"The Matthew Effect"

In reading chapter five one of the concepts that stood out to me was "The Matthew Effect." Prior to this chapter, I had never heard of it. The Matthew Effect is based on the principle of "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" (Graves,123.) This meaning that those students who enjoy reading tend to read more, and those who dislike reading tend to avoid it. This becomes an issue because though the children who are already skilled readers continue to excel, the poor readers fall even farther behind creating a huge gap. This gap in reading skills makes it hard for a single teacher to come into a classroom and provide every single student with developmentally appropriate lessons and material. This is where differentiated instruction comes in. Grave's explains how each student is different depending on their strengths, interests, and needs. He then goes on to explain how teachers are supposed to turn out students who are all "alike"- in the sense that they all can read well. In order to do this, differentiated instruction is necessary for students to learn at their own pace and in their own ways.
In my grade school students who were struggling readers were sent to the "reading van." This was my schools method of differentiated instruction, providing the struggling readers with extra time and attention in order to get their skills up to speed with the rest of the class. It was a good idea, in concept, but by taking the students out of our regularly scheduled classes for two hours a day it alienated them from the group and they were seen as "slow." Graves stated in the chapter that students who have difficulty reading avoid it because they do not see it as rewarding. I can only imagine that if a student had difficulty reading, and then was alienated from their peers for that reason, they would enjoy reading significantly less and therefor avoid it even further. There were methods of intervention discussed in the text such as small group instruction, differentiating texts, and differentiating tasks that could help a struggling reader without hurting their dignity.

Classroom Assessment

This chapter discussed the importance of teacher assessment and the methods for success. It discussed methods such as testing, observation, and student reflection to assess their mastery of topics and their progress. One section I liked was when the author discussed the importance of teachers adapting their lesson plans with the changing times. I have been in classes in grade school, high school, and even college in which the teacher has been teaching the course for 20 plus years and has never changed their assignments or test questions. There are so many problems with this. One the author states is that in many subjects, the information students are expected to know changes all the time, it is not the same material as it was 20 years ago and we need to grow and adapt to be effective teachers. In my personal experience I have been in classes in which the teachers will not hand back your exams so that they can recycle the questions for the next test, but the students then do not know what questions they got wrong or right and do not learn from it. I have also been in classes in which my peers older siblings had taken the same course years earlier and saved the answers to the test, so their younger counterparts do not even need to learn the material. The text also stated that teachers need to prepare students for standardized tests, but not base the curriculum around them. My question would be, how can a teacher make sure their students are adequately prepared, without teaching exactly what will be on the test?