In between Bottom-Up and Top-Down

After reading this chapter, I started to think about what I am seeing in my classroom now and on what I experienced in my classes in elementary school. The classroom that I am in right now has a set up that is a mix between Ms. Teal’s classroom and Ms. Battle’s. The students are arranged in small groups and have very frequent small group discussions on what they have read and what they are writing about. While they do work together to work on their comprehension skills of various texts, they do complete many individual tasks such as silent reading and writing but they are always asked to share with their group members any ideas they have for stories and they are also asked to write letters to their teachers and myself talking about what they are reading during their silent reading.

Practice, practice, practice, words that I’ve heard over and over and over again from my parents and many teachers throughout the years. Whether it was about swimming, playing a musical instrument, or with my school work, I’ve always been taught that in order to master something, practicing it is the only way to learn it and it worked. When I was in school, learning how to read was about learning the different sounds that letters made and the ways they were shaped and how they were combined. We practiced this with worksheets and projects. Whenever a book or a passage was read, worksheets/questions from the book were assigned and I recall most of this work being individually and not in a group setting.

The bottom-up and top-down theories are the two extreme ends of the spectrum. I think that those in the earlier years that are learning how to read would do well with a bottom-up type of classroom such as Ms. Teal’s classroom. They learn to pick apart words and their meanings and they later on use this knowledge that they have learned to comprehend and analyze reading selections. As the students progress, they should be moving into more top-down theory classrooms like Ms. Battle’s. In these classrooms, the students can become more independent and take control of their learning through self selections in books and group discussions about these books. The only problem with this progression is that students learn at different rates, especially those students that struggle with reading and English language learners. In these situations, having a classroom that still incorporates some bottom-up instruction would be beneficial to those students but the students that are not struggling would still have the top-down instruction.