Scenario: A Faculty Meeting Focused on The Acclerated Reader
Topping carefully articulates the differences between good and poor implementation of the AR program. However, it is not difficult to understand why teachers may become involved in what he describes as “poor” implementation: some AR materials concerning the program's design and purposes send mixed messages that may be confusing. Consider the following scenario, which serves to highlight the types of questions (and sources of confusion) asked about AR by many principals and teachers I come into contact with at workshops, in graduate courses, and during reading conferences.
The word-processed agenda for an elementary school faculty meeting I attended a few weeks ago was headed “Questions Worth Asking.” As the meeting began, the principal explained that it was time for the teachers to ask tough questions about the multiple initiatives that were currently underway in their classrooms, because parents, state representatives, administrators, and local newspaper columnists were all demanding to know how well the school was doing in accomplishing goals. Teachers across all grade levels were involved in initiatives related to such areas as responding to the threat of violence in schools, raising children's self-esteem, using computers effectively in classrooms, establishing home-school connections, addressing reading remediation at the word level, teaching phonics programmatically, meeting the literacy needs of children for whom English was not a first language, and implementing The Accelerated Reader program.
Not surprisingly, the teachers said they were feeling overwhelmed by all the new initiatives. One stated, “I go to so many meetings, serve on 'good' committees, get a little bit of training here and there, but I feel like I'm not really doing a good job on any one of the things we hoped to accomplish!”
The principal nodded in sympathy and then announced that the rest of the meeting would focus on AR because the software program, cost of training, and requisite computers represented a large investment by the school district and its business partners. The principal went on to explain that she felt it was important for everyone to review the four steps involved in effective AR implementation by watching and discussing “Accelerated Reader” (1990), an 8-minute video. After the video, she invited the teachers to state their own observations and note students' attainment of benchmarks, their report card grades, the number of books they were reading, or test scores that could be relevant to figuring out how well AR was being used across grade levels.
As the group of 35 teachers and 15 teacher aides shifted uncomfortably in the child-sized, blue plastic chairs in the media center, I began to take notes about the ideas being discussed. The following section presents a list of the four AR steps shown in the video, a brief description of how the video depicts the steps, and the teachers' follow-up comments about what students and teachers do during each step.
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted November 1999
© 1999-2000 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232