1. We genuinely want to listen to all of our students read aloud. Fluency is important. Accuracy, automaticity, and prosody are necessary.
2. Lesson planning is challenging and time consuming work. Teachers need to cover the standards, develop relevant ideas in all subject areas, prepare for standardized testing, and make everything exciting. Sometimes we just need to have an easy way to read that material whole group.
3. It's what we grew up with and we turned out okay!
Let's blow these thoughts out of the water! First, round robin reading is not going to improve fluency. If I dedicate twenty minutes to round robin reading, my struggling reader may read aloud one minute of that. Instead of listening to the material the other nineteen minutes, that struggling reader has been panicked about the upcoming turn, or same struggling reader has tuned out because their turn has been completed. Second, it sometimes can be tiring thinking of one more way to get content across, while providing relevant reading practice. I’m going to give you some alternatives at the end of this post. Finally, I did participate in round robin reading and survived. I’m an excellent reader. (I even have old report cards to prove it.) Of course, there was little difference between myself and the struggling reader during round robin reading. While waiting for my turn, I strategically figured out when I would read. After my turn I tuned the others out and either read ahead or daydreamed. Below I’ve listed some resources to get this out of your classroom. Please get rid of this “worst practice”. This is one robin you have permission to eliminate!
Echo Reading
Partner Reading
Jigsaw Reading
Shared Reading
Choral Reading
Silent Reading (IF the material is at or below their reading level!)
Guided Small Group Reading
Whisper Reading
Recorded Texts
Read Aloud
Readers Theater
Reading Conference
Trio Reading
Recommended Reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment