I taught reading and language arts for seven years in a middle school. I taught 9th grade English for eight years in high school. I cannot claim that I ever taught anyone to read. I do know, however, that many of my students came to me with excellent reading skills. The theorists can tell you why that is so. I only know that most kids can read.
However, MSPAP will tell you otherwise. I am now the curriculum planner in a middle school again, and my job is MSPAP, no matter how you look at it. I have done some long, hard thinking as to why students score so poorly in reading on MSPAP. I have studied Teacher to Teacher Talk. What that wonderful document told me is not that kids can't read. It's that they are not answering the questions asked. They are not giving evidence to support their answers. They are not using inference and injecting personal experience.
I have studied the scoring tools for reading. What do the scoring tools say kids should have in their answers? Evidence from the text. Evidence of reading between the lines. Personal experience to expand their answers....
"Aha!" I said to myself after a long period of beating my head against the blackboard. "It all seems to boil down to strategies." If we can teach the kids how to analyze the questions, how to make it obvious that they are using evidence from the text to support an answer, how to figure out when an answer is going to be scored for reading (there are no handy little icons for reading like there are for writing and language usage), in short, how to prove in writing that they read what they were told to read, then the reading scores on MSPAP would go up.
Now, you can say that this is teaching for the test. Go ahead and say it...it is true. But, isn't the kind of writing I have mentioned above just plain good writing? Shouldn't writers back up their claims with evidence? Shouldn't they inject personal experience, so the reader thinks the writer knows what he or she is talking about? Shouldn't kids be able to read the questions and know what is expected of them? Won't that skill come in handy later in school and in life?
Stephen Decatur Middle School's (formerly Berlin Middle) MSPAP Website consists of all of the strategies, inservices, gleanings, and tons of typing that I have done over the past seven years. I really put together this website to help new teachers learn what MSPAP is all about, since hypertext lends itself so well to this endeavor. However, a friend insisted I put it on the web, so here it is, with no claims to perfection, accuracy, or proven success.
I have given my teachers all these bits and pieces as I have developed them over the years. In an effort to concentrate on raising reading scores, this is the first time I have attempted to put them into a sequence, into a step-by-step procedure, resulting in a document called What Teachers Need to Know and Teach. My teachers will be following these steps themselves this year. If any of these strategies make sense to you, please use them. I welcome any feedback you can give me, and I will gladly take submissions, with credit, to help this website grow.
In the future, I hope to expand strategies for writing, math, science, social studies, and other related topics such as analytic scoring tools, banks of MSPAP tasks, etc. Help me make this website grow, as a resource to all Maryland teachers, and as a benefit to our kids.
(formerly Berlin Middle School)
Worcester County