An end to the reading wars?

NEA Today, Jan 2000 by Kapinus, Barbara

Finally, after years of hard work and consensus building, a concrete, practical set of standards for teaching reading and writing.

Don't be put off by the word "standards" in the title of the new Reading & Writing Grade by Grade: Primary Literacy Standards for kindergarten through Third Grade.

This important new resource isn't about the old sort of reading standards, guidelines that were often either too broad to offer teachers any real guidance or so specific they left teachers no room for exercising good judgment. The standards in Reading & Writing, Grade by Grade, by contrast, are actually useful-and even lively.

Created by 22 reading experts assembled by the National Center on Education and the Economy and the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center, these standards come illustrated with vivid examples of the reading and writing real students should be able to do, at each level from K through three.

And, to help make these exampies even more vivid, two CDs are packaged with each book. The CDs feature videos that show what children who are reading proficiently at different grade levels sound like.

The examples of student work that Reading & Writing Grade by Grade uses to illustrate proficiency aren't limited to end-of-grade achievement. Some of the book's student samples can help track student growth over the course of a a year, others over four years.

The "Primary Literacy Standards" in Reading & Writing Grade by Grade range over three areas:

Print-Sound Code, including knowledge of letters and their sounds, phonemic awareness, reading words.

Getting the Meaning, including accuracy and fluency, self-monitoring and self-correcting strategies.

Reading Habits, which, among other points, emphasize the importance of Having children read a lot every day.

The book features similar standards for writing, and all these standards are ideal resources for planning instruction. But the standards can be put to other uses as well. Imagine a meeting of a gradelevel teacher team. The faculty first look at the samples of student work from the book or the videos, then compare the samples to the actual work of their students.

What fascinating insights might result! The comparisons might lead to significant changes in classroom instruction strategies--or confirm what teachers see as good practice.

At any rate, such discussions would certainly constitute an improvement over what too often passes for professional development in reading, herding staff into a room to hear an "expert" who has never seen them-much less their students-before.

Parents are also likely to appreciate Reading & Writing Grade by Grade. Imagine showing parents of a second grader a video of what a proficient second grade reader sounds like. Picture parents sitting with teachers, comparing the work of their children to the examples of acceptable work in the book.

These new standards also clearly indicate the conditions necessary for reading success. The standards, for instance, note that libraries of books need to be readily available in every primary classroom, at levels that appeal to students with wideranging abilities and backgrounds.

Students, the standards add, need time with books. Kids need to be reading or be read to, on a regular basis, and, to help this process along, Reading & Writing Grade by Grade conveniently lists both books for reading aloud and books easy for students to read at each primary grade level. What a wonderful piece of information for teachers to hand to a principal-along with a purchase order request!

The standards in Reading & Writing Grade by Grade, please note, have the blessing of both sides in the reading wars, with support from partisans in both the phonics and whole language camps. That may be the best part of all.

-Barbara Kapinus

Order Reading & Writing Grade b) Grade at www.ncee.org. For additional information and phone orders, call 1/888-361-6233.

The cost: $45, plus s&h.