Borderland

This little bit of personal history is inspired by Alice Mercer’s post about scripted reading instruction, which sounds to me like a relatively simple way for school districts to train teaching personnel instead of promoting real professional learning opportunities. I like Alice’s recommendation: “Be clear in what the program is doing, what you are doing, and what needs to be done.”

Mostly what I learned from my preservice teacher education was how to follow a teacher’s manual and how to organize student activity. My first teaching job was with second-graders, and teaching reading was fairly simple. I met with reading groups (low, middle, and high) for 30 minutes each day where we read from leveled basal readers while the rest of the class did “seat work” or rotated through “learning centers.” Because each group met with me for about half an hour, I had to let most of the class fend for themselves with independent assignments for about an hour. In the reading group we did phonics and vocabulary drills from a chart, round robin reading from the basal, and fill-in-the-blank workbook “comprehension” exercises. The basals contained abridged versions of chapters from trade books.

That was Reading instruction as we knew it. I trusted the manual to tell me what to do. It was how everyone did it, and most kids learned to read pretty well, though some struggled. We did other things, too, of course. There was journal writing, spelling, reading aloud to the class, and SSR (sustained silent reading). None of it was especially scientific, but it appeared to work.

The whole language movement caught up with me when our district adopted a new curriculum. I’d been teaching about 5 years. After whole language was officially adopted we traded the leveled basals and the workbooks for non-leveled basals and different workbooks with longer blanks for the kids to fill in. We did phonics and vocabulary drills from a chart, partner or round robin reading from the basals, and we used the workbooks. I also did creative writing projects and brought in books from the library on topics related to the basal selections. I had little festivals where I checked out all the books from the library by a particular author, and we’d do reader’s theater presentations and puppet shows. Fun stuff.

As before, most kids learned to read pretty well, though some struggled. The reading difficulty of the basal wasn’t always appropriate to every kid’s need, but neither were the basals we used in the reading groups. The main difference between the old and the new curriculum was that there were fewer textbooks and no reading groups under the new regime. All the kids read and wrote at the same time. I didn’t have to turn them loose for an hour hoping they’d complete a pile of sloppy worksheets that I had to collect and grade after school. And the room was noisier when all the kids were reading out loud at the same time.

The implementation of this new curriculum, though, was not smooth. There was little to no professional development regarding what “Whole Language” really was, and the teacher’s manuals were quite thin. We discussed among ourselves in meetings after school how we were supposed to be teaching reading without so many blanks to fill in. The district didn’t want us to use phonics workbooks any more, but some teachers hung on to them and used them anyway. People missed their workbooks. The community was in an uproar over the whole thing. There were numerous public meetings. Some people said that the Holt Impressions series promoted witchcraft. It was all very dramatic. It also wasn’t whole language, since the idea of using basals is antithetical to whole language philosophy.

Anyone interested in a basic introduction to theories of reading instruction would do well to read Frank Serafini on Theoretical Perspectives on Reading. It’s a quick and comprehensive look at literary theory applied to reading instruction. Serafini explains 3 main ways in which reading is conceptualized. He sees the current skills emphasis as rooted in modernist notions about meaning, which is believed to reside in the text, and which the reader must be taught to correctly identify. The modernist perspective is contrasted with the transactional and the critical perspectives in which meaning is constructed either psychologically, or socially, or both. From a transactional or critical point of view, literature becomes a “way of knowing,” and helps us make connections to the world around us.

Conceptions of teaching are likewise variable and problematic. The idea that there is a single “right” way to teach, just as there is a single correct meaning to any text, creates tension around discussions about public policy since control is a central concern of policy advocates. Scripted teaching programs are all about tightening control, and the problem with them is that not everyone responds similarly to the same approach, and more importantly, not everyone believes that it would even necessarily be a good thing if they did. Returning to Alice’s advice, “Be clear in what the program is doing, what you are doing, and what needs to be done.”

Or as Serafini says:

As literacy educators we should shift the focus from trying to find the right method for teaching children how to read, to determining whether the reading practices and experiences constructed in classrooms are addressing the broad repertoire of practices required in today’s society. Because of this, reading education has to go beyond scientific considerations to include the social, political, and cultural dimensions, if our students are to become the kinds of readers we want in a democratic society.