CLASSROOM PRACTICE

Guiding Children to Be Strategic Readers

By Donna Peterson and Carol VanDerWege

In order to help all students learn, teachers need a variety of strategies. One promising idea for helping teachers develop these strategies is a professional development model, the Primary Literacy Institute, which Ms. Peterson and Ms. VanDerWege describe here.

MIRANDAH, a spunky 7-year-old getting ready to enter second grade, was deep into the session with her tutor. She was reading Ten Little Caterpillars with all the concentration an adult would give a major novel. As she read, she miscued on a word. She read on to the end of the sentence, stopped, and repeated the sentence, this time correcting her error. When Mirandah finished the book, Bobbie, her tutor, complimented her: "Mirandah, I like the way you self-corrected on this page. How did you know to do that?"

Mirandah fastened her eyes thoughtfully on the ceiling, her hands pushing back the hair that had fallen in her face, and said, "Well, I just thought . . . that doesn't make sense. What would make sense and start like that? And then I thought of a word that looked right, sounded right, and made sense. It's just like you told me -- I used my strategies."

Mirandah was having a "metacognitive moment." She was thinking about her thought processes, and thinking about one's thinking is central to reading. Metacognition in reading involves a turning inward -- at first purposefully and later automatically -- to examine how we comprehend a text so that we can alter our interpretations of it and so elaborate and deepen our understanding.1

The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, where Mirandah and her tutor were working together, spreads out over 25,600 square miles and includes 40 schools, four of which can be reached only by plane or boat. The population reflects both Alaska Native and Russian cultures. With a population so diverse, a single remedial reading program just won't work. In an attempt to avoid the "one-size-fits-all" view of remediation, the district employs a framework based on the First Steps Reading Developmental Continuum, a comprehensive literacy framework developed in Western Australia.2 First Steps offers many teaching strategies to support a child's reading development.

In addition to following a developmental continuum, teachers in the district follow a comprehensive program. Teachers are encouraged to incorporate reading aloud, shared reading, guided reading, independent reading, interactive writing, shared writing, independent writing, and spelling in context as parts of the language arts block. And three cueing systems are emphasized: reading for meaning (What makes sense?), attention to syntax (What sounds right?), and graphophonic awareness (Do the letters match the sounds?).

A low score on any standardized measure of reading can be the first red flag that a child is having trouble in reading, and teachers are encouraged to follow up with individual diagnostic tests.1 By analyzing the information gleaned from these assessments, teachers can determine the strengths of each child. A team composed of classroom teachers and specialists then decides in which area a child most needs help -- for example, with motivation or comprehension or phonemic awareness -- and chooses the best way to meet the most pressing needs.

But in order to help all students learn, especially in a district as diverse as the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, teachers need a variety of strategies. One promising idea for helping teachers develop these strategies is a professional development model called the Primary Literacy Institute, which was the brainchild of five Juneau teachers -- Susan Hanson, Barbara Campbell, Luann McVey, Kathy Nielson, and Laurie Schoenberger. The first institute was held in Juneau in 1995, and the idea has since spread to many communities in Alaska. The institutes enroll both adult and child students: the adults are teachers who are learning how to improve their reading instruction, and the children are students identified as struggling readers. The Primary Literacy Institute on the Kenai Peninsula was held in 2000.

The Primary Literacy Institute is essentially a teaching practicum for practicing teachers. The participants are teachers who are committed to being lifelong learners. The institute runs for two weeks and includes learning, practicing with children, and reflection. The teachers have the opportunity to work closely with one of a team of five coaches, who observe tutoring sessions and give immediate reinforcement and feedback. Because the teachers are learning with their students, everyone becomes part of a learning community.

The institute on the Kenai was taught by Susan Hanson, Brett Dillingham, and Judy Cole from Juneau, by Karen McCain from Anchorage, and by Carol VanDerWege from the Kenai. The Primary Literacy Institute trains teachers to use best practices, to gain knowledge of their students by becoming "kid watchers," to allow that knowledge to guide decisions about instruction, and to be able to prompt students to use a variety of strategies during a guided reading session. Although most primary teachers are familiar with the three cueing systems mentioned above, orchestrating their use in such a way as to help children become independent readers can be quite difficult. The opportunity to practice under the watchful guidance of an experienced coach helps teachers see how to incorporate research-based beginning literacy practices in their classrooms.

Throughout the two-week institute, teachers practice working one-on-one by actually tutoring two struggling readers. The children are not present on the first day of the institute, when teachers learn the essential components of a comprehensive literacy classroom as well as how to give diagnostic assessments. But on the second day, a new schedule begins, and the children attend a "summer school" that includes physical, musical, art, and computer activities, as well as reading instruction.

The children meet with the teachers, their Primary Literacy Institute tutors, in 30-minute sessions, which are observed by the coaches. The first thing the teachers do on the morning of the second day is to administer the diagnostic tests that they learned about on the first day.

In the afternoons, the classes are for teachers only. They learn how to analyze the assessments and plan a teaching focus for future tutoring sessions with their students. This "book learning" combines with immediate application and exponentially increases the teachers' learning. There are opportunities to ask clarifying questions, the feedback is immediate, and the stakes are high -- all the teachers know they will have to do what they have just learned with real children on the following morning. In subsequent afternoon sessions, the teachers learn how to take a running record; how to do a miscue analysis; how to find a child's reading level; how to match children to books by taking into consideration interest, reading level, and individual reading needs; and how to ascertain what a child knows by observing closely.

The philosophy that undergirds the Primary Literacy Institute is to give teachers the opportunity to practice their new skills immediately. The teachers become comfortable with both assessment and instruction in a structured one-on-one setting with a coach before they take what they've learned back to their classrooms. The chance to practice and assimilate learning is powerful. In a regular classroom, teachers can't work with an individual child one-on-one for a 30-minute block of time. However, they can apply newly learned and fine-tuned best practices to small groups during guided reading.

Teachers often define success as making a positive difference in some small way in a child's life. At the celebratory closing ceremony of the Primary Literacy Institute, the tutors gave the students certificates and book gifts. The teachers clearly believed that during the institute many of their students had truly "gotten it." Vivid proof appeared when Donna Peterson, the Kenai superintendent, read an excerpt from an article called "No Time to Read," by historian David McCullough. She made a small error as she read, went back, corrected herself, and reread the sentence. From the side of the audience where the children sat waiting to receive their presents, a little girl exclaimed, "She self-corrected!" As the teachers looked for the source of this insight from the audience, the toothless grin of Mirandah could be seen smiling back from the crowd.

It was clearly celebration time for all. Everyone had learned. The teachers will take their successes back to their classrooms and apply them every day. And, best of all, Mirandah won't go to second grade alone in August. She'll take with her a new battery of reading strategies to help her make meaning from text.

1. Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann, Mosaic of Thought (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1997).

2. Diana Rees and Bruce Shortland-Jones, First Steps Reading Developmental Continuum (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994).

3. Among the diagnostic assessment systems used in the district are Marie Clay, An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993); Jerry L. Johns, Basic Reading Inventory (Dubuque, Ia.: Kendall/Hunt, 1997); Joetta Beaver, Developmental Reading Assessment (Upper Arlington, N.J.: Celebration Press, 1997); and Robert Ervin et al., Bangor School Department Grade 1 Literacy Assessment (Bangor, Me.: Bangor School District, 1993).

PDK Home | Site Map
Kappan Professional Journal
Last updated 13 February 2002
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0202pet.htm
Copyright 2002 Phi Delta Kappa International