home

=Deliberately Reading (Instead of Buying Into Labels) Society*=

After taking a year off from teaching reading, I started moving into my new elementary classroom this afternoon. Given what I'd heard about our school's philosophy, I was more than a little surprised to find boxes of artificial reading material waiting for me. But more surprising still was that I didn't feel comfortable telling my principal I wanted to toss out these boxes to make room for literature. I thought about it at home, and realized that in spite of my experience with authentic literature and reading workshops, I didn't have a clear enough vision to explain them to my new boss.

With 10 days left in summer, I resolved to solve this problem by reading //The Art of Teaching Reading// by Lucy Calkins, since her similarly-titled book on teaching writing was pivotal in helping me create a community of 4th-graders who loved to write two years ago. Ten minutes into the book, before even finishing the first chapter, I read three remarkably relevant ideas:
 * 1) thinking that you have a crystal clear vision of how to teach reading is problematic, since your beliefs can blind you to the actual needs of the students sitting in front of you,
 * 2) policymakers have created a culture in which teachers feel like they lack the authority to have their own vision for reading instruction; but when a student reading to you is stuck on a word and their self-concept is on the line, you must be able to fall back on your vision of how students learn to read and your experience talking to others about reading, not go running to a script or program to find answers from some outside expert
 * 3) **everything the author has learned about teaching reading can be traced back to the reading groups she formed with other teachers**

So, I'm inviting other teachers in the district to meet perhaps once a week and form a reading group. What we read will certainly depend on who joins, what they teach, and what everyone's reading interests are.

If you're not familiar with wikis, hi, welcome, this is a wiki, and **you can edit it right now** by clicking the EDIT button in the top-right corner of the screen (well, you'll probably have to scroll up to see it). I took the time to create a wiki rather than just emailing people because this makes it much easier to coordinate meeting times, etc. So, if you're interested in this group, please edit this page, go down to the bottom of it, hit enter a few times, and tell us what you teach, when you could meet, where you could meet, what you'd be interested in reading, and anything else you'd care to say. You'll probably be quite pleased to see how easy it is, and start thinking about how useful this technology is. For instance, if everyone who's interested lives in different parts of town and everyone is taking classes on different nights, it might even be possible to conduct the entire reading group online. Each chapter can have its own page, on which with everyone can posting their thoughts and questions and respond to one another. Personally, I prefer to talk to people I'm learning with face-to-face as often as possible, but it still might be useful to keep discussion questions on a wiki page.


 * if you don't teach at an elementary school, you may not have caught my allusion to DIBELS, a testing mechanism that arguably distorts students' sense of the purpose of reading, and causes some teachers to treat students as labels rather than individuals. If you do teach at an elementary school, note that Wikipedia is also a wiki. So, just like this page, you can edit the entry on DIBELS, hopefully adding more information to it and making it more neutral.

searching for more **[|Michael Taggart Coolest Marketer]** resources