An overview of the newly released issue of The Missouri Reader: 55 Ideas for Celebrating National Poetry Month by Dr. Sam Bommarito
The newest issue of The Missouri Reader is out. In it, Missouri author/poet David Harrison gets together with friends like Nikki Grimes, Ruth Culham, Jane Yolen, Janet Wong, Nile Stanley and others to give us 55 great ideas for celebrating the upcoming national poetry month. The issue also includes articles on hot topics like Engaging Middle Readers, Literacy Stations, and Things Reading Teachers Should Know.
As some of you may already know, I am the Co-Editor of this journal along with Glenda Nugent. The Missouri Reader has been around for over 40 years. It started as a “paper journal.” Now we publish digitally. We have two issues each year. We are peer-reviewed, and our editorial board has many highly qualified people (see the sidebar on the Table of Contents page of the journal). We publish many articles by well-known experts in the reading field. However, we also encourage teachers to publish, especially action research, book reviews, and app reviews. The last page of each issue explains how to submit an article for review. We are an official publication of the Missouri Literacy Association. Missouri Literacy Association is an ILA affiliate. Anyone with the following link can read the current issue for free:
I want to also call your attention to another issue for you to explore. It is another poetry issue which was published in 2019. It is our most-read issue of all time. It contains TONS of innovative ideas about how to use poetry in the classroom. It was the brainchild of David Harrison. He approached Glenda Nugent (my Co-Editor).and I about the idea of a special issue dedicated especially to poetry. We are so glad he did. Here is the link to that issue. Feel free to share it with other interested educators.
Part of our way of distributing The Missouri Reader is using what we call “word of cyberspace.” We ask our readers to share the links to the magazine with other readers. As a result, we are now read all around the world. So, if you like what you see in one or both of the issues, please share the links. They’re both free. THANKS!
You can help support The Missouri Reader by joining the Missouri Literacy Association- membership is open to all. Here is a link where you can join:
Dr. Sam Bommarito (Co-Editor of a peer-reviewed teacher’s journal)
Copyright 2021 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely the view of this author and do not necessarily reflect any other person or organization’s views.
P.S. If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following the blog to make sure you won’t miss it. Use the “follow” entry on the sidebar of the blog.
I was excited to interview Jennifer Scoggin and Hannah Schneewind about their upcoming book, Trusting Readers: Powerful Practices for Independent Reading. The book is available for pre-order now. It is expected the first copies should be arriving in May. Here is a little bit about the two authors.
I first met Jennifer and Hannah at the 2017 NCTE conference held in my hometown of St. Louis. I had the honor of being the chair for their session and introducing them and their innovative ideas. At that presentation, they laid the framework for what became the foundational ideas for this about-to-be-released book. In their collaboration over the past three years, they honed their ideas about how to effectively conference within the workshop setting and then expanded their inquiry into identifying effective ways to promote independent reading. Their work is research-based. Their work is also imminently practical. As you can tell from their bios, both authors have spent considerable time successfully teaching in urban settings. As indicated in her biography, Hannah’s classroom was used as a model classroom for teachers around the city and country. Both these authors have now moved into consulting. They work directly with classroom teachers around the country to help those teachers develop their craft. I predict this book will become a go-to resource for classroom teachers. What follows are the questions I asked them during the YouTube interview. The questions are time-stamped so my readers can easily locate the information from the interview that interests them the most.
1. Tell us a little bit about yourselves. (:48)
2. As consultants who go to a number of different schools, tell us about the current situation you’re finding in those schools. (5:36)
3. Tell us about your other key take-aways teachers will find in your book. Include comments about the cycle of conferring (9:14)
4. Tell us your definition of balanced literacy and the role of phonics instruction in a balanced literacy approach. I understand a whole chapter in your upcoming book will talk about that topic. Also talk about your views on a strength-based approach (18:06)
5. Your Final thoughts- ALSO, how soon will the book be available- how to order it. (21:42)
Next week I hope to feature the upcoming Missouri Reader spring volume. Among other things, you’ll find hundreds of ideas on how to use poetry to foster literacy instruction at all grade levels. In the weeks after that, I hope to interview more authors about their new or upcoming books. Included will be an interview with my good friend, Eric Litwin, who has a new professional book out along with another new children’s book. So until then:
Happy Reading and Writing!
Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the middle taking flak from all sides)
Copyright 2021 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely the view of this author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization
P.S. If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following the blog to make sure you won’t miss it. Use the “follow” entry on the sidebar of the blog.
Decodable Books, Predictable Books or Trade Books? – Why I Now Use All Three by Dr. Sam Bommarito
The debate around whether and how to control text in beginning reading is as old as the Great Debate in Reading itself. Over the years, there have been many different schemes on what to do. Recently the idea of using Decodable texts has come to the forefront. Some SoR proponents say that use of decodable texts should be mandatory and exclusive. A while back, I was surprised when I read a blog post by Timothy Shanahan, a researcher who very much is committed to following science. I was surprised because he criticized what some of these SoR people have said about using decodable texts. I wrote a blog about it. LINK Shanahan was pretty blunt about what he had to say:
“But those ‘experts’ who claim that kids should only read such texts for some length of time (e.g., 2-3 years) are just making that stuff up(bolding is mine). Research is not particularly supportive of such an artificial text regime (Adams, 2009; Jenkins, et al., 2004; Levin, Baum & Bostwick, 1963; Levin & Watson, 1963; Price-Mohr & Price, 2018). ‘Teaching children to expect one-to-one consistent mapping of letters to sounds is not an effective way to promote transfer to decoding at later stages in learning to read’ (Gibson & Levin, 1975, p. 7).’ “
In that same post LINK, he said something that changed the way I go about my teaching:
“Personally—based on my own experiences as a primary grade teacher—I would use all of these kinds of text. My thinking then, and my thinking now, is that the way to prevent someone from being hurt by over-dependence on a crutch is to employ a variety of crutches; deriving the benefits of each, while trying to minimize potential damages.”
What follows now is my response to those things Shanahan said in that post. For those who are new to this blog, I have a fairly extensive background in the teaching of reading. I’ve taught every grade K-graduate school, I’ve taught as a Title 1 reading teacher, Title 1 staff developer, and university professor. I’ve taught all of the reading courses usually taken by preservice teachers. Currently, I am pushing into two 2nd grade classrooms using Zoom, and I am doing individual tutoring for some children in grades K-3. Included are children who are struggling at the very beginning reading levels. For many years, I used predictable books and trade books with those children.
For the Level 1-8 books, I use both Keep Books and Raz-Kids books. Keep Books are a resource available through F&P. Ohio State University publishes them. They are low cost, and available online. Go to this link to find out more about them https://keepbooks.osu.edu/ Here is a screen capture of the Keep Book that I often use as an exemplar when I talk about Keep Books during professional development and conferences. Notice that the back of the books include both Guided Reading and Reading Recovery information and a word count. There are Keep Books available for Levels RR 1-16. Here is what you’ll find inside my example of an exemplar Keep Book.
Keep Books are clearly predictable books. When using them, I encourage the students to crosscheck (say the first sound think of the clues). For instance, what if a student was stuck on the word pear on this page? I might say the first sound “p.” Look at the new piece of fruit in the picture. What word should this be? Usually, that is enough for them to figure out the word. For readers who are skeptical of using context clues, review my last weeks’ blog. LINK It talks about the Reading Research Quarterly Executive Summary on the Science of Reading. Section one of that document indicates that results from six experimental studies suggest that there is value in teaching students to use both alphabetic and contextual information in word solving in interactive and confirmatory ways.
I also use other predictable text with the children, including Raz-Kids books and books from their basal series. The teachers I work with use trade-books for read alouds. So, students also have experience with that kind of text, even at the very beginning of their instruction.
What is new in my teaching practice is that I now use decodable books as well. I use books from a program made by the same company that publishes Raz Kids. That company is Learning A-Z. Here is a link to the Headsprout site: LINK. While there are many programs and options out there, over the years, I’ve gravitated to using the Learning A-Z materials because they are created based on an extensive examination of the research and they have incredibly useful tracking and management systems. Let’s look at a typical decodable book from Headsprout.
There are several things I want you to know about the program. It is essentially designed to be a turn-key program. The program teaches sound/symbol relations explicitly using clever computer characters and games. For instance, before reading this book, they would learn about the “ee” and the “an” sounds. By using the sounds in characters’ names, the authors are able to create less contrived stories, with less need to use words that are in the story mainly to provide right sounds/decodable words. I especially like the program because as students read progressively longer and more complex books, the books are added to a personal library they can access online at any time. I encourage students to go back to reread these books, and include the rereading of these familiar books in most of my lessons with them. Here is a picture of one student’s library. This student is about half-way through the overall program:
Using these decodable texts in addition to the predictable text means that, as I work with these students individually, I can use a variety of teaching strategies. I think this allows me to carry out the earlier advice from Dr. Shanahan “the way to prevent someone from being hurt by over-dependence on a crutch is to employ a variety of crutches; deriving the benefits of each, while trying to minimize potential damages.”
I know there are many other decodable books and other predictable texts to choose from. The point of this post is not to convince you to use these particular books. It is to convince you that using both predictable and decodable books together is a viable option. I’ve tweaked what I used to do and so I’ve improved my individual tutoring program. This fits perfectly into a centrist approach. Don’t replace one thing that works for some but not all with another thing that works for some but not all. Instead, use elements of both. Taking that kind of path is the best chance we have to eventually resolve the reading wars.
Over the next few weeks, I am lining up interviews with literacy experts from various points of view. Let’s do find out what folks from different perspectives are saying. I hope you will join me. Until then, Happy Reading and Happy Writing.
Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the middle taking flak from all sides)
Copyright 2021 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely the view of this author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization
P.S. If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following the blog to make sure you won’t miss it. Use the “follow” entry on the sidebar of the blog.
The Sciences of Reading Part 3- The Reading Research Quarterly Executive Summary/Thoughts About Comments Concerning Last Week’s Post
This week I’m wrapping up the topic of the Sciences of Reading and dealing with a couple of issues raised by critics of my first two posts. By the way, collectively, those posts have gotten almost 10,000 views, and their response has been overwhelmingly positive.
First, Let’s see what The Reading Research Quarterly Executive Summary has to say about the Science of Reading. Here is the link.
“As coeditors of RRQ, a leading global journal that provides the latest research and scholarship on literacy, we saw an opportunity to put together a special issue of the journal focused on what’s at the heart of this debate: science. Our goal for this project was never to decide which is the “right” side of the debate but to help us be better consumers and creators of information. The compilation of articles in this special issue, as well as those that will appear in the second special issue in spring 2021, examine SOR through a broader, more inclusive lens. Together, these pieces bring a supportive and critical perspective to the conversations, and identify next steps for the field.”
It goes on to say:
“We started to solicit opinions on SOR and what the term meant to people both in and outside of the field. It quickly became clear that, not only was there no single definition, there was also no consensus as to what has been cited to inform theory, research, policy, and practice in the name of SOR” BOLDING MINE
It also indicates:
“What is important here is that the authors almost universally emphasized that narrow interpretations of SOR (often taken up by the media to make its way into practice, policies, and schools) are problematic. BOLDING MINE Taken together, the articles in this special issue suggest that SOR is both a body of knowledge (defined broadly by researchers and scholars) and an interpretation of that body of knowledge (often defined narrowly by audiences outside the academy). The authors in this special issue push back on the idea that SOR be characterized by support for or opposition to phonics instruction.”
The appendix of this document contains 26 key points to consider. Overall, my takeaway from these points supports the notion that the narrow interpretations of SOR that have found their way into the media are incomplete, sometimes inaccurate and counterproductive. Some things that caught my attention in the RRQ paper include:
” results from six experimental studies to suggest the ‘value of teaching students to use both alphabetic and contextual information in word solving in interactive and confirmatory ways.’ Unlike the position advocated by SOR groups who criticize use of the three-cueing system, Scanlon and Anderson emphasize that “the thrust of our argument is that the use of context can be a valuable assist for word solving both when a student’s knowledge of the code is still developing and when inconsistencies in English orthography result in only an approximate pronunciation of a word.” From section one.
“that the lack of clarity in terminology weakens our understanding of dyslexia. Elliot writes, “Despite the vast proliferation of scientific research, our understanding of dyslexia is marked by serious weaknesses of conceptualization, definition, and operationalization that are not only unscientific, but also result in impoverished practice in schools, social inequity in both understanding and provision for many struggling readers, and ultimately, reduced life chances for millions of students worldwide.” From Section 4.
“Overall, the authors push on the narrow conceptualization of SOR and also suggest that multicomponent language interventions may be helpful, as they “have tended to be more effective in improving reading and listening comprehension than single-component interventions have (e.g., Connor et al., 2018).” From Section 12.
“emphasizes that reading is complex and multifaceted. The authors explore “a confluence of complexity across: (a) theoretical models of reading based on empirical research, (b) emerging information related to the brain and reading, and (c) research findings based on close observations of young learners.” This embracing of the complexity of reading “challenges instructional approaches (e.g., structured literacy) that deny or ignore the multidimensional and networked nature of young learners’ reading processes and/or unique literacy learning trajectories.” From Section 14
“If our goal is to determine how best to teach reading, then we must rely on data that evaluate the effectiveness of teaching, rather than depending solely or even mainly on studies of reading processes or of other non-instructional phenomena, which are then applied to teaching through analogy or logical deduction or from premature conclusions drawn from empirical investigations that do no more than describe or correlate. The role of basic research in shaping instruction quite appropriately lies either in identifying pedagogical innovations that can be evaluated through studies of instruction or in providing evidence that further buttresses or explains the results of such experimental pedagogical study.” From Section 17
“in contrast to the SOR’s instruction of skills in isolation, adaptive teaching emphasizes an approach to pedagogy that focuses on teaching within authentic opportunities for learning, valuing the individuality of students, and connecting their cultural and linguistic strengths (Duffy, 2005; Fairbanks et al., 2010; Gambrell, Hughes, Calvert, Malloy, & Igo, 2011; Purcell-Gates, Duke, & Martineau, 2007; Purcell-Gates, Duke, & Stouffer, 2016). Adaptive teachers are flexible and skilled at teaching reading, using knowledge of reading acquisition and embedding instruction within students’ instructional needs and their rich literacies, cultures, and backgrounds.”Bolding is mine Section 22
My Conclusions:
All these takeaways from this document lead me to the conclusion that I stated earlier. The pronouncements of SOME, not all, of the SOR folks who indicate they have found the one true path that we all must follow are at best premature and are, at worst. completely misleading and counterproductive. On the one hand it is entirely true that we need to do a much better job of providing all teachers the basic knowledge they need about teaching decoding and especially develop in them a more complete understanding of orthography. On the other hand, however, we can’t discount the decades of work around the reading process/meaning-making part. We must teach students how to use both alphabetic and contextual information in the process of word solving. We must also teach our teachers how to scaffold children into using comprehension strategies- using instructional models based on gradual release. There is no one size fits all solution. LINK
Most of all, we need to learn to listen to one another and learn from each other’s craft. I had one comment about last week’s blog postings & tweets indicating that balanced literacy advocates encourage readers to memorize whole words. She maintained that Kindergarteners taking part in a model video of choral reading were not reading at all. They were simply regurgitating the text entirely from memory. A careful study of the program being used would reveal that the children from that video take part in word work on a daily basis and are using a systematic phonics program. They are not just reading from memory. By the way, they are also encouraged to talk about what they have learned about what they’ve read.
Taking such narrow, inaccurate views about what “the other side” is doing is not limited to SOR folks. I’ve heard some balanced literacy folks intimate that using a systematic phonics approach precludes children from ever doing meaning-making. I visited an EBLI site, which has a strong SOR focus. It uses a form of systematic phonics. I promise you there is more on their minds than simply decoding. Their children do talk about their stories, and EBLI uses a full reading test for their program evaluation. I’ve said before, let’s argue less and talk more. It’s time for ALL sides to do that.
At the end of the day, I believe that the solution to the problem of how to best teach reading doesn’t lie in adopting this program or that one. I believe it lies in creating the kind of teachers that can make effective use of many programs. These teachers should be allowed to adapt what they do to best fit the child. Districts should have a variety of programs to choose from. The final decision of what program to use should be made by the district. They are the ones that know their children best. Mandating one size fits all programs at a state or national level guarantees that some districts will find that there is no program available that fits their children.
I am a firm believer in fitting the program to the child, not the other way around. One of my critics last week indicated that I was guilty of pie in the sky thinking. She intimated that there are too many young, inexperienced teachers and that they would not be able to learn such things. I must respectfully disagree. Districts can and do use mentor teachers to help beginning teachers in that kind of situation. It is time to create the kind of teachers described in section 22. These teachers are “Adaptive teachers (who) are flexible and skilled at teaching reading, using knowledge of reading acquisition and embedding instruction within students’ instructional needs and their rich literacies, cultures, and backgrounds.” It’s time to task those teachers with the job of implementing the programs. It’s time for teachers, not programs, to be the key to improving reading instruction. I think everyone would do well to read and reread The First Grade Studies (Guy Bond & Robert Dykstra, 1967/1997). LINK I’ve talked about them before. It’s been over 50 years since this pioneering comprehensive study first concluded that teachers make more difference than programs. Isn’t it well past time for us to act on that finding?
