Why was Balanced Literacy so popular for so long?
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Anonymous
Oh. My. Dyslexia is a brain-based difference in processing. It is most likely present at birth and the brain is using one hemisphere more than the other when processing language. Phonics instruction CAN sometimes help a poorly processing brain to process reading information in a better way, but instruction won’t make kids dyslexic, the system of processing information poorly is already in place. https://improvingliteracy.org/ask-an-expert/what-do-we-know-about-whats-different-brain-person-dyslexia |
Anonymous
Yes, Mr. Takei, those are the "actually" dyslexic kids. But since dyslexia is also defined as reading below grade level, a lot of kids look dyslexic and read below grade level because of the three cueing method of teaching children to read. They don't have a brain-based difference, they just cannot read well. |
Anonymous
The above is an example of strategies we were REQUIRED to teach in our school district. They came straight from the Central Office RELA supervisors. We got trained in using them and were provided Anchor Charts to model the "Reading Strategies". We were told to teach kids to GUESS based on picture and context cues, and maybe a couple of consonants at the beginning and end. |
Anonymous
I'm really not talking about "true" Dyslexia on this thread. Yes, someone with a severe learning disability or deficit in one of several areas (Rapid Autonomic Naming, long term memory, working memory, etc.) is going to have a hard time learning all the necessary subcomponents of reading and putting it all together, and may need other strategies to compensate, but memorizing words by sight probably isn't going to get them very far - it might be the best they can do though, and they will mostly need to have text read out lous to them. But the vast majority of students who are reading several years below grade level in middle and high school aren't actually dyslexic. They just didn't learn to decode properly when they were in elementary school. That's what we are trying to fix. The kids who can't read, but they COULD read with proper decoding instruction. Phonics is a HUGE part of the foundational skills of reading. When kids are at the beginning of learning to read, they need to see letters on the page, and know how to translate them into speech sounds. It's inefficient to tell them not to pay attention to all the letters in the word. It is possible to guess words, just by reading the beginning and ending consonants, sometimes.. but why do that? Every word, every syllable, has a vowel sound at the heart of it; teach kids the vowel sounds (including oi and ou and er/ir/ur and aw and so on.. they are just as important as the consonant sounds. Once kids have most of the letter-sound connections they need, they are off and running and decode TONS of words. They should be able to read most short words by end of second grade, and start working on harder multisyllabic words of Greek and Latin origin by 3rd and 4th grade, and then you can be more or less done with phonics (except for the fussy spelling rules). With competent, easy decoding abilities, students can actually read the 4th and 5th grade textbooks (instead of needing them read aloud) in Science and Social Studies and can learn content vocabulary and actually learn about the world; they can read rich literature and poetry and not have to have a teacher read everything to them. Of course oral language development, from infancy on, is important for language comprehension and to understand the words the student is reading. You can decode a word like "trough" but you won't know if you got it right if you have never heard the word "trough" before! But if students weren't taught to decode, they will look at the word trough and guess "though". And that is not a phonologically sensible guess. Trough could be truff or trow, or trawf - those are sensible guesses. but though is not sensible. Poor readers who don't decode well makes mistakes like that - mistakes that just aren't plausible. They read "agreement" as "argument". And it isn't hard to help them improve. You just need to make sure they have the basics -- sounds for each letter or letter team, knowledge that each syllable needs a vowel heart, and ability to blend sounds together - syllable by syllable. Oh - and to "flex" the vowel between short vowel and long vowel sound. |
Anonymous
Um... how did she earn a PhD? What field? |
Anonymous
Thanks for advocating discrimination! Maybe your should have been separated in your school for bias? Listen phonics is good for the majority of kids and essential for dyslexics. The law says students need to be in the least restricted environment. No public school in the US takes on full dyslexic remediation anyways so don’t worry… your little whippet smart Johnny won’t have his lacrosse budget cut for dyslexia remediation. But you might want to read up on the IDEA act of 2004 so you don’t sound so ill informed - and Johnny doesn’t sound as out of touch with Federal law. |
Anonymous
That’s so depressing. |
Anonymous
Yeah, none of that is true. None of it. And-you don't understand dyslexia or reading. |
Anonymous
A hard science. She's a VP at a company now and still doing well professionally, but gets help with all written work products. Often has the computer read things to her or does voice to text. She's brilliant, but reading is a struggle. She reads non-sight words from context and using the first letter, just like LC taught. (She's not dyslexic, has been tested many times, and those interventions we're never effective at improving her reading at all.) |
Anonymous
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I'm looking for the most relevant thread that covers the "Sold a Story" podcast and this seemed to be it. I've just finished the podcast and I'm so pissed. Who is being held accountable for this fraud?
Lucy Calkins is a charlatan. And Fountas and Pinell are narcissistic monsters who refuse to admit they were wrong. So many black and brown children have been harmed by their wrongheaded philosophies. |
Anonymous
All children of all ethnicities have been greatly harmed by the Whole Language / Balanced Literacy stuff. And everyone should thanks to the NoVA NAACP for putting pressure on Arlington and Fairfax counties to abandon this crap. |
Anonymous
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We deferred on applying to several local highly-regarded private schools once we saw no evidence of any phonics, saw multiple classroom whiteboards explicitly teaching 3-cueing (which never works), and the whole pile of Fountas & Pinnell reading books.
We might apply to one of those schools at 8th or 9th, but we did not want our follows-teacher-instructions daughter to be de-railed by an awful reading and writing curriculum in K or 1st or 2nd grade. It is so needless and so sad. So many kids have been harmed by bad curricula and correspondingly bad teaching. |
Anonymous
I know all children have been harmed by these methods but I called out black and brown children because they were harmed even more than their white and Asian counterparts who were often able to mitigate the harm caused by the poor reading instruction in schools with private tutoring. |
Anonymous
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The problem is our society and academia only rewards new ideas and new innovations that purports to be more equitable and less biased for some groups. It operates also on assumption that existing systems are somehow inadequate and assumes that the new idea would only make things better, and not actually worsen the situation.
You can pretty much apply this to everything like the 180 whiplash on the War on Drugs in our major cities or the supposed “debunking” of the broken windows theory. In the end the ones who suffer most are the recipients of these “good intentions.” |
Anonymous
That’s a bold statement. Can we be done with the race baiting? Almost every educational reform done in the past half century has been in the name of improving black and brown children outcomes, including balanced literacy, and we have very little to show for it and the achievement gap remains wider than ever. It’s because Asian kids have private tutors? GTFO. Don’t comment when you don’t know what the hell you are talking about. |