I perfomed some training in a school a year ago and between sessions chatted with the academic coaches in their office. I still remember where I was sitting and where the reading coach was standing when she said, ?Teaching reading is really a complicated science.? I didn?t reply at the time, but I have thought about her comment many times since.
Back in the olden days, teaching reading just wasn?t the rocket science it has since become. Ironically, more children are failing to learn to read now than back in those days. Radical changes and experimentation in teaching approaches yielded an increasing number of children failing at learning to read, and as other factors weighed in, the situation became dire.
Just recently I have started hearing a tiny bit from politicians about the state of K-12 education. Dr. Rice, in her speech at the Republican National Convention, pointed out the fact that your zip code largely predetermines whether or not you have access to a good education. While I believe she is absolutely right, I happen to know that even in affluent zip codes, there are children who are also not learning to read. In my opinion, we?ve reached the point where this failure is an epidemic.
There are two separate burning issues here
1.????School quality and the opportunity for equality in education is a critical issue that must be addressed as we continue to claim that every person is equal and enjoys equal access to the benefits that come from being citizens of this great country. Because right now, every citizen in our country does NOT have equal access to quality education. In my own colorful black and white world, this is wrong and should not be ignored any longer. We CAN fix this!
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All schools are not equal!
2.????And then there is the separate issue of failing teaching approaches, which also must be addressed if we hope to prevent this new generation from being functionally illiterate. It is this topic that concerns me personally and that is on my mind every single time I come to work. I have devoted the past 12 years to research and study in order to answer one question: ?Why do some children fail to learn to read?? And I have come to believe passionately that most of those children who are not learning to read COULD learn to read if the teaching materials and approaches changed for them. I know this is true because I have seen it over and over again ? you take a failing child, show him the new materials and the lights suddenly and dramatically turn on. It makes you feel like Wonder Woman, but it is not really about you/me at all! It is all about finding the right approach and the most effective materials.
Adding stuff doesn?t fix the pot
I love to cook and love flavoring dishes. I have had some experiences
with good soup ideas that went bad, and the most common problem I have is the
tendency of over-salting my dishes. Anyone who has eaten at my house can attest
to this fact. My knee-jerk reaction to over-salting an otherwise perfectly
wonderful soup is to keep adding more and more ingredients in the hopes that
this increased bulk will somehow cause the salt to be spread around more thinly
to more and more vegetables. Believe me, it does not work, so don?t try this at
home! All that ever happens is that
I end up with an enormous pot of soup that
no one wants to eat because? it is over-salted! And I cringe at the
veggie-waste!
The same exact approach has been adopted with teaching reading. The
whole language movement was one of those fanciful, romantic experiments that
failed miserably. ?All you need is love? was the theme of the day, and in
classrooms all across our country, while this music was playing on the
radios
across the land, teachers were being convinced that all children needed was to
be surrounded by books and they would learn to read. Most children can?t and
don?t learn to read by simply being immersed in print. This is why the level of
literacy has dropped like a rock in the past few decades.
The reaction to increased failure has been increased complexity, which is the exact opposite approach that should be taken. Most children who fail to learn to read do so because there is a massive amount of extraneous information, detail, busy-work, steps, copy work, homework, testing, (and the list goes on and on and on) that gets in the way of the actual process of learning to read. In my colorful black and white world, what I have found works magically is SIMPLIFICATION. It is counter-intuitive, but it is critical.
What SIMPLIFICATION is not:
- Lowering our expectations of what struggling children can learn
- Omitting certain tough skills (such as correct grammar and spelling and word usage)
- Allowing invented spelling (Invented what? Who thought that was a good idea!)
- Letting children work at learning to read by having them copy things we hope will eventually stick to their brains
- Dodging complex vocabulary and keeping to very simple words
You raise the bar, simplify the approach, and celebrate a lot
In my room (small group or whole classroom) the bar was raised to 100% mastery. That was the beginning point. I made it very clear to the students at the same time I made sure they understood that we were changing up the methods that had not worked for them before.
We also made big celebratory noises whenever the 100% mastery mark
was reached. We
had stickers and stars, we had simple certificates, and at
first we had monthly pizza brought in for lunch. It was a party! The pizza was
an incentive I put into place to celebrate everyone in the group achieving 100%
mastery because I thought this might be a tough challenge to reach. Imagine my
delight when this group mastery became the norm! The kids learned very quickly
to help each other, cheer each other on, and offer helps along the way. We
replaced the costly pizza parties with weekly certificates in the school
auditorium. The whole school knew that in order for these kids to get a
certificate, their whole group had to score 100% and funny thing? Regular
classrooms began to work toward this mark. I remember on Fridays hearing big
cheers next door as the third graders found out everyone in class had scored a
100% on their weekly test. I have goose bumps on my arms right now as I remember
this. There is absolutely NOTHING like achievement to breed more achievement!
How we simplified the teaching approach
The approach we use that is so effective is contained in our Easy-for-Me? materials. The Easy-for-Me? Reading Program was developed while working over a period of years with beginners of various ability levels. Every single detail that was not essential to learning to read was omitted. They are super distracting to the learning process for many children. I have written so much about the hallmarks of the EFM Reading Approach, so I won?t repeat myself here. But rest assured that this approach utilizes the whole body and various pathways to the brain in a very simple approach that is super powerful in terms of the results with children.
This simplification along with raising the bar meant also that children began to read far earlier, but in a far more developmentally appropriate way. The senses of sight and of touch are where young children are in their development at the time they are expected to learn to read. We have taken this to heart in the design of EFM Reading materials so that every possible little thing is taught utilizing this natural bent to see and touch. Our goal is not to push reading on little children at an earlier age, but rather to make it possible for little children to learn in a developmentally appropriate way so that they can succeed!
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