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Recent Posts

  • Jan 22, 2022 Hearing and Charting Reading Fluency
  • May 21, 2021 On “Word Callers” and Vowel Sounds
  • 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

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  • 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,  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
  • Ed School,  Science of Reading,  Teacher Training

    What Do Teachers Need to Know about the Science of Reading?

    July 20, 2020 /

    The more time I spend trying to wrap my head around the world of early-reading instruction, the more I find myself becoming wary of the notion that teachers should devote a lot of their time to learning about the science of reading. I realize that might seem like a bizarre and contradictory statement given that so many of the problems in reading instruction stem from ed schools’ failure to provide research-backed training to pre-service teachers—not to mention the fact Richard and Ben and I are in the process of launching a training program based on, well, the science of reading—so let me explain.    I had already started writing this piece when I…

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    Erica Meltzer
  • 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
  • Decoding,  Dyslexia,  Fluency,  Learning Disabilities,  Phonemic Awareness,  Phonics,  Precision Teaching,  Reading Instruction,  Science of Reading,  Teacher Training,  Uncategorized,  Whole Language

    Of Fluency and Fritters

    June 29, 2020 /

    t’s been clear for a long time that something is very wrong with the way reading is taught, but if we genuinely want things to change, we need to take a hard look at what actually works—and building fluency beyond a doubt does so. We owe it to students to get this right: their success in high school and beyond depends on it.

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    Ben Tobin
  • Reading Instruction,  Science of Reading,  Teacher Training,  Three Cueing System

    The Science of Reading: 5 Key Concepts

    May 26, 2020 /

    The Science of Reading has been in the news a lot recently, and not surprisingly, many people (including a lot of teachers) find the sheer amount of information it involves overwhelming. So, the basics: the Science of Reading is not a movement or a belief system. It is a vast body of research based on hundreds of studies conducted by dozens of researchers over many decades, and involving fields in the social and hard sciences such as psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. While researchers still have questions about the exact processes by which skilled reading develops, a sufficient number of studies have produced similar results to allow them to conclude that…

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    Erica Meltzer
  • Phonics,  Teacher Training

    What Does It Mean to Be “Phonetic”?

    May 17, 2020 /

    One of the most common justifications for not teaching reading as a code in which letters correspond to sounds is that written English contains too many exceptions, and that attempting to teach them all will only lead to confusion. In reality, however, the vast majority of English words are spelled phonetically (50%) or contain only one irregular sound, usually a vowel (36%). (Research also indicates that children can often infer the identities of many common words with slightly irregular misspellings.)  I recently posted these statistics on Facebook and received a predictably snarky response of “How many perfectly phonetic words are in this post?” as if the point of the post…

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    Erica Meltzer
  • Decoding,  Phonics,  Teacher Training,  Three Cueing System

    The Three-Cueing System and Its Misuses (or: The Biggest Problem in Reading Instruction You’ve Never Heard of)

    June 23, 2019 /

    A couple of weeks ago, I attended a conference on the science of reading held by John Gabrieli’s lab at MIT. It was, if nothing else, an eye-opening experience—not always in good ways, but certainly in ways that laid bare the problems involved in implementing broad changes to how reading is taught in the United States. At the reception after the conference, I happened to be introduced to Nancy Duggan, one of the founders of the Massachusetts chapter of Decoding Dyslexia, an organization that advocates for screening and support for dyslexic students. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned one of the stranger reading problems I’d seen among my students—namely,…

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    Erica Meltzer

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Top Posts

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

  • Jan 22, 2022 Hearing and Charting Reading Fluency
  • May 21, 2021 On “Word Callers” and Vowel Sounds
  • 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

Archive

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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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