Well I personally think fluency has pretty much nothing to do with speed. Yes, nothing. To me, fluency is expressive, mindful, flowing... not necessary speedy.
Renee On Oct 28, 2007, at 4:58 PM, Beverlee Paul wrote: > 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. > > Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. > > "When you learn, teach. When you get, give." ~ Maya Angelou _______________________________________________ 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.
