Transcript
Speaker: Here we are.
Speaker: How are you Emily?
Speaker: Hi Rafa, how are you?
Speaker: I'm well, I'm well.
Speaker: It's after Thanksgiving, we're recording this on Sunday, November 27th, 2022.
Speaker: And yeah, no, I'm excited to relaunch, well for us, relaunch Pedagogy of the Distressed.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: This came about because we've long wanted to have a podcast.
Speaker: We're both teachers.
Speaker: We've taught in a lot of different contexts.
Speaker: And this week, I listened to a podcast that really fired me up and gave me lots of thoughts.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: my immediate response was to call my longtime friend Rafa.
Speaker: And we just started gushing about all the things that frustrated us about this podcast, which I'll leave shrouded in mystery until the reveal.
Speaker: And we decided why not record this conversation?
Speaker: Why not record some of our
Speaker: feelings and process things around because this podcast is really an example, I think, of a lot of the reasons we wanted to have a podcast in the first place, which is we feel like teachers' voices are missing from a lot of popular media covering education issues.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So, I don't know.
Speaker: I can share a little bit about me quick before we run into it.
Speaker: I'm currently an adjunct professor at a couple institutions in the Northeast.
Speaker: I teach a variety of subjects, but my specialty is in teaching English to speakers of other languages, multilingual education with a focus on literacy across the lifespan.
Speaker: That's kind of my background.
Speaker: Rafa, do you want to give a little intro?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Well, how many years would you say you've been in education?
Speaker: Pretty much since I graduated from college, so 10 years.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: 10 years.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I'm similar.
Speaker: I'm Rafa.
Speaker: I have taught, this is my 11th year of teaching.
Speaker: I've taught mostly elementary school, dual language, a little bit of special education of district schools, public charter schools, and now I work...
Speaker: as a teacher and a director of a Spanish immersion independent school in Brooklyn.
Speaker: So quite the gamut of experiences there.
Speaker: And yeah, we wanted to, Emily and I have all these conversations and just wanted to chat about things that distress us, quote unquote, even if it's a slight exaggeration at times.
Speaker: It has a nice ring to it.
Speaker: And if you get the illusion to
Speaker: the book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Speaker: Well, even more power to you.
Speaker: And yeah, but really for me, it's a big exploration of what is it about what distresses us, which hopefully gets us to the other side of things, which is what might we do instead?
Speaker: So I'm excited to process with you and-
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And just learn more what you're learning about.
Speaker: So tell me, let's get right into it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What's on your mind.
Speaker: So I listened to a podcast that when I listened to it, it was in the top 10 podcast like charts.
Speaker: It's called sold a story from America public media.
Speaker: And the journalist who put it together is named Emily Hanford.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Different Emily, very different Emily.
Speaker: Um, but yeah, it's, it is a, uh, six part podcast.
Speaker: It's kind of a culmination of years of this reporters, Emily Hanford's reporting on what she terms and discusses as a crisis in American education.
Speaker: She identifies the problem being that, um,
Speaker: Many schools are not using science of reading in their curriculum.
Speaker: And as a result, many children are not being taught how to read.
Speaker: So she advocates for a focus on the science of reading.
Speaker: And before I get into unpacking this, what give you like the Cliff Notes version, because Rafa hasn't listened to it, but sometimes it's fun to listen to the Cliff Notes version anyway.
Speaker: So we thought we'd do that.
Speaker: Rafa, I'm just curious, when you hear the science of reading, what does it make you think of?
Speaker: When I think quote unquote science of reading, I definitely think of Manhattan Institute.
Speaker: I'm like conservative think tanks.
Speaker: When I've taught in schools, it's come up here and there.
Speaker: It reminds me of this idea of the reading wars, which were in short, it continues to be this idea of different camps of thinking of how to teach reading.
Speaker: And one camp that's very much explicitly about explicit phonics instruction and another camp about
Speaker: the whole language and the whole words and looking at the pictures and all that jazz and they even present this opposition to each other.
Speaker: So that's mostly what I think about.
Speaker: And I just think of like an agglomeration of ideas.
Speaker: I mean, I do want to emphasize that we have nothing against the journalists, just that it's the amplification of some of these ideas that alarmed, alarmed us.
Speaker: And these have been things that have been simmering under the surface for years, I feel like, in education.
Speaker: And Emily, like you were saying, your dad was saying before we recorded this, back to basic movements aren't new, right?
Speaker: But that's just the gist of it.
Speaker: Science of reading makes me think of packaged curriculum that says that this is the way to teach reading and then
Speaker: and then trying to force teachers to implement it is the short of it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's kind of before, you know, I would, you know, I did a little bit about me to understand also why I probably have some baggage around this.
Speaker: I did complete a PhD in reading, writing, and literacy at the University of Pennsylvania, where I learned about
Speaker: approaches to teaching literacy.
Speaker: I learned about research-based approaches to literacy teaching that mostly revolved around whole language, which is an approach to teaching reading and writing that centers meaning above language.
Speaker: I shouldn't say above, but meaning is the focus.
Speaker: So teaching a meaningful, engaged, culturally sustaining curriculum that engages students thinking on multiple levels while also embedding in foundations of reading, including decoding, including comprehension, and including things that might be isolated in other curriculums as skills.
Speaker: Or that might even be thought of as hierarchical skills that you need to learn first.
Speaker: For example, you need to learn decoding before you can learn.
Speaker: You need to learn how to decode individual words before you can learn to put a sentence together before you can put together a paragraph, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: So that's very simplified, like these different paradigms for teaching reading.
Speaker: But I certainly was educated in approaches that some might term more progressive and more critical.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I also learned about the reading wars.
Speaker: Rafa mentioned the reading wars, which date back a long time.
Speaker: I'm not a reading wars historian, so I'm not going to pretend to like, and I didn't do a ton of research before this chat.
Speaker: It's more just sharing my reaction to how this podcast was presented.
Speaker: But yeah, I knew there, this debate between the best way to teach and
Speaker: Children, how to read is not new.
Speaker: It's been going on for many, many decades.
Speaker: And as mentioned, my dad is in education research as well.
Speaker: And he has talked about, you know.
Speaker: Everything kind of comes back around again.
Speaker: My mentor, Dr. Vivian Gadsden in grad school has always said there's nothing new under the sun, right?
Speaker: A lot of ideas in education especially get recycled and kind of every 10 years ideas that were thought of 20 years ago are presented as new and innovative and told a story to me plays into that.
Speaker: And what I found so remarkable about it is that it doesn't lay out that history beyond – it kind of starts in the late 80s and goes from there when really it's a debate that predates that.
Speaker: And that's like one beef I have with it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Before I get too far into my critique, I want to give you kind of the Cliff Notes version of the podcast.
Speaker: So my husband and I, on a road trip for Thanksgiving, listened to all six episodes with increasing shock and disbelief.
Speaker: Just some of the gaps and some of the assumptions that were being made without much insight.
Speaker: empirical data cited in the podcast.
Speaker: And I recognize, first of all, this is a journalistic piece.
Speaker: This is not a research piece.
Speaker: It's not an academic piece.
Speaker: So I know the limitations of the genre.
Speaker: So I don't want to, you know, pack unfair punches.
Speaker: But basically, Rafa, the story starts, it presents, I'm looking right now at the plot outline.
Speaker: It starts with the problem and the
Speaker: Reporter states the problem as being that parents, basically she starts with parents who came to awareness during COVID teaching when their children were home.
Speaker: And these were children that went to very well-regarded public schools.
Speaker: So these are not under-resourced schools.
Speaker: Racial identity wasn't really discussed of the students.
Speaker: So I can't really get into that.
Speaker: But I do know that they were painted as
Speaker: parents of means, not wealthy, but definitely probably middle-class parents in well-resourced school districts.
Speaker: She kind of focuses on a couple parents.
Speaker: They're increasing awareness that their children are learning an approach to read.
Speaker: They're young children.
Speaker: I think one was the parent of a six-year-old.
Speaker: And the other was a parent of a seven, six or seven year old.
Speaker: And what they were watching on these Zoom classes during the pandemic was
Speaker: their children being asked these questions to, instead of asking to sound out words or decode explicitly, like they were asked to look at the first letter of the word if they didn't know it, look at a picture.
Speaker: And decoding is basically figuring out, sending out a word, right?
Speaker: Or how would you say, how would you define decoding?
Speaker: Yeah, decoding is putting the letter sounds together to make the word, you know, make sense.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: And right.
Speaker: And so they couldn't like they would get to a word and they wouldn't know what it said.
Speaker: You know, they couldn't say it.
Speaker: And they couldn't seem to figure it out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then they saw their teachers instead of saying sounded out, which is kind of, I would say what.
Speaker: most of us heard when we encountered a word we didn't know, you know, is to sound it out, sound the letter sounds.
Speaker: They heard their children being told to use the first letter, look at the words around it, I think, and try and make sense of the words around it.
Speaker: And then also look at a picture.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Use context clues and then look at the picture, right.
Speaker: To help make sense of it.
Speaker: And so that,
Speaker: The parents are disquieted by this because it doesn't seem to be the way that they remember learning how to read, but they go along with it for a while, but they kind of raise some eyebrows and chat with other parents.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: Then they do some research and lo and behold, they find Emily Hanford's reporting about the science of reading and about how this approach has been privileged in schools through a couple of what she identifies as well-moneyed students.
Speaker: curriculum sellers.
Speaker: And, you know, she kind of goes on in later episodes to take down a couple of researchers and people who run curriculum, you know, who sell curriculum and training and professional development programs in addition to a publishing house.
Speaker: And what she states is the problem in the first episode is that this approach is disproven.
Speaker: Teaching students to decode and understand, teaching students how to read a word by using context clues only looking at the first letter and only looking at the picture is not what science of reading research shows is the best way to decode.
Speaker: to teach children how to read.
Speaker: They should be taught explicit instruction in phonics, basically, to decode words and make meaning of text by just looking at the word, you know, and looking at the word itself.
Speaker: Does that make sense?
Speaker: Instead of like trying to put it in context
Speaker: Trying to guess the word instead of using the sounds.
Speaker: She would argue using a systemic approach to phonics, they would learn all of the ways that English makes sense even though it doesn't.
Speaker: There's a lot to say on that.
Speaker: Maybe we slow down a bit because I think it's good to... Stop me because I could go on forever.
Speaker: I was up all last night being like, what are the points I need to do?
Speaker: Just to summarize.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Let's just summarize.
Speaker: There is this method of teaching reading that's called the three cue system, which is what you were referring to, right?
Speaker: And it's basically children are reading words on a page and a simple story like, I see Carlitos run.
Speaker: And then they get to the word run and they don't know, let's say what the word is.
Speaker: And then the approach in the three Q system as described by many people who supports quote unquote science of reading is that it's asking them to guess.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So the word are, now look at the picture was Carlitos doing in the picture.
Speaker: Oh, run, running.
Speaker: So what makes most sense with the syntax or like the grammar, like, Oh, run, run.
Speaker: So I see Carlitos run period.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: But they're arguing that like a better approach would be to say, okay, you know the word I, you know, C, Carlitos, you just happen to know how to sound out.
Speaker: And then run, run, run.
Speaker: And then that's how you figure it out.
Speaker: And then that unlocks meaning.
Speaker: That's the I. Which is, I would say right now, both you and I do not disagree with it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: In and of itself.
Speaker: Anyway, so that's both the three Q system and Q meaning C-U-E, Q as in what's Q-ing you to know what the word is, right?
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thanks for putting it in better terms.
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: The three Qs are meaning, does it make sense, syntax, does it make sense in the grammar of it all, and visual.
Speaker: Are you relying on the letters or not relying on the letters at all to figure out what the word is?
Speaker: And you can tell Rafa's the elementary person.
Speaker: I do more adult than I taught middle school before.
Speaker: And can A also just... Mm-hmm.
Speaker: No, I love it.
Speaker: I mean, can I also just say that we both definitely support systematic phonics instruction?
Speaker: I mean, it definitely has a place.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But anyway, but it sounds like you're saying families are really upset about this because they see it as like a total disregard for the science.
Speaker: And so what everyone needs to do is hunker down on these systematic approaches to phonics.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So continue.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And the problem I have with the way the reporter lays this out is not that...
Speaker: I obviously I think phonics needs to be embedded within early learning.
Speaker: Like when students are learning how to read, like decode words on a page, make sense of letters and put them together and make words on a page.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: It's not my expertise, but I understand – I understood as being trained in understanding whole language approaches that that would happen within a meaningful curriculum that privileges – like a focus that's meaningful to the children in your classroom above a one-size-fits-all systematic approach that would get –
Speaker: rolled out the same for all students regardless of what community they're in.
Speaker: And
Speaker: what she's advocating for is not a curriculum.
Speaker: She's not advocating for this lockstep systematic phonics approach necessarily, but she is trying to take down.
Speaker: And it's like, it's very clear.
Speaker: She has a central thesis and she almost sees her work as social justice work.
Speaker: You know, that she needs to make this intervention.
Speaker: She needs to bring attention to the fact that these curriculum practices,
Speaker: creators and like what she sees and paints as powerhouses, and they are powerhouses with a lot of power and money in education, are peddling, not necessarily maliciously, but falsely peddling, you know, from either ignorance or willful ignorance, you know, they're peddling this, this erroneous queuing system, which has been queuing specifically has, she has shown in her
Speaker: Her research, she says, her research that she's done.
Speaker: She spent many years in a PhD program.
Speaker: No, I'm just kidding.
Speaker: I got bitter and salty.
Speaker: But she's taught so many children how to read.
Speaker: Anyway, but she talks about that.
Speaker: Sorry, I got lost being salty.
Speaker: What was I just saying?
Speaker: You got lost in the salty broth of your...
Speaker: of your decompression.
Speaker: Just like, it just, the point of like- What distresses you about this?
Speaker: Let's get to that.
Speaker: Like what distresses you?
Speaker: Yeah, it distresses me that she- What is under that you think?
Speaker: She makes, basically, she says like, you know, she takes down Lucy Calkins.
Speaker: She takes down people who advocate reading recovery.
Speaker: She takes down Fontas and Pinnell and she takes down Heinemann who she sees as being, you know, she profiles each of them in a separate episode of the podcast, like throughout the series.
Speaker: And she acts like people who are pushing the science of reading don't have their own curricular products that they're selling and their own agenda and their own like that they don't need to make money as well.
Speaker: And I feel like she misses the critique here, which is that education is
Speaker: Researchers have been pushed to make money for their institutions.
Speaker: Some of them are making a lot of money for themselves, to be certain.
Speaker: I think from what I know about Lucy Calkins, I'm the most familiar with her stuff.
Speaker: I know she makes a lot of money for what she does and brings in a lot of money to Columbia for what she does.
Speaker: But
Speaker: to think that the science of reading people are only operating out of the goodness of their heart and giving their research away for free is, and giving free, you know, curriculum and professional development to schools is really naive, you know, and false, you know?
Speaker: And in that same vein, it just contributes to what's plagued
Speaker: our discussion and education around reading, which is pushing.
Speaker: It's like, instead of talking about, there's other things about whole language, which are really great and which really could benefit kids, but they just happen.
Speaker: A lot of the curricula that call themselves balanced literacy.
Speaker: She also conflates like balanced literacy and whole language a lot, which I understand them not to be the same thing.
Speaker: She's like,
Speaker: really kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Speaker: Like she's not trying to pull out this one viewing thing as, as a flaw in curricula that sell themselves as balanced literacy curricula.
Speaker: She's instead like giving parents like these key things that they should look for in their child's education.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: advocate that that curriculum be pulled.
Speaker: And I listened to the whole thing being like, maybe she's not trying to get parents to rise up against their schools.
Speaker: You know, maybe she's not being that way.
Speaker: But at the very end of the very last episode, she talks about like strides are being made, like laws are being passed that mandate the science of reading be taught in schools and that, you know, all teachers be trained in the science of reading.
Speaker: And I can speak from personal experience because I have taught in Rhode Island and Rhode Island became a right to read state, quote unquote, a couple of years ago.
Speaker: And through that law that was passed, it was passed to ensure that all teachers got trained in the science of reading.
Speaker: I think all teachers who teach
Speaker: I don't know how it worked, how they determine who needs to get it.
Speaker: I know special ed teachers need to get it because my husband did it.
Speaker: And if I had stayed at my job, I probably would have needed to as an ELA teacher.
Speaker: I think seven or eight of my colleagues got trained in science of reading, but those programs cost money.
Speaker: My colleagues did a program called Letters, which taught a systemic approach to teaching reading.
Speaker: And the letters, if you look it up, cost thousands of dollars per person to be trained in.
Speaker: Not to mention the hours of professional development, the time in their life that it took, the opportunities they missed for collaborating during school PD days.
Speaker: They had to go and sit in a room on Zoom and get trained in this.
Speaker: as seventh grade teachers, you know, to teach this approach to reading.
Speaker: And then when they got there and they asked questions about how it could be used in seventh grade context, they were told, oh, this is an approach mostly relevant to K through two teachers.
Speaker: This isn't really relevant.
Speaker: I don't really know how to make this relevant to you.
Speaker: But why were they training?
Speaker: Because it was like legally mandated?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so it just- Without thought to like context?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And to me, that's the problem with this approach to advocacy.
Speaker: You know, it's like mandating that it's like a slippery slope.
Speaker: If you think that this isn't going to be approached as a one size fits all thing, that all teachers need to adapt this, that once it becomes a law, it becomes tinged with, um,
Speaker: fear, you know, for teachers, if they don't teach the way that they're legally mandated to teach, um, it would cause a lot of schools to take up expensive professional development, um, trainings that might be very different from the ones they had before and then have to buy a whole new curricula that like, you know, um, is very expensive, just as expensive as the curricula she was critiquing, you know?
Speaker: Um, and, um,
Speaker: I just wish that it had been more balanced.
Speaker: She spends the whole podcasting on balanced literacy, but I wish that it could be more balanced, you know, just of like, I think she just misses the world of education is, is flawed and fraught with people making money off of their approach.
Speaker: You know, like no one approach that you're getting peddled, especially if it's a really popular approach is going to be free from some,
Speaker: overstatement of its abilities, you know, as a curriculum, there's no, the thing I took away from my graduate work is there's no one size fits all approach to teach children and adults different aspects of literacy, right?
Speaker: Or how to learn languages, how to learn how to write.
Speaker: There's a lot of things we can keep in our toolbox, but different things are going to work for different kids.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's kind of.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: What are you thinking?
Speaker: I railroaded.
Speaker: No, I mean, you kind of got into it near the end.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You got it kind of near the end with the toolbox.
Speaker: I think what gets me about this in general is it's part of a wider movement.
Speaker: It's been around for a long time.
Speaker: especially ever since the publishing of, what is the name of that report in the 80s under Reagan, A Nation in Crisis, something like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But how, we're not reading in our education.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Let me look it up really quick before I flub it.
Speaker: But keep going.
Speaker: I'm going to look up the report and then you go.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: And just this focus on best practices, best practices, this idea that if you just do X, it should work.
Speaker: It should work.
Speaker: And I think what gets lost in a lot of this for me is that, of course, research is a part of this.
Speaker: Of course, theory is a part of this.
Speaker: but on the ground practice and the ability to make sense in a way that makes sense for your context is a part of it.
Speaker: And that's the part that's really, really absent from the system as a whole.
Speaker: So there's just brain, human brains are too complicated.
Speaker: Learning, true learning is ambiguous.
Speaker: And I think that's something as a society we struggle to accept.
Speaker: And that's why we, and we create a school system that assumes learning is not ambiguous.
Speaker: We create a school system that assumes the learning is linear.
Speaker: And so whether one is embracing whole language or embracing phonics all the way, at the end of the day, in both instances, the issue for me is that there's no room for you, the teacher, making sense of it and then seeing what's working in their classroom.
Speaker: There's like that space isn't there.
Speaker: And so in a way where we are in the sense teachers are not really set up to be researchers.
Speaker: They're not set up to be designers.
Speaker: They're not set up as professionals in that way.
Speaker: They're set up to just do what works.
Speaker: And there's not one way that works, period, by definition.
Speaker: And if one believes that,
Speaker: I mean, it does not match my experience.
Speaker: And I mean, and research studies are helpful, but they only point in the direction of something.
Speaker: I mean, it's not, I mean, even physics, I mean, you describe something new and things change, right?
Speaker: It's based on observation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I'm really a fan of like really thinking of first principles and something else I find really funny about the discourse of quote unquote science of reading is I read it.
Speaker: I read an article by the journal Emily Hannaford and Hannaford.
Speaker: Is that it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Hannaford I think.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I really want to focus on her ideas, not her.
Speaker: But the one thing I wrote on, I read in one of the articles, it was like two sentences about how it's important for kids to understand there's an association between sounds and letters.
Speaker: And then it moves on to phonics.
Speaker: And it's interesting because
Speaker: That understanding that there's a relationship between sounds and letter names, that's called phonics.
Speaker: But to be able to do that, one has to be able to manipulate sounds by themselves.
Speaker: So without looking at the word run, for example, what is the first sound in run that one hears?
Speaker: And if a child struggles to...
Speaker: To do that, or just even identify the first sound in a word that they hear, not even see, that's one of the most predictive things.
Speaker: I think that's one of the strongest research-based things there is.
Speaker: If a kid's struggling with that, they're very likely going to struggle with phonics and with decoding.
Speaker: That brings me to this other point of
Speaker: I mean, we're talking about decoding, not reading.
Speaker: Reading is so complex.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Reading is an integration.
Speaker: It's self-monitoring.
Speaker: It's extending.
Speaker: It's enjoyment.
Speaker: And then there's decoding, which of course is a part of it.
Speaker: But I think another part of this discourse for me is let's be very specific.
Speaker: We're not talking about
Speaker: the science of reading we're talking about, if anything, the research and evidence base for helping people decode works, which obviously is important, but that's what it is.
Speaker: Like the whole language and like, for those in the know, like other ways of teaching reading that are more, are rich in many ways are much more based on meaning.
Speaker: As also they all work together.
Speaker: Like there's really, in my head, the queuing system was helpful at times.
Speaker: And then when it wasn't helpful, I wouldn't,
Speaker: lean into it.
Speaker: I would lean into other methods like I love Words Their Way.
Speaker: It's very developmental if people are looking for concrete approaches.
Speaker: Words Their Way recognizes the complexity of reading, including the spelling and all that jazz and writing.
Speaker: So that's just to say that, yeah, the deeper thing for me is how can we get to a place systematically where we're not so much about what's the right, what's the wrong way, but how can we allow communities and especially educators and within communities to be empowered to look at research, look at theory, have the space to do that.
Speaker: be paid and have the mental space and capacity to be able to grapple these very important questions, right?
Speaker: I think we're continuing to ram ourselves into a brick wall with this insistence on, this is the way, you know, this is the way, oh my gosh, it's so erroneous.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, and it's like, what podcast is going to come around in 10 years where it's like,
Speaker: I had to sit in a classroom and recite R, U, U, N, N, string it together.
Speaker: Because a lot of the approaches that are available now that take that systemic approach also have a lot of...
Speaker: You do everything together.
Speaker: Everything is lockstep, right?
Speaker: Uh-huh.
Speaker: It's not personalized.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And how many students are going to be – I think the critique I heard of those programs before was that students can just pretend to be getting it and chanting along with everyone but not really internalizing it because – Mm-hmm.
Speaker: with a whole language approach and a problem solving approach where you ask people to engage the context to make sense of a word they don't know, you're asking them to think critically about, they're asking them to comprehend, right?
Speaker: The sentence at the same time they're decoding, they're learning decoding skills.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: As I've worked with adults who I've worked mostly with adults who are learning English, I've worked with adults studying for their GED.
Speaker: So in that sense, I teach adult literacy, but literacy in the research world and in other worlds, literacy isn't just decoding, which often I think people who haven't studied it, they think of literacy purely as decoding a word and being able to read in that sense.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Literacy means, like you said, it's a rich thing.
Speaker: It's making sense of the written word, right?
Speaker: And that also means critiquing it internalized, you know, like making it make sense to you, connecting it to you, connecting it to other things, you know, right?
Speaker: And it's not just decoding words, right?
Speaker: So that's how I've understood literacy.
Speaker: And I think why I said thank you when you were talking about it and you mentioned it, that to me, I think, I guess, is another flaw.
Speaker: that I saw in just what I took with the framing of this podcast was it assumed reading alone.
Speaker: And she approached it almost like a non, like a, like a, of coarseness, you know, a kind of like commonsensical, you know, like reading is reading.
Speaker: Everyone knows what reading is.
Speaker: And these researchers who are trying to complicate it are making something that is very simple and straightforward, more complicated.
Speaker: And then it's,
Speaker: shutting down access to the written word because of it.
Speaker: I'm on a job search and I've encountered jobs where they're looking for a science of reading person because I'm a literacy person.
Speaker: I apply to them and see if I can spend my experience on how to fit it.
Speaker: But I always end up just kind of coming to loggerheads with people.
Speaker: who've in their minds have had experiences with older children who don't know how to decode words they feel like they should know how to decode, you know, and that to them is really disturbing.
Speaker: And they think how they slipped through the cracks to get to where they are, you know, and they can't decode words that a third grader should be able to decode.
Speaker: Well, if we're going anecdotally based on that, I have also experienced
Speaker: When I taught seventh grade, I encountered 150 students every year over the two years I was at this middle school.
Speaker: I encountered a handful of kids who couldn't decode.
Speaker: I encountered many children who could decode entire paragraphs and not tell me what they meant.
Speaker: And that to me...
Speaker: is just as disturbing as a kid who can't sound out a word.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that means they're just playing along to get along.
Speaker: I don't know if that's the phrase, but you know, it's like, they're trying just to like, they've learned the game of decoding, but they haven't learned what it means.
Speaker: And reading then becomes uninteresting and, and,
Speaker: and not meaningful to them.
Speaker: And that's what whole language advocates would want to caution against, right?
Speaker: An overprivileging on decoding such that it misses, they miss the point of what reading is, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think you're getting at how everything can work together, right?
Speaker: It's not inevitable that things have to be at loggerheads.
Speaker: I mean, the way I saw the 3-queuing system described as being used as dogmatic in and of itself, that was problematic, but that's never how I've been told to use it.
Speaker: When I read Fountas and Pinnell, that's never been the vibe I've gotten from reading them, which is interesting.
Speaker: It's a way to think about things.
Speaker: But again, I'm not ready to die on the sort of 3Q system in and of itself.
Speaker: In fact, at the end of the day, I really, really, really like a developmental approach to writing and reading that sees writing and reading together and a focus on phonological awareness, which is the awareness that sounds...
Speaker: that language is made out of sounds and words, right?
Speaker: And then getting to the realization that these sounds and words can have meaning is in and of itself a big aha, right?
Speaker: So maybe we talk a little bit about how we might approach reading ourselves.
Speaker: I mean, I imagine that people might be interested.
Speaker: I think one more thing to kind of get at, just one more point I was thinking I wanted to bring up and give us,
Speaker: Knowing we're making a podcast and we're wanting to make this because I think we both – we talk about pedagogy of the distressed, why we feel distressed as teachers is I think we worry that parents are going to listen to this.
Speaker: They're going to internalize anytime my –
Speaker: teacher asks my child to look at a picture or use context for meaning, they're teaching them bad reading skills because that's really what she said.
Speaker: Like the research is framed that the three queuing system is not only not the best approach to teach kids how to decode.
Speaker: It is in fact teaching them poor teachers.
Speaker: reading skills and that she says like bad readers quote unquote do those three things they're not the hallmark of good readers and so she adds this level of of fear and a little bit of hysteria which i feel like
Speaker: accompanies what concerns us so much about things like the reading wars where things swing so far from one direction to the other, right?
Speaker: It also revolves around other, you know, culture wars in our society that really rally around fear, right?
Speaker: And especially around children, right?
Speaker: who are, you know, some of the most vulnerable people in our society, you know, it's like, feels like the stakes are really high, especially when parents listen and they hear they don't like, nobody wants their child to be behind.
Speaker: And of course, like that's stratified that has different meanings for different, you know, children based on their community and their identity and their context.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think that what I really took issue with was just this,
Speaker: kind of false fear she's drumming up because not once did I hear a statistic quoted that all of a sudden we're graduating classes and classes across, you know, different contexts, across like races, across like public school, you know, it's like, like we are graduating lower and lower rates across all different contexts of children who can't, like we're seeing people graduating from high school and testing very low on like reading assessments.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's like, that's not,
Speaker: That information wasn't shared, nor has there been a discussion about that, right, in research.
Speaker: So it's kind of like she presents this problem that children aren't learning how to read.
Speaker: Like that's her thesis without any demonstration that that's actually happening.
Speaker: And I feel like so often education can be a field really ripe for critique from everybody because everybody, especially people who have parents who have children in the system, but even people who have gone to school themselves feel like they can have a perspective on it because they went to school, right?
Speaker: Or they...
Speaker: see it, even if they don't have children in school, they feel like they have stakes in it because it's like the future of society depends on our education system.
Speaker: And I think this like way that it, science of reading is being drummed up as like the only, like this necessary intervention is, is harmful in that it pits researchers against each other.
Speaker: It pits the,
Speaker: students and it pits like parents against teachers um and it even though she's said a few times throughout she doesn't want to demonize teachers she does it in a way to say well they didn't know what they were doing like you know like if it's not demonizing it's like deprofessionalizing it's kind of dehumanizing they just didn't know like pitying almost right yeah i mean that yeah it doesn't really invite collaboration i can tell you that
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just from my experience working with science of reading people in the past.
Speaker: Quote unquote science of reading.
Speaker: And I just, yeah, to think now, okay, about like the future and like where I did find alignment.
Speaker: And like I said, she missed the story to me.
Speaker: critique, please critique these people that are coming in and making mega, mega bucks off of schools, you know, like, please critique them and please think about why teachers aren't making more like why children are there's, we spend so much money per pupil on children, especially in our under-resourced districts, you know, like relative, like we spend federal dollars, you know, at, at high, high, not high, but you know, like we spend federal dollars like in, in certain schools, you know,
Speaker: But they often, this money goes into, often in my experience, from what I've seen, it's like funding coaching, funding professional development.
Speaker: And it doesn't go into investing into teachers directly.
Speaker: It doesn't pay for a higher salary.
Speaker: It doesn't cut our workload.
Speaker: The number one thing I think most teachers would like to see is just smaller class sizes.
Speaker: Class sizes haven't shrunk.
Speaker: It's like...
Speaker: It's like, to me, go for that in general.
Speaker: And science of reading plays into that.
Speaker: There are plenty of people peddling science of reading PDs, science of reading curricula, and this mandate to be...
Speaker: I was like, you are really smart with your critiques of fidelity to curriculum, but like the demand, demand, fidelity, fealty.
Speaker: What would you say?
Speaker: Demand fidelity.
Speaker: That's how people say.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Demand fidelity to their curricula in such a way that like you can't do anything else, but exactly what's written down on the paper.
Speaker: Critique that.
Speaker: Critique that that happens in education and that it disproportionately affects... Regardless of the ideology.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It disproportionately affects urban and under-resourced districts.
Speaker: And it's like, talk about that.
Speaker: Talk about whose research gets privileged.
Speaker: Talk about
Speaker: researchers of color not being listened to talk about qualitative research not being taken up seriously you know it's like yeah talking about research and coming from teachers not being taken up seriously you know um i would love to hear more of that and yeah yeah anyway so to me it was just like
Speaker: Same old, same old Reading Wars stuff repackaged with an extra sense of fear.
Speaker: And to me, what causes it distress is it's like packaging seemingly to the public.
Speaker: It's like made as a publicly consumed podcast, right?
Speaker: That's designed for anyone to listen to and take their talking points away from and make change in their districts.
Speaker: So that's where I'm at with it.
Speaker: What were you thinking about while I was ranting?
Speaker: No, I think we're landing a little deeper into what about this bothers us, right?
Speaker: It's not that it bothers us.
Speaker: I feel that, of course, phonics is important.
Speaker: But it's this idea that there's a way again, like there's teaching is such a science and an art.
Speaker: And for me, teaching is fundamentally about asking questions and answering them.
Speaker: So what is it about our kids that are struggling to read?
Speaker: Maybe we will take more of a systematic approach.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, that does work for lots of kids.
Speaker: Lots of kids that just learn to read because they learn to read.
Speaker: Reading isn't a natural process, right?
Speaker: I mean, I will say, and we're definitely not going to get into next, like what we would do.
Speaker: That could be a part two if we want.
Speaker: But it's of interest to people.
Speaker: But I will say in my 11 years of teaching, I've never, I've never, I have had children come into kindergarten.
Speaker: And I work with two to five-year-olds now.
Speaker: But for eight years, they taught in first grade, second grade, and kindergarten for the most part.
Speaker: I never had a child who got to kindergarten who had trouble reading, who already could identify the sounds from hearing them, who could identify words when they rhymed, who could make rhyme, that could do all of that.
Speaker: Again, without even looking at a page, that's phonological awareness.
Speaker: And it's interesting, that's very, very absent from all of the talk about science, quote, quote of readings.
Speaker: Again, the strongest science of reading is phonological awareness.
Speaker: Google it.
Speaker: That is definitely the strongest.
Speaker: And lots of times skipping the phonics too quickly results, hampers kids growth.
Speaker: But that's, that can be a topic for the next one, which informs my approach in general.
Speaker: And, but I have had kids come into kindergarten who knew all their letters, but really struggled to identify the first sound in their name when they heard it, who really struggled to identify the last sound in a word when they heard it.
Speaker: And those kids, most of the time were the ones who struggled the most to read, even if they knew their letters.
Speaker: Because they didn't have that fundamental understanding of sound and sound manipulation that is so important for reading that happens.
Speaker: So again, I would take science, quote unquote, science of reading more seriously if it actually more explicitly talked about that.
Speaker: It was more explicitly part of their approach.
Speaker: And second of all,
Speaker: who I would really love for it to be more of a collaboration.
Speaker: I mean, imagine if you go into a school and it feels like, wow, they're really going to 3Q system.
Speaker: What about the 3Q system is so compelling to you?
Speaker: Oh, it's simple and stuff.
Speaker: Okay, well, let me show you this way of thinking that they consider and then have things speak for themselves.
Speaker: The downside of that is that it takes a little time.
Speaker: But ironically, spending the time to plant the seeds, the tree
Speaker: people with respect and to let people see for themselves how things work over like in a decade from now I would imagine a lot of success because everyone is part of that conversation and growing whereas as here down here's this way of thinking down your throat like I wouldn't 10 years from now will actually probably not be as where we want to be I mean a reminder to people that were what was it the 80s when a lot of this started late 80s we're 20 yeah I was 30 years into this
Speaker: I was doing some cursory research and there's a very famous book from the fifties called why Johnny can't read.
Speaker: And it was person taking down what was the whole word approach, which was advocating that students learn whole words, not, you know, phonics, no, not the discreet, you know, I don't know.
Speaker: Phonemes.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: And this person like said that, you know, they needed, you need to focus more on, you know, phonological awareness and it brought in a wave of, you know,
Speaker: phonics first kind of systemic, systematic approaches to teaching reading, right?
Speaker: And so that happened in the 50s, late 50s, I think, and continued.
Speaker: And then in the 70s, like the whole language movement was born, right?
Speaker: And then in the 90s, it swung back the other way because there was some well-publicized districts that saw slides in their reading achievement, right?
Speaker: And, and, and,
Speaker: The last bone I'll pick about this podcast is she critiques the idea that research in education became politicized so that phonics-based approaches to teaching reading became associated with a conservative agenda in the United States, specifically tied to the politics of George Bush.
Speaker: Education research has always been politicized.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's not that old.
Speaker: And she said, oh, a lot of teachers like miss the science of reading because they associated it with George Bush.
Speaker: And it's like, well, let's think about.
Speaker: Do you want to talk about.
Speaker: What else was happening?
Speaker: It's like even just looking at education agenda.
Speaker: He was publishing like he was advocating for like failing schools and using test scores.
Speaker: He like ushered in this like massive like right.
Speaker: boost and standardized testing and like grading teachers based on how their children did on standardized testing, which many researchers have critiqued as racist, like ableist, like a whole litany of things that are not good for children.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it's like, why a bit?
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm like, I got really tired of it.
Speaker: I'm not going to call someone out.
Speaker: I'm not going to say it.
Speaker: I shouldn't do it.
Speaker: But I need to be civil.
Speaker: But like, it's like, that's why.
Speaker: And she did not mention once.
Speaker: No Child Left Behind did not pass her lips.
Speaker: And I'm just like.
Speaker: you know.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a little weird to me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like, if you're going to report on something, like, maybe analyze a little more why something's not being a, yeah.
Speaker: There's a lot missing there that leaves me with many questions about what's going on there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But, like, to summarize, I'm going to keep repeating this, say, you and I are all about teaching kids to read it, all the different ways they learn to read it.
Speaker: It's just, like, let us be able to do that.
Speaker: And why we want to talk, like, just a plug for this podcast.
Speaker: Like, it's like, let's listen more to people who have worked with learners trying to do the things, like teaching them to read, that you –
Speaker: are advocating for.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's like, why only we all want, we all want the same thing in that way.
Speaker: You know, we do want people to read.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we need to listen to more people in practice, how they learn, how people learn matters.
Speaker: I think that's also process product is being emphasized way more of a process, but you know, that's a very capitalist American way of seeing things.
Speaker: And I don't think that's unrelated to other things such as racism and white supremacy and all that jazz.
Speaker: I really buried the lead on that, right?
Speaker: I should have mentioned up front that she had first talked about No Child Left Behind.
Speaker: Like, maybe I lost it.
Speaker: People made it this far.
Speaker: She probably didn't talk about standardized testing and the regime of standardized testing he ushered in.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So anyway.
Speaker: Anyway.
Speaker: We just want more complexity and to hold complexity.
Speaker: But the system struggles with that.
Speaker: Yeah, it does.
Speaker: So many places we could go.
Speaker: And the way people think they need to advocate for themselves, unfortunately, is also born of this system that pits people against each other.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And asks you to demonize people, even though you say you're not demonizing people.
Speaker: It's like inevitably...
Speaker: you know, it just, yeah.
Speaker: I would welcome a conversation with Emily Hanford.
Speaker: I would call it Emily to Emily.
Speaker: And we would talk about, you could be the moderator and I could fight her.
Speaker: No, I'm just kidding.
Speaker: Oh my gosh.
Speaker: The voice of reason, as I clearly got too fired up listening to this podcast.
Speaker: No, no, not the voice.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: We'll contain it together.
Speaker: I'm sure I'll have moments where I'm like... Yeah, I know.
Speaker: We'll have to take breaks.
Speaker: We'll tag in for each other to go shake our head and what?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, we definitely not going to get to actual things.
Speaker: But we can think about if there's a part two.
Speaker: But it's exciting.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: Are we getting to the end of this for now, you think?
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: Thanks for letting me rant and tell you about a fun... I don't know why I said fun.
Speaker: A painful experience I had on my road trip.
Speaker: I always appreciate your thoughts.
Speaker: You really helped process and bring to light things that I wanted to take from that.
Speaker: critique so yeah I'm looking forward to our next conversation I know I know me too and for those listening we do have an email we don't check it we do we could check it again what if there's an email in it what the email oh can you imagine about the podcast that we never ever ever posted about yeah the ghost about the ghost in the email yeah
Speaker: um but anyway it's pedagogy of the distressed at gmail.com uh but if that's too difficult that's an email right yeah pedagogy of the distressed yeah pedagogy like the podcast name at gmail at gmail.com so yeah the podcast name that hopefully you can see yeah um
Speaker: But please send us an email with that pedagogy.
Speaker: See, I already misspelled it.
Speaker: That's the issue with this long email.
Speaker: What was the password?
Speaker: We shouldn't say it on... Yeah, we don't want to get hacked from all of our listeners.
Speaker: But do you feel a little less distressed at the moment, Emily?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It was really helpful to process.
Speaker: And I just need to not get caught up in it because I think the thing that happens in these situations, in this polarized world we live in, you know, is that...
Speaker: You know, we think that, you know, when we're in our car just processing everything, it can feel lonely, you know, that everyone's against you and what you think is right.
Speaker: When really I think we have more companionship and, you know,
Speaker: people who share our values and approaches in key ways than, you know, we always understand.
Speaker: And that's why I love talking with you because I always feel so affirmed and I can't wait for more conversations that do that.
Speaker: Me, likewise.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Very life-giving.
Speaker: I was so excited for today.
Speaker: Me too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: With that, thank you all.
Speaker: Hasta luego.
Speaker: Bye.
Speaker: And we'll see you next time on Pedagogy of the Distressed.
Speaker: Con Rafa y Elmo.
Speaker: Ciao.
Speaker: Cute outro music.
