Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 1 | Moving Beyond Storybooks: Teaching Our Children to Read to Learn, page 3 (low bandwidth)

Deming teaches social studies as well as English Language Arts; the two other members of the fourth grade teaching “team,” Nancy Marcus and Jessica Gallagher, teach English Language Arts and science and mathematics respectively. All three teach reading and writing in both of their academic disciplines. Students are required to keep a journal in every subject area.

“We need to teach reading skills across the curriculum,” says Deming, adding, “The inferential part of reading is key.” From kindergarten through the second grade, she explains, students are taught to decode text. During this time, they mostly read stories. In the third grade, teachers begin to “teach for understanding.” By the fourth grade, when students are reading texts in the different subject areas, learning activities that focus on reading with understanding have intensified. In general, she says, students are reading and writing “so much in the content areas” that by the time the children are in the fifth grade, where they begin to use trade books and more critical reading is expected of them, they are ready.

By now, in Deming’s class, the learning activity in progress had just concluded. The buddy pairs were ready to get on with their reports on narrative poetry.

Flushed and slightly sweaty, Danny and Josh quickly cut to the chase: Their poem—entitled “I Should Have Stayed in Bed Today”—was definitely a narrative poem. Their classmates rewarded the boys’ analysis and presentation with a boisterous round of applause. As they sat down, the pair appeared extremely happy that they hadn’t remained in bed that day, dispelling suspicion that any irony was intended in assigning the pair this particular poem.

And so it went. On a hot afternoon in June, a group of fourth graders gave every sign that they thought analyzing poetry was a really cool thing to do.

As the children noisily dispersed and headed for their next class, a student approached a visitor with a shy smile. With little urging, Lauren explained why she enjoyed reading so much. “It’s fun!” she said. And also, she quickly added, “When you read you can go to a different place, even when Mom is yelling at you.”

If It Works, Adopt It

Pressed to explain the apparent success of teaching their students to read to learn, teacher Nancy Marcus puts it this way: “We start off loving reading ourselves,” she explains, “and we let [our students] know we love it.”

Alan Lipman, principal of New City Elementary School for fifteen years, notes that he had hired all three fourth grade teachers. The three have established close working relationships with each other over time, relationships that enable them to work together as a team. Stressing the importance of teachers “not working in isolation,” Lipman also emphasizes how critical it is for teachers to be given “planning time” every day. The teachers agree that this time is vital because it allows them to share their ideas, struggles, successes and failures. “If they find something that works well,” says Lipman “we adopt it.”

In such an atmosphere of support and trust, where, according to Marcus, teachers are “allowed to make mistakes,” indeed, are encouraged by their principal to push the boundaries of what they know and have done before, both teachers and students have benefited.

The strategies for creating successful reading-to-learn instruction that are employed by Lipman and his teachers are mirrored in the Report of the National Education Association Task Force on Reading 2000. The report offers guidelines for creating effective reading programs that include focusing on reading achievement for all students; time, resources and professional development for planning instruction; connections between reading and other content areas; collaboration among teachers; and giving teachers the freedom to exercise their professional judgment in deciding how to meet the instructional needs of students.

Lipman sums up these concepts in a few succinct words. What is needed, he says, is “motivated kids, parental involvement, dedicated teachers, continuity and time to develop a team.”

New Approaches in an Urban Setting

A mere 1.2 percent of the children enrolled in Clarkstown Central School District fall into the category of “English language learners.” Twenty-three certified teachers provide instruction to the 437 students enrolled in New City Elementary School. Classroom libraries are well stocked with books and equipped with computers. The facilities are bright and clean, security measures are nominal and morale is high. By almost any measure, then, teaching and learning conditions at New City Elementary School are optimal, but that doesn’t mean that literacy can only thrive in an affluent environment. Even school districts in traditionally less advantaged areas can develop exemplary reading programs when the teachers, the administrators and the community decide that’s exactly what they want to do.

A case in point is Union City, New Jersey, right across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The most densely populated city in the U.S. (with over 52,000 residents per square mile), it has an ethnic mix that used to be predominantly Cuban but now includes immigrants from Central and South America as well as the Caribbean. The majority of Union City’s elementary school students live in homes where English is not the main language spoken (75 percent); many families, in fact, have been living in the U.S. for fewer than five years. A decade ago, the schools were doing so badly that they failed over 80 percent of the state school efficacy indicators such as student attendance, drop-out and transfer rates, and scores on standardized tests.

Yet today, the Union City School District has been transformed from one of the worst performing districts in New Jersey to one of the best, where students’ performance on state-mandated standardized tests is either equal to or exceeds the state average. The turnaround was based, in large part, on creating a systemic school reform program rooted in the idea that improved literacy is the key to all other student learning.

Union City began by forming an Elementary Literacy Committee comprising primarily teachers and directed by Fred Carrigg, who was named Executive Director for Academic Programs for the city after serving as its Supervisor of Bilingual/ESL (English as a Second Language) Education. Working alongside a number of other committees set up to examine every aspect of education in the city’s elementary schools, the Elementary Literacy Committee focused on constructing a literacy curriculum that would help develop students’ thinking, reasoning and collaborative skills but was also, as Carrigg explains, firmly rooted in state standards. An integral part of the revised curriculum was an emphasis on encouraging teachers and students to explore new ways to learn, and to help the children learn by doing—demonstrating proficiencies by writing research papers and carrying out reading and writing-related projects. One of the first steps the committee took was to scour the shelves of the district’s schools to examine its textbooks; they eventually determined that most of the books were not relevant to Union City’s students and did not promote the language and readings skills the children needed to acquire.

Next page: Even school districts in traditionally less advantaged areas can develop exemplary reading programs when the teachers, the administrators and the community
decide that’s exactly what they want to do.

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