Douglas Fisher (2)Rezensionen

I had to read this book for an education class this semester. I couldn't really ever seem to get into it. Yes, it had a lot of useful information, but it felt like such a chore to read.

I was very grateful to my coworker who lent me this book after I began creating lesson plans that wove in all of the required high school subject areas in to one lesson. I put them together using reading passages intended to teach every topic each day, and this map helped me see new ways to do that. I will update this review once I find my notes and have more time.

I must find my notes and update this review later, but I found it quite helpful in planning my lessons with regard to reading levels and how to incorporate text passages across the curriculum for my students who have little time for reading in their daily work lives.

Library 101: A Handbook for the School Librarian. 2nd ed. (Libraries Unlimited, 2015, 233 p., ISBN: 1416619224)
There are two problems with this book. The first is the subtitle. This should be a handbook for library technicians rather than the professionally credentialed teacher librarian. The second is that it was published in the wrong century; it should have been a guide published a couple of decades ago. The central idea here is the traditional library where stuff is acquired, cataloged and circulated with a smattering of audiovisual equipment thrown in (check out the overhead projectors you will need). The problem here is that anyone using this book gets a picture of “library” that is in major decline in the U.S. and is being replaced by Google. Perhaps there is a professional at the district level struggling to keep a few library repositories available, but few teachers and administrators pay attention to such revenue consuming entitities within the school organization when everything is centered on raising test scores. These are harsh words, admittedly, but the data have been growing for the last decade that this type of library is no longer needed or appreciated and it does us little good to advocate for such places in the school. Pass this one up.

Fisher and Frey are champions of traditional top down teaching methods often known as direct teaching but which they term the gradual release model. They view the teacher as in command of what and how content or skills are being taught. And what they mean by gradual release is to have the student take more and more responsibility to do exactly what has been asked of them. Thus, we produce a students do do exactly what they are told to do. This is, of course, a part of real life. In many of the jobs out there, workder are given directions by their superiors and are expected to carry them out precisely and we all rely on such workers who prepare our hamburgers, make cars that work and last a long time, and construct a home that doesn’t leak. Such teaching and the resultant testing is the life blood of what goes on in many classrooms as students are given assignments and strict rubrics and follow-up assessments to ensure that mastery happens. However, such a robot workforce won’t keep a first world nation first world. There have to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, creators, inventors, and those who can see new ways of working and doing. Fisher and Frey have no room for such learners or for the kinds of technology that helps learners become creators. So, do you need to read this book? If you want a source that defends directed teaching, then this is one choice. Otherwise, as teacher librarians, we can cooperate with teachers who see the world in such terms, but we can also develop the learning commons in such a way that the opportunities for bored learners abound in our physical and virtual spaces. If you are doing the later, skip this book.

If you have a dysfunctional school, you already know it, and are puzzled by how to fix it. Perhaps you feel powerless and are just hanging on. Fisher and companions analyze this situation in schools and their book is all about what to do about it. We found it dense reading and wish it were more clear cut, but we are going to recommend it to those whose schools are in disarray because there are sure to be some ideas here to add to the mix of those being generated or resisted in a school culture. Since it is all about the kids, extraordinary measures need to be considered. If you are a premium member of ASCD, then this book has come already into your mailbox. It is worth considering.

Quick skim shows classic reading ed: prior knowledge, motivation, word study, text structures, text features - all presented within the idea that the teacher must model to instruct. Bit of a neuroscience twist thrown in. I'm looking forward to the online discussion through the IRA website.

"How much a reader already knows about a subject is the best predictor of reading comprehension." This book is okay, but it isn't all about background knowledge. They try hard to make it seem like that's what the book is about, but they venture into lots of other areas as well. It could have been a much thinner book, and I think they tried to justify the price by fluffing it out with some other content, which is fine because they other stuff like the two chapters near the end; critical literacy and new literacies, are still useful. My board purchased the book in bulk for all the schools, so I read it during the summer in case it had something really valuable in it to help my staff, but it didn't really have much to offer that I didn't already know.½

It is easy to dismiss this book as but another traditional behaviorist teaching methods book. Not so. The subtitle: gradual release of responsibility, is the central point of the book and the central issue for teacher librarians as they integrate the AASL Learning Standards into learning activities. For many years, we as a profession, have emphasized that by teaching information literacy, students become more and more independent learners, confident that they can attack any question, project, or problem in an information-rich world. Now, if we could just ask Fisher and Frey to refocus this book from just a classroom teacher to a co-teaching stance, this book would be a central element in our collaborative work. I wish I could reproduce their model here because it is immediately understandable and thought provoking. The steps leading from teacher responsibility to student responsibility go through the following stages: The teacher teaches a focused lesson and the student does it; the teacher guides instruction and “we” do the task; collaborative learning focuses on “you do it together;” and independent learning strategies mean “you do it alone.” Fisher and Frey demonstrate what each step is not and then proceed to demonstrate each level as they teach the reader methods to make progress from dependent learners to independent learners. If the reader can get over the focus just on the classroom teacher and stretch the ideas here to a co-teaching stance, then this is one of the best brief books of the year.

Fisher and colleagues are concerned with techniques that can be used in the classroom to engage ELL students in discussion with everyone. Their techniques are based on research and cover making the environment conducive to discussion, how to stimulate discussion, what to do if there is too much discussion, and how to assess the results of discussion. It occurs to us that when teacher librarians co-teach with classroom teachers, this should be one of the topics: how, when working in the learning commons engage every learner in productive discussion as they encounter text and multimedia. There is also the matter of investigative discussions in professional learning communities that are experimenting with various techniques to increase the participation of ELL students. Highly recommended for booth groups who are creating their own repertoir of what works.

brief mention