Wednesday, January 27, 2016

What Struggling Readers Need


http://blogs.longwood.edu/cdelgiorno/page/2/

"Why can't some kids read? It's because they have teachers who 
are not effective reading teachers."
                                   -Dick Allington

I was at the Struggling Readers summit in Portland this last weekend and had the privilege of hearing Dick Allington speak. This was not my first time, and certainly won't be my last. There's something very refreshing about sitting in an audience of educational professionals and having Allington tell you you're an idiot. It's strangely motivating. 

He and other experts provided us with great research. Here are some of the items that most stood out to me:


Dr. Anne Cunningham
What helps children (0-5 years) develop the skills and abilities that are linked to the children's later reading, writing and spelling? What do we need kinders to be able to do?

  1. knowing the names of printed letters; being able to label them correctly and connect to letter sound
  2. Being able to manipulate the sounds
  3. Being able to rapidly name a sequence of letters, numbers, objects or colors
  4. Being able to write one's own name or even isolated letters
  5. Being able to remember the content of spoken language for a short time: simple multi-step instructions; working memory
  6. Phonological STM (short term memory)
Early readers need Dialogic reading. Student who received a shared-reading intervention scored almost a 0.7 of a standard deviation higher than children who did not.



Dr. Janet Mort 
"The most important things of all for students is for them to believe that they can read."


Vulnerable readers need: 
Explicit literacy instruction in kindergarten and before, interventions immediately to close the experiential gap 

Dr. Richard Allington

Much evidence indicates that some teachers literally teach every child to read while others are less successful.

It's not the school that's effective, it's the teachers. Some teachers can get all their students to meet grade level. Some can't. Effective Teachers are the most powerful reading intervention strategy.

Minutes spent on literate conversations with other students is 3x's more powerful than minutes spent on reading comprehension programs. 

Core and Title programs should not look different. Often times we put our most vulnerable students in an incoherent intervention program. 

The average 3rd grader only reads 12-18 minutes a day.


The kids who spend the most time actually reading in school are the kids who 
become readers.
**there was a lot more and if you'd like a copy of my notes, they're HERE They're messy, you've been warned. 

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Productive struggle and the exponential growth of human knowledge



According to Toffler (2002), it took approximately fifty thousand years to accumulate the knowledge of mankind that existed in the year 1 AD. It then took 1500 years to double that knowledge. But by the early 70's, we (mankind) were doubling our knowledge every 6 years. Scientists have determined that in our current day, human knowledge doubles EVERY YEAR. (Collier and Thomas, 2014)

Teachers no longer have the luxury of being the only one doing the teaching. When the knowledge-growth rate was slower, the traditional model of students seated in rows and a teacher delivering the exact same level of knowledge the exact same way to all students was adequate. Today, teachers must become facilitators of student directed classrooms, "preparing students to become information processors, analysts, and self-motivated learners." (Collier and Thomas, 2014).

Do you want to know what my most favorite parent complaint is? "He is so frustrated in class! He says his teacher won't just tell him the answer!" 

"Perfect!" says I. 

"A great teacher doesn't teach as much as possible. A great teacher teachers as LITTLE as possible, while modeling the behaviors of how to figure something out." (Maats & O'brien, 2015).

As parents, this is a huge shift for some of us and the way we learned. And we figured that because we learned that way, and we turned out fine and we understand it and are comfortable with it, our children should learn the same way.

But our instruction and learning environment needs to evolve and adapt to the amount and needs of human knowledge. This means we need to focus less on specific content (all of our favorite dinosaur or circus-themes lessons) and more on teaching students how to learn, how to reflect, how to productively struggle.

Monday, January 4, 2016

New year. What else is new?

http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/5901

                        If you want to do something new, you must let go of something old. 

I've never been big on doing New Year's resolutions. A few years ago I made a resolution to see how much weight I could gain. After a month it became clear that I was AWESOME at this goal and my wife helped redirect my efforts towards other slightly less life-threatening endeavors.

For us to get better and expand our abilities, we are required to let go of that which is holding us back. Sometimes we are able to recognize it for ourselves. Sometimes it takes another's perspective to help us see what is not working.

Being "good" means doing what you were told. 
Being "better" means doing what's right, for the right reasons. 
Being "the best" requires you to change and never go back to the old way.