Reading Fluency "Aha" Moments

I am in the process of closing a graduate course for K-12 teachers, "Teaching Reading Fluency."  I don't know when I've had more fun facilitating an online course! Participants acted like active kids in a new playground! Following are just some comments shared in our last course forum asking everyone to share a few "aha" moments and other learning peaks in the course. I thought you would enjoy reading those. I hope that you will drop in and comment on your work teaching fluency to adults. Do you? What can you share in addition to what others say below? 

  1. My definite A-Ha! moment was the evidence of how unproductive round robin reading is to reading fluency!
  2. Many of my “A-ha!” moments were the connections I made between fluency instruction and what my teachers did in the classroom as I was growing up. I had no idea things like readers theater, puppet plays, choral reading, and repeated readings were targeting reading fluency. It was also exciting for me to see that round robin reading is not backed by research and [is] discouraged.
  3. Before taking this class, I knew that fluency didn’t mean “speed reading”, but I didn’t have a good sense of what it did mean. My first A-ha moment was discovering that in order to become a fluent reader, our students need to improve their prosody...I also learned the importance of rereading in order to build fluency. I was always under the impression that teachers should have their students focus on a new text each day. 
  4. I also changed my thinking about assessment. I used to conduct one-minute running records in order to get a fluency score. That gave me a summative assessment, but didn’t help inform my teaching. Now I know that I can analyze these one minute reads to determine students’ specific fluency mistakes.
  5. Prosody is an important component in fluency.  This is the area that I feel my more "fluent" readers could have received direct instruction to take them to the next level - understanding the context of the author's written word and applying it orally. 
  6. I would have to say one of my a-ha moments from this course was realizing that oral reading fluency is more than just reading rate and accuracy. These two aspects are very important elements regarding fluency. However, prosody is just as important and must be present in a student’s oral reading to be considered fluent.
  7. Most of the fluency assessments I have done with my students revolve around how many words a student can read per minute and how accurate the reading is. I didn’t know quite how to assess prosody until I learned about the Multidimensional Fluency Scale (Rasinski, 2003).
  8. Another a-ha moment for me was the introduction of the Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (FORI) (Stahl, Heubach, and Cramond, 2005). I love the idea of FORI as part of my fluency instruction using the current literacy curriculum.
  9.   At the beginning of this class if you had asked me what fluency was I would have said "how fast a student can read the text".  I had not explored much research with fluency and thought rate was one of the only factors to being fluent.  Through all of the readings and discussions, I have learned that fluency looks at rate but also at accuracy, word phrasing, pace, and inflection of voice. 
  10.  I reaffirmed my belief in repeated readings.  As I meet with various teachers at conferences and in-services, many times teachers don't see a need for repeated readings with students.  They feel once a child has read a book, they can move on to another text.  
  11.  For me my biggest A-ha moment was to assess less and give students intentional practice more...Another surprise was learning that sustained silent reading has not been proved an effective way to increase fluency. 
  12.  My biggest “A-ha!" moment was when I realized that I should be taking the time to administer fluency tests to my students throughout the year. 
  13.  ...with the work that we have done for this class, I have learned how valuable fluency is to comprehension development, and that there are a variety of effective methods for assessment and instruction of reading fluency.  According to the article, “Reading fluency assessments  and instruction: What, why, and how?” teachers need to listen to students read aloud so they can make judgments, and with these systematic observations they can then determine instructional needs..Another “A-ha!” moment was the value of repeated readings.
  Should we discuss fluency more in our community? Your thoughts are invited and appreciated! Leecy
  

Comments

  1. What is your definition of fluency?
  2. How do you help your learners become more fluent?
  3. How important is fluency in adult reading development?

Hello colleagues, Thanks for posting these comments from the teachers taking your course on fluency, Leecy. It's great to see how much they learned. I would like to hear members' thoughts on the topic of teaching fluency. If teachers on our list engage learners in fluency building activties, what techniques do you use? If you use repeated reading, what strategies do you implement and what texts do you use for repeated readings?

Thanks for your input!

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition and Teaching & Learning CoPs