This week, City Teacher from one of my favorite blogs, Teaching in the Inner City, reflects upon what it takes to be a good reading teacher and asks us to reflect upon our own experiences learning how to read. My response is here:

I think teaching reading is really about teaching students to love reading. I don’t think that is done by teaching decoding (how to read) or by teaching reading strategies (comprehension) although without these skills reading is not possible. I think good reading teachers do what good writing teachers, model reading for students and teach students to love reading.

Two moments in my own education come to mind:

1) Reading Dick & Jane type books (although it wasn’t Dick or Jane but a rat named Matt…no offense taken). I’m sure it was there that I learned how to read, the mechanics of it, but I wasn’t much interested in reading at that time.

2) Finding Beverly Cleary books and later Judy Blume in second grade and finding that I could read them, I enjoyed the stories in them, and I couldn’t wait to read the next. It was then that I began to think of myself as a reader. It was then that I became a reader.

My later reading as a kid centered mostly on baseball card price guides and the recently defunct movie magazine, Premiere, but again I sought out and found reading material centered around my interests.

So what does this mean for Open Court Reading teachers?

You have to be teaching the mechanics of decoding because without it a person can’t read.

You have to be teaching how to comprehend what one is reading (reading strategies) even though most of us probably were not taught specific reading strategies in school (at least I can’t remember being taught how to comprehend…most of the strategies I figured out and developed on my own). Sometimes it’s hard for teachers to see the importance of teaching reading strategies because as teachers we’re already good readers and most of us did successfully figure out reading strategies on our own or we wouldn’t be where we are. Statistically speaking, many of our inner city students may drop out of school before they have a chance to develop these strategies.

But most important (and this one isn’t written as explicitly in the manual) you have to be showing students how you love reading (and if you don’t love it then consider another profession) and you have to be guiding them to discover the kind of reading that they will be interested in whether or not it’s related to a current Open Court unit although that’s often a good place to start. This is what separates really great reading teachers from those who are merely adequate. Regardless of how fast your students decode, I think it’s their passion for reading which you should measure when you reflect upon your qualities as a reading teacher. If they don’t genuinely choose books in which they are interested then you’re not building the motivation to read that will lead them to become good readers.

I recommend Nancie Atwell’s “In the Middle” as a terrific primer on how to teach students to love reading via Reader’s Workshop. It’s written about middle schoolers but you can certainly apply it to the early grades.