Acting as a Reader
“Acting as a reader” means beginning a personal examination of one’s self in order to understand what it is that effective readers do. Thus, CAR begins with activities that encourage self-reflection and insight into teachers’ own personal reading. It is impossible to teach or assess reading without defining clearly, accurately, and precisely what readers should know and to be able to do. In other words, teachers need to define learning targets in reading for themselves and for their students. Thus, teachers develop their own definition of reading and then come back periodically to reflect upon and refine those definitions. They then examine the strategies they use to make sense of text. They make connections between theory and practice—how they and their students actually process print. They are asked to clarify what they believe to be the most important targets in reading and then listen to readers to determine what targets the readers are successfully hitting. They also examine how listening to a reader’s retell can give valuable information about the reader’s comprehension. CAR examines reading as a system and asks participants to consider how all parts of a system must fit together in order to function effectively.
Acting as an Assessor
Teachers examine assessment and how it should connect with curriculum and instruction to form a coherent whole. Participants examine their own beliefs about assessment of reading and guiding principles of quality assessment. They look at two different types of assessments, observation of Literature Circles and the Individualized Reading Conference, and how one must select a particular assessment to serve a particular purpose to match a particular learning target. They then examine how curriculum, assessment, and instruction must all work together. They explore the ways that teachers, as assessors, must understand the reading system and the individual student in order to determine what a student needs next, to provide the next level of instruction, and to involve students in the process.
Acting as a Researcher
Teachers act as researchers—putting assessment theory into practice in the classroom and learning from the results of that practice. Teachers think about and prepare to collect a body of evidence in their own classroom. The focus on the body of evidence leads participants to explore how well-constructed assessments that are purposefully geared to targets can give clear and definitive feedback thus allowing the student to go to the next level of learning. Teachers are then asked to bring any relevant evidence to share with colleagues in order to analyze the student work and to make further plans for action research. Thus, teachers go beyond understanding reading and assessment to implementing changes in their classroom and then learning from that implementation. |
