Dead Lesson Routines for ELAR

Does the reading class routine look like this?

1. Teacher gives background powerpoint/lecture about culture and history.
2. Teacher activates schema and vocabulary for the text. Kids copy definitions and forget.
3. Kids read one at a time, or teacher reads, or a recording is played. (Notice the purposeful use of passive voice there.)
4. The teacher stops periodically and interrogates with leading and funneling questions.
5. Kids annotate the text. Or sleep. Or google the answers.
6. Kids take a multiple choice reading quiz to judge comprehension.
7. Sometimes they write a literary analysis essay.
8. The teacher complains about how these kids can't read or write.


Uhhh... Ew.

It sounds exactly like what Jennifer Gonzalez of Cult of Pedagogy was ranting about on Sunday. To Learn, Students Need to DO Something. 

No wonder kids hate to read. And no wonder they have nothing to write about. GEEZ!

Problem One: I tour schools and ask to look in the classrooms and bookrooms.  This is what I see. There are no books. In the bookroom, there are tattered sets of TKM and book sets with unbroken spines from the last textbook adoption. There are no contemporary texts. There are no diverse texts.

There is nothing to read, y'all. Unless you count NewsELA passages.

Solution One: Buy books kids want to read.

Problem Two: Administrators and teachers don't really know what else to do. And some believe, "My English classes looked like this, so by God these kids ought to comply." And then they blame the kids for being awful human beings: passive, apathetic and unmotivated, and ignorant.

But good teaching is about getting KIDS to do the work. Good literacy teaching is not about what the teacher is doing. And really - heresy to some so hang on - the ELAR classroom is not even about what we are reading. Effective literacy instruction is about how the teacher helps the KIDS do the work and the thinking about any text. Look at the left side of the TTESS Rubric if you need language to describe what this looks like.

Solution Two: Teachers need models of what classroom instruction could look like. And we have to do more than tell them to give kids choice and to implement "workshop." Most teachers don't know what that means. (And it certainly doesn't fit well in the linear lesson plan mandates, but that's a problem for another day.) What could/should the classroom routine look like? Teachers need sample design features that help them know what the sequences should/could look like in a 45 minute period with kids like theirs.

I've been collecting some options on workflowy.  Click the link to see them.

So. Ditch the dead  ELAR reading routine from the 19th century and pick something that might actually work. Even better, send me your ideas. I'll add them to the list.