Essay - Reading Specialist in an Elementary School Responsible for Staff Development...

Reading Specialist in an Elementary School Responsible for Staff Development for a B*****l*****ced Literacy Program

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Amid all the recent c*****s for "back to basics" in education, we might *****ll believe that there is *****deed a core set of b*****sic educational goals and values that children in each age should adhere to. However, this is in fact not the case: What schools teach and what a society believes that children should learn varies from one generation to the next ***** reflects issues of importance in ***** culture at large. This is true across the curriculum, but perhaps nowhere more obvious than in ideas about how reading should be taught, no doubt because reading forms ***** core of any educational process. This fact has important implications for someone serving as a Re*****ding Specialist in an elementary school responsible ***** staff development for a bal*****ced literacy program. This paper examines what just some of the strategies involved in teaching reading and how new technologies are affecting those basic *****.

Far too many students today are uninspired by *****. ***** is certainly less ***** at the youngest ages: Most preschoolers believe that the whole make-your-own-play-dough shtick ***** a pretty good deal indeed. But by even the elementary grades students are beginning to lose their enthusiasm for school. They are still intensely committed to the process of learning - for the primate brain is ge*****d ***** learn and it ***** almost impossible to make people tire of ***** itself. However, school and learning are most certainly not the same thing ***** the future direction that education - from the earliest levels through graduate school - must take in this country must be to br*****g schools and teaching far more c*****ly in line with learning. This can ***** an especial problem in teaching children ***** to read ***** the teaching of *****ing skills is ***** inherently repetitive process. However, how much repetition is helpful - and what should be repeated ***** has ********** the subject ***** debate probably since schools began and divide themselves roughly between the "phonics only" and "whole language" schools. These concerns translate into ***** of direct instruction versus balanced *****:

In a sense, the methods of teaching reading and writing parallel the two types of writing: one ***** the rote memory of a ***** word or phrase, hundreds and ***** thousands of them; the other is the memorization of a comparatively few (26 in English) letters in their various *****, numbers and symbols in mathematics, a few pictographs such as "&," and punctuation. The basics ***** be learned in a few months or years and once learned, unfamiliar ********** can be sounded out (http://www.socsci.kun.nl/ped/whp/histeduc/wilson/wilson10.html#r1).

***** Instruction ***** Balanced Literacy

Most traditional methods of ***** reading have emphasized the ***** of mem*****ization over critical thinking and this is something that our Reading ***** will most certainly want to avoid. While it is ***** true that ***** must acquire a certain body of particular *****s - ***** intelligence without the fuel ***** facts