Inquiry Post 1: Fostering a Reading Culture

Inquiry Post 1: Fostering a Reading Culture

With the influx of student teachers and the return to the staff room after Covid, the conversation at lunch has shifted to reading.  More importantly, it has become a conversation about how to effectively teach reading, and how student teachers feel unprepared to teach this most important of skills.  To be fair, I did not feel entirely prepared to teach reading when I graduated from the education program at my university, and creating fully literate citizens continues to be a focus in my teaching.  It is the area in which I am the least confident, perhaps because it is the area I feel the most pressure to excel.  

I know that simply providing kids with a lot of opportunities to read is not enough.  In the article, “For Students Who Are Not Yet Fluent, Silent Reading Is Not the Best Use of Classroom Time” Jan Hasbrouck states that, “‘The National Reading Panel* (NRP) concluded there is insufficient support from empirical research to suggest that independent, silent reading can be used to help students improve their fluency (NICHD, 2000)’(np).”  As a future librarian, and as a classroom teacher, where does this leave me? How do I create a culture of reading in my school when students need more direct support with reading at all levels?  How do I support reading, when in some cases, the majority of my students are not reading at grade level, and reading is frustrating and upsetting for them?

To answer these questions, in the library learning commons and in the classroom I must promote science based reading strategies, linking phonemic and phonetic awareness with brain research, and I must build my own and my co-teachers capacity with regard to this issue, while keeping school culture and teacher autonomy in mind: yikes!  This is a huge task, but I like to think that it is one that is accomplishable if addressed in three parts: getting teachers on board, helping students to read at grade level, and increasing excitement around reading.  

Getting Teachers On Board

I can support teachers in using data based reading programs by first educating myself about best practice with regard to reading.  For example, I am currently attending professional development workshops, and I am reading articles and books on this topic in order to improve my skills.  I also took on the role of professional development representatives at my former school.  This position allowed me to impact the direction of professional learning.  Additionally, I can further support data based reading instruction by building and resourcing reading units, and lastly, I can offer to team teach lessons with teachers.  

Below is a samples of a reading lessons from "The Balanced Literacy Diet" website that I would include in a unit of study, or team teach with interested teachers:

Helping students to read at grade level:

I loved the flexibility of my librarian position.  Outside of my prep blocks, I had a great deal of unstructured time that I could use to directly support reading instruction, and now that I have worked consistently in the same grade for four years, I have further ideas on how I can support reading in my school.

1. I would like to help classroom teachers with diagnostic reading assessments, particularly early primary teachers.  In my district kindergarten students through to grade seven students have to complete a district created reading assessment.  It is a challenging task for the primary teachers who have to painstakingly scribe each student’s responses.  Helping administer these tests would both endear me to the teachers, and it would give me a good snapshot of how students at my school are reading overall.  

2. According to Shannon Miller McClintock and William Bass in Leading from the Library, it is also important to make sure that students have equitable access to technology: “ this means that we must either set or advocate for policies that demand that our purchases and subscriptions can be used by all who need it (p.79)”  It is through apps, accessibility features, and online resources that struggling readers can access read to text, speak to text, and various other tools to help them keep up to classroom content.  Consequently, I would hope to work with my future school to develop a plan for the purchase of technology, because the definition of literacy must be expanded to include “critical consumption of information, media, research, technology, and digital citizenship” (Bass and McClintock, p.74).

3. Similar to building capacity with teaching reading fluency, it is important to build teacher capacity to use assistive technology, and this can be done through becoming the Pro.-D. rep., team teaching, and the creation or curation of instructional videos for reference.

4. I would also directly teach assistive technologies during library prep. blocks.

Increase Reading Excitement

This is the fun part of literacy instruction.  It is where the whole school comes together to celebrate the act of reading in all of its forms, and it can occur in a myriad of different ways. Prior to the pandemic, my class was involved in a morning routine, buddy reading, program where the intermediate students would listen to primary students read. This program gave little buddies much needed support and reading practice, while at the same time sneakily providing my older students with reading strategy review. Another way that I promoted a culture of reading at my school was to create a reconciliation video based on the picture book You hold me up by Monique Grey Smith. My grade 6/7 students read the story with their buddies and helped the primary students to write their own endings to the the sentence stem "You hold me up when.." we then presented the video at the school orange shirt day assembly.

Works Cited

Hasbrouck, J. (2006). For Students Who Are Not Yet Fluent, Silent Reading Is Not the Best Use of 

    Classroom Time. American Educator, Summer 2006, 30(2).

McClintock Miller Shannon; Bass William. Leading from the Library (Digital Age Librarian's Series).        International Society for Technology in Education. Kindle Edition.

Oise.utoronto.ca. 2022. BALANCEDLITERACYDIET :: Balanced Literacy Diet. [online] 

Available at: <https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/balancedliteracydiet/Home/index.html> [Accessed 30 May 2022].