Rationale
I have been teaching in urban schools for five years. In that time I have taught kindergarten and first grade. I have seen how difficult the task of teaching students to read can be. It is simply not possible to make up for every shortcoming our students may have in the allotted time of a school year. If we are going to successfully bridge the achievement gap, standards and assessments are simply not enough. We must create self-starting learners if we realistically expect our students succeed in these circumstances. The best way to create autodidactic learners in early childhood that I have seen is simply to cultivate a love of reading and a love of books in our students.
This type of passion is, of course, fairly difficult to monitor. It is one of many wonderfully intangible results of good teaching that are impossible for standard assessments to address. At the same time it is probably the single most crucial quality we can instill in our students at an early age. If a love of literacy is nurtured it will sustain them as learners for their whole lives.
Although it is difficult to show when this quality has emerged in our students, early childhood teachers everywhere will be able give you instances of the moment when they were able to see it in their students. The moment when a child chooses to read during free choice time. A student delighting over finding a favorite read aloud book in the library. A class that begs you to read a story over and over. These moments are not measurable with data, but they are the true testaments as to whether or not we early childhood educators are doing our jobs.
This past year was the first in my experience in which I was asked to find concrete ways to teach story concepts and track my students' progress in grasping those concepts. Once required to do this, I realized that I hadn't really been as concerned with this aspect of their literacy as I should have been. I realized that I'd thought that exposing them to a variety of books and discussing these using key questions was enough to make my students understand them. I started to involve my students in some pre-assessments and realized that exposing them to a variety of books and discussing them was indeed a wonderful way to help them to understand how literature works. I also realized, however, that I needed to find more ways to help my students learn these concepts, and to produce written evidence of their comprehension.
This unit is an attempt to bring meaningful teaching of literary concepts into the
early childhood classroom. In the state tests in both states in which I have taught, the students are required to understand literary concepts such as main idea and themes fairly thoroughly. They are required to show their understanding not only by answering multiple-choice questions but also in their own writing. An emphasis has been placed on reading scores on these standardized tests in deciding whether or not a school is successful. Because of this, requirements to teach to the test have trickled down to first grade and even Kindergarten.
This does not have to be a negative development. When the standards that are written to address these tests are examined, one can see that they require the teaching of crucial and relevant elements of literature. The challenge in this new wave of "teaching to the test" is in merging the required standards and assessments into meaningful, engaging instruction.
One current form of assessment that my school system has brought in to improve student performance is called Data Team. The system was designed by a man named Doug Reeves, whose goal was to have teachers be more collaborative with assessments, and to have ongoing assessment be more clear and accurate. My school implemented this assessment system this year, and my experience with it reflected both the pitfalls of teaching to the test and the success of clear and meaningful ongoing assessment.
The process allows teachers to break down standards to identify what the examiners are really asking for. It also allows teachers to work together as a team to find ways to judge how far along the students have come in understanding the concepts required to meet the standard they are focusing on. After teachers have had their students take part in a pre-assessment, the teachers look at the results and discuss strategies to improve student performance. After implementing these strategies, teachers once again assess their students to monitor their progress. Because this was a new process, we were always looking for ways to make it more meaningful during these team meetings. Collaborating on specific literacy standards was extremely useful for improving class performance. However, I found that the work that was required for these assessments often had the downside that can come from teaching to the test. The instruction was often unrelated to any other instruction in the classroom. It became extra work, something that could be overwhelming in a full and sometimes scripted curriculum. Time was taken away from regular classroom instruction to perform pre-tests and post-tests, and we often had trouble finding appropriate materials to use for assessing standards that had really been created to address the needs of students who were in older grades and required to take the state's standardized tests. The process, while useful, began to be mechanical and was void of any enthusiasm for learning. Working on these data teams, I realized that they could be extremely useful for monitoring our students' progress, as well as finding ways to collaborate with colleagues. I also realized that in order to be worthwhile they needed to be worked into curriculum in a meaningful way. The assessments needed to be part of everyday activities in the classroom rather than a separate entity. I also decided to try to incorporate instilling a love of literature into the process by using storybooks that seemed to appeal to my students time and again.
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