Teaching Guessing or Teaching Reading?

I’m teaching an undergraduate class this semester that is focused on teaching reading and writing to elementary students, specifically students in first, second, and third grade. Many of the school districts still use running records, so I am teaching this assessment tool. As I was preparing the material for class, I found a bunch of videos of my daughters reading the leveled texts so that I could take a running record - and model it to my students as well as have them try out the assessment without needing to find a chid to work with.

As I watched the videos, I wondered at certain parts - were my kids guessing or were they reading. My younger daughter, for instance, was reading a level A book about a little dog. When she would come to the word little, she would stop, tap her pointer finger on the page, and look at me to tell her the word. She was not sure how to decode the word so she was hoping that I would tell her the word and she could then move on and continue reading. Once she had the pattern of the book figured out, I questioned if she was reading the words or if she was looking at the pictures and making good guesses.

I used this as a starting place to discuss why teaching kids to read is so important. When I brought this up to my students - is my daughter guessing or reading - they were not sure. This led us to consider the types of texts that we use with students.

The students asked an excellent question - why are running records still used as a reading assessment in schools. No assessment is perfect - we know this in medicine and in education. And, we do not use only one reading assessment to learn what are students are doing when reading - there are other assessments. However, when we conduct running records, we do learn about and observe reading behaviors and we learn how they are understanding a new text. So, there are reasons to use a running record.

When I learned to take running records, I used a new text that the students had not read rather than a program like Fountas and Pinnell or Reading A-Z. I think I will try a new text with my daughters next and see if my students and I notice any differences this time around.