Why Are We Still Doing That?

Positive Alternatives to Problematic Teaching Practices

Pérsida Himmele, William Himmele

• Éditeur: ASCD
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781416630531
• Sujet: Didattica
• Sous-sujet: Metodi di insegnamento

Old habits die hard, particularly when they are part of the unexamined norms of schooling. In Why Are We Still Doing That?, the best-selling authors of Total Participation Techniques lead a teacher-positive, empathetic inquiry into 16 common educational practices that can undermine student learning: * Round robin reading
* Teaching to learning styles
* Homework as the default
* Using interim assessments as "formative assessments"
* Asking, "Does everybody understand?"
* Traditional Q&A
* Data-driven everything
* Publicly displayed data walls
* Content breadth over depth
* Adhering to rigid pacing guides
* Teaching to test samplers
* An analysis-only approach to reading
* Elevating English language arts and mathematics over all other subjects
* Ignoring curriculum experts
* Using behavior charts
* Withholding recess

Pérsida Himmele and William Himmele provide straightforward, research-informed accounts of what makes each of these practices problematic. And they share easy-to-implement instructional, assessment, and classroom management strategies you can use to meet the goals those problematic practices are intended to achieve... without the downsides or the damage.

This book is for K–12 teachers at all stages of their career, including preservice teachers who will be educating the next generation of students. Read it and reflect on it with colleagues. Use it to focus your own inquiry into what is and is not working for your students and to replace ineffective and potentially harmful habits with more positive and effective ones.

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Chapter 1

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Round Robin Reading

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You've gotta ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?"

Dirty Harry, 1971

Imagine that you are a developing or struggling reader sitting in a classroom, surrounded by more proficient readers. Like many days, today's agenda calls for a round robin reading of a piece of text—material that you're encountering for the very first time.

To mix things up, today the teacher is using "popcorn reading," a variation of round robin in which she randomly calls on students to read. This twist is meant to keep you focused; unlike regular round robin, you can't count the paragraphs and the number of students in your row, identify which piece you'll be reading, and practice it in your mind ahead of time. You're supposed to just listen, absorb, and be ready. So there you are, a developing reader who struggles with fluency, waiting to have the spotlight turned on you. How are you feeling? How do you think you'll do? Will you be lucky and get words that are familiar—the ones that you know how to pronounce? Will you sound confident? Will you look "stupid"?

The teacher calls your name. You're up. Your best friend sitting next to you graciously points to the passage that you're supposed to read. You begin haltingly, and soon a couple of students are jumping in to "help" you any time you stumble. The teacher strolls the rows of desks, interrupting to correct a word or two as you read. She means well and is focused on providing support and making notes to herself, but you're only thinking about one thing: judgment. "OK, thank you," she says, and calls on the next reader.

You did it. What are you thinking about? Are you thinking about the content of the text you just read or that your successor is currently reading? And how are you feeling? Proud? Humiliated? More important, how are you feeling, right now, about the overall act of reading?

Though it felt like an eternity, your reading lasted less than one minute. You read a total of 37 words during the 28 minutes your class spent on this round robin reading activity. Although the instructional intent was to build your fluency and comprehension, we're going to argue that not only did this round robin reading experience do little to help you become a better reader, it may actually have hindered your literacy progress and put an additional barrier between you and the content. Round robin reading is ineffective on multiple counts, including that it can feel like a pointless slog. But its greatest indictment is that, for the most vulnerable students, it is far from being harmless.

What's Problematic About Round Robin Reading?

Round robin's specific forms vary, but it always involves the teacher calling on students to read out loud, one by one, in front of their peers.

Much of why teachers use round robin boils down to their desire to have more control over the learning. If only one student is reading at a time, the teacher can focus completely on that one student. Middle and high school teachers will sometimes require round robin reading in order to be certain that students have actually read the text and be able to jump in and ensure comprehension of the text. But more often than not, the opposite of what is intended occurs. Fluency suffers, comprehension suffers, and students do not typically follow along with the text being read (Fair & Combs, 2011).

It is safe to say that if reading held a party, round robin would not be invited. Few teaching practices have been so maligned by experts yet embraced by teachers as much as this longtime staple of American classrooms. We earned our first graduate degrees about three decades ago, and even then, the limited research on this strategy suggested that it was ineffective in promoting literacy. Our university professors flat-out warned us it could sabotage the rest of our reading instruction. And yet, we have seen round robin reading practiced consistently and widely over the past 30 years. In a 2009 study, Ash and colleagues found that over half of K–8 teachers in U.S. schools self-reported using round robin reading as an instructional practice. We have found in our own research that the strategy still enjoys a prominent place in classrooms (Himmele et al., 2021). We still see it in our own visits to schools—as recently as yesterday.

Indeed, despite round robin's continued popularity, it is very much a pariah among literacy experts. Richard Allington, former president of the International Literacy Association and prolific literacy author, writes that the strategy fosters "interruptive behavior, and under those conditions, readers begin to read more slowly and tentatively" (Allington, 2013, p. 527). "Studies suggest that much of the time devoted to round robin reading is wasted in terms of student learning," notes Timothy Shanahan, former president of the International Literacy Association and one of the lead writers for the National Reading Panel (Shanahan, 2005, p. 18). Literacy expert Michael Opitz and reading fluency expert Timothy Rasinski write that "although oral reading can be beneficial, round robin reading is not. It more often prohibits rather than facilitates the ability to read" (Opitz & Rasinski, 2008, p. 12). Reading Hall of Fame inductee D. Ray Reutzel and prolific reading expert Robert Cooter Jr. (2019) offer a clear verdict: "Our advice? Never use round robin in your classroom" (p. 201).

Among the first researchers to question the validity of round robin reading was Dolores Durkin. In the 1970s, Durkin studied the use of this strategy in 3rd through 6th grade social studies lessons, finding that teachers spent between 8 and 10 percent of these lessons in round robin reading with little to no focus on comprehension. Her research confirmed that round robin reading was not enough to help students successfully read social studies textbooks. "[N]o teacher saw the social studies period as a time to help with reading," she wrote. "Children who could not read the textbook were expected to learn the content from round robin reading of the text by better readers, and from films and filmstrips" (Durkin, 1978–79, p. 502).

By the mid-1990s, round robin reading was being referred to as "outmoded" (Harris & Hodges, 1995) despite remaining very much present in everyday practice.

Putting Round Robin to the Test

Because there are so few studies directly addressing the effectiveness of round robin reading, we decided to conduct a little research of our own by subjecting 115 senior-level undergraduates in five different teacher education courses to a round robin reading activity—with a twist: to prevent unintentionally embarrassing anyone, we secretly preselected 20 students to call upon and allowed them to practice reading the text beforehand. And even though we were working with college-age students, we had to agree to numerous risk-reduction factors before receiving approval to conduct this activity (Himmele et al., 2021). Afterward, we asked all students to complete anonymous surveys describing the experience and explaining any memories of round robin reading in the classroom that the exercise brought up. Here are a few of the themes that emerged, along with illustrative statements from the students:

• Attempts to count ahead: "The strongest memory is in 10th grade ancient mythology, when we read The Odyssey. I remember counting people and trying to figure out what paragraph I would have to read."
• Feeling like a "bad reader": "My most vivid memory is from 7th grade English. I wasn't a great reader, so I would get hung up on words in front of everyone, and the teacher would wait a few seconds to help."
• Bullying, embarrassment, or loss of status: "One kid in my class would struggle a lot, take a while to read, and then after a while some kids in my class would grunt when he got called on—they'd be like, 'Ughhhh'—and he already wouldn't want to read."
• Emotional stress that manifests physically: "The anxiety I was feeling caused my brain to shut down. I felt worried that I wouldn't be able to pronounce any of the words. I started to sweat, higher heart rate, increased breathing."
• Anxiety-induced confusion: "I would get so stressed that I would not even comprehend any material. I was so worried about messing up. I would try to figure out what paragraph I had to read and practice it in my head."

We strongly believe that one of the quickest ways to make students hate the act of reading is to subject them to this barrage of negative emotions when they try to read.

Academic Drawbacks

One of the main criticisms of round robin reading is that it is inefficient, with students spending most of their time waiting and getting very little time to actually read. "Let's face it," writes Shanahan (2019), "in a 30-minute social studies lesson [using round robin reading], each kid would typically get to read a minute or less. That means social studies would add fewer than three hours of reading time per year—not enough to help the kids" (para. 32). The problem extends to working with small groups. Allington (2013) notes how much more efficient silent reading is than round robin reading: "In silent reading activity, everyone is engaged in reading, so during the same period of time, children engaged in silent reading read three to five times as much text as during a round robin reading event" (pp. 526–527).

In addition to being inefficient, round robin reading does not appear to support comprehension (Durkin, 1978–79; Eldredge et al., 1996). As Durkin (1981) observed in her study of the strategy, "Even though able students followed along, it was often ineffective. They stumbled over hard-to-pronounce words, read in a monotone, and were difficult to hear" (p. 454). This lack of fluency makes comprehension a challenge, and it's one reason Shanahan (2014) notes that "a reading comprehension lesson, except with the youngest children, should emphasize silent reading—and lots of it" (p. 187).

"Active interactive strategic processes are critically necessary to the development of reading comprehension," writes the National Reading Panel (2000, p. 41); these "active interactive strategic processes" are absent during round robin reading. There is a schedule to be maintained, and before a student has time to even process what they read aloud (assuming they were focusing on meaning), the next student is called upon to read. Indeed, round robin reading "actively damages learners' comprehension of text and delays their fluency development" (Ash et al., 2009, p. 88).

For the round robin activity we conducted with our students, we chose to read a selection from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The selection was complex, but we had introduced it in an assigned reading that touched on the concept of "listening objects." Following the exercise, when asked if they comprehended what they read, a full 74 percent of students reported that they hadn't. One student said, "I didn't remember or comprehend anything that was read because I was scanning for unknown words in case I was the next victim." This was a common theme. Another student shared, "I couldn't tell you what I read or was being read. I was just so focused on following along to be ready to read when I was called on." By contrast, only 20 percent of students reported they somewhat understood what was read. As one student said, "I feel like I understood most of what was being read, but I was worried that I was going to get called on, so I wasn't fully paying attention." Only five students (approximately 5 percent) said they understood what was read (Himmele et al., 2021).

Reading proficiency is complex. Consider the concepts of "automaticity" and "prosody." Automaticity refers to the effortless and accurate reading of words (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974), and prosody refers to the intonation, rhythm, and expression with which readers read. Together, automaticity and prosody combine to create reading fluency, one of the essential foundational skills for reading (Rasinski, 2012). Both skills also support (and are indicators of) reading comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000; Reutzel & Cooter, 2019; Shanahan, 2015). Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the skill of fluency was often measured using timed tests to record percentile ranks based on accuracy and reading speed. A child who flew past punctuation and barreled through sentences, reading without expression (indicative of a lack of comprehension), might thus be deemed fluent using such tests, which failed to take prosody into consideration. Partly due to this skewed emphasis on certain components of fluency (i.e., automaticity over prosody), many teachers have come to wrongly equate fluency with reading speed (Rasinski, 2011).

True reading fluency will always be an essential foundational skill for readers. "Less fluent readers struggle through text in a labored word-by-word manner," note Reutzel and Cooter (2019). "They focus most of their attention on decoding or figuring out how to pronounce words, so reading comprehension suffers" (p. 179). As Rasinski and Padak (2013) put it, if readers "have to use too much … cognitive energy to decode the words in text, they have little remaining for the more important task in reading—comprehension. These students are marked by their slow, laborious, staccato reading of texts" (pp. 2–3). Although oral reading usually supports fluency, Allington (2013) argues that round robin reading seems to have the opposite effect: "The interruptive round robin oral reading lesson fosters the dysfluency that typically marks the oral reading behaviors of struggling readers" (p. 527).

Emotional Drawbacks

For many students, adolescence is a time of heightened self-awareness. Most of us remember those socially awkward middle school years when we felt as though all eyes were on us, when even the slightest embarrassment suffered resulted in deep humiliation.

We recently spoke with an accomplished special education administrator who was close to retirement. He recounted one awful day during his middle school years when his teacher was using round robin reading, and he counted ahead to practice the paragraph that he would be assigned. As a socially awkward kid and a struggling reader, his hope was to minimize the shame of "performing" before an audience of unforgiving peers. What he hadn't counted on was that the student ahead of him would falter, and the teacher would assign him the task of finishing the section he hadn't known to practice. Panic descended. What would have normally, for him, been a halting attempt to read was now punctuated by overwhelming fear, and his performance showed it. "I'll never forget that day," he told us, 50 years later. He described it as one of the worst days in his schooling career. "I absolutely hate round robin reading," he told us. "Please tell teachers that it's past time to put that practice to rest."

There's no doubt about it: round robin reading can be profoundly humiliating to students, and especially to self-conscious adolescents. "Unfortunately, this approach only further alienates struggling readers and removes them from the learning experience," write Fair and Combs (2011). "These children will 'leave' the classroom, mentally, emotionally, and in some cases physically" (p. 226). Students who struggle with reading have little experience with the joys it can bring, meaning they lack the best incentive there is to keep trying and, thus, to become better at it.

The stress students experience during round robin reading serves to turn them off not just from reading but from deep...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Round Robin Reading
• Chapter 2. Teaching to Learning Styles
• Chapter 3. Homework as the Default
• Chapter 4. Formative Assessment Imposters
• Chapter 5. Standardized Test-Based Practices
• Chapter 6. Behavior Charts and Withholding Recess
• Conclusion
• References
• About the Authors
• Related ASCD Resources: Teaching
• Study Guide
• Copyright