Taking a break from Marketing to discuss a professional read...I finished reading this book last week. While I think there are a lot of things in here that can lead to a good dicussion, there are two things that most concern me about the tone of the book and its content:
- The author is obviously against standardized testing. I would bet that if Gallup were to conduct a pole, about 90% of educators would agree with that. Having said that, let's get real. Does anyone really think that standardized testing is going away any time soon? Does anyone really think that the United States and all the companies that are making BIG BUCKS manufacturing testing products are going to let us adopt the Finnish model? Anyone? Bueller? Perhaps we should try to think of strategies that will work with the system we have, rather than just saying it's broken and needs to be chucked. I am over simplifying, and he does offer some viable strategies, but a lot of text is spent in attacking testing. Good luck with getting rid of it.
- For all his writing about students needing text rich environments, he mentions the library exactly twice. Once he talks about having gone there to see if the kids checked out the books he talked about in class, and another time he checked out some books. Did he ever think about working with his librarian to offer a text rich environment? Instead, he writes a lot about building classroom libraries, a costly, repetitive solution. Why not use the resources that your tax dollars have already paid for and the professional who can help you? Oh, wait, he's in California, and they got rid of most of their librarians a long time ago.
Perhaps what he wants is to get people talking by making them angry. If so, he'll probably get it. However, I do not see this as constructive, and he completely skips some rather obvious solutions to helping kids have access to text. Librarian book talks? Classroom displays from the library? He claims that him talking about books in the classroom was more effective than taking his kids to the library. I would doubt that is true unless his librarian is just a lump. Perhaps he needs to think about how we can all work together to solve these problems, rather than thinking that classroom teachers are going to do it on their own.
Just my 2 cents.
Thoughts?
2 comments:
Despite the new government in the UK's love of Swedish free schools standardized testing isn't going to vanish here either. We have to work with it too.
Librarians are a wonderful source of help for schools but sadly overlooked here too. I once ran an after school reading club that managed to bus our kids to the nearest library once a week. It had an amazingly positive effect on their attitude to books. Then the funding dried up.
Text rich classroom environments are great but you can't re-create the impact of being surrounded by books which are being accessed by people of all ages. I'd argue that children need to have both.
Class libraries needn't be expensive. Ours was mostly bought from charity shops, donations, books withdrawn from the library. But it can't be a replacement for visiting a full size library.
Librarians are usually thrilled to be invited into school and happy to help with classroom displays. We often just lack the impulse to make contact and ask.
(All this presupposes we have any public libraries left in the UK after the cuts!)
BTW librarians with an interest in displays always welcome in the Flickr Classroom Displays Group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/classrmdisplays/
Linda
Linda,
You make some excellent points. I hope that public libraries will be around for a lond time, but it's not looking that great on either side of the pond. I don't really have any problem with a classroom library, but I would agree with you that it is no substitute for a larger library. In most of our schools, all students have to do to be in one is walk a few steps down the hall. Sadly, many of them seem to not want to. I cannot figure out if it is a marketing problem for school libraries, i. e. we need to do a better job promoting our services, or a sign of the times.
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