Employed as a Criteria teacher, I work with students who fit the profile of an individual with a severe learning disability in both reading and written expression. Found to be weak with regards to phonemic awareness/segmentation and pseudo-word decoding (the grapho-phonemic system), word recognition and spelling, I am availing of the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing (LiPS) program for reading, spelling and speech. In this way, I am able to provide them with a means to becoming a better code breaker, thereby assisting with the piece of the Four Resources Model puzzle (Peter Freebody and Allan Luke) that they appear to have the greatest difficulty with. As a result, I found these readings to be both enlightening and insightful.
Readers and Writers with a Difference: A Holistic Approach to Teaching Struggling Readers and Writers was a most impressive read. I both enjoyed the style as well as the message. There were many highlights to both chapters 3 (literacy assessment) and 4 (assessing aspects of literacy), but it was chapter 5 (going from assessment to planning and adjusting one’s teaching instruction) that I was able to relate to on both a personal and professional level.
In my role as a Special Education teacher (20 years), I have been required to develop educational plans for each student. Referred to as IEP’s in the past, today they are called ISSP’s. My earliest experience(s) goes back to denoting specific and measurable goals. . I can now see, upon reflection, that such has, at times, led to “fragmented instruction”. These authors state that “ ... if written goals or objectives are going to be useful, they must be referred to often and revised on the basis of ongoing assessment” mainly because “ongoing evaluation aids teachers in adapting instructional strategies in accordance with changing student needs.” Delving further, I read that “ ... our challenge is to offer an alternative to behavioral goals or objectives for teachers committed to holistic approaches to literacy learning but justifiably concerned with accountability and with fulfilling their legal responsibilities”. I felt that I was about to become engaged with the right text for me. As I continued to read, I knew that I was going to have to locate a copy of this book as a means of uncovering what the authors say that they will be offering in later chapters. I have since discovered that Readers and Writers with a Difference: A Holistic Approach to Teaching Struggling Readers and Writers will be the set text for the upcoming summer course, and am looking forward to answering the questions that I have as an educator.
I was quite impressed with the extensive and detailed explanation provided with regards to miscue analysis in “How Can We Assess Readers’ Strengths and Begin to Determine Their Instructional Needs?” by Constance Weaver. Clearly, this differs from the reading records that we are expected to conduct at school. She was able to share that her miscue analysis form has advantages and disadvantages, while also providing the name of a detailed form for obtaining and comparing a reader’s use of grapho/phonemic cues along with their use of syntactic and semantic cues as a means of better understanding the reader (Taxonomy of Reading Miscues by Kenneth Goodman). She realizes that “... what most classroom teachers need, however, is not more detailed forms and procedures but simpler ones that will be less time-consuming to use, yet still sophisticated enough to yield information useful in planning instruction”. Conducting a miscue analysis is of importance in “determining a reader’s use of language cues and reading strategies”, but so is “an analysis of the reader’s ability to remember and explain what has been read”. An oral retelling is something that I have not encouraged my reader’s to do when conducting reading records in previous years, but it is important to also remember that my training has been minimal. It appears as if I may well have to change my outlook in the future as I continue to work over the course of the next several years with severe learning disabled students and attempt to provide training in the use of efficient reading strategies.
In “Evaluation”, Regie Routman begins by talking about standardized testing, an issue that many teachers in this province have a serious issue with and basically for the same reasons that she cites; namely, “ ... to judge the effectiveness of schools, to place students in special programs, to track students, to pass or retain students, to evaluate teachers, and to plan curriculums”. What does one actually glean (per individual students) as a result of examining CRT results? If I can refer back to the comments issued by Alex McIver, my research informant, as per the Language and Literacy Conference. When asked if the CRT’s were a fair tool, his response was a resounding “NO! I hated the CRT’s. We were only kids”. Alex was exceptionally stressed over participating in the CRT testing, as disclosed by his mother. In reality, standardized testing tells us very little about the actual child. As Regie Routman sums it up ... “Preoccupation with test scores not only robs our students but also harms our teaching” in that “as long as we continue to equate reading progress with high test scores, we have little hope of raising a generation of readers: students who are able to read and reason, who are able to relate and apply ideas to their lives and different situations, and who choose to read for pleasure”.
It was interesting to read about Doris, a competent reader who obtained low scores on the standardized reading test, mainly because she used her background experiences to make sense when reading and sometimes marked an answer that was correct for her but not for the test makers. Doris had been penalized because she was unpracticed with worksheets and word-study skills subtests (both of which do not measure reading in context). Given that she was one to rely on the aid of context, she was clearly at a disadvantage when it came to standardized testing. How often might this be happening with our own students? Given Alex’s reading ability and comprehension, as was denoted in the research date, it may be fair to say that this might also have happened to him. In cases such as these, we have no right to make assumptions about a student based on test scores alone! It was very troubling to read that “special education programs have a disproportionate number of minority students”, especially when disclosed that the result of standardized tests scores was a major contributing factor.
Instead of providing information that could be useful for instructional decision making, the “results are neither credible nor reliable”, and when “interpreted literally, low scores on subtests are responsible for placing and maintaining students in adjunct skills based instructional programs”. Such devalues a student, sending an invalid message to both student and parent that “mastering a discrete set of skills is of primary importance in becoming a good reader” as opposed to “reading and discussing authentic literature, thinking about books, and finding delight in reading”. How right you are, Ms. Routman!
We must help parents put tests into a proper perspective by educating them as to the most valid indicators of their child’s achievement: the observational practices of the classroom teacher(s). But unless “we use the data to inform and guide instruction, we are merely amassing bits and pieces of information”. Through “kidwatching” as Yetta Goodman calls it, we can become excellent observers. To take this to the next level, it is essential to be able to set up the learning environment to maximize student development (based on our observations). Surely this is more important than test results.
Regie Routman also spoke about needing to “keep in mind that grading is not evaluation” because a students’s abilities “can never be described by a certain letter. At best, grading is a narrow, arbitrary measuring system that fosters competition, discourages cooperation, and does little to promote understanding. Like standardized test scores, grades are scores that do not carry any real meaning for instructional purposes”. Once again, I have to commend her for putting it so succinctly. And, yet, unfortunately, grades continue to thrive in our schools. Regie suggests that “when grades are used, they should be used for looking at a child in relation to himself and for comparing and analyzing the child’s growth over time”. Too frequently, however, children compare themselves to each other, not thinking about how they have grown in their learning. The parents of our students are having a hard time adjusting to the rubric that has been in use these last several years, still wanting to see actual marks on report cards. Our report cards have recently been changed so that teachers have to write anecdotal notes for each reporting period, of which there are three. I like the fact that anecdotal notes provide information that has to have been both documented and accumulated over time. Perhaps this change will attempt to ensure that our teachers do become better kidwatchers.
I was not surprised to read about learning styles, as shared in How Can We Help Those with Reading Difficulties? I was, however, surprised by what she refers to as reading styles. Never having come across this term before, I found myself intrigued, especially as the research that is “beginning to accumulate strongly demonstrates the importance of matching reading styles with reading methods”. Reference is continually made to a Reading Style Inventory as devised by Marie Carbo in that “children have differing styles, abilities, and needs, and the most effective instruction will be that which best matches each child’s strengths and preferences”, thereby teaching through their strengths rather than trying to remediate their weaknesses.
It was of interest to read how both hemispheres of the brain are involved someone reads in comparison to someone who has “dyslexia”. I, for one, would be interested in learning more so as to better assist my students. She writes that “since our typical subskills and skills approaches are so left-hemisphere oriented, we might give particular thought to developing strategies that build upon the strengths of those students who are so strongly right-hemispheric in their approach to learning.” She also believes, most strongly, that some people with severe reading difficulties are “created” and not born. Knowing that I will be working with four severe learning disabled students in the fall (support has been granted until June 2007), Constance has tweaked enough of my interest that I would like to further explore some of the readings and authors cited at the end of the article.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Rhodes, Lynn and Dudley-Marling, Curt. “Literacy Assessment” Readers and Writers with a Difference: A Holistic Approach to Teaching Struggling Readers and Writers (chapter 3)
• Rhodes, Lynn and Dudley-Marling, Curt. “Assessing Aspects of Literacy” Readers and Writers with a Difference: A Holistic Approach to Teaching Struggling Readers and Writers (chapter 4)
• Rhodes, Lynn and Dudley-Marling, Curt. “From Assessment to Planning and Adjusting Instruction (and Back Again)” Readers and Writers with a Difference: A Holistic Approach to Teaching Struggling Readers and Writers (chapter 5) (pages 81, 82, 83)
• Routman, Regie. “Evaluation” as taken from Invitations: Changing as Teachers and Learners K-12 (pages 296, 298, 300, 303, 309, 333)
• Weaver, Constance. “How Can We Assess Readers’ Strengths and Begin to Determine Their Instructional Needs?” Reading Process and Practice: From Socio-Psycholinguistics to Whole Language (chapter 10) (page 355)
• Weaver, Constance. “How Can We Help Those with Reading Difficulties?” Reading Process and Practice: From Socio-Psycholinguistics to Whole Language (chapter 11) (pages 369, 378, 384)
