As teachers, we are always looking to better understand what and how we teach. Sometimes it can be very appealing when someone (an instructional leader, curriculum program, etc.) gives you a clear scope and sequence for instruction. It takes the 'guess work' out of designing your own instruction while saving a lot of time on researching and planning instruction, allowing more time to focus on refining the actual practices.
But teacher beware.
Prepackaged curriculum often supposes beliefs about students, literacies, and learning that come into conflict with some of our deepest held beliefs as teachers. They inherently deprofessionalize the work of teaching by taking away teacher agency and expertise to design instruction in response to their real students. And often, tightly-controlled curricular programs limit the ability to which a teacher can even make adjustments let alone embrace the potential of student ownership of learning.
With this in mind, how you teach reading will likely be a matter of where you are teaching (based on what program of instruction the district/school has adopted). Furthermore, much of the nuance in understanding and interpreting reading development can only come from careful and continued work with readers.
Our goal is to introduce the core dimensions you will likely be asked to address in your instruction. We will construct basic understandings of these concepts by exploring how they contribute to reading development, what they look like in action (teaching), and what they can tell us about individual student experiences (using formative assessments to inform your future instruction). This material is both dense and abstract, and we only have time to begin to scratch the surface.
To streamline this process, we will introduce and explore each dimension individually. Then, we will circle back to integrate these dimensions within the context of literacy practices and structures. This organization is of UTMOST importance. For clarity's sake, we can only hope to make sense of one topic at a time. But for young readers, they will be engaging and developing all of these dimensions simultaneously as they read. And none of this takes place in a vacuum. Students need to explore and use literacies in meaningful ways--to understand, respond to, and even build their own worlds. So please keep in mind that we may be forced to isolate topics to aid our OWN learning. But in reality, none of this is done in isolation and literacy instruction should include but never be reduced to these skills alone.
With this in mind, how you teach reading will likely be a matter of where you are teaching (based on what program of instruction the district/school has adopted). Furthermore, much of the nuance in understanding and interpreting reading development can only come from careful and continued work with readers.
Our goal is to introduce the core dimensions you will likely be asked to address in your instruction. We will construct basic understandings of these concepts by exploring how they contribute to reading development, what they look like in action (teaching), and what they can tell us about individual student experiences (using formative assessments to inform your future instruction). This material is both dense and abstract, and we only have time to begin to scratch the surface.
To streamline this process, we will introduce and explore each dimension individually. Then, we will circle back to integrate these dimensions within the context of literacy practices and structures. This organization is of UTMOST importance. For clarity's sake, we can only hope to make sense of one topic at a time. But for young readers, they will be engaging and developing all of these dimensions simultaneously as they read. And none of this takes place in a vacuum. Students need to explore and use literacies in meaningful ways--to understand, respond to, and even build their own worlds. So please keep in mind that we may be forced to isolate topics to aid our OWN learning. But in reality, none of this is done in isolation and literacy instruction should include but never be reduced to these skills alone.
developmental stages of reading
There are a number of different ways to represent the stages of reading development, with the important caveat that these stages are more descriptive than prescriptive. It's also important to remember that students will progress through these stages at different rates and times, and such progress is impacted by factors that aren't represented (such as motivation and engagement). These representations are not full pictures. Rather, they offer insight into the developmental reading skills that instruction should include and help us to make sense of how those skills develop over time. A few big ideas to keep in mind:
- Development in one area impacts development in other areas.
- Thus, these skills are co-developing and addressed together within instruction. In other words, you do not teach one skill until it is mastered before moving onto the next skill.
- The emphasis of instruction does, however, change based on children's reading progress. For example, once a student has mastered phonemic awareness and moves out of the emergent reading stage, instruction no longer addresses that skill. But other dimensions, such as vocabulary knowledge or comprehension, grow increasingly complex.
- Finally, the goal of reading is to make meaning from text (decoding + comprehending). While these skills tell us a lot about how beginning readers learn to decode, they don't tell us as much about how they make sense of what they are reading. So keep in mind that comprehension (thinking about and responding to text) should always be central to literacy instruction.
Click on the 'play button' for an audio recording of this content.
|
|