Literacy Journal - Becoming Excellent Readers

In her Reading Essentials Regie Routman identifies her "top five" strategies for helping students become excellent readers. Although I will focus in this posting on her belief in the necessity of teaching students the strategies they need to know to process and understand text, I want to first share an anecdote related to another.

My father, a retired high school English teacher, lives far away, in another state. Thanks to the miracle of long distance phone conversations, we are able to stay pretty well connected. We often talk school. Yesterday, he remarked that he had read my literacy blog from last week and that it reminded him of a situation at his school years ago. One day he was called in to see the principal who was deeply concerned about what he had witnessed in another English teacher's classroom. The principal wanted to get my dad, the department chair, involved. It seems that a certain English teacher, assigned to teach a class of poor readers, had been observed allowing her students to read silently for an entire period! In fact, she explained that she did this on a regular basis! Dutifully, my father went to observe this teacher, and was impressed by the sight of a class full of "poor" students quietly reading. He reported back to the principal that this teacher was probably giving these students exactly what they needed.

Now, of course, we accept that students should have time for silent reading in school. We recognize its value. It's hard to become an excellent reader when you don't read extensively. Mrs. Andrews was simply ahead of her time.

"Teach strategies students need to know to process and understand text." (Routman, p. 43)
It's tough to imagine anyone disagreeing with this mandate. I think the real question is how we as teachers facilitate students' learning of comprehension strategies. Do we teach the skills in isolation, or within the context of meaningful text? Do we rely upon the structure provided by a district-provided reading series to determine what skills to teach, or do we attend to those areas in which our students struggle? Do we differentiate within the class? Do we scaffold students' learning, gradually handing over more responsibility, or do we briefly introduce a skill and then set students to work?

Both the Optimal Learning Model and Cambourne's Model of Learning shed some light upon strategies for the successful teaching of comprehension skills. Brian Cambourne's model positions literacy learning within an overall context of immersion and engagement. I like to think of this as a starting point. Our students may comply with our requests, but, in the absence of engagement, they are unlikely to participate fully in the learning process. Again, I cannot help but contrast the level of engagement "my" students seem to experience with a whole book versus a selection in their reading series. According to Cambourne's model, if they are more deeply engaged in a book, it would follow that they would be primed for better learning, in this case reading comprehension strategies.

Even if students are immersed and engaged in meaningful reading material, teachers must still structure lessons to facilitate a transition from teacher demonstration to shared demonstration to guided practice to independent practice. Routman terms this the Optimal Learning Model. In the case of reading comprehension strategies, this suggests a more gradual hand-off of responsibility than occurs with many traditional, series-based lessons. For example, I have recently observed students practicing the skill of making inferences. First the students read a selection from their text. Then, in a small group, they talk about what an inference is, and work together on the first part of a worksheet designed to help them learn to make inferences from the text. Finally the students will finish the worksheet on their own. From what I have observed, the process of teaching about inferences moves too quickly from discussion to independent practice, with too few opportunities for shared demonstration and guided practice in between. Perhaps, if this is the focus of the week, some of the teaching might occur with the whole class before moving to small groups and independent work.

I think it is easy to assume, especially with upper elementary or middle school students, that they will catch on to a new skill with just a quick demo. However, I think that often what seems obvious and easy to the teacher is not so for all of the students. We shortcut the middle steps, either because we think they really aren't necessary, or because we feel pressed for time. I suspect that a lot of important learning goes on in these middle steps.

In the spring, during my full time teaching stint, my MT has tentatively set things up so that I will do a Houghton unit, rather than literature circles. Her thinking is that it is extra challenging to handle several literature groups simultaneously, whereas with the series, all students are working on the same set of materials. My challenge will be to find a way to achieve the level of engagement with the series that I have witnessed with lit circles.