(Host) Commentator Nick Boke says that some teachers will return to the classroom this fall with new ideas about reading.
(Boke) It’s almost Labor Day. Kids stock up on notebooks and backpacks, and make sure that they’ve got only the latest fashions. Teachers get ready to greet them: they set up their classrooms, organize their materials, and outline their lessons.
Recently, lots of teachers have added something new to their book bags. They’re figuring out how to include reading instruction in their daily routines. Not just primary grades teachers and reading specialists. Increasingly, middle and high school social studies, math and science teachers have decided that their students need a hand to make the most of their reading. And upper elementary teachers also are integrating reading comprehension instruction directly into lessons about Columbus and fractions.
About 300 such people just spent four days at the Vermont Reads Summer Literacy Institute in Burlington. There were math teachers wanting more class time to explore equations, instead of just introducing them. There were science teachers wanting to do more than just go over what the students had already read. And there were history teachers no longer satisfied with spoonfeeding basic facts,
facts that could have been picked up from the reading and then analyzed in discussion and writing.
These teachers and administrators are among several thousand Vermont educators beyond grade three who have agreed that teaching reading is everybody’s job.
It’s not easy to make this shift. A history teacher from the Northeast Kingdom noted how difficult it is to look at a text through the kids’ eyes; but she also noted that unless we do this, we can’t give the kids the skills they need to understand, analyze and interpret the material on their own.
A math teacher from the other side of the state said that as long as she only uses class time to show kids how to work problems, she keeps them from doing what every teacher insists they should be doing: learning how to learn independently.
Several years ago, the International Reading Association committed itself to improving adolescents’ literacy skills. Today, quite a few organizations here in Vermont are engaged in this work.
Real reading – reading for meaning, not just to pass a quiz – is very complex. But when I hear a math teacher help students find the thesis in a chapter on similarity, or a science teacher show kids how to make personal connections in a chapter on osmosis, I am convinced that our kids are becoming better readers thanks to the hard work of a wide range of committed teachers.
You see, it’s not readin’ and writin’ and ‘rithmetic any more. Now it’s readin’ and writin’ ABOUT ‘rithmetic… and about consumer science, and geography, and biology, and all the rest.
This is Nick Boke, in Weathersfield, Vermont.
Nick Boke is a reading consultant and free-lance writer who lives in Weathersfield. He spoke from our studio in Norwich.