What is in the best interest of our students? Is it teaching to the newest standards movement, like the Common Core? Teaching that prepares students to take a test? Or is it something more meaningful and authentic? In his new book, In the Best Interest of Students, Kelly Gallagher notes that there are real strengths in the Common Core standards, and there are significant weaknesses as well. He takes the long view, reminding us that standards come and go but what remains constant is the need to stay true to what we know works in the teaching of reading, writing, speaking and listening. Instead of blindly adhering to the latest standards movement, Kelly advocates: - Dialing up the amount of reading and writing students are doing. - Balancing rigorous, high-quality literature and non-fiction with high-interest, student-selected titles. - Giving students much more choice when it comes to reading and writing activities. - Encouraging readers to deepen their comprehension by moving beyond the "four corners of the text." - Using modeling to enrich students' writing skills in the prewriting, drafting, and revision stages. - Helping young writers to achieve more authenticity through the blending of genres. - Resisting the de-emphasis of narrative and imaginative reading and writing. - Providing students with more opportunities to sharpen their listening and speaking skills - Planning lessons that move beyond Common Core expectations. In this provocative and insightful new book, Kelly surveys the teaching landscape since the publication of his highly regarded book Readicide, and finds that although some progress has been made, more needs to be done. Amid the frenzy of trying to teach to a new set of standards, Kelly Gallagher is a strong voice of reason, reminding us that instruction should be anchored around one guiding question: What is in the best interest of our students?
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This is my second Kelly Gallagher book, and it will not be my last. Once again in the world of ELA educational books, he proves to be an excellent resource for those teachers that want to have a list of ideas ready to help their students learn ELA to the best of their ability. Yet, this book also has some problems that may make other teachers want to wait before purchasing it.
I think how much you should read this book depends on where you are in reading his texts, and/or where you are in your educational career. The whole point of this book is one that focuses on the Common Core State Standards. He looks at the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to how these replaced the old NCLB standards and what effect it has on the teachers who must write lesson plans with them in mind. He also takes the time to show some of the reading and writing strategies that he uses to increase the ELA ability of his students.
Yet, there are some issues that I had with this book. For all of the strategies that I saw in this novel, many, (at least from what I know of the reading section, since I have only read his book Readicide), are either barely mentioned, or skipped over completely, and the reader is told to check out his other book to find out more. For the reader that wishes to save time, when they have read all of his other books, this makes sense, but for readers like me, this presents a problem, in that I know have to buy another book to understand what he is talking about here. This makes some of his advice cheap at times, showing his need to sell books, rather than inform teachers, which can be distracting, to say the least.
On a side note, one thing I'd like to see from Gallagher would be a book on classroom management and how to work with struggling student. As I was reading this book, I could not help but wonder what he did to help those students who weren't learning/reading/writing. He often paints teaching with rose colored glasses, and as any good teacher can tell you, you can have the best lesson plan in the world, but it won't count for diddly, unless you have good classroom management techniques in place. It would have been nice/be nice to see what Gallagher thinks of this topic, and what worked for him, since every teacher is different and has different strategies on how to deal with troubling students.
At any rate, I think that you should get this book, if, like me, you are at the beginning of your teaching career. It is something that you can look at when people ask you what you think about the Common Core standards. However, if you are a veteran teacher who has read all of Gallagher's books, then you may want to either buy this one heavily discounted, or get it from the library. There isn't enough new here to justify the (as of this review) nearly $30 price tag for the softcover edition. Still, as a new teacher, and someone who has only read his Readicide book, I found this to be very informative, and I give it a four out of five as a result. I can't wait to not only look at his other books, but also look back on this one after I have been teaching for a few years, and have more experience to evaluate it properly.
