Lucy Calkins is one of the most influential reading researchers In the nation. She created the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, whose teaching materials have been widely adopted and is a proponent of “balanced literacy.” BL prominently opposed the “phonics first” approach.
In my book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform,” I described in detail the long-standing debates about teaching reading, which dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. The phonetic approach was the conventional method until the advent of the very popular “Dick and Jane” reading books in the late 1920s. Those readers relied on the “whole word” method, in which children learned to recognize short words (“Run, Dick, run.” “See Sally run.”) and to use them in context rather than sound them out phonetically. In the 1950s, the debate came to a raging boil after publication of Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” which attacked the whole word method. Many more twists and turns in the story, which should have been settled by Jeanne Chall’s comprehensive book, Learning to Read: The Great Debate (1967). Chall supported beginning with phonics, then transitioning to children’s books as soon as children understood phonetic principles. Nonetheless, the 1980s experienced the rise and widespread adoption of the “whole language” approach, which disdained phonics. Then came Calkins and “balanced literacy,” claiming to combine diverse methods. Critics said that BL was whole language redux.
According to this post by Sarah Schwartz in Education Week, Professor Calkins has called for a rebalancing of balanced literacy to incorporate more early phonics. I continue to object to the use of the phrase”the science of reading,” which I consider to be an inappropriate use of the word “science.” Reading teachers should have a repertoire of strategies, including phonics and phonemic awareness.
Early reading teachers and researchers are reacting with surprise, frustration, and optimism after the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, the organization that designs one of the most popular reading programs in the country, outlined a new approach to teaching children how to read.
A document circulated at the group’s professional development events, first reported on by APM Reportson Friday, calls for increased focus on ensuring children can recognize the sounds in spoken words and link those sounds to written letters—the foundational skills of reading. And it emphasizes that sounding out words is the best strategy for kids to use to figure out what those words say.
“[P]oring over the work of contemporary reading researchers has led us to believe that aspects of balanced literacy need some ‘rebalancing,'” the document reads.
While the document suggests that these ideas about how to teach reading are new and the product of recent studies, they’re in fact part of a long-established body of settled science . Decades of cognitive science research has shown that providing children with explicit instruction in speech sounds and their correspondence to written letters is the most effective way to make sure they learn how to read words.
But it’s significant to see these ideas coming from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. The program, founded by Lucy Calkins and housed at Columbia University, has long downplayed the importance of these foundational skills in early reading instruction, and has pushed other, disproven strategies for identifying words.
In a statement to Education Week, Calkins said that the document reflects work they have done with researchers at the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit that supports children with mental health and learning disorders.
“Those who know us well, know that we are a university-based learning community, and that the knowledge we offer is constantly evolving and expanding. The document reflects my strong belief that children will benefit when people with diverse perspectives and backgrounds sit at the same table and listen carefully to each other,” Calkins wrote.
Calkins also noted that the document has been shared at dozens of TCRWP events, including a virtual reunion for teachers this past weekend.
Mixed Signals on Cueing
The Units of Study for Teaching Reading, the TCRWP curriculum for reading instruction in grades K-5, is one of the biggest players in the early reading market. A 2019 Education Week Research Center survey found that 16 percent of K-2 and special education teachers use the Units of Study to teach reading.
But as APM Reports noted, the curriculum has faced increased scrutiny, including from reading researchers. Some states and districts have reconsidered its use.
The curriculum doesn’t include systematic, explicit teaching in phonemic awareness or phonics in the early grades, as Education Week has reported. The company started publishing a supplemental phonics program in 2018, but marketing materials for the new units imply that phonics shouldn’t play a central role in the early years classroom. “Phonics instruction needs to be lean and efficient,” the materials read . “Every minute you spend teaching phonics (or preparing phonics materials to use in your lessons) is less time spent teaching other things.”
But it’s not only that the materials sideline phonemic awareness and phonics—they also teach reading strategies that can make it harder for students to learn these skills.
Calkins’ materials promote a strategy called “three-cueing,” which suggests that students can decipher what words say by relying on three different sources of information, or cues. They can look at the letters, using a “visual” cue. But they can also rely on the context or syntax of a sentence to predict which word would fit, the theory goes. Reading researchers and educators say that this can lead to students guessing: making up words based on pictures, or what’s happening in the story, rather than reading the words by attending to the letters.
This new document seems to signal a major change in instructional theory from the organization.
It emphasizes the importance of foundational skills, recommending that students in kindergarten and the fall of 1st grade receive daily instruction in phonemic awareness, and saying that all early readers could benefit from frequent phonics practice. It recommends decodable books—those with a high proportion of letter-sound correspondences that students have already learned—be a part of young children’s “reading diets.” And it suggests regular assessments of phonemic awareness, as problems in that area can indicate reading difficulties.
Especially notable, the document seems to do an about-face on cueing. Students should not be “speculating what the word might say based on the picture,” the document reads. Instead, teachers should tell children to “respond to tricky words by first reading through the word, sound-by-sound, (or part by part) and only then , after producing a possible pronunciation, check that what she’s produced makes sense given the context,” it reads.
The statement on cueing contradicts advice Calkins was giving less than a year ago. In November 2019, Calkins released a statement pushing back on those whom she called , “the phonics-centric people who are calling themselves ‘the science of reading.'”
In that statement last year, Calkins said teachers shouldn’t encourage students to guess at words. But she did say that students could create a hypothesis based on the context of the sentence.
In a response to Calkins’ statement, reading researcher Mark Seidenberg wrote at the time, “Dr. Calkins says she disdains 3-cueing, but the method is right there in her document.”
Teachers Need ‘Fine-Grained Guidance’
The past couple of years have marked an evolution of publishers’ and reading organizations’ public positions on reading science and how it should guide instruction, spurred in large part by media coverage of best practice from Emily Hanford of APM Reports, and other outlets, including Education Week.
In July of last year, for example, the International Literacy Association published a brief emphasizing the importance of systematic, explicit phonics instruction, a clear distinction of stance from an organization that has long included members on opposing sides of the “reading wars.”
But it’s not a given that any of Calkins’ or TCRWP’s statements will change classroom practice, said Julia Kaufman, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, who studies how school systems can support high-quality instruction. Past research from RAND has also found that Calkins’ materials are widely used in U.S. schools.
“I don’t think there’s any way that we can expect a shift in [TCRWP’s] philosophy and ideas to change anything unless it’s documented and really clear to teachers where they need to change,” she said.
Curriculum and implementation is complex, Kaufman added: “Teachers need specific and detailed and fine-grained guidance in order to know what they need to do in the classroom.”
In their reporting on this recent document, APM Reports noted that educators at a recent TCRWP training received supplemental curriculum materials that encouraged decoding.
The core curriculum, though, still promotes cueing. For example, a strategies chart from a sample 1st grade lesson tells students to “Think about what’s happening,” “Check the picture,” and “Think about what kind of word would fit,” as ways to solve hard words.
Unless and until TCRWP puts out a new edition of the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, with detailed teacher guidance that reflects these philosophical shifts, Kaufman said she wouldn’t expect to see much change in elementary classrooms.
Some educators were optimistic that TCRWP’s new position could lead to more widespread adoption of evidence-based instruction and higher reading achievement. “Lots of changes still to make but this is encouraging!” wrote Erin Beard, a literacy coach, on Twitter.
Others expressed frustration over a move they saw as too little, too late.
“Is she handing out refunds for all the intervention needed for the missed learning opportunity?” LaTonya M. Goffney, the superintendent of Aldine Independent School District, wrote on Twitter . “Our most vulnerable students – black, brown, poor, ELL, & special education students paid the ultimate cost!”
Sharon Contreras, the superintendent of Guilford County schools, noted that any changes would likely come at a cost for districts using Calkins’ materials.
“Millions of dollars wasted. Thousands of students cannot read proficiently. Districts spending a small fortune on new curriculum & to retrain teachers. All totally avoidable,” she wrote, on Twitter .
At last, some moves in the direction of sanity. Here are a couple more things to think about: key to latter reading ability are a) world knowledge through extended exposure to knowledge-rich materials in particular domains, including the vocabulary of those domains and b) syntactic fluency through exposure to increasingly complex syntactic forms in the student’s ambient SPOKEN language environment.
cx: later, not latter, ofc. Sorry, I typed this hastily.
Oh for the love of reading, phonics and phonemic awareness have always been explicitly taught in a balanced literacy classroom. And her distrust of teachers is still as evident as ever buoyed by non educators cultlike insistence on programs that supposedly produce miracles even though there is zero research to support the efficacy of any of these programs. Lucy is protecting her bottom line. These are the reading wars reborn, rebranded, and supported by tech giants , especially those associated with Amplify. They cannot wait to swoop in and have every child plugged in. No teacher needed. If children aren’t reading for meaning, all the sounding out in the world isn’t going to make them life long readers. Classroom
engagement, joyful learning, emersion in oral language and read alouds, access to high quality children’s literature, and writing, writing, writing personal narratives are bigger pieces than just phonemic awareness and lock step phonics.
Amen
I just posted that! You beat me to it.
Amen.
An overview: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/on-the-pseudoscience-of-strategies-based-reading-comprehension-instruction-or-what-current-comprehension-instruction-has-in-common-with-astrology/
I just commented . . . Oh Diane,
This is disheartening. Lucy is an opportunist and I would NOT consider her to be the leading literacy expert of our time. She supported Common Core when it financially benefitted her. She does not believe teachers can teach without her prescriptive program. Please really really think about posting another perspective.
https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2020/10/19/media-experts-parental-zeal-political-knee-jerk-legislation-market-forces-failing-reading-again/?fbclid=IwAR2_M_OvhAxxDsgHIbWDprqtNMf6xSMOKYfw-CRAb_EKe54BoD_17g0UiAU
And that you gave Emily Hanford airtime is beyond pale. She is not an expert but she is quite dangerous. She does not trust teachers and sees this as her cash cow. She is involved in Amplify and no doubt the road this goes down will be putting all reading instruction on a computer.
This is extremely disrespectful to literacy teachers/experts everywhere. Teachers know how to teach BUT because of NCLB et al, they are no longer allowed to do it. You are feeding into the corporate take over of our schools by sharing anything from Education Week and Emily Hanford.
Programs are not the answer . . qualified teachers are. You are also doing whole language a disservice as that is NOT what it is. Your simplistic definition is hurting our children.
Read this as well. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260409542_What_Really_Matters_When_Working_With_Struggling_Readers?fbclid=IwAR3FzgtprMrNBsLwTw2JiFVenDoN80W9CtUpHmldqcaTE8nEFukn4KTl9-g
Please really really think about posting another perspective.
On these subjects–curricula and pedagogy–that’s precisely what Diane does. She posts a variety of perspectives. She posts when she encounters a piece that she finds particularly interesting or provocative, and great discussion typically follows. Thanks for your perspectives.
Emily Hanford is to literacy instruction what Scott Atlas is to the Covid pandemic.
Ed week is a shill to corporations destroying our public schools.
Maybe a superintendent of schools should work on teacher education verses programs.
Research points to the best way to teach kids how to read is by highly qualified teachers and not a program.
Nclb, race to the top, essa are to blame for this “new” crisis….not lack of phonics.
Have yet to see a classroom where phonics wasn’t taught.
Can you tell me more or point me to where I can read more about Emily’s connections to Amplify the Core? I am so disturbed by her connections to Fordham and how so much of her Hard Words piece connects back to them.
The intro to that essay I just linked to:
For all children, but especially for the one for whom learning to read is going to be difficult, early learning must be a safe and joyful experience. Many of our students, in this land in which nearly a third live in dire poverty, come to school not ready, physically or emotionally or linguistically, for the experience. They have spent their short lives hungry or abused. They lack proper eyeglasses. They have had caretakers who didn’t take care because they were constantly teetering on one precipice or another, often as a result of our profoundly inequitable economic system. Many have almost never had an actual conversation with an adult. They are barely articulate in the spoken language and thus not ready to comprehend written language, which is merely a means for encoding a spoken one. They haven’t been read to. They haven’t put on skits for Mom and Dad and the Grandparents. They don’t have a bookcase in their room, if they have a room, brimming with Goodnight, Moon; A Snowy Day; Red Fish, Blue Fish; Thomas the Tank Engine; The Illustrated Mother Goose; and D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. They haven’t learned to associate physical books with joy and closeness to people who love them. In the ambient linguistic environment in which they reached school age, they have heard millions fewer total numbers of words and tens of thousands fewer unique lexemes than have kids from more privileged homes, and they have been exposed to much less sophisticated syntax. Some, when they have been spoken to at all by adults, have been spoken to mostly in imperatives. Such children desperately need compensatory environments in which spoken interactions and reading are rich, rewarding, joyful experiences. If a child is going to learn to read with comprehension, he or she must be ready to do so, physically, emotionally, and linguistically (having become reasonably articulate in a spoken language). Learning to read will be difficult for many kids, easy for others. And often the difficulty will have nothing to do with brain wiring and everything to do with the experiences that the child has had in his or her short life. In this, as well as in brain wiring, kids differ, as invariant “standards” do not. They need one-on-one conversations with adults who care about them. They need exposure to libraries and classroom libraries filled with enticing books. Kids need to be read to. They need story time. They need jump-rope rhymes and nursery rhymes and songs and jingles. They need social interaction using spoken language. They need books that are their possessions, objects of their own. They need to memorize and enact. And so on. They need fun with language generally and with reading in particular. They need the experiences that many never got. And so, the mechanics of learning to read should be only a small part of the whole of a reading “program.” However, this essay will deal only with the mechanics part. That, itself, is a lot bigger topic than is it is generally recognized to be.
This piece absolutely brought tears to my eyes. Bob knows them, has met them as they are and as they will be, someday, if we will just help them fall in love with reading. Books that are their possessions and books that possess their imaginations. Big Hug.
Thank you, Kathy!!!
Yes, Bob, yes. Reading is fun, not test prep.
Just beautiful, Bob. Thanks so much.
I am not a reading specialist but everything Bob says makes sense.
I grew up in the South. One parent was from New England, another from Texas. The sounds I heard from my teachers and classmates were mostly southern drawl. Not at home. We spoke in the hybrid tones of New England (Boston) and Texas.
When I moved to the midwest, I discovered teachers who said “drawling” when they were talking about drawing. They could not explain the origin of their prononuciations and misspellings.
I mentored an African American college student who was aware that his mother had given him a gift that enabled him to do some code-switching in speech that many of his peers could not. His mother told him to talk like the news commentators on TV ( e.g., Walter Cronkite). Apart from that, he had become an avid reader, connoisseur, and producer of what we now call graphic novels.
I am not sure if teachers of reading are required to pass a speech test that helps them navigate phonics instruction…and with the joys that Bob so wisely positions as central to learning to read. I do recall that my undergraduate teaching degree required me to pass a speech test.
Compassionate, profound remarks by Bob, getting to the heart of the social contexts in which learning to read happens or doesn’t happen, so deeply embedded in inequality, thank you again, Bob!
Exactly.
BINGO…This practice of cramming literacy earlier and earlier even to Pre-K ignores the way children actually learn and the experiences that motivate further learning. As a Principal, I would almost cry when I watched kindergartners struggle through standardized literacy tests and sit through hours of letter sound and decoding exercises at the expense of time spent learning that there are fascinating things in this world to pursue. I come from a long line of latent readers. When I attended kindergarten in 1964 I wasn’t pressured to read. I don’t recall being that interested in reading until 2nd grade yet I loved school and all of the subjects we covered. I soon caught up with my peers to the point that I was in the top 10 in my class in high school. My son had similar issues to the point where he was diagnosed with dysgraphia and put in special ed. There were good aspects to serving his special needs, but he never liked school because the ongoing focus was on his deficits and not on his strengths in critical thinking and creativity. Literacy is a complex topic, but our focus on the structural aspects, so called scientific, over the intellectual motivation to read continues to act as a barrier for universal student success.
Thank you for these specific examples of ways in which kids differ. They are not all on the same developmental schedule, they have differing past experiences, and they have different gifts.
AMEN, BOB. I agree. Thank you.
I never did understand the Reading Wars.
The “Reading Wars” were never about phonics v. non-phonics. It was about isolated decontextualized phonics v. phonics in context, in relationship to meaning-making.
That’s the way I see it. Phonics without meaning making led to some of my Spanish speaking students being able to “read” fluently but have little idea what they read. Their decoding was excellent. Understanding,…not so much.
My own kids were raised in a whole language environment. They had daily exposure to phonemic awareness and phonics in their early schooling, but they also wrote their own stories with their own creative spelling . Their understanding of sound symbol relationships was on display (there is a recognizable developmental pattern), but their story telling was the draw for them. No one sat beside them making sure they spelled everything correctly. As they got older, they had access to a wide variety of books written to address their reading level and interest. They were encouraged to pick books they wanted to read and always had free reading time at school.
Learning to read is a balancing act. Some children need less direct instruction in phonics than others. Some children are better at deriving meaning with the use of context clues than others. Both skills are a necessary part of becoming a fluent reader, but what, when and how they are introduced is probably what we should be addressing. It is not an either/or question. Can any of you imagine reading a story without commenting on what is happening or answering a child’s questions? Sharing a book with a child should be more than an exercise in phonics, just as phonics will help open up a wider reading world to the child.
The Whole Herd Method
See Trump run
Run Trump run!
That’s a good book. I hope for his sake he doesn’t have to run down a ramp in January. He’s not good at that.
See Trump lose
Lose Trump lose!
See Trump plead
Plead Trump plead!
See Trump walk
Walk Trump walk!
Good gosh, can’t everyone just stop with all this mumbo jumbo! Every child is different and most children will read when they are good and ready regardless of what mumbo jumbo approach is used. Give them age/content appropriate books to read. Let them read to develop their own interests. Yes, it’s good to have some basics for everyone and yes, it’s good to have different approaches for those who truly have reading disabilities, but all this in fighting over how to teach kids to read is absolutely ridiculous. How many women had unhappy lives and crying babies because Dr. Spock was the baby guru of the time and everyone thought they had to use his methods?
LisaM,
I just posted the same sentiments below, but your post reminded me that is exactly what I thought about the baby books! OMG did you read those sleep training books? Here is the “perfect” method that will guarantee your child will sleep thought the night!
Thanks for adding the “here’s the one way to raise your child” idiocy to these manufactured “wars”.
I never understood the “wars”. I know I’m just a parent and not a trained educator, but it seemed obvious to me from my own experience learning to read, those I knew, and my own kids and their friends that there is no one way. There are different approaches and no one knows in advance which child will respond to which approach. I thought “balanced literacy” was great — for SOME kids! I think phonics is great — for SOME kids!
It always surprised me that this was even controversial, or that any media or educational institution could ever fall for the idea that one method of reading was a panacea.
The same is true for math! Some parents hated “Everyday Math” but I could see how the approach could lead to a much better understanding of math than the “carry the one” orders that I was taught. And that is true for elements of every math program.
This mirrors our politics. Too many people who want easy solutions or believe there is one way that is perfect and cannot see the complexities of the issue where it is going to be impossible to come up with one “perfect” remedy.
Remember when we were arguing about things like the motion of stars and planets and how to treat a sick person by “bleeding” them? I feel that’s where we kind of are with respect to effective Reading pedagogy with students from disadvantaged households. Magic bullets abound, and admin is sometimes too quick to pull the trigger on junk science. Budgets can be time sensitive though…
“Reading teachers should have a repertoire of strategies, including phonics and phonemic awareness.”
That has always been my approach–never to use just one approach.
And thanks, Diane. Great post.
As someone that taught ELLs to read successfully for many years, I read this post and the supporting research with great interest. I should also say that I attended several of Lucy Calkins’ writing workshops at TC during my career, but I have never used the reading materials that are sliced and diced in this report led by David Coleman and funded by the Gates Foundation among others. The funding for this research comes from Achieve the Core, a Gates foundation project. It seems to me that big money has assembled and purchased the work of scholars for the sole purpose of undermining Calkins’ work in literacy.
Anyone that publishes materials is subject to review and in some cases rejection, but I have never seen any academic subject to so much negative scrutiny at one time. The main thrust of the analyses by different scholars is to show the need for isolated sound system work and a attempt to neutralize the influence of Calkins’ work on literacy instruction in public schools. There is still no research that shows that there is only one way to teach students to read! In fact, students with a solid foundation in literacy would find a lot of the recommendations in these reviews tedious and unnecessary. Similarly, teachers of ELLs may find that their recommendations lack enough specific recommendations in order second language students to develop a command of the English sound system and syntax of English. Similarly, the claim that the three cueing system interferes with the ability to use phonic decoding is weakly supported in the David D. Paige article. As a practitioner balanced literary adapted for second language learners, this has never been an issue for my students.
I think this study was conducted or articles selected in order to support a particular agenda in reading instruction. The fact that Teachers College has assembled these articles is puzzling since Lucy Calkins worked for Teachers College for many years. Is this study another example of money talks? Also, if time allowed, I am positive we could find researchers that would refute some of the findings here and agree with several others.
Bravo!
The so-called “reading wars” were chimerical, and has only served to line the pockets of publishers.
As a retired teacher of English language learners as well, it was clear that all three cuing systems must be utilized through authentic and interesting literature as your knowledge of the student’s strengths and needs develop. Motivation and comprehension are the two traits that develop not only literacy, but also create a lifelong love of learning.
As Frank Smith stated so eloquently in his essay on “12 Ways to Make Learning to Read Difficult”…
“Respond to what the child is trying to do.”
I totally agree with your comments. Students arrive with varying needs, and a competent teacher will figure out how to meet those needs. I have always used this quote from a literacy coach to guide my practice. “If students do not need what you are teaching, stop teaching it and turn to what they need.” There is more than one way to teach reading, and motivation is important.
My favorite Frank Smith quote is “Reading is thinking.”
Love Frank Smith.
Also love his book, READING WITHOUT NONSENSE.
such a scary (and overwhelming) statement: ” It seems to me that big money has assembled and purchased the work of scholars for the sole purpose of undermining Calkins’ work in literacy.”
The current one sized fits all curriculum approach of followers of the Billionaire Boys Club supported school board members is the MISAPPLICATION of science. Just as everyone has a unique genome, every student’s brain is different and different students need different approaches to learn how to read. When school boards mandate that teachers must stick to a rigid schedule, whether or not the material is developmentally appropriate, that is junk science. A child of mine is dyslexic and required instruction that would have driven the non-dyslexic students crazy. I ended up taking my child to a tutor to use a reading curriculum that works for dyslexic students.
Sorting students by birth year is done to lower costs, it doesn’t optimize learning.
That last sentence is wisdom.
Amen. Kids are on different developmental schedules and have VASTLY different experiences in the years before school. One size fits all is for assembly lines. Teaching is craft.
Yes, teaching is CRAFT, not “mouthing” a scripted lesson.
My last 2 years teaching was a frustrating experience. Being told I was doing it all wrong and being told I must adapt to Calkins. I witnessed children not understanding what they read, a loss of vocabulary, and not being able to spell. My district went so far as to not supply spelling or vocabulary books. Teachers also had to guard their class sets of novels.
Next up.. let’s get rid of Chrome books after this pandemic.
While I cannot speak to your district in specifics, some districts purchase new materials, but they fail to invest in training and supporting teachers when a new adoption is made. I don’t know if this is true in your district or not. Some districts also purchase parts of programs, but they skimp on buying supporting materials and guides. As a far as Chrome Books are concerned, I have heard many teachers complain about their overuse in schools.
I taught for a long long time, and had to live through so much nonsense. LAUSD embraced whole language to the point where if I had an alphabet up with any type of phonetically matched picture, the high heeled wonders from downtown used to order me to take it down. I had to hide my plaid phonics book (primary teachers know it), because it gave most kids the tools they needed, but didn’t match the current orthodoxy. Fortunately my immediate supervisors realized phonics are key for most readers, and let me teach reading in ways that worked. When it became obvious that kids couldn’t read, the district went back to phonics. I hear lots of complaints about the new series, but smart teachers will always make it work. I am glad there is definitive research to back it up. Just once I wish they would ask teachers what they think.
Then your high heeled wonders were wrong. We are doing a lot of things wrong, but whole language was never the problem.
Whole language was never the problem. The problem is that much of the “word work” or phonics required the teacher to know what to do. Also, with whole language students that are “hard to start” ie they do not easily apply the sound system, there is another approach called Reading Recovery. The above article never mentions it. One of the reasons New Zealand got great results was that they trained and supported their teachers. We spend more on buying materials and often a shoddy job in training ans support.
Completely agree. Many places that claimed to be implementing Whole Language were not. They were taking only some elements of it and not providing teachers the necessary training, then finding that teachers were frustrated and many kids weren’t learning to read. Not allowing an alphabet chart with phonetically matched pictures? Can’t blame that on WL, only on that administrator.
In my district in the 90s we were provided with extensive training, including modeling, and had great success. Most of my students were ELLs. Our lessons ALWAYS included phonics and phonemic awareness – in context. Classrooms were rich with print, and students wrote very frequently – signs for their block designs, titles for their paintings, journal entries, poems, etc. – starting in the first week of kindergarten. Students who needed more focused instruction were provided it through Reading Recovery in 1st grade or other approaches depending on their needs.
Bob’s comments are wonderful!
They are a refreshing reminder that all we do is grounded with words like “joy” – “closeness” – “environments” – “rich and rewarding” – “adults who care about them”
After that.. just details.
All of which screams at us (to vote) because joy and hearing a captivating story or just words being read with caring adults are grossly impeded while we are teaching virtually or if in school, mask to mask.
The phenomenon of the Reading Wars derived, I suspect, from two failed premises and a phenomenon related to Capitalism: First, many who are today avid readers came from families like mine. They had mothers or fathers or grandparents who had them on their knees, reading to them, from Day 1, and they were reading long before going to school, based upon their innate pattern recognition abilities and the motivation that came from those personal interactions, and such people discounted phonics instruction despite its value for many kids. It simply wasn’t part of their personal early experience. Second, people failed to realize how dramatically kids differ, in the developmental schedules they are on and in their home environments and early experiences. (That said, for all kids, it’s really important that reading time = love.) And then there is the issue of economic inequity and its effects on early reading. In our system, with its profound inequities, a lot of kids are from homes in which the adults are distracted by trying to figure out how to get enough for everyone to eat this week. The kids aren’t surrounded by books because if it’s a choice between a copy of The Cat in the Hat and bread, people will choose bread. That’s just Maslow’s hierarchy. In such cases, the adults around the kid are themselves products of centuries of economic injustice that left them poor and uneducated. The absolutely worst thing that we can do is to test the heck out of kids early and pigeonhole them. Our focus absolutely must be on creating warm, loving, supportive learning/reading environments and on compensatory strategies, including one-on-one SPOKEN interactions with loving adults. Always beware of the person with a simple, one-size-fits-all solution. That’s the My Pillow Guy pitching a miracle cure for Covid19. Trump Capitalism. “I’m the one who can fix it!”
Other themes one sees in the materials above: trust teachers, not programs, but give teachers the resources they need and the autonomy to spend on those.
As a Reading Specialist and Language Arts Coordinator for Boulder Schools, my job was CLEAR …. to SUPPORT teachers,
I wrote recommendations for student about whom teachers were concerned.
However, the teachers were not required to follow my recommendations. That was okay with me. My job was NOT to evaluate teachers, but to SUPPORT them.
What I found interesting is that without pressure, the teachers actually acted on the recommendations and were surprised and happy. And so were the parents.
My car trunk was filled with articles, materials, and books. The teachers could come to my roaming library and take whatever they needed. They could even purchase books, which I had on consignment from CU’s bookstore.
Trust teachers! Provide support on a individual basis for every teacher is different … thank goodness.
Teachers want to do a good job. They certainly aren’t teachers for the money or glory.
My hat’s off to you, Yvonne!
I would have been in your trunk every day! 🙂
I wish people would remember the work of DON GRAVES.
Connect READING and WRITING … for crying out loud. Both are connected and one supports the other.
Yes to Don Graves!
Thank you, Sally. I still have Don Graves first book. It is still a GEM, and one of the best books I have read.
Love Don Graves’ work. .
Still have him on my book shelf after almost ten years retired.
As a primary teacher and literacy specialist I combine the best of both worlds.
Supplementing Whole Language with–very cheap black and white reproducible–Words Their Way Phonics/Spelling Sorts is very easy to differentiate and very successful. Leveled books for small group instruction are also very powerful motivators. Before the Wright Group books from New Zealand, engaging leveled books were unavailable. Now they are widely available from many publishers. Here’s an idea: Spend all the money wasted on standardized testing on leveled book rooms! Lucy Calkins best idea for reading was leveled classroom libraries. She has for years suggested using Words Their Way. Kathleen
I have used all the materials you mention. When a teacher is well trained, that teacher can use a variety of materials and approaches to best help students. Such decisions should not be imposed. That is one of the big complaints today. Teachers in many districts are being forced to use certain materials that have limited value, and they are frustrated.
By leveled book rooms I do NOT mean leveling our school libraries. I mean a place where teachers can access the appropriate level for small group instruction.
“In my district in the 90s we were provided with extensive training, including modeling, and had great success.”
Yes twas a good time to be a public school teacher and student. Rising salaries and benefits, real support. I graduated 8th grade in 91 and started my science teaching job in 00. I don’t know how anyone has taught ELA these last twenty years if they experienced the 90s as teachers. We’re still in the charlatan parade, possibly getting ready for erosion of wages and benefits too.
No bias here (sarcasm).
My eldest learned through whole language, and is now a doctor. My youngest had no luck with phonics, but learned to read in a two-week period by reading my old Dick and Jane books. She has a doctorate in molecular biology.
Each child learns differently, and phonetics is not a cure all.
Dan, thank you. That’s why I object to the term “the science of reading.”
Different strategies for different children. The teacher should know them all and use whatever is suited to the child.
Perhaps the best thing would be to uniquely correspond letters to sound. I know that then spelling bee contests would become relics (or nightmares) of the past but I think it would be a small price to pay.
You mean so we wouldn’t have to deal with though, through rough,ought, rough, cough,…?
Replace second rough with fought, bought, tough, dough,…
borough, enough, bough…
More like why ghoti is supposed be pronounced as fish.
But yeah, instead of rough, write ruf. But even this is not enough since elsewhere the letter u is pronounced differently, as the first one in unique. Of course, the silent letters are a waste, so unique must be unik. The examples are endless and I just feel sorry for all the 6-year olds who need to go through this pain of memorizing English spelling. One way or another, it must scar them for life. 🙂 Instead, make their life easier
few –> fu
bury –> beri
you –> u
Tennessee –> Tenesí
I am sure that this was proposed many times in the past, and some good, consistent systems have been created. Just stop torturing your children.
That’s why creative spelling is allowed in “whole language” circles so that young writers can get their thoughts down on paper without stressing over spelling. That’s also why phonics stories are written with a controlled vocab with just a few sight words, like “the.” There is a place and time for everything. A skilled teacher will make it work if left alone to use their professional judgement.
Gad, the micromgt of the new “fine-grained” guidance is appalling. They’re not only counting the # of angels on a pin, they’re lining them up by surname.
The strategies chart that you are referring to is one I used as a teacher and you might not be able to tell from looking at it but most of the steps on there are phonics/decoding based. The student is also supposed to do ALL 3. It’s not guess and move on. If you guess you also check 3 ways. I don’t know where everyone got the idea to teach readers to just guess but that’s not what was going on in my classroom.
I learned to read in the 50s during the so-called “look-say” years of Dick and Jane. Somehow I learned sound-symbol correspondence and was able to decode difficult words when I had to.
My oldest daughter began to learn to read at the end of kindergarten (which was long enough ago that it was actually kindergarten) and grew a lot in her reading during the summer between Kg and first-grade. Her first-grade teacher contacted us soon after the year started to tell us that she was being referred for testing because she was doing so poorly in reading. The problem? She didn’t do well on phonics worksheets…while at the same time reading at a level that was slightly above the class average.
I taught Kindergarten, first-grade, second-grade, and third-grade for 20 years beginning in the mid-70s. The most important part of my reading instruction for my students (and my own children) was reading aloud to them. But whether it was part of the curriculum or not, I always included elements of phonics in my reading instruction when it was needed.
In the early 90s, I made the transition to “reading specialist” and Reading Recovery teacher. When I worked with my Reading Recovery students one of the first things I did was to assess whether they had a basic understanding of sound-symbol correspondence. We worked on that every day…EVERY DAY…to the point where it became automatic. Even then, Reading Recovery was being “branded” as a WL method of teaching.
We also relied heavily on cueing systems. When you get to a tricky work, consider what the story/sentence is about. What would make sense there? Then, does it sound right (relying on the student’s knowledge of syntax and language)? Does it look right (relying on the student’s knowledge of letter/chunk sounds)? Does it make sense? In other words, we started from a perspective of comprehension to help students decipher “tricky words.” And we absolutely had them use their phonics skills (taught EVERY DAY) to help them read.
After more than 40 years in education working with mostly primary aged students, I understand now that the “reading wars” are simply the monetization of literacy instruction. All kids learn differently.
A reading program has to fit the child, not the other way around.
“A reading program has to fit the child, not the other way around.”
EXACTLY!
Bingo. “Teaching is a response to a learner, not a starting point.” Crouch and Cambourne 2020