What’s Missing from the Reading Wars Discussion
The New York Times’ recent article, “In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat,” brings up an old debate: how do we get all students to be successful readers? It details Lucy Calkins’ shift from a “balanced literacy” approach to one that incorporates phonics instruction from the science of reading. While this is an important move and will help many more young students read successfully, it’s not enough and ignores foundational aspects of literacy education.
The discussion in this article, and the one we often have in the education-focused media, disregards the elephant in our reading-education room: brain development. Some kids do indeed pick up reading easily and "naturally." But most of us don’t. That's not because we're stupid or "behind." It’s because our brains aren’t developmentally ready. When the wiring for a skill develops, we're primed to master that skill. Some kids read at age three. Others not until seven. And for some, the wiring still may not have come in by then. This delay doesn’t have to doom them to academic careers as struggling readers—if they can get the instruction they need when their brains are ready, past the traditional “learn to read” years and in the “read to learn” ones.
America’s education system prescribes a one-size-fits-all pacing to reading instruction, and with NAEP showing that most kids graduate without reading even “proficiently,” we can confidently say that this approach isn’t working. Other countries acknowledge the brain-development factor and wait until children are older to start literacy instruction. In Sweden, all kids wait until they’re around six or seven years old to start formally learning to read.
Instead of addressing brain development, many educators who saw students "failing” to learn to read went with Calkins’ approach, which sounded promising, painless, and originating from a reputable source, Columbia University’s Teacher College. By using her "three-cue" non-decoding strategy, they skipped the unpleasant phonics that make some students feel stupid. No teacher wants that. This approach helped to keep reading a positive experience in the moment but didn’t and couldn’t give kids the skills they need to be successful readers in the long run.
Until we acknowledge the reality of uneven brain development, and how it impacts reading success, we’ll remain stuck with the low reading levels that we’ve seen since NAEP started measuring them over 30 years ago. A simple solution to the brain development problem is to continue to focus on instruction on how to read beyond the first few years of school. In math, we teach students the same skills year after year, but add complexity. In third grade you’re multiplying single digits, and in seventh grade you’re calculating double-digit exponents, which brings a review of that earlier multiplication skill and a chance to catch anyone who missed it the first few times around. Let’s apply the same to English Language Arts (ELA) class.
What this looks like in practice is secondary teachers having students read aloud so as to continue to develop their fluency, and doing so in an environment where there’s no shame in struggling with decoding after second grade. To promote fluency and shame-free decoding, ELA teachers in “read to learn” grades, third through twelfth, should regularly sprinkle in short phonics instruction for all students. By modeling sounding out big unfamiliar words one syllable at a time and encouraging students to do the same, they can catch many kids who unaccountably fall behind. This practice will get many more students attuned to the first crucial step in comprehension: turning letters into sounds in our brains.
Of course, adolescent reading instruction must extend beyond these decoding refreshers. Most students need guidance on how to get from reading a complex text to comprehending it. Secondary teachers should address this by reviewing vocabulary, offering access to background knowledge, and teaching explicit comprehension strategies, like Zinc-ing and Tracking, those we use in the Zinc Reading Ignition program. Our years as teachers and tutors and their research show that If a child fails to fully master reading in the early grades, it's not game over. In fact, even for kids who do, there's lots more to learn as they grow up.