I really, truly have tried to stay out of this fluency discussion because it turned heated the last round, but . . . I really hate it when we equate fluency with speed, even when we say we know they're not one and the same. But our actions and the semantics/word choices we use reveal that many of us do see them as identical. Have any of you read Regie's new Teaching Essentials yet? (great read) One thread of that book is that we always need to be mindful of where we want our kids to end up, and to use that knowledge to guide our every teaching decision along the way. Do we want our children (eventual adults) to read fast???? Or do we want our children (adults) to read quickly enough to enhance/maintain comprehension, which will usually be in a silent reading situation? It makes a difference! We've addressed the issue many times on this list (within different contexts) of teaching for the goal, not for the means. Role sheets are used as a vehicle to get where we want kids to go--being a flexible contributor to group discussion. Cooperative learning is a vehicle for kids to learn how to fully function in group work. Strategy instruction is used so kids can comprehend text. We can't just stop in the middle as if that's where we want to go! We can't even say, IMO, that speed is a necessary, but not sufficient, part of fluency. Yes, there may, many times, be a correlation between speed and fluency. But certainly not always. Just because speed is a "speedy, easy, simple" thing to measure/document doesn't make it necessary nor even desirable. My kids, like Lori's, have been greatly influenced by cultural background and a different language foundation, so kids in my area with Native American roots almost always do speak slower. But even if you talk about a single race in a single locale, for heaven's sake, there's individual variations. Once again, we see that correlation does not mean causal. I'm not sure if you can demean a concept ?!:-) but I think we do marginalize the connotation of fluency by reducing it to something so single-faceted that it can be measured by a stopwatch! "Not everything important can be measured, and we can't measure everything that's important." Bev original post -> I too have students who are focusing on increasing speed. They are sixth graders whose strategy work is progressing well, and they love to read, but they're painfully aware that their rate is slower than most. _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org.
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