October 17, 2024
Reaching Teachers: Reading Instruction (4/8)
Transcript
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Intro
We thank you for joining us for this series with reading specialist and Mason educator Donna Johnson. Let’s listen to her experience and advice.
Have These Ideas Reached Educators?
Danielle: From what you've seen in your work educating educators, have these ideas trickled down?
Donna: I think the best way to answer [is to remember that] the ideas in the Nation's Report Card, which really did come out for phonics... left the door open really for whole language to continue. They just renamed it and went on - but the Nation's Report Card, which is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the NAEP, is given every two years. I've never had a class when I was in public education that participated in it, but I've been in buildings where people came in with all their briefcases full of stuff and went to the fourth grade and gave them part of the reading test or the math, whichever they're going to take, and it was done this year - one young woman that I tutor is in eighth grade and she, I don't know if she did the reading or the math, I should ask her - but every year there's a sample of kids from every state in fourth grade, eighth grade, and sometimes twelfth, that are assessed in reading and math.
Generally speaking, we have not been doing well in reading.
As far as I can tell, the 2024 scores haven't been released. In 2022, you have to admit, it was probably affected somewhat by COVID, but they weren't doing well before that either. But in 2022, nearly two out of every three students in grades four and eight did not read at a proficient level. That's two out of every three. That's 67%. Instead, they read at basic level or were functionally illiterate. And COVID, I don't know, that would have probably contributed to kids in the next two years after that, too, I suppose.
"If teacher educators in the US were teaching future teachers how to effectively teach their young students to read, many more children in America would be proficient readers." So that just gives us a blanket statement, I guess, and there are still specific places where kids are doing fine in reading or teachers know what to do, but generally speaking, we have not been doing well in reading.
Reading Recovery & Reading First
During George W. Bush's years, the Reading First program did promote instructional practices that have been validated by scientific research. And he had he wanted a strong emphasis on phonics. And that is when I was at the University of South Dakota. It was interesting there. The science of reading in regard to phonics was not emphasized there because the University of South Dakota was a Reading Recovery center. And Reading Recovery, which comes out of New Zealand and Marie Clay, has now been totally debunked. In Reading Recovery, you pull out small groups of kids that need work on certain skills, but her methodology was not based on research. It looked like it should work. I can remember going to watch a group and I was just sort of shaking my head because I was already an Orton Gillingham tutor. So I don't know. There's still Reading Recovery around, but there is no science to support it. But that's what they were doing at the University of South Dakota. So anyone that was training in Reading Recovery, whatever schools they were working in, in the long run, that wasn't helping kids very much.
During this time, though, there were a lot of South Dakota K-12 schools that did become part of Reading First. Because South Dakota is a little more conservative. They aren't going to just say, well, it's George Bush, I don't like him, I don't believe in him, I don't want a Republican president, we’re not going to do that here. So it did have a good effect, I think, in South Dakota. But that was at K-12. University professors do not want to have to change what they're doing to be honest. And so they had no interest in his program, for political reasons sometimes, too. And so they were teaching their own future teachers, and still now, balanced literacy, and three cueings, guided reading, whatever you want to call it. There's still a lot of that going on.
So, not much of what is actually evidence-proven has trickled down, I would say, even from the last panel report that we had. But again, there are always teachers that know better and are doing the right thing. I can remember observing student teachers teaching lessons - a reading lesson - and they had the little leveled readers, which were not decodable books, and there was always some kind of small group instruction and sometimes there was a little phonics lesson, but it would be just one small element, and it wasn't building on anything. It wasn't being repeated. That's back when they had word walls and some of the words were up there because of their shape, you were supposed to remember the word. And that's during the years that I was teaching. That wasn't the fault of those student teachers in those buildings either. When you're there, you do what they asked you to do.
Signs of Change
Now, that's actually changing in South Dakota. We just had a dyslexia conference with the International Dyslexia Association, Upper Midwest branch, which represents North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and professors from one of the schools here in South Dakota, two professors talked about what they're doing to change that, not just for their students, but for the schools where they go to student teach and do practicums. And that's happening big time in Minnesota. They're really working on that. And so is North Dakota. So when you can start to do that, when teacher education changes - if you could overnight change that to the science of reading, it wouldn't take long. And it's starting to happen. And I really think it's going to stick this time.
So, there are substantial changes at the university level and many states now mandate teaching in K-12 schools that align with the science of reading. One obstacle to this, though, is districts that still have curricula that do not align and they may include, I’m going to name a couple, they know who they are and I hope they know they're wrong. Lucy Calkins is one researcher that has a program called Units of Studies, and a big one, Irene Fontas and Gay Su Pinnell, they’re reading instruction. They have a great big fat book that people are supposed to use to teach reading that is kind of all wrong and if you go back and look at some of that, what you need to do is follow the money. And again, Emily Hanford has a series of podcasts called Sold a Story that's just shocking to know how just because someone was out to make money, these programs and the people that came up with them, I don't know if that's what you want to say, just kept pushing because they wanted to make money. So for instance, those two methods, which cognitive science have rebutted, rely on strategies like using context or visual clues to guess the meaning of a word.
Six years after Mississippi had started to use the science of reading...they were the only state with statistically significant improvement in fourth grade reading that year.
Colleges of Education do need to see themselves as part of K-12 student outcomes. Their reach doesn't end when a teacher candidate walks across the stage and gets a degree. Their reach impacts everything a new teacher does when they become a teacher and walk into their classroom for the first time.
Colleges of Education play a huge role in ensuring that prospective teachers are ready to one day teach children how to read. And in the states I know the most about this is happening, and here's my thing about the Mississippi Miracle, which I already mentioned, but it was in 2013 that they decided they had to do something and they started to train their teachers in the science of reading with a program called Letters, L-E-T-R-S, and that is being used quite a bit in Minnesota now for professional development, and South Dakota has professional development going on with a different organization that K-12 schools are open to. And universities are starting to use that also, those types of good teaching. And they're out there. You can find out how to become a teacher that knows how to use structured literacy. But in the 2019 NAEP test, six years after Mississippi had started to use the science of reading, and this is quite a while ago actually, they were the only state with statistically significant improvement in fourth grade reading that year. And people noticed that.
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