It has been a long time since I posted, but I seem to be posting a lot more of this type of info straight on my facebook page and in my group. However, this post has been bubbling away all holidays and I just needed to get it down on paper so to speak.
Last year I wrote a blog post about structured literacy around the problems that I could see then with its implementation.
After another year of immense learning I'd like to reflect on some of the things that I still consider to be a problem with structured literacy and its implementation.
1. I think the number one problem with the implementation of structured literacy remains the fact that structured literacy has come to mean for many people, just phonics.
Teacher development in many schools is yet to go beyond that and so approaches in classrooms continue to simply scratch the surface. Structured literacy is not just phonics. We can't assume to be catering to how the brain learns to read if we ourselves don't understand the process, or see how much there is to know and provide for.
In fact I would hasten to add that often 'structured literacy' is being used as a label for the fact that a school now uses a scope and sequence (to some degree) and has changed to decodable books. There is a lot of bandwagon jumping going on, and a lot of re-branding of products that are being sold to schools. Unfortunately to be discerning about what is put in front of children, the people doing the buying need a high degree of understanding themselves. This is a journey of learning for everyone, not just the new entrant teachers.
The simple view of reading will be familiar to most...
But I love this active view of reading created by Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright in 2021.
What this adds the the simple view of reading is summarised below and goes beyond the reading rope.
There are other contributors to reading comprehension within decoding and language comprehension, making it challenging to address a reading difficulty. A student struggling with decoding, for example, may be experiencing difficulty with phonological processing, orthographic knowledge, or even memory.
There are contributors to reading comprehension beyond decoding and language comprehension, such as Executive Function skills, comprehension strategy use, and motivation.
There are contributing processes that help to bridge decoding and language comprehension, such as vocabulary and morphological awareness (understanding parts of words, like Latin roots or prefixes), which highlight yet another important aspect--that reading comprehension depends on constructs that cannot be measured by the simple formula.
Contributing constructs like cultural knowledge and content knowledge mediate reading success.
I will not claim to be an expert here, but look forward to continuing to learn more about this over the next year and beyond. If nothing else, right here in this image, clearly shows, why structured literacy is so much more than phonics.
2. The next problem with structured literacy is that teachers have not and are not being given the time to understand the Science of Reading. This is the body of research that sits behind all that should be happening in structured literacy, the research that sits behind the diagrams shown above.
These are the pillars of literacy, Lyn Stone would also argue that there is a sixth pillar here and in my teacher mind I would agree with her as she makes a case for oral language as the sixth pillar.
What I wonder is this, should oral language be the foundation for these five pillars, makes complete sense to me.
I mean, my journey started with oral language...that is where it all began for me. Funny, sitting here and thinking that was ten years ago!
The Science of reading is HUGE, there is just so much to wade through, teachers don't have time, but they do desperately need to understand the science.
Schools need to ensure that teachers do understand the science behind structured literacy and when they do, I believe there will be no more of these arguments about it just being phonics. Teacher knowledge and understanding is key to the success of children and we have to get this right. However teachers do deserve the time and grace to really embed this learning. This can't be done when schools are running multiple forms of PLD a year.
3. Comprehension...this is a massive area, and there is currently a big problem with how the majority of teachers interpret comprehension. If you are anything like me, you had come to think of comprehension of something that happened at the conclusion of reading...a product of the reading so to speak. Summed up, comprehension could be labelled as the questions you ask at the end of the text, that largely rely on what existing knowledge about the topic the reader had when they started reading.
You'd probably also been under the understanding that comprehension is a skill that can be taught, but finding a main idea and summarising are strategies that will look different according to the text.
That led me to the work of Hugh Catts, who among many other well known experts of comprehension speaks about the value and role of knowledge. The need to tell children what they need to know, to stop all the pre-knowledge activities. He goes on to talk about the fact that knowledge gives us a place to put incoming information and that reading then allows us to add to or modify our existing knowledge. It is our knowledge that helps us to organise and inference. I love the way he says that reading comprehension is thinking with a book in your hand.
Hugh Catts also says it is not possible to think critically unless you have knowledge about something. He advocates strongly (as do many others) for teachers to give background knowledge before reading, so that children have a place to tie the new details on to, it is important we understand our working memory is overwhelmed by too many details. (which is possibly what I am doing to you via this post.)
Hugh Catts says popping comprehension amongst the pillars in the way that it is presented above has led us to think it needs to be measured, remediated or instructed in the same way as the others and this has led to teacher misunderstanding. It has also led to a lot of classroom learning tasks that do very little to increase comprehension skills.
The problem here is that our system largely embraces 'discovery' over knowledge.
In fact I sit in an interesting world, where I actively advocate for play, which innately is based on discovery, but then am here saying, yep I also believe in building knowledge, and in in explicit teaching.
The crux of the problem here is that we think there are two camps and that we can't be in both. In reality we can and should be in both camps...each has a very well deserved place in every classroom. In my opinion magic and science combine to make deep learning.
In fact in our space it is the curiosity that is palpable through play that often feeds the knowledge and vice versa, I see a very symbiotic relationship here.
Tim Shanahan says - Education should both nurture curiosity and provide the means to fulfil it – increasing what kids know about science and social studies (and literature and the arts, too.)
I have learned so much about comprehension over this holidays, too much to put it all here, and a lot of it, is swimming around in my mind, trying to find some knowledge to attach itself too, but what I do know is that in the majority of our schools there is a lack of understanding of the Science and that is a problem.
I have tied this learning strongly to what I had already learned about schema and the building of knowledge and vocab in a classroom. It has certainly given me loads of ideas!
So if the problem with comprehension is that we are thinking of it as an end product, what is the answer.
Well last year, based on what I had been learning, I started to think more about comprehension and fluency as reciprocal and started to think of these on a sentence level.
I guess that brings me to another problem, the whole stress many teachers feel around 'getting through the book' so that it can be sent home.
This stress does not allow us the time to focus on the process of comprehension and it's something we need to start to push against. I had a great degree of success with my basic meanderings in this area and it is something I have big plans for this year. No doubt I will be sharing all I discover.
This podcast with Anne Lucas discusses micro-skills and it is a must listen in my opinion. It will change how you think about comprehension
Quotes from Anne "The more tools we give to kids to grapple with texts and concepts, the better they’ll be able to do it.”
“Background knowledge is incredibly important and is something that we need to integrate into instruction and curriculum.”
4. Another big problem with structured literacy implementation is that all across our country children are being pushed further and further in their reading without fluency.
Time and time again I see posts on social media, asking what stage a child should be reading after a year at school. Time and time again I see really unrealistic benchmarks being put forward and I wonder for the life of me, how the heck these children could possibly be reading with any kind of fluency to allow then comprehension...I mean there is so much for them to learn! When a school says 95% of their Year 2 children are reading at or above expectations, what does that mean and how does the 5% inform our practice?
Children being able to read the words, sounding out each letter in a slow, stilted way, is not fluency. By the time a child gets to the end of a sentence reading in this way, they have little chance of comprehension.
In this instance the problem comes back to fluency or perhaps the lack of it...and does that come down to a lack of understanding on our behalf?
Tim Rasinski has done some awesome work in this area and this podcast is well worth a listen...in fact I think it is a must listen.
Tim Rasinski
He also speaks to Melissa and Lori here
The key takeaways here is the role of repeated reading, children reading the same text many times, (something pushing through the books wont give us)
That the goal of phonics is automaticity (the goal of phonics is for children not to need it any longer.)
That there are two parts of fluency, automaticity and prosody (expression).
That fluency is the bridge to comprehension.
That fluency is not speed reading, while assessments of reading speed are useful measures of automaticity, reading speed should not be part of a reading strategy. Spending teaching time focusing on getting children to read lists of words as fast as they can, is not a good use of our time, or a very useful message to give to children.
What I really love is the link here to what we have always done...storytelling, reading to, poems, nursery rhymes...being able to perform a text. The link to oral language is also really obvious and the link to performing is very strong indeed. There is indeed a very obvious link to writing.
A challenge here for teachers is that fluency can not be assumed to 'just come'. For some children this is not the case and fluency needs to be explicitly taught and modelled.
I guess the key here is that we all need to learn to focus on the reader and not the reading...while we are preoccupied with pumping them through the stages, we will miss out on opportunities to work towards the purpose of being a reader.
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| A summary of my understandings so far from Tim Rasinski...fluency, a bridge to comprehension |
5. So we come to another massive problem; the viewpoint that structured literacy is just for the juniors.
Structured literacy is seen as something that happens in the first couple of years of school and then miraculously we just move back to teaching how we have always taught.
We see that in how it is being rolled out in schools every day. However when looking at those pillars of literacy it is very clear that the science should inform every level of our schooling and therefore it is not just something that junior teachers need to know about. If you are a teacher or you are teaching teachers, you need to understanding the Science of reading...full stop! In fact I will take that one step further, if you are a teacher, or you are teaching teachers, you need to understand the Science of Learning.
6. This problem has really bothered me....while we are on this 'reading' journey, we seem to have totally missed the point that encoding and decoding are two sides of the same coin and therefore writing needs to be part of this journey. After the first year or two at school a child's spelling ability will track slightly behind a child's reading ability. But the fact remains, spelling informs reading, reading does not inform spelling to the same degree. If I can spell it, I can read it. Therefore encoding needs to be part of all structured literacy sessions. In my opinion writing and spelling need much more time in the sun. This is after all referred to as structured literacy, not structured reading.
Again knowledge plays so much more of a role here then we think, I'd say most of us have not even thought about this at all, but it is difficult to read and comprehend a text about something you have no knowledge of, but impossible to write about it.
7. And lastly (for now) the big problem with structured literacy is that we continue to see the pillars of literacy (including oral language) as separate skills. Therefore it makes it hard to see how we can possibly incorporate all of these things into our classrooms when we are already time poor.
So that is my mission this year...to see what it looks like when I do let each area inform my practice, but not only that, not think of this as reading, but think of this as literacy and to do this in a classroom based on play that honours childhood. I absolutely think it is possible. But if you are reading this and I have bamboozled you even more than you previously were, be like me, start with one area...you will begin to naturally see where the connections come, how everything is intrinsically linked.
When it comes down to it, the biggest problem right now is that we claim to be 'doing' structured literacy, but we are doing so without a good understanding of the Science that informs it.
It is not just about decodable books.
And if you are wanting to learn more about decoding, this is a good podcast to pique interest, I plan to get this book, it sounds really good.
If you could change the whole trajectory of a persons life, just by teaching them to read and write, wouldn't you want to do all you could to achieve this?
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