As I read Kelly Gallagher's book, READICIDE, especially chapter 3, "Avoiding the Tsunami" it became clear to me that here I had found a voice who spoke for all of us who remembered why we learned to love reading in the first place. Gallagher calls it the "reading flow." But with it comes a sense of timelessness born of focus and concentration, a letting go of our fitful surroundings, a giving of ourselves to the story and to the intentions of the author.
For some reason though, we have found it an imperative to study to death the molecular structure of the great themes and stories of the human condition. In doing so we have kept young readers prisoners in the analytical, conscious world. Gallagher instead says, as teachers, we should be the ushers who lead young readers to the reading flow and the love of reading. We should help grow their passion for recreational reading by allowing "high interest, recreational" reading to happen in school.
We should assist students expand their abilities to interpret even difficult books, as his friend Carol Jago recommends, by actively doing "everything we can to ease students into academic reading" (READICIDE, p.79). She says we should "give students a hands-on guided tour of the front half of the book" and that we should shift to "the budget tour mode" (READICIDE, p.79) in the back half of the book where we step out of the process and begin letting students find their own way.
I believe that before we can reach that point though, there must be quite a different pattern of teaching literacy and literature that has to precede this. That pattern, that expectation of how teachers and schools present reading must change at an early age for young readers. They first must have the expectation that schools are places where fun reading can happen. We must maintain this "m.o." most teachers create at the elementary level into middle school and beyond if we are to change this modality at the secondary level it seems. We're talking about a whole sea change of expectations about reading under the school roof.
The real coup de grace for me however was Gallagher's citation of Kenneth Burke's notion that "the real value in reading literature is that it provides our students with imaginative rehearsals for the real world." As a young reader, I remember putting down just-read books feeling as though I had gained some kind of valuable insight into my world, as though I had somehow lived through a profound event and time. Things looked different to me having "been through it." Outside real, first hand experiences, this to me is real learning. This is the high level stuff that becomes built into us having had these reading experiences.
I particularly like the idea of the "Topic Flood" as a means of validating a book. Gallagher's "One Pager" also looks like an effective way to galvanize the gains a student makes after having engaged in reading that captivates him or her and holding them accountable to their having had such a reading experience.
Today my carpentry II students began framing their floor framing mock-ups. They were mostly collaborating well with work getting done in sweltering, out-of-season heat. The interesting things in the air today though were the words I noticed flying around, words you would only hear during such a carpentry operation among a crew. As I've said before, this was their new vocabulary at work. Their hands held the materials which were articulating into a useful product. Words they did not know only a few weeks ago were flying around as if they were veterans.
The point here is everything became crystal clear to them, as one boy had said, because "now I can see and hold what the book and drawings actually meant to show, what a joist band is and what bridging is." As I said in my Inquiry Project statement recently that "based upon my own experience,...it is repetition embedded in a meaningful content that clinches the vocabulary knowledge" especially in learners more inclined to learn while working with their hands.
I believe I can use some of the Fisher and Frey strategies as frameworks to teach vocabulary to my students in reverse order. It seems this follows the pattern they mention as most effective even for ESL students or anyone learning a foreign language. That is, at first it is easiest to take on such a language orally, that the written language is better learned after the words are seen at work, in context, where needs of the moment become the incentive for learning the new vocabulary.
What I intend to try now with my students is have them record a new word or two each day as they build their floor systems as a way of teaching them to be more sensitive to unfamiliar words. I'm hoping this creates more of a desire in them to demand that they understand words in whatever context they find them.
I have already been requiring weekly reflective journals of my students many of which have them account for new techniques or processes they have learned on projects such as these. Having them record new words could be an effective lead-in to their journals. I still remember how I learned the language of carpentry and what drove me was the desire to be a contributor to the process. I could do this best if I could use the correct terms at the right time. The vocabulary and me were at work.
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