| Teaching Out of the Box: A Text-Centred Aproach
Talking, listening, reading and writing are inter-dependent: each is enriched by the other.
The introduction of the National Literacy Strategy (DfEE, 1998), and the literacy hour with its prescribed mixture of whole class, and group/independent work, has undoubtedly had a significant effect upon the way texts are viewed and used in many KS2 classes. Very often stories, plays and poems are selected by student teachers, not for their intrinsic value, but for the opportunities they offer to cover particular teaching objectives.
I have observed poetry lessons where, because of the focus on metaphor or rhyme, no attention is given to meaning, enjoyment or personal response. The poem is read, often once only, and then used as a resource for identifying given structural or linguistic features. Similarly, a well-chosen extract from a whole text may be used simply to identify and comment on the use of ‘strong verbs’ or speech punctuation. Worse still, no provision has been made for children whose interest has been raised by the extract, to read the whole text. When extracts have to be used, student teachers need to understand how these can be taster sessions, whetting children’s appetite for new authors and genres.
The Primary National Strategy, while upholding the pedagogy of the literacy hour stresses the need for increased flexibility in planning both individual and sequences of lessons. Using the three strands for reading and their specified core learning, student teachers can be encouraged to begin by selecting a powerful text for a particular age group, one that will challenge, excite and enthral them. This might be a poem, a play or a short story or novel. From this, they can plan to use all the contexts for reading to explore the text.
By modelling how you plan for this approach, and teaching as though your student teachers were a KS2 class, you can help them to see how enjoyable and effective their teaching of reading can be when it is text-, rather then objective-centred. You will probably have only one session for this and the plenary needs to be used to help students draw out all the possible teaching objectives and rich opportunities for collaborative group work which can be covered by this holistic approach to one text. They can also refer to What children need to learn/posess to become readers to realise how both recursive and linear learning is supported.
|
