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Sound It Out
Along with her background as a professor, researcher, writer, and teacher, Joanne Meier is a mom. Join Joanne every week as she shares her experiences raising her own young readers, and guides parents and teachers on the best practices in reading.
No substitute for a teacher
Molly's teacher leaves this Friday for maternity leave. The long-term sub has been hired, the kids have been prepped, and they're throwing her a baby shower before she goes. Sounds good, right?
I sat down to our local paper last week to the headline: Increased use of substitute teachers has negative effect. USA Today carried the story with an even stronger headline: Teacher absences hurting learning. Ouch! Not what this mother wants to read as her daughter embarks upon 8-10 weeks with a substitute teacher.
According to the story, the problem with subs isn't just with teachers home for a day or two — it's the use of subs to fill full-time vacancies. Nationwide, according to Education Department data, the number of schools reporting that they used substitutes to fill regular teaching vacancies doubled between 1994 and 2004.
Other data, from a study out of the University of Washington, suggests that 10 teacher absences within a year cause a significant loss in math achievement (fourth-grade math test scores being the measure used). YIKES!
There are so many issues: good teachers are hard to find, good subs maybe even harder, varying state standards for subs, lack of meaningful lesson plans left for subs, bonding between students and the sub, and differing expectations just to name a few.
For our own personal situation, the silver lining to this cloud might be our county guidelines: "To be approved to fill a long-term substitute position, candidates or applicants must hold or be eligible for a Virginia teaching license to teach the subject/grade of the long-term assignment." It's not a panacea, for sure, but a step in the right direction.
What's your experience with subs? What are your district's requirements for substitute teachers?
TeacherTube
Continuing this month's Reading Rockets theme of reading and writing in the digital world, I thought I'd highlight TeacherTube. If you haven't seen it yet, it's YouTube for teachers. There are thousands of videos there, created by and for teachers. It also includes student projects and videos teachers could use for teaching. Viewers can see what's being viewed right now, comment on videos and vote for ones you think should be featured.
For me, the site buffers pretty slowly, but you might have more luck. I also wish the organization of the site were more intuitive, but if you use the Search feature, you can find some good things. I searched for "fluency," "reading comprehension," "phonics," and "strategies." Two of my finds...
Have you ever seen kids "playing" the Crazy Professor reading game? I saw it for the first time a few months ago at PowerTeachers. On TeacherTube, a first grade teacher posted a short video of her class "playing" it.
Free-Reading, the site I blogged about two weeks ago has a bunch of videos on TeacherTube. I watched a letter writing lesson.
Browsing around TeacherTube reinforces what we know: Some teachers are using technology with their students and to share with other teachers. That's cool!
If you're looking for other video of teachers, check out our very own Watch & Learn section. You can watch through Google, it looks great, and is targeted just for teachers of young kids.
NOTE: TeacherTube is not a site intended for students to navigate on their own. There may be PSAs or videos on there with content not suitable for young children.
Darn hard work: Working with struggling readers
Working with struggling readers is darn hard work. Progress is slow, and it takes an enormous amount of effort. Really concerted, dedicated, sustained effort. The students I work with usually make me want to bang my head against a wall out of frustration and leap across the room for joy, and that's within a 45 minute tutoring session!
The Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) recently summarized K-3 intervention research. FCRR staff established criteria for selecting studies to include in their review; 12 studies ended up making the review and contributing to Extensive Reading Interventions in Grades K-3. The report provides some guidance for people who work with struggling readers. I think it provides some insight into just what it takes to make a difference (and it's a lot).
Among the findings:
(1) Low cost implementers (aka teacher aides) can be effective interventionists; all the programs they studied that relied on teacher aides used a well structured, written-for-them lesson plan. And included lots of training.
(2) Gains from interventions appear to be maintained over time (hooray!)
(3) All the interventions included attention to the big five areas of reading.
There are other findings too, but these are the most critical. There's no one answer: no single intervention came out on top every time. There was no magic number of sessions (each study included at least 100 sessions. 4-5 times a week), total hours of intervention (range across these 12 studies was 25 to 173), or group size. Just a lot of darn hard work, and dedicated professionals.
NOTE: It's a new year, and I feel like a curmudgeon writing this post. But I mean it in the spirit of: DON'T GIVE UP! WE CAN DO THIS! IT'S TOTALLY WORTH IT!
Reading wiki: free-reading.net
A "wiki" is a website or other online resource which allows users to add and edit content collectively. By now, most of us are familiar with Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. But there are other wikis too.
There's a wiki devoted specifically to early literacy. Have you seen it? It's free-reading.net. According to the site, free-reading.net is an open resource center and community for early literacy teachers. Because it's a wiki, the content is continually being revised and changed. There is an advisory board for the site that "refines the ongoing research and development agenda of Free-Reading." The advisory board includes well-known researchers Catherine Snow, Michael Kamil, and Barbara Taylor.
I feel like such a fuddy-duddy when I say it, but I'm a bit suspicious of wikis! I mean, how can I trust a site whose content can be changed by virtually anyone?? But, I have to say, there are some terrific resources that you should see:
64 activities to teach phonological awareness. Several of the ones I looked at included video too.
Vocabulary lessons using popular children's books. The sequence they recommend for teaching the words is a good one.
A Chipmunk Rap. Yes, that's right. And as the mom of two young girls, this one was a BIG HIT.
In addition to activities, guides, videos and rap, free-reading.net offers a full 40-week intervention program for K/1 students. I haven't reviewed it yet, and don't see any links to research done with it, but it might be worth looking over! Now, if I can just do something about the references to "tricks" on the site.....
