Education Week - October 21, 2020 - 14

Schools Face a Daunting
Challenge: Teaching
Reading Online
By Benjamin Herold
Ready or not, the nation's elementary school educators are staring
down a daunting new challenge:
teach hundreds of thousands of
young children to read, without being
able to interact with them in person,
using instead digital tools and videoconferencing platforms in sweeping
new ways that are mostly untested.
Even before public schools shut
their physical doors to help slow the
spread of the coronavirus, many educators were struggling with this most
fundamental of tasks. Especially concerning was schools' scattershot, often-unscientific approach to teaching
the basic building blocks of reading,
such as understanding how sounds
are put together to form words. That's
likely one reason why just 35 percent
of American 4th graders are proficient readers, according to the most
recent results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Now, with thousands of schools
reopening virtually or using a mix
of online and in-person instruction,
even those teachers trying the kind
of phonics instruction supported by
cognitive science will be forced to do
so remotely, in online environments
they are still learning to navigate.
Many more educators appear likely
to try a hodgepodge of early-literacy software programs and digital
apps-many of which have shown no
evidence of effectiveness, and almost
all of which are best suited as supplements to regular classroom teaching-as primary instructional tools.
Add it all up, and America's K-12
system is about to embark on a massive experiment with incredibly high
stakes for an entire generation of
young children.
The best case, according to experts
in early literacy and educational technology consulted by Education Week,
is that schools use the coming year
to actually improve how they teach
reading, responding to emergency
conditions by finally discarding practices and tools that don't work. In this
scenario, technology would actively
help teachers provide a strong foundation in phonics and other foundational skills, while giving students
ample opportunities to apply what
they've learned and build vocabulary,
comprehension, and fluency while
developing a lifelong love of reading.
The more realistic hope is that
schools manage to tread water, making do under difficult conditions to
ensure young readers don't completely miss out on a crucial window
for building basic skills.
The fear, though, is that such a
catastrophe is already underway,
especially for those students who

are living in poverty, have special
needs, or are still learning English.
Huge gaps in access to technology
remain. Coronavirus-related deaths,
sickness, and economic hardship are
causing mounting trauma, especially
in the Black, brown, and Indigenous
communities bearing the brunt of
the pandemic. And many schools, already resistant to change, were beset
this summer by budget cuts and constantly shifting guidance from state
and federal officials, leading them to
provide early-elementary teachers
with little or no training around new
forms of remote literacy instruction.
"We're in totally uncharted space,"
said Kyle Snow, a senior research associate for RMC Research Corporation and formerly a senior scholar
at the National Association for the
Education of Young Children. "Figuring out how to consistently reach
kids with substantive instruction
targeted at foundational skills is the
critical challenge. But even if you assume that we had figured out how to
do that-which we had not-we now
have to dramatically shift what we're
doing because of the pandemic."

'Not a Computerized Process'
Part of the problem is that the technology tools now available for earlyliteracy instruction are all over the
map when it comes to quality.
Some older technologies, including
public television shows such as Sesame Street, Between the Lions, and
Super WHY, have a robust research
base behind them. But many of the
newer apps and software programs
currently being marketed to teachers,
parents, and caregivers do not.
That doesn't mean that all the digital tools now available to schools are
bad. Some, such as the learn-to-read
app Homer, have shown evidence
of success. The best, experts say,
are "explicit and systematic" about
helping children learn foundational
reading skills. That means they take
an orderly approach to introducing
students to the sounds that make up
the English language, showing how
those "phonemes" correspond to different letters and letter combinations.
They also follow a coherent progression demonstrating how letters are
put together to form words and then
sentences.
As an added benefit, some of these
technology tools also have advantages over print materials for K-2 students. Electronic books, for example,
might include animations demonstrating what a "stampede" looks and
sounds like, helping improve comprehension. And where traditional
"word work" might involve children
spending a half-hour or more cutting

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 21, 2020 | www.edweek.org

out printed words and sorting them
into groups based on whether they
feature a long-a or short-a sound,
digital tools allow for that same process to be done more efficiently, via
dragging and dropping on a screen.
Still, those same features can also
be counterproductive. Most experts
say it's critical that young children
learn to sound out unfamiliar words,
for example, but some animations
may pull their attention away from
printed text. Likewise, some digital
word-sort tools automatically correct
children when they place a word in an
incorrect sound-group, limiting the
child's opportunities to discover and
learn from mistakes.
"Part of learning to read is going
through struggle," said Heather
Schugar, a literacy professor at West
Chester University. "But a lot of the
technology we have does the thinking
for kids."
Bigger picture, even the best digital tools are intended to complement classroom instruction. There's
a world of difference between letting students use an app to practice
and reinforce specific literacy skills
and teaching those same skills from
scratch in a way that will motivate an
individual child based on his or her
unique real-world interests, background knowledge, and strengths.
The nuanced feedback that only
humans can provide is crucial to
good literacy instruction, said Elena
Forzani, an assistant professor of
literacy education at Boston University. Imagine a 1st grader struggling
over words as she reads aloud. A good
teacher will already have a strong
sense of who a child is and what he or
she knows and will be closely attuned
to things like facial expressions and
body language as the child reads-
information that will, in turn, shape
the responses and encouragement
the teacher offers.
Good teachers will also try to identify misunderstandings in real-time.
Is the problem that a child doesn't
understand that the letters "s-l-e-d"
form the word "sled?" Or is the problem that the child doesn't understand
the concept of a sled?
Those are the kinds of instructional
decisions that technology simply
can't make, experts said.
"Learning to read is not a computerized process," said Lisa Guernsey,
a senior education policy advisor at
New America and co-author of Tap,
Click, Read.

Reading Instruction Via Zoom
In many ways, then, the more
pressing question facing schools is
whether human teachers can provide
high-quality reading instruction over

National Survey: Reading
Instruction During COVID-19
Who selects the primary digital/online reading programs
and materials that teachers in your district or school use
to teach students how to read during remote learning?
Select all that apply.
District leaders

51%

School leaders
principals

49

A team of grade
teachers

47

Individual teachers

17

Other 3

Compared to prior to the pandemic, how frequently have
you, or the teachers you work with, been using digital/
online reading programs to teach students to read?
Much less frequently

11%

Somewhat less
frequently

7

About the same level
of frequency

19

Somewhat more
frequently

31

Much more
frequently

32

Compared to teaching students to read in person with
print materials, teaching students to read with remote
instruction and digital materials is:
Much less
challenging

1%

Somewhat less
0
challenging
About the same level
of challenge

8

Somewhat more
challenging
Much more
challenging

32
59

*Results show responses from teachers, principals and
district leaders who reported involvement with early reading
instruction.
SOURCE: EdWeek Research Center
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - October 21, 2020

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