Agreed! It's so frustrating when I go out to schools and see teachers frustrated with the curriculum because they haven't been trained properly and to see the actual curriculum that makes absolutely no sense in teaching reading. I think the one district I see most often is on their 3rd reading program in 5 years because they aren't seeing progress because it's a bad curriculum and they aren't training teachers to use it anyway. But the recommendations come down from the state which doesn't help anything at all.
There are individual differences, some innate but most related to how well resourced the caregiving environment is — including how well educated are caregivers and how observant/responsive they are to cared for children. This latter statement is simply that wealthier parents can invest more, but it’s not a trivial point.
Whatever the caregiving environment, good reading teachers begin with the student in front of them, whatever their pluses and minuses.
But there is lots of subtlety in this. The student’s endowments and prior learning (i.e., learning history) contribute some knowledge, preferences, and habits that teachers don’t have to undo so much as use.
Here’s a very common example. We know that recognizing a word is faster than puzzling out its phonemes. Aha, faster but more error prone for those little kids. “Decoding,” on the other hand is slow and laborious, but very likely to produce the word accurately. Slow and laborious are … well, laborious. Fast gets you to the end and it’s reward.
Teachers have to understand that the teaching needed here has to have a mastery goal; it can’t just be show and tell and repeat. That means teachers have to motivate and reward labor but must efficiently get students to fast and accurate. There’s knowledge needed by teachers and strong motivation to guide the student all the way. Also, there’s a not inconsiderable amount of problem solving — thinking — incumbent on teachers especially in early career when they haven’t yet mastered their role in this miracle.
What frustrated me most is that some educators underestimated the complexity (just read the script, how hard can it be?) and utility of DR. There is a big divide between "preaching to the choir" and "converting the non-believers". While I want to teach students higher-order thinking skills, I would ask my non-believer colleagues that "how do you make a complicated dream castle with only a handful of lego pieces?"
Thank you very much. Advocacy in progress, suggestions welcome. Www.tinyurl.com/NYSLiteracyCollectiveImpact
Agreed! It's so frustrating when I go out to schools and see teachers frustrated with the curriculum because they haven't been trained properly and to see the actual curriculum that makes absolutely no sense in teaching reading. I think the one district I see most often is on their 3rd reading program in 5 years because they aren't seeing progress because it's a bad curriculum and they aren't training teachers to use it anyway. But the recommendations come down from the state which doesn't help anything at all.
There are individual differences, some innate but most related to how well resourced the caregiving environment is — including how well educated are caregivers and how observant/responsive they are to cared for children. This latter statement is simply that wealthier parents can invest more, but it’s not a trivial point.
Whatever the caregiving environment, good reading teachers begin with the student in front of them, whatever their pluses and minuses.
But there is lots of subtlety in this. The student’s endowments and prior learning (i.e., learning history) contribute some knowledge, preferences, and habits that teachers don’t have to undo so much as use.
Here’s a very common example. We know that recognizing a word is faster than puzzling out its phonemes. Aha, faster but more error prone for those little kids. “Decoding,” on the other hand is slow and laborious, but very likely to produce the word accurately. Slow and laborious are … well, laborious. Fast gets you to the end and it’s reward.
Teachers have to understand that the teaching needed here has to have a mastery goal; it can’t just be show and tell and repeat. That means teachers have to motivate and reward labor but must efficiently get students to fast and accurate. There’s knowledge needed by teachers and strong motivation to guide the student all the way. Also, there’s a not inconsiderable amount of problem solving — thinking — incumbent on teachers especially in early career when they haven’t yet mastered their role in this miracle.
What frustrated me most is that some educators underestimated the complexity (just read the script, how hard can it be?) and utility of DR. There is a big divide between "preaching to the choir" and "converting the non-believers". While I want to teach students higher-order thinking skills, I would ask my non-believer colleagues that "how do you make a complicated dream castle with only a handful of lego pieces?"