Promising Practices for Urban Reading Instruction

by Mason, Pamela A.; Schumm/IRA, Jeanne Shay

• ISBN13: 9780131536838
• ISBN10: 0131536834
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-01-01
• Publisher: Prentice Hall

Summary

For courses in Urban Literacy and Reading. As the reading profession faces the challenge of high-stakes testing and standards-based curricula, it is essential that administrators, teachers, and teacher educators who plan and implement reading programs in urban settings have a professional development resource that speaks directly to urban education and diversity. This collection is that resource, showing what works-or what has the promise of working-in urban settings.

Table of Contents

Children Have a Right to Appropriate Earlyreadinginstruction Based on their Individual Needs

GoodReadingInstruction is More Important Than Who Provides the Instruction or Where it Takes Place

Talking the Walk: Children Reading Urban Environmental Print

Early Literacy for Inner-City Children: The Effects of Reading and Writing Interventions in English and Spanish During the Preschool years

Children Have a Right to Reading Instruction that Builds both the Skill and the Desire to Read Increasingly Complex Materials

A Comparison of Inner-City Childrenrsquo;s Interpretations of Reading and Writing Instruction in the Early Grades in Skills-Based and Whole Language Classrooms

Breaking Down Barriers That Disenfranchise African-American Adolescent Readers in Low-Level Tracks

Children Have a Right to Well-Prepared Teachers Who Keep their Skills Up to Date Through Effective Professional Development

Cultural Attitudes TowardReading: Implications for Teachers of ESL/Bilingual Readers

Know Thyself and Understand Others

Children Have a Right to Access a Wide Variety of Books and Otherreadingmaterial in Classroom, School, and Community Libraries

3.6 Minutes Per Day: The Scarcity of Informational Texts in First Grade

African-American Childrenrsquo;s Literature That Helps Students Find Themselves: Selection Guidelines for Grades K-3

Children Have a Right to Reading Assessment that Identifies their Strengths as Well as their Needs and Involves them in Making Decisions about their Own Learning

The Evils of the Use of IQ Tests to Define Learning Disabilities in First and Second-Language Learners

Three Paradigms of Assessment: Measurement, Procedure, and Inquiry

Children Who are Struggling Withreadinghave a Right to Receive Intensive Instruction from Professionals Specificall

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Tuesday nights seem somewhat empty now. For months, members of the International Reading Association (IRA) Urban Diversity Initiatives Commission held weekly conference calls to discuss our commission "charges," one of which was to recommend and/or create professional development resources to impact urban education and diversity. To respond to this charge, the commission decided to develop a book. Like most IRA commissions and committees, our work is accomplished with the efforts of volunteer IRA members representing different backgrounds and experiences working long distance with short timelines. What united our commission was a common desire to develop a resource that would "feed the hunger" of administrators, teachers, and teacher educators working in urban settings. Administrators and teachers who plan and implement reading programs in urban settings are hungry to know what works--or at least what has promise for working. Teacher educators who plan and implement professional development in reading share this hunger.Promising Practices for Urban Reading Instructionrepresents the Urban Diversity Initiatives Commission's first step in meeting this hunger--an appetizer if you will. The importance of the work of the Urban Diversity Initiatives Commission is particularly acute as the reading profession faces the challenge of high-stakes testing and standards-based curricula. As Darling-Hammond and Falk (1997) put it, Depending on how standards are shaped and used, either they could support more ambitious teaching and greater levels of success for all students or they could serve to create higher rates of failure for those who are already least well served by the education system. (p. 191) As we pondered our charges and the challenges that face our profession, the commission's weekly conversations led to four major decisions that shaped the design of this volume. The first decision was to take a look at where the International Reading Association is as a professional organization. Nearly two thirds of all children in the United States live in urban settings. Many of these children live in poverty and face the challenge of learning to read in cultural and linguistic environments that are unfamiliar. What has the Association done to meet this need? In recent years, the Association has published increasing numbers of articles related to urban education and cultural and linguistic diversity. We decided that as a starting point our publication would draw primarily from IRA peer-reviewed publications and would provide the reader with a collection of articles that represent promising practices. We also decided to include an annotated bibliography with a larger range of IRA books and articles related to urban issues (see Appendix B). Now to the second decision: how best to identify and organize potential articles. We decided that the framework for the volume would be the IRA position statementMaking a Difference Means Making It Different. Honoring Children's Rights to Excellent Reading Instruction.In this publication, the Association declares that it is time to build reading programs on a set of comprehensive principles that honor children's rights to excellent reading instruction and identifies 10 specific principles that are the right of every child. How to make those rights a reality for children who attend overcrowded urban schools, for children who do not have access to technology, for children of poverty with limited family resources, and for children of cultural and linguistic backgrounds that are different from the mainstream are the challenges for educating students in the new millennium. The United States, its educational system, and its professional organizations have a moral obligation to make those rights a reality for all children in this country and beyond. We decided to make this volume a first step in identifying promising practice