Putting It All Together:
The ABC's of Reading,
Getting Students to Jump Right In,
and Providing Support with Technology
by Emily Dalgleish
When I began my Masters program at Michigan State University four years ago, I was eager to learn all that I could about teaching literacy and reaching to each one of my students. Now looking back over my studies, several courses in my program stand out in my mind as having helped me the most in reaching these goals: TE: 851 Literacy Young Child Home and School, TE: 846 Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners, CEP 802: Developing Positive Attitudes Towards Learning, and CEP 840: Classroom and Behavioral Management in the Inclusive Classroom. Each of these courses has had a profound impact on my perspectives on literacy and special education and my resulting practices in the classroom.
Literacy
TE: 851 Literacy Young Child Home and School and TE: 846 Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners were far and away my favorite courses in my Master’s degree program. As the daughter of a school librarian, my inherent love for all things literary must be genetic! The aforementioned courses spoke precisely to this affinity. They helped me to better understand the inner workings of literacy and its role in our everyday lives. Whether reading a menu, a street sign, jotting down an appointment on the calendar, or composing an email to a friend, reading and writing are deeply interwoven into our everyday lives.
It wasn’t until I read Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy by Victoria Purcell-Gates, one of the texts featured in TE: 851, that I fully realized the significance of a learner’s cultural context and how this shapes the way he processes and decodes his world. Part of a forgotten minority, the urban Appalachian family Purcell-Gates works with is virtually illiterate. With less than twenty words between the two of them, parents Jenny and Donny consequently raised their two children in a virtually print-free environment. This environment, devoid of meaningful print, caused Jenny to rely on physical landmarks, product logos, telephone conversations, and family, friends, and neighbors when all else failed. Jenny’s children, Donny Jr. and Timmy, lacked the informal literacy education of exposure to print through bedtime stories, meaningful text throughout the home, writing and drawing experiences, parent modeling etc. that most students arrive with when they begin school. Rather, they experienced a non-literate culture in which their mother and father modeled how to navigate in an otherwise literate world.
As Purcell-Gates attempted to introduce Donny to the phonics necessary to begin reading, she found that letters lacked meaning entirely for Donny, and it was as foreign to him as “reading the patterns of branches of trees” would be to one of us. Rather, the boys observed the color and shape of such objects as a stop sign, but not the letters displayed. As Donny was slowly introduced to the idea that words carry meaning, and exposed to literate children and adults in the literacy center, he began to be drawn to this literate world. Once he saw himself as a part of a literate world, recognized print as a “code”, and represented himself through print in a simple phrase, “IMI” meaning “I am I”, he was well on his way towards literacy!
As I began to understand how this literate world must look to someone on the “outside”, I began to better understand how to crack the code for a beginning reader. The significance of context and recognizing reading and writing as a code finally made sense. Positive early literacy experiences are of the upmost importance for young children. From birth, a child who is consistently read to will develop vocabulary skills associated with written text, print awareness such as book orientation, title, author, and later a phonemic awareness of rhyming words and letter names and sounds, decoding skills such looking for picture clues or beginning sounds of words etc. With the weight of a learner’s contextual environment in mind, when a learner faces problems I now know to take this background into consideration. One example of this was in one of my students who had fallen behind in reading. I noticed that some basic vocabulary such as “shower curtain” were missing from his schema only to later find that his parents had divorced when he was very young, and his mother whom he spent the majority of his time with worked fulltime. His grandmother would watch the kids, but paid them little attention. In the short time his mother did spend with him, their exchanges were quite brief. Like Donny and Timmy, this student was not read to very much and had little exposure to modeled literacy. After learning this, I found ways to fill-in some of the missing pieces by spending more time working with vocabulary and putting it in proper context in order to boost his comprehension.
Another course that has changed the way I teach reading was TE: 846 Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners. This course closely examined all of the phonemic components and related terminology that contribute to successful reading instruction. Many of these aspects of teaching reading I had taken for granted such as the fact that a student must master each letter sound and know how to blend letter sounds before the work of decoding may be done. Decoding, then involves the student breaking a word into letter sounds and blending the sounds to read words. A new reader must also master the skill of hearing each part: beginning, middle, and ending, of a word. Sometimes beginning readers struggle with reading “through” a word to the end, and subsequently leave off such endings as –ed, or -ing. Thus he may read a sentence as, “The boy was run when he trip and fall.” Perplexing before, I now know to design a mini-lesson on endings for this student in order to teach him or her to pay special attention to these reoccurring patterns in words.
At the close of this course, I was able to complete an in depth analysis of word study in action through a case study of two students. I conducted my initial assessments, designed a pretest for a resulting lesson that I planned and taught, and finally administered another assessment or posttest for the lesson. As each learner’s abilities and needs are unique, each of my lessons went in slightly different directions. My first student followed the lesson as I had anticipated, while my second student progressed much more quickly than I had expected and I was able to integrate instruction on homonyms as they naturally arose.
As one new to lower elementary education, this class was monumental in my understanding of how to teach beginning reading. By knowing these essential skills a new reader must have in place, I am better able to diagnose and rectify the problem(s) of a struggling reader. I now have a better understanding of the work involved with decoding. For instance, before I never would have known that supplying a rhyming word places more demands on the learner or that consonant blends are a more difficult phonological skill. Word study, also consequently, became far more approachable and easier to teach once I understood its rationale and prerequisite components.
After taking these, and other literacy courses, I felt more confident in my ability to teach reading. I then came to my goal of better reaching each of my students. A classroom of twenty some odd uniquely individual students, each with different needs, talents, and abilities, creates quite a challenge to the classroom teacher desiring to meet them all in a powerful, meaningful, and memorable way. Two courses that proved helpful for me to this end were CEP 802: Developing Positive Attitudes Towards Learning and CEP 840: Classroom and Behavioral Management in the Inclusive Classroom. The tools these courses gave me to this end were learning to better motivate my students and finding aides through assistive technology.
Special Education
CEP 802: Developing Positive Attitudes Towards Learning addressed one of my greatest fears as a teacher: the apathetic student, who despite my greatest energies and enthusiasm, has no interest in whatever it is that I am teaching. I have found that through giving students a sense of personal investment or ownership in the task at hand, promoting connectedness between the material and real life as well as other subject matter, and collaboration within the learning environment, student interest and motivation towards the subject material increases and learning becomes more meaningful and more memorable. The case study that I conducted at the close of this course was a perfect example.
One of my students had a very difficult time in reader’s workshop. He continually attempted to read texts that were far too difficult for him or refused to participate at all, claiming that all the books in my library were boring. As a part of my case study, I designed an intervention to change this student’s beliefs that he was not self-determined in his actions during class (the belief that he had no choice) and his beliefs about his reading abilities with the intended outcome of increasing his motivation to learn, time on task, and consequently his reading abilities. Touching on the aforementioned aspects of personal investment or ownership, relatedness, and collaboration, the intervention included gaining his situational interest, changing the student groupings, introducing self-monitoring, goal setting, and allowing all students to see and discuss their reading evaluations openly with the teacher. Once this student felt he had more control over his decisions during reading, he felt more connected to his peers, and could see the connections with other aspects of his life, his motivation and behavior changed significantly!
This course has helped me to see motivational problems as separate from behavioral problems. When a student is motivated and interested, behavior problems fade away. Knowing how to better motivate my students has changed my teaching! By framing my lessons under this context of student self-direction, connectedness, and collaboration, my students are far more invested in the material I present and their learning is more meaningful and memorable.
Many of the tools my Master’s courses have given me thus far have been new insights, ideas, or ways of thinking about reading or motivation. CEP 840: Classroom and Behavioral Management in the Inclusive Classroom was one class that helped me to realize more tangible tools that are available for my students. Many free resources such as text to speech and speech to text software, spell checkers, and idea mapping websites exist. I am exited to share these resources with my students as I plan lessons with these tools in mind.
Prior to beginning my master’s degree, I had a student who struggled to keep up with the required reading (The Wind in the Willows) in the class I was teaching at the time. Then, I could only suggest that his mother find the book on tape or CD through the local library or read to him herself. These options, clearly, were quite limiting. If the library did not carry this particular book or if his mother was short on time, these options would not suffice. After taking CEP 840, my eyes were opened to a wealth of free resources that I could have recommended including Natural Readers (http://www.naturalreaders.com/), Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page), and Literature Network (http://www.online-literature.com/). It is also important that I share these excellent helps with my fellow teachers. My final project for CEP 840 was directed at sharing these resources with my colleagues in a professional development seminar.
Each of these courses have indeed been life changing in regard to my professional life. They have also had a profound impact on my perspectives on literacy and special education and my resulting practices in the classroom. In regards to literacy, I have a far greater understanding of the importance of a learner's contextual learning environment and the fundamentals of reading. In special education, I have many more resources for motivating my students and then keeping them on track with technology aides. Indeed, I am far better equipped to serve my students and their families now than I ever have been!
Literacy
TE: 851 Literacy Young Child Home and School and TE: 846 Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners were far and away my favorite courses in my Master’s degree program. As the daughter of a school librarian, my inherent love for all things literary must be genetic! The aforementioned courses spoke precisely to this affinity. They helped me to better understand the inner workings of literacy and its role in our everyday lives. Whether reading a menu, a street sign, jotting down an appointment on the calendar, or composing an email to a friend, reading and writing are deeply interwoven into our everyday lives.
It wasn’t until I read Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy by Victoria Purcell-Gates, one of the texts featured in TE: 851, that I fully realized the significance of a learner’s cultural context and how this shapes the way he processes and decodes his world. Part of a forgotten minority, the urban Appalachian family Purcell-Gates works with is virtually illiterate. With less than twenty words between the two of them, parents Jenny and Donny consequently raised their two children in a virtually print-free environment. This environment, devoid of meaningful print, caused Jenny to rely on physical landmarks, product logos, telephone conversations, and family, friends, and neighbors when all else failed. Jenny’s children, Donny Jr. and Timmy, lacked the informal literacy education of exposure to print through bedtime stories, meaningful text throughout the home, writing and drawing experiences, parent modeling etc. that most students arrive with when they begin school. Rather, they experienced a non-literate culture in which their mother and father modeled how to navigate in an otherwise literate world.
As Purcell-Gates attempted to introduce Donny to the phonics necessary to begin reading, she found that letters lacked meaning entirely for Donny, and it was as foreign to him as “reading the patterns of branches of trees” would be to one of us. Rather, the boys observed the color and shape of such objects as a stop sign, but not the letters displayed. As Donny was slowly introduced to the idea that words carry meaning, and exposed to literate children and adults in the literacy center, he began to be drawn to this literate world. Once he saw himself as a part of a literate world, recognized print as a “code”, and represented himself through print in a simple phrase, “IMI” meaning “I am I”, he was well on his way towards literacy!
As I began to understand how this literate world must look to someone on the “outside”, I began to better understand how to crack the code for a beginning reader. The significance of context and recognizing reading and writing as a code finally made sense. Positive early literacy experiences are of the upmost importance for young children. From birth, a child who is consistently read to will develop vocabulary skills associated with written text, print awareness such as book orientation, title, author, and later a phonemic awareness of rhyming words and letter names and sounds, decoding skills such looking for picture clues or beginning sounds of words etc. With the weight of a learner’s contextual environment in mind, when a learner faces problems I now know to take this background into consideration. One example of this was in one of my students who had fallen behind in reading. I noticed that some basic vocabulary such as “shower curtain” were missing from his schema only to later find that his parents had divorced when he was very young, and his mother whom he spent the majority of his time with worked fulltime. His grandmother would watch the kids, but paid them little attention. In the short time his mother did spend with him, their exchanges were quite brief. Like Donny and Timmy, this student was not read to very much and had little exposure to modeled literacy. After learning this, I found ways to fill-in some of the missing pieces by spending more time working with vocabulary and putting it in proper context in order to boost his comprehension.
Another course that has changed the way I teach reading was TE: 846 Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners. This course closely examined all of the phonemic components and related terminology that contribute to successful reading instruction. Many of these aspects of teaching reading I had taken for granted such as the fact that a student must master each letter sound and know how to blend letter sounds before the work of decoding may be done. Decoding, then involves the student breaking a word into letter sounds and blending the sounds to read words. A new reader must also master the skill of hearing each part: beginning, middle, and ending, of a word. Sometimes beginning readers struggle with reading “through” a word to the end, and subsequently leave off such endings as –ed, or -ing. Thus he may read a sentence as, “The boy was run when he trip and fall.” Perplexing before, I now know to design a mini-lesson on endings for this student in order to teach him or her to pay special attention to these reoccurring patterns in words.
At the close of this course, I was able to complete an in depth analysis of word study in action through a case study of two students. I conducted my initial assessments, designed a pretest for a resulting lesson that I planned and taught, and finally administered another assessment or posttest for the lesson. As each learner’s abilities and needs are unique, each of my lessons went in slightly different directions. My first student followed the lesson as I had anticipated, while my second student progressed much more quickly than I had expected and I was able to integrate instruction on homonyms as they naturally arose.
As one new to lower elementary education, this class was monumental in my understanding of how to teach beginning reading. By knowing these essential skills a new reader must have in place, I am better able to diagnose and rectify the problem(s) of a struggling reader. I now have a better understanding of the work involved with decoding. For instance, before I never would have known that supplying a rhyming word places more demands on the learner or that consonant blends are a more difficult phonological skill. Word study, also consequently, became far more approachable and easier to teach once I understood its rationale and prerequisite components.
After taking these, and other literacy courses, I felt more confident in my ability to teach reading. I then came to my goal of better reaching each of my students. A classroom of twenty some odd uniquely individual students, each with different needs, talents, and abilities, creates quite a challenge to the classroom teacher desiring to meet them all in a powerful, meaningful, and memorable way. Two courses that proved helpful for me to this end were CEP 802: Developing Positive Attitudes Towards Learning and CEP 840: Classroom and Behavioral Management in the Inclusive Classroom. The tools these courses gave me to this end were learning to better motivate my students and finding aides through assistive technology.
Special Education
CEP 802: Developing Positive Attitudes Towards Learning addressed one of my greatest fears as a teacher: the apathetic student, who despite my greatest energies and enthusiasm, has no interest in whatever it is that I am teaching. I have found that through giving students a sense of personal investment or ownership in the task at hand, promoting connectedness between the material and real life as well as other subject matter, and collaboration within the learning environment, student interest and motivation towards the subject material increases and learning becomes more meaningful and more memorable. The case study that I conducted at the close of this course was a perfect example.
One of my students had a very difficult time in reader’s workshop. He continually attempted to read texts that were far too difficult for him or refused to participate at all, claiming that all the books in my library were boring. As a part of my case study, I designed an intervention to change this student’s beliefs that he was not self-determined in his actions during class (the belief that he had no choice) and his beliefs about his reading abilities with the intended outcome of increasing his motivation to learn, time on task, and consequently his reading abilities. Touching on the aforementioned aspects of personal investment or ownership, relatedness, and collaboration, the intervention included gaining his situational interest, changing the student groupings, introducing self-monitoring, goal setting, and allowing all students to see and discuss their reading evaluations openly with the teacher. Once this student felt he had more control over his decisions during reading, he felt more connected to his peers, and could see the connections with other aspects of his life, his motivation and behavior changed significantly!
This course has helped me to see motivational problems as separate from behavioral problems. When a student is motivated and interested, behavior problems fade away. Knowing how to better motivate my students has changed my teaching! By framing my lessons under this context of student self-direction, connectedness, and collaboration, my students are far more invested in the material I present and their learning is more meaningful and memorable.
Many of the tools my Master’s courses have given me thus far have been new insights, ideas, or ways of thinking about reading or motivation. CEP 840: Classroom and Behavioral Management in the Inclusive Classroom was one class that helped me to realize more tangible tools that are available for my students. Many free resources such as text to speech and speech to text software, spell checkers, and idea mapping websites exist. I am exited to share these resources with my students as I plan lessons with these tools in mind.
Prior to beginning my master’s degree, I had a student who struggled to keep up with the required reading (The Wind in the Willows) in the class I was teaching at the time. Then, I could only suggest that his mother find the book on tape or CD through the local library or read to him herself. These options, clearly, were quite limiting. If the library did not carry this particular book or if his mother was short on time, these options would not suffice. After taking CEP 840, my eyes were opened to a wealth of free resources that I could have recommended including Natural Readers (http://www.naturalreaders.com/), Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page), and Literature Network (http://www.online-literature.com/). It is also important that I share these excellent helps with my fellow teachers. My final project for CEP 840 was directed at sharing these resources with my colleagues in a professional development seminar.
Each of these courses have indeed been life changing in regard to my professional life. They have also had a profound impact on my perspectives on literacy and special education and my resulting practices in the classroom. In regards to literacy, I have a far greater understanding of the importance of a learner's contextual learning environment and the fundamentals of reading. In special education, I have many more resources for motivating my students and then keeping them on track with technology aides. Indeed, I am far better equipped to serve my students and their families now than I ever have been!
