Sunday, February 20, 2011
Readicide, Chapter 1
After reading chapter 1 of Readicide, it has made a great argument about the harmful effects of high-stakes testing in schools across America. I can look back at my educational experience and see how I was taught to read the tests more than I ever was taught how to read books and determine what to look for while I read. While I was able to achieve, many low-income and minority students have either failed, given up, or dropped out completely. This should be unacceptable to educators. While there will always be people who drop out or potentially fail, we must do everything we can to lower that number as much as possible and reading plays a huge factor in that battle. When students read, they have to do their own thinking. Reading requires more effort than just listening in my opinion. In my placement experiences, the students I saw that had to read in their classes had significantly higher order thinking than those who were subject to worksheets, lectures, and test-prep. While my effort as a Social Studies teacher is to create better citizens through many different educational experiences, these experiences can't happen without reading. I try to make my students responsible for their own learning and then I assess how they are progressing in their own learning and then I try to scaffold those who are not achieving as much as others. But without reading, this becomes very difficult. When reading is implemented throughout the curriculum, the students become better readers, writers, and eventually better thinkers. When you're able to get students thinking about the content on their own, it allows you to do more with that thinking and begin the process of higher-order thinking. The only problem with the higher-order thinking is being mindful that you do have a certain number of things you must cover in a year. I feel that the hardest part of teaching will be to find the balance of depth and width. How deep can you get without sacrificing coverage of something the students will be tested on? Hopefully through reading the following chapters, I will come to an understanding of this and find ways to implement reading deeper while getting the coverage I feel comfortable with.
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Josh, I couldn't agree more when you said when students read, they have to do their own thinking. That's one of the problems in my placement. The kids don't want to do their own thinking; they just want to copy the power points word for word to get the facts and pass the test. And we let them get away with this because they don't complain. It's not helping the students become better readers, writers, or thinkers though so ultimately they may have the grades right now, but it's going to hurt them in the long run. As to how deep can you get without sacrificing coverage of something important, I think that'll be something that just comes with practice as teachers. Getting the students to read and write as much as possible about the topics we go over is a good start though. They'll become active learners instead of passive ones so their depth of understanding of the material will already increase than if we just spoon fed them the information.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I agree with the fact that we do not even try to get students to read. I got all the way through High School without reading an entire book and never had any issue with my grades. My own experience with this is a sad commentary on the educational system that takes place based on reading. This was before all the high stakes testing came about and I was still never taught to read correctly. The way that these test are taking place now, it is really easy for teachers to forget about reading just so they can get through the right material that the students will be tested on.
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