Teaching Reading Peer Reviewed Article (2020)
Resource: Frontiers in Psychology 10 June 2020
Summary of article: The study was meant to analyze the relationship between a teacher's beliefs about learning to read, their teaching practices, and discussion time. For this purpose, a "teacher's beliefs" refers to the thoughts, perceptions, and values about their roles as educators and education.
Is there a relationship between "what teachers say and do, teaching practice, and students' knowledge" (Tolchinsky and Rios)? They found three different profiles: instructional, situational, and multi-dimensional. (See discussion below to follow up with these!)
Does ethnicity factor in different beliefs on teaching reading? I would love to gain your insight! (See discussion!)
DISCUSSION:
Instructional practices: Focus on teaching the names of letters and their sounds. How many of you would put this as your top teaching method?
Situational approach: Classroom activities come from classroom situations and students look for the means to understand texts that they do not know. What about this approach? How many of you put this as your top teaching method?
Multidimensional approach: Using both instructional and situational practices. Personally, I believe mixing approaches are always the best practice. All the students are diverse. I do not think the same methods will work for every student.
Let's talk about ethnicity. This article discusses "African American" teachers versus "white" teachers. What's the color of one's skin have to do with teaching methods? Wouldn't school location and socioeconomic status have more to do with it? I just can't see the correlation here. Thoughts? The article claims that African American teachers believe it's more important for a child to learn to read by naming letters and saying their sounds while white teachers believed it's more important for a child to learn by answering questions about a story or telling a story from a drawing. They did mention that teachers with a higher academic level thought the oral language method (retelling the story) was more important.
The article names the teachers: Teachers M, C, MC, S, and I. These will lead to discussion and I really want to hear your thoughts on each method!
Teacher "M" focuses on a child's prior knowledge and allows children to discover their learning. "M" also emphasizes the importance of parental involvement. I agree to an extent... teaching should focus on a child's prior knowledge. Don't waste time teaching a particular standard if a majority of the class gets it. Where does that leave the minority though? At my school, students get teacher-led intervention time. This is a good place for that minority to get what they are missing. What does your school do? I am a huge advocate of parental involvement. I believe it does influence how a student learns, especially to read. Are they being read to by the adults in their lives? If old enough to read, are the parents making them read 20 minutes a day?
Teacher "C" reports that students learn through "construction" and must "discover reading autonomously through the support offered by the teacher." I'm sure several of you will disagree with me and I want to see your opinions and know why/how! I don't really support a child discovering to read independently. I mean, how does that even work? Yes, of course, let the child choose his/her own genre or book (at their reading level). But, learning to read "autonomously" seems like a stretch. "C" does believe that parents play an important role in reading and that resources and phonological awareness are important. That seems to contradict what "C" said about autonomy. If you are teaching phonics, you are teaching reading and therefore, it is not "independently self-taught." Yes, parent involvement (again, preaching to the choir).. is very important. But we absolutely cannot rely on that. I teach in a rural area and for 15 years what I have witnessed is a majority of these kids don't have their parents teaching them phonics at home. It's the "teachers' kids" who usually get this extra "push" to read at home. That is a biased statement... and not always true... and I get that... but it seems like that is the case at least most of the time.
Teacher "MC" focused greatly on developing the student's development of phonological awareness and oral language to teach reading. YES! Ok... now I am familiar with this one. This is my approach. Teaching phonics - letter recognition and sounds AND oral language, in my opinion, is the main focus of reading instruction time. It's multi-faceted. A student must know phonics, yes, but that is just a fluency check! What about their understanding of what they just read? Retelling the story and drawing a picture about the story are phenomenal ways to teach a child to read! What are your thoughts so far? Comments? Agree? Disagree?
Teacher "S" had a priority of student autonomy. What does this look like? What grade(s) did she teach? How do students teach themselves to read?
Teacher "I" focused mostly on the construction of learning. Truth time! I wasn't sure what this was exactly and didn't find a thorough explanation in the article. So, like most of us do, I "Googled" it. What is constructive learning? It is when "learners use their previous knowledge as a foundation and build on it with new things that they learn" (wgu.edu).
The article's conclusion: "Although it is true that a relationship was found in all the teachers between some of their beliefs, practices, and discourse, as revealed in their discursive talks, all the teachers thought that learning to read depended on factors underlying other theories not related to their attributional profile. Therefore, despite attributing to them certain beliefs when they teach children to read and when they think of learning to read, it can be concluded that all teachers maintain an eclectic approach." Eclectic meaning "composed of elements drawn from various sources" (www.merriam-webster.com).
No comments:
Post a Comment