REG Newsletter - Volume 28, Issue 6

Reading Educators Guild Newsletter
Volume 28, Issue 6 May/June, 1999

The Reading Connection
By Janice Blanton

In Closing--A Little Bit of This and A Little Bit of That"

For the novelty of it, I thought this end of the school year article could touch on a variety of events, behaviors, and strategies that are currently in effect or are suggested--a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Graduation
Congratulations to the CSUF 1999 Graduates who have earned their Masters Degree in Education with an emphasis on Reading Instruction. Welcome to an informed and caring group of educators who are making a difference! One of the rewards is that you automatically become a member of CSUF's Reading Educators Guild (REG) without charge for a year. This is a marvelous organization which keeps the lines of communication and knowledge open which you had previously enjoyed while attending your graduate classes. Basically, this membership does not make demands on you--you will receive a bi-monthly newsletter and are invited to some enjoyable events. The first event is the Concert Under the Stars which is held in early fall and involves attending a glorious concert performed by the talented musical artists from CSUF in the great outdoors and sitting with fellow graduates and professors--all for the sake of good cheer and good companionship. The second event is the Winter Dinner held in February at the Marriott Hotel. This includes dinner, friends, and a special guest speaker. This year's dinner attendees had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Norma Inabinette which was a real treat for us who had been out of her classroom for awhile. You may have graduated, but we never disconnect! REG exists for this purpose. Again, congratulations and good luck.

Are you for or against "stillness"?
When you facilitate time management strategies for your students and yourself, do you emphasize the need for quiet time--time to be still? With another busy semester winding down, it is, perhaps, worthwhile to consider if we are preaching the value of balancing one's time schedule and practicing it. This subject was inspired by a newspaper account given by Susan Quinn, a management consultant, who recently returned to California after living out-of-state for several years (Los Angeles Times, Orange County, 4-24-99, B3). Her major source of anxiety upon returning to California was adjusting to the California lifestyle which she describes as "lots of freeway driving, lots of recreation to take advantage of, and lots of opportunity to fill (her) life with busyness" (B3). According to Quinn, evidently if you live, work, and school in California, it is mandatory that you find balance in your daily schedule for "being still" and reflecting as well as conducting your busy activities.

She feels that everyone keeps so busy that "boredom becomes the enemy; we will do just about anything to keep from being bored, even when the effort increases our stress and anxiety" (B3). Susan Quinn feels when she took the time to pace herself and reflect, "amazingly found that I was more productive, not less, and enjoying myself much more" (B3). In addition to Mrs. Quinn's adjustment to the California lifestyle, she was coping with "grief over leaving good friends, and anxiety about making new friends," a situation not unlike many of our culturally diverse students are experiencing.
As educators, do we have a responsibility to facilitate the skill to be still? Furthermore, should we model "still time"--reading, reflecting, reminiscing, ruminating, refueling? Just thought that I would throw this out there. Find some time to "reflect" about this!

CLIP update
In the January-February REG newsletter, Debbie Caulkins shared her experience as a trainee in a year long training program for the tutorial program CLIP. Debbie is an elementary teacher in the Irvine Unified School District. The following is an update from Debbie as her training sessions draw to a close.
"I have almost completed my CLIP training. There will be a graduation ceremony on May 19 at which point our training year will be complete. I think the year was sensational. It was a very positive experience for me but also overwhelming. There is so much to learn, and, you just can't digest it all in one year. It will take another year or two before it begins to feel automatic. We've read and studied several of Marie Clay's books, which aren't easy reads, but which are wonderful resource books to be referred to over and over again.

It is up to us whether or not we want to continue, which I plan to do. Our class of about 15 has been a really neat group of people, and I'd be surprised if any of them choose not to continue next year. If we continue, we will tutor either 2 students or we may choose to tutor one student and tutor a strategy group of 2-4 students. I prefer the one to one experience personally, but my principal feels the strategy group approach gets more students through the process, so I may do that next year. I (and others like me) would not be expected to train others at our schools, although we certainly share our learning. Irvine has two trainers, who have been specially trained to be "trainers." This is a route I might consider, but at this time, I think two trainers are enough for this district.

I think the process is great for students. I've seen such progress with
the students I've tutored. We can tutor a total of 80 lessons--no more. Some of the teachers in my group released students after only 30-60 lessons, depending on how quickly the students accelerated. After releasing a student, we could either pick up another or start a small strategy group. The other teacher from my school (that I took the class with) started a strategy group of 3 students from her 2nd grade class. They meet for 30 minutes each morning before school.
The strategy group is a different situation. The dynamics really change when you're working with more than one student. Marie Clay really recommends having the classroom teacher do the tutoring. My experience was great because the students I tutored were in my class, so I was with them for the rest of the day. I could carry over instruction from our CLIP session in the classroom and even plan big and small group instruction to support the strategies that I was working on with my individual student. This was beneficial for everyone.

I have mixed feelings about asking the classroom teacher to do it. It's a lot of work and teachers seem to be asked to do so much. On the other hand, this and all that I learned in the Masters program at CSUF have been so valuable and relevant that I feel all primary teachers should be exposed to this kind of training. The training year was well organized. Our trainers are also teachers in the district and very sympathetic to our busy schedules. However, their expectations were high. Standards were set early on regarding attendance at class and tardiness. We were expected to be there and be there on time.

Everyone supported those expectations and worked equally hard. There were no slackers in the group. Kathleen, one of our trainers, holds sessions for continuing CLIP teachers, which we will all attend next year. I think they get together monthly or bi-monthly. I look forward to continuing that contact and support and sharing of ideas. I don't know if CLIP is cost effective, because the district paid for it. I know it's expensive, but not as expensive as Reading Recovery. CLIP is all about helping students become independent and strategic. CLIP helps students learn many different ways of "working on print." The CLIP model doesn't give the child a set of information, but instead gives the child a "network of strategies for operating on text." Clay says it's the strategy that is the powerful acquisition. These strategies begin with the lower level visual strategies such as directionality and 1:1 matching and work up to the higher level strategies such as cross- checking and self-monitoring. The CLIP tutor focuses on each of the strategies, based on the need of the student with whom she is working. Hopefully, the student will become competent and independent in the use of the strategies (Clay describes a strategy as a search for cues that will reduce uncertainty). Well, can you tell I've just finished a reading assignment from Becoming Literate by Marie Clay?
Thank you so much Debbie for taking the time from your more than full schedule to share your experience and thoughts for this publication. It is most appreciated.

Faculty Footnotes
By Kathi Bartle Angus

CSUF faculty was well represented at the International Reading Association Conference in San Diego. Ash Bishop, Andrea Guillaume, Brenda Spencer, Hallie Yopp and Ruth Yopp presented an all day symposium on Sunday, May 2. The title was "Language to Literacy: A Responsive Approach." The presentation included an overview of the reading process, language development through literature, developing phonemic awareness through literature, phonic and word recognition literature connections, comprehension strategies and literature, and literature as a bridge to content reading. The target audience was classroom teachers of grades K-2. The symposium was well attended and extremely well received.

This summer plan on checking your local bookstore for the release of Ash Bishop, Hallie Yopp and Ruth Yopp's new book. Ready for Reading: A Handbook for Parents of Pre-School Students. The publisher is Allyn and Bacon.

Recommended Reading
By Carla Thomson

The Professor and the Madman
A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

Need I say more? I needed no more than that intriguing subtitle to begin my quest for this book, but for those of you as yet unconvinced here is a sampling of the high praise Winchester has garnered so far:

"The linguistic detective story of the decade."
- William Safire

"Remarkably readable, this chronicle of lexicography roams from the great dictionary itself to hidden nooks in the human psyche that sometimes house the motives for murder, the sources for sanity, and the blueprint for creativity."
- Kirkus Reviews

"... almost my favorite kind of book: the work of social and intellectual history ... effortlessly clear, spare prose is the perfect vehicle for the tale ... absolutely rivetting"
- Will Self / The Times (London)

And it is absolutely riveting! It has been quite a while since any book, fiction or non-fiction, has gripped my attention so totally. I so much hated to finish the book that I read the Postscript, the Author's Note, the Acknowledgements, and the Suggestions for Further Reading (this last four times) just to prolong the experience!

Winchester tells the story of a gigantic task, one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters ... the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Beginning in 1857, it took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions.

Winchester begins each chapter with excerpts from these definitions. Beginning with "Mysterious" and "Lunatic," he beckons us to follow through (among others of course) "Sesquipedalian," "Denouement," "Memorial," and finally "Coda" and "Acknowledgement." In addition to the remarkable appreciation of the subtleties of our dynamic English
language, what makes this account so fascinating is the story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking.

Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Winchester has great admiration for Murray who wrote the "concise, scholarly, accurate, and lovingly elegant" definitions for the Dictionary. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon from New Haven, Connecticut, who had served in the Civil War, was one of the thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor.

By telling the poignant, human, sometimes shocking tale of William Minor, Winchester has created a window through which to view the greater and even more fascinating history of English lexicography. I urge you to take a peek through that window.

Reading Educators' Guild Newsletter Staff

Editor: JoAnne Greenbaum

Faculty Footnotes: Kathi Bartle Angus



			California State University, Fullerton