It has been two years since the world of literacy lost Linda Dorn. However, her legacy endures. I am devoting this blog entry to Linda. I include three things- A link to the Missouri Reader’s issue dedicated to Linda, a link to her final book, and a reposting of the blog entry I made at the time of her passing, with contributions from William Kerns and Glenda Nugent. Know that Linda’s legacy is important and that it is up to all of us to keep it alive.
Special Edition of the Missouri Reader (a peer-reviewed state journal of the Missouri Literacy Association an ILA affiliate)
The literacy world has lost a giant. Linda Dorn passed away this week. She was a great educator, teacher, and person. Two of my literacy friends have very close ties to Linda. Glenda Nugent is my fellow co-editor for the Missouri Reader. Glenda was the Program Manager for Reading at the Arkansas Department of Education at the same time Linda Dorn developed many of her projects. In the course of that, Glenda got to know Linda and her work very well. She and Linda became close friends over the years. Dr. William Kerns, my blogging partner recently joined the faculty of the School of Education of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in Linda’s Department. In the dedication that follows, he tells of how Linda reached out to him after he joined the faculty this year. In light of the very close ties my two colleagues have with Linda Dorn I feel it is appropriate to turn the rest of this blog entry over to them. I know Linda Dorn will be sorely missed. But her legacy will live on because of the lives she touched and the people she inspired. Let’s now hear from two of those people.
In Memory of Linda Dorn
Glenda Nugent
There are many things I could say about my friend and colleague, Linda Dorn, but in Linda’s and Carla Soffos’ book, Shaping Literate Minds, this quote is one of my favorites: “Teachers must hold a flexible theory-one that can be reshaped and refined according to what children are showing us as they engage in the process of learning.” Linda was masterful at using research and her knowledge of children and how they learn to refine and reshape teacher practice to find what works best for each child. She will be deeply missed.
In Memory of Linda Dorn
William Kerns
Linda Dorn’s legacy is one of passion and dedication. Kindness. Compassion. A commitment to excellence in education.
It is difficult for me to find the words in this tribute. I never had the honor of meeting Linda. I joined the faculty of the School of Education of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock this fall semester. Linda did reach out to me. She helped me to feel welcome. I am of the belief that a person’s life isn’t to be found so much on a list of accomplishments that can be listed on a CV (and Linda does have quite the list of accomplishments), but in the goodness and kindness of that person. Everything that I have learned of Linda is the story of a truly kind, and good, person, self-sacrificing and dedicated to making the lives of others better. She made a difference.
Learning never stops. This is true for students but also for each of us. As we honor Linda’s legacy, I believe that a commitment to continue learning together is a good place to start. “Learning is meaningful, purposeful, self-directed, and generative, for it leads to new discoveries and new knowledge” (Dorn & Soffos, 2001, p. 17).
All one must do is listen to the stories that can be told by her colleagues and friends. Her former students. When I spend time at the School of Education of her beloved UA-Little Rock, I see colleagues who are striving to honor her legacy by continuing the work of delivering excellent teacher education, yet it is a struggle to contain emotions any time there is a reminder of Linda. Be it a reminder of joy, commitment, hard work, or grief at her loss. One thing is obvious, Linda was the heart of the School of Education at UA-Little Rock.
Yet another point is also clear. Linda’s legacy will live on in the commitment that she inspired. It is a commitment to carefully planned, thoughtful and caring instruction. She was a champion of a well-balanced literacy instruction with carefully structured, varying activities, differentiated according to the needs and interests of the student. “A balanced literacy curriculum consists of five interrelated components: (1) reading books to children, (2) independent reading, (3) shared reading, (4) writing about reading, and (5) guided reading” (Dorn & Jones, 2012, p. 29). Linda was also a champion of ensuring that teachers have the training, the skill, and the ongoing support structure to successfully implement a balanced literacy curriculum. “A balanced reading program includes a range of literacy activities, carefully selected materials for each activity, and a responsive teacher who knows how to structure literacy interactions that move children to higher levels of understanding” (Dorn & Jones, 2012, p. 34).
Too often, social-constructivist approaches are misunderstood as promoting a free for all, in which the teacher lets children guess and fumble with no guidance or support or even an understanding of purpose. That is far from the truth of the matter. Teachers are, in fact, actively monitoring and guiding students through careful use of assessment that informs the learning activities. “When teachers coach children to apply flexible strategies during their reading and writing activities, children learn problem-solving processes with generative value for working out new problems” (Dorn & Soffos, 2001, p. 5).
The risk of making mistakes should not curtail learning. Guidance through acts of problem-solving will enable a student to develop deeper levels of skill and understanding of concepts. “Higher-level development occurs as a result of the problem-solving attempts. Neural growth happens because of the process, not the solution” (Dorn & Jones, 2012, p. 27).
Literacy instruction as advocated by Dorn is varied, active, even fun, but also intellectually rigorous. “In a well-balanced literacy program, teachers create flexible and varied opportunities for children to work at both assisted and independent levels. In whole group assisted events, teachers will have to make compromises in their instruction, that is, teach to the instructional needs of the class majority. During small group reading and writing events, teachers can provide students with focused instruction that is aimed at the strengths and needs of a similar population. During reading and writing conferences, teachers are able to provide intensive support that is personalized for the individual student. Through these diverse instructional settings, children receive varying degrees of teacher assistance on related types of tasks.” (Dorn & Soffos, 2001, p. 9).
This is a time to grieve but also a time to celebrate. The legacy of Linda lives in all those reading this blog. It lives in her former students. It lives in teachers and in colleagues inspired by her work. It lives in her friends whose lives she so deeply touched. The torch has been passed. The rest is up to each of us.
Dorn, L.J. & Jones, T. (2012). Apprenticeship in literacy: Transitions across reading and writing, K-4 (Second Edition). Portland, Maine: Stenhouse.
Dr. Sam Bommarito, aka the centrist who uses ideas from all sides to inform his teaching
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. Thanks again to William Kerns and Glenda Nugent for their contributions to the original blog post.
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P.P.S. I’ve already arranged the first of several interviews of various literacy leaders. The first of these will be published next week.
David Reinking, Victoria J. Risko and George G. Hruby have said it’s not settled science. See their interview in the Washington Post, where they give considerable research to back up that point of view. All three of them are researchers with excellent credentials and long histories in the field of research.
Dr. George Hruby from the Collaborative Center for Literacy Development also created a brief U Tube Video indicating that it is not settled science. (The video is a headline service- also see Dr. Hruby’s considerable work on this issue for the details) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Lan72cVDRg
There are simply too many well-credentialed researchers questioning the conclusions of the so-called Science of Reading group for that group to claim that the issues around the teaching of reading are settled. This excerpt from the Washington Post article cited earlier sums that position up the best:
“Phonics is the prime example. Few legitimate experts on teaching reading oppose teaching children phonics. Despite a timeworn narrative, there is no sharply drawn battle line dividing experts who completely support or completely oppose phonics.
Instead, reasonable differences exist along a continuum. (Emphasis is mine) On one end are those who see phonics as the foundation of learning to read for all students. To them, phonics — lots of it — is the essential ingredient that ensures success for all students learning to read, and it must be mastered before other dimensions of reading are taught.
On the other end are those who see phonics as only one among many dimensions of learning to read — one that gains potency when integrated with meaningfully engaged reading and writing, with vocabulary and language development, with instruction aimed at increasing comprehension and fluency, and so forth. (For an extended discussion, click on this.)
Underlying that continuum is the question of whether a deficiency in phonics is at the root of virtually all reading difficulties, or whether, like many medical conditions (e.g., heart disease), those difficulties have multiple etiologies, including external factors, such as impoverished school resources to support students.
There are also reasonable professional differences about what phonics instruction should look like, how much of it is necessary, for whom, under what circumstances, and how it connects with other aspects of reading. But there is no justification for characterizing these differences as a “reading war” between those who believe in phonics and those who don’t.”
It’s not just your Science (rocket science)
Most prominent in the attempt to lay exclusive claim to the term “Science of Reading” are the followers of Dr. Louise Moats. She restated her position on the teaching of reading in a report entitled Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science, 2020 . This document is an update of a title by the same name published over 20 years ago. Here is a link to a pdf of that report LINK.
This is a key takeaway from that report:
Widely Used Programs Are Uninformative or Misleading Inadequately prepared novice teachers often find themselves dependent on the information given in the teachers’ manuals that accompany virtually all commercially available reading programs to learn about spoken and written language concepts and to generate strategies for teaching students to read. Many of the most widely used classroom teaching manuals and materials in language arts omit systematic teaching about speech sounds, the spelling system, or how to read words by sounding them out. The most popular programs being used today are relatively strong on literature, illustrations, cross-disciplinary thematic units, and motivational strategies for children, but very weak or simply wrong when it comes to the structure of the English language and how children actually learn to read the words on the page.26 Ideally, students should be asked to apply code-based skills during reading, spelling, and writing, and there should be sufficient time prescribed for instruction in all essential components.
Her followers have attacked balanced literacy practices, including but not limited to attacks on Reading Recovery, Reading and Writing Workshop, and Guided Reading. Lately, the attacks have become more and more vitriolic. Practitioners using balanced literacy practices are vilified if they try to defend those practices on social media. The practices are referred to as “failed practices.” Anyone defending them is viewed as a liar or worse. Defenders are subjected to ridicule, sarcasm, and name-calling. This myth of failed practices has been repeated so often on social media and other places that it has become widely believed. BTW this is a variation on the public relations tactic known as the big lie. Instead of the big lie- it is the big half-truth. More on that in a minute. Let’s sum up the situation this way:
So, a shiny new rocket will replace all the current dismal practices, and all will be well. The circle representing current practices is grey, denoting the array of practices being used in districts today and the fact that they are all failing by and large. Sounds plausible. There are several huge problems about this view that we will now discuss. First, like all its predecessors before, the shiny new rocket works for SOME, not for ALL students. The statistics “proving” the SOR works have been subject to many challenges, including those made by my new friend and future co-presenter, Dr. P.L. Thomas LINK.
Given that, students for whom the shiny new rocket doesn’t work will eventually begin viewing it as the dismal grey rocket. That will eventually lead to a new pretender coming to do battle with the proponents of the shiny new rocket. And the pendulum of instruction will swing yet again. My very first blog about the reading wars is on exactly that point LINK. Here’s an alternate way of looking at this conundrum.
It’s Our Science, the Sciences of Reading- btw the “s” is there on purpose
The term Science of Reading belongs to ALL of us following science, and there are many different credible views of what constitutes science. What follows is my centrist’s perspective on the Reading Wars.
The shiny new rocket won’t work for all. It has no room on board for the Word Callers. It is only powered by half of the available engines. It has synthetic phonics but effectively rejects analytic phonics. Yet research indicates that when done systematically, both forms of phonics work LINK. It uses quantitative research and effectively rejects all qualitative research viewing that as a weaker form of research. In point of fact, qualitative research is actually a different form of research, a form of research that seems perfectly suited to the incredibly complex phenomena we study in education and the even more complex environment in which these phenomena play out. As a centrist, I look at ALL the research, both quantitative and qualitative. Looking at just quantitative research gives a limited and limiting view of the phenomena being studied. We need the information provided by both kinds of research in order to try to make some sense of what goes on as we go about the complex business of educating children.
And by the way, there is plenty of evidence that the so-called “failed practices,” in fact, can and do work for many many children. Consider the example of Reading Recovery. I’ve written about that many times LINK, LINK, LINK. Be warned that the charge that its learning doesn’t stick fails to account for what happens when the students return to the main program of a district LINK. Also, look at the recent results from Calkin’s workshop projects. LINK. That just doesn’t look like failed practices to me. And there’s lots more where that came from. Perhaps teachers from districts where things are going well (and there are many such districts) might want to share some of what is happening in their district. That invitation is to teachers in districts using practices inspired by SOR and teachers in districts using practices inspired by BL. Most especially, it is made to teachers in districts using combinations of the two.
In my 50 plus years in education, I’ve had a lot of direct experience with programs using practices suggested by balanced literacy. Overall that experience has shown that BL practices can and do work when carried out with fidelity and adjusted for local circumstances. In the mid-1980s, three different Title 1 reading programs I worked in were found to be exceptionally effective by the Secretary of Education. They were given the Secretary’s Award- placing them in the top 1/10 of 1 percent of the programs of the time. At the turn of the current century, circa the year 2000, one of those programs was replaced with a basal known for its structured approach to phonics. Over the next few years, reading scores for the district plummeted. Moving into more recent times, when awards went out to top districts for exceptional programs in education in my state of Missouri- several of the districts named were known for their use of Balanced Literacy programs. I’ve done in-service work for districts using F&P, and the reading scores were more than satisfactory.
BTW some advocates of the so-called SOR tried to explain the phenomena of districts with successful BL practices by saying that some students learn regardless of the methods used (TRUE). They then say that the success of BL practices can be explained by it being created by students who would have learned anyway (FALSE). Why do I say false? How plausible is it that ALL of the gains/success in the districts I’ve just talked about were from students that would have learned anyway? Hmmm, top 1/10 of 1 percent of all districts nationally and three different times, I was lucky enough to be working in districts that were comprised of kids who would have learned anyway in our district during those years. Really?
I talked to some people in a Twitter thread I’ve been involved in in the past couple of weeks about their attempt to spread this half-truth about the success of BL being built solely on scores from kids who would have done well anyway. I asked them for an actual study to prove that contention. I got many excuses about why such a study isn’t possible, but no links to a properly implemented study. In addition, they were also unable to provide studies based on a sample of districts using BL practices with fidelity showing that BL doesn’t work. BTW- without such a study, they have no right to call BL a failure. I’ll be talking more about what such a study might look like in the next section. So, let me now suggest a slightly different way of analyzing today’s situation. I’m using the same grey circle of current practices but adding something missing from the first model. I’ll be using my model to explain why I think there is hope for finding some common ground and common practices.
Finding common ground and practices: Is it a lost cause, or is there hope?
When I interviewed my newfound friend and colleague P.L. Thomas, LINK, as part of my preparation for the upcoming LitCon Conference, he indicated that he was less hopeful than I seemed to be about finding common ground. On the one hand, if finding common ground relies on a dialogue between the two sides at the far ends of the continuum mention by David Reinking et al., there is almost no hope. Both sides are so entrenched in their beliefs, and both are so convinced the other side is totally and utterly wrong that there is no room for any real dialogue. Let’s look over my current situation model and see if some hope can be found by looking at things from the middle.
Being a teacher, I added gold stars, gold circles and gold rockets to the grey circles of districts carrying out practices that aren’t working. Teachers always seem to like gold stars! There’s a bit more to it than that. Within that sea of districts doing things poorly or doing things not at all, there are districts doing things well and doing them with fidelity. Some of them use practice inspired by BL (gold stars) and others by SOR (gold rockets). Maybe some of them do things inspired by other views about the learning process (gold circles). Let’s also remember that some of them are being inspired to carry out practices based on more than one point of view, e.g., the rocket & star inside the same black circle. P.D. Pearson had something important to say about that final group. This quote is from the National Education Policy Center document referenced earlier in this blog entry LINK:
“This back and forth, however, was never helpful for children or meaningful in terms of classroom instruction. As David Pearson wrote in 2004:
‘Interestingly, the debate, accompanied by its warlike metaphors, appears to have more life in the public and professional press than it does in our schools. Reporters and scholars revel in keeping the debate alive and well, portraying clearly divided sides and detailing a host of differences of a philosophical, political, and pedagogical nature. Teachers, by contrast, often talk about, and more important enact, more balanced approaches. For example, several scholars, in documenting the practices of highly effective, highly regarded teachers, found that these exemplary teachers employed a wide array of practices, some of which appear decidedly whole language in character (e.g., process writing, literature groups, and contextualized skills practice) and some of which appear remarkably skills-oriented (explicit phonics lessons, sight word practice, and comprehension strategy instruction). Exemplary teachers appear to find an easier path to balance than either scholars or policy pundits.’ “
Research demonstrates that exemplary teachers use both. What a concept!
I use diagram two to explain my call for research demonstrating the efficacy (or lack of it) when evaluating BL. To do a proper study of BL, one must draw a sample of districts using BL practices with fidelity. The practices must be ones that current proponents of BL advocate (not strawmen practices circa the 1960s). The measurements used must include a direct measure of reading comprehension. If you want to make it a comparative study, you must also draw a like sample of districts using practices advocated by whatever branch of the SOR you wish to study. So, after three-plus years of asking for such a study, I’ve gotten everything but. Mainly what I’ve gotten are studies I classify as “wind tunnel test studies.” You see, when airplanes are certified for flight, one of the preliminary kinds of test done is a wind tunnel test. The final part of airplane certification involves actual flying tests, using the actual plane, in real circumstances, e.g., flying between two cities. Some folks from the so-called SOR movement seem to want to make huge policy changes based on what are clearly preliminary/tentative results. They want to skip important middle steps in the normal process of applying research to educational practices. IMO, before suggesting major changes, they need to provide studies fitting the final gold standard of applying research to educational practices. That gold standard would be studies done evaluating the implementation of selected practices in actual district settings over several years, using reading tests that measure both decoding and comprehension. The comprehension measurement needs to be direct and resemble the testing used in many state-wide tests of reading. Duke has described such standards. You’ll find that in the chart in my blog entry referencing her ideas about reading being much more than just decoding words LINK.
Speaking of Nell Duke, for me, her newest proposed model for studying reading holds the most hope for finding common ground and common practices. Remember Duke is first and foremost a researcher. She doesn’t take sides or fit on a side. What she does do is what researchers are supposed to do. Researchers are supposed to find the cutting edge of our current knowledge and then push our knowledge into areas where it has never been before. Like all good researchers, she is not out to prove anything. She is out to discover something- new knowledge and new understanding. Her new model of reading takes “The Rope” and augments it with her considerable knowledge of the literacy process. You can read all about it in the special edition of The Missouri Reader. The Missouri Reader is a state journal of reading. In the way of full disclosure, I am the Co-Editor of that journal. I think that her model is one example of the kind of research that could discover common ground upon which we all could agree. Here is the link to the issue containing her article LINK.
In Conclusion:
In sum, I think there is hope for finding common ground and common practices. I think the search for common ground is most likely to be carried out by centrists, open-minded folks willing to learn from all sides. Those that know my work know that I am willing to do just that. I’ve blogged before about how, based on advice from Shanahan, an empiricist with whom I do not always agree, I now use both predictable and decodable books with my beginning readers. I’ve done so and I’ve been pleased with the results LINK. So have my teachers, parents and administrators. Let’s do begin the journey of locating the common ground. Let’s call a truce on the talk about what divides us. Let’s talk for a time about the things on which all sides might agree. I’m sure that one of those areas of agreement could be to do a better job teaching phonics (all forms of phonics). So, this is Dr. Sam signing off. I’m still that guy in the middle happily taking flak from all sides. I do so because my kids are worth it.
This entry is the final one in my series of op-eds about the reading wars. While I may pick up this topic again sometime in the future, in the coming weeks, I’m trying to line up some literacy leaders who will be sharing their ideas on how we might better serve our students.
Dr. Sam
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.
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In place of my usual Saturday morning literacy blog, I thought it would be appropriate to say something about the 20th anniversary of 9/11
In 2001, I was teaching a Title 1 class, when one of my fellow teachers came and asked- Sam- have you heard? Like many who were alive at the time of this tragic event, that moment is etched in my mind forever. The very next year I went to New York in order to study writer’s workshop. I was able to visit the World Trade Center site. It was not yet cleared. Beams from the site had been placed as makeshift memorials. Another moment etched in my memory.
I count several first responders among my friends. They, of course, were deeply moved by this tragedy. I count some New Yorkers among my friends and relatives as well. Of course, New York wasn’t the only place where people suffered. Today is a good day to talk about heroes: folks who run toward danger when others are running away, folks who are willing to give their own lives to save others. There were such folks back on that day. There are such folks right down to today. Today is a good day to honor those folks with your thoughts, prayers, or reflections. Today is a good day to remember the heroes of 9/11 and all the other heroes who have given us so much.
Last week I noticed that several middle and high school folks reported that their students could not decode. They laid this entirely at the feet of balanced literacy, which they believe always does a bad job of teaching phonics in the early grades. Speaking to that is a whole different blog, but I will say that I use balanced literacy methods in my teaching, and the younger children I work with end up the year being able to decode, read with fluency and comprehend. Let me give one possible alternate explanation for why some children in middle school/high school cannot decode new words. I was in Title 1 buildings for over 30 years, and I know that the turnover rate can be very high in buildings with high numbers of at-risk children. Some years, three-quarters of the kids I finished the year with were not the kids I started with. I mention this because to get a true picture of what is happening in the beginning reading program (say grades PreK, Kg and 1st) of such districts, you need to look at the kids who spent their entire time in the district’s program. If those kids can’t decode, then it’s time to revamp the early grades’ program. If they can decode, then the problem is elsewhere. That doesn’t mean do nothing. It likely means the district needs to develop an effective program for transfer students.
Now that you’ve indulged me with my musings about last week, I’d like to share some things that I’ve found can really help older readers in both the areas of decoding and comprehension. Remember that my program simply augments the main literacy program for the school’s K-4 classes. The school has K-8 classes. My program includes the use of trade books, predictable text and some decodable texts from the online program called Headsprout, LINK. That program is produced by the same company that makes Raz Kids. I will now talk about some ideas that middle school and high school teachers might use to help their students who come into those grades unable to decode.
The first is to make use of the ideas of Dr. Tim Rasinski around fluency, word work and prefixes/suffixes/roots. He has materials about that, LINK, a video about that LINK, and if you follow him on Twitter (@TimRasinski1), he gives out free materials about prefixes, suffixes and roots every Monday. Here’s a sample:
Teaching about affixes can pay off handsomely for both meaning-making and decoding. Knowing them helps students decode words and also helps them figure out the meaning of words. Examples of affixes include math- bi, tri, deci, science sarus, bio, macro, history, pre, post, trans, and the list goes on and on. Do have a look at Dr. Rasinski’s next morphology Monday on Twitter, and try out some of his resources. Also, look at one middle school teacher’s explanation of how he used vocabulary study based on Dr. Rasinski’s work with Greek and Latin roots, LINK. NOTE: In Comments about this post readers have been talking about Pete Bower’s Structured Word Approach. That’s another source for this kind of teaching.
Dr. Rasinski is best known for his work around fluency. He and Melissa Cheesman Smith wrote The Megabook of FluencyLINK. It has a treasure trove of resources, including many for the upper grades. In his research on repeated reading, Rasinski found that reading and rereading the same short passage several times improved fluency and comprehension. His website includes many free resources and ideas on how to improve reading, LINK.
Again, from his website, one teacher describes a research project on an upper-grade fluency program she carried out LINK. The results of the program were impressive. In my own setting, each week, I choose a short passage for the class to practice (1 paragraph or less). It can be a poem, song, or excerpt from a book or short story. I use various sources for the sample, including the Megabook and Rasinski’s Phonics Poetry book. The Phonics Poetry book is copyrighted in 2001 and sometimes out of print, but used copies are readily available on Amazon and other sites. The Megabook has great passages that are suitable for middle school and/or high school students.
For my students, I make a Zoom video of me reading the passage. I emphasize that I try to read like a storyteller as I do. The students watch the video at home. I ask for them to watch at least three times a week and to read along with me as they do. They can see the full passage as they watch the video. At the end of the week (or two weeks), they create a video of themselves reading the passage with prosody (like a storyteller). That is the performance event in “reading to perform.” There are times when I also do a whole class zoom. I sometimes pick a word from the passage and use analytic phonics (teaching the sounds from the word) to reinforce the words in their synthetic phonics program. Periodically I look at the videos of the students’ performance reading scoring them with Rasinski’s rubric from the Megabook. I consider Rasinski’s rubric far superior to some of the more commonly used fluency measures. His rubric includes Expression, Automatic Word Recognition, Rhyme and Phrasing, and Smoothness (EARS). There are norm tables for use in the Automatic Word Expression component. Rasinski’s measure avoids some of the problems associated with other measures where students, teachers, and administrators come to view fluency as simply how fast you read. This problem is addressed in Rasinski’s blog entry entitled “Making Kids Read Fast is NOT the Goal of Fluency Instruction; Making Meaning Is “ LINK. I think the combination of work on prefixes, suffixes, roots and on reading to perform (repeated reading) could really help middle school and high school teachers help their students who have problems decoding.
JUNE 2020 ADDITION TO THE POST: Based on comments from readers I highly recommend looking at the work of Jeffery Bowers and his Structured Word Inquiry. I visited this site and the practices he recommends look very promising. LINK
Writing and reading:Writing and reading have a symbiotic relationship. There are many ways writing can enhance a reading program. Lucy Calkins recently talked about that on Heinemann’s Facebook page LINK. Since the middle school/high school teacher’s concerns were mainly around decoding, I’d like to discuss a classic teaching method that helps both decoding and comprehension. The method is Language Experience, LINK. The link I just gave gives a look at language experience and how it fits into a program of personal narratives. Though it is most often used with younger readers, I have used it with readers of every age and have found it especially effective with older readers who are reading well below grade level (or not reading at all).
The process is very simple. Ask the student to tell a story or talk about a topic of interest. As they do, write down what they say. For instance, I once used this with a 16-year-old who wanted to get a driver’s license. I read to him from the state license manual. I asked him about what he learned from the passage. I wrote down what he said. I kept a copy for later. We came back to this copy and I asked him to read it.. This became a library of material for him to read from. Of course, with other students, I might just have them tell stories, or talk about something they liked, or ???
Back in the day, I used to take what the students said and write it down- usually in a notebook. Today I sometimes do that, and I sometimes use a word processor. For the youngest children, I also have them create their own books. I’ve blogged about how I used Zoom to do this LINK. Here is a screen capture of one of the books a younger student dictated.
I first took “dictation” from the student- he wanted to talk about strange animals. He started because he had found a picture of a blobfish online. Yep, that funny-looking fish in the picture actually exists! I wrote down what he said about the blobfish. Then we found pictures of other strange animals. I wrote down what he said about them. I wrote the language he used and avoided writing for him. It was his story to tell. I then saved the book and printed it off for him. We read from that book for several more lessons.
Language experience stories can be produced in any form- handwritten, handwritten with hand-drawn pictures etc. This procedure works so well for older students because it is often hard to find books they can decode but are age-appropriate. The other advantage of this method is that every word in the book is already in their listening and speaking vocabulary. You can do analytic phonics (teaching sounds from words) using words from the book they wrote. The book becomes one of the materials that you can use for repeated reading. I can’t begin to tell you how proud the student who wrote the Strange Animals bookwas when he was able to go home and read a book he had written to his family.
Another thing I sometimes do with older readers is to have them write a “show don’t tell” paragraph. Here’s one I wrote:
When the boy walked in the door, he had to duck his head. He was sweating and a little out of breath. He was smiling. He tossed the ball from hand to hand. He had made the team.
What team do you think he was trying out for?
The rules for a “show don’t tell are simple.” You can give clues, but you can’t use the word. After creating their show don’t tell paragraphs, I usually let students pair and share more than once. I tell them if the other person doesn’t get it, then add another clue or two. This is a great activity for teaching inference. After doing it for some years, I found a similar activity in Jennifer Seravallo’s Readings Strategies book, LINK. For students who need it, let them do “show don’t tell” using language experience. (of course, the answer for my show don’t tell is basketball!)
In sum, writing can help to develop reading comprehension and fluency. So can learning about prefixes, suffixes, and roots. This isn’t all one can do to help older students with decoding, but it is a good start.
BTW- I’m already starting to line up some folks for upcoming interviews. I think you will find some great ideas for things that can help you help your students in literacy. As always:
Happy Reading and Happy Writing
Dr. Sam Bommarito, aka the centrist who uses ideas from all sides to inform his teaching
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.
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