Gallagher's article is all about finding the middle ground between overteaching and underteaching the material/curriculum in the classroom. For English teachers, this problem arises when we constantly analyze everything in the given text, causing students to halt their "reading flow" to assess their own reading strategies and the author's intents. We underteach when we give our students a text and expect them to do their own independent thinking. "Finding the Sweet Spot" is about incorporating elements from both of these extremes to provide the most effective instruction.
I asked a lot of questions of this text and made a couple of personal connections for my own classroom. Some of my questions included the following: How does Gallagher hold his students accountable for reading the assigned/selected recreational book? Would such accountability even matter? Didn't Tovani disagree with rereading because assigning a rereading would mean we didn't give an instructional purpose for the first read-through? Why couldn't Gallagher first tell students to look out for opposites in the Jekyll and Hyde text rather than have them struggle through it the first time?
Regarding personal connections, I had considered using a reading strategies unit for the first unit of the year, but after reading this article, I wondered what texts I would use for this unit. I wouldn't be able to use a classic, because during this particular unit we wouldn't bother discussing the book nearly as much as we'd discuss the strategies we used to tackle it. I wouldn't be able to use anything recreational since that might encourage readicide. Instead, I'm thinking Gallagher was right to use a couple of minutes in class time to build reading strategies. That way, required content is linked to lifelong strategies.
Gallagher, K. (2009). Readicide: How schools are killing reading and what you can do about it. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
No comments:
Post a Comment