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SilentReading

Page history last edited by Moira Ekdahl 10 years, 8 months ago

About reading and [your secondary school’s] reading initiative:

 

See link to my blog below, esp post about Krashen … but the one by Jamie McKenzie on flatulence is fine too!

 

http://tlspecial.blogspot.ca/2013/05/jamie-mckenzie-and-apocalypse.html

 

http://tlspecial.blogspot.ca/2008/08/stephen-krashen-do-libraries-matter.html

 

Here is a message one TL sent to her colleagues sent recently:

If you run out of self-directed professional development options, try Dr Stephen Krashen on Sustained Silent Reading:

http://www.sdkrashen.com/handouts/88Generalizations/index.html

and if you would like to read more, perhaps during silent reading, try any of the links here:

http://www.sdkrashen.com/index.php?cat=2

 

Also, see Krashen on youtube.

 

You may use whatever it takes to beat back the forces that would not recognize that teaching and learning only really happen when kids can and do read.

As something of a "Krashen groupie," I can offer some additional pieces to the Krashen links.

 

  • another piece about reading that I wrote after the privilege of hearing him at a conference in Berkeley:

 

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/81311685/BCTLA-Journal--the-Bookmark (see p 10-11)

 

  • Reading and poverty: see page 3, Dec issue of Tackboard: 

 

http://vsta.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/December.pdf-

 research on reading: excerpted from longer article to be published online imminently

 

A Serious Need to Collaborate to Consider a Reading Agenda

Excerpted from “Just a Little Thing: At the Heart of 21st Century Learning Must Be Reading”
By M. Ekdahl, May 2012, Treasure Mountain Canada (June 2012, Ottawa)
Online publication: 
https://sites.google.com/site/treasuremountaincanada2/ekdahl

Theoretical Framing: Reading Driven by Inquiry, Joy, and Conversations

A look at reading theory generates important foci for consideration in creating a renewed focus on learning, school libraries or learning commons, and the creation of a culture of reading. 

Where, in theory, do we find the underpinnings for building of a culture of reading within a school community?  How do we co-design the learning contexts that these underpinnings envision? 

Educators, the research suggests, need to attend to “teaching students to read complex non-fiction texts … and to master informative writing,” begins Marge Scherer, editor, Educational Leadership (EL), in her introduction to the March 2012 issue, themed “Reading”; they need to read like a detective and write like a reporter (Coleman).  This particular EL issue, while filled with strategies for building a culture of reading in schools, is short on ways that teachers can work collaboratively with their teacher-librarians to construct meaningful “reading conversations.” 

How can educators collaboratively construct such conversations?

Recent discourse in the field of reading deepens the connections for teacher-librarians amongst processes for learning, knowledge-creation, and community.  R. David Lankes argues for community-building and connection, as opposed to collection, development when he suggests “that a functional view of librarianship has led us to focus too much on collections and artifacts (books, web pages, and the stuff we can point to) and not enough time on our most basic collection: our communities.”   He draws on Conversation Theory and its implications for dynamic learning; that is, what is learned is a series of “tangles” or memory associations formed when participants engage in conversations that use common language and understandings to reach agreements or disagreements around new information that further shapes or re-shapes existing knowledge structures.  As reading prompts internal conversations, readers make sense of the resources and artifacts collected in the context of inquiry-based learning.  Teacher-librarians who understand how this works, suggests Lankes, construct learning as “participatory conversations”; they have something to contribute to the conversation. 

How will a learning community construct learning conversations such as these?

Teacher-librarians understand the need to work collaboratively with colleagues to attend to the joyfulness of reading, or such would be the implications of the recent study conducted by the Ontario-based research group People for Education; elementary-aged children surveyed reported a decline in interest in reading that correlates positively with the emphasis on the more traditional literacy strategies in classrooms and with the decline in numbers of teacher-librarians.  “We learn to do well what we learn to love” (Allyn 16). Richard Allington advises educators to eliminate worksheets and workbooks, using the saved funds to buy books that prompt student-centred reading and writing, literary conversations, and read-alouds (14).  Allyn suggests that we are all struggling readers in one context or another.  Yet, “reading enjoyment is not only associated with high student achievement.  Research shows that ‘engaged’ readers are also more likely to be socially and civically engaged as well.” (People 2).  In more concrete and corollary terms, poor adult readers have trouble finding and keeping work and completing day-to-day activities like reading and writing letters, email, and forms, as well as helping their own children learn (Allyn 18).  

How, in light of these understandings, might we re-think the Literacy agenda in our schools?

The field of reading theory is also beset by the new discourse of digital reading.  “Debate still rages about the extent to which reading in digital contexts is really new or different” (Biancarosa 25).  Research shows there is a loss of reading efficiency, possibly due to the added complexities in reading digital text, a non-linear reading experience that offers ready hyperlinking to definitions, background information, and other inquiry choices. 

It is going to continue to be important for students to have teaching for reading in each content area:

If our adolescents are to meet 21st century expectations for reading, all students must have opportunities to learn specialized reading habits and skills.  In short, struggling readers who need basic skills instruction should receive it plus instruction in adolescent literacy …. Funding and accountability policies must anticipate the incorporation of disciplinary and digital literacy into reading instruction and practice. (Biancarosa 26)

Building skills and motivation to enable reading complex text will hinge on providing students with opportunities to practice fluency, understand vocabulary and sentence structures, including those that are domain-specific, recognize the connections amongst and organization of ideas, and develop background knowledge that is developmental, experiential, and cultural (Shanahan).

Another thread in the discourse of digital literacy worries about the impact of the digital environment on reading and learning; it is characterized by writers such as Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, and Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or Don’t Trust Anyone UNDER 30).

Will more technology in high school classrooms help? Not in the crucial area of reading. When teachers fill the syllabus with digital texts, having students read and write blogs, wikis, Facebook pages, multimedia assemblages, and the like, they do little to address the primary reason that so many students end up not ready for college-level reading. When they assign traditional texts -- novels, speeches, science articles, and so on -- in digital format with embedded links, hypertext, word-search capability, and other aids, they likewise avoid the primary cause of unreadiness.  (Bauerlein)

How can these threads in the reading discourse help to initiate and inform a critical look at the importance of an inquiry-based approach to reading as we integrate technology with teaching and learning here in our schools?

Stephen Krashen offers simpler sociopolitical analyses.  His is a strong and persistent voice advocating for narrowing the achievement gap by eliminating poverty and for diverting the costs of testing, monies paid to the publishing industry, to improving libraries in high-poverty areas.  To Krashen, the public’s faith in the skill-building approach to literacy is wrong:

… mastery of the components of language is acquired as a result of understanding what we read and hear. [The Comprehension Hypothesis, as opposed to the Skill-Building Hypothesis] claims that grammatical competence and vocabulary knowledge are absorbed as a result of listening and reading, and that writing style and most of spelling competence is the result of wide, self-selected reading.

Noted for his pithy common-sense approach to the promotion of reading and free choice, Krashen advises educators that reading improves with reading; reading anything improves reading; children are more likely to read if they have access to books; kids need to be immersed in opportunities to read and, in Krashen’s view, school libraries are the hottest tool in the literacy kit. The better the school library, the higher the reading scores. 

How can we attend to the needs of the VSB’s reading students to optimize learning as we construct learning contexts that turn on the “light” that engages our students with reading, reading to learn, and learning?

 

How can we attend to the needs of the VSB’s reading students to optimize learning as we construct learning contexts that turn on the “light” that engages our students with reading, reading to learn, and learning?

 

 Silent Reading Survey

 

Please place an "x" beside your school's name, type when it happens, and add any comments in the right column

 

 

SCHOOL

YES

NO

WHEN IS IT?

COMMENTS

Britannia

 X

 

 

Not all in favour.  Staff voted to continue SSR for one more year.

Byng, Lord

x

 

 

 ENGLISH CLASSES

Not all at the same time. It's school-wide, but it happens during English classes.

Sir Winston Churchill

 

 X

 

 

David Thompson

 X

 

 

 

Gladstone

 X

 

 

 

Eric Hamber

 X

 

 MON. - THURS.

 -20 minute sessions (4days per week-not on short day)

-all staff participate

enthusiastically

John Oliver

 X

 

 

 

Killarney

 X

 

 MON - THURS.

 20 minute sessions held Mon - Thurs. Approx. 85-90% of teachers willingly participate. All students are expected to participate, even on spares. Teacher/admin./ support staff modeling is KEY to SUCCESS.

King George

 

 X

 

 

Kitsilano

 

 x

 

 

Magee

 

 X

 

 FRIDAY

 English teachers conduct SSR sessions every Friday

Point Grey

 

 X

 

 

Prince of Wales

 X

 

 

 

Templeton

 

X

   

Sir Charles Tupper

 X

 

 MON - THURS.

 20 min. sessions M- Thurs. Strong participation among teachers and students.

University Hill

 

 X

 

 

Vancouver Technical

 

 X

 

 

Windermere

 

 X

 

 

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