Former Marine, Current Student, Future Teacher, but always a Dad!

So where does the Department of Education stand on reading? Well, if your are interested in this subject and have been paying attention just slightly then you have probably heard of Reading First. Reading First is the part of No Child Left Behind that adresses reading instruction. When looking at the Dept. of Eds website on Reading First you can not see specificly where the Federal Government stands on this issue (Phonics vs. Whole language) but by digging a little deeper I was able to see that there ais a part of Reading First called Early Reading First that says that one of the goals is:

To demonstrate language and literacy activities based on scientifically based reading research that support the age-appropriate development of
- Oral language (vocabulary, expressive language, listening comprehension)
- Phonological awareness (rhyming, blending, segmenting)
- Print awareness
- Alphabetic knowledge

I think it would be fairly safe to say that the Department of Education falls on the side of Phonics. In reading the Purpose for Reading First the phrase “scientifically based research” is mentioned 4 times in less then 10 paragraphs. I am a big believer in methodology and pedagogy being based on scientifically based research that leads to a convergance of evidence. Does Reading First’s stance on scientificly based research and the published position favoring Phonics mean that the phonics based approach is where the convergence of evidence leads. Sol Stern writes in City Journal:

To see clearly what’s at stake, we need to remind ourselves of the gravity of the national problem that Reading First seeks to solve—and of how it proposes to solve it. That essential context is missing from both the inspector general’s reports and much of the media commentary.

After a century and a half of universal public education, and despite the highest per-pupil expenditure on public elementary and secondary education in the world, 40 percent of U.S. fourth-graders are reading below the minimally acceptable level, according to the gold-standard NAEP test. For minority students in inner-city schools, the reading failure rate is a shocking 65 percent. This educational failure bodes ill: children who don’t read by fourth grade almost always fall behind in all other subjects, often wind up in costly special education programs, and, as adults, have higher rates of drug addiction, incarceration, and welfare dependency.

Making the situation more tragic, nineteenth-century American children learned to read very well, thank you, in one-room schoolhouses, with nothing more than a single determined teacher wielding Noah Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller and the McGuffey readers. Even before a public school system existed in America, Alexis de Tocqueville had marveled at the country’s extraordinarily high literacy rates.

Happily, recent developments point the way to a solution to the nation’s reading woes. For the past several decades, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a wing of the National Institutes of Health, has sponsored reading research at universities across the U.S, with scientists from cognitive neuroscience, pediatrics, genetics, educational psychology, and child development publishing hundreds of peer-reviewed studies that describe not just how children learn to read but why so many fall behind—and how schools can best keep it from happening.

The converging scientific evidence confirms what our great-grandmothers knew intuitively. The most effective reading instruction for most children—especially for those from disadvantaged homes—begins by training them to recognize the relationship between letters and the sounds they make (phonemic awareness), moves on to teaching them how to sound out whole words (phonics), and then focuses on fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Reading science has also developed effective new technologies to assess students’ progress in mastering the skills they need to decode written language. To make an analogy with medical science, reading science has discovered not only the educational equivalent of treating diabetes but also the technology that monitors how the treatment is working.

Many people reading this will have the same questions I have as I investigate this issue. The first being, Does the whole language aproach have scientific based research backing it? The fact that phonics has some convergence does not mean that whole language does not or that phonics encommpasses all children. the second question being, While it might have evidence in research what are the field results or in other words are the rates of success as high when actually practiced in the some scientificly uncontrolled environment of the classroom. Sol Stern goes on to write:

Unfortunately, the similarities between reading science and the medical kind end there. A breakthrough in medical research soon leads to new clinical practice. In education, however, the science has collided head-on with the ideologies and economic interests of the panjandrums of public education.

Reading science is a mortal threat to what E. D. Hirsch has called the “Thoughtworld” of American education—the system of “progressive” beliefs about classroom instruction promulgated by the ed schools that monopolize teacher training. The Thoughtworld has a cult-like attachment to a Romantic theory of reading instruction called “whole language,” which recently morphed into “balanced literacy” to make it sound more reasonable to dubious parents. Balanced-literacy true believers claim that to subject children to the “drill and kill” of direct phonics instruction is a form of child abuse.

The balanced-literacy cultists believe that learning to read is a natural process and that most children can intuit the alphabetic principle and the meaning of printed words with a little guidance from a teacher and through pleasant cooperative classroom activities such as “shared reading” and “reading circles.” Basically, this approach says that kids can learn to read by reading—by immersing themselves in print. And for some children from literate homes, where print and articulate conversation abound, this approach can work.

Progressive educators don’t cite scientific research to support their approach, however, because none exists—not one study based on randomized field trials. In 2002, the whole-language-dominated National Council of Teachers of English passed a resolution attacking Reading First for favoring only “one model” of science and called instead for “implementation of diverse kinds of scientific research, including teacher research.” Translation: teachers can evaluate instructional methods by observing their own classrooms, science be damned.

The National Council on Teacher Quality, a mainstream public education advocacy group, recently surveyed ed schools and found that 85 percent of their elementary education classes don’t teach the principles of phonics and scientific reading instruction. “The resistance from many educators to [teaching phonics] has been palpable,” the report concluded. Of course, interests other than pedagogical are at stake. If a major shift occurred in teaching methodologies, tenured jobs and professional development contracts from the $500 billion-plus education industry would suddenly be up for grabs.

Such was the state of affairs when NICHD’s chief reading scientist, Reid Lyon, and House education committee staffer Robert Sweet drafted the Reading First legislation, early in 2001. Lyon had just become President Bush’s informal advisor on reading instruction, while Sweet was a former teacher and longtime advocate for science-based reading programs. With the president’s encouragement, Lyon and Sweet consciously designed Reading First to do an end run around the deeply entrenched whole-language movement.

“We knew we were battling a culture of intellectual corruption and hostility to science in the education industry, and we had limited weapons to use effectively against it,” recalls Sweet. “Reading First was created to be a catalyst, to provide a financial incentive for schools finally to start doing the right thing for the millions of kids left behind in reading.” You could say that Reading First was a $6 billion federal bribe to get districts to do what they really should have been doing already.

Getting the program enacted required walking a political tightrope between Republicans wary of federal interference in local decisions and Democrats who liked spending more federal education dollars, but with no questions asked. Compromising, the Reading First legislation abandoned the idea of requiring participating districts to use only scientifically tested reading programs. Instead, districts could also use untested ones, as long as they adhered to the principles of scientific reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

It wasn’t everything Lyon and Sweet wanted, but it was enough—or so they hoped. The two reformers bet that a critical mass of schools would sign on and implement the general principles of reading science, which would then produce evidence that this instructional method was lifting achievement in previously struggling schools. Such a real-life demonstration, they believed, would ignite a countercultural education movement of teachers, parents, administrators, and education activists who would spread the Reading First gospel.

Four years later, the evidence is starting to come in. More than 5,600 schools in 1,700 school districts nationwide have received Reading First grants. The participation level is impressive in itself. It means that state education agencies and a large number of districts have pledged (in writing) to use Reading First grants exclusively to teach according to the principles of Scientifically Based Reading Research—a phrase that appears so often in the legislation that it has become an acronym, SBRR. So unless officials are lying and just grabbing the money, we now have a critical mass of educators willing to try the pro-science side of the reading wars.

We also know that 100,000 K–3 teachers are receiving training and continuous professional development in reading science. That represents a critical mass, too—one that takes on even greater significance if the Reading First teachers appear to be improving the academic performance of their low-income, at-risk students. Reading First has pulled off something of a coup just in removing all these early-childhood teachers from the ed schools’ ideological orbit.

A comprehensive study by an outside evaluator will appear in 2007, measuring Reading First’s influence on student achievement nationally. But some states and districts are already seeing significant improvement. When the relevant congressional committees hold hearings on NCLB reauthorization, they might start by looking to neighboring Virginia, where they’ll discover a dramatic example of Reading First’s power. With apologies to Dickens, we might call it a tale of two school districts—one welcoming Reading First, the other disdaining it.

The first, Richmond, offers a classic profile of an inner-city school district. Of its 25,000 students, 95 percent are black, more than 70 percent are poor enough to be in the free-lunch program, and 44 percent change schools during the year. Until 2001, Richmond’s student test scores were among Virginia’s worst. Only five of the district’s 51 schools achieved the status of full state accreditation.

But 2001 is also when Richmond school officials embarked on an ambitious reform, whose centerpiece was a standardized reading program based on evidence from the NICHD studies. By the time Reading First funds were available in 2002, Richmond was already up and running with a phonics-based reading program called Voyager Universal Literacy. The district channeled the modest $450,000 Reading First grant into a handful of its lowest-performing schools. But the principles of scientific reading instruction took hold throughout the district.

Since then, Richmond’s test scores have skyrocketed. By 2003, the number of the district’s schools achieving full state accreditation had climbed to 22. The next year, it rose to 39 and has now reached 44.

While this is just one person writing from a standpoint of support for the Dept. of Ed.’s program we have to admit he sites bases for his support. Many will say that Reading First’s recent political scandal taints anything it supports the facts are that the methodology of phonics is supported by a convergence of evidence despite any flaws it might have. With out making any judgements on whole language i think I can at least answer some questions I had at this point. A phonics based approach does work and that if applied correctly can improve results for many children in most situations.

This Bush Education Reform Really Works
By Sol Stern
City Journal
Winter 2007

Reading First Web Site

I have an 11 month old daughter and like most new parents my wife and I are constantly worrying about bench marks. We worry about when she will crawl, walk, use her fingers as pinchers, when she is babbling, how she is babbling, when she says her first word. All these things fly through our brains and conversations on a daily basis. Believe or not we have already discussed how we will prepare her for school and whether our day care has the best curriculum. Soon my daughter will be in school and ready to start to learn how to read. So the question to ask at this point is: How do we teach a child how to read? 

Here is where my status as parent and future educator converges. In education there is a battle in this area of teaching reading. Many teachers believe in a whole language approach while others believe phonics is the best way. I want to use this post to cover the basics such as definitions and a little bit of history so that I (or we) at least have a starting point in my effort to come to a conclusion. 

So what is the difference between whole language and phonics? Jenny Curtis writes on Superkids.com:

What’s the difference?
The traditional theory of learning established in the 19th century draws on the notion that children need to break down a complex skill, like reading, into its smallest components (letters) before moving on to tackle larger components (sounds, words, and sentences). Phonetic reading instruction applies this theory; children are taught to dissect unfamiliar words into parts and then join the parts together to form words. By learning these letter-sound relationships the student is provided with a decoding formula that can be applied whenever they encounter an unfamiliar word.

Whole language learning is less focused on rules and repetition than is phonics. It stresses the flow and meaning of the text, emphasizing reading for meaning and using language in ways that relate to the students’ own lives and cultures. Whole language classrooms tend to teach the process of reading, while the final product becomes secondary. The “sounding out” of words so central to phonics is not used in whole language learning. Instead, children are encouraged to decode each word through its larger context.

The stance of educators on this subject, like many others, seems to vacillate. To give a brief (Very, very brief) history of teaching reading methodology, I have used this excerpt from an article by Sharon Cromwell in Education-World:

 THE PENDULUM SWINGS THROUGH TIME

The debate over the best way to teach reading isn’t new. In fact, the question has been argued through much of the 20th century. A number of different approaches to teaching reading have dominated during that time span.

The “look-say” reading method was widespread for 30 years, from around 1940 to 1970. From around 1970 to 1990, phonics was popular. And whole language gained a foothold around 1990. Several other approaches have also been utilized for a briefer time before they were found wanting.

After a global approach, such as the “look-say” method, is popular for at time, the pendulum tends to swing in the opposite direction toward a more analytical approach, such as phonics. Proponents of one method are often extremely critical of another method, as if the effectiveness of each method precluded the success of another.

After reading this, what do think is the best approach? I can’t come to a conclusion from the tiny bit of information I have sited here but at least I understand what the different approaches are at a base level.

Jenny Curtis
Superkids
SuperKids Software Review – Phonics vs. Whole Language: Which is Better?

Sharon Cromwell
Education World
Whole Language and Phonics: Can They Work Together?

My question today is (just in case you didn’t read the title of this post) why is it that we are even considering using blogs in the classroom? What is about this medium that makes it different or better then other mediums? The learning journal is nothing new. Teachers have been getting students to write this type of thing for years. So why is a blog a better then lets say just having them write an ongoing journal on Microsoft word and turn it in to be graded as part of a portfolio every so often? To me this question is the first question that should be asked when considering using a blog in your classroom. You need to make sure you as the teacher feel that some of the work (maybe even hassle) will be worth it. If you you don’t totally by into the purpose for using the blog how can you justify it to the critics or even more importantly, your students.

I believe the answer to this question is in the basics of teaching writing. Blogs are not something that are written with the purpose of just getting good grades from your teacher. These blogs will be read by your classmates, your teacher, and maybe other people that have nothing to do with your class. This gives you an audience (remember I talked about the basics of writing), this gives the writer a vested interest in his/her writing that they is on another plane then just writing for the teacher. This audience makes the writer aware of how the writing is being read and how they are being viewed. The voice pr personality starts to hold importance in the writers point of view. Kristen Kennedy explains this on Techlearning.com a few years ago during the early stages of using blogs in classrooms:

What makes Web logs unique is their emphasis on publication and their signature as a dynamic genre of Web writing. Forming the technical backbone of blogs are content management programs, such as PostNuke or UserLand’s Manila, that are built to be “personal publishing systems,” as UserLand president and COO John Robb puts it. No HTML is required, since these programs are designed to be as easy to use as a word processing application, but with additional collaboration and communication features. Manila, for example, can manage 500 individual student sites, discussion boards, mail bulletin functions, and digital portfolios all with site search and syndicated news stream capture capabilities.

Unlike most Web sites, which generally combine static and dynamic features, a blog is produced with an active writer in mind, one who creates in an online writing space designed to communicate an identity, a personality, and most importantly, a point of view.

This begins to answer the question of “why blogging?”. By providing a means to publish the writing of your students, they start to care about this writing in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. They are not just presenting a paper to a teacher but are presenting themselves to their peers and the outside world via the blog.

Now that we have started to consider the why question we need to start to investigate the how question. How do we as teachers implement the blog into our curriculum so that it supports the fundamentals and methods of writing to make our students not only become powerful writers but to meet the expectations of the outside world (i.e. standardized tests, employers, future teachers, etc.). Hopefully we can start to investigate this fully in my next post.  

techLEARNING.com | Technology & Learning – The Resource for Education Technology Leaders

Are blogs really where its at in education now!?! Can blogs be done in a way that is counterproductive to what you are trying to accomplish? Do teachers jump on the latest technology teaching craze (blogging in this case) without thinking how it can be used effectively to support the curriculum? Do students feel as though blogging is just as big of a hassle as any other type of writing they are assigned? 

These are the questions I would ask if I was approaching this subject from a negative viewpoint. I am not approaching this subject in that way though. I want to look at it from all viewpoints. I want to display the good, the bad, and the ugly if need be. Most of what we hear or read about blogs in education are glowing reviews or stories of how they have breathed new life into the classroom but not all blog experiences are like this are they? I wanted input from an instructor (not a student because we are fickle) who has experience teaching with blogs and has a different point of view from what we hear most of the time.  Kara M. Dawson articulates some of the problems she has encountered in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In some courses, I use a single blog on which all students are expected to post comments. In other classes, I require students to create individual blogs and to visit their fellow students’ blogs through RSS feeds. Typically I expect students to write at least one posting a week and to comment on several others’ blogs. Sometimes I require students to post on a particular topic, and sometimes I leave it open-ended. Whatever the approach, I found last semester that many students fell victim to blog overload.

I began to feel overloaded, too. Don’t get me wrong. I love blogs. I have my RSS feeds set to a number of blogs that help me stay current on personal and professional interests. But the key difference is that I am not forced to read any of those blogs. None of them were created because of someone else’s course requirement.

Frankly, the blog postings I required my students to write were just not very interesting. Those students are bright, insightful, frequently opinionated, and, as a whole, a pleasure to be around. Their blogs were not.

With few exceptions, the blogs would sit inactive until about 24 hours before our face-to-face class meetings (or 24 hours before the assignments are due in my online class) when a flurry of posts and comments would erupt. Then, I would spend an excessive amount of time reading and commenting in the hours before class. Some students did the same while others didn’t bother to comment at all. Effective teaching and learning? I think not.

This gives you a different view of what the typically hear from professors using blogs in their classroom. Given that view, how successfully will a high school teacher, who is not doing their homework, implement blogs into the curriculum. In my opinion no matter what the method, plan, or tactic you are using to introduce subject matter, if it is ill conceived, thought out, or planned itwill fail. Let me preface all the rest of my posts by saying that I believe blogs can work in the classroom. The problem I am starting to see in my reading is maybe just maybe some teachers see this as a way to lessen their work load. I’m not sure if this is the case but hopefully I will have an answer to that question along with many others as I investigate this topic. 

Chronicle Careers: 1/30/2007: Blog Overload

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Blog Overload
By Kara M. Dawson
January 30, 2007

Before I get to far along in my “Blog journey” to discover the in and outs of the different methodologies of teaching reading I want to mention that it takes more then just the perfect methodology to teach a child to read. If we could just look at the different methods in teaching a child to read I am sure that some sort of conclusion would be ascertained fairly quickly. We all know that all children are the same though. They come from different cultures, with different socioeconomic backgrounds. Some students have learning difficulties while others have different disabilities. There are many different variables that come into play in any given classroom, let alone school, district, state, or country that the question of what methodology is pretty tricky. The complexity of the issue was illustrated in a column by a Carol Cedarholm, a reading teacher in Ithaca, NY in which she writes:

As a result of my 23 years of teaching reading in the Ithaca City schools, I can say with certainty that the ‘direct instruction’ method is a method used in most classrooms in Tompkins County. Any teacher who stands in front of a group of first graders and tells them: “This is the letter A. It makes the sound ‘aaaaaaaaaa’ like at the beginning of the word apple. Let me show you how to make an ‘A’ …” is using a “direct instruction” method. This is a tried and true method but not the only one.

Teaching quality is also a very critical factor in reading success as a letter writer to The Journal pointed out on Nov. 9 (“Improving teaching is the key”). Poverty, racism, parents’ level of education and health care are just a few others. I don’t mean to minimize the importance of teaching method on reading success. In fact the best teacher won’t be successful using an ineffective method. Neither will an excellent teacher be successful using Direct Instruction/Reading Master if the child is hungry, hasn’t slept, hasn’t been read to, can’t focus, has only 30 minutes of reading instruction four times a week, etc. My point is that Lion, although well meaning, exhibits a naïve understanding of the task of teaching reading in today’s world.

I don’t think anyone can argue that some of the points being made in the above article. There is much more to teaching reading, or any material/subject for that matter, then just going into a classroom with what you believe is the best method and giving a lesson based solely on that method. Children have issues beyond just receiving and working through the curriculum we are using. This does not mean that we as teachers throw up our arms and say, “Its not my fault Joey or Suzy can’t read because she’s poor and he’s ADHD,”.  What we have to do is take the different dynamics that a child or set of children bring to the educational table and be aware of them when coming to decision on the tactic we will use. As I discuss the different methods use in teaching reading I will try touch on the different aspects involved in a child’s learning process and each methods viability in addressing these variables.

Carol Cedarholm – Guest Columnest                                                                                            January, 3, 2007

The Ithaca Journal – www.theithacajournal.com – Ithaca, NY

How do you teach a student to write something that expresses what they are feeling in meaningful way? How do you get them to take a subject, pick a side, and use powerful sentences in combination with facts to argue their point? Its hard enough at times to get them to say hello let alone communicate in this way in writing. This is what I set out to do when I created this blog. While reading extensive on the different methodologies of how to teach writing I noticed that most articles kept mentioning something that was right in front of my face…..literally. They kept mentioning blogs. Some teachers love this new tool, others fear blogs, while others hate the idea of the Internet taking over yet another part of there teaching.  That is why I have decided to really focus in on the effects thatblogs have on the ability to teach students how to write well.

In a recent Chicago Tribune article this debate was showcased:

“It’s the tip of the iceberg of something really, really tremendous that’s happening in education,” said Dave Sherman, principal of South Park Elementary School in Deerfield. “I really think this is cutting edge, where education is going in the next five to 10 years.”

A little farther down the article the opposite point of view was expressed:

Blogs offer a new level of convenience, but some educators fear the technology will open them up to criticism.

“There is great resistance,” said Cynthia Mee

Don’t let me mislead you this is not a hot button subject. At least for now. Most parents and quite a few teachers have no idea what a blog is. As blogs become more prevalent I am not sure whether there will be a huge surge of opinion against it. Safety for the students writing these blogs is an issue but there are security measures to take care of that. Some people will complain that this type of on-line writing breeds poor writing habits but I am sure that capable teachers will be able to create boundaries and guidelines for this. 

I believe that the more you write the better you become at writing. It can’t be different from anything else. The more you do something the better you get at it. I am not saying that every person who plays the piano is Mozart and i am not saying every person who skates allot is Dorothy Hamel but what I am saying is that the people who practice those things a lot are much closer to reaching their potential then those who don’t practice at all. So my question for this semester will be “Does blogging make the average student have more interest in writing then if they were going through the more traditional approaches?” In other words: Blogging vs. the 5 paragraph Compare and contrast essaythat Prof. Rozema likes to talk about.  

 Does blogging is having positive effects on the quality of writing in schools? Lets find out.    

Source:

Blogging clicks with educators | Chicago Tribune

By Lisa Black

If some of you that are in both the 310 and 311 classes you will see that I am pretty much writing about the same type of thing. Only in 310 it is about writing instead of reading. We have already delved into this subject in class when we talk about the writing process.

I have mixed emotions when I hear us discuss the writing process or I read something like the Murray article “Writing as a Process…”. It all seems well and good in theory and I am sure that with the dedication of enough time it will work but does it play out with success in the classroom. Murray talks about rehearsal to draft to rewrite to revision that is the beginning of another rehearsal and so on. Sounds solid as you read it. The question is will you get students to buy into it and even if they do will they stay committed to it. High School Student A has got to learn all about integers, the Battle of Trenton, the Bill of Rights, run a mile and half for gym, has practice after school, followed by practice till 5:30 and guess what we want you to do. Write this way. I am just not sure it works in practice.

That is why I am blogging about methodology. I really want to know different methods and where these methods are in practice or at what stage of development they are. I want to say before i end that I am not an English Major, I am a Social Studies major. I also want to admit I know very little about this subject but I hope to discover a little bit about my beliefs through this process.     

 I am taking this class at the same time I am taking a taking a Ed. Psych. class. In that class we are talking about scientific based research, NCLB, etc. Pretty much what you would expect at the beginning of this type of class. In an example that is used in that class they talked about the “whole language” method of teaching reading. This has got me very interested in the subject matter of the different methodologies of teaching reading. I should say at this point that I know very little about this subject and I don’t have a stance on it at this point (knowing myself, a great big “yet” should be added) but it interests me greatly. I should also add that I am a social studies major with an english minor so some of you English majors will have to be patient as I post and work through the concepts.

As I said I have just barely begun to investigate the surface of this subject but as I researched whole language I stumbled across this article about the reading program in the Butte, MT schools:

“We were consistently in the 80th percentile and suddenly we were in the 60th percentile,” said Judy Jonart, the district’s curriculum director. The statistics showed many of Butte’s students were struggling with reading, a building block for all other subjects.                                                                        So began a dramatic shift in the way the district’s nearly 4,600 students attacked reading: They hired an outside consultant, used a different curriculum and added reading coaches in every school. More time was devoted to the subject: teachers and students spent at least two hours of every school day learning and practicing reading.

New system                                                                                                            Just a few years ago, the buzz word in reading was the “whole language” method. Whole language devotees believe all children can learn to read naturally, encouraged by immersion in good books and literature that will make them lifelong and eager readers.”You couldn’t find anything that wasn’t whole language,” Jonart said of the materials available to districts.But Butte statistics showed whole language wasn’t working and parents complained the system did not emphasize phonics and “drill and kill” methods with which they learned to read.In 2001, the district started a pilot program in five classrooms using a program called Reading Mastery, which emphasized phonetic awareness – especially in the younger grades – and fluency, comprehension, vocabulary and other skills.Developed by a scientist, Reading Mastery was resisted by teachers who weren’t sold on the new curriculum.                        “It’s scripted and it’s very strict,” Jonart said.                                                    The system provides a script from which teachers read and lessons are plotted, leaving some teachers feeling robbed of creativity and spontaneity. The program also requires total devotion or “fidelity,” meaning teachers must not stray from the boundaries.

Reading earlier, faster                                                                                      But the latest batch of numbers offered encouragement.Not only are kids reading earlier, they are advancing faster. By fourth grade, some students have tackled high school material from 20 years ago with Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.”To be sure, in Shannon Tregidga’s class on a recent day, about 20 students sat in front of a board filled with small words as Tregidga – who had perfect command over squirming bodies – practiced each word, taken from their reading, in rapid-fire fashion.Weeres encourages teachers to put their mark on the system, even though it is scripted, paced and repetitive. “I say you can’t take anything away, but you can add (to the lesson),” she said.

Reading this article left me with many different feelings. None of which reduced my interests on the methodology of teach reading. First and foremost I think that the article leaves me with a great sense of hope. That a school district could come to this point from where they were is exciting. It proves that it can be done. At the same time it is discouraging to think that the art or craft of teaching has been taken away from these teachers. Their personal teaching style has been replaced by a system that does not allow for modification. No matter what the success rate is these teachers have to feel less personal satisfaction. There experience and insight has been replaced by specific inflexible modules.

This article also leaves me with some serious questions. What is the background of the teaching system/methodology? Was it studied/researched/published? While the success rate of the whole district went up, were there instances of children that had trouble learning this way? For those children, does the school allow for different methods to be tried? While these children are learning to read, do they understand the meaning, concepts of text or literature at later ages?

There are just so many questions that this article has left me with. I look forward to investigating and researching about “Reading Mastery” (phonics based) and about other methods such as whole language. I plan to move from this whole language vs. phonics debate to literary theory. I hope to touch on some of Jeff Wilhelm’s articles and books besides “”You Gotta Be the Book” and use this as a base to explore other theorist to iclude competing points of view.  This is the beginning of this trip but hopefully by the end of the semester I will have a much better view and stance on the subject.

As sources for this blog I am using the education feeds from the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Seattle Times. I am using a number of search quesries to include “Whole Language Methods”, “Reading Mastery”, “Teaching Reading”, and “Literary Theory” with these leading me to other searches at times. I also am using the blog “Phonics – The resource for teaching children to read”. As they sources change as my subject changes i will be sure to update them.

Strict reading program puts Butte schools in spotlight

1/9/2007 at 12:18 am

By Leslie McCartney
Montana Standard

http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/01/09/news/state/67-reading.txt