I think it was very appropriate that you highlighted some of the drawbacks/difficulties to Smith's dos and dont's in the reading process - sometimes it is the school districts that make the decision as to what reading curriculums are to be followed, and it is not necessary the teacher's fault that it is ineffective. You've done an excellent job at applying Smith's theories to real life, and whether or not you find it realistic - and I agree with you, I don't entirely agree with his article either :)
I agree with you that reading should flow at a medium pace, similar to how you would speak. I have asked students to slow down when reading aloud, too. It seems some readers are reading for the goal of speed and I think it makes them feel good that they are capable of reading fast, but they are missing content, and what's the point of reading fast if you aren't retaining anything? But reading too slowly prevents the "flow," and as we just learned about short term memory and metacognition, we need to finish our sentences within a few seconds to so we don't forget the beginning of the sentence before we get to the end of our sentence! Somewhere in between slow and fast, lies the perfect medium pace, like you said. I have experimented with pace on myself before and I don't really enjoy reading when I am reading too fast, maybe others do though.
Another good point you make is about school systems and whether or not teachers have the choice as to whether they follow the programs that their school is using. I think the choice is to be a part of changing the current system to one that reflects the goals all schools would like to reach of creating lifelong readers. With the evidence out there, it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to persuade the team to go in a direction other than some of the existing programs.
Some things Smith says not to do would definitely be difficult not to do sometimes, I would think. I noticed that in the reading program at my school, when we would test for reading, we would let the students read the whole story without saying a word. We would not correct any mistakes, and we would let them figure it out for themselves. We would simply mark up a copy of the story with labels, and each child was only allowed so many mistakes, or they would not move on to the next story. After the child finished the story, we would have three comprehension questions to ask them. I agree with you that reading at an even pace helps kids with comprehension. Many of our kids would read too slow or too fast and would miss the comprehension questions because of it.
I think it was very appropriate that you highlighted some of the drawbacks/difficulties to Smith's dos and dont's in the reading process - sometimes it is the school districts that make the decision as to what reading curriculums are to be followed, and it is not necessary the teacher's fault that it is ineffective. You've done an excellent job at applying Smith's theories to real life, and whether or not you find it realistic - and I agree with you, I don't entirely agree with his article either :)
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that reading should flow at a medium pace, similar to how you would speak. I have asked students to slow down when reading aloud, too. It seems some readers are reading for the goal of speed and I think it makes them feel good that they are capable of reading fast, but they are missing content, and what's the point of reading fast if you aren't retaining anything? But reading too slowly prevents the "flow," and as we just learned about short term memory and metacognition, we need to finish our sentences within a few seconds to so we don't forget the beginning of the sentence before we get to the end of our sentence! Somewhere in between slow and fast, lies the perfect medium pace, like you said. I have experimented with pace on myself before and I don't really enjoy reading when I am reading too fast, maybe others do though.
ReplyDeleteAnother good point you make is about school systems and whether or not teachers have the choice as to whether they follow the programs that their school is using. I think the choice is to be a part of changing the current system to one that reflects the goals all schools would like to reach of creating lifelong readers. With the evidence out there, it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to persuade the team to go in a direction other than some of the existing programs.
Some things Smith says not to do would definitely be difficult not to do sometimes, I would think. I noticed that in the reading program at my school, when we would test for reading, we would let the students read the whole story without saying a word. We would not correct any mistakes, and we would let them figure it out for themselves. We would simply mark up a copy of the story with labels, and each child was only allowed so many mistakes, or they would not move on to the next story. After the child finished the story, we would have three comprehension questions to ask them. I agree with you that reading at an even pace helps kids with comprehension. Many of our kids would read too slow or too fast and would miss the comprehension questions because of it.
ReplyDelete