Seeing Past the End of My Nose
Many teachers have kids practice with fluency passages and folders. Repeated reading helps kids increase their reading rates. Read too slow and comprehension suffers. On the flip side, reading too fast can do the same thing.
Something is missing here. Like most things, we stop too short with our instructional practices. We make student activities about doing stuff instead of doing stuff because there is a reason to do so. Fluency is no different. (Ask the kids: Why are we doing fluency practice?) And since fluency is now in our ELAR TEKS all the way up into 8th grade, we'd better get ahead of this before we institute classroom practices and routines (and add more tests) that do harm in the name of standards and assessment.
If we have kids practicing fluency passages and graphing their improvements with repeated readings - and that's all we are doing with it - we are teaching rote skills without meaning. Kind of like writing your spelling test words three times each in different colors. Might as well memorize a random list of phone numbers. It's a waste of time.
Experience It:
Read this article called Bad Dancers and time yourself. Give it your best shot with fluent expression and prosody.This passage has about 319 words. After 8th grade, reading this passage aloud should take a little less than two minutes to read aloud. How'd you do?
Fluency is a TOOL
Fluency is not just about how fast, how expressive, and how accurately you decode and phrase text. Instead, fluency is a TOOL that good readers use to help them make sense of text and monitor their comprehension.
Yes, fluency includes: rate, accuracy, expression, phrasing/prosody. But readers USE those four things for adjusting the reading performance: adjusting for purpose and genre, adjusting for decoding and comprehension, adjusting for silent, oral, or performance purposes that include the audience and the delivery of the message. But I think most classroom models for fluency only focus on the first four. If so, we divorce student from how fluency helps us make and communicate meaning. Fluency instruction must include a focus on making meaning, meatcognition, and conscious choices about what good reading requires. If we don't focus on fluency as a tool, then we make reading a mindless think about calling words correctly and quickly. Instead, we make reading about finishing. Fluency is supposed to be about understanding and using text for our purposes as readers and thinkers and doers.
Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark:
Let's go back to the passage I had you read about Bad Dancers. How we go about reading and approaching a text depends on the GENRE. Teachers tell me, "Oh, we do that. When they get their fluency passage, we tell them that it is expository or narrative." Really? How many times to you open an email and people start off telling you that they are writing to persuade you? How many times to the newspaper headlines and magazines start off by telling you that the text is expository? Never. You have to figure that out for yourself. At least you should.Sure, we need to do some explicit modeling with kids and teach them how a good reader goes about diffusing and reading against specific features in each genre. But at some point, kids need to be able to figure that out for themselves and decide how that needs to impact their reading, fluency rate, and comprehension. Fluency passages are the perfect place to practice those skills.
Fear of Impending Doom
Check out this set of bookmarks from Lead4Ward for elementary and secondary. Which of the genre bookmarks fit Bad Dancers?
When I discussed this with a group of teachers, they pulled out three different cards: Literary Nonfiction, Expository, and Persuasive. It was quite a discussion that had us re-entering and re-reading the text purposefully to determine which genre fit the best. Get this straight y'all. We were not merely passing our eyes over the text with the goal of reading it faster and without any decoding mistakes. We had a real reason to reread. Having kids reread stuff for no discernible purpose will NOT achieve our Literacy objectives. They might read faster, but they'll be bored as hell and no thinking will be involved. We're not in the robot business, y'all, yinz, you-uns, you guys, youse guys - regardless of the region you hail from. From which you hail. Whatever.
First of all, we realized that we read Bad Dancers the first time as if it were a narrative or literary nonfiction. Which means we really didn't "get" what the author wanted us to understand. As we looked for evidence in the text to justify our decisions, we realized the text didn't match our purpose or approach to reading it!
We zoned in on the Expository bookmark. (Might I mention that we won't be using that silly term in the new ELAR Standards? We'll call it Informational like the rest of the civilized world.) Soon, we realized that there were some nuanced features of persuasion that didn't match the formulaic way we teach kids to write persuasion with the thesis blatantly posed at the end of the first paragraph. (Bad Dancers isn't five-paragraph-blathering-nonsense either.)
It started to get scary...
...as we realized that the author had a clear perspective and bias about dancing
...as we realized that the author laid out a clear path of logic and reasoning
...as we made discerning distinctions about her opinions and facts
...as we juxtaposed the feasibility of accepting her ideas into our own lives
As we realized these things, we heard ominous music. What if the topic had been less innocuous and more insidious? Our approach to reading the text would have left our minds open to manipulation at worst and at risk for incorrectly answering multiple choice questions at the least.
I am stunned again by the moral imperative of our work and service as literacy professionals. We must go further than teaching kids to practice fluency as a rote and isolated skill divorced from meaning and thinking.
Probably preaching to the choir. So what can we do to beef up our fluency passage work? Because I'm not asking you to stop fluency like I am asking you to stop with the Spelling-Test-on-Friday nonsense.
As Plain as the Nose on my Face
The genre places demands on our fluency. When the teachers and I read the text again, we used the genre bookmarks to help us ask questions about the text to guide our more critical purposes for reading the second time. We realized...
....a need to make a decision about what we believe about bad dancers. Are there bad dancers in the world or not?
....a need to see if this idea is feasible: In the way we see and live life, do we realistically see the truth in the author's perspective? What would this idea add or take away from our life choices?
...a need to trace the author's path of logic and reasoning purposefully laid out for us. How is the author presenting the ideas? Are there any red flags (logical fallacies) that we should note?
...a need to see the author's perspectives, facts, opinions, and biases. Do we know the differences between those things? Which facts warrant further research to verify? What hidden biases and motives might be driving the author to communicate these points? How do I respond emotionally and intellectually to these assertions?
Don't we want students to read like that?
When Throwing a Monkey Wrench into the Fray is a Good Thing
Fluency practice isn't necessarily a bad thing. But we definitely need to throw a monkey wrench into what most of us are doing with fluency practice. We need to interrupt the mindlessness. Here's a suggestion for a more literate, principled approach.
- Have students read the fluency passage appropriate for their independent reading level to their reading partner. Have the partner time the reading. Perhaps you could even use the Synth App to record, share, and respond to each other. Consider graphing the first rate if that really matters. I'm starting to wonder if graphing the speed/rate is sending the wrong message about why we do this work.
- Students then pull out the genre bookmarks to discuss and decide which genre the text best fits. They should highlight text features and evidence to justify their decisions. (If you want to have a quick check for students working independently, write the genre on the back of the passage. They can self-check and adjust before moving on to the next step.
- The Lead4Ward genre bookmarks list the demands each genre places on the astute reader. We can use those demand to guide our purposes for reading! Students discuss those purposes and turn them into questions to guide their reading. (You can use the ones we composed from Bad Dancers listed in the previous section.)
- Student reread the text again, using their questions to guide their purpose for reading. Students time the reading and chart the results. They should change their rate at times to make sure they are attending to sections of the text that warrant closer inspection. (Of course, this will have to be modeled during Read Alouds and Shared Reading time in the Reading Workshop block.) Students can discuss the questions and ideas with their reading partners.
- Students conduct a third re-reading to practice the basic elements of fluency (the first four) and to bump up their reading rates up to grade level expectations. They can chart and compare the results over the three readings. Or you can throw those out the window and let the kids create a Reader's Theatre, Choral Reading, or Dramatic Reading of the text. You might even have the kids complete the final reading at the guided reading table to offer final support and feedback for where they could head next or to resolve problems that remain.
- With their partners or during the whole class debrief at the end of Reading Workshop, discuss the experience. In your second reading, what adjustments did you make? Why? What impact did that have about your understanding and reasoning about the text?
Additional Resources:
Some more
resources:
Fluency
Handouts from the TEA Reading to Learn Academy: These handouts show you
the following things:
- How to set up fluency
folders with graphs and handouts
- How to set goals for fluency
- How to add a comprehension
element to fluency practice
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