Top 5 reasons to eliminate guided reading
By Mark BarnesFor more than a decade, I bored my language arts students to tears with guided reading activities. We'd read one novel for six weeks, analyzing every chapter, completing vocabulary worksheets and fill-in-the-blank plot charts. Then, after one truly amazing summer of research, I decided to stop the guided reading madness forever. Here are the top 5 reasons to eliminate guided reading in your classroom.
5. Guided reading does not teach reading -- The most undeniable research on this subject has been completed in over 40 years of study by literacy expert Stephen Krashen, who says that the best way to teach reading is to put books in kids' hands and get out of their way. See www.sdkrashen.com for plenty on this subject.
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| via: theinspiredclassroom.com |
4. Guided reading work is boring -- Put a fill-in-the-blank worksheet in a student's hands and watch how quickly she rolls her eyes. Students driven to get good grades may complete the work, but they'll hate it for sure, as they long to read books they enjoy.
3. Guided reading stifles readers -- While you're spending 4-6 weeks on that one so-called classic novel, enthusiastic readers are dying to move on to something different. Instead of encouraging a love of reading, teachers who spend several fortnights in one book are inhibiting good readers' abilities to get better.
2. Guided reading is about teacher control -- When teachers tell students what they have to read and what they should think the theme of a novel is, this is about teacher control, which is really an extension bad discipline practice. Guided reading inhibits independent reading, which is always best, as it encourages a love of books.
1. Guided reading teaches students to hate books -- All those years that I used guided reading, maybe 20 percent of my students read more than one or two novels in a year. The avid readers might have read five to 10 on their own. Since I've abandoned guided reading and gone to an aggressive, year-long independent reading program, my average student reads 30 books during the school year. Some read 60-90, and those who enter the year as reluctant readers finish 10-15 books. After mini-lessons on book structure and context clues, they read, write about and discuss their books daily.
Best of all, they now love books and can't get enough reading.
Agree: it's spoon feeding and teacher control, not student-led participatory learning. Better to focus on higher level meta-skills and let the learners work it out for themselves. Filling in boxes is just like ticking boxes: no one cares and very little is learned or recalled.
ReplyDeleteYou hit the proverbial nail on the head, Ian. Box-ticking, as you so aptly call it, hits only rote memory learning, which research constantly demonstrates does not encourage real learning.
DeleteCurious how you create opportunities to show what they are learning from their reading. I am imagining this to be similar to a Daily 5/CAFE style reading workshop that I run in 2nd grade that is focused on teaching skills in mini lessons whole group/small group/1:1 and independent practice with feedback in short conferences with students as they work. Using Kidblog and paper to have Ss share about books ... Do have structured/semi-structured pieces/projects to help guide Ss in how they show what they are learning? Having read ROLE I am thinking you have Ss created projects to show learning that you provide feedback on ... do you have individual or groups of targets to help focus work and creation?
ReplyDeleteHey Mr. White, it seems to me that you have this pretty much figured out. I love what you're doing, as it sounds very results-only learning. Here is a sample piece from my Reading All Year project: http://barnesclass.com/RAY-Project-Part-1. Here are some of the learning outcomes. http://barnesclass.com/Learning-Outcomes-Reading.
DeleteAlong with this, we wrote reflections on KidBlog and participated in book talks and did oral presentations, called book commercials. All of this throughout a year, along with the complete immersion in books, turned my kids into amazing readers.
Thanks for the info Mark ... We chatted on Twitter a little about this ... @mwhitedg ... The old saying "the one who does most of the work does most of the learning" is appropriate here ... sometimes it is hard to see how to do that though. We are also using RAZ Kids to provide my beginning readers lots of material to devour, yet provide me some data on how and what they are doing ...
ReplyDeleteI have been looking really hard at assessment lately and it seems that when we shift away from a "completion" mindset we get more focused on growth and the power of revisions ... Grades drive us to completion ... feedback drives us to growth ... seems like a bit of a quantum leap though at times ... working at it ... :)