Dr Louisa Moats in Australia - the agony and the ecstasy

Last Saturday I joined around 160 other language and literacy enthusiasts (predominantly teachers, both primary and secondary, and speech pathologists) to hear Dr Louisa Moats speak in Melbourne on the science of reading instruction. I was well primed for this event, having read rave reviews of her presentations in other states, and also having re-visited some of her published work in the week prior to the workshop, most notably this one from 2007: Whole Language High Jinks – highly recommended if you haven’t read it. 

Dr Moats was in Australia as a guest of LearningDifficulties Australia (LDA). LDA celebrates its 50^th birthday this year, and in a generous and inspired piece of gift-giving, brought Dr Moats and her expertise to Australia so that we might benefit from her wisdom on matters pertaining to teacher training, literacy instruction, Response to Intervention, and management of children with dyslexia.

I’ll focus in this blog on Dr Moats’ comments on reading instruction in particular, though I will also mention some of her reflections on Whole Language and on teacher training.

Dr Moats impresses as an under-stated highly knowledgeable scientist, who also has the benefit of many years’ experience as both a teacher and an educational psychologist. She has personally assessed thousands of struggling readers of all ages, as well as conducting rigorous research on optimal teaching methods and teacher training regarding language constructs relevant to reading instruction. 

Much of the Saturday workshop was devoted to the science of teaching reading. Here, Dr Moats drew on Hollis Scarborough’s 2001 “reading rope” (see below) to drill down on the specifics of reading-related subskills such as 

•       What is a phoneme?
  How do voiced and voiceless phonemes differ? How does place of articulation influence phoneme production?

•       What is a grapheme?

•       What does phoneme-grapheme correspondence mean?

•       What is morphology and how does it inform the teaching of reading and spelling?

•       How can children’s vocabulary be strengthened?

•      What do syntactic knowledge and understanding contribute to reading proficiency and how can they be developed?

•     The importance of comprehension and the role that oral language skills play in this.

 


For a self-described “Phonicator” Dr Moats’ approach to reading instruction richly reflects the cognitive psychology evidence on early reading and goes way beyond the necessary but not sufficient role of early phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Dr Moats also stressed that while poor decoding skills play a large part in reading difficulties in the early years, by secondary school, the picture is more complex, and deficits in early decoding skills are now compounded by decrements in vocabulary, syntactic understanding, and reading comprehension. If the foundations of a house are not sound, then we can’t expect the walls and roof to be strong either. 

Some of the exercises Dr Moats asked the audience to do (like determining the number of phonemes in common words) proved a little challenging on a Saturday morning, even for this highly motivated and more-knowledgeable-than-average audience. This took me right back to first year linguistics when I was studying to be a speech pathologist, and it struck me that if I was teacher who had not been schooled in these concepts (a la most Australian teachers in recent decades), I would have been feeling out of my comfort zone. That’s a comment on teacher training and not on teachers, and it also reflects the truth behind the title of one of Dr Moats’ most well-known texts: Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science.

While there was much intellectual ecstasy in listening to Dr Moats (OK, yes, I’m a bit of a nerd) bringing the science of reading instruction to life and seeing its teaching illustrated with clear and theory-based examples, the metaphorical agony lay in the fact that Dr Moats was preaching to the choir, albeit in ways that gave the choir stronger, more in-tune voices. I doubt there were many Balanced Literacy advocates in the room, nor Reading Recovery teachers, nor, perhaps most critically, teacher educators who (in the main) persist in their promotion of non-evidence-based approaches to early literacy instruction. On this, Dr Moats observed that “…we need to be outraged and less tolerant”. Dr Moats also observed that there’s no point telling teachers that “phonemic awareness is important” if teachers don’t know what phonemes are (as indicated by the research evidence on teacher knowledge). 

As a first-time visitor to Australia, Dr Moats expressed humility at the reach and influence of her work here, but also some incredulity at our preponderance for following in the footsteps of our UK and US neigbours with respect to changing tack, and adopting approaches ahead of the science being adequately accounted for. It’s too late to put the Whole Language/Reading Recovery genie back in the bottle, but I wonder what cliff we’ll jump off next if we don’t abandon our lemming ways?

Dr Moats noted that reading is one of the most studied human skills, yet we persist in failing to apply the hard-earned science in early years’ classrooms, and instead accept high rates of suboptimal literacy levels in first-world nations such as the US and Australia. I’m not the first to observe that such willingness to look the other way would result in riots in the streets if interventions that treated a potentially chronic medical illness were being withheld from small children. Low literacy, however, is such a condition, yet we have allowed a confluence of social and political factors to force evidence to take a back seat, in favour of allowing ideology to drive the literacy instruction bus.  

As an important aside, at Dr Moats’ workshop, I also met Berys Dixon, whose work I became aware of when she contributed to the discussion forum following this piece on The Conversation that Alison Clarke and I recently co-authored. Berys is a primary school teacher who had her own phonics epiphany in 2008, having been using Whole-Language based approaches such as the Three Cueing System. You can hear Berys telling her story at this link on the Spelfabet website. There’s also more information about Berys’ work at this link and here's information about sourcing her fabulous little Pocket Rockets.  So this added a bit more ecstasy to the day.

In addition to a dozen or so workshop and seminar presentations, Dr Moats also met with senior state and federal education bureaucrats and ministers during her visit. In the interests of preventing us from having to replicate other nations' expensive mistakes, I hope some of those people listened carefully to what this very measured scientist had to say. 

Thank you LDA, for bringing Dr Louisa Moats to our shores.

(C) Pamela Snow (2015) 


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Thou shalt not worship false idols: Education and shiny neuroscience.

 

One of the major frustrations of many stakeholders in education (teachers, academics, parents) is the propensity of education as a field to be susceptible to "fads and fashions". As I've indicated in previous blogposts, in some respects, this reflects the shaky hold of evidence-based practice on education, and perhaps also an historical tendency for this term to not mean in education what it means in related fields of medicine, psychology, and speech-language pathology.

However - regardless of the great epistemological divide between those who favour so-called "teacher-centred" direct-instruction approaches and those whose take on education is more a social-constructivist, "student-centred" approach to learning, most would probably agree that it is helpful, if not necessary, for teachers to understand something about how children and adolescents learn.

In its enthusiasm to improve student learning, education as a discipline has had a bit of a penchant for adopting Big New (but not backed-up-by-evidence) Ideas in an uncritical fashion over the years.

Here's but a few examples:

• Learning Styles
• Whole Language as a basis for reading instruction
• Perceptual-motor programs
• Notions of "left-brain" and "right brain" learners
• Use of tinted lenses for struggling readers
• Sensory integration therapy
• Brain Gym
• Reading Recovery*

*Some readers may be surprised to see Reading Recovery on this list. Please refer to my previous blogpost on this. 

There has been a growing tendency in recent years for academics in and around education to "call out" such approaches and to demand that teacher educators teach only concepts and approaches for which solid empirical evidence exists. The fact that in many cases this solid empirical evidence comes from related disciplines (e.g., cognitive psychology and speech-language pathology) seems to be something of a sticking point in some teacher education circles, and such evidence is dismissed as being "out of paradigm". Conversely, all peer review is not created equal, just as all peer-reviewed journals are not created equal, so knowing that a teaching approach has been described in a "peer reviewed journal" does not necessarily offer the kind of cover we might expect. As Twitter's "Neuroskeptic" observed recently:

So it's perhaps not surprising then, that some educators willingly throw open their doors (and minds) when so-called "Neuroscience" comes knocking.

In the process, it's unfortunate that many proven, low-tech approaches to good teaching and learning are relegated to the "old hat" pile when new, superficially exciting players enter the stage. Examples of the tried and true (but perhaps "unglamourous") include careful consideration of seating arrangements (rows Vs tables), Systematic Synthetic Phonics instruction (Vs Whole Language and/or so-called "Balanced Literacy" approaches), and actually correcting errors in students' written work so that they benefit from specific feedback (Vs giving them generic positive feedback for effort and allowing them to simply learn and rehearse errors)....the list goes on.

Teachers need to know about factors that promote attention, engagement, concentration, problem-solving, persistence, abstract thinking, analysis, synthesis, learning, and memory. Of course this knowledge needs to be embedded in a developmental framework, so that expectations are appropriate to the child's age and/or year level. Call it knowledge of "executive functions" if that makes it more palatable, but let's not be distracted by the superficial glamour of so-called neuroscience, particularly when it comes packaged as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI.

Knowing that in Study X, particular regions of the brain "lit up" in pretty colours when children were performing a particular task or being given a particular kind of feedback is simultaneously somewhat interesting and somewhat unhelpful. It is somewhat interesting in the sense that we all have a strong desire to de-mystify the inner workings of the brain. However it is of very limited practical use in the classroom environment, for a wide range of reasons, e.g.:

• In most cases, the scientists who undertake these studies can only speculate about the meaning of apparent "activation" of different brain regions. 
• Sometimes the speculative nature of the language is lost when the findings are picked up and reported in the popular press.
• Sometimes scientists' speculation will be correct and other times it will ultimately be shown to be off the mark. It takes time, and often unsuccessful replication for this to become apparent.
• It's very easy for non-experts to be impressed by technical-sounding explanations and extrapolations. Conversely, it takes a high level of specialised knowledge to be able to astutely digest fMRI research and ask the kind of probing questions that shed light on its ambiguities and limitations.

Keep it simple

  

But perhaps most importantly, fMRI data is not needed in order for teachers to know whether a student is engaged and is understanding the material at hand. That's where teachers' knowledge of children's behaviour and development comes in, and needs to be blended with sound teaching practices. Somehow, for thousands of years, teachers have managed to convey new knowledge, skills and ideas to young people, without the privilege of "looking into the brain". Common sense tells us that this is not about to change. I would recommend reading Professor Dorthy Bishop's January 2014 blogpost on educational neuroscience for further explication of this.

There is one caveat I would add, however, and I have blogged about this previously. This pertains to the benefits of teachers having some understanding of the impacts of early childhood maltreatment (neglect and/or abuse) on the immature brain, and the ways in which these developmental blights can manifest behaviourally in the classroom. In order for this understanding to occur, however, teachers need to first have some rudimentary understanding of healthy brain structure and function, and need to be unconstrained by the "neuromyths" mentioned above.

(C) Pamela Snow 2015

My response to Dr. Eileen Honan's AARE blogpost on "how teachers are taught to teach reading"

I have now made two attempts, two days apart to post the following in response to a blogpost by Dr Eileen Honan (University of Queensland) on the Australian Association for Research in Education website

Dr Honan was writing in response to this piece by me and Alison Clarke, published on The Conversation site on February 6:The way we teach most children to read sets them up to fail

I don't know why my response has not been published, but here it is:

Eileen no-one, least of all me or Alison Clarke, is suggesting that phonics is a “magic bullet”. Phonological and phonemic awareness are, however, necessary, though not sufficient elements in good reading instruction. The key point in our piece on The Conversation recently was that in spite of recommendations made in the 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy,  teachers are not being taught how to approach this aspect of literacy instruction in a systematic way. Some very fortunate children seem to be able to skip over the bridge to literacy in a fairly seamless manner, while others need much more in the way of systematised support.

I really don’t think it’s possible for you to make authentic generalisations about “how Australian teachers are taught”, because (as far as I am aware, please correct me if I’m wrong) we don’t have national audit data that maps this.  Recently, however, in NSW, a report was released that indicated that this needs to be done better: http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/news-media/media-release.html  

The work of Australian teacher educator Ruth Fielding Barnsely also shows poor teacher grasp of key metalinguistic knowledge in pre-service and inservice teachers – see http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1359866052000341133#.VPQHuyuUd8E. Being passionate is a great start, but having some real knowledge and skills is what gains traction with respect to high quality instruction. This raises the issue of the "Peter Effect" in teaching – that “one cannot teach what one does not know” See: https://www.cis.org.au/images/stories/policy-magazine/2013-spring/29-3-13-jennifer-buckingham.pdf

It’s ironic that you refer to Dr Norman Swan, of ABC Radio National’s Health Report, as “endorsing” a phonics-based program, as he is one of Australia’s biggest champions of evidence-based practice. As such, he has a keen eye for unsubstantiated claims and holds researchers and practitioners to account for their claims. 

I note too, your attempt to discredit my colleague Alison Clarke, a highly regarded Melbourne Speech Pathologist who does a huge amount of probono work to promote improved classroom practices and afford more children the opportunity to exit primary school as skilled readers. In addition to her hours and hours of honorary work, Alison provides resources and ideas free of charge via her website.  As a clinician who specialises in working with children with reading difficulties, she should be receiving only a small number of referrals from surrounding schools.

Until Australia is performing much more strongly on objective measures such as PIRLS, clinicians such as Alison will have to struggle to see as many instructional casualties as they can. Sadly, there’s just not enough Alison Clarkes to go around.

In addition to PIRLS (http://www.acer.edu.au/files/TIMSS-PIRLS_Australian-Highlights.pdf) , we also have Australian Bureau of Statistics data on poor literacy rates in this country (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4228.0Main+Features202011-12), and a damning 2011 report from the Industry Skills Council of Australia (http://www.voced.edu.au/print/content/ngv45623) .

If you can present compelling evidence that we’re actually doing well with respect to how we teach our children to read, I’m all ears.  

(c) Pamela Snow 2015

researchED Sydney - Some puzzling thoughts

Yesterday I was very fortunate to be part (as an observer) of researchED, at the Shore School in Sydney. Apart from my keen anticipation of meeting a number of Twitterfriends in person for the first time, I was also excited to be part of a very deliberate attempt to move educators and researchers closer together over the shared passion of improving academic outcomes (and subsequent life chances) for all children.

researchED is the brainchild of Tom Bennett, whose brief bio you can read here. Tom has already blogged about his reflections on the success of the day yesterday, as has educator Greg Ashman, who was also in attendance.

So - I won't go over the highlights of the day here, as you can read about those in some detail at the links above.

I would however like to share a key reflection concerning the panel discussion that opened the day. The panelists were all distinguished speakers whose views and perspectives I was keen to hear: Emeritus Professor Kevin Wheldall (Macquarie University in NSW), Professor Stephen Dinham (University of Melbourne), and Dr Kevin Donnelly of the Melbourne-based Education Standards Institute and Australian Catholic University. I would have loved this session to go on much longer and for there to be greater opportunity for audience engagement with these key players in contemporary education policy discourse.

However I was surprised and disappointed to hear Dr Donnelly comment (and I am paraphrasing here) that people should stop comparing education with medicine, and that calls for "evidence-based research" (his term, and I did wonder whether it was a bit of a slip of the tongue - did he mean "evidence-based practice" perhaps?) were misplaced, as education, unlike medicine (so Dr Donnelly would have us believe) is a craft, and we cannot expect teachers to rely on science alone (as Dr Donnelly might have us believe occurs in medicine - that was the implication as far as I could see). Dr Donnelly went on to say that teachers have "good crap detectors" (his words, not mine), and we should rely on those, rather than expecting teachers to draw on published rigorous research about "what works" in the classroom.

Now, I had been out to dinner the night before, catching up with some very good friends, and I had probably had a slightly later night than I should have, so I did wonder initially whether I had misheard.

Let me briefly summarise the reasons for my surprise:

1. Neither education nor medicine is "simply" a craft or a science. They both require a sophisticated and nuanced mix of both. I happen to have quite extensive experience of this, as in addition to spending the best part of the last decade in medical education, I am the wife, mother, and mother-in-law of medical practitioners, and many of our family dinner conversations (to the exasperation of the photographer and the geologist in the family) centre around the challenges of dancing between (1) what the science says, (2) the values and wishes of the patient/family, and (3) what resources the system is prepared to mobilise in a particular clinical scenario. These three elements make up what is commonly referred to as "evidence-based practice" in modern medicine.
   
   It is never simply about the research data.
   
   Until quite recently though, doctors were in a similar boat to teachers - they went to university, learnt a whole lot of stuff, did a supervised internship, and then had to muddle through each day's clinical conundrums, hoping that they were focussing on the key aspects of a patient's presentation, ordering the right tests, making the right diagnostic calls, and instituting the best treatment. 
   
   Then along came Archie Cochrane and the practice of medicine was never the same again. You can read about Professor Cochrane's huge contribution as the father of evidence-based medicine here.
   
   Writing in the British Medical Journal nearly two decades ago, Sackett et al (1996) stated (and the emphasis is mine) that:
   
   The practice of evidence based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. By individual clinical expertise we mean the proficiency and judgement that individual clinicians acquire through clinical experience and clinical practice. Increased expertise is reflected in many ways, but especially in more effective and efficient diagnosis and in the more thoughtful identification and compassionate use of individual patients' predicaments, rights, and preferences in making clinical decisions about their care.
   
   Interestingly, these same authors went on to note that:
   
   The argument that “everyone already is doing it” falls before evidence of striking variations in both the integration of patient values into our clinical behaviour and in the rates with which clinicians provide interventions to their patients.
   
   Sound familiar?
   
   So, Dr Donnelly, I cannot agree at all that medicine does not provide useful lessons for education. Teachers and doctors are both practitioners, and both must make a myriad of decisions in the course of a day. Having research as part of that decision-making toolkit would have to be a good thing....wouldn't it??
   
   
2. I also took issue with Dr Donnelly's statement that we should rely on teachers' "crap detectors". With all due respect to teachers and the constant bombardment of new ideas and practices that are foisted on them, I think this is totally unrealistic and is not borne out by the ....er...... evidence. I'm going to change tack with the language here, and refer to teachers' discernment filters, because I  think they are what we actually want to promote in the teaching workforce.
   
   Currently, however, certain ideas are packaged and presented very attractively by teacher educators, and it's probably a bit rich to expect student teachers to be "calling out" the quality of what they are taught as undergraduates. If they could, however, we might not still be having exhausting and resource-wasting debates about
   
   
   • learning styles
   • whole-language based reading instruction
   • multiple intelligences
   • Reading Recovery
   • Three cueing approaches
   • etc.....
   So - at a conference designed to promote discussion about ways of moving the language and ideas of research and evidence into the classroom, I thought Dr Donnelly's comments made for an odd start to the day.
   
   I also had some reservations about the way in which "neuroscience" was discussed by some presenters, but will blog about those concerns separately.
   
   Overall though, a terrific day and Tom Bennett is to be congratulated for his energy and commitment in making researchED a global community of educators and researchers who actually talk to each other. That's a great start!

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(C) Pamela Snow 2015 

Taboo topics: Reading instruction and teacher education

Like many people of my generation, I was reared on the firm axiom that when in company, one didn't discuss religion or politics. Such was the risk of inadvertent offence to third parties, that it was considered poor taste and insensitive to venture into these conversational waters. As an adult with an interest in early reading instruction, I have had to get my head around the fact that this topic seems to have features of both of those no-go zones from my childhood. There is a definite political dimension to the question of where reading instruction fits in the wider pedagogical landscape and there is also something of a religious fervour when it comes to the passionately-held beliefs around this topic.

What's the big deal?

The big deal is that too many children never make it to the other side when it comes to learning to read, and their education, mental health, and overall life-chances suffer as a consequence. If you need evidence of this under-performance, have a look at how Australia performed on the Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) in 2011. This data shows that a staggering one quarter of Australian Year 4 students  had not attained expected standards in reading, and 7% of these performed extremely poorly. Australia is a first-world economy that should not be punching this far below its weight. The picture for adults is not very rosy either, with Australian Bureau of Statistics data showing 43.7% of people scoring at or below Level 2 reading, on a 5-point reading scale. This very poor performance is not lost on Australian employers, with the Industry Skills Council of Australia releasing a report (No More Excuses) in 2011 in which it stated that

"Literally millions of Australians have insufficient language, literacy and numeracy (LLN) skills to benefit fully from training or to participate effectively at work. The situation looks as if it could be getting worse, not better: the LLN performance of Australian students has, over the past decade, worsened in comparison to other OECD countries".

So when Melbourne speech pathologist Alison Clarke and I published this piece on The Conversation last week, we anticipated some strong reactions, but in the main, we were pleasantly surprised by the comments and level of engagement in the forum.  The essential argument behind the article is that the teaching solution to English's tricky orthography is not Whole Language (WL) based instruction, but rather the use of Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP).

As many readers of this blog will be aware, basing early reading instruction around SSP was a key recommendation of the (Australian) 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Reading. Unfortunately, however none of the recommendations of this inquiry appear to have been adopted by any state or territory and many teacher education programs continue to operate within a predominantly WL framework. Given the hold of WL thinking on teacher education since the 1970s, this means that we now have a generation of primary school teachers who themselves were not given an explicit mastery of how language works - where words come from, what their component parts mean, what the rules of grammar and punctuation are, and so on.

So it's a big ask, expecting a teaching workforce that was not itself equipped with this knowledge, to take enthusiastically to approaches such as SSP - approaches which in many cases they did not experience themselves as children, and so they may seem alien to the process of learning to read.

Many children make a fairly seamless transition to literacy, as a result of fortunate biological and environmental circumstances. Many others, however don't, and these are the ones who have very often missed out on the critical toolkit of decoding skills that able readers use when they encounter unfamiliar words, particularly when the pictures have gone.

Decoding skills, like the foundations of a house, are necessary but not sufficient. If you don't build a house on solid foundations, its walls won't stand and even a mild storm could do lasting damage. With solid foundations in place, however, the walls and roof can be made secure so that even a Force 10 gale won't budge the structure. So too with SSP - this approach in and of itself won't produce proficient and engaged readers, but along with targetted work on vocabulary, comprehension skills, syntactic mastery and narrative skills, will in all but a small number of cases, ensure that a child is on the road to reading.

Doesn't this sound a lot like "Balanced Instruction"and wouldn't that be a good idea? 

Well it might be a good idea, if we actually knew what Balanced Instruction was, and could be confident that what it means in one classroom is similar to what it means in another. If Teacher A devotes 70% of her time to phonics and the remainder to Whole Language strategies, while Teacher B reverses these proportions, it makes no sense to put them together for research purposes and call them both "Balanced Instruction". If we did so, we would be comparing apples and oranges. In practice, Balanced Instruction probably has more features of WL and a more modest nod to phonics, though not of the systematic synthetic variety, more of the analytic phonics approach.

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At the time of writing, our little piece on The Conversation has been read by nearly 70,000 people and has been shared on Facebook >2,700 times. We don't for a a moment imagine that all of those readers agree with our views. However, we are delighted that so many people do think that whether and how children learn to read, and how teachers are taught about this, are matters we need to debate, rather than being taboo topics.

That's a very good start.


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Literacy License

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If you ever needed any convincing that Whole Language is alive, well, and thriving in Australian pre-service teacher education, then you need look no further. This week, an Australian literacy academic, Mr Ryan Spencer  left no doubt at all in readers' minds that this failed and harmful ideology continues to hold a firm grip in university lecture theatres. Oh sure, education academics will, in the main, assure us that this is not the case, but opinion pieces such as this one, boldly informing parents that they should "ditch the home readers" that their child's teacher has provided tell otherwise.

Let me affirm some points of important common ground between Whole Language advocates and its detractors: learning to read is important; children need rich immersion in and exposure to spoken and written language in order to have the necessary linguistic "toolkit" to progress from the oral to the written form; and learning to read should be enjoyable. Note I used the word "enjoyable" here, not "fun". I don't know whether anyone has specifically researched this question, but is there any actual empirical evidence that children need to be having "fun" in order to learn to read? Or do they simply need to be engaged and achieving? I ask this because it's a claim that is often made quite uncritically in education circles and I am not aware of any research that operationalises "fun" over established cognitive constructs such as attention, concentration, learning, and memory. When did "fun" attain a higher educational standing than engagement and achievement?

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To quote one commentator on The Conversation discussion forum about this article, "there is evidence and there is evidence". This pretty much sums up the problem, and resonates with frustrations expressed by Dr Jennifer Buckingham in a recent opinion piece in The Australian newspaper

There has been a bewildering reluctance in education faculties to acknowledge the scientific basis for effective teaching methods. Education academics often view the idea of explicitly teaching children how to read the written word (rather than reading children lots of books and hoping for the best) as between an anachronism and a “neoliberal”, anti-public education plot.

So I find Mr Spencer's advice, delivered with the imprimateur of the title "Clinical Teaching Specialist" at a university, worrying at many levels:

1. It dismisses, in one sweep, the value of "levelled readers" that allow children to decode text at, or slightly below/above their current level of ability;
2. It undermines attempts by beleaguered primary school teachers to actually apply evidence in the classroom about the importance of early decoding/phonics skills. Can we possibly make things any harder for teachers with respect to the conflicting information they receive?
3. It assumes that children find these texts "boring", with no evidence presented to this effect. What about the child who doesn't find such a text boring and enjoys the sense of growing mastery over an alphabetic code that previously seemed opaque, but is now emerging, like a ghost out of the fog, to give the beginning reader an algorithm with which to tackle new, unfamiliar words? Guessing only takes you so far, and as any struggling Grade 4 reader will tell you, it's a poor substitute for decoding skills once the pictures have gone.
4. Statements such as "...when children are provided with the opportunity to select their own reading material, they achieve greater levels of success"are so sweeping and so general that they do not belong in academic writing at all. The citation provided to support this generalisation is in fact an opinion-based narrative review, not an empirical study, nor even a systematic review.

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Not all "levelled readers" are the same, and of course they can reflect different learning-to-read philosophies. As long as children are being exposed to evidence-based early reading instruction in the classroom, (and this is not a given), I doubt that it matters a great deal what kinds of books parents and children enjoy together for pleasure, if circumstances are such that this opportunity can be created.

As Melbourne Speech Pathologist Alison Clarke has commented, however, time spent actually practising reading on the part of the child is different:

(Mr Spencer) conflates books-to-read-to-your-child, which should be chosen on the basis of interest, and books-for-your-child-to-read, which can and should be carefully selected on the basis of the complexity of their text, because we have a very complicated and opaque spelling system in English, and it is too hard for little children to learn all at once. 

Parents are natural teachers, and those who are fortunate to be able to read (something that we should not assume is universal), will in many cases default to sounding out unfamiliar words in order to assist their young learner - much closer to reading science than encouraging guessing*. Parents are to be encouraged in this natural teaching, but not at the expense of shared book time affording relaxed and warm interactions.

So my advice to parents is not to ditch home readers, but to think about their place as a simple practice-aid, to discuss their selection with the child's teacher, and to make them just a part of the evening reading ritual, not the "whole story". 

*I wonder how many parents naturally default to a three-cueing system?

(C) Pamela Snow 2015

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The tricky dilemma facing Education Deans and getting rockets off the launching-pad

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Media reports last week of the findings of the New South Wales Board of Studies Teaching and Educational Standards (BOSTES) audit of university teacher education curricula pertaining to the teaching of reading have again stirred the possum on the thorny issue of what Australian teachers do and don't learn in their pre-service education about optimal ways of teaching children to read. 

To say that this is an exasperating “debate” is to seriously understate the frustration of academics, policy-makers, clinicians, teachers, parents, and the media. Imagine a scenario in which the medical profession in the 1940s had been unable to agree on the role of penicillin in treating infection. Instead of decades of improved health care and subsequent cumulative scientific advances, we would be stuck in circular arguments about the merits of poultices and other folkloric treatments, the outcome of which was too frequently death, even in young, otherwise healthy patients. Medicine, of course, has to deal with the inconvenient obviousness of its failures. As I have stated before on this blog a significant difference between education and medicine is the fact that education policy-makers and practitioners are rather “quarantined” from the impact of their failures, and can even re-ascribe these to characteristics of the learner (e.g. with respect to capacity, motivation, effort, family background etc). An exception to this is the publication of PIRLS data, which then needs some explaining.

My question to Education Deans is this – if the findings of the NSW BOSTES audit are incorrect and/or are based on a flawed methodology, then how do we explain (a) teachers’ poor knowledge of the English language code (see for example Fielding-Barnsley, 2010 and Moats, 2014, and (b) the marked under-achievement of Australian children on international measures of reading progress such as PIRLS? There’s a disconnect somewhere.

This question, it seems to me, creates the kind of bind for which no amount of media training can adequately assist with the formulation of an obfuscating response. Or so I thought, until I read this piece by Stewart Riddle (University of Southern Queensland), in which we are now assured that teachers’ inability to spell does not interfere with their ability to teach reading and spelling. That’s akin to saying that the inability to use a protractor shouldn’t interfere with an architect’s ability to design a house. Knowing that Dr Riddle used a dictionary on the occasions as a teacher when he didn’t know how to spell a word is no reassurance either – what about all those times he thought he knew how to spell a word, and neither he, nor his students were any the wiser in the face of his errors? That’s like a doctor saying that there’s no need to be concerned about incorrect drug doses, because when s/he thinks the dose might be wrong, s/he checks it. On the other occasions of course, the outcome might be fatal for the poor unsuspecting patient. 

Until a couple of years ago, I was course co-ordinator on a postgraduate diploma for practising teachers. The teachers who enrolled in this program were highly motivated and committed to improving the everyday lives of at-risk and troubled students. I had a great deal of respect for some of the challenging scenarios their work threw up to them. However when it was time to assess their written work, I had to suck air in through my teeth and brace myself for constant frustration and disappointment. On average, I would say about 15% of these teachers had written skills (spelling and grammar) of a standard the community would expect of tertiary-qualified professionals. Their work stood out and was a joy to read, as I could engage with their ideas, without being distracted by sometimes less than junior secondary standard writing. About 60% had mid-range skills, characterised by homophone-based spelling errors (e.g. their/there; bear/bare; compliment/complement, etc) and basic grammatical errors such as poor subject-verb agreement, poor use of commas, and next to no understanding of when to use/not use apostrophes. This work was below the standard expected of university graduates and interfered with the transmission of ideas. The remaining one quarter or so had very poor written skills, such that the reader was pre-occupied with anticipating the next error or omission and their ideas were lost. I remember writing on one such assignment “Please make sure you proof-read and spell-check your work carefully before you submit it”, to which I received an email reply, as follows: “Sorry about the sloppy writing. My husband was away on the weekend and he usually does my proof-reading and editing”. I wonder how that same teacher would have dealt with such an excuse from one of her students?

A number of commentators (Dr Riddle included) have referred in recent times to Louisa Moats’ oft-quoted line that “Teaching reading* IS rocket science” (*in fact Dr Riddle refers in his recent piece on The Conversation to “literacy”, which of course is not the same as reading – a misapprehension that might be part of the problem). I agree fully that there is a complex science to the application of evidence in early year’s classrooms; however it is a science to which student teachers are receiving only patchy and partial exposure, and it is children who bear the life-long cost of this.

Remember too, that when launching a rocket, being inches out on the launching pad means you’ll be miles out in space.

Image source

 (C) Pamela Snow 2015

 

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