#1 Philosophy on Teaching Literacy

     I have been teaching on the same team for 17 years. The three of us have really come together in our thinking, in our approaches, and in our philosophy of teaching literacy. In talking with my teammates about teaching literacy, we came up with our most important beliefs as a team: 

     We talked about how reading and writing need to be connected. We know through research that reading and writing should be taught together.  Carl Nagin explains, “Reading development does not take place in isolation; instead, a child develops simultaneously as reader, listener, speaker, and writer” (Nagin, 2006, p. 32). Reading and writing should be taught hand in hand. The process for each is similar and we feel they need to be taught together. 

     In teaching reading, we feel that these areas need to be taught: The five elements: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension all are needed to prepare a student to become a successful reader. None of them can stand alone as a reading program. Together they build a well balanced approach to reading instruction. Teaching these five elements means teachers can build their students’ skills efficiently and effectively, resulting in overall reading success. As a team, we have had to work on phonemic awareness and phonics instruction because we haven’t had as much in place in these areas. We are still working to build these areas so that they are a stronger part of our program.

*Phonemic awareness.  It “is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words” (National Reading Panel, 2000 p. 1).  All of these sounds work together to create words. This beginning process improves a child’s ability to later decode words. A reader needs to be able to decode words quickly and accurately. This then frees them up to think about the meaning of the reading instead of struggling with the decoding process. Teaching children to manipulate the sounds in words is important so that children can then later attach the sound with the letter making it easier to read and spell. 

*Phonics Instruction If a child has had explicit phonics instruction, they will be able to implement fix up strategies when they come to a word they don’t know. Phonics instruction teaches children to use the “relationships between letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language” (National Reading Panel, 2000 p.11). Children need to have this foundation in order to read and write. As a team, we are now doing a program called FAST to make this area of our teaching stronger. 

*Fluency We know children need practice with fluency when they are making word recognition errors, do not read with expression, or are having trouble with comprehension. We monitor reading fluency regularly to make sure that children are making appropriate progress. Fluency is the reading of text in an accurate, quick, and effortless manner. The more fluent a reader becomes, the more the reader is freed up to comprehend the text. Readers need time and practice to develop reading fluency. We model fluency through reading aloud to students.  We also provide practice opportunities with guidance and feedback for children.

*Vocabulary Instruction Vocabulary is another important piece of teaching literacy. Children learn vocabulary in different ways. Most vocabulary is learned indirectly. This means that children are learning words through conversations, through having adults read to them, and through their own choice reading. We also teach vocabulary directly. We give children the skills and strategies to understand words. For example, we teach suffixes and prefixes to help children break apart and understand a word. We teach them how to use context clues in their reading. . “The ultimate goal of all vocabulary development is to help students become independent learners who have the strategies for inferring the meaning of unknown words when they encounter them in reading” (Cooper & Kiger, 2009, p. 259).

*Reading Comprehension Reading comprehension is where reading all comes together for a child. This is what reading is all about. Good readers are actively and purposefully engaged with the text to help them understand what it is they are reading. We teach many reading strategies that encourage this engagement and help with comprehension. C.R. Adler (2004) explains that comprehension strategies are steps that good readers use to make sense of text. “Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension” (Adler, 2004, p. 1).  

      We teach students how to monitor their own comprehension. This teaches children to know when they do understand and to identify when they don’t understand. We need to teach them fix up strategies that they can use to resolve the problem when they don’t understand. The base of good phonics instruction helps here. Teaching children how to be engaged with the text improves comprehension. It is important to model this thinking for children. We show them that there are times when we, as adults, don’t understand what we are reading, and that it is alright to say that you don’t understand. If it is not making sense there are things that can be done to help. We need to teach children that they can reread, read ahead, look up words, or ask for help. Our goal is for children to become independent when meaning breaks down. 

      My teammates and I were trained by the PEBC years ago. The core of our literacy belief is based on teaching reading strategies. There are many comprehension strategies that help keep children engaged and understanding the text:

Teaching children to make meaningful connections to their background knowledge helps to improve understanding of the text. 

Along with making connections, teaching children to visualize what is happening in their reading will help them to interact with the text. 

Students should also be taught to question before, during, and after reading. If students are generating and writing their own questions, then they are thinking about what the text is meaning, and they are interacting with the text. 

Children need to be taught to infer or read between the lines. They need to learn to conclude things from the given information. 

One of the higher levels of comprehension is summarizing and synthesis. We want children to combine information from multiple places and put them together with their background knowledge to make a new whole. We need to make it as concrete as possible for kids. We can do this by modeling things that we have synthesized. Showing that you knew something, learned something new, adjusted your thinking, learned something new, adjusted your thinking and put it altogether to make a new whole. 

Lastly, we need children to be able to react and respond to text. They need to think about if the author did a good job in developing the story or if the characters used good judgment. They need to think about if they liked or disliked the text and why. Reading and writing should go hand in hand. Evaluating is the perfect opportunity to have children writing about their reading. Allowing children to evaluate text is empowering for them and it builds them to be more critical readers. 

     We believe that we need to teach these reading strategies, model them through think aloud lessons, guide students to practice these strategies in shared reading, and eventually practice in their own reading. We want children to become strategic readers and to apply these strategies independently to improve overall reading comprehension.

 References

Adler¸C.R. (2004). Seven strategies to teach students text comprehension.  Retrieved on 4/10/11 from:

             http://www.readingrockets.org/article/3479?theme=print

Cooper, J. and Kiger, N.  (2009). Literacy: Helping students construct meaning. California: Brooks/Cole

            Cengage Learning

National Reading Panel: National Institute for Literacy: National Institute of Child Health and Human

             Development: and U.S. Department of Education. (2000). Put reading first:
             The research building blocks for teaching children to read (kindergarten through grade 3) 
             (3rd ed.). (Original work published 2001) Retrieved from http://www.nichd.nih.gov/‌publications   
             /‌pubs/‌upload/‌PRFbooklet.pdf

National Writing Project and Nagin, C.  (2006). Because writing matters improving student writing

             in our schools. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass.