Effective reading instruction

Heather, Tina and I discussed the articles for this week. I really enjoyed reading the articles and then our discussion about the articles. The first thing we all said was important from Dr. Allington's article is that he stated that expertise matters. This important point seems to have been lost in education thought for the past few decades. We all said that the 6 T's were important and liked how he made points about each. We noted that for Time, many teachers have students doing other "stuff" during a 90 minute reading block. Very little time is actually spent reading. Texts must be books the kids can actually read and understand I think Heather made the point that we have come a long way with our selection of texts. Teaching must be more than just assign and assess. Effective teachers gave explicit demonstrations and modeling. I admitted there were times in my teaching career that I was guilty of just assigning and assessing. We all agreed that the end of the article was important where Dr. Allington makes the point that in highly effective classrooms there is little test prep work. He states that it seems that less effective teachers don't know what to do and thus hope the test prep material will make up for less than effective teaching.
The Valencia and Buly article was interesting. We all agreed that too many decisions are based on one test score. Tina said she really enjoyed the analogy of the fever just being a symptom just like failing a TCAP test is a symptom of what is going on in schools. Heather talked about the different tests that were administered to get a better picture of the child and how one is able to better design instruction for those students. I wondered how they had time to administer all these tests to the students. I have administered the Woodcock Reading Mastery test, and it can take about 45 minutes per student in kindergarten and first grade. I liked how the students were put into clusters for instruction.
Both articles were interesting, but I enjoyed Dr. Allington's more...maybe because I am also reading his book in the book club and had many of those thoughts on my mind already.