Chapters Three and Four
I can't wait to hear what you all have to say about these two chapters.
"The problem is that 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." p.25
This is exactly what I kept thinking about when we were looking at the new HSAP release items in the faculty meeting on March 15. All of those test questions were under the ELA portion of the test, yet they are not necessarily the type things I would ever cover in an English class. I'm sure you could tell I was nervous about the bar-code release item.
I do "Mental Modeling" p. 27 with my reading and my writing in my classes. I'll have to be honest, it was hard at first; I felt kind of silly saying my thoughts out loud, but it works. It really helps my students. It helped them see that reading isn't a "mindless" word calling activity. I identified with the girl who was almost finished with Frankenstein but did not have a clue what she had read. I will be interested in seeing how this works other content areas. If you try it, let me know how it works.
The "Real Rigor" section of Chapter 4 certianly made me question myself and what I may be putting some of my poorer readers through.
"...some teachers might be confusing rigor with unrealistic expectations. Is it rigor to assign a tough textbook chapter when no one in the class can understand it?" p. 40
"When students are always given text that is too hard for them to read on their own, they begin to associate school reading with reading that is pointless." p. 41
The state has just recently invested quite a huge amount of money and time developing modules for English I and English II which have texts sets in them. I am involved in the development of the English II curriculum. Come by my room and take a look at some of the cool text sets. I wish we had an unlimited supply of money to develop text sets in social studies and science.
Of course there is plenty more I could comment on in these two chapters, but I prefer to hear what you all have to say.
**If you have a chance, check out the article Emma put a link to in the previous blog. It addresses the problem of secondary and middle school students who are poor readers. The schools took drastic measures. Gee, I wonder what Cris Tovani thinks about their solution...
posted by P. Miller @ 12:26 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Chapter 3 Oh how I wish someone had modeled how to stay with a text back when I was reading Dante's Inferno, The Iliad and The Odyssey. If I had a teacher like Tovani, I might have done better in my advanced placement English class. If those stories had been presented with the "exciting" parts presented first and even explained a little bit what a difference it would have made with our comprehension. Instead we were told that we were honors English students who should not be complaining. As teachers, we need more of Tovani’s methods of modeling not just reading out loud to students or letting students watch us read while they read although those are good methods too. I hope that we can share ideas at an in-service or have our new literacy coach share all of these ideas with the entire faculty.
Chapter 4 As a media specialist I want to help teachers find those "accessible texts." Although Tovani says that it is not necessarily low level sometimes a children's book or a low level book is exactly what is needed in order to help a student understand. I remember reading a book in a book club just a few years ago that talked about Japanese internment camps. I didn't really understand from my history back in high school that these were camps built by Americans in America to house Japanese Americans. I understood it later in children's book that I checked out to read in Children's literature class. I learned from that class that there are many children's picture books that will help children, young adults, adults, and people just learning English to understand history, concepts, theories and many other difficult and scholarly topics.
This summer I can't wait to start creating a text set for my classes. Even if I just can create a "general science" text set with various topics, I think it would be an extremely valuable tool for my classes. I completely understand the idea of "accessible" texts because I see how inaccessible the text book is for most of my students. Whenever I assign a reading assignment, at least 1/3 of the class has NO idea how to answer questions about it or find information. So if you need to find me this summer, look in Panera (they have free wi-fi) -- i'll be eating a bagle and looking up texts ;)
I was able to attend a literacy workshop with Cris Tovani at the beginning of this school year. At the workshop she modeled her “thinking aloud” strategy that she mentions in chapter 3 and gave everyone in attendance an article to practice with. At the workshop she referred to the strategy as “text chunking” because she had us read a chunk of text and then make comments about what we were thinking in the margins. As someone who is pretty confident with my reading skills, I really enjoyed using this strategy and then bringing it back to my own classroom. For one of my lessons after attending her workshop, I chose a sports article from ESPN to teach the text chunking strategies to my struggling readers. Although many of them are pretty familiar with sports and the lingo used, they didn’t comprehend all of the information in the article. After modeling the strategy to my class I had them use a follow up article to try it themselves. I was amazed at how much more they understood and how insightful their thoughts were. I have caught many of my students using this strategy with their readings from their academic classes and I am confident that it has help increase their comprehension levels. Although I used this strategy on a language arts lesson, I agree with Tovani that this strategy can be very helpful to struggling readers in all subject areas.
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