My Research on Ability Grouping in Reading Classrooms

I'm putting the final touches on some ethnographic research I've been conducting this semester in conjunction with a doctoral class. The study was about the effects of ability grouping in reading on students self-perception and teacher curricular choice. The study has been very interesting and eye opening.

Of course I went into the study with pre-conceived notions about homogeneous groupings for reading. I currently teach a "high" reading group, while there is also a "medium" and "low" group. I am not a fan of the format, but because that's the way it is at my school, I of course go with the flow and make the best of it.

My study has taught me quite about about how fully aware of levels the students how, how they view themselves, and how they are either more or less motivated depending on where they are and if they think they can do something to move up a level (for those in the lower levels).

Also, as part of this study, I took a look at teacher curricular choices depending upon group level taught. Again I've learned quite a bit. It's obvious that the "high" groups in many cases feel more freedom in terms of what books they choose (for example in my own experience, I've read books this year such as The Lightning Thief, The House of the Scorpion, and The Little Prince, among others), how they approach the work load and how students are motivated from a teacher perspective.

I will be submitting my final paper next week, not for publishing but for grading (welcome to grad school). I will hopefully be posting it here on the blog shortly thereafter to great fanfare!

Expert Teachers, the #1 Reason Kids Succeed

Recently I've been reading some research that pertains to the effects on student achievement of pre-packaged programs and curriculum designs that are being sold to schools across the world. Program A claims to raise student achievement higher and faster than ever before, while Program B makes the same claims. Sometimes these programs do make positive gains on achievement (usually measured by standardized and/or norm referenced tests).

The first few years of my doctoral studies have been focused on looking deeper at the negative aspects of business models in schools, of pre-packaged programs (Success For All and DNG to name a few), and of what actually has the most profound impact on student learning in the long term. It's a hard thing to study, because as a teacher-researcher I've decried standardized testing as inherently unequal and inaccurate. Of course the current studies, some of the best I've ever read, agree with this, but go a few steps further.

To put it quite simply, these articles, that I won't name here yet, because that's not the point of my discussion here, claim that the single biggest factor on student learning is quality teaching. Of course, quality teaching is almost impossible to define because it means different things to different students.

This is something I've tried to keep in mind every day when I enter the classroom. There's 28 young kids in my classroom, and what works for him may not work for her and so on. In the current era of test reform, rigorous political factors, and money being put at a higher level of importance than kids, it's hard for teachers to ever reach the level of teaching students, they're so focused on teaching content and teaching tests that they are afraid that actually *gasp* teaching to their students needs will be seen as subversive. I can confirm this, in my short five-year career, I've focused on teaching students and have been considered quite the rebel because of this.

I hope to continue looking at and pegging down indicators of great teaching, and hopefully researching it more in depth some day. If we can define it, if we can prove that it serves the best interests of children and scores them proficient on those ridiculous standardized tests, there might be a compromise out there that actually hands the reins of education to teachers while keeping the politicians at bay.

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History, by Art Spiegelman

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History has had a reputation since the late 1970's as being one of the hardest hitting graphic novels ever written. Art Spiegelman wrote Maus as a biography of his father, Vladek Spiegelman, and did it through very straightforward but well drawn and written metaphor.

The metaphors I'm talking about are Spiegelman's portrayal of the Jewish as mice, the Nazi's as dangerous looking cats, of Russians as noble looking dogs, and of the Polish as pigs. Spiegelman himself described this metaphor as stupid but necessary, which you can see by watching the 1 minute and 5 second clip at the end of this review.

You have to be cautious when teaching this book in class, cautious to make sure you approach it correctly. Right now, I am using this book in my 5th grade class, and feel that my students are getting quite a lot out of it. We're using the book as a discussion on the holocaust, something that we studied in depth a little over a month ago, and we're also using it as a discussion on literary and visual devices, and how they work together to make a graphic novel. Students are working on their own autobiographical graphic novel as well, attempting to use the same visual cell types and word play used in Maus.

Graphic novels are still considered fringe in terms of their value in the classroom. Many teachers, parents, and literacy experts argue that graphic novels do nothing more than give students something they want (comic books) other than something they need (a valuable, learning literacy experience). I have found graphic novels to be valuable, when considering that, on top of the words on the page, students have to understand the immediate connection between words and pictures.

Maus is a great story, it's one of my all-time favorite reads, and considering that I didn't read it for the first time until earlier this year, that means that, as an adult, it's one of my favorite reads. I am currently doing research on the book, and am teaching it in my class. I will provide updates on both of those things as they move along over the next few weeks. But for now, I would consider reading Maus I (and II), and seeing if you think it would be a valuable classroom experience.

Pleasure Reading and My Boring Research

I'm doing some classroom based research for a graduate course right now, actually I'm putting the finishing touches on the study, but the point of it is to try to better understand how No Child Left Behind and the political pressures have affected the pleasure of reading for students and how they perceive themselves as successful learners.

It's been real interesting, and oddly enough, I'm not totally surprised by the findings. I'm looking at things from a few different angles, including socio-economic status and how it unfolds regarding literary success, and how reading level influences the enjoyment one gets from reading.

Of course, there's millions of teachers out there who know the answer to those questions, but I am tying them further in to No Child Left Behind. One of the more telling articles I came across was actually in The Washington Post and is nearly three years old. That article is titled Odds Stacked Against Pleasure Reading and in it, high school students talk about how much they enjoy reading and how much they hate 'reading class' at school. It's so true, and it's something I think about everyday.