The Sister Ship
In recent years, our school district, and several others have adopted a reading assessment test designed to gather data on oral reading fluency and retell comprehension. From the data that is collected, right down to the testing procedures for each grade level, this method of data collection and leveling deeply concerns me as it paints an extremely limited picture of a student's relationship to literacy.
I get it though. How can we give scores, and properly level our students without some sort of hard fast data? It's true, the act of reading is very subjective, which makes it very difficult to quantify for data collection purposes, so I understand the convenience in assigning numbers to our students, and graphing their progress on monthly assessment monitoring chart. But this form of testing is beyond a disservice to young readers. Teaching children that good reading, is fast reading robs them of the opportunity to develop a lifelong love of reading. It devalues the importance of reading for meaning, while emphasizing a higher regard for speed and accuracy (which is inaccurately referred to as fluency on this particular test).
Because we each lead independent lives, equipped with our own mechanisms for making sense of the world around us, individual transactions with text will be inevitably different from the next person's interpretation. This is the essential theory behind sociolinguistics-- the study of linguistics applied toward the connections between language and society, and the way we use it in different social situations. The poem, titled “The Blue House,” by Tomas Tranströmer gracefully elicits the essence of a sociolinguistic approach to teaching reading. I think of this poem each time I am instructed by a teacher's manual to extract the main idea from a story we are reading in class. I cringe at the thought of students scoring low in comprehension because they did not supply the predetermined response expected from a given text.
Tranströmer's poem is narrated by a man who is standing in the woods near his house. When he views his house from a particular location, he observes that it’s “as if I had just died and was seeing the house from a new angle.” It’s a wonderful image—that man among the trees—and it’s an instructive one too. There is a transformative power in seeing the familiar from a new, more distant perspective. It’s in this stance that Tranströmer’s narrator is capable of seeing his life for what it is, while also acknowledging the lives he might have had. Literacy, as described as the ability to interact with text and make sense of it based on independent thinking, prior knowledge and social interactions, is experiential.
“The sketches,” Tranströmer writes, “all of them, want to become real.” The poem strikes a chord in me because it’s so very true to life. Every life, Tranströmer writes, “has a sister ship,” one that follows “quite another route” than the one we ended up taking. One of the greatest gifts of my chosen profession is knowing that I can help young readers learn how to decode printed text in a way that will enable them to take an emotional journey not only to acquire knowledge, but also to reflect on life's "sister-ship."
All that considered, how then can a child's reading ability be measured from a 60-second transaction with an unfamiliar passage, completely void of contextual meaning, or concern for individual interest? To add insult to injury, students are then asked to regurgitate what they remember when they were not given an opportunity to even finish reading the passage they were tested on.
In the next few weeks I’ll share some ideas for meaningful assessments, and how to engage young readers and writers in meaningful discourse to examine their own reading habits and attitutedes. But for now what seems important to remember is that reading levels, strategies and skills are the means to an end, not the end itself. Assessments need to be aligned to what we truly value, not just what’s easy to measure. When students are asked to apply strategies and skills to their own meaninful lives, only then are they truly able to benefit from the tremendous insight reading can provide.
This morning I came across this beautiful visual representation that is chocked full of meaning, yet completely wordless. What does it mean to you? Read the world.
Source
I get it though. How can we give scores, and properly level our students without some sort of hard fast data? It's true, the act of reading is very subjective, which makes it very difficult to quantify for data collection purposes, so I understand the convenience in assigning numbers to our students, and graphing their progress on monthly assessment monitoring chart. But this form of testing is beyond a disservice to young readers. Teaching children that good reading, is fast reading robs them of the opportunity to develop a lifelong love of reading. It devalues the importance of reading for meaning, while emphasizing a higher regard for speed and accuracy (which is inaccurately referred to as fluency on this particular test).
Because we each lead independent lives, equipped with our own mechanisms for making sense of the world around us, individual transactions with text will be inevitably different from the next person's interpretation. This is the essential theory behind sociolinguistics-- the study of linguistics applied toward the connections between language and society, and the way we use it in different social situations. The poem, titled “The Blue House,” by Tomas Tranströmer gracefully elicits the essence of a sociolinguistic approach to teaching reading. I think of this poem each time I am instructed by a teacher's manual to extract the main idea from a story we are reading in class. I cringe at the thought of students scoring low in comprehension because they did not supply the predetermined response expected from a given text.
Tranströmer's poem is narrated by a man who is standing in the woods near his house. When he views his house from a particular location, he observes that it’s “as if I had just died and was seeing the house from a new angle.” It’s a wonderful image—that man among the trees—and it’s an instructive one too. There is a transformative power in seeing the familiar from a new, more distant perspective. It’s in this stance that Tranströmer’s narrator is capable of seeing his life for what it is, while also acknowledging the lives he might have had. Literacy, as described as the ability to interact with text and make sense of it based on independent thinking, prior knowledge and social interactions, is experiential.
“The sketches,” Tranströmer writes, “all of them, want to become real.” The poem strikes a chord in me because it’s so very true to life. Every life, Tranströmer writes, “has a sister ship,” one that follows “quite another route” than the one we ended up taking. One of the greatest gifts of my chosen profession is knowing that I can help young readers learn how to decode printed text in a way that will enable them to take an emotional journey not only to acquire knowledge, but also to reflect on life's "sister-ship."
All that considered, how then can a child's reading ability be measured from a 60-second transaction with an unfamiliar passage, completely void of contextual meaning, or concern for individual interest? To add insult to injury, students are then asked to regurgitate what they remember when they were not given an opportunity to even finish reading the passage they were tested on.
In the next few weeks I’ll share some ideas for meaningful assessments, and how to engage young readers and writers in meaningful discourse to examine their own reading habits and attitutedes. But for now what seems important to remember is that reading levels, strategies and skills are the means to an end, not the end itself. Assessments need to be aligned to what we truly value, not just what’s easy to measure. When students are asked to apply strategies and skills to their own meaninful lives, only then are they truly able to benefit from the tremendous insight reading can provide.
This morning I came across this beautiful visual representation that is chocked full of meaning, yet completely wordless. What does it mean to you? Read the world.
Source
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