• read grade-level prose and poetry orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression on successive readings; and
• use context to confirm or self-correct word recognition and understanding, rereading as necessary.
Offer Ongoing Professional Development That Includes Teaching Strategies Based on the New Research
Because all reading programs are not the same, teachers must be educated in how to evaluate the different programs to determine which ones are based on strong evidence. Preservice and in-service programs need to provide teachers with the training necessary to select, develop, and implement the most appropriate reading program. Systematic phonics instruction is a necessary and vital component of learning to read, but it is not the only component. A total reading program should include instruction in phonemic awareness, vocabulary development, fluency, and comprehension (NRP, 2000).
Beginning teachers are in extra need of in-service support. Too often their preservice courses did not provide them with sufficient knowledge and skills to help all children become successful readers. Studies of teacher preparation programs show that too little time is allocated to the teaching of reading and that there is wide variance in the content of these programs (Cheesman et al., 2009; NRP, 2000).
Every day, teachers try to help students learn to read. For some children, learning to read comes quickly, usually because of exposure to frequent language experiences during the preschool years. But for other children, learning to read is a struggle, and this is when teachers really do make a difference. Recent studies bear this out. An extensive analysis of student achievement and teacher training concluded that teacher experience was a major factor in determining student success in elementary reading (Harris & Sass, 2007).
When early literacy teachers do participate in training to learn about research-based practices, the results can be impressive. For example, one study involved a yearlong project in which first- and second-grade teachers participated in scientifically based instruction on phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency, and were coached by professional mentors (Podhajski, Mather, Nathan, & Sammons, 2009). The reading achievement of their first-grade students exceeded that of students in the control group in letter name fluency, phonemic segmentation, nonsense word fluency, and oral reading. Students in the second grade achieved better than the control students in phonemic segmentation. A similar study involving the training and coaching of kindergarten teachers also showed improved achievement in student literacy (Kretlow, Wood, & Cooke, 2011).
Children who come to school with phonics skills already developed and who can apply them correctly do not need the same intensity and level of phonics instruction as children who are just beginning to learn to read. Professional development should help teachers assess the needs of individual children and tailor instruction to meet these needs.
Remember the Content-Area Teachers
To some degree, all teachers are teachers of reading. Yet, we often overlook content-area teachers when designing professional development programs to enhance reading instruction. If the content-area teachers assume that the English department bears the responsibility for teaching reading and writing skills, then they will see no reason to assume this task. Furthermore, whenever I have discussed literacy instruction with content-area teachers, they often reply that they know little about teaching reading or how to get their students to read the subject matter more fluently. Of course, they are correct. The Common Core State Standards include goals for integrating advanced literacy instruction into the content areas in middle and high school. If these goals are to be met, districts should provide meaningful training to content-area teachers that includes simple yet effective strategies they can use to help their students better comprehend their content material (see Chapter 7 for suggested strategies).
Even modest training times can be effective. Studies (e.g., Concannon-Gibney & McCarthy, 2012; Torgesen, Houston, & Rissman, 2007) show that whenever content-area teachers participate in a professional development program to enhance the reading outcomes of the struggling readers in their classrooms, the following findings consistently emerge:
• Before the professional development, content-area teachers are generally not cognizant of the reading difficulties their students display and are often overwhelmed by these challenges.
• Content-area teachers welcome in-service training on the comprehension strategies, insisting on substantial modeling, engaging in biweekly support meetings, and taking time in class to implement the strategies.
• The teachers see positive effects from the strategies through improvements in students’ vocabulary decoding and use, reading comprehension, and graph interpretations.
• Middle school is the last chance for struggling readers to get the support they need in reading to learn. Content-area teachers at this level who are knowledgeable in how to use research-based interventions can have a major impact on the reading success of their students.
Teach Reading Through the Students’ Strengths
Difficulties with reading frequently mask a student’s strengths in other cognitive areas. Because struggling readers have problems with their phonologic module’s ability to interpret the meaning of individual words, they will miss details in the text. Furthermore, they have difficulty remembering extended lists of unfamiliar words long enough to comprehend complex sentences. You will recall from Chapter 5 that dyslexics deal with this situation by calling upon their brain’s right frontal lobe during reading to interpret the overall meaning of a passage. Consequently, the dyslexic students’ reliance on the right frontal lobe develops other cognitive strengths, such as creativity, problem solving, critical thinking, concept formation, and reasoning (Shaywitz, 2003; Vlachos, Andreou, & Delliou, 2013).
Although overall cognitive ability may not influence the acquisition of phonemic awareness or of understanding phonics, reasoning and verbal skills can help dyslexic children and other struggling readers comprehend what they are reading. By using their bank of vocabulary words, personal experiences, and other knowledge, these students can use their cognitive skills to identify unfamiliar words in text. Teachers can work with these students to expose them to opportunities that bolster their strengths through enhancing their vocabularies, expanding their storehouse of knowledge, and enriching their worldly experiences. This approach allows students with reading difficulties to use their other strengths to overcome their phonological weakness.
Offer Professional Development in Reading to Building Principals
Principals are the instructional leaders of their school. They need to become familiar with the latest scientific research on reading, especially with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. Learning to read is far too important a goal to be left to discretionary programs and individual teacher decisions about what approach to take. The challenge for the principal is to maintain consistency of instruction while still encouraging the unique contributions of teachers. In the end, however, principals must insist that the district select a scientifically based reading program, ensure that all teachers of beginning reading follow it, and stress the development of phonological awareness.
Effective reading instruction in kindergarten and the primary grades should be one of the principal’s top priorities (Torgesen et al., 2007). Below is a brief survey that may help principals and teachers determine the extent to which the school’s reading program is meeting the needs of all children.
When you have completed the chart, add up the values of the circled numbers to get a total score. The highest possible score is 63. Take a close look at any component with a score of 1. Why is that the case? What can you do about it?
Preparing for the Common Core State Standards
Adopting the Common Core State Standards will require principals at all grade levels to prepare their faculty and staff for implementation. For the English Language Arts standards, principals may wish to consider the following steps, among others (NAESP, 2013):
> • Engage teacher leaders so that teachers buy into the process.
• Take the small step necessary to help teachers adjust to the rigor and expectations of the standards.
• Allow plenty of time for teachers to discuss and reflect on the implementation.
• Inform parents of the coming curriculum changes.
• Create an ongoing, job-embedded professional development program for English language arts that emphasizes rigor, text complexity, and use of research/evidence-based strategies.
• Discuss implications for social studies and science courses.
• Discuss the intent and types of assessments and the need to document the evidence of student achievement.
• Develop plans for struggling students.
The details for facilitating these steps will vary, of course, depending, for example, on the degree to which each school has unique populations—such as the number of English language learners and students with special needs—the socioeconomic level of the school’s community, and the rate of teacher turnover.
Answer to Test Question #10
Question: The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts include a basic curriculum and a selection of assessment instruments.
Answer: False. The standards are a list of knowledge and skill goals. What content and what instructional methods are used to achieve the goals are left to the states and school districts to decide. Stakeholders are discussing how the standards are to be assessed.
Working With Parents and Students
Principals provide a great community service when they talk to parents of newborns and alert them to the importance of the early preschool years in developing a child’s literacy. Given the evidence that the brain’s ability to acquire spoken language is at its peak in the early years, parents should create a rich environment that includes lots of communication activities, such as talking, singing, and reading aloud. In schools, this means addressing any language-learning problems quickly to take advantage of the brain’s ability to rewire improper connections during this important period of growth. It also means that parents and teachers should not assume that children with language-based problems are going to be limited in cognitive thought processes as well.
Principals can also ensure that the school’s reading program will help students associate reading with pleasure. For readers having difficulties, principals can develop a library of specially recorded books that have a slow pace, clear phrasing, and small amounts of material per audiovisual recording. Struggling readers need to listen to the recording and to follow along.
Close the Achievement Gap in Reading
We hear a lot these days about closing the achievement gap between low-income and minority children, and other students. Despite the continuing concern, money, and effort, the gap in reading scores refuses to narrow. What causes this unfortunate situation depends on who you ask. Adults often say these students achieve poorly because they don’t eat breakfast, they are too poor, their parents don’t care, or they don’t have any books at home. This focuses blame on the children and their families. But talking with students often produces different reasons. They talk about teachers who are not qualified in what they are teaching, about counselors who underestimate their potential, about principals who dismiss their concerns, and of a curriculum that is boring and irrelevant to their needs.
No one argues that issues like poverty, family stability, and home environment do not matter, because clearly they do. But if educators assume that unfortunate social and economic conditions will affect how much a child learns, then we end up not challenging the child. As a result, these students become the object of a self-fulfilling prophecy: We expect less of them, so we give them less, and they produce less in return.
Educators are not usually able to change what happens to children outside of school, but they can ensure that what happens in school really matters. Closing the achievement gap, in my opinion, requires concerted effort in four areas:
• Establish and maintain high standards, and expect all students to meet them. People rise and fall to the level of expectations we set for them. Too often in high-poverty schools there is little expectation that students can meet the reading standards. We misinterpret their lack of literacy as an inability to acquire literacy. Schools must be clearly committed to the notion that standards are for everyone and that everyone can reach them with appropriate instruction and, if needed, systematic interventions.
• Design a challenging reading curriculum that is aligned with the standards. Assume that all students can learn phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle, although some students may take longer. Keep the practice consistent and challenging and introduce interesting literature as appropriate to enhance comprehension.
• Provide systematic research-based additional help for struggling readers. Many schools have programs, such as Title I, designed to offer additional help to disadvantaged students. But these sessions can subject the students to more of the same outdated strategies that did not work in their regular classrooms. For some children, the school day just does not provide enough time to include the activities they need to catch up. More effort should be made to provide help through an extended school day, on weekends, before school, during vacation periods, and in the summer. Districts that have implemented these extended instructional times for struggling readers are reporting significant improvements in reading achievement.
• Ensure that teachers thoroughly know the subjects they are teaching. In many states, 15 to 30 percent of middle school and high school teachers are teaching outside their areas of college study (Hill, 2011). That number increases dramatically in high-poverty schools because fully qualified teachers often find those positions less desirable and succeed in avoiding them. Numerous research studies over decades have shown that the classroom teacher remains the single greatest factor that determines most students’ success in learning. As I have stated in my other books, the quality of learning rarely exceeds the quality of teaching. When we have fully qualified teachers with high expectations and an updated knowledge base of how to teach reading, we can make great headway in closing the reading achievement gap.
Encourage Teachers to Be Researchers
Teachers cannot be mere consumers of the knowledge emerging from scientific research. They must position themselves as active participants in the research community. One way to do this is through action research. Action research gives the practitioner a chance to be a researcher and to investigate specific problems that affect teaching and learning. Unlike traditional education research, where teachers are studied by outsiders, action research is conducted by teachers themselves to study their own classroom practices. It is a systematic investigation into some aspect of the school pursued by educators out of a desire to improve what they do. Action research expands the role of a teacher as an inquirer into teaching and learning through systematic classroom research.
Teachers of reading can test whether a particular strategy they want to use is effective by trying it with some students and not with others. By setting up a small research project in the classroom, teachers can determine how well the students using the strategy (test group) learned compared with those who did not use the strategy (control group).
Action research is well suited to schools because of its democratic methodology, inclusiveness, flexibility of approach, and potential for changing practice. Action research uses a solution-oriented approach that is characterized by six cycles (Figure 8.1):
• Identifying the problem (“Will this strategy be more effective than other ones I have used?”)
• Systematically collecting data (“How will I know if it worked?”)
• Analyzing the data (“Did it improve the students’ learning? How?”)
• Taking action on the data (“What changes should I make?”)
• Redefining the problem, if necessary (“Is there something else I should try?”)
• Sharing the
results with colleagues
Because the teacher who is responsible for implementing changes also does the research, a real fit is created between the needs of a specific learner and the action taken. Teachers of reading should understand that their own honing of proven instructional strategies through reflection and systematic monitoring of their students’ progress is a critical component of a scientifically based reading program. Action research provides a means to that end.
Figure 8.1 This diagram illustrates the six steps in the action research cycle, starting with identifying or redefining the problem.
Action research also provides teachers with opportunities to gain knowledge and skills in research methods and applications and to become more aware of the possibilities and options for change. Teachers using action research are likely to be receptive and supportive of systemic changes that school leaders may be seeking. We teach our students that inquiry is a tool of scientists. By engaging in action research, teachers extend their knowledge of reading instruction through inquiry. They carefully observe, generate and test hypotheses, collect data, and draw conclusions based on evidence that are shared with other reading teachers and researchers.
CONCLUSION
Here are some of the major points I have presented in this book:
• Despite the variations among how and the rates at which children learn, they all have similar brains. Although the brain is not innately wired for reading, the neural circuits for visual recognition and spoken language processing can be taught to make connections between the sounds of language and the letters that represent them (the alphabetic principle), an absolutely necessary skill in order to learn to read competently.
• The size of a child’s spoken vocabulary is a key predictor of later success in reading.
How the Brain Learns to Read Page 28