Monday, June 13, 2011

Entry 12: Priorities


Let me make this short and simple (something I’m not known for because classrooms and schools are complex social organizations).

The first priority of any teacher is to get the students engaged in learning.

The second priority of any teacher is to keep the students engaged in learning.

The third priority of any teacher is to make learning and performance of the students intrinsically motivating.

The fourth priority of any teacher is to assess the classroom performance of the students and to use those assessments to build engagement, motivation, and lifelong learning.

Without these four priorities, teaching and learning do not occur. To meet these priorities every teacher needs a repertoire of strategies for getting and maintaining student attention and interest, for motivating students, and for assessing students. Without these four priorities on the minds of every teacher and administrator and parent, the schools fail. Right now, the testing regime is striving to make schools as toxic as possible in the U. S. The tests have become a punishment for all learners and teachers. There is no reward for learning or even for performing on the tests. The joy of learning has been removed from the classroom. The interconnectedness of thought and learning has been lost. There is no plan for improving the repertoires of the teachers. Learning must not be punished. Activity in classrooms must not be a punishment.

With these for priorities, students and teachers will succeed. They all need success because without success the school is a toxic environment. Change the punishments of the testing regime by focusing on real learning, engagement, motivation, classroom performances for assessment, and lifelong learning, or, more simply, the four priorities. 

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Entry 11: Phonics and Other Preliminaries in Learning to Read


The vowels are a, e, i, o, and u. WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! AN EXAMPLE OF BAD, BAD, BAD TEACHING. Okay, I'm calmer now. Sorry. 

These are letters: a, e, i, o, u. THEY ARE NOT VOWELS. They are some of the letters that are used to represent the vowels and semivowels when writing English. They are used in all sorts of combinations (oi, oy, ea, ae, oo, etc. – called digraphs), and they must be augmented with many other letters: y, w, r, l, h, and j (think of words borrowed from Spanish dialects for examples). Furthermore, letters do NOT HAVE A SOUND in English. Letters have names. Letters and letter combinations can represent sounds, but letters have a many-to-one and one-to-many relationships with English phonemes (sounds). A particular problem for children (or adults) learning to read English is that each letter or letter combination can map onto different phonemes in the oral language and this mapping depends on the word and the sentence. Can I say this in another way? It’s English and that means it must be complicated. Every rule has exceptions, and English words have all sorts of sources because it’s a living language.

Not everyone learned phonics as a child in school. The 1950s and 1960 were dominated by the "Look-Say" methods ,and most people who started school then did not have any phonics instruction (unless teachers deviated from their teachers' manuals). It worked as well or perhaps a little better than the current phonics-skills-testing-accountability maze that's dominating the schools. But that’s only one piece of the complex puzzle that are the schools.

All of the phonics rules are broken regularly! Even the one about short vowels in written CVC words fails regularly because it’s about sounds not letters. Teacher language is important, too. Mention that it isn’t always the same.  I'd be more comfortable with a teacher saying something like, "/tu(/ is one of the sounds that the letter 't' can make/represent". It sets children up for the variations if you use this construction more regularly in the early grades rather than focusing so heavily on one sound.

Learners need to recognize most words automatically. This set of words that are recognized automatically is called the individual's "sight vocabulary". Fluency depends on building a vast sight vocabulary. Only with the occasional unusual words should learners have to apply various skills to decode the word; one of these skills is application of phonics, but there are about 8 others. What are they? Strangely, most good spellers have excellent visual memory skills and are not as strong with phonemic processing, of course, having high levels of both would be an advantage. To improve spelling, 1) get used to using spell checkers, 2) let written work rest for a while before your revisit it and edit it, and 3) have someone else do a close editorial reading (all professional writers do this, often multiple times).

Most children learn to read well no matter the approach, but the flip side is that some do not (it’s about 30%). Why? Here is Speaker’s Hypothesis: there are two subgroups of the 30% of children who struggle with developing literacy: one group learns better with an alternate method, one different from the one being used by the teacher/school, while the other group has difficulty learning to read no matter the approach or the use of alternatives. No one seems to be able to answer following big question: Which students need how much phonics instruction of what kind for how long?

I prefer to build strong teacher-knowledge. Teachers need to know the graphophonemics of English and the needs of learners from direct observations. An external testing scheme that gives teachers useless data to decide what phonics children need is counterproductive (yes, that’s an attack on DIBELS), but I’ve developed expertise over years to do this, assessing hundreds of children.

Unfortunately, many phonics programs drill on things that are wrong (like not dealing with a set for diversity in learning phonics) and don’t get the students applying the phonics elements rapidly. Teacher knowledge and wisdom is much more important than adhering to a badly designed program, and the same goes for tedious exercises and workbooks in the early grades. Reductionist teachers can be outstanding and keep children excited and involved, but this has to be your teaching style and part of what you do to satisfy yourself. Realize that other approaches work equally well for most students, Constantly denigrating something that works seems counterproductive to me (that’s a dig at the phonics first and only true believers, most of them don’t know much about English graphophonemics, what they know is their pet program).

Pre-K probably should NOT do phonics. They should do phonemic awareness. For instance, during the B week work on initial consonants, alliteration, and language play related to the sound /b/, then progresses to onset and rime activities and finally some phonemic segmentation activities. Also write down many words that include the letters ‘b’ and ‘B’ so that children see dozens of words. Make lists of familiar words and add pictures (digital photographs the children take whenever possible). Have the children tell you sentences with ‘b’ words and write those sentences down emphasizing appropriate phonemic awareness skills or letter naming skills while writing the sentences (this is called language experience).

“If words are broken down than they will be easier to learn and understand”—WRONG! That isn't how children learn to talk. They have to figure out things from speech that is not broken down into smaller parts unless you count "motherese" as a simplification. Most of the analyses of  "motherese" indicate it has more complicated intonation patterns that SFAEng. Why would you expect one version of easy to work for all children? Some learners need to see the whole before they can get the parts. Most need situational contexts for learning words. For instance, no one would drive a car without having many experiences related to cars, but some children are taught parts of words when they haven't had experiences with many oral or written words. Many pre-k programs are designed to give the learners these experiences with oral and written words that high-literate families do automatically with children.

Being a language role model is important and one of the few things that have an effect, eventually, not immediately. Correction of speech DOES NOT work, wastes time, and can make the forms that are not SFAEng permanent. Good teaching is hard work! Very few short cuts have any value at all.

Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaker Blog

GTIrbs.blogspot.com