This week Charles Fuhrken, author of What Every Elementary Teacher Needs to Know About Reading Tests, has some tips for preparing students for reading tests throughout the school year and not one of them involves a skills worksheet!
In this age of testing, school campuses with a history of performing well on high-stakes tests may get through the first month of a new school year without a single mention of "the test"-- they very well may make it through the fall and winter without mentions of an upcoming spring assessment. That's refreshing, because the sad truth is that this will not likely be the case for the school campuses that have been deemed "low performing" by recent test results; instead, anxiety is felt on these campuses and preparation for a spring assessment begins almost immediately.
Teachers know that students cannot do their best work when they are encultured to view "the test" as something to be feared and something that requires year-long preparation via worksheets. Therefore, practices that will ultimately help students on tests need to be more seamlessly integrated into the teaching of reading. Here are some ways of doing that:
Translate "classroom speak" into "test speak"
The language of tests has been called formal English or hyper-English. It's more like funky English. Certainly, it's much too polite for the ways in which students (and teachers) talk about skills in the reading classroom. Because tests have a certain way or a couple of ways that questions are posed about reading skills, teachers might want to do a bit of digging around in released tests and supplemental materials authored by their state department of education. These sources provide information about how students are expected to recognize and respond to questions about reading and can be used to guide and assess classroom talk. For instance, a review of released tests might tell you the word "conflict" is used to ask about story problem. And yet you may hear students repeatedly use the word "problem" to discuss story problem. Seize the opportunity to help students cross the bridge from "classroom speak" to "test speak" by discussing that "problem" and "conflict" are synonyms. For younger students, especially, you may have to be explicit about your purposes for pointing out the association. You might have to say, "So if you see the word 'conflict' on a reading test, just know that the test maker means 'problem.'"
Embedding test language into classroom discussions in this way provides students with nuggets of test-taking wisdom over the course of the school year and can help students feel more confident about the questions they will be asked.
Teach students to be reading skill "name droppers"
We all have experience with name droppers -- those acquaintances who infuse their dinner party conversations with the important people they know. At parties, these people are annoying, but in the reading classroom, we like name droppers! By that, I mean, we want students to label and name the understandings they voice. Teachers often have to model how to be a name dropper. For instance, if a student says, "Paragraph 3 tells about how bats are nocturnal," then the teacher can label that student's talk by saying, "You're helping us to understand the main idea of paragraph 3. You explained what paragraph 3 is mostly about. It's about how bats are nocturnal. That's what the author wants readers to know about bats in that particular paragraph." Because a test will use the words "main idea" and "mostly about" to test the reading skill main idea, your labels will help students learn to "name drop" when talking about this reading skill. That way, the names and labels that test makers use will have become part of students' everyday vocabularies.
Gather and publicize test knowledge
As students are learning "test speak" and to become "name droppers," keep public records of students' understandings by having students make lists and charts of their growing knowledge of test information. Then, closer to the spring assessment, students can review this information so that it is on their minds come test day. For instance, students can create "Classroom to Test" dictionaries in which they "translate" classroom speak to test speak and share them with their peers. Another useful exercise is to have students work together to host a test-taking workshop in which groups of workshop leaders share their top five (or more) tips. Such engaging activities provide a review before a test without the need to resort to worksheets.
Help students build their reading stamina
Reading tests are long. Let's just put that out there as fact. Even "accomplished" readers, if you will, can have a tough time of getting through the text-dense test pages in the spring. That's all the more reason why students need time to get used to facing multiple pages of dense text in one sitting long before the day of the reading test! Here are some ways teachers can help students build reading muscles:
Increase time spent in self-selected reading gradually
Asking students to stay focused on one text for a bit longer each month in the fall will certainly help students focus their minds on test passages in the springtime. Try to make the increases unnoticeable to students. (Having great books available in the classroom library will help with this too!)
Offer a range of reading opportunities -- and follow-up activities
Reading silently from magazines. Reading a chapter book with a book club or partner. Preparing and reading aloud a poem. Listening to the teacher read and following along. Then writing about their reading. Talking to a buddy. Acting out a scene. These are ways for students to spend meaningful time with texts and increase stamina. Nancy Gregory, supervisor of secondary English language arts in a San Antonio, Texas, district, once told me, "Stamina comes from being fully engaged in reading and being a good reader. Stamina is not built by reading test passage after test passage in test prep booklets."
Allow students to be accountable for their reading work
Lucy Calkins suggests asking students, before they begin reading, to place a post-it note on the page they would like to reach during a particular reading session. She contends that doing so helps students stay focused on their task and push to reach their goals.
Test scores from a previous year shouldn't interrupt or halt the "real" work of the reading classroom in favor of skill-building workbooks. When the preparation for tests that students need is incorporated seamlessly into the teachers' instructional decisions all year long, students can grow to feel powerful over the test instead of anxious about it.