Even when you have a program that sequences phonics instruction systematically and explicitly, it needs to be acknowledged that this is only a small part of what is on most teachers’ plates each day. Kindergarten – 2nd grade teachers usually teach most core subjects, and may be drawing upon a panoply of programs they are supposed to be experts in, while managing a bunch of young homo sapiens who have not yet fully developed a prefrontal cortex and the ability to regulate their emotions and behavior. It’s exhausting, to say the least. Another important thing to bear in mind is that delivery of foundational literacy is what we could call high density. There is a fair amount that needs to be packed into that 30 minutes, if it’s being done right. So it’s unsurprising that if a teacher has not been directly trained on the program itself, or does not have any previous background on foundational literacy and the importance of skills like phonemic and morphological awareness and spelling and handwriting that phonics is most likely delivered haphazardly.

And this is all without mentioning what I discussed in the previous post–that even when there is a phonics program in place, if it is then directly contradicted by the core ELA program used (e.g. Really Great Reading followed by TCRWP and F&P), it can be a confusing experience for teachers and students alike. Thankfully, it seems our field is moving away from that kind of disconnected and shallow instruction.

While from afar you may think that teaching foundational literacy skills should be basic, in actuality, it can be even more challenging to know how to teach because it is the kind of knowledge that becomes automatic and subconscious once acquired. As a fluent reader, you don’t consciously think about what it took to learn to read words in print. But can you explain the distinction between digraphs and diphthongs? Can you provide examples of derivational and inflectional morphemes? Heck, why don’t you just give me a refresh on the difference between open and closed syllables, then? See, it’s actually quite technical and non-intuitive the closer you get to it. There are ongoing debates between literacy nerds about speech-to-print vs print-to-speech methods, or between teaching patterns vs syllable types. This is not as simple as one might think given that it is “foundational.”

With all that said about the importance of a high quality 30 minutes of foundational literacy, let’s return to the equal importance of that daily core ELA block, which is where I had landed in the last post:

A strong, high quality ELA block should include the writing, shared reading, and read-alouds so important to gaining fluency, building language and knowledge, and peer interaction to explore multiple perspectives.

What does that look like?

It looks like daily textual feasts for engaging young intellects in topics that get them interested and curious, while building their vocabulary, language, and literacy. A high volume of texts at multiple levels read, listened to, written, discussed, and savored each and every day, across subjects.

Here’s my stab at outlining what this means in the form of spiffy looking table:

A large volume and wide reading of texts at multiple levels: dialogic, interactive read-alouds of texts well above grade-level to build knowledge and language; shared readings of texts aligned to phonics scope and sequences and at grade-level to practice and build oral reading fluency at the word and sentence-levels; small group interactive readings at grade and instructional levels; and opportunities for independent reading at a variety of levels based on interest and ability. This is what engaging students in daily textual feasts is all about!

Various current curricula do this to varying degrees. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses, and overall, our field has advanced remarkably in the availability of a high quality ELA curriculum in the last decade. One I have looked at that arguably best demonstrates what I just described, IMHO, is Bookworms. You can view it and download it for free and decide for yourself. There’s even some empirical evidence of its efficacy.

I’ve done some of my own curriculum work along these lines when I worked with a small team during the pandemic to draw upon freely available ReadWorks.org texts and resources to develop lessons (available on TeachHub if you work in NYC Public Schools) for “Stand-alone ENL” instruction (small group instruction for students newer to the English language). We took what ReadWorks calls “Article-A-Day” texts, which are short read-alouds, then paired them by topic with grade-level texts. We engineered the texts digitally to be more accessible with chunking, visuals, targeted prompts, and other scaffolds, and the same grade-level texts were to be read over multiple days, digging deeper into the meaning at the sentence and paragraph-level while practicing oral reading fluency–and while pairing with different aligned Article-A-Day read-alouds each day. Over the course of a week, students heard, read, spoke, and wrote words and sentences aligned to rich and interesting content but in varying forms.

Reading and re-reading the same short passages might be useful to a degree, as with paired reading fluency practice, but wide reading with listening and fluency practice, in which different short texts are read that share common language, exposes children to greater variation of language, while repeating similar vocabulary and concepts.

This balance of explicit instruction and practice, alongside implicit and cumulative exposure, is the holy grail of literacy and language. It’s why so many people have been stressing the importance of “text sets” for years now. Reading, talking, and writing about shared topics that are thoughtfully spaced and sequenced builds knowledge and language. Yes, genre knowledge is important, too, but it’s been oversold and overplayed.

Our tendency is always to simplify things for kids, thinking that we are overwhelming them. But we aren’t overwhelming them if we build knowledge and language coherently across multiple texts on the same topic using consistent routines and practices. As we read and listen to and talk and write about these shared texts and topics, we are focusing our kids’ attention on what knowledge is important, and on specific recurring patterns and constructions of language at the word, sentence, and text and discourse-levels. We analyze how authors choose their words and craft their sentences and texts, and provide practice with those words, patterns, and constructions. We see, listen to, speak, and write the words and sentences that hone our understanding into greater depth and precision. We consider, critique, and consume multiple perspectives. We talk about how we are talking about the texts, building our metalinguistic and metacognitive awareness.

This rich literary and language work must happen simultaneous to foundational work in the earliest grades, and it continues and deepens through to college. Read-alouds and shared reading do not only need to live in elementary school, either – there is always a place for them in any subject.

In K-2 grades (really we should be thinking preK-3) a strong ELA block lives alongside that high quality, high density 30 minutes of foundational literacy instruction. Bring the reading rope together!

#curriculum #ELA #literacy #literature #texts #reading #phonics #knowledge #language #AlfredTatum #textualfeasts

Teaching decoding and encoding of written words in English shouldn’t be much more than 30 minutes a day for most kids at a K-2 level. So what’s the big deal, right?

Here’s my “why”: First of all, until perhaps very recently due to a growing outcry from parents, journalists, and other advocates, there are still schools out there not teaching any phonics systematically at all, aside from whatever teachers may have taken on themselves.

Second of all, a school may be using a phonics program or teaching phonics, but just having a program doesn’t mean doing it well.

I have witnessed elementary schools that claim to be “doing Fundations,” yet when you dig below that statement, teachers are actually using bespoke and scattered materials gathered online they feel more comfortable with, cutting out or modifying essential components (such as phonemic awareness!) or otherwise planning and delivering the program haphazardly, scheduling it at the last period of the day when kids are packing up to leave, or newer teachers haven’t been adequately—or ever—supported in using it.

In other words, phonics instruction is all too often missing that whole explicit, systematic aspect that makes it effective according to decades of research.

Furthermore – and this is the most pervasive and fundamental part that seems to be getting lost in the mix again – many of those very same schools that are “doing Fundations,” have ALSO been heavily invested in using F&P BAS and guided leveled reading, and/or the non-updated version of TCRWP Units of Study, and have been actively confusing kids who may be struggling to internalize and apply decoding and encoding skills. Such schools lean more heavily into practicing “sight words” and guessing based on context clues (i.e. “three cueing”) rather than providing direct and explicit instruction at the age and time when kids most need it. This is the “phonics patch.”

Is it hard to put numbers on this? Definitely. We barely know what curriculum is being used in most schools. But the numbers we do have across the U.S. point to a substantial number of elementary schools that fits this kind of profile.

Who loses? The students who need that explicit and systematic instruction the most. The students for whom the effort required to gain automaticity goes unrecognized and unsupported, and so they give up.

Some phonics patch schools may have overall numbers that can look pretty good from afar on outcomes-based measures, like ELA state tests. But I ask you to think about that 10, 20, or 30% of children in those schools who are NOT achieving basic proficiency. And all the other students in so many other schools who are not achieving the decoding thresholds required for deeper reading comprehension. They are for whom it matters the most.

So let’s go back to that 30 minutes a day of explicit, systematic phonics instruction. It may only be 30 minutes, but this kind of instruction requires automaticity in planning and delivery that only comes with deeper knowledge and experience. That same teacher who is delivering that 30 minutes is also teaching nearly every other subject, aside from one period, every single day. So let’s not pretend it’s easy to get this right.

Teachers need district and school leaders who provide the systems and structures needed to plan and deliver that high density instruction well.

And please, let’s also not overcorrect and feed the trolls and do phonics instruction for an hour a day. A strong, high quality ELA block should include the writing, shared reading, and read-alouds so important to gaining fluency, building language and knowledge, and peer interaction to explore multiple perspectives.

Furthermore, for students new to the English language, the critical importance of oracy and connecting decoding and encoding of words to their morphology and meaning can’t be lost. And just because an older student is new to the U.S. and learning English does not mean they need phonics instruction — and when they do, they also need all the other components of the English language.

But don’t sleep on that 30 minutes of high quality, well-delivered, direct, explicit, and systematic daily phonics instruction in the earliest grades.

I’ve also experienced this difference firsthand. My son was going to a school that fit the phonics patch profile I described above. They were supposedly “doing Fundations” alongside TCRWP, but the only evidence of instruction I could see was related to sight words and print-outs from random websites. He was not making the growth I expected, given what I knew he was capable of. I began gearing up to teach him phonics myself, but by the time I got home each day it was hard to manage.

So I pulled him out in the middle of the year and put him in another school that was also “doing Fundations,” but here’s the difference: I could immediately see the impact of it, literally after one day. As he was doing his homework after his first day in that new classroom, he was segmenting words using his fingers to figure out their spelling. He had not been doing that before. All it took was a little dose of explicit instruction, and consistent structure and routines. Now for homework, instead of random worksheets with sight words and patterned sentences for which I felt like the burden of teaching was on me, he is applying the skills he is learning in class.

Are we still also doing flashcards of “tricky words”? Of course! That’s part of the equation when learning to read in an orthography where there aren’t always direct correspondences between sounds and symbols. The difference is that the balance in practice has shifted towards gaining automaticity and accuracy with decoding and encoding, rather than putting most or all of the weight on memorizing and guessing.

My son doesn’t suffer from a language-based disability, and I am fortunate to be able to have options. But what about all the kids who aren’t so lucky? This is why I keep harping on about foundational literacy.

Let’s get that 30 minutes a day right. And let’s get that ELA block right with a high quality knowledge building curriculum. Until we do, please stop pretending that sprinkling in a little phonics into a balanced literacy mix is enough.

For more on why 30 minutes a day, see this Tim Shanahan piece: How Much Phonics Should I Teach?

#literacy #reading #sightwords #phonics #curriculum #knowledge

There were a myriad of potential excuses for it. They were ramping up for test prep season, there was a spring break and a snow day, they had cycles of interim assessments that broke into their instructional time, they rotated between reading and writing units during core ELA time, and had been in the middle of a writing cycle, etc.

It took me a while to see it clearly, as I came only once a week, at most, and couldn’t always see the full picture. But then it hit me like a ton of bricks once I did. How could students improve their literacy when they weren’t expected to read for sustained and structured periods of time daily?

This wasn’t the only school I visited where something like this was happening. All the schools I worked with were in a highly segregated district by race and class with the highest concentration of students in temporary housing in the city. In another school, there was a constant assortment of students who simply roved about the open spaces of the building. And when instruction was happening, it was mainly a teacher shouting to be heard while print outs of short passages slid to the floor.

In all of these schools and classrooms, there were striving, smart, kind, passionate children seeking to have their intellect ignited.

So Alfred Tatum’s recent book, Teaching Black Boys in the Elementary Grades: Advanced Disciplinary Reading and Writing to Secure Their Futures resonates deeply with me because he is on a mission to disrupt this dismal reality, which all too many Black boys face in schools across our nation. Too few texts, too little intellectual engagement, diminished expectations of their capacity and potential.

I’ve been paying attention to Tatum’s work for some time now when a colleague turned me on to Reading for Their Life: (Re)Building the Textual Lineages of African American Adolescent Males several years ago. His concepts of providing daily textual feasts for Black boys and of connecting them to textual lineages provided me an aspirational anchor for lesson design.

Yet admittedly, when you listen to Tatum present or read some of his previous writings, it can at times be hard to understand exactly how these concepts may play out in a lesson. But my colleague also had shared with me some of Tatum’s Boys College lessons, so I had an inkling of what he meant, and have drawn upon them as a reference in my own lesson design. I find his lessons one of the very few examples out there of moving swiftly between multiple components of literacy within one lesson, from decoding to deeper comprehension to writing about multiple disciplinary texts.

So I was excited to see when Tatum’s latest book came out that he centers the books around these very same lessons. In this book, he lays out a foundational multidimensional view of reading that he draws upon when designing lessons for Black boys. He takes the reader through specific lessons, from texts to student writing, to demonstrate what engaging boys in disciplinary and interdisciplinary intellectual work can look like.

I think we can and must go well beyond these lesson approaches — the texts are short, and it’s hard to see how they could move beyond a few lessons and into a full set of units — but Tatum provides us a strong case study of how instruction can be approached radically differently. Instead of slow walking children through surface-level content, he gives us a moral imperative, draws explicitly upon a legacy and lineage of Black intellectual and pedagogical forebears, and provides concrete examples of what engaging Black boys in daily textual feasts and building textual lineages can look like.

In Tatum’s view, focusing on mere proficiency in literacy is a diminished expectation wrought of racism. Instead, he promotes an accelerated focus on developing advanced literacy through intellectual engagement with disciplinary texts, and synthesizing thinking across disciplines. This is a cause I applaud and if you haven’t heard of Tatum’s work before and you serve Black children, I suggest you get yourself a copy.

If teachers had been using this kind of approach in that school I mentioned at the beginning of this post, they would have been doing something far more effective compared to what had been happening.

#AlfredTatum #reading #literacy #AfricanAmerican #textualfeasts #advancedliteracy #knowledge

Discuss...

The book is compellingly written, narrating an expansive overview of the history of the treatment of cancer, while at the same time painting portraits of individual researchers, clinicians, and patients that draws the reader in. It makes oncology research and clinical practice sound exciting, which is no small feat.

As I read Mukerjee’s book, I began drawing parallels between the slow but accumulating body of knowledge on cancers to research on literacy development.

Cancer, just like reading, has seen massive investments and nationwide commitments to improve outcomes, yet with seemingly little to show for all the rhetoric, money, and effort. And just as with reading, in the absence of clear evidence and knowledge, there have been ego-driven and problematic practices and treatments, and many strong assertions with little data.

Yet through Mukerjee’s telling, it becomes clear that however zigzagging and plodding and subject to the whims of character and fortune, science and knowledge has slowly advanced and that we now have an understanding of various forms of cancer that–while no silver bullets exist for all cancers–we do have an arsenal of screening and specific treatments for specific forms of cancer that we can wield, and that however incremental, the field is advancing.

In reading and literacy and language research, it can feel at times like the “science” is a matter of opinion, and that we know not much at all. There are many who discount the value of empirical research in the field of education completely. And yet, I think we would do well to heed the history of cancer to see not only the progress we have made and can make, but to at the same time bear greater cautiousness against overzealous claims by silver bullet enthusiasts.

One passage in particular, describing the endeavors of Henry Kaplan, a radiologist in the 1960s, got me started in thinking along these lines:

This simple principle—the meticulous matching of a particular therapy to a particular form and stage of cancer—would eventually be given its due merit in cancer therapy. Early-stage, local cancers, Kaplan realized, were often inherently different from widely spread, metastatic cancers—even within the same form of cancer. A hundred instances of Hodgkin’s disease, even though pathologically classified as the same entity, were a hundred variants around a common theme. Cancers possessed temperaments, personalities—behaviors. And biological heterogeneity demanded therapeutic heterogeneity; the same treatment could not indiscriminately be applied to all.

The insight described here is that while we use one term to describe the phenomena of “cancer,” researchers began to increasingly realize that different cancers manifested in incredibly diverse ways, and thus required similarly diverse approaches in treatment.

Prior to this insight, a silver bullet was sought against all forms of cancer, and all kind of ego-driven practices and over extrapolations of unclear research led to, for example, mastectomies that tore out nearly everything from the shoulder to the ribs, in the zealous belief that cancer would be rooted out.

How often do we hear “dyslexia” described as a general construct that requires a silver bullet solution? Yet increasing research demonstrates the genetic and biological variation in individual brain development that can manifest in difficulty with literacy or language — and may thus require differing forms of instruction and supports.

What are the implications for assessment? Here’s another passage that stood out on this idea of heterogeneity:

But although these alternatives did not offer definitive cures, several important principles of cancer biology and cancer therapy were firmly cemented in these powerful trials. First, as Kaplan had found with Hodgkin’s disease, these trials again clearly etched the message that cancer was enormously heterogeneous. Breast or prostate cancers came in an array of forms, each with unique biological behaviors. The heterogeneity was genetic: in breast cancer, for instance, some variants responded to hormonal treatment, while others were hormone-unresponsive. And the heterogeneity was anatomic: some cancers were localized to the breast when detected, while others had a propensity to spread to distant organs.

Second, understanding that heterogeneity was of deep consequence. “Know thine enemy” runs the adage, and Fisher’s and Bonadonna’s trials had shown that it was essential to “know” the cancer as intimately as possible before rushing to treat it.

I want to be careful about drawing too closely on an extended analogy between cancer and reading — but there is a similar need in schools to build more precise and accurate profiles of students to ensure the right form of instruction and intervention. We often land on the simple distinction of “students not meeting standards,” then rely on item analysis of standards (which are at a composite level of performance), rather than identifying the underlying literacy and language skills that could be targeted for further support.

Here’s another passage on cancer screening, which certainly has some similarities to screening for reading and language difficulty in schools:

In cancer, where both overdiagnosis and underdiagnosis come at high costs, finding that exquisite balance is often impossible. We want every cancer test to operate with perfect specificity and sensitivity. But the technologies for screening are not perfect. . . .

No; merely detecting a small tumor is not sufficient. Cancer demonstrates a spectrum of behavior. . . To address the inherent behavioral heterogeneity of cancer, the screening test must go further. It must increase survival.

For screening in schools, it must increase literacy attainment. And this is where the rubber hits the road. Even when a school is drowning in data, it does not mean the needed action will be undertaken, either to improve core instruction across classrooms, or for putting in place the right interventions for the right groups of students at the right time.

The academic specializations that result in terminology so precise it is opaque to those outside of that domain may seem extremely distant from classroom practice, but I don’t see how we can make headway until we more fully unpack how, when, and where learning happens in the brain in relation to its body and its environment, while at the same time identifying the forms and use of language and literacy that are most fundamental.

Despite the great heterogeneity of cancer, scientists have begun to recognize some universal understandings that is leading to more effective treatments:

Biologists looking directly into cancer’s maw now recognized that roiling beneath the incredible heterogeneity of cancer were behaviors, genes, and pathways. . . . Notably, Weinberg and Hanahan wrote, these six rules were not abstract descriptions of cancer’s behavior. Many of the genes and pathways that enabled each of these six behaviors had concretely been identified—ras, myc, Rb, to name just a few. The task now was to connect this causal understanding of cancer’s deep biology to the quest for its cure . . . The mechanistic maturity of cancer science would create a new kind of cancer medicine, Weinberg and Hanahan posited: “With holistic clarity of mechanism, cancer prognosis and treatment will become a rational science, unrecognizable by current practitioners.” Having wandered in the darkness for decades, scientists had finally reached a clearing in their understanding of cancer. Medicine’s task was to continue that journey toward a new therapeutic attack.

We are beginning to recognize some universals and particulars of language and literacy, as well. We can improve literacy outcomes for our society. It just may be much more complex and progress much slower than we’d like to think.

I’m not being a Pollyanna here on either front, by the way. My father died of lymphoma last December after being diagnosed in October, and his doctors seemed just as surprised as us when his artery ruptured suddenly just as his 3rd round of chemo treatment began. Some forms of cancer will continue to kill us prematurely, despite our best efforts based on our current understanding of the research and the technological tools in our arsenal. And some children will continue to struggle to read and write fluently, despite the concerted efforts of many committed educators.

My sincere hope is that every casualty along the way provides new learning that can inform improvement. If we learn from every failure, than each failure will not be in vain.

#cancer #language #literacy #reading #dyslexia #screening #SiddharthaMukerjee #research #knowledge #heterogeneity

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It resonated with me because there’s a very strong tendency, when serving our students who may need more support with understanding academic texts (such as students learning English, or students with disabilities, or students living in situations with acute and chronic stressors), to provide less frequent opportunities to engage with written texts that are intellectually and linguistically demanding. Because it’s assumed that they can’t handle it.

So students are given lower level texts. Less texts. Less discussion. Less writing about texts. Watered down tasks.

Why do we assume our children are so fragile and so incapable of intellectual engagement?

Instead of giving them less, what if we gave them more? What if we hosted a daily textual and linguistic feast? What if we read aloud above grade-level texts to them, and students read and re-read and discussed grade-level passages with one another, and read a variety of texts at different levels of accessibility to build knowledge and language? What if we scaled across such a multiplicity of texts like this across disciplines every single day?

#readalouds #reading #knowledge #language #mindset #textualfeasts