The tug of war between phonics and sight reading continues.
You need both skills.
The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
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Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#22I wish educational systems were less eager to jump into the latest fads, and more conservative in their approach (and I say that as a progressive). In my country we didn't have this particular fad as far as I know, but we are harming kids with the trend of making everything digital. With nonsense such as classrooms of 3-year-old kids where they solve a puzzle by dragging images of the pieces on a big screen, rather t…
Yeah, there’s nothing progressive about not teaching kids to read. The “just throw them in the pool and expect them to swim” approach is particularly harmful to kids with ADD type difficulties. Replace conservative with evidence based. This sounds like one of those “sounds right to me” ideas pushed by someone with charisma who was positioned properly in the educational world to be listened to. In any field there occa…
> In any field there occasionally seem to be these ideas that emerge fully formed with a hallelujah chorus. These days it’s usually accompanied by a book, a book tour, and a TED talk.
Meh. The flipped classroom was one of those ideas, and it seems to work just fine.
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#23I wish educational systems were less eager to jump into the latest fads, and more conservative in their approach (and I say that as a progressive). In my country we didn't have this particular fad as far as I know, but we are harming kids with the trend of making everything digital. With nonsense such as classrooms of 3-year-old kids where they solve a puzzle by dragging images of the pieces on a big screen, rather t…
I agree on the digital stuff. I really don't like that kids are primarily using Chrome books and stuff as their primary mode of learning. Maybe that would be fine in high school, but I feel that elementary and middle schools should be taught with physical media.
I'm touring schools in my area now (k-8) to figure out where we want to send our kids. One school says the kids get hybrid instruction, but every single class we walked past except an art class had the kids working on their device. Hybrid my ass. It's easier to teach and grade using the tech, so that's what they're going to use. I question how durable that type of learning is vs things like handwriting notes (shown to increase retention).
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#24I wish educational systems were less eager to jump into the latest fads, and more conservative in their approach (and I say that as a progressive). In my country we didn't have this particular fad as far as I know, but we are harming kids with the trend of making everything digital. With nonsense such as classrooms of 3-year-old kids where they solve a puzzle by dragging images of the pieces on a big screen, rather t…
Yeah, there’s nothing progressive about not teaching kids to read. The “just throw them in the pool and expect them to swim” approach is particularly harmful to kids with ADD type difficulties. Replace conservative with evidence based. This sounds like one of those “sounds right to me” ideas pushed by someone with charisma who was positioned properly in the educational world to be listened to. In any field there occa…
I don’t think just being evidence based is going to cut it. Yada yada yada, replication crisis in psychology (and every other science, including physics.) There was a time when evidence based teaching included “Power Poses.”
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#25It makes no sense to me that they had the idea that reading will just naturally arise like speech. Like, how did they come up with that?
We have ample evidence that human infants spontaneously generate language. If you're unlucky enough to be born profoundly deaf in a country without an existing programme of sign language for deaf infants, you'll sign anyway, just there isn't anybody to provide a vast menu of existing signs and a grammar for them, and those you're communicating with wouldn't know it if there was. So your signs will be primitive and you'll struggle unless/until introduced to a full sign language. [Sign languages are languages, they're not just spoken language somehow transliterated into signs - so e.g Mexican Sign Language is a thing even though in Mexico the spoken language is Spanish]
Writing seems to have arisen independently only very rarely. Some tiny fraction of humans will spontaneously invent written language, and a larger but still small fraction will spontaneously acquire this technology if exposed to the writing. Everybody else must be taught if you want a literate society.
I can imagine that functional literacy would be aided by school programmes which encourage it, but the core technology of converting between words you say (or sign) and symbols in the world makes no sense as something you just hope they'll absorb from their surroundings without teaching.
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#26The tug of war between phonics and sight reading continues. You need both skills.
But only one of those needs to be taught directly, and that's phonics. Sight reading can be left to emerge later on as the amount of reading increases. English is not Mandarin Chinese, we don't need to guess the meaning of words from what they look like, we can mostly read out how they sound.
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#27Am also a NYC parent, 15 years of deep school involvement. The critiqued curriculum from Columbia TC was supplemental for us and excellent. With all respect to those conducting reading studies of various kinds, and of course to parents whose kids were suffering, many of the broad claims in this piece are bewildering and are far from what I observed directly and indirectly. My views are perhaps colored by my low opini…
What do you mean by 'was supplemental for us'?
I suspect the gulf between your experiences and what others have been writing about is that for others, the critiqued curriculum wasn't supplemental, but was the only source for learning to read in school.
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#28Huh, wow, yeah I never heard of this but that makes complete sense. I spent a bit of time helping by at an elementary and though it took a bit to click, it was painfully obvious that a lot of the worst behaved kids were doing so as way to hide the fact that they could not read. And yeah, the idea of trying to get kids to read by just making them read does seem like bullshit vs teaching it as a skill.
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Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#29This was a pretty poor article. They never really explained what balanced literacy is, what its key positions are, or how it measured success. Nor do they really explain how their ideas would be better, or adress failings of balanced literacy.
It certainly doesn't present an uncontested view of the evidence.
https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10...
https://www.vox.com/23815311/science-of-reading-movement-lit...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09515-y
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-social-science-of-reading-i...
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#30I wish educational systems were less eager to jump into the latest fads, and more conservative in their approach (and I say that as a progressive). In my country we didn't have this particular fad as far as I know, but we are harming kids with the trend of making everything digital. With nonsense such as classrooms of 3-year-old kids where they solve a puzzle by dragging images of the pieces on a big screen, rather t…
Yeah, there’s nothing progressive about not teaching kids to read. The “just throw them in the pool and expect them to swim” approach is particularly harmful to kids with ADD type difficulties. Replace conservative with evidence based. This sounds like one of those “sounds right to me” ideas pushed by someone with charisma who was positioned properly in the educational world to be listened to. In any field there occa…
"Replace conservative with evidence based."
I think it doesn't matter what it's called. Most of the fads do have evidence. It's just that it might not be measured in the right way, or ignoring other effects.
As an example, the balanced reading approach has evidence that it does work. However, the practical implementation of this approach has numerous interpretations. It's supposed to include balanced meaning between meaning and phonics. It's not supposed to be putting kids in the position of independent reading prior to being able to read. That's just a shitty school, lesson plan, or teacher. Its also supposed to include 1-on-1 reading instruction. I wonder how many kids are getting that at school with the instructor to kid ratio...
Now, maybe the systemic phonics approach will work better, but that's possibly due to the key resources (essentially lesson plans and materials) that the school is using. If it doesn't include forcing kids who don't know how to read to read independently, then any implementation would be an improvement over that, including if it was still an alternate implementation of the same system.