For last week's Learning Module, I viewed a podcast on adolescent literacy. I was pleased to learn of one school's efforts to help their students reading in the content areas. As a teacher, I see my students struggling everyday with reading and even understanding how to process their information in the textbook. The school formulated a professional learning program that allowed the teachers take charge of teaching the students reading in the content areas.
I realize now, upon reflection, that schools do, in fact, stop teaching reading to students in the elementary grades. This is very disturbing. When students matriculate to higher grades, the requirements for reading and comprehension change drastically. Children are initially faced with phonics, pronunciation, and basic comprehension in elementary school, and then when they arrive to the middle grades they are required to understand the layout and advanced content within textbooks without any assistance in how to approach this vastly different type of literature.
In the podcast from last week's Learning Module, the teachers of this school were empowered to teach their students within each lesson how to approach reading. Many teachers believe this task should be left to the language arts teachers, but I disagree. Language arts teachers are experts in their content area just as are science or math teachers. We should not expect them to teach our students how to read science or math textbooks or publications. the reading in the content areas should be left to those who are experts in that area.