Thinking about Literacy...

As I returned from my first teaching block, we had a week of reflecting on stories that all the teacher candidates were excited to talk about. One common trend I found was that most of my peers were shocked with the level of literacy (or lack of) within their high school, sometimes senior level, classrooms. Especially as an English major/teacher candidate, I felt the same. This brings me to ...

In my English class, we are reading a book called When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do by Kylene Beers. This amazing author has truly changed my perspective on literacy. She tells her teaching story as she progressed and learned while focusing on the challenges she had to overcome.

Her main challenge was that no one has taught her how to teach literacy; she's clearly a good reader but her students don't always mimic that level of skill or interest -- so what now?

So far, here is some of what I have gathered (all taken straight from that book -- buy it, read it!):

• "if they read it (the text), it (the meaning) does not necessarily come" -- don't think telling students to reread a text while help them understand it
• "simply improving the cognitive aspects of reading [...] does not ensure that the affective aspects of reading [...] will automatically improve"
• "we cannot make the struggling reader fit one mold"
• "teach students how to struggle successfully" ... "good readers do more than simply read the words" -- good readers struggle as well (i.e. has anyone struggled reading a tech-manual?)  but they know what to do to gather meaning -- i.e. they know how to struggle
• "we must convince disabled readers that reading is an active process that requires engagement"
• strategies take you to the skill of reading -- teach strategies that will help them understand the texts:
1. "Clarifying
2. Comparing and contrasting
3. Connecting to prior experiences
4. Inferencing
5. Predicting
6. Questioning
7. Recognizing the author's purpose
8. Seeing causal relationships
9. Summarizing
10. Visualizing"
• "We can [AND SHOULD] model how we use those strategies to understand texts (explicitly and directly)"
• we can "THINK ALOUD" while reading

This is only a tiny portion of Kylene Beers' text (literally a summary of 2/15 chapters) and it's already opened my mind to learning to teach literacy. I hope this blog has given you some insight into the world of literacy and perhaps made you interested to purchase this text (and no, I'm not an advertiser, I'm just inspired)

p.s. When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do is not found at Chapters but can be ordered online on Amazon -- Check it out!
p.p.s. this is a tool for ALL subject areas -- the teacher candidates I heard complaining about their students' literacy levels were not typically English teachers -- nor is it only important for teachers.

I hope you feel the way I do -- we need to make the difference.