Philosophy of Literacy. on a daily basis. My students will be motivated, fluent, and flexible because I will make my reading

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1 Balanced Literacy Summer 2010 Philosophy of Literacy My personal philosophy on literacy in the classroom is to develop good readers who actively interact and make connections with the text in order to gain in-depth comprehension of what they read on a daily basis. My students will be motivated, fluent, and flexible because I will make my reading instruction effective my incorporating the six Ts (time, texts, teach, talk, tasks, and test) that were research and developed by Richard L. Allington, Ph.D. By basing my reading instruction on the six Ts, my students will value reading and choose to read for a variety of purposes in and out of the classroom in their lifelong pursuit of literacy. Time According to Allington (2002), effective teachers routinely had children actually reading and writing for as much as half of the school day. As I reflect on how much actually reading and writing time in allocated in my classroom, I realized I don t allocate enough time in my daily schedule in order to teach reading effectively as I could. It will be my goal to increase the amount of time spent on reading and writing in my classroom so that my students become even better readers and writers. I will increase the time of my reading instruction by integrating more of my reading and writing instruction into the social studies and science curriculum. By integrating my reading and writing instruction into other subject areas I hope to increase the amount of time that I spend on teaching literacy; therefore, making it more effective. This will also produce more time for my students to actually read and write and make

2 them realize that reading and writing does not just happen at school during reading class. I want them to understand and believe learning to read and write happens in every subject in and out of school. Texts If children are to read a lot throughout the school day, they will need a rich supply of books they can actually read (Allington, 2002). That is why I have worked and continue to work on supplying my students with a classroom library of leveled books. By providing my students with different level of books, I will help meet the needs of my students individual reading abilities. When considering the reading abilities and needs of my students, it is important to realize that all readers differ considerably in their interests, aptitudes, personalities, backgrounds, and learning styles. Their varied needs can be addressed successfully by having enormous quantities of successful reading to become independent, proficient readers (Allington, 2002). By providing my students with level books, especially my lowerachieving students, they will have more opportunities to have success at reading and grow to enjoy it. No child who spends 80 percent of his or her instructional time in texts that are inappropriately difficult will make much progress academically (Allington, 2002). Teach Obviously, part of good teaching is planning instructional time allocations and selecting appropriate books (Allington, 2002). By selecting appropriate books and modeling appropriate reading skills to my students, it will help them self-monitor their own reading when they are engaged with reading text. It will also provide the modeling and support they need to succeed and gradually release that responsibility to my students (Cunningham & Allington, 2011). I will release the responsibility to my students by using the approach: 1) I do, you watch, 2) I do, you help, 3) You do, I watch, and 4) You do, I help. By using this approach to teaching literacy in my classroom will make sure that I do not use the traditional way of teaching literacy by assigning text to read and coming up with an assessment. This

3 traditional approach does not engage the student in what they are reading. This approach only tells me what students already know how to engage with the text and will not teach the students who don t know how to engage with text. For children to come to own and use powerful reading and writing strategies independently, I must first engage them by using the gradual release of responsibility approach to literacy. I will use this approach daily; especially, during read aloud time, guided reading and writing workshop. Talk Exemplary teachers encouraged, modeled, and support lots of talk across the school day (Allington, 2002). I will use talk by giving my students instructional strategies that promote reflection, discussion, and critical thinking. I will do this by asking questions that are more conversational than interrogational. I can do this by asking my student open ended questions instead of close ended questions that only encourage a single correct answers dictated by the story. I can teach my students to talk by encouraging them to use prior knowledge to connect what they read to what they already know (Learning Point Associates, 2004). Having students make predictions will help keep them on task when talking and will encourage them to call up prior knowledge and make connections (Cunningham & Allington, 2011). I can have my students make predications during read aloud or guided reading time and encourage them to tell me why they believe what is going to happen next in a story. I can also promote talk by encouraging student to share books that they are reading with other students in the class. This will help focus the talk because it will allow students to persuade other students to read a book that they might not otherwise read. If I model and provide my students with the skills on how to talk about text, it will further help engage them in their daily reading.

4 Tasks According to Allington (2002), another characteristic of exemplary teachers are the ones who use longer assignments and reduced the emphasis on filling the day with multiple, shorter tasks. Instead of teaching literacy through small isolated task such as worksheets, I can help foster literacy by using integrated units of study based on projects that last for more than one day and can be selected by the students needs and interest. By using a project base approach to literacy and expanding it into multiple days of instruction, it will allow my students to develop their reading strategies and skills within meaningful contexts, rather than isolation. According to Turner (as citied in Allington, 2002), choice of this sort has been documented to lead to greater student ownership of the work and greater engagement with the work. Assigning literacy tasks across the curriculum will allow my student to respond to literature and text in a variety of ways outside of just reading and writing class alone. Test Finally, teachers who evaluated student work based more on effort than improvement meant that all students had a chance at earning good grades, regardless of their achievement levels (Allington, 2002). By focusing and grading my students on their effort rather than on achievement levels will help motivate my developing readers and lower achieving students. It will help to keep them motivated because these students will have the potency to keep improving and making gains because providing students who are experiencing reading difficulties with clear goals for a comprehension task and then giving them feedback on the progress they are making can lead to increased self-efficacy and greater use of comprehension strategies according to Schunk (as citied in Alvermann, 2001). If I base all my grading on achievement levels, the highest level of achievement might not be possible to reach for all my students no matter how hard they try, especially the developing and lower achieving students. Therefore, they will not put forth their best effort because they know they can not

5 accomplish such tasks or goals because it is out of their reach. Thus, it will only teach my developing readers and lower achieving the self-fulfilling prophecy: Achievement based grading where the best performances get the best grades operates to foster classrooms where no one works very hard. The higher-achieving students don t have to put forth much effort to rank well and the lower-achieving students soon realize that even working hard doesn t produce performances that compare well to those of higher-achieving students. (Allington, 2002) Therefore, it is important that I let my students know I am looking for effort when it comes to improving in reading and writing rather than achievement alone. I can help foster effort in my all my students by using a rubric-based evaluation scheme to assign grades because I can show them where they started and where they ended up, instead of just giving them an achievement based grade. This will help my students focus on their effort because they will be able to see their gains instead of just an achievement grade. Using rubric-based grading and assessment will mean that I will be unlikely to drift towards the use of packaged test-preparation activities in the hopes that such activities will make up for lesseffective teaching throughout the year (Allington, 2002). It is my philosophy that relying on boxed programs to enhance my students learning will teach my students how to improve their achievement on test only and not improve their actual reading and writing skills like grades based on effort. Using a box program is like teaching to the test, and therefore is less effective in teaching students to foster literacy skills they need to use in their everyday lives.

6 Summary In order for literacy instruction to be effective, it is my philosophy that read and writing needs to be taught across the curriculum. It will not be taught in isolation. Reading and writing will be integrated across the curriculum everyday in every subject. Using the six Ts as research by Dr. Richard L. Allington in all subject content areas will help foster literacy in my students and will help my students gain confidence in them as readers and writers. Works Citied Allington, R. L. (2002). What I've learned about effective reading instruction from a decade of studying exemplary elementary classroom teachers. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(10), Alvermann, D. E. (2001). Effective literacy instruction for adolescents. Executive Summary and Paper Commissioned by the National Reading Conference. Chicago, IL: National Reading Conference. Cunningham, P. M., & Allington, R. L. (2011). Classroom that works: they can all read and write. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Learning Point Associates. (2004). A Closer look at the five essential components of effective reading instruction: a review of scientifically based reading research for teachers. Retrieved from