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> 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 wi

> 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.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      If you don't have skills to aquire new words, you may get thru elementary but have a very hard time in hs and uni.
    - insickness 6y ago
      This is exactly the point that the article is trying to dispel. If you learn to read in an improper way, such as 3-cue, you could carry that with you and struggle all your life.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    Nope, I don't believe so. In the long term we're all dead, and students need to be learning and staying motivated every day. Remember, phonics gives immediate improvements too, for short words. So it's pretty much a false dichotomy. For students who are picking up phonics quickly from the start, great. For the students who are struggling from the start, try other methods ASAP. As a teacher, figuring out which methods work for a student isn't rocket science. Your students are either getting better on a visible daily basis or not. We're not talking a 5% difference in outcomes, it's more like 75% difference. (Of course, bad teachers just don't pay attention at all, or are too swamped with work to be able to.)

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.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    If you don't have skills to aquire new words, you may get thru elementary but have a very hard time in hs and uni.
  - insickness 6y ago
    This is exactly the point that the article is trying to dispel. If you learn to read in an improper way, such as 3-cue, you could carry that with you and struggle all your life.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Nope, I don't believe so. In the long term we're all dead, and students need to be learning and staying motivated every day. Remember, phonics gives immediate improvements too, for short words. So it's pretty much a false dichotomy. For students who are picking up phonics quickly from the start, great. For the students who are struggling from the start, try other methods ASAP. As a teacher, figuring out which methods work for a student isn't rocket science. Your students are either getting better on a visible daily basis or not. We're not talking a 5% difference in outcomes, it's more like 75% difference. (Of course, bad teachers just don't pay attention at all, or are too swamped with work to be able to.)