Teaching Content is Teaching Reading

Part of my Summer Institute training for TNTP includes a Literacy Course.  Not for me to become literate, but to teach me how to include and promote literacy skills in my classroom.  Perhaps the first reaction I, and many others, had is "But I'm a math teacher...".  As I have learned, literacy is something that cuts across all content areas.  You can't succeed in life without strong literacy skills and you can't succeed in math without them either. 

The video above, Teaching Content is Teaching Reading, comes from Dr. Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia who studies the application of psychology to education.  The video makes a good argument for the importance of learning about the world and learning in many different content areas in order to improve reading comprehension. 

Research has found it is critical to attain decoding and fluency skills (being able to pronounce and read the letters of words without hesitation) by the third grade. Once those skills are in place, kids can begin to focus more on building vocabulary and improving comprehension skills.  It is very hard to work on vocabulary or comprehension when a student is still unable to read and decode the letters.  For a lot of young readers, or struggling readers, too much focus is put on improving reading skills alone, without focusing on improving overall background knowledge.  This is why it is important to teach literacy skills across all content areas.  In order to improve reading comprehension, it is vital to just know lots of things.  Knowing about history, science, math, sports, culture, religion, social studies, literature... all of these things that make up our world, is a key to greater understanding. 

In my next post, I will further explore the importance of literacy in the content areas by looking at a tools that helps you find reading materials appropriate to a student's reading level.

Teaching to the Standard

This week our TNTP training sessions have focused on how to make sure everything we teach is aligned to the state educational standards for curriculum.  In today's educational climate, a great emphasis is put on assessments and a common objection people will voice is that because of the high-stakes nature of NCLB, teachers are only 'teaching to the test'.  But the proper way to ensure student achievement on assessment exams and in school as a whole is not teaching to the test, but rather teaching to the standard.  If students know the ciriculum material in the state standards, then they will be prepared to pass the assessments as well.  The standards documents, which are publicly available for each state, include the material that will be tested and beyond, giving students a much fuller breadth of knowledge than is even being tested.

It is such a logical way to teach and design instruction, you have to wonder why aren't all teachers doing this?  Well, as I have learned the past few days, it is possible to do this but you need someone to show you how.  Looking at a copy of a state standard is confusing.  The standards themselves contain broad, over-arching ideas that are what should be covered over the course of the entire school year.  The supporting topics themselves can be hard to translate into workable units and lesson plans.  Going into my TNTP training this summer, I was pleased to learn that my school district provides a lot of guidance to teachers in terms of curriculum framwork guides that ensure all the teachers in the district who teach a particular subject (Algebra for instance) will be teaching the same topics in the same order at around the same time of the year.  This provides much needed continuity in a large school district.  The guides help with the order and pacing of the units, but do not dictate to teachers HOW they must teach, just what they must teach and when.  I know that there is often some debate about wanting to standardize curriculum while still maintaining teacher freedom to choose the teaching activities that they feel are best. As a new teacher, I am very glad that my school district does provide this level of structure and guidance.  Not all schools or school systems do so.


After two days spent wrestling with designing my own standards based unit plan as an assignment, I can see what a large undertaking this really is.  I'll end this post today with the related topic of the National 'Common Core' Standards that were developed earlier this year.  I saw an article today in Education Week that details the conclusions of a study in which each state's individual standards are compared to the Common Core.  The majority of the states were deemed to be inferior, and I was surprised that my state scored very low. Of course, the details of how the standards were judged were not given in the article.  I know that my state is one of the 33 that has agreed to adopt the new Common Core and that these changes will begin appearing over the next few years.  I will be very interested to see how those changes will appear at the district level, and what changes individual schools and teachers will see to the curriculum.

Book Report: There are No Children Here

I just completed another book from the recommended reading list, There are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz. It is a story of two young brothers growing up in housing projects in Chicago in the late 1980's. It gives the reader a look at poverty and the many things that come with it- gangs, drugs, violence, death, teen-pregnancy, crime, prison, high-rates of school dropouts – and it focuses especially on how it affects the children. This true story takes place from 1987 to 1989, and one thing that stays with me throughout the whole story is the children's young ages - just a few years older than I was at the same time, but living light years away in another world entirely. Here I am, growing up happy and safe in my middle-class suburb, when only a few hundred miles away are children who live in fear of not making it to their next birthdays.

Book Report: “The Learning Gap”

I mentioned the recommended reading list, and today I am going to discuss “The Learning Gap: Why our schools are failing and what we can learn from Japanese and Chinese Education” by Harold Stevenson and James Stigler. The authors have compiled the results of their academic publications on studies of American, Japanese, and Chinese elementary schools into a book for the lay-audience. They left out the more technical aspects of their findings, and instead give more general descriptions and conclusions of their work. They begin by giving evidence that American school children do in fact perform poorly on basic skills tests compared to children in Japan and China – i.e. The Learning Gap. Let's assume we can all agree with this premise and move on to trying to understand what makes education in these countries different, which might explain why Japanese and Chinese children are out-performing American children.

Kansas City School Closings

Today, the school district in Kansas City, Missouri is making national headlines by announcing that in order to avoid bankruptcy, they will be closing down half of their public schools starting next fall. I grew up in the KCMO metro area and to me, it is no news that their schools are in crisis.