A friend sent me this article from American Public Media on early reading teaching. The summary of the article: "Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don't know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail."
What's the problem? According to the APM story:
The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters — phonics.
And what's the bigger problem? The article continues:
But this research hasn't made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don't know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.
Most teachers nationwide are not being taught reading science in their teacher preparation programs because many deans and faculty in colleges of education either don't know the science or dismiss it. As a result of their intransigence, millions of kids have been set up to fail.Another friend sent this blog post from Education Week Teacher entitled "What Teachers Should Know about the Science of Reading." This one had shown up in the Marshall Memo that week.
The New York Times covered it, too. In this Op-Ed piece, the writer states that "[i]t’s not just ignorance. There’s active resistance to the science, too. [She] interviewed a professor of literacy in Mississippi who told [her] she was 'philosophically opposed' to phonics instruction. One of her colleagues told [her] she didn’t agree with the findings of reading scientists because 'it’s their science.'"
For crying out loud. Given the amount of time that we teachers spend talking about "Best Practices" or the importance of "research-based pedagogy," it wouldn't seem that there should be so much resistance to change on this topic. The lack of teacher preparation is in the news all over the place.
Secondary school teachers, this is AT us; we just may not know it yet.
I was on a search for some "Best Practices" for teaching reading when I first encountered these articles. My brain keyed in on the "phonics instruction" pieces. The NYT article tells us that students "need explicit, systematic phonics instruction" early in their schooling to have success as readers. Clearly, these articles are directed at elementary-school teachers. Clearly, I'm not going to start teaching phonics to high-school kids. Clearly, this isn't about my kids in my classroom.
Except clearly this is about the kids in my classroom. In our classrooms. How?
Do the math. If elementary-school teachers aren't teaching reading well, then elementary-school students aren't all learning to read well. Elementary-school students become middle-school students, and middle-school students become high-school students. And those are the kids in my seats.
According to the NAEP Reading Assessment from 2017, only 64% of American eighth-grade students test "at or above proficient" in reading. So 36% of American eighth-grade students are testing below proficiency.
It gets worse. In Reading for Understanding, the authors note that "[a]ccording to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), two- thirds of U.S. high school students are unable to read and comprehend complex academic materials, think critically about texts, synthesize information from multiple sources, or communicate clearly what they have learned.”
So some students are coming into high school underprepared to read, and an even greater number are leaving high school unable to read well.
Wait, aren't we teaching them to read in high school, too?
More from Reading for Understanding:
When students are unprepared for the academic literacy demands in their courses, many teachers feel frustrated by their own unsatisfying “solutions” for helping them, or find themselves turning to a handful of defaults that serve only to postpone or compound students’ problems.
More generally, teachers may try to teach “around” the text altogether with lectures and PowerPoint presentations, or they may try to “protect” students from dry or difficult texts with alternatives that never challenge them or help them grow as readers and learners.
I'm in that crowd of teachers who "feel frustrated by their own unsatisfying 'solutions' for helping them." You?
We secondary-school teachers have a challenge...
We need to pay attention. If the teacher preparation programs are getting air time in the national news, then we have a great opportunity to learn about what our kids are learning and not learning.
We need to take responsibility. I can remember sitting across the conference table from a middle-school Language Arts teacher a few years ago. We were having a round-table on a struggling student, and she said, "Well, who is going to teach him to read?" I was baffled. "YOU are!" I wanted to scream. (She was the kid's "Language Arts" teacher, after all.) But she wasn't going to teach him to read. Because she wasn't willing to take responsibility for it. We all need to take responsibility here.
We need to figure this out. We've identified that there is a problem. But we also know our present "unsatisfying 'solutions'" aren't necessarily making our students into better readers. The interesting thing about all this research on teacher preparation programs is that it isn't addressing secondary-school teacher preparation. If those programs aren't preparing teachers to get all students to proficiency (or mastery, really...let's shoot for the moon...), then we need to prepare ourselves to do that work.
Wrestle on, teacher friends.
Wrestle on, teacher friends.
