Reply to Why was Balanced Literacy so popular for so long?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Part of why BL was used for so long was because the creators based it off of research on what good readers do.  Good readers do: use the first letter of a word and the context, they do skip words they can't read and come back to them, they do flip the vowel sound and more.  Problematically,it wasn't researched to check that what works for readers who pick up reading easily, would work for most kids. So, when teachers like me heard "research based" and really read the dozens of great professional books written on the topic, we bought in.

The other problem is that balanced literacy was never intended to be taught without explicit and systematic phonics.  But for some reason, some teachers (okay, many) assumed it was.  Balanced literacy was intended to provide time for fluency instruction, comprehension instruction, writing instruction, vocabulary instruction and phonics instruction.  For me, my first job was in a little private school that used a truly terrible curriculum that ONLY taught phonics using phonetic decodable books.  There was ZERO (and I truly mean zero) comprehension, fluency, writing (other than handwriting) or vocabulary instruction taught in the early years.  We didn't even have any read alouds.  (for real)  My students could decode a lot.  But read?  Not really.

At the same time, I'm grateful for those years because I can get all my students to meet or exceed what they should know in phonics and phonemic awareness by years end. There's a balance (excuse the word) here.  Kids do need explicit and systematic phonics.  Kids do need decodable readers.  They do need to learn sight words through the lens of phonics as much as possible.  But they also need vocabulary, fluency, comprehension and writing instruction.  I probably focus too much on phonics, comprehension and writing and need to include more vocab and fluency work.

I really feel for all the students who had teachers who thought the 3 cueing system was balanced literacy and didn't have what they needed to teach phonics.  However, after nearly 30 years of being in education, I can guarantee you that in 10-15 years, we'll be reading all the research that shows how SOR created a buy in that created great decoders but those decoders can't comprehend.  Why in the world someone can't come up with a great full curriculum that has both is beyond me.[/quote]
Thank you for this thoughtful and informative response.[/quote]

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