Education Week - December 4, 2019 - 12

What Teachers Mean When
They Say 'Balanced Literacy'
Nearly 70 percent of K-2 and special education reading teachers in a nationally
representative survey conducted by the Education Week Research Center
said that they are using balanced literacy. But what did they mean by it? In
responses, teachers outlined how they defined the term, with most falling into
one of the following three categories.
A combination of phonics and whole
language instruction
Balanced literacy is often defined as
"taking the best parts" from these two
approaches. Among the most common
blended approaches is the notion of
using "cueing systems" to solve unfamiliar
words: Students are asked to use
meaning cues like pictures and context,
syntactic cues like sentence structure,
and "graphophonic" or visual cues like
initial letter sounds to identify a new word.
In practice, phonics is often subordinated
to the other two cues.

Guided reading or leveled reading
These are most associated with two
specific curriculum providers, both of
them popular among educators. The
Education Week survey found that 4
in 10 teachers use Fountas & Pinnell's
Leveled Literacy Intervention and 16
percent use Units of Study for Teaching
Reading, developed by Teachers College

Professor Lucy Calkins. In a guided
reading program, students work with
a teacher in groups separated by their
reading level, usually determined via
periodically administered "running
records" looking at student reading
errors based on cues. The students read
and analyze texts at their instructional
level, rather than books deemed too
challenging or easy. Phonics skills are
generally introduced within context.

A program that bases instruction on
all five major components of literacy
The "big five" refer to the 2000 National
Reading Panel report. The federally
financed panel concluded from a review
of empirical research that phonemic
awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary,
and comprehension were critical
elements of early literacy teaching.
But the panel did not prescribe a
particular way that these components
should be put together in a curriculum.

an implicit message continues to tell teachers that phonics
should be separated from the "real" work of reading.
Marketing materials for the Units of Phonics K-2
curriculum, written by Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at
Teachers College, Columbia University, and published by
Heinemann, say: "Lucy and her coauthors aim to protect
time for authentic reading and writing, while also helping
you teach a rigorous, research-based phonics curriculum."
Professional associations also send a variety of mixed
signals. Conferences hosted by the International Literacy
Association and the National Council of Teachers of
English continue to include sessions critical of codebased instruction. The American Association of School
Administrators' November 2019 issue contained an article
written by Calkins on her balanced literacy curriculum,
whose materials use some of the cueing prompts. It ran
right next to an essay by another superintendent, who
noted-correctly-that the curriculum's approach lacks
empirical research.

12 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 4, 2019 | www.edweek.org

In light of that, it's no wonder misunderstandings persist,
some frustrated district officials said, in response to the odd
juxtaposition.
"We're talking about things that are settled, versus
things that aren't settled or proven outside of anecdotal
little stories," said Jared Myracle, the chief academic
officer for the Jackson-Madison district in Tennessee,
about the articles. "Most superintendents are not experts
in the science of reading. ... The next time the discussion
comes up in the district and you're making decisions about
materials, you've opened a door for an unsupported theory
to take over your district's literacy initiative, even though
I'm sure that wasn't the intent."
For Fernandez, things came to a head after one
particularly brutal lesson. Students were working on the
word family of the week, specializing in a particular vowel
sound, like the long o. They were excited, peppering
Fernandez with examples. But then she ran into a problem:
Students were naming words with the correct phoneme
but lots of different spellings. And Fernandez realized she
couldn't explain to them why the /o/ sound could also be
spelled -oa or -ow or -oe.
"They came up with these great ideas, and it would
absolutely be the right sound, but it wouldn't fit into that
word family. And I'd tell them that, and their faces would
fall," she said.
She commiserated with a colleague, newly arrived from a
different district that had been using a systematic codebased approach, who ultimately told her: "You're really not
teaching it the best way. Letter names aren't as important
as teaching all the letter sounds," Fernandez recalled.
She thought that was crazy at first, but she determined
over the summer that she'd get to the bottom of matters
before starting at a new school district. She Googled
"teaching letter sounds." She spent hours on blogs. She
eventually came across articles on the science of reading,
participated in webinars, even paid for some private
training on phonemic manipulation and phonics out of her
own pocket. And eventually, all the pieces clicked.
"I was just kind of shocked, I guess, like, 'Huh! This is
so weird. This makes sense to me, and it makes sense to
teach. Why isn't everyone doing it this way?' " she said. "It's
baffling to me, still."
Unmixing the Clay
It's not as baffling, though, when you consider just how
complex foundational alphabetic skills are. The rules for
phonics aren't simple or intuitive, and guiding students
through 44 sound patterns is a lot more difficult than
reading alongside a student and prompting him to use
context to guess at new words.
Marnie Ginsberg, a former federally funded literacy
researcher, is now a literacy consultant and one of the
sources Fernandez credits with her breakthrough. She
says the teachers she works with generally fall into several
categories. Some have access to great phonics resources,
but simply feel overwhelmed trying to put them into

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Education Week - December 4, 2019

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