Thinking Through Assessment Chapters 5 & 6

Chapter 5 – Assessing and Teaching Developing Readers

This chapter begins by pointing out the pitfalls of using one method of teaching reading to the exclusion of all others. If you only teach one method of reading you end up with “word-callers” who have no sense of what the passage they just read means.  Phonics must be taught in conjunction with other reading strategies not in isolation or students will not become effective readers and writers because many phonics programs focus on the rules and not on decoding.

The chapter also informed me of something I was doing wrong and had no idea! I make Cloze activities all the time for my reading and Latin students but never knew that you are supposed to delete every fifth word. I would just choose words at random or words they were having trouble with to help focus on them.

I engage my students in a lot of retelling, even though I didn’t know what it was called. I must often employ this tactic with poetry and pair up students who groan whenever I say Plath with the students who look like they are going to stand up and clap. This pairing allows the enthusiastic student to give an impassioned reading and heighten the enjoyment of the listening student. I also do a summarizing activity called ‘60 Second Shakespeare’ in which students get up individually or in groups of two to act out the previous night’s reading of whatever Shakespeare play we are working on.  The must act out the whole reading in under sixty seconds and they are allowed to speak. Some of the most eager student involvement I have ever seen is the day after we read Caesar’s death scene. They all wanted to act that out.

Students must increase their time spent reading. The book shows multiple studies that just reiterate what most educators know, kids who don’t read outside of school are behind kids who do. I try to encourage reading outside of school by assigning booktalks once a month for all of my students. They must get up and give a three minute presentation on a book they read FOR FUN. Not for another class or for me but for enjoyment. These booktalks help students see a myriad of genres and styles and find books they like to read.

 

Chapter 6- Informal Assessments of Reading

Informal Reading Inventories are very flexible and show many variations of what students are capable of. I love that the chapter broke down each step in detail and then included a handy summary for refreshing your mind right before you give an assessment.

The independent, Instructional and Frustration levels seem to fall within the Zone of proximal development theory. I like this it ties together many reading I have done over the course of an almost obscenely extensive education.

I don’t like to put reading levels directly on books. I think at the higher grades it discourages lower readers from reading (the shame factor) and encourages higher readers to read lower level books (the laziness factor).

I like the way the book says to talk about lexile levels but parents and students inevitably want to know what grade it matches up with and sometimes I find it easier not to throw the lexile number at them unless the news is positive. Should I tell parents every bit of testing information? I think sometimes more information will do more harm than good.

I love portfolios for my reading classes to show them how far they have come and all the cool stuff they have done throughout the year. This chapter gave me some great ideas on how to better organize them! I think portfolios show more about student achievement than an end of the year exam because exams have so many variables like students health that day, test anxiety, change of environment, and students home environment. Once again I love that summary list! The suggestion of photocopying the best work from multiple portfolios to use as examples was something I had not thought of before.

I like the idea of parental input and parent conferences about portfolios but I am not sure I could get all the parents in my district to go along with it. I know for a fact that some of my students live on their own or with siblings, grandparents or foster parents who may or may not have the time or the inclination to participate in their education on that level. What happens if I send a paper home for a foster parent to fill out and he laughs and says, “I don’t have to do any damn homework anymore” and won’t fill it out? Or if I send one home to a grandmother who is doing her best to raise her grandchildren but was never taught to read? I will have just alienated guardians and students. I think I will stick with the student/teacher and student/student conferences.

Chapter 9 – Working with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

Chapter nine points out that, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” and that reminds me of the saying, “history is written by the winners” because both statements point to some of the issues with dominate languages. Dominant languages came to b so because someone conquered someone else or because someone broke free of someone else but even with, maybe especially with, Standard English there are cultural ramifications of its status as “proper” or “standard”, just ask a Native American, Native Hawaiian or Native Alaskan. Teachers must be aware of the current culture and history of their students but also the historical culture as well.

I love that this chapter is all about bringing a student’s home language into the classroom and not about making sure their Standard English is flawless. Teachers are trained in multiple ways to improve the Standard English skills of conventional students but often ELLs are forgotten or passed off as dumb because teachers do not know how to help them become fluent in English as a second language. It is the second language part that is important. Learning your first language is done at your family’s knee and happens almost unconsciously but it takes a serious effort to learn a second language even at elementary school ages.

The chapter points out that students must learn to “play the classroom game” and I agree with that to some extent. They have to learn how to behave and what is expected of them but they should not have to give up their home culture to do it.

Teaching ELLs is very similar to teaching a foreign language. I teach Latin half the day and Advanced Reading the other half and I believe that teaching a foreign language has prepared me to better assist ELLs in the classroom. I find myself using similar lessons and similar tactics to help with vocabulary and grammar. I will definitely be bringing some of the books teaching suggestions into both of my classrooms.

I already provide text in other languages, mostly Spanish at this point, for my students. I have a complete set of the big three young adult series (Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games) in both English and Spanish and hope to pick up a copy of them in Mandarin and Korean as well. My students love to compare these books to the English counterparts and the few students I have that are native Spanish speakers really get to come to the forefront and show off while we compare them!

I was reminded while reading this chapter of a serious misconception I used to have: before I got into teaching I thought that all standard tests were given in a student’s home language. I was floored when I found out differently. I am still aghast at the blatant ridiculousness of testing a student in a language they have only known for five or six years. It would be like giving to ACT to my upper level students completely in Latin, they may be able to pass but they are not going to do as well as they would have if it was in English. I am sure that the lack of bilingual testing materials is completely about money and it bothers me that so many students are being set up to fail so that the district can save a couple hundred dollars.

Thinking Through Assessment Chapters 3 & 4

Chapter 3- Assessing and Teaching Emergent Readers and Writers.

Chapter three has tons of great information in it and for someone like me who is used to high school and middle school it has a lot of great teaching techniques for emergent readers. That being said it may be too much… I was overwhelmed by the end of the chapter and had to go back and read through it again. I felt like I was writing down every single bullet point and I may never use them. So I decided to focus on things I had not really done before like telling a story instead of reading it and engaging young students in decontextualized conversation.

Telling a story instead of reading it always seemed like a cop out to me. I felt like students needed to be engaging with the written word all the time or else I was doing something wrong. I was so glad to read the benefits of telling a story in engagement, comprehension and oral language skills because I love telling stories. I can tell very energetic stories of many famous moments in history, although they are mostly wars so probably not for young children, and most popular fairy tales. I can’t wait to meet up with Mel and practice telling stories!

The other thing I never thought a lot about was decontextualized conversation and storytelling. Once again I thought that the written word had to be involved all the time or at least pictures and graphics. I was surprised to learn the benefits of decontextualized conversation until I started thinking about it and then it started to make sense. Students will be engaging with text throughout their lives and most of that text will not come with pictures or diagrams. They will have to be able to “see” what is going on without visual aids and they should be trained to do that from a young age. I would be interested to see if children exposed to more decontextualized conversation were better at figuring out word and spatial reasoning problems in mathematics later in life.

One line of this chapter that really stuck out to me is they referred to proper use of “I” versus “Me” as hypercorrect. That annoys me. It isn’t hypercorrect it is just correct. I feel like the book was calling me a grammar snob. Maybe I am too sensitive.

 

Chapter 4 – Assessing and Teaching Beginning and Fledgling Readers and Writers.

                This book is just full of wonderful teaching ideas! The ideas in this chapter are for beginning readers but many of them could be adapted for higher level vocabulary or foreign language classes as well. I had never heard of a running record before I read this chapter but wow what a great tool! The consistent symbols and scoring system should be very helpful when assessing the ability of younger children. Does the running record help with older students and challenging high school or college material as well? It might be harder to score unless one on one time with students is common in your class room.

                I never thought of handwriting as being important to literacy. My own hand writing is legible but never got the flowery curls of my mother’s script. She is also better at spelling than I am and I have to wonder what difference my lack of handwriting instruction made in that regard. I got very little instruction in handwriting but my students now are getting none and will whine constantly if they are asked to write something long hand. My students have even suggested to me that they could type out their board work in an e-mail on their phones and send it to me. Sometimes I allow them their electronic crutch because I want thoughtful fluid responses and I get better writing when they have a spellchecker and a keyboard.

                I think handwriting also suffers at home. Parents often read to their children and have them read books as well but they rarely ask them to properly form a lower case “q” and a lower case “g” to point out the differences. If teachers aren’t paying attention to handwriting and parents aren’t reinforcing good handwriting how long before we graduate students that can’t write a check or sign their names?

Chapters 1 and 2 of Understanding Reading Problems: Assessment and Instruction

Chapter 1- Reading and its Assessment

                This chapter started off with the scariest possible scenario for a teacher who relies heavily on class discussion: EVERYONE IS THE SAME! Yikes! I would have some seriously boring classes if that were the case. If I pose a discussion questions and everyone agrees with the first person’s thoughts then I will have twenty minutes of class time to stare blankly at my little pod people. Thankfully students are not like that and they will argue about almost anything at the high school level. I led a forty-five minute long discussion this year on which version of Beauty and the Beast was the best. We never did reach a consensus.

                This chapter jumps into why we assess students before the book goes into how to assess students and I think that is a great way to do it. So many books take why we are assessing students for granted and just jump right into formal assessment techniques. I enjoy that this book showed why we assess and what different levels show educators about a student’s abilities because every student has some ability.

                The chapter then introduces us to the phases of reading ability from emergent to mature reader and tells us what to expect at each stage. AS I was reading through these stages I could see some of my older students had not reached the mature reading stage yet and for a class full of gifted students that is a serious issue.

Chapter 2- Response to Intervention and Struggling Readers

                Response to Intervention (RTI) is a way of helping students at all levels become fluent readers. This book talks about the challenges inherent in current education legislation, mostly that it is a one-size-fits-all model, and how to help students within the boundaries of the legislation and its challenges.

                The book offers two models of RTI. The first is the Interactive Strategies Approach (ISA) which focuses on phonological awareness and knowing how words and sounds are made. The second is the Comprehensive Intervention Model (CMI) which focuses more on assessment and testing than I think is necessary but has more room for technology and application to older students than ISA. With my child study I am using ISA because she is transitioning from kindergarten to first grade but is struggling with literacy.

                The book is quick to point out that ESL students may be shoved into special education classes when they do not belong there and a comprehensive ESL program will provide them with more benefits than special education ever could. I love that they point this out and that they talk about the differences in speech amongst cultures and backgrounds. I teach in mainly urban education and some of my brightest students use language that makes my inner grammar geek freak out but they are still smart students they just have to be taught the difference between their home language and “money English” (standard English).

                This chapter was very informative on the ways students can be helped and how to work within the well-meaning legislation that gums up curriculum.

This chapter briefly touches on gifted students but it focuses on things they may lack and never mentions how to improve them. Gifted students improve in the same ways as other students except with more rigorous material but it seems that all educational texts focus on the students with disabilities and leave gifted students to become average by lack of attention.