of Egyptian culture/history. There will be biographies on famous pharaohs, info texts on building pyramids, historical fiction about daily life. I even found many Egyptian folktales to add to this mix! They will read and discuss the texts together and figure out a way to share their knowledge with the rest of the class.

The next section of the text focuses on Common Core. Even though we don’t use Common Core in SC anymore, I was struck by the statistics about the lack of informational texts used in schools. “In a study of second-fourth graders experiences with informational texts, , second graders experienced one minute per day of exposure to this text type, while third and fourth graders averaged only sixteen minutes” (Moss 26). This amount shocks me!  The text went on to say that read alouds are rarely informational. I am committed to changing these numbers in my classroom. How can we expect students to master informational texts which are the bulk of the reading they will do as an adult if we give them little exposure to the genre? My goal will be to use informational read alouds more often. This week, I have chosen a biography of Moses to go with our study of ancient Egypt.

Often, I skip over the research because quite frankly it bores me. I am challenged by the numbers these authors have included in their book. Now, I know why this book is part of the series “Teach This, Not That.”

What can you cut to make more time for reading?

I choose to read No More Independent Reading Without Support by Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss mostly because I am familiar with their work and agree with much of it. This book is part of a series called “Not this, but that” and outlines instructional practices that are commonplace but don’t work. This book is tackling finding time for real, authentic reading not just SSR/DEAR type reading.

This book starts out with a hook that plagues teachers all over the planet- the issue of TIME. I love how they started off with this particular issue (I personally have read almost an entire professional book wondering that very question- how am I supposed to make time for this!) They begin by busting up many things that clutter our instructional days from calendar time to morning announcements. Many of these things are so ingrained into our school’s culture that we believe to make room for something else is heresy. BUT- this made me look at my measly hour with my students again. I teach 6th-grade social studies. How could I add more time for reading while I teach ancient civilizations and world cultures. As I pictured my daily agenda to ponder what I could cut, Debbie Miller’s words floated in my brain. “When children read extensively, they learn about themselves, other people, and the world.” (Miller, 1). Isn’t that the ultimate goal of studying world history? I usually read aloud a few times a week but Debbie is so insistent that I wanted to make it a daily habit. So I decided to boot out my daily geography “starter.” My. Kids. Love. It.  

Miller also believes that children need more than just exposure to texts, “They need a teacher to show them what behaviors they need to practice as they read” (Miller 8). Our sentence, phrase, word protocol was a big hit with them last week.  It helped them to pay attention to the reading and writing  as well as adding to our learning about ancient Mesopotamia. (We are reading The Golden Bull by Marjorie Cowley). We even used it as a share strategy to sum up their learning as they left the room.

This book has challenged my assumptions already and I am excited about the next section on why independent reading matters and the best ways to support it. I hope to learn more ways to transform my students into lifelong readers.

I am looking forward to supporting one another in this endeavor.  It is exciting to see my friends and colleagues join the course so we can become more skilled.
I am proud of our District for our initiatives on professional development, and I'm eager to see what impact we can have on our students and our community, as we develop students who are not only better readers, but more complex thinkers.