Education Week - May 13, 2015 - Special Report - S3

EDUCATION WEEK MAY 13, 2015
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Building Literacy Skills > www.edweek.org/go/buildingliteracy
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text-dependent-question technique.
Keeping the children's focus
on the content of the book helps
ensure that they understand the
story and that they build vocabulary
and content knowledge, before
they move on to discussing their
feelings or personal experiences,
she said.
The intense content focus also helps
all children access the story equally,
regardless of their individual life experiences,
said Katrina Martinez, the
instructional coach for the district region
that includes Ruby Duncan.
"There's a fine balance between
when to ask questions that help
children connect personally with the
story and when to ask questions that
help them understand the content,"
she said. "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 a desert."
The books chosen for the readalouds
occupy a distinct niche in
overall class text selection, Ms. Tomlinson
said. Teachers tend to choose
on-grade-level books for whole-group
instruction and books at each student's
instructional level for individual
reading, she said. But since children
can understand oral language
before written language, teachers
try to use read-aloud books that are
two to three grade levels above their
students' assigned grade to help
them develop higher-level skills with
teacher support, she said.
Reading aloud to children has a long
history as a powerful classroom technique
to build foundational literacy
skills. It exposes children to different
kinds of text structures and language,
builds awareness of how sounds are
connected to words, and demonstrates
phrasing and fluency. Most importantly,
in the eyes of many educators,
it can foster a loving-and they hope
lifetime-relationship with reading.
Some experts worry, however, that
an approach like rap's can undermine
the joy of the read-aloud.
"We have to be very careful that
we don't turn them off more than we
turn them on," said Jim Trelease, the
author of The Read-Aloud Handbook.
It's important to prepare children for
a challenging book by acquainting
them with its new vocabulary, he said.
But "breaking up the story constantly
with, 'Let's talk about this,' and 'What
about that?,' Well, gee, how about the
plot? All that stopping and starting
can become an impediment."
Finding a Balance
Susan B. Neuman, the chairwoman
of the department of teaching
and learning at New York University's
Steinhardt School of Education,
praised the Read-Aloud Project's emphasis
on helping children understand
the content of the story. The trick, she
said, is ensuring the right balance between
reading for the sheer joy of it
and delving into specifics for vocabulary
and content mastery.
"Too many of our poor readers don't
focus enough on the text itself, and
that's a problem," she said. "They really
need that rich content development.
But some teachers can tilt too
much toward obsessing about specific
words without the larger picture, the
sound, the feel of the book that's
being read. If it's not done right, it
can look too exercisey and can get excruciatingly
boring."
To guard against that, the ReadAloud
Project approach reserves the
first reading of a book for pleasure.
Deeper dives are reserved for the
second and third readings of a story.
Each lesson envisions three or more
readings of a book, each with a distinct
focus, over several days. Children
have the opportunity to make
personal connections with the story
early on, and again in the classroom
activities built around the story.
After the second reading of Thunder
Cake, the children in Ms. Landahl's
class filled out worksheets
with graphic organizers shaped like
thunderclouds to help them get ready
to write about the story. They listed
things that scare them, like thunderstorms,
and talked about their
experiences with big rainstorms. "I
saw a storm one time that was so big
it flooded a whole road," one boy told
Ms. Landahl.
Building Background Knowledge
In another wing of the school on the
same day, 2nd grade teacher Nikki
Longmore was using a rap lesson to
read aloud a nonfiction book: 14 Cows
for America, which recounts how a
Maasai tribe in Kenya sent cows to
the United States as a gift of comfort
after the Sept. 11 attacks.
On the second reading of the book,
she stopped to ask the children to
point out things in the story that
showed the compassion of that gift:
the Maasai's deep reverence for
cows, and the pain of 9/11, conveyed
to them by a native son who had returned
to his village from his medical
studies in New York.
Ms. Longmore and her colleagues
chose to customize that lesson. As
written for rap, it focused on themes
of past and present, since the story
flips back and forth between the two,
a structure that can prove challenging
for young students. But the 2nd grade
team wanted to use the story to build
students' background knowledge of
9/11 also, so they chose to focus more
discussion on that and paired it with
another book: Sept. 12th: We Knew
Everything Would Be All Right. That
book was written and illustrated by
1st graders at a Missouri school who
were upset by the plane crashes, but
found reassurance and security in the
recurring events of their days, such
as their teacher reading to them at
school.
During the read-aloud of 14 Cows
for America, Ms. Longmore's 2nd
graders were absorbing the messages
of the Maasai's gift and the tragedy of
9/11. The teacher asked the children
to "turn and talk" with one another
about a phrase in the story: The villager
who told his tribesmen about
9/11 said that it "burned a hole in his
heart."
"What is the author trying to tell
us?" Ms. Longmore asked the children.
"That it made him sad," a boy said.
"Can you provide some more support
for your answer from what
you've read?" the teacher asked.
"Because the author told us that
many people lost their lives," a girl
said.
Ms. Tomlinson, the assistant principal,
said that kind of focus on a
story's meaning leads her students
more often to deeper understanding.
"Listening to what they say in
class," she said, "it's proof that they
can reach those higher levels, with
scaffolding, and they can get it." ■
Coverage of the implementation of
college- and career-ready standards is
supported in part by a grant from the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation. Education
Week retains sole editorial control over
the content of this coverage.
The CURRICULUM MATTERS blog tracks news and
trends on this issue. www.edweek.org/go/
curriculummatters
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e-newsletter. www.edweek.org/go/newsletters
MULTIMEDIA: Watch a read-aloud
lesson at Ruby Duncan
Elementary School.
www.edweek.org/go/reading-video
Kindergartners take part
in a read-aloud session
led by their teacher, Jamie
Landahl, at Ruby Duncan
Elementary School in
North Las Vegas. Like
many schools across the
country, Ruby Duncan,
above, is using new
questioning techniques to
help children learn to
draw evidence from what
they read. The strategy is
called for in the Common
Core State Standards,
now adopted by more
than 40 states.
Photos by Tiffany Brown Anderson/Redux for Education Week
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Education Week - May 13, 2015 - Special Report

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