"Tonight, on Fluency Idol!"

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In searching for an article from the journal, The Reading Teacher to read, I happened upon the perfect topic for this class, so naturally, it was an easy decision. I picked this article, “Fluency Idol: Using Pop-Culture to Engage Students and Boost Fluency Skills” by Kristine M. Calo, Taylor Woolard-Ferguson, and Ellen Koitz because I could tell just from the title that it would be a 100% match for what we are studying. It turns out it was exactly like I thought it would be- The Poetry Academy! I remember how brilliant I thought The Poetry Academy article we read was as a way to encourage fluency, and so stumbling upon this, I imagined I would think very much the same (which I did).

So where did this idea come from? The article points out that fluency has long been high up on the list of things that will make students better readers. Even the Common Core Standards recognize fluency as “A foundational skill necessary for children to become successful readers,” so teachers are really starting to see its necessity. There has also been research done showing that the best way to aid students’ fluency is to integrate different approaches- hearing something read, repeated reading, supportive responses, and oral practice. Does all of this sound familiar from The Poetry Academy? Poetry, coincidentally, plays a large role in Fluency Idol, as that’s what the teacher who started it recommends for the students to practice and compete with. Fluency Idol originates in a 2^nd grade classroom, where the idea was to “Build on the students’ love of pop-culture while looking to encourage oral performance in a new and different way.” That seems like a very solid plan to me.

So how does it work? Here are the main steps:

Monday
o   Teacher and students pick out individual poems to work on that week
Tuesday-Thursday
o   Students practice their poem at home, using family as an audience
o   Students practice with partners in class
o   Students practice with the teacher to receive feedback on progress
Friday
o   Three students are chosen to perform
o   They have a toy microphone
o   Teacher records so students and parents can review later
o   Class votes in a secret ballot to determine the winner
o   All three students receive a certificate for achievements

Is it successful? This second grade teacher found her students really enjoyed Fluency Idol, getting excited for the competitions on Fridays and really showing improvement from practicing with each other and at home. Another program decided to try this concept to see if it could work to increase their students’ literacies as well. This was a summer program for 23 K-5^th grade students who were below their reading levels. Different days of this program, students had the opportunity to read with clinicians/teachers, each other, and even therapy dogs (the students really seemed to be calmed by and enjoy the dogs’ presence). Students proceeded just like the 2^nd grade classroom in picking poems and preparing them for the final competition. On the last day of the summer program, they had their big Fluency Idol where there was a stage set up, decorated with a “Fluency Idol” banner, and students entered through a doorway covered in streamers. Parents and other students were there for the performances, cheering on the readers. The parents really noticed an attitude change in their children towards reading, and based on their responses (from “a sucess” to “Today was vary fun,” the students really enjoyed the experience. The numerical data agreed, fluency increased with Fluency Idol.

Need a more direct association to our class material? I’ll give you a few of the techniques to build fluency we talked about from Graves Chapter 8, and then explain how Fluency Idol modeled this!
Partner Reading: Students got the opportunity to read with and to each other in class, ideally helping to give input into how the other student was doing, all with the goal to help each other succeed in the Idol competition.
Tape-Assisted Reading: Students in the Fluency Idol program didn’t use tapes, but they did get video recordings of themselves reading to help them work and learn from what they had already done.
Readers Theater: Graves describes readers theater as, “The well-rehearsed reading of scripts, with feeling and expression, in front of an audience, but without the memorizing of the lines, costumes, prompts, scenery, make-up…and other features of a full-blown play performances” (232). Fluency Idol is readers theater on steroids. Students practice pieces, and learn how to give them to “Recreate the voice of the author so that an audience listing to the performance of the text read aloud will truly appreciate the meaning.” Then, with the rehearsals culminating in a final completion, the Fluency Idol participants are getting the full experience of readers theater, and surely some of the enthusiasm and motivation for reading that comes along with this method. In addition, if you look back to page 233 of the Graves text, you’ll see what I saw- the Monday, Tuesday-Thursday, Friday schedule that is used for Fluency Idol exactly mirrors what Graves recommends for a “Schedule for a Week of Readers Theater.”

How would I use this in my classroom? If you haven’t noticed by this point in my post, I’m a pretty big supporter of readers theater, particularly this idea of using a friendly (emphasis on the friendly in my classroom) competition in a way the students would love. I had a few thoughts that ran through my mind as I was reading. 1.) Do kids still watch American Idol? If not, could we find other ways to make literacy and fluency game shows in the classroom? For instance, maybe their more into The Voice, so we could try something where they formed teams that way. 2.) I would want to try this using other texts other than poetry. I’ll be in a 4-9^th grade classroom, so we will be reading novels at this age, so I think it could be a really great way to do book reviews. If students are all reading different independent reading books, an innovative way to get them to share could be to have them do a Fluency Idol competition competing with a passage they really liked! 3.) When I originally saw the article, I imagined the students would be competing using lyrics, but reading them like poetry, so that would definitely be something I would want to try (with appropriate lyrics of course)!

I would post the link to the article, but you have to sign in through the OSU library databases to get it for free, so if you are interested, just let me know and I can help you find it!

Let the Records Run!

Having never ever heard of “running records” before, I found Clay’s Chapter 5 absolutely fascinating. Math and Language Arts are my two areas of concentration as a Middle Childhood Education major, and it never really occurred to me how similar they could be to teach because of how grading and progress are handled. Math is much more simple- you can tell who is practicing and who is not, where their mistakes are on homework based on which step they made an error, whether they understand previous concepts, how they are thinking on their own, all because so much work is shown for each problem. Reading always seemed so different and impossible to understand in such a mathematical way, but running records takes a reading passage and makes it mathematically understandable, which of course, I love.

I tried to think back to my early reading days to think if I can ever recall anything like this in my experience, but of course my memory isn’t so great. I wonder what mine would have looked like, and I can’t help but think that mine may have been somewhat like the example from “Claire” (appropriately) from Clay. My speculation is that I was very much a self-corrector. I was never a particularly fast or flawless reader as “Emma” was in her example, but I know I tried very hard to be perfect, which I think would have shown through on a running record if I had one from when I was beginning to read.

The fact that you can tell so much about how a child is learning and processing reading from the marks made word by word in a running record is absolutely brilliant. I loved that bits that the “teacher” wrote after each sample running record. I am sure it takes a lot of practice, but it seems so incredibly practical that it only makes sense to use this technique. I know Clay mentioned that it’s best to start with average readers, but I think if you mastered the process enough, this could be very helpful to every variety of learner. My only question is that I couldn’t help but wonder how English language learners fit into the mix. Is there any sort of special mark for different pronunciations? What happens if the student says the word in their primary language?

English Language Learners? Or Just Learners?

My grade school, middle school, and high school didn’t have a single English Language Learning. The reason for this is probably the neighborhood I lived in combined with the fact that it was 12 years of Catholic education. Since it hasn’t been something I’ve had a lot of experience with, I love learning about teaching ELL students.

I found it particularly intriguing that Graves Chapter 14 emphasizes so strongly that “Learning a second language is more like learning a first language than different from it” (414). This fascinates me. I do have a good understanding that learning a second language is easier if the first is similar, but it never occurred to me that the actual process of learning a language could be so similar. As I kept reading, it made more sense.

Every method or strategy mentioned in this section as a way to help students learning English as a second language have also been noted as ways to help English-speaking students learning to read and write for the first time. What a novel idea! We can teach students that are learning to read and write English as a second language with the same methods that we teach students who only speak English to read and write. So what are these tactics?

·         Emphasize grammatical skills as well as critical thinking

·         Help students reference their own culture (or own lives for non-ELL students)

·         Help them gain positive self-esteem towards reading

·         Use and teach “A wealth of diverse strategies” (420)

Don’t those sound like concepts we have already learned in different areas for how to help any student with reading and writing?

That being said, I also appreciated some of the differences we could make as teachers to help our ELL students (since something like 42% of us will have at least one non-native speaker in our class each year). I think these ways of scaffolding, like making sure these students really have enough time to fully read through things and respond to them, and differentiating, like allowing students to choose their language to respond on tests, with later having them translate, have the potential to really help students acquire knowledge and a positive attitude towards learning English.

The last thing I find particularly interesting is that there is no regulation for how ELL and ESL students are taught across states or across the country. Yes, every classroom is going to be different, but I think there should be some sort of consistency across schools so that all students can have these methods and special attention when they need it.