Would you
describe your school's culture as being warm and supportive, but without
attention to rigorous learning? Or is it run like a tight ship in an attempt to
create rigorous learning, but lacks warmth? Fountas and Pinnell believe that in
order to build an inclusive, respectful, and supportive social community where
people collaborate with and help each other, you can't have one scenario
without the other. One of the goals of the second edition of Guided Reading is
to get teachers to not only treat the classroom as a place to learn to read,
write, and expand language skills, but to create a community of
learners. Here are some ways to start building your community! [more]
Provide
Thought-Provoking Books
The
classroom is where students spend most of their lives. It's important to create
an environment that helps them think deeply about the world, themselves, and
how they fit into the world as global citizens. A great way to open up these
channels of thinking is through books! Give them high-quality books that help
them think about important ideas and issues, and about developing empathy for
others.
Think About
Classroom Management
In Guided Reading, 2e, Fountas and Pinnell describe the
behavioral and emotional expectations of a student from entry to middle school;
the traits you want to see in a successful student. These include, social
interaction, empathy, sense of community, emotional well-being, and
self-regulation. Guided
Reading, 2e shows you ways to provide numerous opportunities for students
to learn these traits throughout the school day, from grade to grade, starting
with the classroom. Your classroom should be a peaceful environment and reflect
a climate of acceptance in which you can communicate to your students that you
are interested in what they have to say. But you should also think about the
physical space, as well as predictability, empathy and kindness, inquiry, and
more. “Your classroom is a place where students learn how to read, write, and
expand all of their language skills, but it is much more. It is a laboratory
where they learn how to be confident, self-determined, kind, and democratic,”
(Fountas and Pinnell 2017).
Have a
Design for Literacy Education
Creating
the ideal literacy classroom environment where your students are always
thinking, talking, and reading about the world can be a daunting task. You want
to make adequate time for designing a landscape for language and literacy
learning, but how? Where do you start? Fountas and Pinnell know from personal
experience, and from talking to teachers that there are many constraints—both
physical and financial—to creating this ideal environment, but it is possible.
In Guided Reading, 2e,
Fountas and Pinnell provide creative ways to take this vision of a literacy
classroom into an actual design, as well as provide advice on how to create
this classroom on a budget. "When students
spend their time thinking, reading, writing, and talking every day, they get a
message about what is valued in your classroom and they begin to develop their
own values," (Fountas and Pinnell 2017).
Building a
literacy community in your classroom takes a lot of thought and effort, but the
payoff is worth it. "In a sense, the classroom is a sheltered environment
within a noisy world where everything interferes with high-level intellectual
discourse and time for reading and writing. But in these short years students
have a chance to live a literate life that expands their empathy, curiosity,
and competencies. Literacy is their job,"
(Fountas and Pinnell, 2017).
~The Fountas & Pinnell Team
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