Welcome to this first post on A Literacy Researcher Goes back to School! As you might guess, during 20+ years of reading and conducting research on elementary literacy instruction, I have developed many ideas about highly effective reading instruction. Here, I want to share the research-based hypothesis that will be the foundation of my fifth-grade reading instruction this year.
Over the past decade, I have conducted research in a number of diverse school settings. However, the starting point for much of my work has been my wife's third-grade classroom. We referred to her class as LOLA, the Laboratory for Optimal Literacy Achievement, and used it to develop and pilot a number of instructional approaches. During the last two years, we switched from focusing on specific areas of literacy instruction - vocabulary, textual analysis, advanced word reading - to conducting a holistic case study of all aspects of her reading instruction. Our intent was to confirm and examine her students' accelerated growth in reading and to provide a detailed description and analysis of the classroom instruction that led to this growth.
Assessment data from numerous measures demonstrated that her students made accelerated growth in all areas of reading. For example, the class began the year at the 30th percentile on the Gates-MacGinitie test of reading comprehension and ended the year at the 61st percentile. Further, analysis of student groups who began the year in the bottom quartile, middle quartiles, and top quartile on the Dibels test of Oral Reading Fluency revealed that each group showed accelerated growth in all areas of reading.
How, specifically, would I describe the instruction that produced these exceptional results? My analysis of my observational data led to the identification of the following 10 characteristics that captured the nature of Ann-Margaret's instruction:
1) High degree of teacher-managed instruction featuring rich teacher-student interaction and scaffolding of tasks for lower-performing readers and writers
2) Close linguistic study of words, including phonemes, phonics, syllabification, and morphemes
3) High degree of oral text reading in assisted and partner structures.
4) Reading of challenging texts in multiple genres including daily reading of informational texts
5) Continual focus on vocabulary both in stand-alone instruction and during text reading, discussion, and writing
6) Comprehension instruction focused on analytic (e.g., literary elements, key informational content, text structure) discussion and written response
7) Use of small group instruction for in-class intervention in word and text reading
8) Assigned independent reading within a motivating and accountable structure
9) Daily instructed writing in response to text reading
10) Strong teacher encouragement of growth mindset with regard to performance in literacy
Taken together, these 10 characteristics constitute my current holistic hypothesis on the nature of instruction that leads to accelerated student achievement in reading. They are guiding my planning for reading instruction for my first year back in the classroom, and I will be examining, on a careful week-to-week basis, how they play out in practice in my fifth-grade class, where and how they may need revision for my diverse students, and the effects that they have on each student's growth in reading. I hope that you will tune in regularly to this blog for my ongoing analysis as I test this hypothesis and for descriptions of the practical structures, activities, and materials that I use to address these themes in daily instruction.
Thanks for reading! Patrick
No comments:
Post a Comment