The Reading Academy - Instruction

How the Reading Academy Work Supports Teaching in All Contents

The most important thing we can say about the Reading Academies is that they are not in conflict with or a replacement for our instructional model: CISD READS & WRITES. In fact, the work a campus does in the Academy is designed to compliment and enrich existing instructional practices.

The Reading Academies and Workshop Teaching

You're probably familiar with this visual representation of a day in workshop. As you know, teaching this way involves more than just delivering a mini-lesson and setting students free to read. It takes careful coordination of small group work, scheduling of conferences and ongoing assessment to make a workshop really grow individual readers. If you've ever worked with a struggling reader in small group and wondered "How do I help this child?" or taught a shared read and thought, "They've got this! But what's the next step?" the Reading Academy content will certainly appeal to you.

(And, by the way, who hasn't asked these questions?)

We see the work of the Academy as building on the framework of the reading workshop. Once a framework is in place, you do the detail work. Most of us were never taught how to intervene when a child comes to us lacking phonological awareness. Many of us struggle with the "visual" part of MSV cuing - helping students tap into phonics knowledge to get unstuck. The Academy provides an opportunity for us to develop and deepen this knowledge and immediately put it into practice.

Hollis Scarborough developed the Reading Rope to communicate the complexity of teaching children how to read. You'll notice the interconnectedness of the eight elements to the left. Without a strong basis in word recognition skills, high-level comprehension will not occur. Students who struggle to read independently, for instance, often need support in pre- or partial-alphabetic reading. This is a fancy way of saying they need support in phonological and phonemic awareness and likely phonics. At the same time, print concepts, grammar, features of genre, inferential thinking, and other comprehension skills have to be explicitly taught and practiced with real books. At its best, literacy instruction is a seamless blend of language comprehension and word recognition.

So what does this mean for day to day teaching? It means integrating all of our new learning into the workshop framework we already have in place. While all eight components of Scarborough's Rope are covered in the Academy, the strands that comprise Word Recognition will receive heavier attention. And this makes sense given the complexity of each strand and the relative lack of training most of us have in these areas.

The likelihood is you'll find ways to integrate your new learning into conferences, guided reading, shared reading and elsewhere. We're not restructuring our day so much as we're arming ourselves with new knowledge and a skill-set to better meet the needs of our readers.

The Reading Academies Across Contents

If you teach more than reading and writing, you've undoubtedly seen the impact reading has on other contents. Teaching reading takes a village. It isn't simply that literacy instruction is complex, but reinforcing reading skills can feel like a constant uphill battle. So much of what we do in language arts is recursive - that is, we expose students to a skill and then revisit and solidify that skill in a variety of ways. This goes to show how painstaking growing a reader can be.

As a practical matter, having a small range of instructional strategies at the ready can pay big dividends. In his New Art and Science of Teaching, Robert Marzano discusses the importance of teachers utilizing a repertoire of strategies across contents. The Reading Academies ask all K-3 teachers to develop a shared understanding of literacy instruction. The goal is to create a common instructional language that readers will encounter in all contents, not only as a way to remediate when they struggle to read but also as a way to reinforce the direct instruction of skills occurring in language arts. Teachers on departmentalized teams will play a vital role in this initiative.

The Reading Academies and the TEKS

The modules developed for the Reading Academy cover a broad range of literacy content, from language acquisition to advanced forms of comprehension and analysis. As you see in the graphic to the right, the work of the Academies mirrors the seven basic strands of the TEKS. In the modules, a heavier dose of attention is paid to foundational language skills as they not only underlie the comprehension abilities readers develop over time, but foundational skills also tend to be discrete and often prove challenging to introduce instructionally. Little formal time is devoted in instructional schedules to phonological awareness or print concepts, and this isn't necessarily a mistake. Ideally, these foundational skills are integrated throughout a reader's and writer's workshop to build competency and stress transference.

This integration is a delicate balance. Marzano and Simms found that "for students who have not acquired phonological recoding abilities, attempting to engage in independent reading ... simply wastes time that they need in phonics-focused teacher-directed small group instruction." And, conversely, "students with strong vocabulary scores [make] greater gains when they spend more time in meaning-focused activities, such as sustained independent silent reading." In other words, not all TEKS carry equal weight for all students. Much of it depends on timing and the development of the reader relative to grade-level expectations. Regardless, the Reading Academy aims to equip teachers with instructional strategies that benefit readers at the different stages of their development.

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