25 Biggest Mistakes Teachers Make and How to Avoid Them

Mistake 12: Inappropriate Classroom Policies
and to move about as they engage
in learning tasks. Worksheets can be
effective if they are used for follow-up,
SCENARIO 12.17
Let Your Fingers Do the Reading
practice, and individualized instruction.
They should never be a singular
mode of instruction.
When I was in sixth grade my teacher divided us into groups in my reading class by the
way we pronounced words on a list. I of course went into the slow readers group. I
never liked to read after that. It was never fun because she made us follow along with
our fingers and to me that was degrading. In my senior year my English teacher got me
to read a book and I now enjoy reading this certain author plus other books. All it took
was an interesting book and a teacher who had a positive effect on me to change my
views of reading in a positive way again.
This ineffective teaching practice
of grouping students
based on such limited criteria is
bound to have some undesirable consequences.
Grouping students by the
way they pronounce words is a practically
useless strategy. This selection
process invites error and has the
potential to distress a child who has
been erroneously assigned to a lower
group. Understandably, children in
this situation would feel degraded
by being forced to follow along with
their fingers because this practice
reflected the teacher’s expectations
for the low group. Kerman and
Martin (1980) found that teachers
have lower expectations for lowachieving
groups and give them less
feedback. The author of this scenario
acknowledges that a lack of feedback
and low expectations made her dislike
reading for a time. A teacher’s
SCENARIO 12.18
Rigid Mortis
belief in her ability to read a book
restored her interest.
Effective teachers would explore
alternatives to grouping, considering
the controversy that surrounds ability
grouping. If they elect to use
groups, the selection criteria would
be explicit, appropriate, and functional
enough to allow the teacher to
organize students into groups of
preferably five or more students to
facilitate efficient, effective instruction.
This type of grouping can best
be accomplished by first determining
a child’s skill level through appropriate
assessment and then matching
the task to the skill level. To communicate
high expectations for children,
encourage them to read alone and
offer assistance only when it’s
needed. Positive feedback plus high
expectations fosters a love of reading
and facilitates reading achievement.
One of my worst experiences at school was during the fall of 1995 while attending college.
That semester my father-in-law passed away unexpectedly on Halloween.
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