Insight

News you can use

by Maisie McAdoo

Apr 13, 2006 11:32 AM

This month, Reality Check offers summaries of five articles from recent education publications that should be of practical use to people working in schools:

Spelling instruction passé? Hardly

Spelling instruction can be designed to help children become better readers, writes Louisa C. Moats, in “How Spelling Supports Reading — And Why It Is More Predictable and Regular Than You May Think,” in the Winter issue of the AFT’s American Educator.

Hasn’t Spell-Check made spelling skills unnecessary? Moats says that rudimentary spelling skills are insufficient to use a spell checker, and besides, those programs catch just 30-80 percent of misspellings (they miss “hear” vs. “here,” for example).

The article is especially rich in discussing the origins of English, its roots, prefixes and suffixes, and families of related words, all of which help students tackle new words with increased knowledge. The article also includes a grade-by-grade (K-7) guide to spelling instruction.

Moats advises teachers to focus on the ways in which English spelling is regular and predictable. The spelling of 84 percent of English words is mostly predictable, she says, and students can memorize the most common irregular words. Even with young children, instruction can go beyond just rules and be an exploration of language. Invented spelling is fine in writing exercises with young children, but children should be expected to correct errors on words they have already studied, Moats adds.

The full article is available in PDF format at www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter05-06/Moats.pdf.

Should high school teachers teach reading?

Results from an evaluation of the college-entrance ACT exams suggest they should.

In “Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals About College Readiness in Reading,” ACT says its 2005 tests showed only 51 percent of high school students are ready for college-level reading, the lowest rate in more than a decade. The organization also found more students are on track to college-reading readiness in 8th and 10th grades, but that they slip behind by 12th grade.

Where many of these students fall short is in their ability to comprehend complex texts, according to the report. Most can identify main ideas and supporting details, understand word meaning and generalizations and distinguish between literal and inferential content in text. But when text becomes more complicated and challenging, the differences emerge.

More boys than girls were not ready for college reading, and more students whose family income was $30,000 a year or less were behind the curve. Few states set standards for high school reading or differentiate between 9th- and 12th-grade standards, ACT says. In high schools, English and social studies teachers are most likely to teach complex reading skills and strategies.

Here’s what ACT recommends:

• Incorporate complex reading materials into your courses — all high school courses. Just the exposure helps student master more complex material in college.
• Teachers should explicitly teach reading strategies to master challenging text. (The Alliance for Excellent Education at www.all4ed.org is a good resource.)
• Schools should diagnose and address deficient high school readers.

Read the full report at www.act.org/path/policy/pdf/reading_report.pdf.

Teaching in high-needs schools

Whenever this topic comes up, it seems to deteriorate into blaming teachers and/or teacher unions. Either excellent teachers are selfishly fleeing high- needs schools, or their union is selfishly protecting seniority rights and harming kids. (Sound familiar?)

In “Every Child Deserves Our Best: Recommendations from North Carolina’s National Board Certified Teachers on How to Support and Staff High-Needs Schools,” teachers bring a breath of fresh, sensible air to this controversial subject. They say:

• Be sure that administrators in high-needs schools make use of the skills and knowledge of accomplished teachers and understand the importance of teacher leadership.
• Create opportunities for accomplished teachers to teach effectively in high-needs schools, including smaller class sizes, adequate supplies and books, and freedom to use research-based practices that go beyond scripted curricula. Would you send a surgeon into the operating room without a scalpel? Give these teachers uninterrupted common planning time to work with colleagues to analyze work, plan lessons and build relationships.
• Accomplished teachers can serve as mentors and coaches, but they themselves may need help in learning to address the cultural diversity of a high-needs student body.
• Create an array of incentives, above and beyond financial ones, to attract highly skilled teachers. These could include retention bonuses, relocation reimbursement, tuition-free advanced degrees, housing subsidies, state income tax credits, and state university scholarships for children of recruited and retained teachers.
• Eliminate the stigma of working in a low-performing school.

Read the whole report, or print it for your LIS, at www.teachingquality.org/pdfs/ncnbctrecs.pdf.

Homework, homework, homework

Drawing on the expertise of several New York City educators, Linda Darling-Hammond and Olivia Hill-Lynch, in the February issue of Educational Leadership, suggest some solutions to the perennial problems of homework in “If They’d Only Do Their Work!”

Students fail to do homework because they don’t really know how to do it well, they get little satisfaction from it, or sometimes they truly don’t have time, Deborah Meier, founder of Central Park East school in East Harlem, tells the writers. Some students are expressing despair of difficult home circumstances, difficult school circumstances or the tortuous struggle to reach adolescence.

The authors suggest that rather than automatically punish students by failing them when they don’t turn in their work, try some of these educators’ ideas:

• Ask yourself: Are the directions clear? Is the homework being collected and reviewed so students are getting immediate feedback?
• Start homework in class. It gets everyone going and lets the teacher observe to see where problems might arise.
• A homework workshop for teachers, where they share successful assignments, helped teachers at one New York City high school realize that homework success was often the result of group projects or classroom “team” activities.
• Students are most likely to complete homework that is actually used in class; for example, selecting a passage to read aloud the next day.

“The point is for the student to learn that it feels better to succeed than to fail,” one educator said.

There are more good ideas in this article: Read it online by going to www.ascd.org, then going to Publications, then Educational Leadership, then Archived Issues, and then February 2006.