Hi, My Name is Velma!

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Pendulum swings in education can be opportunities to improve one's teaching. What Ms. Swartz objects to is being told that what she was doing was wrong and then, with the next swing, being told that she was right after all. IN THE FALL of 2000, I found an article in national education publication that offered helpful advice about how to use basal reader as an integral part of guided reading program.1 I really appreciated the advice and have made use of it in my classroom. What I did not appreciate, however, was the characterization of the teacher who has taught reading for (since the 1970s). The authors gave her the pseudonym Velma. She was contrasted with more progressive teacher who has taught for eight years, whom the authors dubbed Autumn. I thought the choice of pseudonyms for the two teachers was hilarious. My 19 years of teaching first grade were interrupted by five years of teaching seventh-grade I think my seventh-graders would have found the choice of those names an excellent example of propaganda techniques, like those used in advertising. I guess my name is Velma, since I started teaching first grade in 1976. At that time, teacher was considered to be dinosaur if he or she used whole-group instruction for Most teachers then used three homogeneous groups for reading instruction. When I started teaching first grade, I had master's degree in reading instruction and subsequently earned doctorate in curriculum and instruction with concentration in So maybe I wasn't typical first-grade teacher, but, thinking back, I certainly don't think I was one of kind. Although I thought the article that touched off these reflections was very good, I was distressed to see once again an inaccurate characterization of the reading instruction that was common during the period when I began to teach. I can speak with certainty only about my teaching, of course, but I suspect that I am speaking for the teaching of many others who taught then. The old by ability was characterized as being based on score on single instrument, such as a quick paragraph, word list, or survey test. Although I did check to see how many words student knew, I took into account in my grouping decisions each student's readiness, emotional characteristics, and personality, among other things. What's more, my groups were not static or fixed. I was constantly on the lookout for students who were becoming frustrated because the work was too hard or who were in need of greater challenge. If my concerns about students came near the end of the year, I recommended different placements to the second-grade teacher. Rather than preparing my students to read specific selection in the basal reader, I tried to help students develop strategies for orchestrating multiple cueing systems into fluent, silent, independent reading. I know I am dredging up information from over two decades ago, but I am pretty sure about what I was trying to do. Back then, I didn't have available to me the wealth of terrific children's that I have available today (which, by the way, I have accumulated by using bonus points from send-home book orders, not from my district). Nevertheless, the focus was always on transferring things learned to real books - at least I thought so. The field of education certainly swings like pendulum, but I think that is healthy, because each time it swings, we learn things that make our teaching better. However, I am tired of being convinced that I am wrong - only to be convinced that I was right in the first place. (To be honest, sometimes I was never really convinced.) Let me offer few examples of what I am referring to. …