Beers, Kylene. When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do: a Guide for Teachers, 6-12. Heinemann, 2003.
When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do: A Guide for Teachers 6-12 by Kylene Beers provides teachers with in depth instructions and suggestions for how to fruitfully teach children who have trouble with reading, comprehension, and inferencing. Beers reflects on her personal experience with a middle school boy from her first year of teaching who showed interest in learning how to read but lacked the skills to further his ability and her inability to help him understand. She uses this story, plus many more from her own and other teachers’ classrooms, to illustrate how to and how not to help middle and high school children grasp the concepts needed to become successful readers. She offers many different types of activities, as well as examples of them in use in real classrooms, to give teachers the tools they need to help kids read, spell, comprehend, and gain confidence. She encourages teachers to understand students who are having trouble and to provide a variety of activities that help students grow in their reading abilities. Beers highlights the amount of kids who are dependent readers, completely reliant on a teacher’s assistance, and presents strategies and activities so that teachers can show students how read effectively.
With the information given in Beers’s book, I will continue researching ways to further help students who struggle to read. Beers goes into detail about the different kinds of kids who struggle with an array of different reading skills. I will use here information and research to launch my own investigation into and observation of kids who have difficulties with reading.
Gallagher, Kelly, and Richard L. Allington. Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. Stenhouse Publishers, 2009.
Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It by Kelly Gallagher, an experienced teacher and author, identifies and offers a solution for the issue in teaching English and literature in US schools that he calls Readicide. Readicide, as he defines it, is the killing of a student’s desire to read through the use of the current standard teaching methods in classes. He claims that because schools focus, more often than not, on teaching to the required standardized testing, students are not learning basic reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. Schools lack the literature and time necessary to nourish authentic reading that will be useful to them as they enter adulthood. Instead of showing them how to read critically through detailed but digestible instructions, students are overwhelmed by the sheer number of standards and excessive analyses of small sections. Gallagher recommends that teachers attempt to find the “sweet spot,” the place in teaching that includes good support and instruction for students in reading and analyzing and that demonstrates to students the value of studying literature. Gallagher argues that students too often are bogged down by a test preparation mindset rather than given the chance to think creatively and explore literature for themselves.
As I create my lesson plans and enter the classroom, remembering the arguments and information in this book will help me make sure that my focus is to mentor students as I show them how to navigate texts effectively. Gallagher’s book details the dangers of not allowing students to develop critical reading and thinking skill because teachers may be preoccupied with insuring that students past standardized tests. I want my future classroom to be a place where creativity can thrive and where important standards are taught.
Smith, Michael W., and Jeffrey D. Wilhelm. Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men. Heinemann, 2008.
In the book Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men, the authors Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm analyze research data in order to understand why, on average, girls did better in English, literature, and reading classes than boys did. For the past few decades, the overall level of literacy and reading skills for boys has slowly been lowered. The goal of this text is to demonstrate the pattern that many boys will fulfill and to encourage teachers to take such tendencies into account when planning lessons. Smith and Wilhelm found through multiple research projects that boys often found the subject of literature to be feminine. Boys often preferred interactive, hands-on, goal-oriented activities and methods learning. With this, they generally are also competitive and place emphasis on this trait being a valuable motivator. Many of them stressed that maintaining a level of control and choice in their education, especially with literature and reading, is important. They tend to like well-documented, straightforward texts rather than narrative-based texts, so they find some literary characteristics, such as ambiguity, to be hard to understand. In all of this, they most often wanted a purpose to their work. Most of the boys who were a part of the research project expressed a tolerance of school, learning, and reading for pleasure because they believed that these things would be necessary for them to reach their goals. The authors encourage teachers to apply this knowledge to their future lesson plans so that, hopefully, more boys will pick up the reading and literacy skills that are lacking at the moment.
This text will be extremely beneficial for me as I enter classrooms and make my lesson plans. The information presented gives me a new understanding of half of my future students and how they learn. I want my classroom to be one that accepts diversity and nourishes it, so understanding how a lot of my students will learn is important to achieve my goal. I would also like to research this topic further so that I can be well-equipped when I do enter my own classroom and interact with my students.
Katelyn Hobbs 