Carol Jago: How Can Teachers Improve Their Craft?

From "Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo":

Response From Carol JagoCarol Jago has taught middle and high school in Santa Monica, California for 32 years. She is past president of the National Council of Teachers of English and author of With Rigor for All: Helping Students Meet Common Core Standards for Reading Literature (Heinemann 2011).
Advice from Someone Who Learned the Hard Way
1. Stop telling students that reading is fun, though not because it can't be. "Reading is fun!" puts books in competition with World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto. If students groan, "I can't do it. This is too hard!" as you distribute copies of a novel, agree with them that reading this book may be hard in places, but assure them that with effort and your help they will be able to read the book. Experience has taught teenagers that if they complain loudly for long enough, the teacher will often abandon a difficult text for something shorter, simpler, and funnier. Don't fall for it.
2. Address, don't avoid challenging vocabulary. Instead of looking for books without difficult vocabulary or figurative language, teach students how to meet these challenges. Rather than pre-teaching all the hard words in a chapter, select a few to teach that are critical to understanding the passage. Also, while assigning and assessing lists of relatively random words is common teaching practice, that isn't how you developed a robust vocabulary. You did it by reading.
3. Teach student how to negotiate complex syntax. Reading long, complicated sentences is a challenge for all everyone but particularly for today's students in the habit of skimming and scanning Twitter updates. Teachers need to help students slow the pace of their reading for literature and develop the habit of rereading when a sentence doesn't seem to make sense. Though rereading doesn't have a cool acronym or fancy graphic organizer, it is the technique experienced readers employ most often. When was the last time you reached for a KWL chart when struggling through a challenging text? Don't seek out rewritten texts. Teach the real thing by helping students parse of each complex phrase.
4. Assign homework reading. In too many schools, teachers have stopped assigning homework reading altogether, principally because students have stopped doing it. This is the path to perdition for literature study. If a teacher reads aloud Lord of the Flies to a class of tenth graders, the only person in the room becoming a better reader is the teacher. I sometimes hear the excuse that there aren't enough copies of the books to send home with students. In many one-to-one laptop or e-reader programs the machines must remain at school. This is educational malpractice. Students need to develop the self-discipline and stamina necessary to read for extended periods of time on their own. How else will they be ready for college? The amount of reading required in college can be up to eight times greater than what students are reading in high school.

See responses by Carol Jago and Penny Kittle to Larry Ferlazzo's prompt here:

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2013/02/many_ways_english_teachers_can_improve_their_craft.html