In the Education Week Teacher article Can Reading Be Saved?, Kelly Gallagher outlined his vision for correcting a sagging reading level in students. Gallagher is a 25-year veteran from California and has authored four books on reading and writing.
In the interview article, Gallagher points to the usual suspects for student ill-ability to comprehend what they read…Facebook, texting, IMs…but he reserves most of the blame on teaching strategies.
“I think what we are doing is selling out the long-term prospects of our kids becoming readers for the short-term pressures to raise test scores. And the sad thing is, I don’t think that those two things are mutually exclusive.”
His solution is to have kids read books that are interesting at the student’s level. While its important to offer challenging reading text, he argues, its more important to have books that they can handle.
“…if you have a high school kid reading at the 4th grade level, he or she should be reading a lot of books at the 4th grade level. And once they get better at that, then he should be reading books at the 5th grade level.” And so on.
Mr. Gallagher sees well-intentioned culprits for the lack of reading development. Here is a brief list:
In the interview article, Gallagher points to the usual suspects for student ill-ability to comprehend what they read…Facebook, texting, IMs…but he reserves most of the blame on teaching strategies.
“I think what we are doing is selling out the long-term prospects of our kids becoming readers for the short-term pressures to raise test scores. And the sad thing is, I don’t think that those two things are mutually exclusive.”
His solution is to have kids read books that are interesting at the student’s level. While its important to offer challenging reading text, he argues, its more important to have books that they can handle.
“…if you have a high school kid reading at the 4th grade level, he or she should be reading a lot of books at the 4th grade level. And once they get better at that, then he should be reading books at the 5th grade level.” And so on.
Mr. Gallagher sees well-intentioned culprits for the lack of reading development. Here is a brief list:
- Teaching “strategies”
- “Fake” school writing (as opposed to the writing we want kids to do when they grow up.)
- Slowing down stories to recap and explain.
- Stressing standards at the exclusion of classics.
All of the above are done in an attempt to help students, but they are counter-productive according to Gallagher.
“More than ever, we need to reintroduce kids to the richness and creative play of our subject.”
