The reading instruction kaleidoscope: A policy maker’s self-check

 

Image source: Alonso Reyes

Once again, in the last week, I’ve been interstate providing professional learning to mixed audiences of teachers and allied health professionals. Being “on the ground” with practitioners in this way is a great opportunity for conversations about the challenges facing schools in different states/territories and in different jurisdictions. In Australia, “jurisdictions” predominantly refers to the state/territory-based government departments of education and the diocesan-based Catholic sector. Then there’s the independent, or “private” sector, which encompasses everything from wealthy, so-called “elite” schools to small community-based schools, some of which run on the smell of the proverbial oily rag. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the breakdown across sectors is roughly 65% in government schools, 19% in Catholic schools, and 16% in independent schools.

In the Catholic system, there’s no fewer than 21 education dioceses across the country. It is difficult to accurately gauge the number of independent schools, as these are sometimes counted with Catholic schools, but we do know that in Australia in 2023, we have approximately 4,042,512 students enrolled in 9,614 schools. (North American readers might be surprised by what seem like low numbers, so it should be borne in mind that the total population of Australia, at the time of writing is 25.7 million).

This introduces scope for enormous background variation in what happens in schools. In Australia, we have 8 states and territories, so in practice, this means 8 different sets of policy settings and guidelines on reading instruction, 8 different approaches to school resourcing, 8 different approaches to professional learning, 8 different approaches to supporting struggling students…..all before we begin to factor in what 21 Catholic education dioceses means for policy variation, and the room for individual variation across private schools. Consider too, that in some government sectors (e.g., Victoria) responsibility for reading instruction is (theoretically at least) devolved to individual schools. So, the possibilities for variation within and between schools are seemingly endless.

The problem here is that there cannot be 9,614 different versions of best practice. “Best practice” by definition implies a hierarchy, i.e., that some approaches are better bets than others. The hierarchy should change over time, as evidence changes, but there is going to be a hierarchy, because of findings derived from scientific research and its application in classrooms. By “scientific” here I am referring to the extent of the rigour, not the discipline or the research paradigm. Researchers from a large number of disciplines study reading (education, sociology, psychology, linguistics, speech pathology, neuroscience, and public policy) and they do so by employing a wide variety of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodologies.

Against this complex backdrop, it can be tempting, when discussing school transformation with respect to reading, to see this as a process that is driven by key individuals in schools, because in practical terms, that is often the case. Let’s not forget, however, to lift our eyes from the immediate dashboard, up to the horizon, and ask ourselves what role policy makers have in guiding, influencing, and in some cases, mandating practice.

Policy is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as:

“A set of ideas or a plan of what to do in particular situations that has been agreed to officially by a group of people, a business organization, a government, or a political party”.

Some of these ideas are going to be better organised, more sharply articulated and prescriptive than others. In the interests of stimulating some reflection among policy makers, I have compiled some self-assessment questions for consideration. Each of these should be responded to on an imaginary sliding 1 – 100-point scale, where the landing point reflects approximate percentage agreement with the propositions below.

I am not suggesting that there are “right” answers here, but policy that doesn't land somewhere lands nowhere, and then anything goes. I am posing these questions for policy makers to ponder because policies are written by people, no matter how de-humanised and impersonal they may appear on web-sites and in downloadable policy documents. So it is people in positions of policy influence who need to consider these questions and determine where they sit on the continuum:

 1. How important is it to you that teaching in your sector is closely informed by and aligned to the best possible currently-available research evidence?

2. How important is the combination of low variability and high quality in school reading instruction?

3. If high quality means reducing variability, how prepared are you to mandate practice in schools?

4. To what extent do you believe that policy makers can influence reading instruction in schools?

5. To what extent to do you believe that student data reflects classroom instruction?

6. To what extent do your policy settings endorse / apply / require Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) as a conceptual framework for curriculum design, student monitoring, and intervention?

7. To what extent is teacher autonomy in selecting instructional approaches a core value in your sector?

8. How constrained are you by likely push-back against change to reading instruction in schools? (e.g., from unions, school leaders, classroom teachers, professional bodies).

9. To what extent do your policy settings rely on additional funding (e.g. from the Commonwealth government) as the driver of school change?

I do not want to be prescriptive here about what policy makers “should” think, but I do believe that policy makers should think about each of these dimensions and should identify tensions and inconsistencies in their positions. These tensions and inconsistencies can be the conceptual tangles that create downstream blockages and impede the work of highly capable and motivated players in school leadership and in classrooms. Such blockages impose the greatest educational barriers on our most disadvantaged students.

Reading instruction policy should not be an esoteric set of abstract ideas that allow a thousand flowers to bloom, without disrupting anyone’s equilibrium. Rather, reading instruction policy should be aligned with the greatest weight of evidence (not the loudest ideology), so that it provides a clear blueprint for education practitioners and is highly accountable to education end-users: students, teachers, and parents. 

(C) Pamela Snow 2023

Learning to read is not child's play

 

 Image source: Markus Spiske, Unsplash

In a recent post on the AARE Blog, Edith Cowan University academic Dr Pauline Roberts raises a  number of points about the importance of play in the early years of school and strongly pushes back on the role of formal assessment, such as NAPLAN. In fact, she goes so far as to refer to NAPLAN as an “oppressive test that is killing the magic of childhood”. That’s quite some hyperbole, and clearly doesn't stand up as an evidence-based claim.

I want to challenge the notion that our thinking needs to be polarised on devoting children’s time to play Vs explicit teaching of reading, writing, and spelling, especially in the first three years of school.  I also want to challenge the notion that play is enough, in its own right as a “pedagogy” to teach children how to read, write, and spell. For this reason, I posted a reply on the AARE site, offering some different perspectives for consideration and discussion.

My response is reproduced and, in some cases, slightly expanded here:

1.      Play is fundamentally important for all children, and we should never be talking about play and explicit teaching as an “either-or” in terms of how we allocate children’s instructional time. This is an unhelpful dichotomy. We need to make room for both, in a considered way.

For the record, play is important for the development of language skills, social cognition skills, turn-taking, empathy, self-regulation, perceptual skills, hand-eye coordination, gross motor skills, understanding cause-effect relationships, making and testing predictions, and so much more. I need no convincing of these things.

2.      Literacy (by which I mean reading, writing, and spelling) is a set of biologically secondary skills, where oral language is biologically primary. This distinction is critical to consideration of how children learn in the first three years of school and beyond. David Didau has written a succinct blogpost about the notion of biologically primary and secondary skills (drawing on the work of Professor David Geary). It can be accessed here.

As a speech-language pathologist, I am acutely aware that although oral language skills are biologically primary, that does not mean that all children acquire them at the same rate or are at the same level of proficiency on school entry. Oral language skills are not “set and forget”. Children benefit from intentional play experiences as well as explicit, teacher-led instruction to support ongoing development of language skills in the school years. I have written about this here.

3.      Play is biologically primary, but it is not necessarily the optimal way to learn biologically secondary skills, which in many cases, if not taught are also not “caught”, i.e., they go unlearnt.

We do not expect children to learn to play a musical instrument by listening to (immersing themselves in) recordings of Mozart sonatas. Why does this same logic not apply to the learning of other biologically secondary skills such as reading, writing, and spelling?

4.      Harvard cognitive psychologist Stephen Pinker has observed that humans have a language brain, but they don’t have a “reading brain”. A reading brain can be developed through explicit teaching of the ways in which speech and print map to each other. Developmentally, this is best achieved in the first three years of school. The work of French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has shown that this “re-wiring” becomes harder to achieve, the more time that passes. It’s one of the reasons that low literacy skills in secondary students are harder to turn around than difficulties that are identified and responded to in the early years.

5.      When children are struggling with literacy in Year 3 (and often unfortunately beyond), what changes their trajectories is not more time spent playing, but time with tutors (if they are fortunate to be able to access them), who unlock for them the mysteries of how their writing system works.

6.      Being unable to read, write and spell is a major correlate of emotional and behavioural difficulties. I’ve been researching the school-to-prison pipeline for the last two decades and the link between low literacy, behaviour problems and school disengagement is one of the most robust and immovable findings. Again, it’s not play-based activities that youth offenders need to give them a chance at educational, vocational, and economic engagement. It’s having the mysteries of the English writing system unlocked for them – as efficiently and painlessly as possible. US APM reporter Emily Hanford has written about this here.

7.      Becoming a proficient reader (one who can efficiently and fluently lift words off the page and derive the meaning of connected text) is fun for children. They love being able to “crack the code” and apply their reading skills to printed books, screens, and environmental print. There seems to be an assumption in Dr Roberts’ post that explicit teaching and enjoyable, productive learning are mutually exclusive. They are not.

8.      Many schools are adopting a Multi-Tiered Systems of Support approach to early literacy, numeracy and positive behaviour support and are seeing pleasing shifts in both academic success and wellbeing. These schools still allow time for child-led, play-based learning, but not at the expense of explicit initial teaching of complex, biologically secondary knowledge and skills in the literacy and numeracy domains. Student success is also good for staff morale and self-efficacy on making all students proficient learners, not just some of them.

9.      We shouldn’t blame the bathroom scales if the diet isn't working. We have to go back and look at the quality of the diet and our fidelity to it. NAPLAN may be imperfect in all kinds of ways, but I am quite sure that if the data was trending upwards, calls for its demise would fade, and we would be asked to celebrate the work of teachers. We can’t have it both ways.

It’s NAPLAN data that tells us that 13.5% of Year 9 boys are not at the minimum national standard for reading. In an economy in which jobs for unskilled workers are being replaced by artificial intelligence, how are these young men going to be part of the social and economic mainstream after they (inevitably) exit school early? This, rather than the test itself, is what I think of as “high-stakes” for life-chances.

Enough with the false dichotomies and villainising of explicit teaching and progress monitoring. If anything might “save childhood”, I would put my money on supporting teachers to explicitly teach biologically secondary skills and allowing play to hold up its end in biologically primary domains in the early years. Children need both for strong personal and academic outcomes.

(C) Pamela Snow (2023)

Calling time on parent-blame and children’s reading success.

 

                                                                                                                                        Image source

There’s no shortage of odd, confusing, infuriating, ill-founded and contentious claims in education, and in the wider social chattersphere that sits around it, but surely there’s one that we can put to bed for good and for all: the idea that it is the job of parents to teach their children how to read – and by extension, that parents are to blame when children struggle in this endeavour.

There are many reasons why this cosy, middle-class-meme-cum-system-level-excuse-for-schools needs to be exploded and I’ll address as many as I can here.

First of all though, I think we can agree that reading is a fundamentally important life-skill and one that is best fostered in the early years of school. Reading is the means by which students engage with the academic curriculum and have the opportunity to succeed at school. The downstream benefits of successful early reading achievement yield the kinds of investment returns we can only dream of for our financial portfolios. When students become proficient readers in a timely and smooth way, they are more likely to succeed academically. When students achieve academically, they are more likely to display prosocial, on-task behaviour in classrooms. When students display prosocial, on-task classroom behaviours, they are more likely to feel a sense of attachment to school, to stay at school, and to exit secondary school with open doors to postsecondary training, education and/or employment. When schools have early reading instruction nailed, they are also going a long way to addressing student wellbeing. It’s hard to be self-regulated, calm, and ready-to-learn if you are locked out of the writing system by which learning is transacted in classrooms (see references at the end of this post).

Whole Language (WL) and its descendent ideology, Balanced Literacy (BL) are based on ideas about reading and reading instruction that have not withstood rigorous scrutiny over the last three decades. This scrutiny includes cognitive psychology research as well as system-level data about reading performance. Key among the premises of WL/BL instruction is the notion that reading, like oral language, is a “natural” thing to do. The problem here is that this is patently incorrect. If reading was “natural”, we would not have hundreds of thousands of illiterate or semi-literate adults in the world (who, incidentally, in most cases, have been to school).

The work of US evolutionary psychologist David Geary has been pivotal in illuminating the important distinction between human knowledge and skills that are biologically primary and those that are biologically secondary. Biologically primary skills include acquiring oral language, learning to walk, learning to read facial expressions, and displaying reciprocity in social interactions. Biologically secondary skills, on the other hand, are skills that we humans have the capacity to learn but need to be taught. Here we are looking at reading, writing and spelling, mastering mathematical concepts such as algebra and trigonometry, learning musical instruments, and becoming proficient in activities such as chess, golf, and driving a car. Many biologically secondary skills are developed through classroom instruction at school (though the pedagogical approach adopted will unfortunately result in variable outcomes).  

WL/BL proponents did not consider the fact that humans have had oral language for a couple of hundred thousand years, thanks to advantageous evolutionary changes in our brains, but writing systems for only approximately five thousand years. They did not reflect on the fact that writing is a social, albeit clever contrivance, developed by humans to share information horizontally with each other, and vertically, with future generations. To do this, humans had to create a code to represent oral language, and speakers of different languages did this over thousands of years by developing an orthography for their particular language. English, for historical reasons, has one of the more complex alphabetic writing codes in the world. Unfortunately, the lack of sophistication inherent in WL/BL thinking meant that this was taken to mean that English writing is too “cumbersome and unreliable” to teach explicitly. But conveniently, that didn't matter, because they decided to call reading, writing, and spelling “natural skills” that children could pick up via rich exposure and skills in “prediction” in their environments. Problem solved. Or not.

This smoke-and-mirrors sleight of epistemological hand resulted in a staggering dumbing down of the reading and writing process by faculties of education in English-speaking worlds because they now (apparently) did not need to devote preservice hours to explaining the intricacies of the English writing system to teachers, let alone to equipping them with instructional practices that would maximise mastery by the overwhelming majority of students, regardless of their preschool oral language experiences. Conveniently, this meant that academics did not have to have background-knowledge in linguistics or cognitive psychology. “Reading” (a verb) was replaced by the abstract noun “literacy” and was re-imagined as a vague social and cultural process that students experience through immersion in rich, so-called “authentic” texts. Just as children develop oral language through interactions with others, a misguided folklore took hold in education that this is how they can and should become readers.

This folklore did a number of clever things for academics in schools of education:

·       It meant that education academics could indulge their own love of children’s literature and build entire subjects (units or courses, depending on terminology) around this and pretend that this was legitimate preparation for classroom practice with children who are in many cases complete novices with written text.

·       It justified education academics’ withholding of critical knowledge from preservice teachers about how the English writing system works. I have described this knowledge being like teachers’ family china. It was removed, piece-by-precious-piece, and replaced with what looked like more modern, but plastic wares that do not stand the test of time.

·       It conflated books that children read as novices with books that adults read to children. Where books were considered to have an instructional role, these were predictable and promoted reliance on cues outside the text such as pictures, because there was (apparently) really no difference between oral language and reading. This means that an illusion of early reading could be created cleverly and quickly in the first year of school, by having children draw on their oral language skills and basic vocabulary knowledge to recite predictable texts. This is very different from the usually slow and effortful grinding of cognitive and linguistic gears that occurs when children are mastering an unfamiliar skill-set through explicit teaching of how the code works, e.g., through systematic synthetic phonics instruction. It is initially slow, faltering, and hesitant, in the same way that a novice learning a musical instrument is slow, faltering, and hesitant, or anyone mastering any complex, biologically secondary skill through practice and repetition is slow, faltering, and hesitant.

·       Perhaps most perniciously, it meant that parents could be positioned as the primary agents of reading instruction, so that when children did not successfully become readers after three years of formal schooling, responsibility could be laid squarely at the feet of parents and the impugned quality of the home language and literacy environment. Teachers, schools, education systems, policy makers and education academics could all look the other way. Shame on those parents who obviously did not read to their children from the moment of birth. What did they expect? That schools would somehow turn around their neglectful parenting practices? This gaslighting of parents has unfortunately been supported by some high-profile children’s authors.

So, what IS the role of parents in their children’s early reading success?

What all policy-makers, educators, and clinicians would ideally like to see, is children being raised in language and text-rich home environments, supported by high-quality preschool and childcare experiences. We have known for a long time, however, that there is a social gradient on which families sit with respect to the extent to which they can support children’s early oral language development. This is not a free pass for schools to shrug their shoulders, however. On the contrary, it is a reminder that oral language itself requires a focus in early years classrooms.

The role of parents in reading instruction is, all other factors being equal and within their capacities:

·       To engage in language rich interactions, elaborating on children’s utterances, teaching new vocabulary, and the meanings of common idioms.

·       To model reading as a valued, worthwhile activity in their own lives.

·       To read to their children (ideally even after they can read for themselves).

·       To provide access to quality children’s books (in the home and via library visits).

·       To listen to their children reading instructional texts they bring home from school, providing feedback and encouragement. Parents reading to their children should not be mistaken for the process by which children learn to read, any more than parents playing classical music to their children should be conflated with teaching them how to play a musical instrument. Reading to children should be enjoyable for parents and children and can promote oral language skills and background knowledge. These contribute to the language reservoir that children will draw on at school when the serious business of learning how speech and print map to each other should be one of several early instructional focus areas. 

          Where parents can provide some or all of the above, this is a bonus and should be encouraged, but should not be relied upon as a principal means by which reading success will be chalked up by schools.

Sadly, given the continued stronghold of BL instruction in most English-speaking countries, it is also advisable for parents to critically interrogate reading instruction approaches being employed in their children’s classrooms.

Parents sometimes unwittingly conceal the real ways that their children achieve success and in so-doing enable schools and systems to cruise, falsely reassured that their BL diet is producing healthy outcomes. In many cases in fact, these are coming from supplements provided by parents, directly at the kitchen table, or indirectly via investment in tutors. If credit is taken by schools for reading success, then responsibility must also be taken for casualties.  This requires an honest look at what is going on in the school community and the extent to which parents are ironically, propping up reading success rather than being the scoundrels who neglect this aspect of their child’s development.

Let’s not overlook too, the aspect of teacher well-being and professionalism that resides in the knowledge that they are competent and accountable professionals with respect to this critical aspect of their everyday work. In a time of severe workforce shortages, teacher self-efficacy regarding children's reading success is surely a win we can all celebrate.

When a child is struggling with early reading, questions do need to be asked and answered.

The wrong question is the one directed at parents and is some version of “Do/did you read to her at home?”

The right question for teachers and schools to ask is “Why is this child not progressing and how can we adjust our instruction to address this”?

Effective reading instruction by teachers in the first three years of school is like planting a tree that their students will sit under as adults. Teachers themselves may not see the enormity of the leafy canopy their efforts have fostered, but we can count the costs of early reading instruction casualties by tallying up justice, mental health, substance abuse, public housing, and other social services for adults with low literacy skills.

Further reading (all open access)

Snow, P. (2020). Balanced literacy or systematic reading instruction? Perspectives on Language and Literacy, Winter, 35-39.

Snow, P. (2020). SOLAR: The Science of Language and Reading. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 37(3), 222–233.

Snow, P.C. (2016). Elizabeth Usher Memorial Lecture: Language is literacy is language. Positioning Speech Language Pathology in education policy, practice, paradigms, and polemics. International Journal of Speech Language Pathology, 18(3), 216-228.

Dear Parents: Welcome to the Confusing World of Reading Instruction

 

Pamela Snow © 2023