Tag Archives: science of reading

We are what we appear to value.  Reading Proficiency and Censorship.

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Simultaneously the Wisconsin legislature is considering a bill to improve reading instruction for all children and a bill to limit what schools can provide for children to read.  Two bills each with its own perspective on how the state should fulfill its commitment to educating children.  One bill attempts to apply the best practices of the science of reading to ensure all children can be proficient readers.  One bill tells schools to limit what they provide for children to read and see.  Each bill uses the power of the state to transform how schools impact children.  Each bill is an expression of what we value.

What do we know?

Our WI constitution says the state is responsible for establishing and supervising public education.  State statute 118.01(2) outlines the state’s educational goals.  These include instruction in 118.01(2)(a) the basic skills of reading, arithmetic, listening, writing, and speaking, analytical skills to think rationally and solve problems, a body of knowledge in literature, fine arts, and the natural sciences, skills and attitudes for lifelong intellectual activity, and knowledge in computer science including the social impact of computers.

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/118

What is being proposed?

Representative Joel Kitchens is spearheading Assembly Bill 321 to improve child literacy by creating an Office of Literacy, focusing teacher prep programs on science-based reading instruction, establishing and funding literacy coaching, and standardizing early literacy screening through grade 3 assessments.  Equally important to the use of phonics-based reading is the ban on schools from using three cueing strategies in teaching children to read.  Every child in 4K-grade 3 will be taught how to decode words and encode sounds – to read and write independently.  Each child will be taught the mechanics of literacy and strategies for building vocabulary.  A child’s ability will no longer be determined by her school’s reading program preferences but by best practice. 

The bill institutes change in teacher education and professional development to ensure that teachers know how to teach phonics-based reading.  Today most teachers do not teach phonics as it was not part of their baccalaureate preparation or their school district’s PD.  Most teachers learned to teach whole language or blended reading strategies dominated reading instruction.  Teachers will learn to teach and be accountable for teaching all children to read using the science of reading concepts and skills.

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2023/related/proposals/ab321

State Senators Andre Jacque, Romaine Quinn, and Cory Tomczyk presented a bill that would cause schools to remove books and material that are “deemed harmful or offensive to minors from public schools and libraries” and “enact policies that ensure minors do not view harmful materials on public computers”.

Under the guise of parent rights to supervise what their children learn, the bill requires schools to publish their curricular materials so that parents may object to what they deem harmful and/or remove their child from that class instruction. 

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2023/proposals/sb10

One bill supports our educational goals and the other subverts those goals.

I fully agree with Joel Kitchens when he says “Students will succeed by returning to the way most of us learned to read.  I truly consider this to be the most important thing that I ever worked on in the legislature”.  AB 321 advances the educational goals of our state by improving how we teach all children to read. 

Senate Bill 10 contradicts our educational goals to provide all children with opportunities to consider, think, and become intellectual problem solvers.  It ignores or does not trust the authority of school districts to supervise the materials they provide for children to read and see and experience in school.  Instead, this bill creates a new right for a parent to make that decision not just for that parent’s child but for all children.

SB10 is Wisconsin’s effort to keep up with other conservative-dominated state legislatures with book banning.  If successful, the bill ensures that schoolbooks and materials can be censored by a single parent or small group of parents.  It also places school boards in the bullseye of the issue to ban or not ban books.

https://www.wortfm.org/following-national-trend-wisconsin-lawmakers-introduce-book-ban/

Where is our educational high ground?

As a former school superintendent and school board president, I applaud Assembly Bill 321 and shun Senate Bill 10.  The high ground of public education is to teach children how to think and to resolve issues.  It is low ground to tell children what to think and to insulate them from issues they should, with appropriate instructional support, be able to consider. 

Our state constitution explains the educational goals of a public education in Chapter 118, section 118.01.  118.01(d) says “Each school board shall provide an instructional program designed to give pupils: (8) Knowledge of effective means by which pupils may recognize, avoid, prevent and halt physically or psychologically intrusive or abusive situations which may be harmful to pupils including child abuse and child enticement.  Instruction shall be designed to help pupils develop positive psychological, emotional, and problem-solving responses to such situations and avoid relying on negative, fearful, and solely reactive methods of dealing with such situations.  Instruction shall include information on available school and community prevention and intervention assistance or services and shall be provided to pupils in elementary schools.”

The high ground for our state is to implement the goals of its statutes.  Schools must constantly improve how we teach children while we constantly are vigilant regarding the educational materials we use for that education.  The state constitution gives schools the authority and responsibility to do these, and the role of legislation is to enhance not impede schools.  The constitution commends parents to work with local school boards to understand and advocate for the education of all children.

The high ground for local school boards is to constantly supervise the materials and experiences used to educate its students.   When a challenge arises the board can engage in an appropriate conversation with the conviction that the district has and is meeting its responsibilities for the entirety of our state’s educational goals.  We teach all children to become proficient in basic skills and to consider, think, problem solve and make decisions regarding their school experiences.  We do not teach them what to think or how to value their experiences.

Improving Reading is like “Trouble With The Curve” – Current Players Are Not Prepared To Do It

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Educators statewide should applaud parents, educators, and legislators in Wisconsin who are advancing AB 446.  The proposed legislation will strongly improve the state mandates for assessment of reading readiness and reading proficiency for all our youngest learners.  The current mandates are weak and ineffective; AB 446 is robust in its requirements.  Proponents of the legislation are impassioned for these changes.  As expected, there is opposition to doing what is right.  Legislators claim the bill to be an unfunded mandate ignoring the current state funding given to districts for this very purpose.  Political opposition for opposition’s sake.

Parallel to AB 446 we need the President of our University of Wisconsin System to acknowledge and remedy the companion problem causing children to fail as proficient readers.  Educator preparation programs in Wisconsin do not teach prospective teachers to teach reading.  I overuse the term “teach” on purpose.  Reading is not a natural skill set; it is learned.  Proficiency in reading is yet more difficult; it must be taught.  Teachers must be taught to teach children to be proficient readers. 

Take note:  A person who can read proficiently is not prepared to teach a child to be a proficient reader.  The set of reading skills we want all children to learn and use is complex and compound.  There is a clear and distinct science underlying proficient reading.  Many children obtain these complex and compound skills through a combination of untargeted instruction and the opportunity to read.  However, more than 50% of children in Wisconsin do not.  Data support this statement.  A majority of children in Wisconsin are not proficient readers and are not prepared to be critical readers for the decades of their future lives.

Why is this?

For lovers of the “the game”, Clint Eastwood’s Trouble With The Curve (2012) highlighted the difficulty of finding baseball players with requisite talent for playing in the big leagues.  A power hitter can feast on fastballs, but throw him a curve and he will walk slowly to the bench.  The game requires talented players who can hit the irregular pitch.

Children need teachers who are prepared to teach all children to be proficient readers because they are trained to hit the curves of children who present challenges in their mastery of reading skills.  Our current teacher preparation programs do not do this.  Our colleges of education must strengthen teacher preparation with requirements in –

  • Phonemic awareness
  • Decoding skills
  • Word sight recognition

combined with

  • Background knowledge
  • Vocabulary development
  • Knowledge and use of language structures
  • Skills of verbal reasoning
  • ELA literacy

Check the transcript of a graduate of a WI-system college of education and look for this preparation.  It is not there.

For AB 446 to be effective, it must be paired with improved teacher skills in the teaching of proficient reading.  As with the legislation, this needed improvement bangs against the status quo and proponents of the status quo oppose changes in our teacher preparation programs.  Such institutional thinking and behavior is arcane and archaic.  This is why the action of the President of the UW-System is required.  He can mandate change. 

If we are to hit the curve of reading proficiency challenges and use the assessment data handed us by AB 446, we need players/teachers who are prepared and do not have trouble with the curve.

Reading Wars Redux – A Good Fight

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We are a contentious lot – people in general, that is.  It is not that people like to fight, I hope, but that they will rise to the occasion.  There are many arguments in the realm of public education and the pandemic fueled these and bred even more.  I write this morning about one that has history, many bouts, and still rages. It is a good and worthy engagement in public education measured by the distance between the opposing forces and the significant differences in outcomes should one side prevail.  This is the Reading Wars Saga Redux.

A reader may snub this this post believing that the Reading Wars are old news, a story that is put to rest.  But, it is not.  Three key points make the Reading Wars more than relevant today.  They are:

  • In the absence of daily in-person reading instruction during the pandemic, we need the most effective and efficient reading strategy to cause all children to be proficient readers.  This is more that compensatory, because children in K-3 who missed 30 months of direct reading instruction are in danger of a lifetime of ineffective language acquisition skills and reading behavior.
  • Public education sermonizes the need for all children to be well-educated, yet categorizes a percentage of children as learning challenged.  The achievement gap between non-categorized and categorized children is clearly demonstrated in their reading proficiency.  A strategy that will cause categorized children to acquire language and read and write with equivalency to non-categorized children compels us to consider that strategy for all children.
  • The status quo in the Reading Wars is not based upon the merits of an argument but upon the politics of state legislation.  Once again, money plus lobbying causes legislation and policy decisions not the righteousness of an argument.

Two sides stand in opposition regarding the teaching of reading, the Reading Wars Saga redux in Wisconsin, and it is important for any person concerned with educating children to understand the battle line.  I use the singular battle line, because I find the arguments boil down to a single question.  Shall educators use the understandings and instructional strategies of the Science of Reading (SoR) to teach reading and language acquisition to children or not?  There is not an argument for other strategies for the teaching of reading.  Those strategies are an amalgamation of ideas and approaches for the teaching of reading, usually encompassed as whole language or blended reading.  No, the issue is whether we will use the phonics-based strategies of SoR.  It is the same argument of the 1980s and 1990s Reading Wars grown up, because we know much more about reading and language acquisition today than we knew in the last century. 

I point to the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education (IMSE) for an example of SoR.  This document summarizes the approaches of SoR that are pertinent to the argument.  There are many others – I picked this.

What is the Science of Reading?

At the heart of SoR are a child’s abilities to encode sounds into words and decode words into sounds and from these abilities acquire vocabulary, learn to spell, learn to read complex and complicated text, and to write with fluency.  Children who cannot encode and decode reading and language are exiled to a life of frustration and low achievement in a world that requires literacy.

When I ask someone who opposes SoR why they do so, two statements invariably are heard.  Phonics-based instruction requires drilling in the sounds and spellings of phonemes and morphemes and some children are put off by this repetition.  They are bored.  And, some children can learn to read naturally – just let them read and guide their reading as it grows.  Schools have adopted complete reading programs based upon not boring children and the belief that with minimal foundational skills and maximal reading opportunities children will become successful readers.

Is that it?  Yep, that is the long and short of an argument.

On the other hand, SoR speaks of foundational encoding and decoding skills for all children, especially those who have learning challenges or whose early home life does not present much reading encouragement or whose natural abilities satisfy primary grade reading material but struggle with more complex vocabulary and language in the secondary grades. 

In simple terms, SoR teaches children phonemic awareness of sound-letter correlations, to use phonetic patterns to understand and use regular and irregular words, to read and pronounce words with fluency, to build complex and technical vocabulary based upon phonetic patterns, and the comprehend the meaning of words and word families.  This is a structured approach that is individualized to a child’s learning needs.

Therein lies a compelling difference in the argument about reading instruction.  Shall we leave success to each child’s native abilities and opportunities presented at home and school when then are young or shall we instruct every child with the skills to read and understand language for a lifetime? 

In the 1990s the forces in Wisconsin for blended and whole language moved the state legislature to adopt language favoring non-phonics-based reading instruction.  A simple phrase in the WI Stat 18.19 says that teacher preparation shall include phonics-based reading, but that a course is phonics-based reading is not required.  Over the past 30 years teachers in our state’s teacher prep programs have received such nominal instruction in phonics-based reading that when asked to describe encoding and decoding skills, phonemic awareness, and linguistics, most cannot.  Elementary teachers today are illiterate regarding the SoR.  Sadly, legislation and lobbying efforts against SoR stymy teacher education.

Educational data, especially data that is disaggregated, describes a flattening of reading achievement in Wisconsin over the past fifteen years.  Whole language and blended reading instruction cause some children to succeed as readers, but less than half of all children can achieve proficiency in reading or language assessments on state assessments.  And, children with learning disabilities invariably achieve at a basic or minimal level.  When we disaggregate the data, we find that children with dyslexia not only do not achieve, they decline in achievement over time and educationally “die” in frustration.  Our systems are not working for all children.

This is a good fight in the non-combative and non-life-threatening struggles of the public education Wisconsin provides to all enrolled children.  Shall all children learn to read?  All children not just those who can read without explicit instruction.  Shall state legislation and teacher preparation programs be reformed to endorse SoR or will they continue with a status quo of minimal and selective achievement?  It is fight for the future of our children.

What Did We Learn? Lesson #5 – Teaching Today Requires A Rethought Teacher Prep

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Close your eyes and remember your favorite teacher.  Picture her or him teaching you.  Now, blink twice.  Whatever your memory calls to mind is out of date for contemporary teaching!  That image does not appear in a classroom today.  This begs the question – Are we preparing teachers to look like our memory of what a teacher used to be or are we preparing teachers for what they need to be?  In fact, teacher prep programs, like our memories, are stuck in time and need to change.

Teacher preparation programs in colleges, universities and educator preparation centers are fundamentally of the last century.  The template for teacher education is universal across institutions and all states.  An undergraduate completes the institutional liberal arts requirements during the freshman and sophomore years.  In the junior year and half of the senior year, the prospective teacher completes courses prescribed for the chosen major and minor  baccalaureate emphases, pedagogical courses, and pre-student teaching experiences.  One semester of clinical student teaching is completed in the senior year.  This produces a DPI-issued teaching license.  Is this preparation an adequate preparation for a pandemic and post-pandemic teacher.  I think not. 

Let’s look more deeply in to the three semesters of the junior and senior year reserved for teacher preparation.  A college student completes an average of five courses (15 credits per semester) or 15 courses (45 credits) in the junior and senior year prior to student teaching.  In our state, at least three courses are required to meet the statutory requirements for minority relations, conflict resolution, responsibilities of teachers for special education, ethical responsibilities of teachers, and environmental education (9 credits).  Twelve courses remaining.  In almost every topic essential to teacher prep, one course leads to introduction and a broad view coverage.  It takes two courses to move from “I know about that” to “I know that”.  We need teachers who “know that”.

Why is there a distance between “I know about that” and “I know that” in teacher preparation.  It is because we historically have viewed a first year teacher as an apprentice becoming a journeyman.  We immediately assign a mentor teacher to each newly hired teacher and the mentor continues the college training with on-the-job training.  We assume that professional development and required continuing education will fill out the remaining needs of teacher preparation.  Lastly, most teacher contracts treat first to third year teachers as probationaries.  The assumption is that some probationaries will not be successful and resign or be terminated.  Please consider what this says to children being taught every day by an apprentice/journeyman/may-not-make-it teacher.  It says we accept less than fully polished teaching.  Bad practice!

Some of our deficits in teacher prep are made apparent by the pandemic and other deficits have been brewing and erupted parallel to the pandemic.  I will speak to four of these deficits.  When I examine more than a dozen colleges of education and teacher education programs in our state, I find a woeful lack of teacher preparation in these four areas of study.  At best, some teachers can say “I know about that”.  Few programs create teachers as the solid practitioner a teacher needs to be entering her first job. 

Child psychology.  Undergraduates study the theories of psychological development of infants through teens in an “introduction to psychology” course.  That’s it – a one semester course to prepare a career teacher to understand and successfully teach children through their most difficult years of intellectural and personality development.  If nothing else, the range of generational characteristics and values that lives in schools and affects how children relate to parents, teachers, peers, and society at large demands more in-depth work in behavioral, cognitive, social, and biological psychology.  Teachers are not psychologists,  but children today are so complex that teachers must have a psychologist’s lens for viewing children. Our Gen X and Millenial teachers, each with their own distinct set of characteristics, are instructing as-yet undefined Gen Z children, the most diverse generation, yet.  Atop their generational traits, Gen Z now is the pandemic generation.  Never before have we needed more understanding of psychological development to shape our teaching.

Clinical teaching.  Student teaching for most teaching licenses prepares a teacher for whole group instruction.  We quickly learned in the pandemic that remote teaching and learning requires very purposeful, strategized and consistent teaching to the individual learning needs of every child.  A general announcement made in class of “turn to page 68 and read the first paragraph” goes nowhere in remote education.  In class, a teacher scans to see children lift their book, turn the pages, and begin their reading.  On screen, a teacher cannot scan but needs to see each child perform this.  A usual “Are there any questions?”, may allow a teacher to move on in an in-class lesson.  On screen, a teacher needs to focus on the screen shot of each child, especially children with learning needs, to assure that child is ready to move on.  Whole group assumptions do not translate to remote teaching and learning.

When a teacher sits with an individual child for personalized, individualized or prescribed instruction, proximity is a good thing.  Using all her senses, the teacher knows and perceives how the teaching is being learned.  On screen, there is no proximity.  The knowing and perception must be created through clinical questioning and listening to the totality of a child’s response and reaction to teaching.  Individualized instruction on-screen is very doable, but it requires a clinical planning, strategizing and implementation to ensure learning.  Teacher preparation must teach teachers how to prepare, strategize and deliver clinical teaching to individual children. 

The major flaw we see today arises when a teacher must deliver reteaching interventions to individual children.  This is where clinical teaching lives and the need is greatest.

Phonics-based reading instruction.  Parallel to the onset of the pandemic, the science of reading is impacting reading instructional practices.  The science is teaching us that all children can be taught to be readers and allowing children to self-develop as readers is not acceptable, because too many children do not.  Setting aside the history of the so-called reading wars, statutory and DPI rules now require a stronger preparation in phonics-based reading, but their language leaves it to the college to determine the quantity and quality of that preparation. 

An “I know about it” preparation about the science of reading will not do.  Teacher prep requires in-depth, laboratory-based preparation that causes a first year teacher to be a strong teacher of reading for every child.

Meta cognitive development of mathematics.  The current critique of student learning during the pandemic is that academic achievement will be significantly less than annually anticipated for most children and math achievement will slide down more than reading achievement.  Aside from the teaching/learning downside of remote education is the fact that most teachers of mathematics are good mathematicians but not as good in understanding and teaching mathematical thinking.  Simply stated, a math teacher was a good math student and able to answer questions correctly.  However, the ability to solve math problems is not the same as understanding the thinking processes, sequences, and mental gymnastics required to teach another person to solve math problems.  Too much of math teaching is “do it like this” rather than “think about the thinking necessary to solve the problem”.  We observe this in “show me your work”, an observation made more difficult due to the pandemic and to the perfunctory nature of “show me your work”.  Instead, it should be “talk to me about your thinking in solving this problem”.  Too few teachers are prepared for this conversation.  Every elementary teacher must be taught how to think mathematically and teach mathematical thinking.

Studio teaching.  Pre-pandemic, almost all teachers were users of usual school technologies – laptops/desktops, tablets, smartphones.  They taught using tech knowing that their daily work was in-person.  The scenario shifted to this:  how will you teach students living on Mars if you and your school are on Earth?  That is a fair description of remote teaching.  Few teachers were ready for the totality of on-screen teaching and learning.  Studio teaching is when a teacher uses cameras and video screens   When a teacher is teaching via a camera and screen, especially multiple screens, it is studio teaching.  Studio teaching doubles in complexity with in-school children are in the classroom.

Teaching and learning with technology is more psychological, personal and preferential than we thought.  The task of assembling the necessary cameras and screens and setting up a classroom as studio is easy.  Creating the emotional and personal commitment to studio teaching is much more difficult.  Veteran teachers said, “This is not teaching” or “This is not the way I teach”.  And, they were right.  They were not prepared for studio teaching.  Teacher prep must train teachers for studio teaching. 

What have we learned?

The Time of COVID is teaching us to reconsider how we prepare teachers.  To quote a song, the times not only are “… a-changing…”, they have changed and our conventions for educating teachers have not kept pace.  Our children need teachers who are ready for today’s and tomorrow’s classrooms not last century’s.

A Reading Reformation

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Reading instruction is undergoing a revival and reformation. You may scratch your head at this statement and look 360 degrees in your world for evidence of its truth. It is a true statement and here is what you should know.

A generation of teachers who are 10 to 25 years in the profession are realizing that they do not possess the needed skills sets to teach reading. College-based teacher preparation programs in the 90s and first two decades of this century under-taught an understanding of reading and the technical instruction of reading. They taught about reading and literacy in general. Teachers today are reassessing what they know, or don’t know, about the teaching of reading and engaging in needed professional development.

Check it out. If you are a younger teacher, inspect your transcript for coursework in reading instruction. You will find few, if any courses, labeled “Instruction of Reading” and if there is one course there is not two or three. You will find units within the courses you completed that reference reading skill building and literacy, but a lack of strong preparation in the evidence-based teaching of reading.School districts analyze the reading achievements and annual growth of children in their classrooms, gasp at the poor results, and go through the throes of trying new reading programs. Educational leaders are understanding that changing an adopted reading series is not the answer. The answer is developing more powerful teachers of reading and this begins with each teacher’s understanding of the science of reading. Leaders on the bleeding edge of reading reform will see the statistical and real reading development their children need and later on other leaders will follow.

Reading gap analysis shows us today that reading skills for many children are obstructed by aspects of dyslexia. Their lesser reading skills are not caused by a disinterest in reading but by neurological impediments. This one word, dyslexia, is causing teacher preparation programs to completely rethink and reconstruct how they teach teachers to teach reading. And, that is the first major change – teachers need to be taught how to teach reading. Reading cannot be taught by someone who can read as their singular skill set. A reading teacher skillfully uses the science of reading development to cause children to learn to read.

Reading advocates are mobilized. A decade ago there were soccer moms who collectively harnessed their interests to gain our attention. Today, moms are organizing to cause political and educational decision makers to understand that reading is fundamental to our democracy and that we can cause every citizen to be an effective reader. They and we cannot accept the current status quo – some children graduate from school as non-readers.

This movement is differs from the work of state reading associations. Our state association is a proponent of reading, just as they stand for apple pie and the nation’s flag. But, their traditional platform is about reading not the assurance that every child can read effectively. Interestingly, the state association is large in the lobbying and influencing to state legislation which means that legislators are slow to turn from their annual receipt of the associations donation of apple pie to the real problem – apple pie does not teach children to read.

There is a science to reading. We accept the science within the technologies we use without thought. We just turn it on. Reading is not a skill we just turn on. There is a science to the teaching of reading. Causing all children to be effective readers requires every thought and resource we can bring to the challenge.

Since the 60s, I have been a fan of the late Harry Chapin, singer, song writer, and champion for feeding the world. His foundation continues long after his death living his credo to align with “important causes and never be afraid to do the right thing”. Harry would have carried a banner for “Every Child – A Reader”. It is an essential and righteous cause and we cannot be afraid of doing the right things today to make every child a reader.

Check out these sites to learn more.

https://www.decodingdyslexiawi.org/

Facebook – The Science of Reading – What I Should Have Learned in College 

https://institute.aimpa.org/resources/pathways-to-practice

http://www.buzzsprout.com/612361/1866496-about-science-of-reading-the-podcast

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read

https://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2019/03/what_teachers_should_know_about_the_science_of_reading_video_and_transcript.html