Quote of the Day – Plus – On teaching reading
“We’ve Been Teaching Reading Wrong for Decades.”
“As administrators, we came to recognize that we’d passed many of these ill-founded notions on to teachers at our school — and that has produced no small amount of guilt. How could we have taught students to read this way for so many years?!”
Victoria Thompson, Elizabeth Wolfson and Mandy Hollister
The PLUS
Here’s another admission from educators who only recently learned what science shows really works best for reading instruction.
Such expressions of guilt are a common outcome for teachers after they learn about the “Science of Reading.”
These three educators add:
“It was only after we started to implement evidence-based literacy instruction that we could really see the stark differences between balanced literacy practices and those that were more evidence-based.”
The good news here is more teachers are coming to grips with their obviously poor results in teaching reading using such flawed approaches as “Balanced Literacy” and are learning how to teach reading much more effectively.
The bad news is a lot of teachers still have not made this discovery. Uninformed teachers continue to cling, often with near religious fervor, to Balanced Literacy and similar concepts that do not follow the Science of Reading and produce disastrously low percentages of good readers.
Something dramatic needs to change before Kentucky can move beyond its current state of affairs where only about one in three of the Bluegrass State’s public school students can read proficiently. That dramatic change will involve helping a lot of teachers work through the inevitable feelings of guilt as they learn their current practice is wrong and discover how to teach reading the way scientific research shows works best.