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Reading allowed!

Posted on January 2, 2008January 7, 2008 by Staff

Steve Peha & Margot Carmichael Lester

What gets tested, gets taught. That’s a guiding principle of education reform. And it appears to be working. But is it working the way we want it to in reading?

In a New York Times article (“Mission: Making a Love of Reading Happen,” October 14, 2007), a parent wrote of his surprise at learning that his middle school-aged children weren’t reading in reading: “Not until back-to-school night did I realize what was actually going on. The ‘reading’ teacher had a stack of workbooks. They were going to be reading short essays and answering questions: a full year of test prep.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with testing. And there’s no doubt that the pressure of measurement is moving schools forward in positive ways. But the trend toward teach-to-the-test curricula and year-long test preparation is not positive. Reading tests are part of life and kids must be well prepared for them. But kids are best prepared for reading by being taught how to read, not how to test.

Many people — parents, especially — express concern that testing might be overwhelming teaching. This is especially true in reading where the act of preparing kids to bubble-in answers on a sheet doesn’t align well with our sense of what it means to read a novel or a newspaper. Everyone wants kids to be good readers. But most feel that learning to read should be grounded in a love of good books, something tests can’t measure. So how do we ensure that our instruction maximizes students’ love of reading and level of skill while at the same time preparing them for tests?

First, make individual reading the focus of every student’s experience. Reading is an individual sport and readers like to play with their own equipment. The majority of time kids spend learning to read should be spent with their noses in good books they enjoy. Kids must read voluminously and with such regularity that reading becomes the true habit that it is for literate adults.

Second, concentrate on the development of fluency in high-interest texts to raise the reading levels of our lowest readers. Test preparation is focused on reading skills. But if kids’ skills are so low they can’t even read the test, it’s not likely those skills will be of use to them. For our lowest readers, we must focus on rapidly raising reading levels. The best way to do this is to get kids into books they like and can read comfortably, to gradually increase the amount of time they spend reading and to concentrate skill instruction on reading fluency.

Third, apply the strategies of reading in Language Arts to the content of reading across the curriculum.

Content-area reading presents the greatest challenge to our kids. Why not bring it into the Language Arts classroom where our best reading teachers can help kids master it? This gives students extra support where they need it most. It also helps content-area teachers who may not have an instructional background in reading.

Finally, treat test preparation as a genre. Test reading is different from normal reading. That’s why we need to prepare kids for it. So let’s treat it like the genre that it is. We teach genres all the time — mystery, biography, historical fiction, etc. Why not teach test reading the same way? Delivering a three- to four-week unit a month or so before kids take a test seems like an appropriate thing to do. Spending 10 percent of a year on test preparation with 90 percent spent teaching kids to read is a healthy balance that supports high reading achievement and higher test scores.

Helping kids become better readers has more to do with teaching than with testing. We should question putting more and more time into test preparation at the expense of practicing the skill we want to test. We should also question the materials we use to teach reading and make sure that books — real books, not textbooks, anthologies or basal readers — are by far the most prominent.

But one thing we should never question is reading’s status as the first “R” of education. No matter what we disagree on, we can all agree on that. And from that agreement perhaps we can develop an attitude that says, like a brightly painted sign on the door of every classroom: “READING ALLOWED!”

Steve Peha and Margot Carmichael Lester own Teaching That Makes Sense Inc., an education reform, advocacy and consulting company based in Carrboro.

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