As I was reading this section, I thought back to my own experiences of teaching reading. I remember that first year how I struggled so...No one taught me HOW to teach reading in college. I had no idea what I was doing. So I decided that teaching reading was dedicating one week to each story in the basal reader and each week we took on a new story. We had a system...read through the story together on Monday, work with vocabulary on Tuesday, work on a reading skill on Wednesday, reread the story for fluency and comprehension on Thursday, and test on Friday. My class and I plowed through as many of the stories as we could that year. And guess what...the next year I just did it all over again. It's what I did year after year not knowing what else to do to teach reading. In fact, if someone would have told me to devote 30 minutes of my instructional time to independent reading, I would have seen that as a waste. It was simply my mindset that teaching reading was me talking to students before, during, and after reading, modeling think alouds, and working on building vocabulary. So I guess to some degree my mindset was correct, reading does involve those things, but I was depriving my students of the opportunity of reading for themselves. I made it too much about me doing it with them or for them.
Although I wouldn't want to pick up teaching ELA at this point, I feel like I have a better handle on what reading instruction truly is. I feel like I've learned a lot more about teaching reading than I ever learned in college. One of the key pieces that was missing from my instructional model was independent reading. And not just the Drop Everything And Read model of independent reading! But an independent reading model as Miller spoke about in Section 2.
Me too, Heather! That's how I taught reading when I first started. I just did what everyone else was doing. It wasn't until Dr. Cox started exposing us to more effective ways to teach reading that I began to put the basal away (literally), and giving my students choice in their reading. We still had mini lessons on strategies or skills, but they were not practicing those strategies with the same story all week long -- that may or may not have been on their level. They were practicing those strategies with books they chose. It made a HUGE difference . . . in how much they grew as a reader AND how much they enjoyed reading. I am so glad that more and more teachers are seeing the value in this type of teaching. Thank you, Dr. Cox!!! :)
ReplyDeleteYes--I think moving from a teacher-centered reading model to a student-centered one is closely related to independent reading! I know you will find great ways to use reading in the content areas!
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