Education Week - October 27, 2021 - 10

Popular Literacy Materials Get 'Science of
Reading' Overhaul. But Will Teaching Change?
Lucy Calkins and Jennifer Serravallo
are among those making shifts
By Sarah Schwartz
A slow but significant change has
been taking place in the early reading
world over the past year, loosening
the grip that some long-used, but unproven,
instructional techniques have
held over the field for decades.
Big names-like Lucy Calkins,
of the Teachers College Reading
and Writing Project, and author
and literacy specialist Jennifer Serravallo-have
recently released updates
to their published materials or
announced impending rewrites that
change how they instruct students to
decipher words.
Reading researchers say they find
these industry moves encouraging.
" The fact that there's an awareness
... that's a step in the right direction, "
said Claude Goldenberg, a professor
emeritus at Stanford University who
studies early literacy development in
English-language learners.
But they also cautioned that this
narrow change in materials won't necessarily
lead to large shifts in instructional
practice, and that more needs
to be done to support teachers of the
youngest learners in developing kids'
early reading skills-especially after
several years of disrupted, pandemicera
schooling.
The shifts curriculum providers
are making mainly have to do with
how teachers instruct students in
word-level reading-that is, decoding
the words on the page into spoken
language.
Much of teacher training and many
classroom materials adhere to the theory
that children should use multiple
sources of information, or cues-the
letters in a word, but also the pictures
on the page or the flow of the sentence-to
make a prediction about
what the word is.
But evidence from cognitive psychology
and neuroscience research has
long shown that good readers attend to
the letters in the words to identify what
words say. Research has demonstrated
that instructing students on how to
crack the code of written language is
one of the most effective ways to get
them reading words.
And while it's important to teach
young kids about story structure and
syntax, and to have rich conversations
about illustrations in picture books,
children shouldn't rely on those
sources of information to guess at
what the words on the page say, said
Goldenberg.
" There's a very subtle, nuanced,
delicate dance in sequencing, " he said.
" It's that kind of delicate balance that I
see completely missing from programs
that try to do everything all at once. "
Now, some publishers are trying to
make a shift in how they integrate,
sequence, and attend to foundational
skills instruction. But there are open
questions about how these changes
in materials will change practice in
classrooms.
" We see ourselves at a hinge moment, "
said Maryanne Wolf, the
director of the Center for Dyslexia,
Diverse Learners, and Social Justice
at the UCLA School of Education and
Information Studies, and the author
of several seminal books about how
the brain learns to read. " The separation
of two doors on reading has been
not just unfortunate, but even tragic,
leaving behind children who have
needed desperately a different form
of instruction. "
A public conversation about
reading science
The research motivating these
changes isn't new.
In 2000, a panel of experts was
convened by the federal government
to evaluate the evidence on reading
instruction. One of the takeaways
from the National Reading Panel's report
was that explicitly teaching about
the sounds in words, and how those
sounds matched up to written letters,
would help children learn to read.
This finding drove policy changes in
the early 2000s, most notably the introduction
of Reading First, a federally
funded program that emphasized
phonemic awareness and phonics
instruction.
The program had mixed results,
leading to some improvements in
children's word-reading ability, but
not in their reading comprehension.
In its wake, many schools and teacher
education programs adopted a model
called balanced literacy-aiming to
balance foundational skills instruction
with more focus on stories, comprehension,
and developing a love of
reading.
But in 2018, reporter Emily Hanford
of APM Reports brought to light
that in many balanced literacy classrooms,
students were not receiving
systematic, explicit instruction in
phonics-how written letters match
up to spoken sounds-and were being
encouraged to use other strategies to
guess at words. Without this foundational
instruction, many students
never figure out how to decode the
printed words on the page.
Hanford's documentaries-as well
as a slew of coverage from Education
Week and other outlets-ignited a
firestorm of controversy, with some
teachers outraged that they had never
learned how to teach phonics in their
teacher preparation programs, and
others pushing back with a defense
10 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 27, 2021 | www.edweek.org
of their teaching methods. In the several
years that followed, more states
started to mandate teacher training
in, and classroom attention to, foundational
skills instruction in an effort
to adhere to what came to be referred
to as the " science of reading. "
But these word-guessing strategies
are also deeply embedded in much of
early reading curricula, as Education
Week reporting has shown. Many programs
and teacher guides encourage
prompting students to rely on a story's
meaning and structure, as well as the
"
This work is as
much about the
reading science as it
is about the science
of understanding
how to support
human and
organizational
change.
KARI YATES
Co-author of Shifting the Balance:
6 Ways to Bring the Science of
Reading into the Balanced Literacy
Classroom
letters on the page, to predict what
words will say-a strategy known
as three-cueing or MSV (for meaning,
structure, and visual). And while
most curricula incorporate phonics
instruction, it's often " competing for
teachers' and children's attention and
time, " said Goldenberg.
Top 5 Reading Materials
By Percentage of Teachers Using
43% Fountas & Pinnell Leveled
Literacy Intervention
27% HMH Journeys
19% Reading Recovery
17% HMH Into Reading
16% Units of Study for Teaching
Reading Series
SOURCE: EdWeek Research Center,
Fall 2019 survey
Now, some influential publishers
are starting to make changes.
This summer, Serravallo released
an update to part of her popular The
Reading Strategies Book, revising strategies
for word-level reading to emphasize
decoding and abandoning
techniques that encourage students to
guess at words. Early this year, literacy
consultants Jan Burkins and Kari Yates
released a new book, Shifting the Balance,
that offers " ways to bring the
science of reading into the balanced
literacy classroom. "
And Calkins, of the Teachers College
Reading and Writing Project, has
announced upcoming revisions to
her popular Units of Study for Teaching
Reading program. The changes,
Calkins said, will incorporate more
explicit instruction in phonics and remove
some prompts that ask students
to look to pictures or context for word
identification.
At the same time, several more
states have passed laws mandating
that schools teach the " science of
reading " -laws that would affect curricula
and materials.
Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist
at the University of WisconsinMadison
who studies reading, said
the publishers' changes are a response
to these new policy priorities. But he
worries that the revisions will be surface
level, only shifting instruction
enough to " satisfy the stipulations in
those laws, " he said.
" They can't change their materials
too much, because they'll lose their
followers, " Seidenberg said. " What's
going to come out of this? Minimal
changes that are enough to satisfy
[these] states. "
Wiley Blevins, an educational consultant
and author of several books on
phonics teaching, understands the critiques,
and the skepticism, that some
experts are expressing about these
changes: " I get the anger, because
we're talking about kids' lives. We're
talking about their futures. " But he sees
more reason for optimism, in teachers
who may now have more guidance to
" do better for their students. "
Lucy Calkins outlines upcoming
changes to Units of Study
In some cases, this guidance for
teachers is still forthcoming. Calkins'
Reading and Writing Project, a workshop-based
program that publishes a
reading curriculum used by about 16
percent of early elementary and special
education teachers, according to
data gathered by Education Week, is
planning to release updated materials
in summer 2022. (The timeline has
been pushed back due to COVID-related
production delays, Calkins said.)
The planned update reflects a shift
in approach for the group. In November
2019, Calkins released a statement
pushing back on those whom
she described as " the phonics-centric
people who are calling themselves
'the science of reading.' " About a
year later, in fall 2020, TCRWP put
out a new position statement, calling
for attention to phonemic awareness
and phonics instruction, and emphasizing
that sounding out words is the
best strategy for kids to use to figure
out what those words say.
" [P]oring over the work of contemporary
reading researchers has led us
to believe that aspects of balanced literacy
need some 'rebalancing,' " the
document read.
The revised units will offer different
guidance on reading " superpowers, "
or reading strategies, Calkins
said. Instead of being taught " picture
power " -to look at the pictures
to figure out words-students will
be taught " slider power, " that they
should " slide " over the word to blend
the letter sounds together. Early units
will also teach a progression of letter
iStock/Getty
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - October 27, 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - October 27, 2021
