Shadow

Stacey Anderton, a teacher at Saegertown Junior-Senior High School, Meadville, PA, wrote in to protest an earlier article critisizing NCLB.

Meadville Tribune - LOCAL COLUMN: Teachers, students demoralized? Local school says ‘No!’

As an award-winning teacher myself, I read with dismay Miller’s account of the teacher who wept because his ability to teach had been undermined by the “punitive regime” which had “foisted” this NCLB legislation upon the nation’s schools. While it is always sad to hear of teachers choosing to leave the profession, I can honestly say that my own teaching has been informed, enhanced and energized by NCLB.

what interested me was how she described how she taught before NCLB:

Five years ago, I was unaware that many of my students did not have the skills and strategies to understand the reading I was assigning to them. They all learned to read in elementary school, didn’t they? Of course, I was disappointed when they failed my reading quizzes on “The Scarlet Letter” and sat mute in my classroom during discussions of the reading, but I was teaching the way I had been taught myself. I was reflecting what I had learned in my education classes. I felt confident that those students who were interested or “trying” were getting it. As for the others, I rationalized that they were choosing to do nothing. They had a right to fail.

"They had a right to fail". Horrifying, isn’t it? And clueless about teaching as a profession. Then how did she learn to teach? Through NCLB, apparently:

When testing and accountability measures were introduced, I understood that my philosophy would have to change. My students would all take these assessments, and we would all be held accountable for the results. In a short time, NCLB convinced me that I would have to exhaust every option I could find to give them the reading skills they would need to be successful in life.

 Here’s her self-reflection, and perception of others as well:

Looking at my own practices, I realized that I had been teaching around the books, assigning pages, asking questions, and then answering them for the students and telling them what the book said. They didn’t know what to do with the text, and I wasn’t helping them gain the skills they needed.

Fortunately, other staff members in my building were reaching similar conclusions. We started talking about reading strategies and how to improve students’ ability to understand and use what they read.

The agent of change, interestingly, is reading books like:

And so I began to research adolescent literacy. Through books like “Yellow Brick Roads” by Janet Allen and “When Kids Can’t Read, What Teachers Can Do” by Kylene Beers, I started to understand that all students (and all readers in general) experience reading challenges. Whether they have always been struggling readers or they are advanced academic students encountering Nathaniel Hawthorne for the first time, they all need to be taught how to cope with and understand text.

So what did NCLB do to change her teaching behavior? I guess two things:

1. Realizing that there is a moral responsibility to ensure every child in her class learns
2. Piquing her interests in reading something relevant to her profession

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Teaching, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.