Education Week - May 13, 2015 - Special Report - S2

S2 |
EDUCATION WEEK
EDUCATION WEEK MAY 13, 2015
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MAY 13, 2015
Building Literacy Skills > www.edweek.org/go/buildingliteracy
Building Literacy Skills > www.edweek.org/go/buildingliteracy
Teachers Turn to New
Read-Aloud Strategies
For Common-Core Era
Questioning techniques
transform story time
for youngest learners
North Las Vegas, Nev.
R
READING A PICTURE BOOK ALOUD
from her armchair, 20 children gathered
on the rug at her feet, kindergarten
teacher Jamie Landahl is carrying
on a practice that's been a cornerstone
of early-literacy instruction for decades.
But if you listen closely, you'll
see that this is not the read-aloud of
your childhood. Something new and
very different is going on here.
What's happening in Ms. Landahl's
classroom at Ruby Duncan Elementary
School reflects a major shift in
reading instruction brought about by
the Common Core State Standards.
In place in more than 40 states, the
standards expect children to read text
carefully and be able to cite evidence
from it to back up their interpretations.
That approach requires teachers
to pose "text-dependent" questions-
those that can be answered only with
a detailed understanding of the material,
rather than from students' own
experience. And it's not just for complex
high school books; it's increasingly
being used in reading stories
aloud to young children.
Ms. Landahl's lesson on a recent afternoon
showed the strategy in action.
As she turned the pages of Patricia Polacco's
Thunder Cake, she didn't ask
her students to share their feelings
or experiences. Instead, she posed a
series of questions that gently guided
the class back to the story for answers.
The book recounts how the author's
grandmother taught her to manage
her fear of thunderstorms by learning
to tell how far away they were
and hurrying to bake a cake before
the rain began.
The teacher asked a cluster of questions
aimed at helping the children
understand that the author is also
the narrator. "I wonder who's telling
this story? Turn and talk to your
buddy," she said.
And then: "Oh, so the character is
also the author?"
When the narrator described the
"sharp crackling light" that frightened
her, Ms. Landahl said: "What is
she scared of?"
Hands shot up. "Thunder!" some
children called out.
"Well, that's the sound," Ms. Landahl
replied. "She can see the light,
right?"
There was a momentary pause, and
then a girl said: "It's lightning."
Ms. Landahl embedded vocabulary
instruction into the lesson, too.
When the story said that Grandma
took a deep breath as she watched
the horizon, Ms. Landahl put on a
confused face and said: "Hmmm.
What do you think 'horizon' means?"
The pupils took several passes at
a definition, but struggled. Ms. Landahl
pointed to the place in the picture
where the sky meets the land.
Continuing, she asked: "Why did
Grandma take a deep breath when
she looked at the horizon?"
"Maybe she was thinking about
something," one boy volunteered.
"Or maybe she was trying to calm
down," a girl next to him said.
"She was thinking what will she
do, because the storm is coming," said
another girl.
Teacher-Written Lessons
In that way, the children made
their way through the book, piecing
together its meaning. Then Ms. Landahl
read the story again, and they
acted out the parts in the book. Some
children jumped up and roared when
thunder appeared, and others stood
up and shook little paper lightning
bolts. Others played the protagonist,
counting aloud the seconds between
the lightning and the thunder, as the
book shows her grandmother teaching
her to do.
The Thunder Cake lesson is one
of 82 that have been written collaboratively
by more than 300 teachers
across the country and stored
online as part of a collective effort
called the Read-Aloud Project. The
"
In classes like ours,
asking 'Who's been
to the ocean?' might
reach only a couple of
our kids. We're in the
middle of the desert."
KATRINA MARTINEZ
Instructional Coach
Clark County (Nev.) School District
Washington-based Council of the
Great City Schools, which represents
large urban districts, and Student
Achievement Partners, in New York
City, which supports common-core
implementation, launched the project
in 2013 to build a warehouse of free
common-core-aligned lessons that
teachers can use as is, or modify to fit
their students' needs.
The 318,000-student Clark County
school district has waded deep into the
work, using the Read-Aloud Project in
all 218 of its elementary schools this
year. A good chunk of the $7.5 million
it spent on elementary-level books was
for the texts that Read-Aloud Project
lessons are built around, said Wendy
Roselinsky, the district's director of
K-12 literacy and language development.
District leaders see the ReadAloud
Project-dubbed "rap"-as a
key strategy in improving literacy
skills in a student population that
often struggles with reading.
Focus on Content
Lindsay Tomlinson, the assistant
principal at Ruby Duncan Elementary,
which enrolls 685 children,
helped bring rap to Clark County
after participating in its early development.
She's a big fan of the
By Catherine Gewertz
http://www.edweek.org/go/buildingliteracy
Education Week - May 13, 2015 - Special Report

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