LWISD Bullfrog Bulletin
January 21, 2015
“We educators are directly responsible for crucial, life-saving work. Today, a student who graduates from school with mastery of essential skills and knowledge has a good chance of successfully competing in the global market place, with numerous opportunities to lead a rewarding adult life. In stark contrast, students who fail in school are at greater risk of poverty, welfare, dependency, incarceration, and early death. With such high stakes, educators today are like tightrope walkers without a safety net, responsible for meeting the needs of every student, with little room for error.”
(quoted from Burns, Appleton, and Siehouwer in The Why Behind RTI by Austin Buffum, Mike Mettos and Chris Weber)
Next Week:
Events to Come:
- February 4, 2016: Guided Reading Walks at Howry and elementary schools: principals send me your list of when guided reading occurs during reading blocks by Friday, January 29th.
- February 5, 2016: Assistant Principal/Instructional Coach Leadership Training 8:00 am - 4:00 pm
- February 8, 2016: Miller Literacy Leadership Teachers work with Debbie in classrooms
- February 10, 2016: Early Release
- February 11, 2016: Principal PLC @ 9:00 am
- February 15, 2016: Howry and Effie Literacy Leadership Teachers work with Sheri in classrooms
- February 16, 2016: Marine Creek Literacy Leadership Teachers work with Sheri in classrooms
- February 17, 18, or 19: Principal Data Conference--Time TBD individually
- February 18, 2016: District Leadership Academy--@ 9:00 am
- February 19: TLC Meeting @ 9:00 am
Donalyn Miller on Reading
To Paraphrase Gary Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars, one of my new favorites: Teachers plant in the fall and harvest in the spring. Looking around my classroom this March day, I know it to be true. My students are bent over their books; one even reads while blowing his nose and walking to the trash can. I end the year in the same way that I began it: sitting in my green chair, reading. Not reading in front of them as much as reading with them. I wonder, sometimes, whether I have pulled my students into a circle around me or whether they have opened their circle, and allowed me to come into it. Whichever it is, reading is what we are about now, and we are happy doing it.
Instead of following me around, begging for book recommendations, my students have started to make preview stacks and suggest books to each other. They are mimicking what I have modeled. They don’t need me to support them as readers as much as they did in August, and this thought warms me and makes me sad at the same time. I know that they will be leaving me soon. For me, the worst part about being a teacher is saying good-bye to children whom I have loved, many of whom I will never see again. All I will have are the mental snapshots I take of them now, peeking over my book. . . .
I have been told many times, both to my face and through comments on my blog, that I am not preparing my students for the ‘real world’ by letting them read whatever they want. Yes, it’s true, if the real world means years of comprehension worksheets and test practice. If those things constitute reading instruction, then I suppose the naysayers are right, I am not preparing them.
. . . The purpose of school should not be to prepare students for more school. We should be seeking to have fully engaged students now. . . .
Righard Allington’s findings from thirty years ago indicated that students weren’t spending enough time actually reading during reading instruction, and they still aren’t. The title alone of Allington’s landmark article“If They Don’t Read Much, How They Ever Gonna Get Good?" tells me everything I need to know. That article was published in 1977, the year before I entered middle school. I certainly didn’t see more reading in my middle school classroom as a result of this research, and I don’t’ see it in many classrooms now. No matter what intervention strategies you employ to support developing readers or what enrichment projects you provide to your most gifted ones, none of it is going to affect the reading achievement of all the students in your classroom the way hours and hours of time spent reading will.
Scores of research findings, federal policy documents, and books from gurus tell teachers that actual reading is the most valuable classroom activity. Although I read a lot of research, you don’t have to look any further than the catalogues and magazines the average teacher receives in the mail. Thumbing through the International Reading Association’s Professional Development catalogue, I count seven books whose explicit focus is to promote independent reading and students’ choices in reading material. If I add the books that advocate giving students some choice—for independent reading as part of a comprehensive teaching model, I count fifteen more. . . .
Despite the abundant information available on implementing free-choice reading programs and the clear research support for such practices, why is so little authentic reading done in schools? When students do get to read a book, why is the book still weighed down with so much ‘stuff’ as Allington calls it, instead of reading? . . . I think that it shouldn’t take a capable reader six hours to complete a reading test and the that the best method for building up reading miles is to read books.
--Donalyn Miller The Book Whisperer (161-171)