A reader who identifies as “Retired Teacher” explains the best way to teach reading. The best way is to start by understanding that there is no single way to teach reading. The best way is to assess what’s right for the students in front of you. Some need help in phonics; some don’t. Some are already fluent readers and need challenging and engaging stuff to read.
RT writes:
Most competent reading teachers are effective when they diversify instruction based on the needs of the learner. Generally, the first step in effective reading instruction is to assess students. What often results in elementary classrooms is that teachers often end up placing students into a group with other students with similar needs. Some students arrive in kindergarten reading fluently. They have clearly mastered phonics so there is no need to spend time on phonics lessons the student does not need. Both Diane Ravitch and myself grew up in the “See, Say” era of reading instruction. We didn’t learn phonics. We deduced the sound system from reading it. This method will not work for many students, but there are some that would be successful with this approach.
All learners have strengths and weaknesses. Other students may have other issues like a difficulty with auditory discrimination, and teachers should have the freedom to adjust instruction based on the needs of students. By the way a student with auditory discrimination or memory problems will struggle and flounder in a science of reading environment. This student may have to write the word in order to basically memorize it.
I am a certified reading teacher. I have taught many struggling students, most of whom were English language learners, to read successfully and fluently in English. Part of the reason for positive results was due to the assessing and addressing what the student needed to understand and apply the skill and become a good reader. There is no magic to this process. It is called diversifying instruction, and many competent teachers adjust teaching to meet student needs. Whatever method is used, it needs to meet students’ needs, offer the student a degree of success through application, and be engaging. Professional teachers should have the freedom to adjust instruction without government interference.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow. I had a simlar experience in teaching reading and writing in my 41 years as an elementary teacher. I could have written this article myself and could not agree more with this author. Any reading program/curriculum that takes away teacher autonomy to make best use of any and all resources that can help the diverse learner in their classroom is a wrong, harmful program. The “Powers that Be” are making decisions for classrooms based on faulty data and ignoring the socioeconomic factors that challenge some students’ success in school. This will not bring about the results they think it will. Students are diverse in how they learn (among other things) and teachers need to be able to diversify their teaching to meet the needs of students, not the metrics of some flawed test that provides no help whatsoever. Teachers needs autonomy to make informed decisions about instruction that will benefit their students, and students need the opportunity to learn in the best environment and best way that their brains work. Prescribed curricula that use a “one size fits all” approach will leave many students behind and continuing to struggle. We need better from the decision makers.
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In my opinion after almost 40 years in teaching, Literature Circles are also so very important. Where schools need to encourage writing is with content journals and communicating with them. Seeing it all work together in the classroom provides life long learning for the students.
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I have a good friend who is retired from teaching after 40 years in special education and the regular classroom. She reported years ago that she cannot discern emphasis on syllables. Is this common?
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I don’t think I have ever seen a percentage breakdown of weaknesses that affect reading although I’m not sure I understand what her difficulty is by saying she cannot discern emphasis on syllables. She can’t hear or remember the emphasis or she can’t remember the common syllable patterns (visual)? Auditory or memory? I was an ordinary special ed teacher who ended up supporting struggling readers, so my knowledge is far from that of a reading teacher. Whatever my students difficulties were (case study testing), relative areas of strength were used to support areas of difficulty.
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I found this, from a 10-yo Science Daily article: “Dyslexia is not only a problem related to reading; children with this difficulty also display impaired prosodic processing, in other words, they struggle to detect stressed syllables.”
Makes sense, as, per International Dyslexia Association, “Phonological processing problems are the principal cause of dyslexia.” Phonology is the study of the distribution and patterning of speech sounds in languages generally; [e.g., phonemes are speech sounds].
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I would add that giving students things to read that they are interested in: be it teen magazine, hot rod magazines, space opera, I don’t care. Students learn to like reading if what they read interests them. And if it does, they will read and learn to read better.
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I agree, and think this is key. While there are things a teacher may have to assign for reading, giving students opportunities to also read and discuss things they’re particularly interested in is a great way to get them reading. I found that individual students are even willing to write more about something they read based on their own interests.
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I have a son who is a wizard at teaching young kids to play the piano. At some point early in the process, he’ll ask them what song they really want to learn to play. Often it will be a theme to a video-game or movie [like Star Trek]. My son arranges a rank-beginner version, and uses it to teach fingering, letter-names of keys etc—the passion for learning to play the song sustains the tot’s interest. He will begin to sit at the piano duet-style and accompany the student with rhythmic chords to spice it up. That leads to interest in learning chords… etc.
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There is no teaching machine.
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Amen to that
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There is no competency based learning.
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There is no science of reading.
And Congress has more important things to do than tell teachers to do wrong because
there is no declaration of war.
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Trump said yesterday that the federal government should not pay for healthcare, neither Medicare nor Medicaid.
Only for defending against enemies. So he is upping the defense (war) budget to $1.5 trillion.
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Oh, it has always been “America First” right? I can’t listen to the dolt anymore, but how much more damage can he do? Imagine all that money put into Cancer research and a host of other pertinent issues than creating optics that he thinks makes him look like the “mighty dictator.” From drapes to ballrooms to pens — oh, what a fool believes.
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He cancelled billions that were supposed to be spent on cancer, dementia, other diseases, but wants to add $500 Billion to the military. That would mean $1.5 trillion for the defense dept.
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Here is what my classroom looked like before corporate takeover.
I was assessing reading and writing all the time. Our school was very involved in action research. I was part of an academic community that served our students well. We had parent nights and a teacher liaison that met with parents. It was an amazing community.
Old but relevant.
https://sojo.net/articles/public-education-common-good
We do have a reading problem in our schools thanks to corporate greed and tech giants. Teacher’s hands have been tied due to mandates that have nothing to do with best practice.
Return public schools to their communities and let teachers be academic and teach.
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Well said! Mandates are way to enforce control, but they most likely do not reflect best practices, particularly when trend is to attempt to monetize teaching and learning. Teachers need some degree of autonomy in order to better serve their students. On-line ‘point and click’ learning is failing our young people.
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Well said! When I first started teaching, the students didn’t know their “sounds.” Well, that is what I knew, later to be phonemic awareness. I always believed there is never “one way,” all children learn differently and taught them “one mind at a time.” In the beginning, there was still leeway in teaching, but that was the beginning of whole language. We were told to “throw out all the phonics books.” Veterans told me to “hide them away.” Another teacher taught me the “Slingerland program” where students would say a word and touch the object. For example, “Eh, eh, eh, edge.” And they touched the edge of their desk. And it went on. Whatever worked for a child, is what we did. I could teach children how to sound out words and how their breath should feel coming out of their mouths. I was an anomaly because I was one of the few high school teachers who could work with at risk students (who were always passed on because, well, they were behavior problems) and teach them to read without making them feel stupid and inferior. But, in my last year they closed my program and sent me back to the middle school. There I had to use Study Sync or as the kids called it “Study Stink.” It used excerpts, asked high level questions (most of my kids were reading at 2nd grade level in 8th grade). It took me hours to figure out what Study Stink was asking me to do and then how to convey that to the students. I finally told kids, “I don’t like these questions. What I want to know is can you relate to the characters and what did you think of the story?” You are right about these “for crap” programs that “the suits” think are the panacea for everything and it never made sense to me. What I wanted was for kids to read for enjoyment, build pictures in their minds (and I found I had students who could not do that) so we would draw and basically do whatever created success for the student. It pains me to see what they have done to “for the love of reading.”
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yes!!!
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My daughter was not reaching pseudo reading goals in kindie and 1st grade. But her teacher was amazing and inquiry based which was exactly what my daughter needed.
The teacher did, however, feel pressure to get my daughter into a phonics intense program. I refused as I knew that would hurt my daughter. She needed meaning along with word work and since I know about reading acquisition I worked with her at home always leading with books…meaning being the most important piece.
Her teachers were always impressed with her intellect. Unfortunately, her 3rd grade teacher, when the dyslexic mania was just starting, wanted that label for my child. My daughter had strong comprehension but struggled when reading out loud. Again a hard no from me. Would never allow her to be labeled even though a few in our family have been labeled that. Reading out loud is not a skill we use often. I struggled with reading out loud in Jr. High.
BY 5th grade even her reading out loud was fine. But her school was forced to do intensive phonics stuff even then and it frustrated her so much as wasted time.
I state this as she wasn’t a strong decoder. She worked on phonics within the context of actual books. She is now a Jr in high school and getting A’s in all of her classes including AP classes, and she only got one wrong on the comprehension part if her pre ACT. More importantly she loves reading.
So again..yes phonics is important but by itself…without meaning…would have damaged her ability.
I’m also not convinced all strong readers are strong decoders.
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This is such a great post with so many great responses!
Please forgive me for asking, but is the so-called “Science of Reading” one of these terms/phrases that is being used by the powers that be in some kind of mindless way?
I ask this because there are indeed cognitive processes that are involved when we read and structures within the brain that can be studied neurologically when someone reads.
I would be hesitant to say there is nothing scientific going on when we read, but I’ve also had a career as a K-12 teacher and teacher educator long enough to know that the templates, slogans, platitudes, and constrained regurgitation assessment procedures (C.R.A.P.) are rampant.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m still recovering from a workshop on differentiated instruction where the instruction on differentiating instruction was not differentiated.
(I’m also trying to prepare my stomach for an upcoming workshop on co-teaching where there person teaching about co-teaching doesn’t have a co-teacher.)
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excuse me: (“the person”)
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Constrained Regurgitation Assessment Procedures!
That one is a keeper!!!
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I follow the Science of K.I.S.S. (Keep it Simple, Sweetheart): one size does not fit all.
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Good doctrine
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Beautiful, important, profound observations from the aptly named “Reading Teacher”!
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Great to read you again! It was nice to see the acronym CRAP back in action, however, the CRAP I did in my classroom was “Creative Responses After Processing” and I stuck with it! You know that darn metacognition thing. And, the most fun kids had reading was when they would go to my magazine cabinet for art collage pictures then start reading 1965 National Geographic magazines. I would yell back to them, “No reading. No fun. That’s not allowed!” And, of course, they would say, “But Mr. Charvet we found this cool article about giant spider eggs in Africa!” And I would tell them, “You know when you all are gone and I put back all the magazines, I find myself reading all sorts of great, interesting articles. If you love the article, keep the magazine. Read as much as you want. And, lastly, the time when I went to the library and got all children’s books/poetry and brought back for our “Just Read” so I would turn in my reading count on time. I never saw so many kids have so much fun and so many smiles. They said, “But isn’t this cheating? I mean these are baby books.” “The rules stated you could read these books to your siblings. And how do you know if the book is any good if you don’t read it first?” And because of my sons (when they were little) I found a few great art books that I incorporated into my lessons. And, if you ever want to learn how to draw, look to children’s books; excellent illustrators. So much joy in reading when I was allowed to “do my thang” and ask the kids, “What do you think?”
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I taught long enough to see this theory get replaced by that theory, only to be replaced by theory number 1 with a new name. I also quickly learned for every study “proving” that this is the way to teach reading, there was another study proving the exact opposite. Effective teachers have a big toolbox, saving the good stuff from every system they have been told to use, and pulling it out as needed. My least favorite was 100% whole language mandates, where I got yelled at by a district honcho because my colorful ABC cards had phonic cues on them. Good thing she didn’t look in my closet where I had stuffed all sorts non-mandated learn to read programs.
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Excellent!
I often think of the word “toolbox,” which all teachers keep by their side, knowing that different tools are needed at different times.
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