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I'm a kindergarten and first grade teacher. I have taught children how to read. It's amazing! I try to follow current research, but it's clear to me through art

I'm a kindergarten and first grade teacher. I have taught children how to read. It's amazing! I try to follow current research, but it's clear to me through articles like this that there is so much we don't know about how children learn to read. EDIT (just adding on): It's clear to me from my experience that there is not one single way children learn to read. That much should be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, but the field of education clings to the idea of "best practices." Second, a lot of our practices in the U.S. still stem from the National Reading Panel, which was convened nearly 20 (!) years ago as part of No Child Left Behind. Yet it's easy to find criticisms of the report the Panel issued. Just Google it. Here's a good one to start with: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.html https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.h...

istjohn 6y ago
> It's clear to me from my experience that there is not one single way children learn to read. That much should be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, but the field of education clings to the idea of "best practices." One of the key points the article makes is that a "balanced literacy" approach doesn't work. A footnote explains: > "If children are taught systematic phonics in one part of the reading program but are encouraged to use context to guess at words when reading passages, they may not apply their phonics skills consistently. Thus, the phonics component of the reading program may be undermined." — from The Use of Context Cues in Reading.[1] I'm not sure why you think there shouldn't be best practices in reading education. Certain methods will outperform others. Why shouldn't we identify and refine the methods that prove to work best? 1. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading#footnote-content-44 https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
- cardamomo 6y ago
  Thanks for calling out that footnote. To clarify, I'm a proponent of a strong phonics program. Within that, however, there are a myriad of ways to organize and structure the instruction. But I don't disagree with the article. I called out the term "best practices" because it's often used to refer to pedagogy that is no longer supported by the research. I suspect this is the case in other fields as well: the so-called best practices we espouse are more a function of the values of our workplace or work community than anything else.
- coryrc 6y ago
  Because if they admit there are good and bad ways to teach, we might start evaluating whether the public school teachers are good at their job and fire them when they are not.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  In my experience in teaching English as a foreign language to students of all abilities and levels... you quickly discover that different strategies work for different students. Some students are strong with vocab, others with grammar. Some with listening, others with speaking. Some with oral, some with written. I could go on and on with 20 other different things. Education experts do attempt to identify and refine the methods that prove to work best, but real-world teachers know that those methods come in waves, fads of academia, and that a teacher needs to know the basics of all methods, combined with the strengths and weaknesses of their students, and use their intuition to try to come up with a good combination. So it's less about a "balanced" approach, and more of a "try everything and see what sticks with any individual student" approach. Because here's what does work: let students build core competency around wherever their natural strengths are, and then they'll eventually get the other stuff. But the idea that "certain methods will outperform others" is grossly simplistic. Sure there are some dumb methods that don't work for anybody but those get quickly discarded. Of the rest, even if a method outperforms in the aggregate, it's going to be terribly underperforming for a significant proportion of students.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    Don't you believe that it's also possible that there are sometimes methods that do outperform all others in the long term for everyone (such as phonics) but can initially be harder than other ways (such as three-cueing)? So all _you_ see as a teacher in the little time you get with a pupil who doesn't learn as well is that the phonics isn't "working for them" and that three-cueing is "just how this person learns," but really you're just teaching them an inferior shortcut which leads to worse outcomes.
    - watwut 6y ago
      If you learned to read and continued to read few years later, it does not matter what method you used initially. After few years you are remembering how most common words look like and instantly "know" them.
      - 6y ago
Camillo 6y ago
The specific flawed ideas in the article are actually from the 1960s.
InfiniteRand 6y ago
I'm not sure if figuring out best practices is possible or not, but from my observations of the field it is difficult to determine these types of things definitively. So I agree the emphasizing a singular set of "best practices" too much can be detrimental. Moreover, I think when teachers feel forced to adopt a teaching method they dislike, their enthusiasm flags, and teacher enthusiasm is something that has a big impact on learning (I'd be interested to hear if anyone disputes the idea that miserable or apathetic teachers result in less effective teaching) I think the most effective approach to this kind of research is a toolkit approach, where teachers adjust their teaching methods using different well-developed practices based on experience, different aspects of the student population, and the teacher's knowledge / enthusiasm for a specific technique.

istjohn 6y ago

> It's clear to me from my experience that there is not one single way children learn to read. That much should be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, but the field of education clings to the idea of "best practices." One of the key points the article makes is that a "balanced literacy" approach doesn't work. A footnote explains: > "If children are taught systematic phonics in one part of the reading program but are encouraged to use context to guess at words when reading passages, they may not apply their phonics skills consistently. Thus, the phonics component of the reading program may be undermined." — from The Use of Context Cues in Reading.[1] I'm not sure why you think there shouldn't be best practices in reading education. Certain methods will outperform others. Why shouldn't we identify and refine the methods that prove to work best? 1. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading#footnote-content-44 https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

cardamomo 6y ago
Thanks for calling out that footnote. To clarify, I'm a proponent of a strong phonics program. Within that, however, there are a myriad of ways to organize and structure the instruction. But I don't disagree with the article. I called out the term "best practices" because it's often used to refer to pedagogy that is no longer supported by the research. I suspect this is the case in other fields as well: the so-called best practices we espouse are more a function of the values of our workplace or work community than anything else.
coryrc 6y ago
Because if they admit there are good and bad ways to teach, we might start evaluating whether the public school teachers are good at their job and fire them when they are not.
crazygringo 6y ago
In my experience in teaching English as a foreign language to students of all abilities and levels... you quickly discover that different strategies work for different students. Some students are strong with vocab, others with grammar. Some with listening, others with speaking. Some with oral, some with written. I could go on and on with 20 other different things. Education experts do attempt to identify and refine the methods that prove to work best, but real-world teachers know that those methods come in waves, fads of academia, and that a teacher needs to know the basics of all methods, combined with the strengths and weaknesses of their students, and use their intuition to try to come up with a good combination. So it's less about a "balanced" approach, and more of a "try everything and see what sticks with any individual student" approach. Because here's what does work: let students build core competency around wherever their natural strengths are, and then they'll eventually get the other stuff. But the idea that "certain methods will outperform others" is grossly simplistic. Sure there are some dumb methods that don't work for anybody but those get quickly discarded. Of the rest, even if a method outperforms in the aggregate, it's going to be terribly underperforming for a significant proportion of students.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  Don't you believe that it's also possible that there are sometimes methods that do outperform all others in the long term for everyone (such as phonics) but can initially be harder than other ways (such as three-cueing)? So all _you_ see as a teacher in the little time you get with a pupil who doesn't learn as well is that the phonics isn't "working for them" and that three-cueing is "just how this person learns," but really you're just teaching them an inferior shortcut which leads to worse outcomes.
  - watwut 6y ago
    If you learned to read and continued to read few years later, it does not matter what method you used initially. After few years you are remembering how most common words look like and instantly "know" them.
    - 6y ago

Camillo 6y ago

The specific flawed ideas in the article are actually from the 1960s.

InfiniteRand 6y ago

I'm not sure if figuring out best practices is possible or not, but from my observations of the field it is difficult to determine these types of things definitively. So I agree the emphasizing a singular set of "best practices" too much can be detrimental. Moreover, I think when teachers feel forced to adopt a teaching method they dislike, their enthusiasm flags, and teacher enthusiasm is something that has a big impact on learning (I'd be interested to hear if anyone disputes the idea that miserable or apathetic teachers result in less effective teaching) I think the most effective approach to this kind of research is a toolkit approach, where teachers adjust their teaching methods using different well-developed practices based on experience, different aspects of the student population, and the teacher's knowledge / enthusiasm for a specific technique.