I've decided to continue my adventures in this school year in a series. Here is a diary I wrote in desperation this week: http://www.dailykos.com/...
Consider this diary a continuation of my plea.
If this were my third grade class I would have everyone choral read the following statement:
Education is a systemic endeavor.
We'd choral read because a good portion of my class would not have the ability to decode the words above. Then we'd discuss the meaning of each individual word. Here's the one we need to focus on in education:
Systemic: Has the root word SYSTEM which means, in third grade language, the things we do that make something work.
I've written about the things that we need overall in my last diary to improve our system. Today I want to narrow to one of the areas that are plaguing the system, in my opinion as a practitioner in the field. That is what I am going to term the "conflict of the ambiguous." I think that the general public, and especially people who are somehow influencing the "reform" of education need to know how this translates into my classroom.
Let's start with my first month of school. In the first month of school I am trying to develop appropriate programs for the class that enters. Every year I find myself taking steps backward in order to meet the needs of my students, even as the curriculum is pushing forward. I am going to focus on reading instruction today.
So, I have 25 children who have never taken any form of reading standardized test. I have a reading specialist whose task it is to meet with children at risk and help to bring readers to grade level. Logically, what we need to do is to assess the readers to see what level they are at. We could go by basic scores from last year, but that doesn't factor in the long summer break and what knowledge has decayed. There is also no data to indicate performance in specific areas of reading, most basically, fluency, decoding and comprehenshion.
Now, what happens? The reading specialist of years ago used to assess the entire third grade for these skills with some measures to offer us an overview of skills so that we could then use this to assign reading groups and focus on skills each group needed to improve upon. Below grade level on decoding? That group would need extra emphasis during guided reading on the structure and analysis of words and phonemic awareness, etc.
Here's the thing, I'm not getting that this year. If I want it, I've got to do all of the assessments myself. I have 25 children. The assessments are individualized. It could take me two months or so to get this done. Why isn't my reading specialist helping out with this? The instructions for reading specialists issued from the district is that they are only to assess the students who are reading below grade level. Now, let's refer back to what I said earlier, the part where there are no standardized reading tests for third grade in my state and no scores to refer to. So what is being used to determine who these kids are? Word of mouth from last year's reading teacher to this year's reading teacher. Right there, we've gone subjective, and that's a dangerous place to go in early childhood education.
Why so dangerous? It is dangerous because right now what we are having in education is our "conflict of ambiguity." In education we are all influenced by what we were taught was "proper educational theory" for our time. While we tend to look forward and do our in-service classes to keep up with the times, it is rare that educators sit down and look at what worked in the past, or for some, ever change their classroom practices based on either a forward or backward inventory of educational theory. This is because, for the most part, we aren't given the opportunity to talk to one another about actual educational theory. We have curriculum proscribed to us by so-called experts at the top who are giving us conflicting ambiguous messages. What results is that theory is applied based upon what the teacher subjectively thinks is right. Now, that may not be a bad thing if the teacher has the time to look over the entire body of educational theory, compare methods, and assess a class properly to determine what is needed. However, that is not what is going on, obviously in my class this year. I can't even get past the initial assessment phase. I admit that my assessment to start this year off consists of the baseline third grade test that was administered by my district. If the children scored a certain grade they are in my "at need group" and so on. Does this tell me what the problem is? No, it is a generalized test. Do I have time to do the actual assessment to determine what the problem is? Not really, I'm going to have to figure it out informally during guided reading for each child. I may have the groups configured properly by the end of October. By the way, that reading specialist? She hasn't finished testing the seven kids she was told needed the help, and it's October. Why not? She's busy being trained, has taken sick time, etc. So...I'm on my own if I want to begin reading instruction, which I've done.
Getting back to that "controversy of ambiguities" I present an article from the AFT's (American Federation of Teacher's) publication, entitled Sparks Fade, Knowledge Stays http://www.aft.org/... Now, I am a member of AFT and I believe in the good work that they do, just as I support the Nagtional Early Literacy Panel, which is cited in the article. This is what I, as an educator, gleaned in my ten minutes this morning as I sought out what the "experts" had to tell us.
The first part of the article was an explanation of how the National Early Literacy Panel is limited in their paramaters of research. After much reading, we get to the conclusion for literacy from the panel as described in the article, "code-based instruction=early reading development." This means that understanding how letters work and how to comprehend and write contributes to learning to read. Thank you National Early Literacy Panel.
What conflicts with this recommendation, according to AFT's published article? Well, according to the author's analysis, prior knowledge influences comprehension of text. Upheld as support for this stunning argument, "It turns out that background knowledge of baseball trumped all the reading skills measured on the standardized achievement test: poor readers with high knowledge of baseball displayed better comprehension and recall than good readers with low knowledge of baseball." Really? Thank you American Federation of Teachers.
So we have: traditional decoding, letter recognition, writing and comprehension curriculum vs. teaching rich content.
Am I the only teacher in the room that says, why the controversy? Is someone suggesting that as a third grade teacher, when I sit down to teach reading, I don't discuss with my reading groups prior knowledge and have the kids share their experiences about any given story? Is someone suggesting that as a third grade teacher, when I sit down to teach reading, I am not stopping to help my students recognize sound/letter relationships? I suggested to myself, this morning, that what happened was that I wasted ten minutes of my day reading about a conflict that is not only inconsequential, it distorts education and doesn't address the "meat" of any kind of theory whatsoever. It confuses everyone, especially the public, which continuously foists upon educators new policy to "redirect" in order to "fix" the problems that don't exist in the curriculum, or don't need to, in the first place. Further, I want the salaries of the people that are paid to come up with these studies and/or the money that is paid to the subsequent people who analyze them down to meaninglessness.
What did I do after that? Well, I pulled out a book that I bought at a local educational store, from the bottom of a "used" bin for 25 cents. It was published in 1958, back when we ostensibly were leading the world in education. What advice does it give? Voila, and sakes alive, it's a systemic approach to the problem of literacy. There are no arguments over content education vs. code education in reading, because back in 1958, for some reason, we didn't think those two things were in conflict. Here are the sub chapter headings from Chapter 1, for example, pre-reading:
- Why Read? (tips for motivating children to read including combining high interest "content" with drill "code")
- How to Awaken a Desire to Read (using high interest "content" to inspire lessons in "code")
- Some Problems Related to Reading Readiness (Lists problems in physiology, mentality, maturity, social development, emotional stability, social maladjustment, and oral-language backgrounds which must be diagnosed with tips on how to help.)
- Prereading Instruction (left to right direction, letter forms, sounds and discrimination is suggested in addition to suggesting that parents help teachers by providing rich content)
- Introduction to Reading-use of pictures to tie content with code
...And then there is a comprehensive, step by step approach to teaching reading skills that includes steps in phonemic awareness, sight vocabulary, word recognition, directional attack, phonics, structural analysis, comparative analysis, word discrimination, word meanings, context clues,phrase perception, comprehenshion, reading speed, maintaining interest in reading, etc...all to develop a "Balanced Reading Program." The name of the book, by the way is Building Reading Skills, Teacher's Guidebook by McCormick-Mathers Publishing Company, copyright 1958, and it is by far the most significant evidence I have found so far that we are talking in circles in education academia these days. We had a systemic approach to literacy back then, what the heck is going on?
How does this translate into my experience in the classroom? Well, we've got the "whole language" people who are all about content, because it's been posed against code... and guided reading, except that many of the teachers forgot about the decoding that needed to go along with that and I've got students who come to third grade without knowing what their vowels are, how to order the alphabet, how to decode even short letter sounds. It's very nice to immerse children in content and build background knowledge, but the fact is that we can't do that for every bit of background knowledge children may come across on a standardized test (which really isn't using content properly anyway, but is the way it is misapplied) and further, all students are not going to be so inspired by the teacher's choice of a thematic unit on apples that they magically develop the ability to decode unfamiliar words.
Then there are kids that I get who can decode beautifully, because teachers know that they need to have the ability to discriminate letters, but these students have no knowledge of what they are reading because they've been missing the ability to discuss what they have read while letter sounds were focused on.
And why shouldn't this be the case? When our so-called "experts" have been splitting hairs over reading curriculum to no avail, I fully understand how I end up with a hodge-podge of readers missing skills in my classroom.
I should be able to fix this, right? Well, not really. As I described above, I can't even get the assessments done due to problems noted in my first diary. Even if I could, my reading specialist is a "content" person and most of the teachers in the grades before me are as well, so when the tests prove the inability to decode, she still goes into elaborate lessons on vocabulary and inconsequential building of knowledge based upon what sparks her subjective fancy. I know this is not representative of all schools, but I have a feeling it might be. I cannot bridge the divide in theory that has been inflicted upon students by teachers who were educated at various times and who ascribe to the ever-growing educational mish-mosh of studies and analysis that signify nothing, as far as I'm concerned.
What do I need? I need the people at the top that are recreating the wheel and creating these controversies of ambiguity to have a look back at this bargain-bin book from 1958. I mean it. It cost me 25 cents, and I've found it much more useful than your $500,000 reading program. I don't need two complete series in Reading and English Language Literature with overhead transparencies, four workbooks, blackline masters, computer programs, CD's, etc. that cost millions and are based on what was the theory of the day. I don't need so-called "centers" that are paid for that I have to recreate because they are unusable and don't teach the skills you say they do. I don't need more bells, whistles, ponies, formative tests, summative tests, or research studies with accompanying analysis in separate directions.
I need a meeting of the minds of teachers that are actually applying these theories in their classrooms. I need the ability to actually talk and collaborate with the teachers in my building to build a strong reading program. I need educational academia to stop writing about a competition of ideas that does not exist in successful instruction, and did not exist back in 1958. I need people that aren't doing the job of education to actually shut up and listen to the people that are to develop curriculum that is back to what we knew and not confused with a lot of false controversy. We have new reading programs being purchased, new tests being made, billions in educational spending happening, teacher contracts being renegotiated, daily media assaults and political biting at teachers alone for a systemic problem, and someone needs to say, "Whoa Nelly."
You don't fix a problem by making it more extravagant. And, as with all of the problems we have in education, I need neurologists and social workers and parents and social scientists and legal representatives, and boards of education and policy makers, and school administrators and specialists to do their jobs and address the system (education is a systemic endeavor) that IS teaching a child to read. The problem is complex, but the instruction is not. We know what the instruction is supposed to be, now give us the rest of the pieces.
I don't know how to get these things, so I'm going to just keep writing about it until I figure it out.