AUDIT OF TEACHING READING
Hi fellow teachers! Today I'm going to share with you what I believe are some of the best teaching strategies you can use with your students. We're going to be looking at this from the students' point of view as well as the teacher's point of view. Let me tell you, there is something beneficial about being a young and upcoming teacher in the 21st century. It puts me in an interesting position where I am able to recall what worked best for me and what worked best for my classmates back in elementary and high-school. You'll be able to see my take on this as well as other perspectives from my research. So please stick around until the end! :D
I would like to start this off with our current curriculum on the reading strand of literacy. This is important because this is what Teachers in Ontario must completely follow! After doing some research Canadian teachers have a lot to live up to as Canada has the HIGHEST OECD score in literacy in students aged 15 (OECD). That is important as Canada is compared to many other countries worldwide.
The reading strand consists of four expectations:
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Students will:
1. read and demonstrate an understanding of a variety of literary, graphic, and informational texts, using a range of strategies to construct meaning;
2. recognize a variety of text forms, text features, and stylistic elements and demonstrate understanding of how they help communicate meaning;
3. use knowledge of words and cueing systems to read fluently;
4. reflect on and identify their strengths as readers, areas for improvement, and the strategies they found most helpful before, during, and after reading.
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Side note: it's kind of funny when grammarly picks up an error in the grammar of the reading curriculum expectations. (Note: expectation 2 should have (an) before (understanding).
AHHH it bothers me that the curriculum is so vague. A teacher could technically teach those expectations in a few days if they wanted to. Just give the students an assignment per expectation and your good to go.
WELL no, that wouldn't work because even though the curriculum is vague, teachers are tasked with the unique task to teach students those expectations in great detail. Obviously, the curriculum goes into more detail about reading too but you know what I mean.
The Past
There were many great ways teachers would teach my classes reading skills. The way that I believe was the most beneficial was reading multi-level texts. Having to read books and poems was easily the most beneficial thing we did. The more we read the more subconsciously our brain was adapting to learn all the different types of sentence structures and grammar. If students are not challenged when they are reading then they will not progress. It was beautiful reading books that had such detail to them that you could picture the entire scene of what was going on in your head. Another great tool SOME teachers used was giving meaning to reading. When the teacher would let us pick our own book that was a huge benefit. Finally, the classic worksheets to give definition to sentence structure, grammar, and different writing terms were somewhat beneficial... Not like I remember many of the terms now. But implanting those terms subconsciously definitely made students aware of them when reading.
There were many practices that NEED to be avoided. In my opinion, heavily teaching terms that students will rarely ever use in the real world is not okay. Things like (allegory, alliteration, metonymy, motif) blablabla. If students are interested in terms like that show it to them once and then let them figure it out on their own. It's the 21st century, students as young as grade 3 know how to navigate the internet better than most adults. The best skill students can learn is to think for themselves. We don't need to baby them they can google things on their own time/go to a library. Another thing that honestly disgusts me and I believe this might even still apply today is some of the book choices forced by schools/teachers. I've heard this from MANY students in elementary & high schools in the GTA but can we stop giving our kids depressing, dark, and disturbing books based on murder, rape, dark, and dystopian societies. I've heard the argument, "Those are the only types of books with good and thoughtful literature." Examples of these books are The Chrysalids, Flowers in the Attic, and Holes. We need to give students better choices because in my opinion reading the books above was traumatizing at a young age.
The Future
I am a very progressive person and I believe that the field that should be the most cutting edge is teaching. How is society going to evolve and learn from past mistakes if we're teaching outdated information, and using old techniques? Teaching, especially in elementary school, is still largely based on memorizing clumps of information. Luckily, there has been a big shift to teaching students concepts rather than just raw memorization. However, this whole concept of memorization is what is fundamentally flawed with teaching. It humored me when I heard cell phones were banned in the classroom. In current society what do you do if you need to know something? You search for it on the internet. Rather than limiting students of a valuable resource and skill they use daily in their lives we should be integrating it into our teaching. Now I'm not saying we let everyone just use their phones carelessly as that could be very distracting for students. However, instead of having these big Chromebooks which took way to long to make it into the classroom. Students should have a school tablet that is not as big as say an iPad, but definitely bigger than a phone. Imagine the possibilities this could bring to reading and the classroom. The teacher could technically do a whole day of lessons and activities with these devices. In terms of reading and writing, it could save paper, mess, and sync with the teacher's master tablet. Students would get a pen with the tablet and be able to write with that. The only thing stopping this from happening is because our current system is so insanely slow. Laptops should have been in the classroom when I was in elementary school. The first modern laptop was made in 1982 and the first tablet was made in 2001. Although, the tablet wouldn't have made sense in the classroom until the Ipad was released in 2010. Now I don't mean to rant but this is important, the number of regulations and funding that need to happen is making our school system too slow!
Other Resources
Well, that was my aggressive take on reading and the school system. But sometimes you have to be aggressive for change to happen. Take Greta Thunberg, for example, we haven't seen such movement in climate change in years. Her reading and writing skills are magnificent by the way. I wonder why that is? Probably because she felt so passionate about climate change that she put in the work to develop her reading and writing skills so that she could make impactful speeches. I originally was going to do this blog on effective teaching strategies to teach reading based on outside resources. However, that was really boring me and I don't know why anyone would want to read it when there are 100000 other blogs discussing that. If you're interested in some basic strategies you can read "A Guide to Effective Literacy Instruction". I'd rather discuss important matters than regurgitate information.
Citation
https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO_3_4_Literacy_scores_gender_age_15.pdf
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/language18currb.pdf
ALL IMAGES USED WERE LABELED FOR REUSE
WELL no, that wouldn't work because even though the curriculum is vague, teachers are tasked with the unique task to teach students those expectations in great detail. Obviously, the curriculum goes into more detail about reading too but you know what I mean.
