While searching the newspaper one day for an obituary of someone I knew, I accidently came across this one of a woman musician who had lived in Washington, D. C. The woman played the harpsichord, the violin, and jazz piano. Here’s part of what it said about her, “Her passion was teaching music to young children, toddlers and kindergartners. She was affectionately known as Ms. Mara, the Music Lady. Her pupils danced to the Gypsy Kings, learned about new instruments and sang nursery rhymes.” Her passion…I loved that. I loved the way she combined her two passions of teaching young children and music.
That idea of PASSION really spoke to me. I’m worried about where all the passion for teaching has gone these days. I see so much discouragement, frustration, or just plain lack of excitement about teaching. New teachers are leaving the profession by an alarming rate. Whether the cause is the testing craziness, or the leveling frenzy, or the national standards, or the overwhelming curriculum – whatever the reason for it, I thought I’d write about passion in hopes of bringing some of it back.
I have had ONE PASSION for the past 13 years. And that is… to help and support as many teachers as I can to learn about a reading processing system so that they can better understand how to support the struggling readers in their classrooms. But this hasn’t always been my passion. In fact, maybe it takes a large part of your career to come to your own passion clearly. So take a walk down Memory Lane with me, if you will, and although I’ll write mostly about my own journey it may still ring true for what’s been going on around the country.
I graduated from Douglass College, part of Rutgers University in NJ in 1972. At that time there were about a gazillion baby boomers also graduating college and many of them were teachers. Alas, there were no jobs. AND to make things worse, my degree was in teaching English, k-12, not a degree for elementary school. I landed up taking a job as a 7th grade Reading Teacher in a Junior High an hour from my home.
There really weren’t many reading teachers around then. And there had never been a program before for the 7th graders to have a reading class, thus there was no curriculum for me to follow. Nothing. They had an English teacher – who did grammar teaching, diagramming sentences, and the 5 paragraph essay – but the school was finding that many of the kids were not strong readers. The principal asked me to sign up for a Reading class at a local university graduate program and when I agreed, I got the job. That’s how I accidently began going for a masters degree to become a reading specialist.
At the junior high I had 6 classes a day with 30 students in each class, and there was quite a range of reading ability in every group. I was handed some workbooks that included pages on synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, prefixes, suffixes, main idea, draw conclusions, fact and opinion, and so on.
I had no idea what to teach, and I soon discovered neither did anyone else. I went across the hall one day and asked the English teacher (who had been teaching for about half a century), “Is there something else I should be doing besides these workbooks?” She proceeded to explain to me about long and short vowels and suggested I might start there.
Somehow I didn’t think that was what these kids needed. I kept thinking, “Hmmmm…. a reading class…maybe they should be reading! Reading real books!” I asked the principal for a little more money and bought tons of paperback books. I remember one was Sounder and another was Mr. and Mrs. Bojo Jones – (about teenage pregnancy, believe it or not.) I found a book called “Hooked on Books” published in 1969 (instead of hooked on phonics). I set up, as best I could, an individualized reading program. I spent that year trying to get kids turned onto reading.
Was my eye on struggling readers yet?
Not really. If I had a passion at all back then it was about surviving each day. And for any of you who are brand new teachers I’m sure you can relate!
My next three years followed along a similar path. I had moved to the DC area, got a job teaching 6th graders this time. Six classes a day, thirty kids in each, a range of abilities once again.
My memories of my first 4 years of teaching were not very happy ones. I barely survived each day. Discouraged by my chosen career I decided to stay home when my first child was born. I stayed home for 8 years until my youngest was in first grade. I still had a passion for teaching, but I wanted to be good at it. I didn’t just want to go through the motions of giving assignments, marking papers, and giving grades. While I was home I did two things. First, I finished up my Masters in Reading and while doing so I read all kinds of professional books about teaching reading. Secondly, I ran a tutoring clinic in my home, and I taught myself a lot about teaching kids to read by watching one kid at a time. In my clinic I kept getting younger and younger students– and loving it. And I knew, when I went back to work, I was going back to elementary school. I had found my niche.
Along comes the 1985 school year, we were living in VA, and I landed my first job as a Reading Specialist in an elementary school. That was right around the time that Don Graves published his book Writing: Children and Teachers at Work. Reading teachers were busy helping classroom teachers develop authentic writing workshops. It was a most exciting time to be a young reading teacher because we were among the ones trying to figure it all out. And we were doing it WITHOUT the help that exists today. We had none of the work of Ralph Fletcher, Katie Wood Ray, Carl Anderson, or Georgia Heard. The Lucy Calkins kits didn’t exist and Giacobbe and Horn had not done their work with writing in kindergarten yet. We only had Graves, Lucy Calkins, and Shelley Harwayne at the very beginnings of their research. (And of course, Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle.) Their work was brand new. But the excitement they shared was invigorating.
Back then, Don Graves, Lucy Calkins, and Shelley Harwayne were the most inspiring speakers anyone could have heard. I can still hear Graves’ unique voice. I bet if you closed your eyes some of you can too. And we are all so sorry he’s no longer with us. But we were so lucky to work in this big county of Fairfax, Virginia, because they could afford to bring these speakers in. I heard Don, Lucy, and Shelley speak many times. And afterwards I’d go out to dinner with friends and we’d be so fired up. We couldn’t wait to get back to classrooms to help teachers with new ideas. It was all so new and classroom teachers had so many questions. Now don’t get me wrong. Many times we bumped up against resistance --- teachers who wanted to hold onto their grammar books and spelling books and not do writing workshop at all. It was a challenge, but we welcomed it. We had a passion for all this new understanding.
So was my eye on struggling readers yet?
No, I was very busy with writing workshops! And besides that, the schools I worked at had Title I Reading Teachers who were in charge of teaching all the struggling readers. (Isn’t it interesting how easy it is to say that struggling readers are someone else’s job?)
What was going on in reading at that time, in the mid 80’s and early 90’s? Well first off there was the appearance of Big Books and Shared Reading in primary grades. All of that was based on the work of Don Holdaway. But, again, schools didn’t have the wealth of wonderful Big Books to choose from that exist today. Each school was lucky if they had 10-12 to share among many classrooms.
Also, in reading, the Whole Language approach to reading and writing was taking shape in classrooms in my county and all across the country. Ken and Yetta Goodman, Frank Smith, Regie Routman and several others helped Whole Language to flourish in the U.S. Teachers began moving away from only using a basal, to using real books in the classrooms. I read children’s literature like there was no tomorrow. I was passionate about Whole Language because it came with an aspect of ‘turning kids on’ to books and into lifelong readers, writers, and learners. Whole Language pushed for bringing enjoyment of reading into classrooms and encouraged teachers to support children as they made their own choices, as they read authentic texts instead of basals and workbook pages, and as kids wrote for real purposes. And it was fun!!!
There was no talk of Guided Reading yet, no Interactive Writing, and no leveled sets of books in classrooms. Because teachers wanted to know how to work with kids who were reading their own books, my work headed in that direction. We developed many generic ways to respond to texts – we had response logs and response activities coming out our ears! Perhaps many of you can remember those days.
Was my eye on struggling readers yet?
No, but we’re getting closer. I was reading children’s literature like crazy and I was trying to get teachers to match children to books better as a way of motivating them. In fact, talk of motivation was big back then, and I’m embarrassed to say I even jumped on the reading incentive bandwagon --- reading for pizzas or ice cream parties and balloon launches. I quickly realized the error of my ways and saw the problems and the dangers of these incentive programs. Now I abhor those and want to support children in learning to read for intrinsic purposes. I always remember an article that came out back then titled something like “Are we raising readers, or just fat kids?”
But let’s get back to Whole Language. I won’t go into the details of the misunderstandings of the WL movement, how the media played a role in destroying it, but soon it became a dirty word in our county and elsewhere. Whole Language gave way to a Balanced Literacy Approach to reading and writing. And we began to understand the different contexts of a comprehensive balanced classroom that included Reading Aloud, Shared Demonstrations, Guided Reading, and Independent Reading. In writing it also meant modeling writing, shared or interactive writing, and independent writing time.
By the time that Balanced Literacy was in full swing, I had moved to a different school in my county and stayed there for seven years. This school had a very diverse population and we had a much larger group of kids who were struggling with reading. Fountas and Pinnell’s work was becoming very popular; they had put out their first book about Guided Reading and we were all taking note of how we could actually teach kids in K-2 better. We knew we needed more early intervention and to give all students a better, stronger start. We thought, “Why wait until 3-4 grades when they were totally frustrated and then test them and place them in LD programs? Wasn’t there something we could do to help more kids, especially in grade 1?” As an answer, our county implemented a low student/teacher ratio (15:1) in grade one, but required teachers to take a “Beginning reading strategies” class. The idea behind this was: “You don’t just get less kids. You have to be doing something different. You have to better meet the needs of individual learners!”
Around this same time Reading Recovery had also come to the county (1986) and some reading teachers were getting trained. Our county was actually the second site in the U. S. after Ohio to begin training RR teachers. When it began it actually snuck in very quietly. No one knew too much about it. Little by little a few more teachers were trained. I was a bit skeptical about it at first but only because of my ignorance. The training for it was so intense that those who were trained just didn’t feel like they could share any of it with others who were not trained. Many of us used to tease that there was a ‘secret handshake’ and only those trained knew it.
But I was reading more and more about guided reading, about early intervention, and about struggling readers needing to build their own reading processing system. I facilitated countless Teachers-as-Readers groups, reading and discussing professional books together, learning more about running records, about guided reading, about leveled texts, about teaching for strategies, and so on. I believed strongly back then as I do now that the way to support teachers is through long-term staff development – slow change over time is the best way. Eventually, around 1994, I was Reading Recovery trained. Woo Hoo, I got my Reading Recovery tattoo and learned the secret handshake!
All kidding aside, Reading Recovery changed my world! Now I look back and wonder, “How could I have called myself a reading teacher for those first 12 years if I had never taught a struggling reader to read? I’m not saying every reading has to be Reading Recovery trained, but I am saying that a reading teacher should know how reading works. A reading teacher should know about reading process. And a reading teacher should be able to share with classroom teachers, ELL teachers, LD teachers, special ed teachers, how to support their struggling readers.
Was my eye on struggling readers now?
Oh yes… clearly…absolutely. And I’ve been focused on struggling readers for the past 13 years now. I’ve been an advocate for struggling readers because I’ve made it my mission to reach as many teachers as I can and help them learn about 3 things:
- how a reading processing system works
- what that means for struggling readers
- and how to teach in ways that support struggling readers in building a reading processing system.
Because I know it’s NOT possible for every person to get trained in Reading Recovery, I constantly think, “How can I help? What is it from my new understandings that I could share with other teachers?” And each year since then – through all my series of workshops at schools, through my LLG (Literacy Learning Groups that I did with Title I teachers for 3 years), through my graduate classes at George Mason University, through my two books (One Child at a Time and Catching Readers Before They Fall) – each year I try to find ways to say it better.
I hope my journey has stirred up some memories for those of you reading this. Or I hope that sharing my passion will help you focus on your own personal passion about literacy teaching.
