Readers and Writers with a Difference: A Holistic Approach to Teaching Struggling Readers and Writers.
By Lynn K Rhodes & Curt Dudley-Marling
"We wish to emphasize that our goals for literacy instruction apply to all children, regardless of ability or economic, social, linguistic, or cultural background. Special literacy programs for poor and minority students (students often described as "at risk") that emphasize basic skills instruction and limit the purposes and audiences for students' reading can have the effect of reinforcing a status quo in which many people are disadvantaged because of their race, gender, class, ethnicity, or language."
When I read this quote, I felt very badly about how we configured our reading groups this past year. We skill grouped the children, which meant separating out all the students who were struggling and putting them in a group together and separating out all the students who were "beyond grade level" to be together in another group. I taught the "approaching" group and did spend most of our time working on basic skills such as phonemic awareness as opposed to having the students engage in meaningful reading of connected text for a large percentage of our time together. I feel like I taught them according to district expectations, using the adopted curriculum as I was told, but now I am seriously questioning the methods that we used.
I always love to read books in which teachers describe their "holistic" methods and I am always astounded by what young students are capable of doing. I am so anxious to see reading instruction at my new international school because I am just dying to see first hand how this more holistic approach really works!
Do you feel like whole language and direct instruction are two mutually exclusive camps that cannot be combined? (I always thought you were either a teacher who did one or the other!)
Do you think that there can exist a marriage of the two that results in more successful students?
What have you found useful in your classroom?
2 comments:
Yes, I do think that both can be used together. You have to work at it. I was taught the Whole Language method in college, and then taught an intensive Alphabetic Phonics and tried to teach Stevenson. Now, instead of Whole Language, the materials that I read call it
Literature Based and Thematic Units, and Guided Reading.
I am going to try to do all of this and Phonics, too.
Teaching reading can and must be two prong, directly instructing the skills needed as we help students formulate their personal theory of what reading really is. If teachers focus on one, but not the other, our students are doomed. It takes much more work to marry to the two ideas together. I applaud anyone who works this hard. I, too, am in the trenches!!
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