Feedback and Teaching Reading

Problems With Teaching


One study related to this book says, "teaching is providing the procedural means for a student's participation in a community task so that the student can move from being a novice to being an expert."  As teachers, we need to help our students understand the contexts of the material that they are reading so that they can apply it to their lives and enjoy the text more.  Unfortunately, in this study, only one of the boys experienced this in school from a teacher.  What needs to change?  As teachers, taking an interest in our students can be viewed as added work that is unnecessary.  But what is our goal as teachers?  We certainly don't do it for the money, so why be lazy about helping our students?  I feel like we are abusing our positions sometimes by being lazy and not creating the best learning environment for our students.  


Feedback


This study looks at how boys read and why they read, looking at the aspect of feedback.  For boys, reading extended texts like novels does not provide quick and clean feedback, which they like the most  Reading for information, however fulfills this need, and therefore boys are more likely to read it.  It's interesting because almost all of the boys, except two,  disliked reading novels.  They would rather read magazines, sports articles, even newspapers.  They had a purpose for reading and something to gain from it.  How do we help boys get something out of an assigned novel?  If we learn about our students and explain how this book can apply to their lives, I think that it would help.  


Only one student in the study said that his teacher helped point him down the right path for reading.  By doing this, we see that, like Gee's article, the teacher was guiding her reading apprentice.  She showed him how to approach different texts and what he could gain from reading them.  This was HUGE for the student.  He had never liked reading before, but after she helped him, he loved it.  What would our state be like if we did this with every student and every teacher?  I talked about the boys needing to feel competent in things in order to be willing to accomplish them in an earlier post.  The one student that had this experience with his teacher felt like he had control of the situation and that he was competent in his reading because he knew how to approach it.  He didn't feel as though he was overmatched by the material, rather that he was being challenged.  If we increase confidence in our students, I think it would go a long way.