LE 1: Reading Leadership
ETFO Reading Specialist AQ, Fall 2014
Within this Smore you will find the key concepts that were discussed in this LE along with some of your own ideas. I hope you find this a useful summary of our collective learning.
Shared Reading Experiences
Guest Reader Program (Brian)
I developed a Guest Reader program where I invited specific adults in my students’ lives to come and read in our classroom, then to discuss everyday ways that they used reading and perhaps their experience of reading as a child. We had dads and big sisters, mothers and our school principal. Not every visitor was dynamic, and that’s okay. But it was amazing to see how differently individual students would react to different guests. The most powerful experience for me was one student’s mother who came in and read a story entirely in Mandarin with her daughter as translator. It was amazing to see my English Language Learners and students with multiple languages respond to valuing a non-English language in the classroom. It was a scary thing for me to let go of control enough to have that happen, but what it brought about was an empowering experience for many and an eye-opening experience for native English speakers who had never experienced this kind of marginalization. It was a popular initiative with our class and ended up catching on with several other teachers as well.