AUSSIE

Blog entry posted September 12th, 2008 by Maria Utevsky

Bienvenidos a Costa Rica! and welcome to the IRA 22^nd World Congress on Reading, “Reading in a Diverse World” held this year in San Jose. I feel very privileged to have been one of the over 1450 people from 37 countries (mostly from the Americas, but with generous sprinklings from Oceania and Eastern Europe) who attended. It was especially compelling to be in the company of so many dedicated people who work in the most challenging of circumstances and for whom a trip abroad was a huge personal sacrifice (e.g., teachers in Panama earn $500 a month). Folks traveled on buses from every Central American country, bunked in together in distant hotels and were the most avid participants I’ve ever seen at a conference. Every session was well-attended and presenters held over time to explore and expand on new ideas. The presenters themselves seemed energized by working with such enthusiastic learners and gave it their all. I wish you all could have experienced this unique perspective on the work we do, and I guess that is the most fundamental reason for taking part in conferences.

Among the sessions I attended was one with Ray Reutzel, whom you’ll all be familiar with from his frequent articles in The Reading Teacher. Ray has been researching the causes and consequences of the demise of Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) in classrooms since the National Reading Panel (NRP) declared it unuseful in 2000. He and his team have been working hard to redesign the instructional practice conditions of SSR to deal affirmatively with the NRP criticisms, hoping to revive it but with effective classroom libraries organized by genre and levels to obviate “browser overload,” individual monitoring conferences with running records, and sets of comprehension questions geared specifically for narrative or expository texts. The conference must include goal setting and a choice of response to literature. My initial reaction was something like, ‘so what’s new?’ but in the context of this conference, and surrounded by hundreds of teachers who began teaching recently and who have no idea of the importance of readers becoming self-regulated, independent comprehenders of diverse genres, it was new and important for them and a good reminder for me.

Katherine Au and company presented the major session on professional development design, based on their research in “schools that beat the odds.” Their contention is that we actually know very well what the essential characteristics of those schools are (setting a high bar for high levels of thinking, instruction occurring around challenging problems set in authentic contexts, and coherent whole school implementation and commitment to evidence-based results); what we need to focus on now is how do we get there??? Their model is called Standards Based Change (SBC) and they conceive of it as “second generation of research on school change.” They are mainly looking at distributed leadership through the lens of a to do list of how to build a strong professional learning community, including: developing ownership, a ‘gallery walk’ that bridges whole school community and student achievement, curriculum coherence, time, building capacity – essentially fidelity to the process of change over the long haul with clear targets and strong structures. I could go on and on, but you can get a much clearer picture at http://litd.psch.uic.edu/pr

David Hornsby with colleagues from North Carolina, Missouri and Colorado gave a great session on “Supporting reading comprehension without leaving hands-on science and writing behind.” It began with the traditional incomprehensible science text that has everyone feeling ignorant and incapable of answering anything but the most literal comprehension questions, followed by a series of hands-on experiments and an opportunity to work with colleagues and write about the experiences, and the culminating ‘magic’ of increased comprehension. It was a powerful demonstration of how integrating reading, writing and science supports learners in comprehending their world and how effective teachers of literacy are also effective teachers of content.

I attended other shorter sessions on conversation scaffolding and teaching literacy with culturally responsive activities, but the greatest thrill of the entire conference were the sessions with the pillars of whole language learning – the names that jumped off my bookshelves and who I read with awe 20 years ago – Ken and Yetta Goodman and Emilia Ferreiro. They are still with us folks – feisty, committed, unwavering voices that rise above political frays and serve as a guide and reminder of why we do this work.

The next World Congress is in Auckland in 2010 – I hope to see you there!

Maria Utevsky, AUSSIE Education Director