Reading Response 1

Reading Instruction and Social Class by Patrick Shannon
In this article, Patrick Shannon talks about how social classes are further separated in schools. According to Shannon, teacher expectation plays a huge role in student success. Some teachers use middle class ideals to group students of all classes into low and high performing groups instead of using academic histories. Once these students are grouped, they stay in those groups for, at least, the next few grades. Teachers treat the low and high performing groups differently, which causes an increase in the gap. For instance, teachers allow for more interruptions in the low-achieving group, which gives them less instructional time than the high performing group. Shannon offers three different solutions to this problem: the academic, the affective, and the emancipatory. The academic is about keeping social structure and giving society the highest talent pool possible. The affective focuses on the individual and ignores social structure and societal constraints. The emancipatory solution offers to rid society of social structure by teaching students the historical reasons for the social differences and coming up with solutions.

Toward an Educationally Relevant Theory of Literacy Learning: Twenty Years of Inquiry by Brian Cambourne
In this article, Brian Cambourne seeks to prove that children that are not good at conventional school learning are not necessarily deficient by studying how children learn outside of the classroom. Cambourne found that there were many students in his classes that seemed to have trouble grasping simple concepts in school, but outside of school that could understand complex ideas fully. Cambourne did a lot of research on oral language development because that is one of the most complicated ideas a child learns to grasp outside of the classroom. He found that there are many conditions that contribute to learning outside of the classroom and these conditions should try to be applied in schools. The most important factor of learning is engagement. The students need to be engaged in demonstrations in order to learn from them, which is why it is so important to make topics seem relevant, interesting, and doable.


"Their frequent mistakes trigger student and teacher interruptions, and the unfortunate cycle begins anew." This quote is talking about the cycle that occurs when teachers treat students of lower ability reading groups differently than they do their higher achieving students. They interrupt these students more often, give them difficult materials, and give them too large of assignments. These aspects of the reading lessons don't help the students improve their reading abilities, but instead further handicap them through this "unfortunate cycle." - Shannon Article

  One of the images that quickly came to mind while reading these two articles was the picture of an elementary school reading group. Although both articles discuss issues among reading instruction, I feel that this picture more appropriately relates to Patrick Shannon’s article. In his article, Shannon examines the issues that arise from the self-fulfilling prophecy of educators and the consequences of grouping students as learners not based on their academic understanding of the material or level of mastery, but rather along the lines of social stratification and aspects. In essence, if the teacher is not aware of his own biases and consciously works against those beliefs to properly place and instruct each of his students at an academically challenging and appropriate level, then he is providing a disservice to his students and is placing a ceiling on their ability to grow in his classroom.