Variability Not Disability: Struggling Readers in a Workshop Classroom - Softcover

Roller, Cathy M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872071421 ISBN 13: 9780872071421

Publisher: Intl Literacy Assn, 1996

Synopsis

Shifting the focus to ability rather than disability, this inspirational account provides readers with a new perspective and new ideas on the challenging, often frustrating, task of finding an instructional approach that is flexible enough to accommodate the wide variance in students' abilities. Author Cathy Roller lays out a practical, day-to-day instructional framework for working with struggling readers in a workshop setting. She explains the research supporting workshop-style instruction and shares work examples based on 6 years' experience as a faculty director of the University of Iowa's summer reading program.

About this title

About the Author

Cathy M. Roller is a Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA.

From the Back Cover

This book is the story of the author's experiences at the University of Iowa summer reading program from 1988 to 1994 and the children she teaches, who are all viewed as "reading disabled." The children range in age from 8 to 12 years and in reading ability from recognizing fewer than 15 words to reading at a late second or early third grade level. The summer reading program, which operates as a workshop classroom, emphasizes children's abilities and assumes they can do many things, including learn to read.

Roller describes how to implement a workshop format for instruction, which is flexible enough to accommodate the wide variability in students' abilities. She explains the research supporting this type of instruction, includes chapters on direct instruction and writing, and outlines her record-keeping system. "Variability Not Disability" will appeal to elementary and middle school classroom teachers and is also timely and important work for reading specialists, special education teachers, and others who work with struggling readers and writers.

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From the Foreword

"Variability Not Disability: Struggling Readers in a Workshop Classroom" is about enabling reading growth and ability, the ultimate goal of reading diagnosis, reading clinics, and all reading teachers. Numerous books detail how to identify disabled readers, choose and interpret tests, select instruction materials, write reports, and so forth, yet few of them mark out a practical, day-to-day instructional framework for working with struggling readers. Here is one that does just that. In your hands is a most sensible and clear guide to helping these readers become independent. As one reading teacher to another, this book is a find and a boon.

Historically, the focus of remediation has been one of separating out and starting over. A reading specialist's job is seen as searching out children who fail and re-instructing-repeating particularly those early identified bits and pieces of reading, the "skills." Remedial clinics also habitually lag behind any changes made in the rest of reading practice. The majority of our reading fellowship may progress in thought and action, but remedial instruction remains static. With some wonderful exceptions, reading clinics are the most conservative element in the reading community. Curiously, in being so, conservative clinics rely on exactly what research says not to: focus on behavior, rules, and rote repetition. The attitudes, interests, and personal learning timeframes of struggling readers are not taken into consideration, nor are their surrounding family influences. Readers' understanding of their own process and progress is ignored. And the children, the struggling readers for whom good instruction can make the most difference, become less able. Rather than accepting this deficit model we are so accustomed to, Roller provides us with a fresh way of thinking. Her approach to remedial instruction focuses on seeking out, reinforcing, and building on the capability of struggling readers. She asks us to look for what they can do instead of what they can't.

At the same time that we depend on an insufficient model to instruct struggling readers, the economic reality is that more children are being labeled as special learners and less money for separate instruction from specialized teachers is available. The diagnosis and instruction of struggling readers is now being left on the insufficiently prepared shoulders of classroom teachers. In her book, Roller adapts the reading and writing workshop approach practiced in many classrooms and makes it usable for any teacher of struggling readers, whether in clinic or classroom.

Written from the insights of her own clinic experiences and the conviction that struggling readers are like all other readers, Roller convinces us that, given the appropriate context, struggling readers are just as capable of seeking the knowledge and making the connections needed to solve the puzzle of reading as their more proficient classmates. Based on a teaching approach that honors children's ability, competence, and intellect, this method frees them to become self-motivating, self-directing, and thus, independent readers. It recognizes that struggling readers are not "dis" -anything, that they are as able as any other. It challenges each one of us to make the conceptualization of our classrooms and clinics more genuine and our instruction more realistic.

Edition details

• Publisher: Intl Literacy Assn
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0872071421
• ISBN 13: 9780872071421
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160