Teacher Training Center challenges PA teachers to rethink reading

Philadelphia teacher Jane Hileman is the English teacher we all wish we had. Because while most students are slipping Us Weekly inside Wuthering Heights, Hileman is battling illiteracy by letting students choose their own reading material. It’s common-sense strategies like these that pepper Hileman’s teaching materials. Her King of Prussia teacher-training center, the American Reading Company, has seen a 35 percent increase in sales over the last year, breaking records and making waves in classrooms across the country.

A veteran of the much-maligned Philadelphia Public School System, Hileman has been in teacher training and consulting for 35 years. She started the ARC with a cherry-picked group of award-winning teachers from across Pennsylvania. Together, these educators created a model and put it into action over the last 12 years, slowly building a market for classroom innovations like providing constant progress reports and making all information accessible online. So when education secretary Arne Duncan announced $2.6 billion in stimulus funding for Pennsylvania and that all proposals must have certain innovations built in, Hileman’s crew was way ahead of the game.

“There was not much of a market for innovation during the ‘No Child Left Behind’ era,” says Hileman. “But when your President puts money behind innovation and says if you want this money, you must do this kind of thing, all of a sudden, everyone is scrambling and here we are with it done.”

Instead of a one-size-fits-all textbook, the ARC model allows students their choice from hundreds of books that they want to read. By providing a national standard for assessing reading growth, teachers and students can work together to find the correct book for each individual student. And since the program uses real books, Hileman believes her training model has applications for adult illiteracy. Currently, ARC warehouse employees’ advancement is based on improving their reading level.

But what about Great Expectations and Lord of the Flies? Is Hileman creating a nation of Us Weekly readers at the expense of the classics? Maybe so, but at least they know how to read.

“There is nothing wrong with students having to read the Count of Monte Cristo once they are readers, but many students have not yet established a reading identity, or taste or appetite,” Hileman says. “If all they ever read is Sarah Plain and Tall in the fourth grade and Johnny Tremain in the seventh grade and Wuthering Heights in the 11th grade, all they really learn is that reading is something schools invent to torture them. We made a mistake in thinking we need to teach students how to read. We have to teach them to be readers first.”

Source: Jane Hileman, American Reading Company
Writer: John Steele