The “science of reading” movement has direct roots in a U.S. media narrative starting about 2018, but the Science of Reading now drives reading and education decisions in many states and provinces. The decisions and legislation often includes policies and practices not supported by research (for example, grade retention) and further de-professionalizes teachers. This session places the Science of Reading movement in historical context and disrupts the “evidence-based” claims of Science of Reading advocates. The goal of the session is to provide teachers the evidence and support needed to assert their professional autonomy in support of their students’ needs and agency.
I have also continued to blog about the movement, and in all of these experiences, I am forced to rethink and think more complexly through what I know and understand about the SoR movement as well as how to teach reading and literacy.
The most recent interview, by literacy expert Sam Bommarito, proved to be an enlightening experience on several levels.
First, Sam’s experience and expertise in the field of literacy were a welcomed change from being interviewed by generalists and journalists because his questions dove directly into the core of the issues surrounding SoR and those questions challenged me to think more deeply and carefully.
Our exchange between people with similar levels of expertise on the subject allowed (or even required) us to focus on how best to offer any viewers nuanced but clear explanations of a deeply complex topic; as I noted (and emphasize often now), the evidence on teaching reading is not simple, and not settled.
But the larger take-away for me after the interview was that Sam’s third question—Does it make any sense to effectively ban selected practices found in balanced approaches to reading, e.g., reading recovery, workshop teaching or guided reading?—prompted me to explain in greater detail a core concept that grounds a fundamental reason I reject the SoR movement.
Whether I am addressing literacy specifically or teaching pedagogy broadly, I have relied for many years on the best practice concepts expressed by Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde.
Each chapter in their book (now in its fourth edition) ends with a chart that suggests instructional practices that teachers should increase or decrease; for example, on writing instruction (download sample here):
Key to note is that best practice is grounded in broad and diverse bodies of research on teaching and learning, and that best practice philosophy neither requires nor bans any specific instructional approach; whether a teacher uses any pedagogy is directly linked to student need (not a prescription form some authority such as standards or an adopted program).
When SoR advocates call for “all students must” (for example, systematic intensive phonics for all students and universal screening for dyslexia), they are misrepresenting what we know about teaching and learning: There is no universal silver bullet for “all students.”
Best practice structures promote research and evidence as a spectrum, a range of practices for every teacher’s toolbox; best practice also recommends that instruction begin with individual students, their demonstrated known, unknown, and misconceptions.
If we think carefully about decoding and direct instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness, teachers will face a wide diversity of students in any class in terms of where they are in their reading development; in short, there simply is no situation where “all students must” serves students well.
Literacy is not simple, and literacy development is not linear, sequential, or systematic.
For example, most people do not accumulate vocabulary in order to be able to read, but develop their vocabulary by reading.
Context (in terms of so-called literacy skills) and engagement are extremely important when students are developing their literacy; regretfully, many misguided movements during the history of the Reading War have eroded an essential aspect of literacy that must be honored—literacy as holistic.
Here, we must address a fundamental paradox in the SoR movement.
Several different kinds of advocacy are fueling the SoR movement—from parents advocating for greater awareness of dyslexia to Black and poor parents advocating for under-/un-served populations of students to advocates for the needs of emerging bilingual students.
The common denominator here is a genuine concern for the under-/un-served student, a pervasive belief that for a number of reasons, too many students are being failed by the system itself (although some elements of the SoR movement are also directly blaming teachers and teacher educators for those failures).
The paradox is that the aggressive advocacy behind the SoR movement is driving an all-or-nothing silver-bullet approach to teaching reading, which will mis-serve students as much or more than the current conditions of teaching and learning in U.S. public schools.
So this leads me to Sam’s effort to bridge the divisions in the Reading War (something I am far more skeptical about, as I address in Sam’s question 5: Cambourne and Crouch recently said we should stop using the Reading Wars metaphor and replace it with the metaphor of the Reading Quilt- with different “sides” adding different pieces to the quilt. Do you see any hope for that point of view? Do you see hope for an end to the divisive discourse? Do you see hope for ending the reading wars? [13:20]).
I am no fan of compromise (as I explain in the interview) but I think we do have common ground in terms of two beliefs: (1) Far too many students are being under-/un-served in our current K-12 public school system (notably in their literacy), and (2) the under-/un-served are disproportionately marginalized and vulnerable populations of students (Black students, poor students, emerging bilinguals, students with special needs).
Not a compromise, but my modest proposal is that all of us concerned with reading and literacy among K-12 students need to set aside the “all students must” mandate and commit instead to “each student deserves.”
“All students must” be screened for dyslexia is a guaranteed disaster for students (consider the over-diagnosing of ADHD as one example), but “each student deserves” access to ample books and other texts in their homes and schools fulfills what we know about literacy development without being overly simplistic or harmful.
Each student deserves whatever teaching and learning experiences they need and want in order to grow and develop at the rate unique to them (not some manufactured and artificial “grade level” proficiency).
This commitment shifts our instruction and assessment gaze away from compliance to a reading program or to a set of prescribed standards and toward the demonstrated needs and wants of each student who enters any classroom.
The ultimate irony here is that the whole language (WL), reading/writing workshop, and balanced literacy (BL) movements (all falsely demonized since the 1990s) offer that exact commitment along with very high standards for teacher expertise (each of us in charge of any student must have a very complex toolbox for teaching and also must be prepared to individualized instruction).
Again, as I stated in the interview, WL, workshops, and BL did not fail our students, but we have certainly failed the core commitment of those movements—serving the learning needs of each student.
What we know about teaching reading is not simple or settled, but I think we can and must all agree that instead of falling prey to the overly simplistic and harmful “all students must,” a better way forward is a resolute commitment to “each student deserves.”
Schedule: Thursday, February 3, 2022, 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm est
Session Strand: Leadership in Literacy
Session Title: FS21 – The State of the Reading War: Not Simple, Not Settled
Description:A new round of the Reading War embraces the “simple” view of reading, arguing that the “science of reading” is settled. This session interrogates the “science of reading” movement by placing it in historical context and refuting its central claims based on a more complex view of reading and science.
Topics: Equity in Education, Literacy Leadership, Reading
About a year ago, a friend and I introduced my grandchildren to gaming; soon after I bought them a Nintendo Switch.
My granddaughter, Skylar, was immediately drawn to Animal Crossing because she loved that the game allows players to visit each other’s world. But the game also requires a great deal of reading so her initial experiences meant she had to play with someone who could read with comprehension to help and guide her.
Today, Skylar is starting second grade.
Happy for day 1 of grade 2.
Recently, when Skylar was visiting, she immediately wanted to play Animal Crossing with my friend. As they played, Skylar was reading aloud incredibly well, only occasionally stumbling over words that would typically be classified as “above her grade level” (a concept I reject).
Despite Skylar’s ability to decode with speed and accuracy, we noticed something really important.
After reading through the text, Skylar would pause and ask my friend what she was supposed to do. Of course, the text in the game is designed to guide what the player does so my friend patiently explained that Skylar needed to re-read but pay attention to meaning (comprehension).
With that guidance and attention to the need to decode with comprehension and purpose, Skylar began to play the game with more agency (a few days later, she Facetimed my friend to continue having someone to mentor and guide her; in other words, she didn’t magically become an independent reader).
Skylar is 7 years old, my grandson, Brees, is 4 (about to turn 5 in a few weeks).
Watching them navigate gaming as well as learning to read is fascinating for several reasons.
First, Skylar clearly prefers communal gaming. Even as she is developing the ability to read with comprehension and engagement independently, she desperately wants to play the game with someone else.
Brees, who has chosen Minecraft [1] as his go-to gaming, is a solitary gamer. While they were over for a pool day, Brees took a break and happily lay on a lounge chair playing Minecraft on his iPad.
Minecraft mania extends to Lego as well.
Second, Skylar’s gaming and reading journey dramatically reveals the limitations of decoding—notably the danger of assuming that proficiency at reading aloud (words pronounced quickly and clearly) results in comprehension and engagement.
Here I want to stress that without Animal Crossing and an expert mentor (both at the game and reading), Skylar could well have remained at the level of “going through the motions” of reading aloud.
She didn’t hesitate to re-read and work toward comprehension so that she could fully engage in the game.
In other words, literacy is ultimately about autonomy, but it is also a profoundly important aspect of community.
During the Facetime session, Skylar was seeking a mentor to confirm the decisions she was making. Even though she was decoding with comprehension, she kept asking for confirmation that she was navigating the game the right way (or more accurately, a right way).
Before I go further, I want to stress that Skylar clearly has acquired some very powerful decoding strategies based in what most people call “phonics,” but when she is in the real world of gaming, she often comes to situations when those blunt decoding skills are not only inadequate but distracting from the flow of the complicated act of reading and acting on the comprehension.
I also want to stress that watching a 7-year-old play a reading-intensive video game complicates the simplistic and misleading faith placed in “grade level” texts. Like almost all real-world texts, Animal Crossing simply uses words (no concern for “grade level” and no “context clues”), often very common words mixed in with exact vocabulary that is uncommon.
Overly simplistic views of reading and vocabulary tend to conflate the “easy/hard” binary for vocabulary with “common/uncommon.”
Uncommon words that Skylar could not decode, and often has never encountered before, were not “hard” since with a mentor to pronounce and explain the word, Skylar very quickly adapted and with repetition in the game, those words became common to her (and thus, “easy”).
Finally, this experience with my grandchildren, at different stages of development and reading, helps personify some of the significant problems with the “science of reading” (SoR) movement that advocates for the “simple view” of reading and for systematic intensive phonics for all students.
Decoding is a necessary but small aspect of the reading, which ultimately must be an act of comprehension with engagement.
But the SoR movement also will fail our students because it centers systematic programs, silver-bullet thinking, and a misguided emphasis on decoding (and blunt decoding strategies).
However, what all students need and deserve are real-world experiences with and reasons to read.
Those experiences include activities too many people still stigmatize as “bad” for children—comic books, gaming, and even Lego.
Skylar as an emerging independent reader has had some wonderful traditional school experiences, and loving teachers. But her journey to reading is much larger than that, including her current fascination with Animal Crossing.
My beautiful and eager grandchildren are powerful examples that when it comes to teaching reading, nothing is settled and nothing is simple.
Reading is comprehensions and engagement, and as Skylar demonstrates, reading is about community, a shared purpose that is filled with pleasure and the joy of creating without a finish line.
Background/Context: Educators have considered how Minecraft supports language and literacy practices in the game and in the spaces and circumstances immediately surrounding gameplay. However, it is still necessary to develop additional conceptualizations of how children and youth’s online and offline worlds and experiences are blurred by and through the games. In this study, I take up this call and examine how the boundaries of the digital were blurred by one child as he wrote in response to a standardized writing prompt within his urban fourth-grade classroom.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Through snapshots of Jairo’s writing, I illuminate how he muddled the lines between his physical play experiences and those he had in the virtual world of Minecraft. In doing so, I argue that he carried over his personal interest as a fan of Minecraft into the writing curriculum through creative language play. As Jairo “borrowed” his physical play experiences in the virtual world of Minecraft to complete an assigned writing task, he exemplified how children blur playworlds of physical and digital play in the elementary ELA classroom.
Research Design: Drawing on data generated in an 18-week case study, I examine how one child, Jairo, playfully incorporated his lived experiences in the virtual world of Minecraft into mandated writing tasks.
Conclusions/Recommendations: My examination of his writing is meant to challenge writing scholars, scholars of play, and those engaged in rethinking media’s relation to literacy. I encourage a rethinking of what it means for adults to maintain clear lines of what is digital play and what is not. I suggest adults might have too heavy a hand in bringing play into classrooms. Children already have experiences with play—both physical and digital. We must cultivate a space for children to build on what was previously familiar to them by offering scaffolds to bridge these experiences between what we, as adults, understand as binaries. Children do not necessarily see distinctions between “reality” and play worlds, or between digital and physical play. For children, play worlds and digital worlds are perhaps simply worlds; it is we as adults who harbor a desire for clear boundaries.
Teachers College Record Volume 123 Number 3, 2021, p. – https://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 23622, Date Accessed: 9/18/2021 7:46:35 AM
How can historical perspective help direct teaching and learning?
When trying to solve problems, humans are prone to looking for a “silver bullet” which often bypasses the learning process. Educational trends prove this theory. The hot teaching movement today may not have solid research behind it. History shows us that we are not good at being patient students throughout life’s journey.
Our guests Dr. Michele Dufresne, President and founder of Pioneer Valley Books and Dr. Paul Thomas at Furman University share that while K-12 education may be a basic right, not everyone has equal access to it. If every child is capable of learning and no one progresses at the same rate, then how can teachers better support student growth? Having an educated society impacts all facets of our communities.
MacPhee, D., Handsfield, L.J., & Paugh, P. (2021). Conflict or conversation? Media portrayals of the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, TBD. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.384
Bowers, J. S., & Bowers, P. N. (2021, January 22). The science of reading provides little or no support for the widespread claim that systematic phonics should be part of initial reading instruction: A response to Buckingham. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/f5qyu
Criticizing U.S. public education through international comparisons is a long-standing tradition in the U.S. media, reaching back at least into the mid-twentieth century.
This is one of many crisis approaches to covering education—Chicken Little journalism—that makes false and misleading claims about the quality of U.S. education (always framed as a failure) and that because of the low status of the U.S. in international comparisons of education, the country is doomed, economically and politically.
Oddly enough, as international rankings of education have fluctuated over 70-plus years, some countries have risen and fallen in economic and political status (even inversely proportional to their education ranking) while the U.S. has remained in most ways the or one of the most dominant countries—even as we perpetually wallow in educational mediocrity.
Yet, this isn’t even remotely surprising as Gerald Bracey (and many others) detailed repeatedly that international comparisons of educational quality are essentially hokum—the research is often flawed (apples to oranges comparisons) and the conclusions drawn are based on false assumptions (that education quality directly causes economic quality).
Media coverage, however, will not (cannot?) reach for a different playbook; U.S. public education is always in crisis and the sky is falling because schools (and teachers) are failing.
Next up? I am betting on the “science of science.”
Fewer than 1 in 4 high school seniors and a little more than a third of 4th and 8th graders performed proficiently in science in 2019, according to national test results out this week.
The results are the latest from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in science. Since the assessment, known as “the nation’s report card,” was last given in science in 2015, 4th graders’ performance has declined overall, while average scores have been flat for students in grades 8 and 12.
“The 4th grade scores were concerning,” said Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP. “Whether we’re looking at the average scores or the performance by percentiles, it is clear that many students were struggling with science.”
But it is even worse than we thought: “These widening gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students, particularly in grade 4, mirror similar trends seen in national and global reading, math, and social studies assessments.”
Yep, U.S. students suck across all the core disciplines compared to the rest of the world!
Organizing instruction around phenomena is a key feature of many reforms aimed at meeting the Next Generation Science Standards, an ambitious set of standards adopted or adapted by 44 states in 2013. Phenomena are also an organizing feature of instructional reforms in countries outside the United States, likehigh-performing Finland. But what is phenomenon-based learning, and what evidence is there that it works?…
Our study found that students exposed to the phenomenon-based curriculum learned more based on a test aligned with the Next Generation standards than did students using the textbook. Importantly, the results were similar across students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Up next, of course, is the media trying to understand why science scores are so abysmal (like reading and math), assigning blame (schools, teachers, teacher education), and proposing Education Reform. What should we expect?
Well, since fourth-grade scores are in the dumpster, we need high-stakes science testing of all third-grade students and to impose grade retention on all those students who do not show proficiency in that pivotal third-grade year.
We also should start universal screening of 4K students for basic science knowledge (or maybe use “science” to screen fetuses in utero).
Simultaneously, states must adopt legislation mandating that all science curricula are based on research, the “science of science.”
Of course, teachers need to be retrained in the “science of science” because, you know, all teacher education programs have failed to teach the “science of science” [insert NCTQ report not yet released].
And while we are at it, are we sure Next Generation Science Standards are cutting it? Maybe we need Post-Next Generation Science Standards just to be safe?
Finally, we must give all this a ride, wait 6-7 or even 10 years, and then start the whole process over again.
The magical thing about Chicken Little journalism is that since the sky never falls, we can always point to the heavens and shout, “The sky is falling!”
In the early to mid-1980s, I entered the world of serious recreational cycling. I had been an athlete throughout my childhood and teen years, but found myself sedentary and out of shape in the first few years of my career as a high school English teacher.
Road cycling wasn’t the most inviting of sports, being both an individual and group endeavor. I quickly discovered, in fact, that cycling is deeply tradition-bound and steeped in ritual and conformity.
Ultimately, it is also an orchestra of Social Darwinism; you must be strong enough and skilled enough to ride with a group regardless of anything else (such as the right bicycle or the proper kit).
Early on, I had to focus on fitness—riding more often and longer, but always alone—and finding ways I could afford ever-better bicycles (see Rule 12). Gradually, I began shaving my legs and made the most daunting commitment facing me, using toe clips on my pedals.
Toe clips were a must among serious cyclists, but they involved literally reaching down and tightening a leather or nylon strap around your feet. The monumental learning curve was reaching down to tighten the straps and always reaching down to flick the release when coming to a stop.
At the time, I lived only a couple miles from my bicycle shop so I rode my bicycle there to buy my first toe clips. They installed the clips to my pedals and went over how to tighten and release.
Filled with glee about my next step toward being a real cyclist, I rolled out of the shop parking lot and promptly came to a stop at a red light where I fell over fairly dramatically beside several cars—having completely forgotten to reach down to loosen the straps.
Just as I had to learn how to shift gears (old-school down-tube friction shifting), I learned to tighten and release the toe clips along with dozens of other behaviors necessary to ride in tight packs of cyclists at high intensity and to near exhaustion.
High-paced group cycling is a mix of many precise behaviors in incredibly tense contexts—from being dropped from the group to being in or causing a serious accident.
That was three decades ago, and today (after many changes to pedals and shifting) I function on a bicycle in ways that seem entirely natural, requiring essentially no thought.
Matching kits, clipless pedals.
Cycling for me is automatic behavior; I also have acquired an incredible amount of knowledge about bicycles (I do bicycle maintenance and build bicycles) and the history of the sport.
I often think of this journey in learning of mine, which was again prompted by a few exchanges on Twitter:
Multiple choice questions are not bad.
Direct instruction is not bad.
DOK level 1 questions are not bad.
Rote memorization is not bad.
We often completely write something off instead of recognizing that it is a tool with value, limitations, and the capacity to be misused.
These comments about what we know and how we know it are common, but, I think, trapped in a misunderstanding about, for example, “rote memorization.”
Memorization and automatic behavior are not about “bad” or “good.” In fact, memorization and automatic behavior are inevitable for most humans, even essential.
The trap can be exposed by considering a behavior most of us have in common—assembling something from parts such as a TV stand or entertainment unit, or a children’s toy.
Do you recall opening the box, spreading out the parts, laying out the directions, and then beginning to assemble? Was there a moment (or several) while assembling when you turned from the directions to look on the box at the image of the fully assembled item?
So here is my point: The Twitter exchange above is trapped in viewing learning in a reductive way based on part-to-whole, easier-to-harder, sequential perceptions of learning.
This singular and reductive view is the trap.
Since most of the items we assemble are a one-time event, that assembly is both learning to assemble and assembling at the same time. (I once assembled a TV stand, badly, and then my in-laws wanted the same stand. The second assembly was a near-euphoric experience since I was able to apply what I had learned from doing the whole thing one time before.)
My journey in cycling and my assembly example here reveal that learning resulting in memorization and automatic behavior is extremely complex and is in fact an interplay between part and whole, not a step-by-step journey from part to whole.
“Breaking it down” is not always easier or clearer for some students, in some learning activities.
Many people learning to use toe straps, for example, would go into a grass field, strap in, and (as I did publicly) fall down repeatedly. Learning the real thing required doing the whole and real thing relatively badly until they improved (motivated by real consequences).
There is no debate, then, about the good or bad in memorization or automatic behavior. The real tension is about how and why we come to memorize or behave automatically.
Despite misleading claims that memorization is a foundation, we often come to know something, have it memorized, after (not before) we have rich and complex experiences with the knowledge or behavior.
In my doctoral program, I had to perform from memory in two intense settings—written comps and dissertation defense. I studied for neither because I had engaged with the material for so long and in such intense situations (course work, numerous papers, a full dissertation) that I had much of the material in recall.
Twenty-five-plus years later, much of that dissertation work remains in recall for me.
Like with cycling, my final doctoral work felt natural, as much a part of me as pedaling with my hands off the handlebars while I remove my cycling vest and stuff it into a rear pocket while sitting at the back of a high-paced group.
The quests for silver-bullets and simple step-by-step paths to learning and automatic behavior are at the core of many educational debates, in fact, including the incessant reading debate.
The complexity of cycling reminds me of the complexity in reading—the many interconnected behaviors and knowledge required to do both automatically and well.
Reading, learning to read, and teaching someone to read—like all learning—are not simple and how we come to know is just not settled.
In fact, learning will never be simple or settled because human beings are far too complex.
The paradox, of course, is that how we know is simple to explain: It is some type of interplay between doing the whole thing we want to learn and coming to know the many intricate parts that make up that whole thing.
How do we know?
It is a journey—not simple, not settled.
educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 
