Summary Of Katie Dickerson's Perspectives On Urban Education

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In the spring of 2015, Katie Dickerson, an 11th grade English teacher, published an article to Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education, titled “Reimagining Reading: Creating a Classroom Culture that Embraces Independent Choice Reading”. The article discusses the strategies she used to better engage her students in reading more on their own and in class. Throughout a two-year mark, she collected data during the schoolyear and at the end, gave students a questionnaire of how they felt towards these

Today’s schools are seeing more children lacking an interest in reading, which is crucial to their intellectual development. In this article, Katie Dickerson noted that “reading… (leads to) the establishment of future goals…, open-mindedness…, the ability to empathize with others, strong communication skills, and the ability to focus”. Furthermore, she stated that “People…are, by nature, lovers of stories. Sometimes it takes the right story for them to realize that. She states that some of her students have parents that do not know how to read, with only a few having parents that have a bachelor’s degree. Many of her students come from backgrounds that do not promote high literacy standards and therefore are very uninterested in reading. Advancing technology …show more content…

She selectively assessed reading levels of students whom excelled, struggled, and performed mediocre in her class.
Students also tracked themselves using reading trackers, which monitored the number of pages read in particular book in a time frame. This gave her a more personal viewpoint of data to collect. The more advanced classes were required to maintain reader’s notebooks, which contained reading trackers and other strategies such as “thinking stems” and journal entries designed to make the student connect more in depth about what they were