I am not saying that kids who read laboriously are not hindered by the slow, word by word reading. I think where we would diverge in our approaches is I would say, model, allow the kid to do lots of reading but do NOT let the child for one second think it is about speed and even speed and intonation. I think the end result is the same-- in terms of how kids sound. The difference is in the way to get there and how they come to view reading. I don't think we totally disagree.
One thing I think we tend to forget that is SO important, is that we are always teaching kids--even when we forget or deny it. Every instructional decision we make teaches kids. Every ASSESSMENT decision we make teaches kids. It's pretty irrelevant what our sophisticated, educated minds tell us internally when we time kids. No matter our thoughts about comprehension/fluency. No matter our goals of prosody. No matter our lofty intents. It is ABSOLUTELY INESCAPABLE when a teacher/adult gets out a stopwatch that a child learns SPEED. Good grief! It really sends me to the boiling point of disbelief that anyone could possibly think that any normal child doesn't learn we want him to read FAST! If we brought out a mic, he'd read LOUD! If we brought out a metronome, he'd read rhythmically. In the post-NRP/NCLB era, our entire profession has become so disjointed and "trivialized" as we have attempted to reduce every skill/strategy/strand to smaller and smaller pieces so they can be measured and tracked so we are "accountable." One of the reasons fluency became one of the NRP thrusts was because "reading" could be reduced to brief timed outbursts which could be "measured." Measuring comprehension is a far broader skill to measure and the assessment couldn't be done by retired teachers and paras-of-the-day (read: DIBELS) quickly, down, and dirty. Anyone, however, can run a stopwatch and all those numbers can be recorded, graphed, charted, compared, and made into PowerPoints! When will we ever learn that the whole is so much, much greater than the sum of stripped, devoid of meaning, parts??? Parts will always be just....parts. _________________________________________________________________ http://newlivehotmail.com _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
