Teach Like You Hair’s
On Fire: Chapter 3
Chapter 3 was all about creating
lifelong readers – one of the most important tasks for a teacher, and also one
of the most difficult. Rafe believes that teaching students to enjoy reading
should be one of our top priorities, and he lays out how to best do so, after
first acknowledging that many schools and districts make this nearly
impossible, by forcing educators to all teach from the same boring book of
stories.
Schools, he explains, focus too
much on “fluency, comprehension, and other necessary but deadly dull goals”
while they should be focusing on “joy, passion, or excitement.” Students should
be shown how much fun reading can be, so that a strong foundation can be
developed early on, which will cause them to read throughout their lives.
The best ways to do this are to
take students to the library, choose quality literature for them to read, give
children books associated with their reading level, lead group discussions,
assess appropriately, make the literature relevant, and encourage emotional
connections to characters and stories. We need to be careful not to turn
students away from books by choosing works above their level and either
confusing or embarrassing them. We also need to make sure their reading books
that are both entertaining and of quality, so it is important to guide them in
this area, while also giving them the freedom to explore their own interests.
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