"Where do we begin?"

Closing post for Teaching Readers (Not Reading) Book Study

Photo by Heidi Fin on Unsplash

Throughout the book study, the most common question I observed from readers was:

“Where do we begin?”

In the conclusion, Peter suggests starting with where we already are: cognition.

“Given the central role that strategy and skill play in reading and the omnipresence of strategy and skill lessons in reading programs, what better place to teach readers? By this, I mean that an efficient approach to teaching readers involves situating out attention to metacognition, self-efficacy, attributions, and epistemic knowledge in our exisiting cognitively focused strategy and skill curriculum.” (p. 166)

This feels refreshing. Use the program as a starting point to integrate affective and/or conative resources within your lesson plans. A few examples were shared in the previous post below.

Implemented with fidelity, or teaching with integrity?

That said, I keep coming back to a question that builds off this initial one:

If teaching readers is the priority, how do we begin with the student?

Peter acknowledged this around the 14-minute mark of the podcast.

“Self-efficacy, motivation and engagement, and attribution are all areas that need immediate attention, before any skill or strategy instruction.”

How to Teach Readers

This leads to the challenge of teaching readers and knowing we are successful through the results of the assessments we choose to use.

And just as important is how we are positioning students to engage in self-assessment to know themselves as readers, and not just rely on a level or a score.

This is where the complexity of teaching readers seems to experience a bottleneck.

• We have a goal of teaching readers.

• We know traditional assessments are typically poor measures of self-efficacy, motivation and engagement, attributions, etc.

• Our context competes with these goals, such as assessments aligned with scripted curricula that focus almost exclusively on skills and strategies.

I guess I just want to acknowledge educators’ realities and the fact that their teaching environments make this goal harder to achieve.

With that in mind, here is one entry point when starting to teach readers:

Teach students how to build and maintain literacy portfolios.

The reason is straightforward:

What we test is what gets taught.

If we value the affective and the conative factors that influence reading development, then I believe there has to be a system present that captures, organizes, and communicates how students are growing and succeeding as literate individuals.

Here is a brief list of considerations.¹

• These portfolios could be in print, digital, or a mix of both.²

• The portfolios can be simple (see example below).

• As much as possible, the students are in charge of managing the artifacts and reflections of their learning.

• The tools match the developmental level of your students.

• You will need to teach students how to capture, organize, reflect upon, and express their learning.

• Ensure there is an audience for the learning posted (this is where digital portfolio tools become important if we want families to see their children as readers).

And maybe most importantly:

The portfolio categories should reflect the different factors of being a reader in authentic ways.

For example, if I wanted students to organize data around their motivation and engagement with reading, I might have them dedicate one page or section to “My Reading Life”.

It could begin with a simple reading log that documents what they are reading, a rating for the book, and a short review of each text. Periodically they would revisit their reading log and post reflections about their reading lives at the moment. Simple questions to support self-reflection could include:

1. What’s going well?

2. What isn’t?

3. How might I improve?

4. What value has been added to my reading life?

As students continue to engage in this process over the course of a school year, other factors will likely come into play. For example, we might fold in a new question such as “How have you grown as a reader since the beginning of the school year?”. Now students are building self-efficacy (acknowledging successes over time) and attributions (observing how their efforts lead to positive outcomes).

All from a more authentic shift in using reading logs: from a basic accountability tool to Goodreads for kids. Who knows where this practice could go next?³

These actions embrace the reciprocal nature of teaching readers which Peter referenced.

“I suggest that the development of students’ metacognition, self-efficacy, motivation and engagement, attributions, and epistemic knowledge are related, and that this relationship gives us different entry points for addressing them.” (p. 165)

However, I am not in the classroom and I don’t know your context.

• What do you believe might work for you and your students?

• Reflecting on this study, how will you lead or teach today?

1. For more information on digital portfolio assessment, I wrote a book in 2017 on the topic through ASCD. You can find it here.

2. On pages 132-136 in my book Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H., I describe a conversation with a teacher who was debating whether to implement print or digital literacy portfolios.

3. In this article for Choice Literacy, I share my experience of demonstrating this reflection process with a student and their reading log for a classroom teacher.