Lucy
Calkins Says Balanced Literacy Needs 'Rebalancing'
Early
reading teachers and researchers are reacting with surprise, frustration, and
optimism after the Teachers
College Reading and Writing Project, the organization that designs one
of the most popular reading programs in the country, outlined a new
approach to teaching children how to read.
A
document circulated at the group's professional development events, first
reported on by APM Reports on Friday, calls for increased focus on ensuring
children can recognize the sounds in spoken words and link those sounds to
written letters—the foundational skills of reading. And it emphasizes 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 reads.
While
the document suggests that these ideas about how to teach reading are new and
the product of recent studies, they're in fact part of a long-established body
of settled science. Decades of cognitive science research has shown that
providing children with explicit instruction in speech sounds and their
correspondence to written letters is the most effective way to make sure they
learn how to read words.
But
it's significant to see these ideas coming from the Teachers College Reading
and Writing Project. The program, founded by Lucy Calkins and housed at
Columbia University, has long downplayed the importance of these foundational
skills in early reading instruction, and has pushed other, disproven strategies
for identifying words.
The curriculum doesn't include systematic, explicit teaching in phonemic awareness or phonics in the early grades, as Education Week has reported. The company started publishing a supplemental phonics program in 2018, but marketing materials for the new units imply that phonics shouldn't play a central role in the early years classroom. "Phonics instruction needs to be lean and efficient," the materials read. "Every minute you spend teaching phonics (or preparing phonics materials to use in your lessons) is less time spent teaching other things."
But
it's not only that the materials sideline phonemic awareness and phonics—they
also teach reading strategies that can make it harder for students to learn
these skills.
Calkins' materials promote a strategy called "three-cueing," which suggests that students can decipher what words say by relying on three different sources of information, or cues. They can look at the letters, using a "visual" cue. But they can also rely on the context or syntax of a sentence to predict which word would fit, the theory goes. Reading researchers and educators say that this can lead to students guessing: making up words based on pictures, or what's happening in the story, rather than reading the words by attending to the letters. READ MORE ➤➤
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