The Elephant in the Room
This is how the overemphasis on testing is playing a major part in killing off readers in classrooms.
What is the "Elephant in the Room"?
What is the "Bridge to Prison" cartoon?
Teachers subject students repeatedly to treatments that are counterproductive to developing book lovers. And they do it book after book, year after year. Teachers rationalize their behavior by believing they must prepare students to perform well at test time. This also contributes to the destruction of life-long readers.
What is "The Overteaching of Academic Texts"?
The perfect in between of overteaching and underteaching.
What is the “Sweet Spot”?
This is the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.
What is "Readicide"?
This is when teachers are given so much information to teach at once for testing that they don’t get to cover all the topics in depth.
What is shallow testing?
This activity allows students an opportunity to build their prior knowledge and background.
What is "SSR"?
Gallagher talks about the best type of _______. They must have interesting books to read, a time to read the books inside of school, a place to read their books
What are the three ingredients of building a reader?
Gallager writes “(1) to introduce my students to books that are a shade too hard for them and (2) to use my expertise to help them navigate these texts in a way that brings value to their reading experience.” (Pg. 94)
How to achieve the “Sweet Spot”?
An endless cycle that prioritizes test scores instead of helping struggling readers.
What is the "Paige Paradox"?
Teachers are being ___________ for teaching the state/federally mandated exams that will be given out in the spring. It’s an unfortunate situation because teachers are being told to teach a boatload of information and in turn they’re spewing out so much information at their students.
What is being “held responsible” for?
This is a solution to having a "dearth" of reading materials in school.
What is the "Book Flood Zone"?
To mix up reading for students, half of their reading needs to be academic and the other half recreational. By emphasizing recreational reading does not mean to undersell the value of academic texts.
What is The 50/50 Approach?
This method is when a student rereads aspects of a text for a deeper understanding of the value of a text.
What is Second Draft Reading?
These are jumping-off points for having book conferences with students. They contain just enough accountability to encourage reading but not too much to ruin the reading experience.
What is… a One-Pager?
This takes from ______ for students to be able to recall all of the information being tossed at them every year. It takes this long for the curriculum being tossed at both teachers and students and both parties are losing here.
What is K-22?
"[B]y kindergarten, a gap of 32 million words already separates some children in linguistically impoverished homes from their more stimulated peers. In other words, in some environments the average young middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than the young underprivileged child by age five."
What is "Word Poverty"?
From its first time being mentioned in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s text, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. This term is known as “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter…”
What is "Reading Flow"?
This method is a pre reading activity where the teacher provides important information about the book to spark student interest.
What is framing?
-Schools value the development of test-takers more than they value the development of readers
-Schools are limiting authentic reading experiences
-Teachers are overteaching books
-Teachers are underteaching books
What are the four components of Readicide?
This creates shallow teaching and learning, and it is heavily emphasized by this kind of cumulative assessment. It doesn't help readers who are struggling, but it ensures that they will continue to struggle.
What is test prepping?
These are the three leading problems to this: 1) Lack of interesting reading materials in our schools; 2) Many schools have removed novels and other longer challenging works to provide teachers and students with more test preparation time; and 3) students aren’t doing enough reading in school.
What is an "Endangered Mind"?
“Tsunami” curricular guides: They direct teachers to chop up novels into so many pieces that novels are destroyed. Worse, they often gloss over, or ignore, the imaginative rehearsals these book's offer. It creates instruction that values the trivial at the expense of the meaningful
What is the Over-analysis of Books?
This method is used when the teacher first assigns the large parts of text for the first draft of reading and small parts of text for closer reading during second draft reading.
What is “Big Chunk, Little Chunk”?
It's an obsessive test-driven curriculum leading students to readicide. It is the "remarkable" progress Texas schools made when educational carrots and sticks were attached to high-stakes, multiple-choice reading exams.
What is the "Texas Miracle"?