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I recently listened to a (very interesting, recommended) 6-episode podcast called Sold a Story about why so many USAmerican kids (and Kiwi kids, too, apparently!) can't read. Long story short: a lady from New Zealand came up with this theory that kids don't learn by sounding out the words but by paying attention to context and stuff like this ("three-cueing"). Her ideas took off and schools stopped teaching phonics. There's a big publisher and some superstar reading pedagogy authors who have made an empire from teaching this weird theory despite the fact that neuroscience is very clear that, actually, yes kids do indeed learn phonetically. This is accompanied by a theory that if you just give kids books on topics they're interested in, they will learn to read automatically? I guess? The idea is to make them "passionate" readers but not actually, you know, worry about whether they understand the mechanics of reading. Which, as a lifelong passionate reader, seems wrong-headed.
It's a depressing story (mostly because it appears that upper and upper-middle class families have papered over this problem by hiring private tutors, while poorer and working class kids just suffer), but what I kept getting hung up on was that this has to be an English-language problem, right? The root of this thing has to come down to the fact that English has such weird and quirky spelling for so many words. A language like, say, Spanish that uses an alphabet or syllabic system for phonetic spelling--in which you always, always know how to pronounce the word just by looking at it--could never give rise to such a theory, right?
So the fact that this took off in the Anglophone world has got to be just another manifestation of the way that Anglocentrism bites us in the butt--if any of these people had looked at how kids learn to read Korean or whatever, they would have realized that their theory can't be right?
Or am I missing something?
It's a depressing story (mostly because it appears that upper and upper-middle class families have papered over this problem by hiring private tutors, while poorer and working class kids just suffer), but what I kept getting hung up on was that this has to be an English-language problem, right? The root of this thing has to come down to the fact that English has such weird and quirky spelling for so many words. A language like, say, Spanish that uses an alphabet or syllabic system for phonetic spelling--in which you always, always know how to pronounce the word just by looking at it--could never give rise to such a theory, right?
So the fact that this took off in the Anglophone world has got to be just another manifestation of the way that Anglocentrism bites us in the butt--if any of these people had looked at how kids learn to read Korean or whatever, they would have realized that their theory can't be right?
Or am I missing something?
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and it does not seem at all right as a universal approach for teaching English reading! the articles I've read have indicated that a certain percentage of children WILL just learn to read no matter what approach you take to teaching them, but for the kids outside that set, they need phonics, if they're going to be long-term successful. I think you're right that it takes a language with a spelling as weird as English to give rise to a theory like three-cuing!
admittedly I do know someone who is an excellent English reader who I think has never used phonics strategies once; I get the sense they do whole-word recognition, as if English were written with logograms that you learn to recognize the shape of, word by word, instead of any individual letters being relevant ever? which is totally wild to me as a way to approach reading an alphabetic language! to me, the way I store words in my brain requires me to know the spelling, or it can't settle in properly! but I suppose it's an example of how some kids just WILL make reading happen no matter what
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admittedly I do know someone who is an excellent English reader who I think has never used phonics strategies once; I get the sense they do whole-word recognition, as if English were written with logograms that you learn to recognize the shape of, word by word, instead of any individual letters being relevant ever?
Well good for them, if it works for them! I do think it makes sense that there are different strategies that different readers use. But as a baseline approach, surely phonics should be the first step?
but I suppose it's an example of how some kids just WILL make reading happen no matter what
Yeah, I think I'm probably one of those people, but I don't think there are all that many of us!
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I am goofing around with Duolingo Korean, and I find that I'm trying to make sight words out of what I see rather than sounding them out, even though sounding out is much more straightforward in Hangul than in English (not 100%, though). My guess is that readers in most languages end up doing this.
I know Dr. Seuss gets a bad rap as a person, but don't people still read Hop on Pop? The very basics of sounding out right there.
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I think one of the problems here is that people look at skilled, fluent readers, see that they're recognizing words as wholes, and figure that must be how to teach beginners how to become skilled, fluent readers.
In contrast, gold-standard intervention for dyslexia is systematic phonics instruction.
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I don't usually notice at all, but you're right that the medication example is a really good way of looking at it. It's all about the phonics there!
I find that I'm trying to make sight words out of what I see rather than sounding them out, even though sounding out is much more straightforward in Hangul than in English
That's so interesting!
I think people very much do read Hop on Pop (in fact, I read it to my niblings just last week!) and it's that kind of thing that I feel like should be a foundation for learning to read.
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I keep telling my ESL student how little sense English spelling makes, and tell her, "It's easier than Chinese, but not by that much."
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The frustrating thing is that people drew ideological lines between "whole language" and phonics, at least in the US, and now saying that phonics is a better way to teach English reading is... considered a conservative position. Most people arguing strongly for phonics and saying "whole language" doesn't work are also arguing for only reading dead white men, teaching that the US Founding Fathers were actually conservative Christians of the speaker's variety that could do no wrong, and teaching that 1950s gender roles will make everyone happy and violating them is evil.
People who find those positions reprehensible often don't want to be seen attacking "whole language" because they don't want to be associated with people like that.
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Plus, surely whole language and phonics are not in contradiction to each other but can both be used as tools.
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Yeah, that makes sense, though I know nothing about neurological research at all. The podcast does certainly have an agenda--one that it's very straightforward about. Most things in life rest in the nuance, don't they?
Human brains are complicated, any experiment involving them is subject to all sorts of confounding factors and is extremely sensitive to the questions being asked and types of experimental conditions that are easy to overlook even being part of the experimental setup.
Thank you for this reminder!
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Absolutely! I'm planning to listen to the podcast, I find this stuff fascinating, but it's all about the nuance. Skimming the podcaster's science of reading reading list, it includes an article arguing that phonics is better than whole word, but also that a lot of phonics education is bad too- in practice, it claims, many teachers who are teaching 'phonics' are doing it badly. But that to me sort of begs the question. Maybe whole word is better than phonics, but even more teachers are simply teaching it badly!
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Oh wow. Yeah, sounds like reading pedagogy isn't the root of that, but still, that's extreme.
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But it did! Up to the late 80s/early 90s, the phonic method was widely used (that's how I learnt!), but then the psychogenetic/immersive method became super popular. That in itself was not a problem--quite the opposite, because it definitely created a more immersive approach and reading experience. But in my opinion both methods can (and should coexist), because our brains need that structure when we are first approaching reading. Otherwise it's just like you said: a sort of reading pedagogy fad (that totally misrepresents Piaget's theories, I think!). And I agree with you in that poorer and working class kids are the ones more affected by a method that doesn't contemplate their reality. When I was a school librarian (in the mid 2000s), I definitely saw that kids benefited from immersive reading, and but also that they need that first structured approach! Giving kids books about things they're interested in is great (I hooked a lot of kids by offering them dinosaur books! XD) but first you have to give them the tools and structure to read them! Over here, in recent years, a sort of hybrid model has been tested, and I think that works a lot better.
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But in my opinion both methods can (and should coexist), because our brains need that structure when we are first approaching reading....When I was a school librarian (in the mid 2000s), I definitely saw that kids benefited from immersive reading, and but also that they need that first structured approach!
Yes, this makes sense! So much sense! That phonics would be an indispensable part of learning to read but that there are other tools too! I'm really fascinated by the fact that it popped up in other languages too--thank you for correcting me!
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(Now I have fond memories of the school library... showing kids books about robots and dinosaurs and monsters, reading aloud... and helping them with phonics! XD)
ETA: I forgot to say thank you for another super interesting and thought-provoking post!
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(Now I have fond memories of the school library... showing kids books about robots and dinosaurs and monsters, reading aloud... and helping them with phonics! XD)
I love this!
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Which has led to a whole generation or two who don't learn how to spell correctly when they start writing and have to re-learn how to spell. Which, for many many children, doesn't happen. It's a travesty, really.
(German is easier on the phonetics than English, but we still have a few quirks with the diphthongs and the ss/ß spelling.)
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"A trnsrus rex is scry." The idea was that by second or third grade, the kids would be able to read, and the words they were reading (correctly spelled, from books) would sink in somehow and replace the made-up spelling the students used when they were younger. And they had vocabulary lists that they were supposed to be drilled on at home. This worked for some of my daughter's classmates - I was a spelling helper in the 3rd grade and some of the students were getting words right that many adults have a hard time with (I remember "separately" in particular, for some reason). My daughter took much longer to make the switch. She started getting sent home with extra homework, to write the words ten times or make up sentences, etc. I don't think any one system works best for a whole classroom of individuals.
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As far as languages go, German with the new spelling rules, is pretty logical.(if you ignore genders....)
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But either way, German is relatively easy, and also was before. But things like hier can ne tricky, because unless the pronounciation is super exaggerated, it could easily be hir. Is it is Eumel or Oimel or Oymel? Is it Ei or Ai? It could be ain Ai im Ayerbecher!
The point is, it's stupid to let kids write the way they hear it, because it depends so much on how something is pronounced. On top of that, we're a country with strong dialects, and I don't even want to imagine what children write like in Bavaria or Saxony when not taught how things are written correctly. I understand why they're later frustrated by reading because they can't sound out the words in their head or writing because it's all wrong and then get bad marks for orthography in secondary school.
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Oh no, what have you done?!?! I don't hear the difference between i and ie, or ei and ai but it just looks so, so wrong.
I didn't even think about dialects! Omg, that would be unreadable.
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Sorry, sorry.
But this is exactly my point, it looks wrong to you because you learned how to spell! You intuitively know what is correct, because your primary school teacher taught you how and probably had you keep a book where you write down every new word you learned. (Ah, nostalgia....) And then you wrote Diktate where those words were also used.
But the point is, you learned them correctly the first time around and you never convinced yourself that you were right and it is an Ei is an ai (not capitalized, because you can't heart that).
But I agree, it breaks my mind also a little. I don't even have children and never wanted children and I get mad on behalf of every child out there.
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It's truly awful to think of kids having to unlearn things they learned because they learned them incorrectly. Those poor kids! They deserve better!
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Yeah, I know. But it's good that I can do that now. Communication depends on shared rules.
I'm so sorry for all the school children out there. This way of teaching will make life so much more difficult for them in the future.
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And still children can't spell...
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The grammar part is simply, if you have more ways to specify a noun, you can get more precise in refering to it. You can get more flexible in your sentence structure cause the things that belong to gether don't have to be close together.
I hope that makes sense.
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Do you know of some examples of this? Because my brain isn't great at thinking about language on a theoretical level.
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Die Sonne und der Mond sind Himmelskörper. Sie scheint von allein, er reflektiert ihr Licht.
The English translation would be:
The sun and the moon are celestial bodies. It shines on its own, it reflects its light.
If we pretend, we don't know how the sun and the moon work for a second, we can't tell which one is the light source and which one the reflector, in English. In German we can, cause the sun is considered feminine and the moon is considered masculine.
So the German is closer to:
The sun and the moon are celestial bodies. She shines on her own, he reflects her light.
But in English that makes no sense, unless the sun and the moon as personified in some way. In German it's just grammar.
Another example would be:
Der Hund jagd die Maus, der sonst den ganzen Tag schläft.
The dog hunts the mouse, who usually sleeps the whole day.
Who is usually sleeping? In English we can't tell, in German it's clear.
The dog (masc.) hunts the mouse (fem.), who (masc.) sleeps the whole day.
does that make sense?
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Yeah, definitely! It's such an uphill battle for an adult learner though!
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What's actually working for many children is going by phonetics and syllables. I can't remember how I learned to read in school, but a popular way to start is using easy words that have very clear syllables where you can't make mistakes ins sounding them oout so that the child learns the sound chorectly in combination with the letters/word. You add some words they have to memorise to build the first few short sentences, like "mit" (with). Children also usually use a table with pictures + starting letters to help with sounds, but that doesn't work for English of course because of so many different ways to say a letter...
Spelling has been a huge issue in elementary school and many children have problems even without that very questionable "reading through writing" method. German states work with a basic vocabulary, I think about 800 words, that children have to know and be able to spell correctly when they leave elementary school. There are also some preogressive methods to help children with spelling, working individually on their texts etc. But it's really a problem, not enough teachers, too many children in a class, too many things to teach and not enough time...
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This gives me flashbacks to a former Professor of mine: reading and writing are two different skills. She repeated that lesson in so many ways, so many times, I'll never forget.
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Iirc, it's been........a long time, we had a huge chart with the pictures you mentioned and we had a Fibel (to read) with single syllables and short sentences and we learned spelling by writing out each new word in a Kladde, that had to be prepared by the parents before the start of first grade with sections for each letter, like a dictionary. And then we had to write them down as, I think, "(das) Haus".
As languages where written and spoken match, German is still one of the easier ones. If only the grammar (and, admittedly, the genders) were easier....
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There are phaenomena in spelling that you can't hear if you haven't practiced it or rules you can't apply if no one taught you. Like when to use "s", "ss" or "ß", or when to use "äu" verus "eu". Also capitalisation is like a thing and you can't hear that.
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But this made me think about how I leaned English (which was ~15 years ago, so that too might have changed).
They basically practiced simple sentences with us first e.g. "I like ..." and we would learn words for food, or hobbies or animals to fill in the blanks. In our book the vocabulary was written down in English (duh) and in IPA, so if we weren't sure about the pronunciation, we could check on a chart, how to pronounce the IPA.
We never learnt the weird rules, that I see in some posts, like "i befor e except after ...". And from what I understand those ""rules"" often have more exceptions than one can reasonably remember.
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I am very good at German grammar though, so if anyone had told me that tenses are essentially constructed in the same way, it would have made sense that much sooner.
As it was, that summer I discovered fanfic and in 8th grade my English was great! And then in Oberstufe/LK had a teacher who didn't know any idioms or similes in English, so my grades tanked because I tended to use them in exams.
Ah, to never go to school again.
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Animes, fanfiction and, erm, Netflix alternatives taught me English in the end.
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Can confirm that a) this stupid technique of learning to read was taught to us in Australia and b) my upper middle class mother was horrified and paid a private tutor to teach my sister and me spelling using phonics. It wasn't that we couldn't read, it was that my sister in particular couldn't spell (I was better off as I read so voraciously that I'd somehow learnt to spell by osmosis). The situation was marginally better in the 1990s because we were mainly taught by baby boomers and a handful of people my grandparents' age, who had all learnt phonics and retained lingering elements of it in the curriculum. (There was a similar problem with being taught mental arithmetic in maths classes — you do actually need to learn these things like drills, with lots of boring repetition, for them to be able to stick — and my mother paid for us to be tutored at the local Kumon centre, after a particularly dreadful year in primary school where my Gen X teacher basically didn't teach us any maths at all and my mother realised I didn't understand how to do division.)
I would say that in my own family's case, the decision to pay for private tutoring came only after literally years of my mother ringing up the school to complain and coming in for meetings with teachers (I believe she took it all the way to the principal) to complain about this, and got nowhere.
In terms of the non-Anglophone world, I have been told anecdotally by e.g. my German husband, my friends who are raising their son in the Welsh-speaking part of Wales etc that because spelling is phonetic, children in those countries don't have to have spelling tests in the classroom, and the idea of American-style spelling bees is absurd because (apart from loanwords) there's no ambiguity in spelling. I remember a friend from Iceland saying that in his school, they weren't just taught phonetics, they were taught the International Phonetic Alphabet, because it was considered important to know a universal way to represent phonemes, since such phonemes can be spelt in various ways if you use e.g. the Latin alphabet.
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(I was better off as I read so voraciously that I'd somehow learnt to spell by osmosis)
Oh same.
I would say that in my own family's case, the decision to pay for private tutoring came only after literally years of my mother ringing up the school to complain and coming in for meetings with teachers (I believe she took it all the way to the principal) to complain about this, and got nowhere.
From the people they interviewed in the podcast, this sounds like a very, very common situation.
children in those countries don't have to have spelling tests in the classroom, and the idea of American-style spelling bees is absurd because (apart from loanwords) there's no ambiguity in spelling.
Right! My brother-in-law thinks it's wild!
I remember a friend from Iceland saying that in his school, they weren't just taught phonetics, they were taught the International Phonetic Alphabet, because it was considered important to know a universal way to represent phonemes, since such phonemes can be spelt in various ways if you use e.g. the Latin alphabet.
I think this would be a great think for everyone to learn! But only after everyone's learned to read in their own native language first, obviously.
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( https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading )
i found it deeply compelling and honestly pretty confusing, because i couldnt remember how i learnt to read OR how i was taught (which may have been different), and then i also struggled to believe that the poor teaching strategies were really THAT bad and nonsensical. I felt like surely some ~contextual strategies made sense, right? using the letters and sounds you recognise, what kind of word could it be? etc etc. but then it was like, oh yeah we just let students guess the completely wrong word and didn't correct them. !??!?!?!?!?! . i couldn't comprehend how that would EVER be understood to be a viable way to teach reading, or like... anything. The anecdote at the very end of this article - where goodman says that a child misidentifying the word "pony" as "horse" is totally fine - just made me so SAD. It's such an impoverished way to look at reading, language, and communication as a whole!! :( :( :( :( :( :(.
anyway, im glad you posted about this, because the discussion in the comments is super fascinating!! the question of how literacy pedagogy for children works in other languages is now going to haunt me!!!! All my rudimentary googles are about best practice/contemporary education, but it'd be fascinating to hear about how different alphabets have shaped different reading cultures in general. to jstor i go....
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but then it was like, oh yeah we just let students guess the completely wrong word and didn't correct them. !??!?!?!?!?! . i couldn't comprehend how that would EVER be understood to be a viable way to teach reading, or like... anything. The anecdote at the very end of this article - where goodman says that a child misidentifying the word "pony" as "horse" is totally fine - just made me so SAD. It's such an impoverished way to look at reading, language, and communication as a whole!! :( :( :( :( :( :(.
RIGHT????? Who is satisfied with that?????
Yeah, I did not expect the comments to be as interesting as they are, but I should have because I have tons of interesting friends who know so much more than I do!
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My other thought is, I think because teachers are overworked and underpaid and annoyed by useless/toxic continuing education requirements (that often turn into marketing opportunities for garbage like three cueing), they are rightly resistant to demands that they face any objective evaluation of their effectiveness as teachers. Partly that's because there's really no fair way to do it -- there's really only so much you can do with students you see 45 minutes a day or whatever, and as your friend notes above, that's all part of the larger replication crisis in social science research. You can't find a really reasonable metric for teaching effectiveness, and most of the people who come up with one are trying to sell it, not help you teach better.
However, I do think many teachers overestimate their effectiveness. I think it's partly a nice white lady/nice Jonathan Kozol phenomenon, where people think being kind to others and creating nice spaces for them is "enough", and certainly people like you and me probably enjoyed some of those nice spaces in school, because we were fortunate enough to learn to read without hindrance, and thus to enjoy lovely nooks and writing assignments.
But let me give you an example of what I mean. So there is this visiting scholar from Taiwan at Penn State this year, and she does these workshops trying to teach the students how to do more "extensive reading" in Chinese. Obviously learning to read in a second language is different from learning to read in your native language, but still, it's an interesting approach. So she did this one hour workshop last spring, and I attended it, and it was lots of fun. She told us about the Cool Chinese extensive reading platform, had us write some websites we like on a big poster and she told us we could try watching Chinese TV and reading the subtitles. That was basically it. Oh, and she told us to follow her on her instagram, which, by the way, she monetizes and tries to sell clothes on. Then this fall, I told her I ended up using the extensive reading platform with another teacher, and that I really enjoyed it. She said "yeah, I already told you about that, it wasn't the other teacher." And I said yes, you told us about it, but I did not end up using it at that time, and the account you gave us expired, so I had to beg this other teacher for one, and now I ended up using it. And she said, "well, I also gave you guys a lot of great reading strategies." And I was like wow, I can guarantee you that none of the other students ever used the platform again unless another teacher brought it up, because you only told us about it once, at a one-hour meeting, and then gave us accounts that expired very quickly. But somehow she turned that into a conference paper about how she's teaching American college students to read in Chinese. And I don't think she's that unusual! I think teachers take an incredible amount of credit sometimes for doing basic work, and why? Not because they naturally buy into their own hype, but because it's incentivized. It's good for her to go to national foreign language teaching conferences and tell people she's using new platforms for literacy instruction. It sounds like she's a highly engaged foreign language teacher. But it really doesn't reflect the reality. Like, she probably has taught some students very well at some point! But the story that gets told is so fake.
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I 1000000% agree about the teachers who are feeling attacked. Teachers are embattled on every level, underpaid, not appreciated...this has got to feel like just one more front in a war they're not winning. I am so sympathetic to that. All of the teachers they talked to in the podcast genuinely thought they were doing what was best for kids, and I know that's the case for most teachers most places. I feel terrible that people are using this as fuel to attack teachers.
The villain in the piece for me is the colleges of education who are supposed to be in charge of keeping teachers up to date with the latest research in the many hours of mandatory continuing education they have to do while working full time, but instead just recycle the same garbage they've been teaching for years and enjoy their job security.
A great point.
they are rightly resistant to demands that they face any objective evaluation of their effectiveness as teachers. Partly that's because there's really no fair way to do it -- there's really only so much you can do with students you see 45 minutes a day or whatever, and as your friend notes above, that's all part of the larger replication crisis in social science research. You can't find a really reasonable metric for teaching effectiveness, and most of the people who come up with one are trying to sell it, not help you teach better.
Absolutely.
However, I do think many teachers overestimate their effectiveness. I think it's partly a nice white lady/nice Jonathan Kozol phenomenon, where people think being kind to others and creating nice spaces for them is "enough", and certainly people like you and me probably enjoyed some of those nice spaces in school, because we were fortunate enough to learn to read without hindrance, and thus to enjoy lovely nooks and writing assignments.
Oh, yeah. I hadn't really articulated this to myself, but I think you're spot-on with this.
That's a really interesting example. And she's not, like, a bad guy there, it's just...not really that helpful. But how could she be in one hour session? What do those things really accomplish?
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Now teachers in Ontario are in this weird spot where depending on what board you teach in, you have some resources that are approved and some that you're being discouraged from using but there's no new resources being bought to replace defunct ones because the government hasn't actually moved to implement any of the OHRC's recommendations. So resources in school libraries/classrooms may not be decodable (because publishers stopped pushing decodable books) but our board has entirely halted purchasing reading resources until this all gets resolved.
Like someone upthread said, it's frustrating that many of the teacher training programs don't spend much/any time on how children learn to read - in my experience, our language courses in teachers college focussed on literacy programming for older students who already know how to read, not on the actual processes of learning to read (e.g. phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension). So new teachers are reliant on their own independent learning, taking AQ courses in reading, and their colleagues to help them develop their reading programs...Most experienced teachers I know who were using phonics didn't stop using them entire, but they were encouraged to include them as part of "balanced literacy".
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I am not surprised that teachers are being asked to do something but not being provided the resources to do it, but I do hate it so much. Teachers are so frequently set up to fail.
many of the teacher training programs don't spend much/any time on how children learn to read - in my experience, our language courses in teachers college focussed on literacy programming for older students who already know how to read, not on the actual processes of learning to read
That's failing you!