From a Mountain Hollow

Comment: I found this teaching site called From a Mountain Hollow. It's the best thing I've read on education in ages. This teacher is retired - BRING HER BACK and thousands like her. The one thing I'd like to ask those professionals who push the basal (should be banal) reading approach is, "What happens when you take the book away. Will the teacher following a script know what to do?" Answer -- in most cases, NO!
Judy

Saturday is the day my website's weekly log report is available. I keep a running record of the visitors to some pages in Excel. The most popular pages have always been the article on math speed tests and the article on using poetry to teach reading. But I have noticed a large increase recently in the number of visitors to my article on the classroom library. In this week's report, "classroom library" was the most frequent search phrase that brought people to the site. Is it possible that the "powers that be" in education are again realizing that if you want kids to read, you have to give them good books and the time to read them?

When I retired, I could see the trend going back to using the basal reader as the only source of reading instruction. I know the next school year the teachers were all teaching reading at the same time of day in a very structured format. The fact that I saw this coming was one of the contributing factors to my retirement. Just plain old burnout was the most pressing factor, but I knew that going back to this type of teaching was only going to increase that feeling. I taught using a basal reader for much of my teaching career. I hated to teach reading.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will know that I love to read. Books have been a part of my life since early childhood. I was reading before I started school. I always find some time to read for pleasure, even when I am very busy. Since my semi-retirement gives me more free time, I usually have a couple of books in progress in the house and an audio book for the car, plus magazines and articles on the web. So how could a person who loves to read hate to teach reading? Teaching "by the book" when the book is a basal reader is boring for both teacher and students.

Basal readers did improve over the thirty years I was teaching. The stories changed from those written for the basal with a very controlled vocabulary to using stories by published children's authors, including some of the illustrations from the original book. This worked fairly well at the lower levels, but the basals for older children often had excerpts or condensed versions of the story.

But when using a basal, you don't just read and discuss a story. Basals come with teacher's manuals, so the whole thing is very scripted. First, you do some type of vocabulary exercise to introduce new vocabulary. Then you do guided reading where the students read X number of pages with some question they should answer. The manual has all the teacher's questions written out and the expected answers. The faster readers sit there and wait for the slowest one to finish. If it is a good story, they want to go on to see what happens next. But they can't because that might mess up the question the teacher is going to ask for the next section. You discuss that part of the story and then read another section, etc. Then you do the dreaded workbook pages. This process takes several days.

After a few stories with workbook pages, there is a test. If the student does not pass the test, there are remedial exercises. When you look at the time spent doing all this stuff, there is very little time actually spent reading stories. But you can see where this fits right in with the current test, test, test mentality.

The whole language movement grew up in protest to this approach of teaching reading. But like many things that happen in education, some people carried it to an extreme. Their idea was that if you just read stories, children would intuitively learn to read and write. (That is a bit of simplification, but basically the idea.) Anyone with any common sense should have known that would not work with most children. The term "whole language" came to be associated with this idea and, by the time I retired, it had become a naughty word. So anything that hinted at whole language was being discouraged in some areas.

One thing I learned in thirty years of teaching reading is that what works for one child may not work at all for the child that sits beside him. For some reason, the gurus of education have never seemed to grasp this. They keep looking for the one method that that will work for everyone. Someone finds something that works well. It gets hyped. Everyone jumps on the bandwagon to use that method. While it works for many kids, there are still some who don't learn to read. So it is declared a failure. The method is abandoned just as the teachers are getting comfortable using it.

The whole language movement gave me a chance to teach reading the way I wanted. I read a lot of professional books on the subject and went to conferences, most of which I paid for myself. I quickly decided the "pure" method was a bunch of horse hockey. You can't abandon the teaching of skills. There are a few students who might learn that way, but the majority need some direction. But what I did get from my research was to start with the story. If you got the students hooked on the story, then it could lead to other activities. As time went on, this was called literature-based instruction to distinguish it from the "pure" whole language philosophy.

The supervisors and principals I worked under at this period of time were very supportive of this new style of teaching. Many teachers kept using the basal reader, but we were encouraged to try other things. I was chosen to help with the inservices to encourage others to try some of the new strategies.

I surprised many of my colleagues by embracing the change because I was one of the "old" teachers by this time. "Old" teachers are supposed to keep doing things the way they always have, but I spent 30 years trying to find a better way. If something worked, I kept it as a teaching strategy. If it didn't, I kept searching for something that did work. A good teacher can never stop learning.

I gradually weaned myself from the basal by having the reading group read an occasional novel, or as the younger set refers to them, chapter books. But the real fun started when I gave up reading groups all together. I did most reading instruction with the entire class, whole group instruction. I always started the book to be used for instruction by reading the story aloud. Over a period of days, we read the book together, chorally and as a Readers' Theater. We talked about the characters, identified the parts of story, learned about authors. Skills were taught with words and passages from the story. We found nouns and verbs, homophones, synonyms, and antonyms. We did ABC order, syllables, and all the other things, including phonics.

I read a lot of other books to the class, too, including the daily chapter of a novel. The students read books independently. We were engaged in some type of reading activity for much of the day.

If you remember, this reminiscence (or rant, depending on your view) started with a mention of a classroom library. With this new way to teach reading, the classroom library became the heart of my classroom. I had always had a classroom library where children could chose a book to read when they had free time. It was a choice that children seldom made. After I gave up using the basal reader, it was always in use. The children were eager to see the new books I brought in. When we went to the library, they wanted books by certain authors or poets. If I read a book to the class, the students were eager to have a chance to reread it themselves. The children enjoyed reading and I enjoyed teaching them.