Jeffrey Shedd EDU 520 July 2008 Schools that Work, Allington and Cunningham
Quote. Summarizing Taylor, Pearson, Peterson and Rodriguez (2003) report: [T]he most consistent variable related to reading achievement growth was teacher emphasis on higher-order thinking either through the questions they asked or the sorts of tasks they assigned students.” (50)
Reaction. This observation seems so obvious, but the simplistic reaction—simply to start asking higher order questions—is not easy. Asking good questions that continue a discussion is one of the rarest of teaching skills. I have seen a few teachers who are excellent at it, but very few. Additionally, the failure of many teachers to ask higher order questions is at least in part connected to the depth-breadth teachers faced by all teachers. To the extent the teacher slows down to hold a discussion, material is not covered. Only the most confident of teachers are willing to do this.
Quote. “The most important factor in determining how much readers will comprehend and how well writers will be able to communicate about a given topic is their level of knowledge about that topic…The importance of prior knowledge to comprehension and communication is included in virtually all modern theories of reading….Emphasizing the skill subjects and excluding the knowledge subjects often results in a short-term gain and a long-term deficit…Children who can read the words but can’t understand what they are reading are not really reading. These children who ‘have the skills’ but who lack needed prior knowledge of critical school topics are a legacy of a primary grades curriculum that required teachers to spend all their time ‘on the basics.’” (52-54) (Great example of this on two quotes concerning French and Indian War on p. 53)
Reaction. The idea that new knowledge builds on old knowledge is hardly new. E.D. Hirsch wrote a whole book about it called Cultural Literacy. Writers so unconsciously incorporate references into their writing that requires prior knowledge. For example, referring to a task as “Herculean” presupposes a knowledge of Roman mythology. Referring to “the emperor has no clothes,” “chicken little,” or “the sky is falling” presupposed knowledge of folk tales. Many children gain familiarity with this cultural vocabulary through their home reading. Many do not. A key task of elementary education, it seems to me, is to build this cultural vocabulary. Allington indicates that an overemphasis on skills can harm comprehension in the long run if students are not exposed to science and social studies in the early grades. I agree. Much of our cultural vocabulary, however, does not rest in social studies and science. We need to really be mindful of how we incorporate not only social studies and science, but myths and folklore, too, into early grades curricula.
Quote. “Children who find learning to read difficult often see the teacher and other children reading and writing, serving as models, but the wonder, ‘How do they do it?’ All children benefit from instruction, but some children need incredible amounts of careful, personal instruction, with clear and repeated demonstrations of how readers and writers go about reading and writing.” (56)
Reaction. This is an important insight. The habits of good reading are so deeply ingrained in most good readers that they have no conscious awareness of what they are doing. To bring that awareness to consciousness is to surface the mysteries of reading. Watching a basketball game, the mystery of what happens during defensive rotations is not at all obvious to me. To watch a practice, however, where the coach walks the player through the rotations, allows even the relatively unathletic to follow the drill. It’s all good teaching.
Quote. “Emergent literacy research begins in the homes of young children, tracing their literacy development from birth until the time they read and write conventionally…This observational research demonstrated that children in literate home environments engage in reading and writing long before beginning formal schooling. Children born into homes where someone reads and writes with them walk into school with an incredible foundation on which instruction can easily build. These children experience an average of 1,000 hours of quality one-on-one reading and writing activities…”(60)
Reaction. This is absolutely true, and how can one disagree? Yet this insight may overstate the importance of home literacy. Aren’t there many students who grow up with parents who read to them, yet who still struggle with the mechanics of reading? Clearly, this is the case in the case of dyslexics or those with organic deficiencies, but even some without such deficiencies struggle. There are many students in my very advantaged community who struggle with reading, particularly as they fall out of the habit of reading and into the temptation of computers, Facebook, computer games, etc.
Quote. “Before setting out for a weeklong vacation, few adults go to the local university bookstore or library and look for a really difficult book to read. Fewer look for a book on a topic they are uninterested in….Children who find learning to read difficult are unlikely to find books in their classroom libraries that they can read comfortably…Yet enormous amounts of easy and interesting reading are essential to developing effective reading strategies, to say nothing of appropriate attitudes and responses. When children struggle with the material they are reading, they cannot apply the strategies that good readers use, and they do not develop the habits and attitudes that good readers do.” (63-64)
Reaction. I really like this insight. It seems so obvious, and it is. My kids still love to read picture books when I take them out of the library even though they read lots of long chapter books, too. Introducing kids to the Odyssey through a Marcia Williams graphic novel is a great introduction to a classic work, even though the reading level is pretty low. Yet the implication of this insight—that classrooms should be replete with easy books—is so often not applied. I know it is not the case in the classrooms in my high school.
Quote. “What is most troubling is that in too many schools where achievement is low, we find no sense of urgency about instructional time. None. Academic learning is important. Altering a few organizational procedures could have a major impact in many schools. Such changes would provide 10 to 20 percent more time for teaching.” (139)
Reaction. This is quite an amazing statistic. I know that I have known secondary teachers who seem to lack urgency about time—letting students leave class before the time for the end of class has arrived, taking a long time getting class started, etc. I had always envisioned elementary schools has time crunched and efficient. How to use time well seems a central problem in education that needs examination at all levels, because the inadequacy of time seems the number one concern of teachers at all levels.
Quote. “One federal study of school in three states that served many low-income children…noted that in some classrooms children actually read only 5 minutes daily while in other classrooms children averaged 48 minutes of actual reading each day…[C]hildren in more effective classrooms read and wrote two or three times as much every day, all year…In many schools, teachers (and often administrators) seem uncomfortable when children are only reading! These teachers seem to view reading more as a leisure activity than as real educational work.” (149)
Reaction. Again, I am surprised to read that some elementary teachers and administrators would not view children reading as an educationally valuable use of time. I do suspect that many secondary teachers (and perhaps me) share that prejudice. Most secondary teachers will plan for students to engage in seatwork; few will lesson plan for students to read (aside, perhaps, for some English teachers). This is a prejudice that needs to be overcome. Children reading, particularly under teacher supervision, is an educationally valuable use of time.
Quote. “According to the National Center for Education Statistics…the pupil/teacher ratio has shrunk considerably since 1960. At the same time, class size has not changed dramatically. These contradictory trends can be explained by understanding the substantial growth in the specialists’ roles in school today…Today, in many elementary schools with high concentrations low-income children, there are as many special teachers and special staff members as there are classroom teachers…According to NCES data, more than half the adults working in the average school today are not classroom teachers.” (104) Reaction. This is quite a factoid. It is intriguing for me to see that Allington sees this as an important issue. The issue of class size and the number of non-teaching staff was an issue in our budget discussions in my district. Many School Board and town council members expressed a desire to invest less in specialist staff and more in teaching staff. Some administrators (including me) were arguing for addition of specialist staff (including a literacy teacher!). Were the School Board and town councilors right? In the case of the literacy teachers that I am hiring, that person will both teach classes to our most struggling students and lead professional development activities for classroom teachers. Allington views this professional development as critical. If this position is successful, the eventual ability to get rid of it must be the best measure of that success!
Quote. “Schools that work emphasize student learning. They focus on fostering collaboration and developing student independence. They focus less on identifying academic winners and loser and more on helping all children achieve high levels of academic proficiency…A school’s culture affects how student perceive learning. When learning is seen primarily as a matter of ‘ability,’ student effort is undermined. When we make much of rank-ordering children by achievement, we undermine student effort. We actually create schools where no one works very hard.” (301-302)
Reaction. This is a fascinating cultural observation. I have long believed that American schools and schooling place way too much emphasis on intelligence dictating academic success and way too little on effort. That part is not a surprise to me. The new insight from this reading was that competitive cultures that emphasize academic achievement may even undermine the work effort of the strong achievers because they deemphasize the need for the strongest students to continue to show growth. The question is: how do we deemphasize competition without feeding into the notion of self-esteem as a value even if it is unsupported by effort? We would have to have clear substitutes in place to measure growth and continually raise the bar, or moving away from competition may undermine the effort that students do demonstrate.
Quote. “In accountability-with autonomy models, a school administrator’s authority derives less from an organizational hierarchy and more from teachers’ assignment of authority to the school-administrator position. One strategy that seems particularly useful is for the school administrator to observe and monitor continually the effects of the changes being implemented.”(307-308)
Reaction. Finding the time to implement the observational role for the administrator is a huge challenge. It is definitely the right role for the administrator—observing lessons, asking questions of teachers, helping teachers think through collaboratively the reasons for doing the things they do and the connection (or lack of connection) between their practice and their instructional and curricular goals.
Jeff, I enjoy the quotes on p. 56 and 301-02. very interesting things to think about, and your responses are as well. Which of your quotes are the 2 most powerful?
Just to clarify for everyone, just post 2 quotes on the blog. Your 10 quotes and responses are for a double entry journal to be submitted as a paper electronically.
Kirstie Truluck EDU 520 July 20, 2008 I am posting the quotes only b/c I think that is what the directions ask for. If you want my responses, just say the word and I will send them along.
Allington and Cunningham pg 68:"It is not possible to determine clearly which children will learn best with which approaches, but it is clear that when a teacher provides alternative routes to the goal of literacy, more children will find a route to take them there. Many children fail in school because their personalities and the approach taken to instruction do not match."
A and C pg 85 - gray box: "In an odd turn of events we have found schools where use of core books dramatically restricts the amount of reading that children do. In some schools as few as six core books were read each year.... even though it takes a typical sixth grader perhaps five hours to read Hatchet [eight weeks were spent on the study of it].
Quote #1: Oddly, schools expect more from parents today, even though more children are living with only one parent or both parents are working (in the majority of families with school-age children). (5)
Response #1: It certainly is true that schools expect more from parents; as a parent of elementary-age children, I am all too aware of this. However, it is also true that parents expect more from schools than ever before. It seems to me that society expects more from our children and consequently more from our schools. The schools, in turn, expect children to come to school ready to learn and supported at home. But the demographics of the “average” household have changed and many students are not ready or supported. This is a significant disconnect and the cause of many problems.
Quote #2: We firmly believe, however, that our framework will improve schools for all children. (245)
Response #2: Many schools and districts have mission statements that make references to “all” students. Improving things for all students, however, is a real challenge. The authors spend some time talking about a few of these groups, including students receiving special education services and students who move around and miss school much of the time. Of course, individual students’ needs and the individual reasons students migrate or miss school are unique and consequently difficult to address. It really comes down to meeting the needs of “each” child to improve schools for “each” child.
Quote #1: “Currently, ‘second system’ programs may undermine the critical role classroom teachers play in the futures of struggling readers. For 40 years, classroom teachers have been led to believe that they were ill equipped to teach these children…. Is it any wonder then that many teachers feel a limited sense of professional responsibility for teaching struggling readers in their classroom?” (Allington, p. 109)
When I first arrived at WDS, I was overwhelmed and impressed by the additional services and facilities available for students with special needs or limited experience. I toured the school, noting endless rooms devoted to speech and language, O.T. and P.T., healthy-living, special education, Title 1, literacy, and behavioral support. The expertise and specially designed spaces seemed to speak to a certain richness of the culture of the school.
Some time has passed and while I still see the strengths that all that expertise and expertly designed space could offer, I also see how it has created a “second system”. Regular education teachers defer to the expertise of their “specialist” colleagues, assuming that expert instruction will somehow “fix” these students with their specialized instruction, as if the decontextualized learning would provide some immediate antidote to every learning difficulty. The fragmentation and lack of coherence in most of these children’s days and years becomes more of an obstacle to learning than whatever their initial difficulties might have been.
Teachers, for fear that they just don’t know enough about learning disabilities, are not providing instruction to students with special needs. Similarly, they are quick to refer children with learning differences. Roughly 26% of our students are identified and another 30% receive Title I or literacy support. During reading, it is not uncommon to see nearly half of a class walk off to alternative education providers. Teachers complain that they rarely have all students in the same place to deliver critical content.
While all of this sounds ridiculously dismal and resembles the worst-case scenarios that Allington described, I do believe we can dig ourselves out of this dual-education system. I think Allington is right in acknowledging that the root of this lies in our beliefs about whether all children can learn and whether it is acceptable to maintain a second, lower set of expectations for some children. If anything good has come out of NCLB, I do believe it is raising expectations for all children. I am optimistic that as we begin to look collectively at how all children are performing, it will not be acceptable to see limited growth for any child. Similarly, I think parents are becoming savvy about expecting more from special programs, asking for evidence of growth and effectiveness of program.
Next year, I will be teaming with a special educator to provide services and core program support to first and second grade teachers and students. This is a big shift in collaboration and will place us collectively responsible for raising levels of instruction and performance of students. While much of the details of this plan will need to be worked out, in essence, the plan has named the game- increased collaboration and coherence between special education and regular education. The collaboration plan dismantles the notion of a “second system” by aligning our teaching, planning, and collaboration schedules. Many of these changes are being mandated, albeit with mixed support and buy-in. While I greet these changes as necessary, I am also cognizant that providing significant side-by side support and meeting teachers where they are may be what makes or breaks this initiative. Emphasizing research-based practices that are already in place and successful will allow us to build upon our strengths amidst the changes.
Quote #2: “The key point to be understood is that good evidence shows that schools can organize instruction so that nearly all children can learn to read and write alongside their peers. Children who begin school with few books, story, and print experiences can speed their literacy development and catch up with more advantaged peers. But to achieve such outcomes means providing some children with access to larger amounts of higher-quality instruction and supplying more actual opportunities to read and write each and every school day.” (Allington, p. 72)
I agree with Allington that all too often programming for children with greater literacy needs, in fact, slows the pace of learning, providing children with fewer opportunities to read, write and think deeply. The idea of actually “closing the gap” by accelerating learning is a relatively new idea in my school setting and making those gains right beside their peers is an even more novel idea. Small positive changes are having positive outcomes. Two years back, we reframed the qualifications of Title I staff, eliminating the use of paraprofessionals and requiring teaching credentials with strong literacy skills. This change brought immediate increases in achievement. We also reorganized the master schedule to map out when supplemental instruction could happen articulating the expectation that classroom teachers were providing the first most significant part of students’ reading instruction. Past practice had students leaving their regular classrooms during reading time with our least skilled staff. Truly, it was a recipe for failure.
The struggle for our staff is in trying to identify time that could be earmarked for supplemental instructional time. In most cases, science and social studies blocks have been capitalized upon. We have concerns about how these decisions will impact students’ background knowledge and vocabulary. While we may see some immediate growth in targeted areas, such as fluency, we wonder if there will be a negative impact down the road. Some creative solutions have emerged which include collaborative planning so that Title I teachers are introducing concepts and key vocabulary in reading selections and integrating content with intensive reading instruction. We have offered some before and after school reading and math clubs to capitalize on time outside the school day.
Ultimately, I think the biggest gains from some of these changes will be in classroom teachers taking greater responsibility for being all students’ first teachers and in Allington’s words, students “learning alongside their peers.” Many teachers are eager to expand their repertoire of strategies to provide better first instruction. Still, however, when engaging teachers in conversations about providing more reading and writing opportunities, I confront what many of our primary teachers say is their need to be developmentally responsive. They explain that these students need more time, more opportunities to learn what school is about, and how to be a friend or a student. While I respect that many of our students do have such needs, I think there are plenty of ways to ‘tweak’ what we do to increase the effectiveness of instruction and routines. There are many lost minutes, particularly in primary classrooms, which could be capitalized to increase reading and writing opportunities for all students.
I am interested in Jeff's comments on the need for elementary schools to build cultural literacy-the importance of science, social studies, and cultural understandingings. Many of the assessments that elementary reform movements, such as RTI,assess low level, easily measured skills. I think you are right to think this overemphasis of low level skills will have negative impacts on your students in years to come.
I am having the hardest time, i keeping typing up entire responses and losing them before i can get them posted. So i will redo it:
To expand on Jill's quote and response regarding the second system, I can see that I have an advantage in my boarding school environment that I did not realize - there is almost no second system because every teacher is a master generalist. Each teacher is an athletic coach, dorm parent, disciplinarian, family advisor, mentor and advisor in matters social and emotional and a classroom teacher. So, we certainly avoid compartmentalizing a kid. We do ask for help from other teachers who work with the student (benefit of a small school), but the student is usually only pulled out for disciplinary action. In the last few years we have hired a few reading specialist/tutor types to work with a hand full of young men who come to us through a scholarship program in NYC. These boys read and write well below their grade level - some are initial readers in their Junior year. I have experienced the kids of deferring to the tutor that Allington and Jill allude to. What these boys do with their tutor does not integrate with what the regular classroom teacher does. The tricky part for me is how do I help these generalist teachers find time, energy and resources to be better skilled at reaching and teaching the struggling readers in their classrooms?
In response to Jeff's quote from Allington - "enormous amounts of easy and interesting reading are essential to developing effective reading strategies, to say nothing of appropriate attitudes and responses" - I see it connecting to a quote I posted –“is clear that when a teacher provides alternative routes to the goal of literacy, more children will find a route to take them there." I taught a nearly non-reading 11th grader this year and I chose to focus on Literacy rather than the core books (topic of my second posted quote). I allowed him to read easy and interesting books around the middle part of the year because I am learning that reading begets reading. So, he read three high-action spy novels from a series and he was so excited. I worked with his 'second system' reading tutor (a family friend trying to support him) to help him ID themes in the novels he read that mirrored the themes the rest of the class encountered in Othello. It worked OK, but I really did have to defend myself to my peers and the other kids in the class. Here I was betraying the core texts and making things unfair. I had a deep, dark fear that I was creating a situation where this boy would go off to college without having read Shakespeare. I know the fear is silly though because the alternative would be to pass him through 11th grade without having read a single book cover to cover. The boy read three easy and interesting books voraciously and started to see himself as a reader! I created a route to literacy.
I apologize for misunderstanding the use of this space for only a couple of comments. The two most important, in my view, are the page 53 and page 69 quotes. I think modeling effective strategies and finding the right balance between building background knowledge and effective strategies are critical hurdles to overcome.
I am fascinated by others' comments describing the "second system" and the common sense, but all too often forgotten insight that "reading begets reading." The learning gains achieved by substituting certified teacher for paraprofessionals is certainly encouraging but raises some huge systemic questions about one of the most common approaches to supporting our most struggling students.
The "reading begets reading" insight really connects to a concern I have about the impact of the internet on reading skills. At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, I have become increasingly suspicious of the effects of hours spent on the Internet and its impact on attention. So many reading strategies that I have come across seem to be vehicles for forcing kids to give attention to what is in front of them. In many cases, the challenge is: how to we get them to focus attention? One way is to have students self-select reading and make sure the reading is within their easy ability. This is the "reading begets reading" connection. The other way is to use strategies (summarizing, effective note-taking, previewing, etc.) that force their focus. This is more challenging now than ever.
8 comments:
Jeffrey Shedd
EDU 520
July 2008
Schools that Work, Allington and Cunningham
Quote. Summarizing Taylor, Pearson, Peterson and Rodriguez (2003) report: [T]he most consistent variable related to reading achievement growth was teacher emphasis on higher-order thinking either through the questions they asked or the sorts of tasks they assigned students.” (50)
Reaction. This observation seems so obvious, but the simplistic reaction—simply to start asking higher order questions—is not easy. Asking good questions that continue a discussion is one of the rarest of teaching skills. I have seen a few teachers who are excellent at it, but very few. Additionally, the failure of many teachers to ask higher order questions is at least in part connected to the depth-breadth teachers faced by all teachers. To the extent the teacher slows down to hold a discussion, material is not covered. Only the most confident of teachers are willing to do this.
Quote. “The most important factor in determining how much readers will comprehend and how well writers will be able to communicate about a given topic is their level of knowledge about that topic…The importance of prior knowledge to comprehension and communication is included in virtually all modern theories of reading….Emphasizing the skill subjects and excluding the knowledge subjects often results in a short-term gain and a long-term deficit…Children who can read the words but can’t understand what they are reading are not really reading. These children who ‘have the skills’ but who lack needed prior knowledge of critical school topics are a legacy of a primary grades curriculum that required teachers to spend all their time ‘on the basics.’” (52-54) (Great example of this on two quotes concerning French and Indian War on p. 53)
Reaction. The idea that new knowledge builds on old knowledge is hardly new. E.D. Hirsch wrote a whole book about it called Cultural Literacy. Writers so unconsciously incorporate references into their writing that requires prior knowledge. For example, referring to a task as “Herculean” presupposes a knowledge of Roman mythology. Referring to “the emperor has no clothes,” “chicken little,” or “the sky is falling” presupposed knowledge of folk tales. Many children gain familiarity with this cultural vocabulary through their home reading. Many do not. A key task of elementary education, it seems to me, is to build this cultural vocabulary. Allington indicates that an overemphasis on skills can harm comprehension in the long run if students are not exposed to science and social studies in the early grades. I agree. Much of our cultural vocabulary, however, does not rest in social studies and science. We need to really be mindful of how we incorporate not only social studies and science, but myths and folklore, too, into early grades curricula.
Quote. “Children who find learning to read difficult often see the teacher and other children reading and writing, serving as models, but the wonder, ‘How do they do it?’ All children benefit from instruction, but some children need incredible amounts of careful, personal instruction, with clear and repeated demonstrations of how readers and writers go about reading and writing.” (56)
Reaction. This is an important insight. The habits of good reading are so deeply ingrained in most good readers that they have no conscious awareness of what they are doing. To bring that awareness to consciousness is to surface the mysteries of reading. Watching a basketball game, the mystery of what happens during defensive rotations is not at all obvious to me. To watch a practice, however, where the coach walks the player through the rotations, allows even the relatively unathletic to follow the drill. It’s all good teaching.
Quote. “Emergent literacy research begins in the homes of young children, tracing their literacy development from birth until the time they read and write conventionally…This observational research demonstrated that children in literate home environments engage in reading and writing long before beginning formal schooling. Children born into homes where someone reads and writes with them walk into school with an incredible foundation on which instruction can easily build. These children experience an average of 1,000 hours of quality one-on-one reading and writing activities…”(60)
Reaction. This is absolutely true, and how can one disagree? Yet this insight may overstate the importance of home literacy. Aren’t there many students who grow up with parents who read to them, yet who still struggle with the mechanics of reading? Clearly, this is the case in the case of dyslexics or those with organic deficiencies, but even some without such deficiencies struggle. There are many students in my very advantaged community who struggle with reading, particularly as they fall out of the habit of reading and into the temptation of computers, Facebook, computer games, etc.
Quote. “Before setting out for a weeklong vacation, few adults go to the local university bookstore or library and look for a really difficult book to read. Fewer look for a book on a topic they are uninterested in….Children who find learning to read difficult are unlikely to find books in their classroom libraries that they can read comfortably…Yet enormous amounts of easy and interesting reading are essential to developing effective reading strategies, to say nothing of appropriate attitudes and responses. When children struggle with the material they are reading, they cannot apply the strategies that good readers use, and they do not develop the habits and attitudes that good readers do.” (63-64)
Reaction. I really like this insight. It seems so obvious, and it is. My kids still love to read picture books when I take them out of the library even though they read lots of long chapter books, too. Introducing kids to the Odyssey through a Marcia Williams graphic novel is a great introduction to a classic work, even though the reading level is pretty low. Yet the implication of this insight—that classrooms should be replete with easy books—is so often not applied. I know it is not the case in the classrooms in my high school.
Quote. “What is most troubling is that in too many schools where achievement is low, we find no sense of urgency about instructional time. None. Academic learning is important. Altering a few organizational procedures could have a major impact in many schools. Such changes would provide 10 to 20 percent more time for teaching.” (139)
Reaction. This is quite an amazing statistic. I know that I have known secondary teachers who seem to lack urgency about time—letting students leave class before the time for the end of class has arrived, taking a long time getting class started, etc. I had always envisioned elementary schools has time crunched and efficient. How to use time well seems a central problem in education that needs examination at all levels, because the inadequacy of time seems the number one concern of teachers at all levels.
Quote. “One federal study of school in three states that served many low-income children…noted that in some classrooms children actually read only 5 minutes daily while in other classrooms children averaged 48 minutes of actual reading each day…[C]hildren in more effective classrooms read and wrote two or three times as much every day, all year…In many schools, teachers (and often administrators) seem uncomfortable when children are only reading! These teachers seem to view reading more as a leisure activity than as real educational work.” (149)
Reaction. Again, I am surprised to read that some elementary teachers and administrators would not view children reading as an educationally valuable use of time. I do suspect that many secondary teachers (and perhaps me) share that prejudice. Most secondary teachers will plan for students to engage in seatwork; few will lesson plan for students to read (aside, perhaps, for some English teachers). This is a prejudice that needs to be overcome. Children reading, particularly under teacher supervision, is an educationally valuable use of time.
Quote. “According to the National Center for Education Statistics…the pupil/teacher ratio has shrunk considerably since 1960. At the same time, class size has not changed dramatically. These contradictory trends can be explained by understanding the substantial growth in the specialists’ roles in school today…Today, in many elementary schools with high concentrations low-income children, there are as many special teachers and special staff members as there are classroom teachers…According to NCES data, more than half the adults working in the average school today are not classroom teachers.” (104)
Reaction. This is quite a factoid. It is intriguing for me to see that Allington sees this as an important issue. The issue of class size and the number of non-teaching staff was an issue in our budget discussions in my district. Many School Board and town council members expressed a desire to invest less in specialist staff and more in teaching staff. Some administrators (including me) were arguing for addition of specialist staff (including a literacy teacher!). Were the School Board and town councilors right? In the case of the literacy teachers that I am hiring, that person will both teach classes to our most struggling students and lead professional development activities for classroom teachers. Allington views this professional development as critical. If this position is successful, the eventual ability to get rid of it must be the best measure of that success!
Quote. “Schools that work emphasize student learning. They focus on fostering collaboration and developing student independence. They focus less on identifying academic winners and loser and more on helping all children achieve high levels of academic proficiency…A school’s culture affects how student perceive learning. When learning is seen primarily as a matter of ‘ability,’ student effort is undermined. When we make much of rank-ordering children by achievement, we undermine student effort. We actually create schools where no one works very hard.” (301-302)
Reaction. This is a fascinating cultural observation. I have long believed that American schools and schooling place way too much emphasis on intelligence dictating academic success and way too little on effort. That part is not a surprise to me. The new insight from this reading was that competitive cultures that emphasize academic achievement may even undermine the work effort of the strong achievers because they deemphasize the need for the strongest students to continue to show growth. The question is: how do we deemphasize competition without feeding into the notion of self-esteem as a value even if it is unsupported by effort? We would have to have clear substitutes in place to measure growth and continually raise the bar, or moving away from competition may undermine the effort that students do demonstrate.
Quote. “In accountability-with autonomy models, a school administrator’s authority derives less from an organizational hierarchy and more from teachers’ assignment of authority to the school-administrator position. One strategy that seems particularly useful is for the school administrator to observe and monitor continually the effects of the changes being implemented.”(307-308)
Reaction. Finding the time to implement the observational role for the administrator is a huge challenge. It is definitely the right role for the administrator—observing lessons, asking questions of teachers, helping teachers think through collaboratively the reasons for doing the things they do and the connection (or lack of connection) between their practice and their instructional and curricular goals.
Jeff,
I enjoy the quotes on p. 56 and 301-02. very interesting things to think about, and your responses are as well. Which of your quotes are the 2 most powerful?
Just to clarify for everyone, just post 2 quotes on the blog. Your 10 quotes and responses are for a double entry journal to be submitted as a paper electronically.
Kirstie Truluck
EDU 520
July 20, 2008
I am posting the quotes only b/c I think that is what the directions ask for. If you want my responses, just say the word and I will send them along.
Allington and Cunningham pg 68:"It is not possible to determine clearly which children will learn best with which approaches, but it is clear that when a teacher provides alternative routes to the goal of literacy, more children will find a route to take them there. Many children fail in school because their personalities and the approach taken to instruction do not match."
A and C pg 85 - gray box: "In an odd turn of events we have found schools where use of core books dramatically restricts the amount of reading that children do. In some schools as few as six core books were read each year.... even though it takes a typical sixth grader perhaps five hours to read Hatchet [eight weeks were spent on the study of it].
Quote #1: Oddly, schools expect more from parents today, even though more children are living with only one parent or both parents are working (in the majority of families with school-age children). (5)
Response #1: It certainly is true that schools expect more from parents; as a parent of elementary-age children, I am all too aware of this. However, it is also true that parents expect more from schools than ever before. It seems to me that society expects more from our children and consequently more from our schools. The schools, in turn, expect children to come to school ready to learn and supported at home. But the demographics of the “average” household have changed and many students are not ready or supported. This is a significant disconnect and the cause of many problems.
Quote #2: We firmly believe, however, that our framework will improve schools for all children. (245)
Response #2: Many schools and districts have mission statements that make references to “all” students. Improving things for all students, however, is a real challenge. The authors spend some time talking about a few of these groups, including students receiving special education services and students who move around and miss school much of the time. Of course, individual students’ needs and the individual reasons students migrate or miss school are unique and consequently difficult to address. It really comes down to meeting the needs of “each” child to improve schools for “each” child.
Quote #1: “Currently, ‘second system’ programs may undermine the critical role classroom teachers play in the futures of struggling readers. For 40 years, classroom teachers have been led to believe that they were ill equipped to teach these children…. Is it any wonder then that many teachers feel a limited sense of professional responsibility for teaching struggling readers in their classroom?” (Allington, p. 109)
When I first arrived at WDS, I was overwhelmed and impressed by the additional services and facilities available for students with special needs or limited experience. I toured the school, noting endless rooms devoted to speech and language, O.T. and P.T., healthy-living, special education, Title 1, literacy, and behavioral support. The expertise and specially designed spaces seemed to speak to a certain richness of the culture of the school.
Some time has passed and while I still see the strengths that all that expertise and expertly designed space could offer, I also see how it has created a “second system”. Regular education teachers defer to the expertise of their “specialist” colleagues, assuming that expert instruction will somehow “fix” these students with their specialized instruction, as if the decontextualized learning would provide some immediate antidote to every learning difficulty. The fragmentation and lack of coherence in most of these children’s days and years becomes more of an obstacle to learning than whatever their initial difficulties might have been.
Teachers, for fear that they just don’t know enough about learning disabilities, are not providing instruction to students with special needs. Similarly, they are quick to refer children with learning differences. Roughly 26% of our students are identified and another 30% receive Title I or literacy support. During reading, it is not uncommon to see nearly half of a class walk off to alternative education providers. Teachers complain that they rarely have all students in the same place to deliver critical content.
While all of this sounds ridiculously dismal and resembles the worst-case scenarios that Allington described, I do believe we can dig ourselves out of this dual-education system. I think Allington is right in acknowledging that the root of this lies in our beliefs about whether all children can learn and whether it is acceptable to maintain a second, lower set of expectations for some children. If anything good has come out of NCLB, I do believe it is raising expectations for all children. I am optimistic that as we begin to look collectively at how all children are performing, it will not be acceptable to see limited growth for any child. Similarly, I think parents are becoming savvy about expecting more from special programs, asking for evidence of growth and effectiveness of program.
Next year, I will be teaming with a special educator to provide services and core program support to first and second grade teachers and students. This is a big shift in collaboration and will place us collectively responsible for raising levels of instruction and performance of students. While much of the details of this plan will need to be worked out, in essence, the plan has named the game- increased collaboration and coherence between special education and regular education. The collaboration plan dismantles the notion of a “second system” by aligning our teaching, planning, and collaboration schedules. Many of these changes are being mandated, albeit with mixed support and buy-in. While I greet these changes as necessary, I am also cognizant that providing significant side-by side support and meeting teachers where they are may be what makes or breaks this initiative. Emphasizing research-based practices that are already in place and successful will allow us to build upon our strengths amidst the changes.
Quote #2: “The key point to be understood is that good evidence shows that schools can organize instruction so that nearly all children can learn to read and write alongside their peers. Children who begin school with few books, story, and print experiences can speed their literacy development and catch up with more advantaged peers. But to achieve such outcomes means providing some children with access to larger amounts of higher-quality instruction and supplying more actual opportunities to read and write each and every school day.” (Allington, p. 72)
I agree with Allington that all too often programming for children with greater literacy needs, in fact, slows the pace of learning, providing children with fewer opportunities to read, write and think deeply. The idea of actually “closing the gap” by accelerating learning is a relatively new idea in my school setting and making those gains right beside their peers is an even more novel idea. Small positive changes are having positive outcomes. Two years back, we reframed the qualifications of Title I staff, eliminating the use of paraprofessionals and requiring teaching credentials with strong literacy skills. This change brought immediate increases in achievement. We also reorganized the master schedule to map out when supplemental instruction could happen articulating the expectation that classroom teachers were providing the first most significant part of students’ reading instruction. Past practice had students leaving their regular classrooms during reading time with our least skilled staff. Truly, it was a recipe for failure.
The struggle for our staff is in trying to identify time that could be earmarked for supplemental instructional time. In most cases, science and social studies blocks have been capitalized upon. We have concerns about how these decisions will impact students’ background knowledge and vocabulary. While we may see some immediate growth in targeted areas, such as fluency, we wonder if there will be a negative impact down the road. Some creative solutions have emerged which include collaborative planning so that Title I teachers are introducing concepts and key vocabulary in reading selections and integrating content with intensive reading instruction. We have offered some before and after school reading and math clubs to capitalize on time outside the school day.
Ultimately, I think the biggest gains from some of these changes will be in classroom teachers taking greater responsibility for being all students’ first teachers and in Allington’s words, students “learning alongside their peers.” Many teachers are eager to expand their repertoire of strategies to provide better first instruction. Still, however, when engaging teachers in conversations about providing more reading and writing opportunities, I confront what many of our primary teachers say is their need to be developmentally responsive. They explain that these students need more time, more opportunities to learn what school is about, and how to be a friend or a student. While I respect that many of our students do have such needs, I think there are plenty of ways to ‘tweak’ what we do to increase the effectiveness of instruction and routines. There are many lost minutes, particularly in primary classrooms, which could be capitalized to increase reading and writing opportunities for all students.
I am interested in Jeff's comments on the need for elementary schools to build cultural literacy-the importance of science, social studies, and cultural understandingings. Many of the assessments that elementary reform movements, such as RTI,assess low level, easily measured skills. I think you are right to think this overemphasis of low level skills will have negative impacts on your students in years to come.
I am having the hardest time, i keeping typing up entire responses and losing them before i can get them posted. So i will redo it:
To expand on Jill's quote and response regarding the second system, I can see that I have an advantage in my boarding school environment that I did not realize - there is almost no second system because every teacher is a master generalist. Each teacher is an athletic coach, dorm parent, disciplinarian, family advisor, mentor and advisor in matters social and emotional and a classroom teacher. So, we certainly avoid compartmentalizing a kid. We do ask for help from other teachers who work with the student (benefit of a small school), but the student is usually only pulled out for disciplinary action.
In the last few years we have hired a few reading specialist/tutor types to work with a hand full of young men who come to us through a scholarship program in NYC. These boys read and write well below their grade level - some are initial readers in their Junior year. I have experienced the kids of deferring to the tutor that Allington and Jill allude to. What these boys do with their tutor does not integrate with what the regular classroom teacher does.
The tricky part for me is how do I help these generalist teachers find time, energy and resources to be better skilled at reaching and teaching the struggling readers in their classrooms?
In response to Jeff's quote from Allington - "enormous amounts of easy and interesting reading are essential to developing effective reading strategies, to say nothing of appropriate attitudes and responses" - I see it connecting to a quote I posted –“is clear that when a teacher provides alternative routes to the goal of literacy, more children will find a route to take them there."
I taught a nearly non-reading 11th grader this year and I chose to focus on Literacy rather than the core books (topic of my second posted quote). I allowed him to read easy and interesting books around the middle part of the year because I am learning that reading begets reading. So, he read three high-action spy novels from a series and he was so excited. I worked with his 'second system' reading tutor (a family friend trying to support him) to help him ID themes in the novels he read that mirrored the themes the rest of the class encountered in Othello. It worked OK, but I really did have to defend myself to my peers and the other kids in the class. Here I was betraying the core texts and making things unfair. I had a deep, dark fear that I was creating a situation where this boy would go off to college without having read Shakespeare. I know the fear is silly though because the alternative would be to pass him through 11th grade without having read a single book cover to cover. The boy read three easy and interesting books voraciously and started to see himself as a reader! I created a route to literacy.
I apologize for misunderstanding the use of this space for only a couple of comments. The two most important, in my view, are the page 53 and page 69 quotes. I think modeling effective strategies and finding the right balance between building background knowledge and effective strategies are critical hurdles to overcome.
I am fascinated by others' comments describing the "second system" and the common sense, but all too often forgotten insight that "reading begets reading." The learning gains achieved by substituting certified teacher for paraprofessionals is certainly encouraging but raises some huge systemic questions about one of the most common approaches to supporting our most struggling students.
The "reading begets reading" insight really connects to a concern I have about the impact of the internet on reading skills. At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, I have become increasingly suspicious of the effects of hours spent on the Internet and its impact on attention. So many reading strategies that I have come across seem to be vehicles for forcing kids to give attention to what is in front of them. In many cases, the challenge is: how to we get them to focus attention? One way is to have students self-select reading and make sure the reading is within their easy ability. This is the "reading begets reading" connection. The other way is to use strategies (summarizing, effective note-taking, previewing, etc.) that force their focus. This is more challenging now than ever.
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