Teaching Reading

The article we are referring to is: Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies in Reading Extensions for Kindergarten, First Grade, and High School.

It can be found at: www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/reading/peer_assisted.html

We have noticed that at first it is not boring to the high readers, but can be frustrating to the lower readers. One solution could be to pair a high reader with a low reader and have them complete the reading assignments together. Results of this have been that the low readers step up to the challenge and the high reader learn how to work with their peers.

Thank you for answering our email. We tend to agree with you. The goal is to bring up the lower ability student. Raising expectations for all students is what our goal should be. One concern that we must also address is the pairing of the students. If the students have “issues” with each other, learning will not take place. Pairing can be multi-faceted. Gen. ed-sped; gened-gened; sped-sped. It is all about inclusion in the classroom and how your class is set-up.

One example where we see this work is by also combining grade levels. Most 5th graders read better than most 1st graders. The fifth graders can become reading buddies to the younger students. This helps the older students learn that younger students look up to them in more than just academics. The younger students can expand the selection of books that are read to them and model their reading behavior based on the older students.

There are two real potential problems with this approach. First, is “learning to work wtih other students” an appropriate goal for the high level learner for the reading class? Or should s/he have reading goals of her own, whether or not s/he is bored?

Secondly, having the high-level reader help the low-level reader figure out what the reading is can hardly be confused with the instruction these students need to fill in their gaps. If it’s an occasional activity so that lower-level readers can stretch themselves and higher-level readers can “learn to work with other students” it could have benefits; if it’s a big part of the lessons it’s a cop-out substitute for actually teaching reading.

Not that I have opinions about this of course — I just get to try to teach the college kids reading at a third grade level the skills they didn’t get earlier.

Depending in your objective. Clearly many skills must be taught at a student’s instructional level, not frustration or independent. Sometimes we can argue that good students can “model” good reading for less capable students.

As far as my daughter, who was forced into this because it’s popular these days, it meant that she did the entire project; some of the other kids tried to watch and learn but let’s face it, at age 8 she wasn’t a teacher and couldn’t help them; others just goofed off. This kind of group learning most often goes that way; the rich get richer, ie those who can already read get all the benefit out of whatever learning activity there is, and the poor get poorer, ie the non-readers waste yet more valuable learning time hanging around.

and the fifth graders can also teach mistakes, misconceptions, and bad habits. Since most fifth-graders don’t have a big picture view of reading and academic work, they will almost always try to teach shortcuts that do far more harm than good.

Once upon a time, I was a bored 6th grader (age-wise should have been in 5th grade) who found reading easy (tested 10th grade that year). My teacher felt that I should not be allowed to read freely at my level once I had completed the classwork (SRA Reading ‘Digests’, if memory serves) and decided I ought to mark the books of the ‘lesser’ readers in my group, then go over their answers with them to ‘help them’. I paid BIGTIME on the playground for this — especially since I was already socially challenged, being a full year or more younger than the others. You might imagine from my comments that I have a personal prejudice against ‘peer assisted’ methods of teaching. You’re right.

As Victoria says, this sort of thing being now ‘the vogue’, my son has suffered from it as well. Unfortunately, he did NOT respond to ‘whole language’, ‘look and say’, and a first grade classroom heavy on ‘peer assisted’ learning, where most papers were marked by passing them to the left, and experienced ‘reading failure’ in Grade 1. It took his summer resource teacher only four weeks of Spalding to get him reading, but it has taken the better part of 2 years to undo the damage done by his peer, ‘Laura’, who made it quite clear what she thought of his academic skills: ‘Stupid, Baby, Dummy, can’t even do what my baby sister can do…’. Well, at least he learned SOMETHING that year…I guess :(!

Anything that puts children at risk for reading failure MORE at risk should be approached with EXTREME caution. And the kiddoes at the ‘top’ of the class are still kiddoes, and worthy of greatest care and respect, though we ‘dyslexic moms’ have to remind ourselves of that fact quite often. I realize that the general task given to teachers today is equivalent to being asked to dig ditches with one arm and no shovel, (sometimes in concrete!) but if we are assigning busy work we should CALL it busywork…not ‘teaching’.

Just my opinion…two ‘experience stories’, from both sides of the coin, but I hope you eager teachers-to-be will take them to heart…best wishes,
Elizabeth

Wouldn’t teacher be more “capable” of “modeling”? It seems to me that it is easier for the strugeling students to model after a teacher than to model after peers. Especially the bright ones LDs might feel quite intimidated by the fact that their friends are reading so well while they are just “decoding” with so much effort.

Couldn’t agree more.

Even a good student is still just a student, and is likely to model some errors; and almost certain to model some undesirable shortcuts and to explain things unclearly.

See the post by Elizabeth above.