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Part 1
Set the Habits of Learning
Introduction: The Fundamental Habits
This book is about giving elementary students everything they need in order to be outstanding readers. Teaching phonics lessons, reading aloud to students, and developing a great curriculumâall of which we'll coverâfall squarely into this category, but there's another necessary element that may initially seem much less obvious: setting up effective habits of learning. The habits of learning are the most fundamental of the âgreat habitsâ to which the title of this book refers: if students lack them, they cannot develop exemplary reading habits. Accordingly, we've chosen to address them in the first two chapters of this book.
Here's an overview of the habits Part One will cover:
- Chapter One: Habits of the Classroom. Why talk about the setup of a classroom and the way students move through it when we've set out to talk about reading? Because a well-organized classroom and airtight student transitions can save you full days of teaching time. Chapter One shows how this worksâand how to make it happen.
- Chapter Two: Habits of Discussion. Change how students talk about reading, and you will change how they think about reading. In Chapter Two, we'll present the habits of discussion that have enabled the most effective reading teachers we've observed to facilitate meaningful comprehension conversations among even their youngest readers.
As you may notice when you read through Chapters One and Two, many of the teaching techniques we describe in Part One can drive instruction in any subjectânot just readingâfurther and faster than you could push it without them. However, they are such great enablers of game-changing literacy instruction in particular that this book simply would not be complete without them.
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Chapter 1
Habits of the Classroom
Multiply Your Minutes
At the start of each college basketball season, legendary UCLA coach John Wooden gave new players the same speech. âYou know,â Wooden would begin, âbasketball is a game that's played on a hardwood floor, and to be good, you have to change your direction, change your pace.â Hearing this, the UCLA team could not have been surprised. Footwork and direction changes, after all, are practiced by almost every basketball team. But to the players' surprise, Wooden did not begin with a footwork drill. Instead, he started to pull on a sock. As the players looked on, Wooden explained the sock procedure: âPull it up in the back ⌠run your hand around the little toe area ⌠make sure there are no wrinkles ⌠check the heel area.â Why start from socks? âThe wrinkle will be sure you get blisters, and those blisters are going to make you lose playing time, and if you're good enough, your loss of playing time might get the coach fired.â1
As avid basketball fans, we have always been drawn to the career of John Wooden. In choosing to begin our exploration of literacy instruction with routines and procedures, we have been deeply influenced by leaders like Wooden. There is no doubt that Wooden's âsock talkâ helped UCLA to victory over the course of his decades-long career. The talk suggests an invaluable mind-set: every habit we build in our students allows them to shoot higher. By the time Wooden's players were seniors, they had internalized a host of such habits: passing with perfect form, remaining respectful at practices, shifting one's feet for the precise block-out on a rebound. These habits existed because Wooden took the time to think about them and had the patience to teach them. The result was that it was far easier for the players to learn and apply the game's most complex ideas. Wooden's approach created a powerful advantage for his team, both on and off the court.
In teaching as in basketball, it would be tempting to start with the equivalent of a complex playâidentifying the root cause of a comprehension error, for example. Yet just as the most subtle jump-shot technique is useless to a player injured by blisters, the most crucial reading skill won't help students if there is not time to teach it. Efficient classroom routines and procedures keep students from losing playing time, and more playing time allows them to build stronger reading skills. When you practice for only five minutes per day, there is simply no way to build the habits of great reading as thoroughly as you would if you practiced for twenty.
Core Idea
You can't add more hours to the week, but you can add more hours of instruction: just build tighter routines.
It may sound absurd to suggest that the difference between smooth classroom systems and dragging ones could be so significant. But pause and consider: in your classroom, how many times have you lost teaching time to the task of making sure all students have the right materials? How often have you glanced at the clock in frustration as students transitioned between activities? Because delays like these happen again and again in most classrooms, the lost time adds up. An invaluable rule of thumb for building the right classroom habits is to give high priority to efficiency in the systems that happen most frequently over the course of the school day. It is in these areas that small time deficits grow large the most quickly.
Core Idea
Time lost to systems is time lost for learning.
We'll illustrate this concept with one example: students making the transition from their desks to a carpet reading area. In an early elementary classroom, this transition may happen four or five times a day. Imagine a teacher, Ms. Stark, leading her students in such a transition.
Case Study
Ms. Stark's Transition
Ms. Stark is an experienced teacher whose classroom management practices are strong overall, but she feels less in control of transitions than of other moments during the school day. She'd like to change that, starting with desk-to-carpet transitions.
Ms. Stark has already established a basic routine for her students to follow as they transition from their desks to the reading carpet. The moment she says, âLet's go to the carpet,â students begin to...
