Sunday, July 6, 2008
Professional Reading on Literacy Leadership
Please post a brief (3 paragraph) response to a professional book on literacy leadership in which you: 1) name the title and author, and briefly summarize the book’s main points; 2) construct a personal reaction to the text; and 3) suggest ways a literacy leader could apply its information in practice.
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Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents by Gay Ivey and Douglas Fisher
Ivey and Fisher explore what it takes to foster a school-wide approach to literacy development and support in middle and secondary level schools. The first and second sections focus on specific methods English and content-specific teachers can use to approach literacy. The third section reinforces the need to increase the amount of time adolescents spend “just reading.” The fourth section explores the characteristics of effective reading interventions. Finally, in the fifth section Gay and Iverson delineate how leaders need to support literacy approaches. There are appendices and other sections that take the form of other perspectives that reinforce the points made elsewhere in the text.
In many ways, Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents is typical of ASCD texts in that it is a short, reader-friendly, book chock full of explication, analysis, and suggested practices on a particular educational topic. I reacted differently to each of the five sections, probably because of my background as a former English teacher and current administrator trying to foster a literacy program in my school. I found the information for English teachers accurate but not new. I think most English teachers already know about readability scales and the like but Ivey and Fisher explained them clearly and easily. The authors neglected to comment on the cultural literacy that comes from reading “the canon”; this is frequently cited by secondary English teachers as a reason for having class-wide texts. I very much appreciated the section on helping content-specific teachers support literacy efforts. In particular, the authors drove home the point that literacy instruction has as much to do with helping students learn how to organize their learning as it does with actual text. This is something I can use when working with my faculty. And as one can imagine, as an administrator I appreciated the section on how administrators can support school-wide literacy. The authors provide five specific standards and indicators of effective practice in this regard. Given the number of responsibilities administrators have and how susceptible any one responsibility is to fall off the plate, having such a succinct list of effective practices can be a life-saver.
Leaders of a wide variety of literacy efforts in many different stages of implementation can apply the strategies put forth by the authors of this book. As I shared in the above paragraph, I plan on using much of what the authors said for content-specific teachers and administrators as my school implements our literacy plan this school year. After a year I can foresee spending more time with the English department to further their literacy skills. Similarly, Ivey and Fisher spend a fair amount of time discussing reading programs such as Sustained Silent Reading (SSR). I participated in an SSR program (and have a copy of the SSR Handbook they cite at length) as a teacher and remember the bitter debates that can arise over it. I support SSR but at this stage in our literacy efforts I think it would create more collegial strive than anything else. Nevertheless, I suspect SSR will come up in the future and that I will review the authors’ comments at that time.
The Learning Leader by Douglas Reeves.
Frankly, I chose this book for two reasons--neither of which was ideal. First, I was being cheap. I had the book in my bookshelf, sent to me by ASCD with my membership a year or two ago, and I had never read it. Second, I have attended conferences where Reeves presented, and I generally liked his focus and his ideas. If I knew then what I knew now, I would have spent the money to purchase the Ivey and Fisher book. I went to Borders to buy it because I have a gift certificate there, but they said it would take too long to get. Now I think I'll probably end up buying it anyway because it sounds good.
In any event, there are some good things about this book, but there is nothing particularly good when it comes to reading specifically.
The highlights for me in Reeves's work are a couple. First, he is passionate--and convincing--in pressing frequent nonfiction writing as a school practice closely associated with across-the-curriculum student increased academic performance. His evidence for this is compelling.
Second, he is equally passionate--and just about as convincing--in his attack on a couple of standard grading practices, specifically, the use of the zero grade an averaging. About the zero grade, Reeves compares the discrepant impact of assigning a zero in a 4-point grading scale and a 100-point scale. In a 4-point scale, all the steps from each letter grade to the next are the same height (1 point). In the 100-point scale, the height of the last step from 0 to D- is, depending on the particular scale a school has in place, either six or seven times any of the other grading steps (e.g., the 7 or 10-point step from a B to and A). The zero grade is a killer to many students, and he is right. His case is pretty convincing on this score, and this has been a topic of discussion in my school.
Reeves also takes on averaging as a practice, maintaining that a modal score may be a more accurate measure of what a student has learned than a mean score. This is particularly true where a student has, for example, one or two very bad grades and mostly very good grades. The result of averaging would be to give the student a barely mediocre score depending on what the numbers actually were, whereas the frequent strong scores may be a better measure of how much the student has learned.
The balance of this Reeves book has to do with a model of effective leadership that he sets up that is designed to assess whether a school with strong students is being lucky or good and whether a school with weaker average performance is being unlucky or bad. This issue intrigued me, because my school has many advantages that many others do not. We always struggle with trying to determine whether our students do well because of us or in spite of us (it is a mixed bag, I believe, depending on content) and battle faculty and community complacency based on an assumption of what the right answer to this question is. Frankly, however, Reeves's discussion and his model along these lines, while insightful, is so dry and abstract as to be entirely uninspiring. I was disappointed.
Leading a Successful Reading Program: Administrators and Reading Specialists Working Together to Make It Happen
Nancy DeVries Guth and Stephanie Stephens Pettengill
Guth and Pettengill write about their experiences establishing a school-wide literacy program in a middle school, but much of the book is adaptable to elementary and high school settings as well. This is a practical, how-to book, for an audience of literacy specialists with each of its nine chapters written to provide ideas for supporting school-wide literacy. This book includes information about building a resource collection, coordinating assessment data, and providing professional development.
This text reads much like a conversation with Guth and Pettengil who respectively serve as a literacy supervisor and literacy specialist. I usually shy away from how-to books , but this book wasn’t advertised as such. The blurb on the back suggested that they had developed a model, and indeed, the graphic organizer does a nice job of describing the multiple facets of a literacy specialist’s job. Where the book falls short is that the authors speak in generalities about what has worked for them in their particular school. They do offer specifics, but, in my opinion, in all the wrong places-such as how to make a sign out-sheet for resources, or color-coding a binder so you won’t lose it. The chapter on planning and collaborating with teachers provided lots of checklists of what to expect in literacy-rich classrooms, but few ideas about how to engage teachers and grow literacy. Much of the relationship building that the authors espouse could be described a literacy specialist as “resource expert”. I think they underestimate the skills and abilities of teachers to engage as professionals.
While this text was a disappointment, I did tuck away a few ideas that I think the teachers would find helpful in my school. One idea was to offer professional development mini-sessions, which Pettengill calls “quickies” (I kid you not), which are highly focused learning opportunities for just an hour after school. While this is not deep professional development, I do think this format could provide a launching opportunity or whet teachers’ appetites for continued study. I will not use the name “quickie” for fear of being misconstrued.
Kirstie Truluck EDU520 Lancia July/August 08 Professional Book Response I. McAndrew, Donald, Literacy Leadership: Six Strategies for People Work. International Reading Association, 2005. The first three chapters set out a vision for creating a culture of great literacy and illuminate the barriers. The next six chapters introduce lists of user-friendly strategies for specifically improving the culture of instruction and literacy in a school. And yet, while the book is tuned toward literacy improvement, the universal purpose is really to guide leaders through improving any culture through a series of intentional actions. One of the clearly important actions is to improve your leadership skills. The book concludes with a chapter titled “A Call for Leaders” and so is somewhat revolutionary in nature. The book is not grade specific. II. I enjoy the author’s sense of humanity and whimsy. Each of the six strategy chapters begins with an advanced organizer or bulleted list of the practical tasks or strategies that will be explained – and the bullets are little black hands with the pointer fingers extended. The book is a slim volume with reasonable size print and lots of white space for making notes. At a mere 168 pages, it respects the busy teacher who wants to do better. I enjoy the way the book blends research, short vignettes and explanations of tactics. I am always a sucker for a real life story that illustrates the point. In general, the book is about building relationships to foster change and to do so by being present and engaged. This guiding tenet corroborates what an experienced and admired administrator told me about leading communities – “people just feel better when they know you are around.” All that is left is to wonder and worry about whether all of these wonderful strategies can begin to counteract my deep lack of belief in my ability to affect change. III. If teaching a renewed vision of literacy is the first step to developing an adolescent literacy community, then offering a renewed vision of leadership that includes its humanity and rewards is the next step to creating a culture of literacy. This book offers the literacy coach real research, insight and advise on how to do what Brenda Shearer states we must: "to change behavior, [teachers] must change internally. They must change what they believe. In effect, they must change who they are." I will use this ‘soft skills’ book as a companion to the more ‘hard skills’ books such as Vogt’s or Lyons that are full of assessment check lists and planning tools.
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