As You Like It: Star Power

It’s amazing what a new approach and a few words can do. Admittedly, the words are carefully chosen ones like: epitome, eccentric, encounter, adamant, and amiable. But if you just read those words there’s no hint of the magic that they brought to my classroom. No clue of the enthusiasm, laughter, and just plain silliness that erupted after I wrote them on a large blank pad and hung them up in the room. And I am quite adamant about that.

I’ve been attending a series of reading workshops. Usually when teachers attend seminars they begin with high hopes, but by the time they leave they realize that they haven’t really added anything useful to their bag of classroom tricks. But this program is different. I admit the first day was rough — all the research and new techniques, vocabulary, information — I thought my head was going to explode. But once I had time to process and think and consider, the pieces began to fall into place.

The program is called Student Achievement in Reading or STAR. It was developed by the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE), which is committed to improving the quality of reading instruction in adult education. OVAE launched the National STAR Training Network to help state leaders, program administrators and classroom teachers deliver evidence-based reading instruction to intermediate-level adult learners who are having trouble progressing to the next level.

Adults learn differently than children. With children, you can usually assume that you are starting from the beginning and a linear approach makes sense. But with adults it’s more of a case of filling in the gaps. I find that no matter what I teach, my adults will have some experience in some of it and sometimes are even experts in parts, but I never know when I’m going to hit a hole. And so it becomes a dance: advance two steps, backtrack one, and sometimes sidestep and whirl. It’s never boring.

STAR is not a curriculum but a very specific method that you adapt for your students’ different levels. While I’m thrilled that it is supported by evidence-based research, I’m equally thrilled that I don’t have to read every word of that evidence. Instead I can jump right in, use it in my classroom, and then sit back and bask in the glow of adults finally getting it.

You begin by assessing your readers to find out their strengths and weaknesses, then you place them in appropriate levels for alphabetics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. You may have a student who is strong in fluency but weak in comprehension. You may work on improving his vocabulary only to see that it also improves his comprehension since the more words you know the better your reading comprehension becomes. All the parts are interconnected and each has its own specific exercises; nothing is left to vague guesses no matter how educated they might be. It sounds complicated, but when you’re teaching it, it’s nothing short of a wonder.

I’ve begun with vocabulary. When you were in school how many times did you hear, “Go look it up in the dictionary!” when you asked what a word meant? Teachers, how many times have you said that to a student? But what if you’re a fair to middling reader with a limited vocabulary? A trip to the dictionary will only confuse you. You look up your word only to find that you don’t understand the explanation. So you begin a scavenger hunt looking up the words in the explanation. Or you find at least five different meanings for the same word and you have no idea which one is right.

Or you read an article and come across a word you don’t know. So you keep reading, hoping that you’ll get a clue from the surrounding paragraph, but then you realize that there are lots of words you don’t know, and depending on context is useless and you’re lost and you usually give up.
Our STAR trainers, Jane and Becky, told us that the first thing you should do with a new word list is give your class the definitions — and just one definition for every word, not every possible configuration. Next you discuss the words using personal examples and use them in specific writing exercises; then you talk about them during the week and, above all, use them. By the end of the week your students haven’t memorized a list; they’ve internalized every word.

I saw it unfold in my class. My students even enjoyed learning to pronounce the words we learned. They made up silly sentences, came up with personal examples, played with them as if they were shiny new toys. They listened for them when they left class and searched for them in the newspapers and on TV. And best of all, they used them even though their friends told them they were crazy.

“I used them at home and my family got mad at me, but I just smiled!” Gino told me.

“Now I finally know what amiable means; my brother’s always calling me that,” added Deanna.

“I wrote it on my Facebook page and my friends think I’m nuts!” Lany told me.

It’s amazing. A few specific, directed techniques and a new world opens up. If I hadn’t taught it I wouldn’t have believed it. My students were wonderful before this but now they’re STARs.

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Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on Apr 15 2010. Filed under As You Like It, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.