Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests

by Calkins, Lucy McCormick

• ISBN13: 9780325000008
• ISBN10: 032500000X
• Edition: Teacher
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-05-13
• Publisher: Heinemann

Summary

This book reflects the authors' belief that in order to be less victimized by tests, we need to be more knowledgeable about them.

Author Biography

LUCY CALKINS is founding director of the Teachers College Writing Project, a coalition of teachers, teacher-administrators, professors and writers, which provides professional sustenance and hope--roots and wings--to literacy educators across the country. Her celebrated Heinemann publications include: Lessons From a Child (1983),Living Between the Lines (with Shelley Harwayne, 1990), and The Art of Teaching Writing (1986,1994). Ms. Calkins has also developed The Writing Workshop videotape (produced by Shelley Harwayne and Alex Mitchell) and has written The Writing Workshop (with Shelley Harwayne, 1987) to accompany the videotape. Lucy Calkins is an active participant in Heinemann's Professional Development Services through Heinemann Workshops.KATE MONTGOMERY teaches reading and writing in Harlem, New York. Prior to this, she was a Peace Corps literacy educator in Kenya and teacher of English in Czechoslovakia. Kate has been a lead researcher in all of the Teachers College Reading Project's work in New York City schools and has played a major role in shaping the Project's thinking about the teaching of reading.Through her work with the Children's Defense Fund in Washington D.C. and her years of upper elementary school teaching at the Bronx New School, DONNA SANTMAN has come to believe that teaching and advocacy are intertwined. As a staff-developer with the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Donna leads a Schools-for-All-Readers initiative. She also leads think tanks and institutes on topics such as working with struggling and strong readers, and holding children accountable for doing their best work.BEVERLY FALK is an associate professor at the School of Education, City College of New York. She has been a teacher of early childhood through graduate education courses, the founder and principal of a New York City public elementary school, a district administrator, a consultant to schools, districts, and states, and the Associate Director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching (NCREST) at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is also the creator of The Early Literacy Profile and coauthor of Authentic Assessment in Action (with Linda Darling-Hammond and Jacqueline Ancess, Teachers College Press)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vi
Part I: Confronting the Tests
The Challenge	1	(10)
Learning Enough to Talk Back to the Tests	11	(20)
Part II: Teaching Reading in the Shadow of Standardized Tests
When a Concern for Scores Drives the Curriculum	31	(18)
The Overlap of Good Teaching and Good Test Scores	49	(16)
Part III: A Curriculum for Test Preparation
Rethinking Test Preparation	65	(11)
Reading the Test Passages	76	(18)
Navigating the Formats of Tests	94	(11)
Mastering the Tricks and Avoiding the Traps	105	(18)
The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day	123	(14)
Part IV: The Politics of Testing: A Guide to Survival
The Politics of Reading Scores and the Community	137	(27)
Taking Our Place at the Policy Table	164	(19)
Glossary	183	(2)
Suggested Readings	185	(3)
References	188	(4)
Index	192