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I was eager to read the Mesmer and Mesmer article about Response to Intervention. Since discussing RTI in our Special Ed course last summer, I've been interested in learning more about how it works. The Mesmer article was clear and concise; most helpful was the vignette about Mark, the second grade student with reading difficulties. This section helped me see the roles of the various professionals involved, including the classroom teacher. It is very clear that RTI cannot be successful without a team working together to ensure the success of the child. In fact, the number of hours the team in the article spent working with Mark -- just one child! -- seems a bit overwhelming (although clearly worth the time if the child is able to progress more efficiently).
What still confuses me somewhat is the question of "scientific" or "research-based" intervention. Mesmer states that "interventions should be based on practices that have produced verifiable results through research studies" (second page). My first question is whether it is up to individual teachers to know current research about effective interventions; if not, who is responsible for disseminating that information? (It seems to be in the same category as "best practices" -- who determines what those are? Teachers speak of them as if they are in a canon somewhere. Am I missing something?) Mesmer's concern (last page) that publishers and companies will use the term "scientifically based" seems to me to be a valid one. Clearly, teachers need to be aware of what current, quality research studies are saying about effective interventions, particularly since RTI is a relatively new field.
The chapter by Lisa Delpit, "Language Diversity and Learning," seemed to throw another complication into the picture, although a student's home language or dialect seems critical to consider when identifying a student for RTI. I truly hope I don't react like some of the teachers she mentions in this chapter! The negative reactions of white adults to the black child's story (p. 55) seem to have been based on their perceptions of what it takes to be successful in school, rather than any malicious intent, but serve to highlight the creativity and openness and humility that we middle-class, white teachers need to employ in order to serve our students well.
I was particularly struck by the fact that children have established their group identity by the age of eight or nine (p. 52). Delpit says that it is critical for teachers to "recognize that the linguistic form a student brings to school is intimately connected with loved ones, community, and personal identity. To suggest that this form is 'wrong' or, even worse, ignorant, is to suggest that something is wrong with the student and his or her family. On the other hand, it is equally important to understand that students who do not have access to the politically popular dialect form in this country, that is, Standard English, are less likely to succeed economically than their peers who do. How can both realities be embraced?" To me, this suggests both awareness and caution when identifying students for special services. An aware and educated teacher may be able to tease apart home dialects from difficulty reading and recommend RTI when truly necessary.
As I sit at my desk at the front of the classroom, I watch the sixth-graders as they engage in a 15-minute stretch of "SSR" -- silent, sustained reading. A few children hold a book and stare into space. Many are reading a book chosen by the teacher, Maniac McGee, which I know some are enjoying, but others find boring. Two children are reading books that were clearly written for adult audiences (and I'm pretty sure they aren't comprehending much of what they read). Three students are at the small classroom library, looking through the worn copies of Boxcar Children and Babysitter Club books. Fortunately, plenty of the kids are lost in their books, clearly unwilling to put them down when SSR time comes to a close.
All the topics we read about in Reading Essentials (Routman) and I Read It, But I Don't Get It (Tovani) are present in this little scene.
Tovani discusses the "fake reading" she's encountered in her adolescent students. I'm pretty sure many of my students who are reading Maniac McGee and certainly the two who are reading the adult literature are "fake readers." These readers are looking at the page, but probably wouldn't be able to tell me much about the story.
The daydreamers have no purpose for reading, no reason to engage with the text. If they knew strategies to keep themselves interested -- asking questions, taking notes, listening to the "voices in their heads" -- they would be more immersed and probably find their books more interesting.
The students searching the little classroom library would really love to have some high quality literature from which to choose. When they find nothing to match their interests or pique their curiosity, they wander away. Routman says that "there is no substitute for quality books" (p. 81).
In an ideal world, I would change the scene in front of my desk to reveal students deeply engaged in excellent texts of their own choosing. Rather than sitting behind my desk, I would be conferencing with individual students briefly to check on comprehension and to help them identify "just right" books. The classroom library would be a book-worm's candy store: brimming with quality books, fiction and non-fiction at a variety of reading levels. The 15 minutes would stretch into 30...
Once again, I'm encouraged by Regie Routman's sensible approach to teaching reading. She always seems to balance the teaching and the practice of reading in a way that directs students without taking the joy out of reading.
Routman points out that comprehension strategies are often taught in isolation, as if each one can be individually perfected and also as if we use these strategies in isolation. I agree that while the strategies are important, we "need to be careful, too, about the amount of time we're devoting to strategy instruction; the act of reading still needs to predominate" (p. 119). Yes!
My son is an excellent example of a student who was taught too many comprehension strategies, too intensely. After a year of reading and discussing texts until he was tired of them, by the end of his sixth grade year, he had decided to boycott reading. It broke his book-loving mother's heart, because I had seen the joy he had experienced in pressure-free reading. It was three years before I saw him pick up a book for pleasure again.
Routman suggests a 20 percent explicit instruction to 80 percent guided practice model. This ratio makes sense to me and falls perfectly (of course) into the Optimal Learning Model. I've seen something like this ratio in my main placement classroom; my master teacher demonstrates a strategy, does an activity to reinforce the strategy and then reminds the students of the strategies from time to time as she teaches. During informal conversations, I've listened to students talk about their use of comprehension strategies and they seem to be grasping how these tools can help them understand what they are reading.
I had trouble choosing just one of Routman's examples of things she does to "ensure students become excellent readers," because the first two seemed so important to me.
Routman's first bullet is "Demonstrate that I am a reader." I haven't seen much of this in my main placement, but I did in my dyad placement. My master teacher there was enthusiastic about what she read and shared her enthusiasm with her students. Often, she used articles she had found in the New York Times to launch her lesson plans (they were the inspiration for the lesson plans). For example, she read NYT book reviews aloud to her eighth graders and pointed out ways of writing and critiquing that were characteristic of these reviews; they then wrote their own. The students picked up on her enthusiasm about reading -- one of the sixth graders' reading goal was to finish Anna Karenina by summer (sixth grade!).
Enthusiasm for anything translates to students, I think -- and knowing that one's teacher is passionate about reading is bound to have an effect on students' interest in reading. A teacher's interest in reading is an unspoken example of the optimal learning model Routman outlines: the teacher who talks about herself as a reader is demonstrating her reading life while encouraging and teaching her students to read.
Routman's second bullet is "Provide an excellent classroom library." This is easier said than done, I think. The books in my main placement classroom are few and worn. The children browse through them, but I haven't seen a student really interested in one yet. I've seen examples of fantastic classroom libraries -- but these have been at schools where parent dollars help out. The classroom library issue is also complicated by whether or not the teacher remains in the same grade level. I've known teachers who build wonderful libraries (often with their own money) and then are transferred to a grade level where those books are not applicable. It seems that high-quality literature should be at the children's fingertip and that book talks should drum up enthusiasm, but I'm beginning to see that it may not be so simple...
In my main placement, the sixth grade students are given a spelling "pretest" consisting of a list of words from the book the class is currently reading (all students read the book, but independently). There are actually two lists -- one is slightly simpler than the other -- and the students can choose which list they would like to be tested on. If a student gets all words right, he or she is exempt from the upcoming test; otherwise, the students know which words to study.
In observing the students during spelling tests, it is fairly clear that plenty of the words are unfamiliar to them. When I first read a word out, they look up at me, puzzled. I then use the word in a sentence, which sometimes -- but not always -- clarifies the word for them. Because they've read several works of historical fiction, many of their spelling words have been words they probably will never use (e.g., "curio").
I can understand that even using words with which they are unfamiliar, the students are learning something about letter patterns and combinations. However, I'm concerned that without instruction in vocabulary as well, the students are not given the opportunity to learn how, as Templeton and Morris point out on p. 106, "spelling represents meaning." Sixth grade seems to be a perfect age to be teaching this concept -- how one can figure out the meaning of a word based on roots, prefixes, etc. -- but I haven't seen this connection made yet.
I agree with the authors that a word like "solemn" should be accompanied by a related word, like "solemnity," in order for students to learn about the relationships between words. I also feel that the students should be well aware of the meaning of the word and be able to use it in a sentence; without this knowledge, connections between words can be lost.
When my brother Martin joined the Peace Corps, he knew he would be sent to Senegal to work in a small village there, on the far Eastern edge of the country. Under the direction of Peace Corps officials, he brushed up on his French, because French is the official language of Senegal. He was also taught rudimentary Wolof, one of the two main languages of the country.
When he arrived in the little village that would be his home for three years, he discovered that he had been taught the wrong language and that only one man in the village spoke French -- and that man had left town to find work. Martin was left without language.
He learned like an infant does. He was immersed in the community, surrounded by people trying to meet his needs and make themselves understood in Pular. Observing facial expressions and body language, connecting objects with words, Martin eventually was able to speak with his hosts and later became fluent in the language. I've always been amazed at my brother's "stunning intellectual achievement" (to use Brian Cambourne's words).
Cambourne compares learning to read and write to the experience of an infant (or my brother!) learning language. Having watched my children learn to talk, I find language acquisition to be a fascinating topic, but had never before considered the similarities to learning written language. As I read this article, I kept being struck by its common sense. Of course it works best for children to be immersed in what they are learning (thus the words posted all around kindergarten classrooms); of course they need continuous demonstration; of course they must be given latitude to approximate... and so on. Cambourne's schematic model of learning will be excellent to have in my mind as I teach reading and writing, but also as I teach other important subjects.
Au's article, "An Expanded Definition of Literacy," really opened my eyes to cultural variations in literacy. The author compares the uses of literacy in two communities that are geographically similar, but whose residents are either mainly African American (Trackton) or European American (Roadville). The two communities use literacy quite differently.
What was most helpful to me in thinking about my future students was that in Trackton, reading alone was considered something that people do who are not socially adept. Au quotes Shirley Heath, the researcher, "In general, reading alone, unless one is old and very religious, marks an individual as someone who cannot make it socially" (p.27). In that community, reading was a social venture. That statement alone changes the way I view my future classroom: reading must be done with others and for others as much as it is done alone.
The same holds true for other types of literacy: writing is not only purposeful, but social. Another reason why shared writing will be so useful in a classroom. Literacy must make sense to each student, and for it to make sense to an individual, it must connect with ways the student has seen literacy used in his or her own community.
