For the past 19 years, I have been learning how to be a reading teacher. About 4 years into my career, I was trained to be a Literacy Collaborative coach. I’ve written about this training before and how it changed the course of my career and made teaching so much fun. After my training, I felt like I truly understood how to teach reading and I had a deep understanding of the reading and writing process. I was so happy to get to help other teachers learn the things that I had learned in my training. I really wanted teaching to be as enjoyable for others as it was for me.
In January of last year we started looking more closely at certain data that we honestly had discounted before. We dove into the phonemic awareness and phonics standards, we looked at DIBELS data and we started asking some different questions. From these conversations we began implementing a new phonemic awareness curriculum in K, 1 and 2. And, just like any good data collection, what we learned started to make us ask even more questions. Now we continuing to ask more questions about the way we teach reading and I AM UNCOMFORTABLE! I mean I am REALLY, REALLY UNCOMFORTABLE but I love it! When I was presented with differing ideas about how to teach reading I knew that I had two choices. Choice one was to BCD and stay in my comfort zone. Choice two was to jump in feet first and swim around in the unknown. If you haven't noticed, I chose choice two and I thank you all for coming along on this journey with me. My job right now is to question our practices, collect data and help all of us draw conclusions about how we can be better. One of the things that helped me realize that I need to rethink my philosophy on teaching reading is this podcast called at a Loss for Words. Here is my advice-before you listen, grab a notebook, a pencil (and maybe a barf bag). Do not come to any conclusions until you’ve listened to the whole thing…maybe twice. Then, come talk to me about it. Happy listening and get ready to be UNCOMFORTABLE just like me.
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