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Recent Posts

  • Apr 06, 2021 Teaching Reading Isn’t Rocket Science
  • Nov 03, 2020 The Special Education Bubble
  • Sep 20, 2020 How Love Became a Weapon in the Reading Wars
  • Sep 16, 2020 The Three-Cueing System and the Most Disordered Form of Reading
  • Sep 08, 2020 Why Running Records and Leveled Readers Don’t Mix with Phonics

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  • Ed School,  Reading Instruction,  Science of Reading

    Teaching Reading Isn’t Rocket Science

    April 6, 2021 / 4 Comments

    In the summer of 2020, the well-known researcher Louisa Moats published an article in AFT magazine entitled “Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science,” in which she laid out the daunting series of challenges involved in turning children into skilled readers.  For the record, I have immense respect for Dr. Moats; and from what I know of her LETRS program, it seems extraordinarily well done and highly effective. She’s done more to advance SoR-based approaches and to train teachers than almost anyone else around.  And yet, I have to disagree with her on this one—or at least with her (or perhaps an editor’s?) title.   To be fair, the type of reading Moats…

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    Erica Meltzer
  • Balanced Literacy,  Decoding,  Dyslexia,  Ed School,  Fluency,  Learning Disabilities,  NAEP,  Phonemic Awareness,  Phonics,  Precision Teaching,  Reading Instruction,  Reading Wars,  Science of Reading,  Teacher Training,  Whole Language

    The Special Education Bubble

    November 3, 2020 /

    The reading world was recently rocked by an article from esteemed reporter, Emily Hanford. The longtime maven of whole language, Lucy Calkins, admitted she needed to change her Units of Study after decades of context clues, guessing at words, picture walks, and dismissing the science of reading. Of course, Calkins promptly responded with a statement that essentially tried to take credit for always being a phonics-minded practitioner (despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary). When you look at the latest NAEP data, the influence of decades of whole language-oriented instruction being the dominant pedagogy in the United States is readily apparent. According to this new data, roughly 63%…

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    Ben Tobin
  • Balanced Literacy,  Reading Instruction,  Reading Wars

    How Love Became a Weapon in the Reading Wars

    September 20, 2020 /

    When I read almost any article about education, I cannot help but be struck by the language that is used—and not used—to discuss the goals of schooling. Teachers, for example, are almost invariably described as teaching students to love reading, or to get excited about reading—not to actually read, or to read well, or to become more reflective or thoughtful readers. The emphasis is squarely on the emotion surrounding reading rather than on the act of reading itself, or on the intellectual development it entails.   It seems to me that this has become such an accepted way to speak about education that its presumable implication—that obviously, yes, loving to read…

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    Erica Meltzer
  • Balanced Literacy,  Lucy Calkins,  Reading Instruction,  Reading Workshop,  Three Cueing System

    The Three-Cueing System and the Most Disordered Form of Reading

    September 16, 2020 /

    As I’ve written about before, what launched me onto this whole insane journey into the seamy underbelly of American reading instruction was my observation of high-school students who seemed incapable of reading in a linear, left-right manner; whose eyes raced randomly around the passage; and who also misread, skipped, and guessed without seeming to realize that they were doing so. So even though I’ve touched on this topic before, it’s so severe and so under-recognized that I think it merits a discussion of its own. Students who read this way are not simply “struggling”—they have been taught to read according to a theory that fundamentally misconstrues what reading is, and as…

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    Erica Meltzer
  • Balanced Literacy,  Decoding,  Ed School,  Lucy Calkins,  Phonics,  Reading Instruction,  Three Cueing System

    Why Running Records and Leveled Readers Don’t Mix with Phonics

    September 8, 2020 /

    Last winter, Lucy Calkins (via the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, or TCRWP) issued a rebuttal to the Achieve, Inc.-sponsored report asserting that her Units of Study fails to provide the sort of instruction that would result in all children learning to read—particularly those who do not already arrive in school with strong language skills. Entitled “A Defense of Balanced Literacy” it is, in keeping with Calkins’s previous major statement regarding phonics, a veritable masterpiece of half-truths, evasions, contradictions, misunderstandings, and distortions.  I don’t want to get pulled down into the weeds trying to offer a point-by-point analysis, but there is one major idea that I think is worth…

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    Erica Meltzer
  • Balanced Literacy,  Common Core,  Reading Instruction,  Teacher Training,  Three Cueing System

    The Three-Cueing System Grows Up

    August 30, 2020 /

    In a post written back in March, Valerie Mitchell posed the question of why teachers of native English speakers are increasingly adopting classroom activities designed for ESL students. As she pointed out, the fixation on scaffolds in the form of “visuals, vocabulary aids, graphic organizers, etc.” does not make much sense. For native speakers, the point of English class is (presumably) to help them express increasingly complex ideas in more sophisticated ways, not to teach them basic vocabulary in a language they have been surrounded by since birth.   I had no idea that this was such a widespread phenomenon until I read her piece, but once it was called to…

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    Erica Meltzer
  • Phonics,  Reading Instruction,  Reading Wars

    The Misunderstanding that Sparked the Reading Wars

    August 7, 2020 /

    I just finished reading Anthony Pedriana’s Leaving Johnny Behind, an enormously important and under-appreciated book that I discovered by chance, thanks to a post on Facebook. (Social media certainly does serve a purpose other than being a black hole of procrastination from time to time!) The author is a retired teacher and principal who, quite by chance, found himself at the center of the reading wars: in an attempt to boost the reading performance of a class that was falling behind, Pedriana went against everything he had been taught and permitted one of the teachers in his school to implement a scripted reading program for a single short lesson each day.…

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    Erica Meltzer
  • Common Core,  Dyslexia,  Ed School,  Fluency,  Learning Disabilities,  Lucy Calkins,  Reading Instruction,  Science of Reading,  Uncategorized

    Munchausen by Special Education

    July 30, 2020 /

    I think what we have is a system that doesn’t really, at the end of the day, want students to get better and improve.

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    Ben Tobin
  • Decoding,  Dyslexia,  Fluency,  Learning Disabilities,  Lucy Calkins,  Phonemic Awareness,  Phonics,  Precision Teaching,  Reading Instruction,  Reading Workshop,  Science of Reading,  Teacher Training,  Three Cueing System,  Whole Language

    A Child is Not a Mollusk

    July 14, 2020 /

    In some sense, without evidence-based instruction, a child could be more like a mollusk in that they will withdraw from the learning process and build a shell to protect themselves from the emotional anguish of feeling less-than in the classroom.

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    Ben Tobin
  • Fluency,  Learning Disabilities,  Phonics,  Precision Teaching,  Reading Instruction

    Forget Sourdough Bread – My Pandemic Project is Precision Teaching!

    July 11, 2020 /

    Some learned to bake sourdough bread. Some took on home improvement projects. However, when it came time for me to choose a pandemic project, I decided to be a precision teacher. Unfortunately, it is not Instagram friendly, so I will simply write about it. Let me introduce myself. I am a seasoned teacher with thirteen years in the NYC public school system with licenses in French and ESL. In fact, according to the NYC ratings system devised by the infamous Charlotte Danielson, I am even considered a highly effective teacher. I have also had skin in the game long enough to watch the DOE follow many fads, particularly the fad of big data.…

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    Valerie Mitchell
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Tipping the Scale on Fountas and Pinnell 

10 Reasons the Three-Cueing System Is Ineffective

The Science of Reading: 5 Key Concepts

Forget Sourdough Bread – My Pandemic Project Is Precision Teaching

10 Signs of a Decoding Problem

Recent Posts

  • Apr 06, 2021 Teaching Reading Isn’t Rocket Science
  • Nov 03, 2020 The Special Education Bubble
  • Sep 20, 2020 How Love Became a Weapon in the Reading Wars
  • Sep 16, 2020 The Three-Cueing System and the Most Disordered Form of Reading
  • Sep 08, 2020 Why Running Records and Leveled Readers Don’t Mix with Phonics

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Links

A Brief Review of Research on Forms of Instruction

An Open Letter to Student Teachers

Basic Phonics Test

Children of the Code

The Critical Reader

Emily Hanford on Reading Instruction

The Fallacy of Balanced Literacy

Filling the Pail (Greg Ashman’s blog)

The Fluency Factory

How Do Kids Learn to Read?

How to Teach Reading

Importance of Background Knowledge

International Foundation for Effective Reading

Jon Gustafson’s Blog

Letter to the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education

LETRS 

Lifelong Literacy

Literary Performance of Ex-Reading Recovery Students

Louisa Moats

The Maloney Method 

Marilyn Adams on the Three Cueing System

Nancy Young: Reading, Writing, Spelling

Orthographic Mapping (Video)

Phonics Myths

Phonological Awareness Screening Test

Preventing Reading Failure: An Examination of the Myths of Reading Instruction 

Reading Matters (Mark Seidenberg)

Reading Rockets

Readsters (Learning Center) 

Right to Read Project 

Running Records

The Science of Reading: Evidence for a New Era of Reading Instruction

Spelfabet

Ten Phonics Research Findings

The Simple View of Reading

The Spell of Language (Jean Tucker)

Structured vs. Typical Literacy

The Three-Cueing Model: Down for the Count? 

Why Aren’t Kids Being Taught to Read?

Why Reading Is Not a Natural Process 

 

 

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