I’ve been thinking about war. Not actual war, obviously. I have the luxury of writing this from a safe country where my principal occupational hazard today is getting told off on Facebook. But I am thinking about what happens when a profession is engaged in a serious contest of ideas and some of the people who know perfectly well what is wrong decide to sit it out.

Education is filled with this. People often speak to me privately, over dinner, in messages, at conferences, and after the microphone has been switched off. They know which practices are unsupported. They know which claims don’t withstand scrutiny. They know where children have been badly served. Some of them say they feel every bit as strongly about it as I do. Then the argument happens in public and they disappear. That silence has consequences:

• It leaves the public argument to the people who are prepared to fight it.

• It allows bad ideas to appear far less contested than they actually are.

• It means somebody else takes the abuse, reputational risk and commercial risk while those who agree privately preserve their market share and wait to see who wins.

I understand why people do it. Schools are customers. Teachers are customers. Education departments are customers. Speaking plainly can cost you goodwill, invitations and money. It can cost me those things too. Yet somebody has to say these things, and before we get to the usual discussion about collegiality, kindness and whether people like me could perhaps be a little less…difficult…about all this, I want to explain why I think it’s important to speak out.

Who pays when we get it wrong?

I was talking recently with a colleague who works in the specialist school sector. A mainstream school had approached me about professional development in vocabulary instruction. The principal explained that the school has several Inclusive Education classes and asked whether the professional learning would cater for those students too.

My colleague was surprised that the question even needed to be asked. Of course vocabulary instruction is appropriate. Of course children with intellectual disabilities and autism are entitled to be taught words, concepts and the knowledge those words represent.

It reminded me of some work I did years ago with several students at a specialist school. I remember wondering why nobody seemed to be teaching them some of the things we routinely taught students in mainstream settings. So much seemed to be focused on functioning in the community. Those things are important, of course, but they cannot constitute the whole of an education. The students I worked with were interested in this word-knowledge. They were excited by it. They wanted to learn, just like anyone else.

My colleague, who knows this sector far better than I do, described a history in which care, behaviour and preparation for life in the community have sometimes taken precedence over education. She also told me that things are beginning to change. She is currently working with special schools on the Reading Rope and literacy, which is encouraging. But the conversation also got me thinking about marginalisation in general.

• Think about the child with an intellectual disability whose opportunities to acquire literacy may already be limited.

• Think about the child whose behaviour has become the focus while their educational needs disappear behind it.

• Think about the teenager who has spent years experiencing failure at school.

• Think about the child whose family cannot simply buy private intervention when school instruction fails.

If you think the small details of reading instruction don’t matter, think about the already marginalised.

These children have very little room for us to be wrong. The consequences of our mistakes are not evenly distributed. An adult who attends poor professional development can read another book. A consultant who discovers five years from now that something they have been teaching is wrong can change their slides. A school that realises a program hasn’t delivered what was promised can buy another one. Children don’t get those years back, and the children with the fewest alternatives are likely to pay the highest price.

That is why I argue about details other people dismiss as pedantry. I want claims tested. I want people to produce evidence when they say something works. I become irritated when anecdote is presented as research, and I don’t think decades of professional tradition entitle an idea to indefinite protection from scrutiny. Children’s futures are being decided while we have these arguments. Please. Have some perspective.

Silence is a red flag

There is an ever-changing cast of consultants in education who attract considerable admiration. People recommend them, partner with them, invite them to speak and describe them as leaders in the field. Before joining the applause, I suggest looking at what they have been prepared to say when something important was actually contested.

Silence is a red flag for me.

You might argue that the quiet ones have a useful role. Perhaps they keep doors open, make people feel safe enough to change or get into rooms that more outspoken people cannot enter. Maybe they do. But safe for whom? Whose comfort are we protecting? If keeping adults comfortable requires silence about practices that are failing children, particularly children who are already marginalised, I struggle to see the virtue in that silence.

There are circumstances in which silence is somewhat understandable. People have employers, rent/mortgages, families, and precarious professional positions. I don’t expect everybody to conduct their professional life as I conduct mine. There are, however, also people with established businesses, substantial platforms and considerable professional security who have built very comfortable reputations while rarely saying anything that might cost them a customer. I find that much harder to admire.

When children’s futures are at stake, I think persistent silence in the face of something you know to be wrong is morally bereft. I also think it tells us something about a person. If I’m choosing a consultant, collaborator or employee, I pay attention to whether that person has been prepared to speak when speaking carried a cost.

Trustworthiness, in my view, is directly related to that kind of courage. It’s easy to have impeccable principles in private. It’s easy to tell your friends what you really think. It’s easy to agree enthusiastically with the outspoken people behind closed doors while leaving them to take the hits in public. It’s also very easy to emerge once the battle has been won and explain that, actually, you were on that side all along.

I don’t get to dictate anyone else’s behaviour, but I do get to notice it. So do your potential clients.

“Why can’t we all just get along?”

Then there is another response to professional conflict, one that has been particularly evident during a recent round of Reading Recovery argy-bargy. “Why does everybody have to be so hostile? Why can’t we debate respectfully? Why can’t we acknowledge that everyone has something to offer? Why can’t we all just be kind?”

There is a particular kind of professional posturing in this that presents staying above the fray as evidence of wisdom and robust disagreement as a regrettable failure of collegiality. It offers a wonderfully comfortable moral position too. You don’t have to examine the evidence, say who you think is right, risk offending anyone or risk any business. You can simply deplore the tone.

Meanwhile, the substantive questions remain unanswered.

This is the part I find particularly irritating. Someone can appear thoughtful, moderate and morally superior simply by disapproving of the argument itself. The people actually making claims, producing evidence, challenging practices and risking being wrong are recast as the problem because they are making everybody uncomfortable.

There is a difference between respecting people and protecting ideas. Ideas don’t require our kindness. They need to withstand scrutiny. If an idea about literacy instruction is wrong, I want it challenged. If evidence contradicts something I am doing, I want to know. If an instructional practice is contributing to children failing to become proficient readers and writers, the discomfort of the adults defending it is very low on my list of concerns.

Tolerance sounds virtuous until you ask what you’re being asked to tolerate. There are plenty of professional disagreements in which generosity, compromise and a willingness to accommodate different approaches are entirely appropriate. But tolerance of bad ideas has consequences when those ideas determine what happens to children in classrooms.

Again, think about who has the least protection from those consequences: The child with a disability. The child already struggling. The child living in disadvantage. The child whose behaviour is masking educational failure. The child who will eventually leave school and perhaps enter systems such as youth justice having experienced years of academic failure along the way. We can’t treat them as abstract casualties in an intellectual dispute.

Arguing is good for you

Having made public professional disagreement sound approximately as appealing as being in the Somme circa 1916, I should add that it really isn’t that bad. In fact, arguing in public has been one of the most useful forms of professional development I’ve ever had.

Having somebody tell me I’m wrong forces me to examine what I think. Having somebody challenge an argument makes me sharpen it. Being asked for evidence makes me go and find it. Encountering a position I dislike makes me understand it properly enough to explain why I disagree with it. Occasionally, inevitably, somebody else turns out to have a point. All of that has made me better at what I do.

I think there is something intellectually lazy about rarely/never arguing. If your ideas aren’t exposed to opposition, you never discover where the weak bits are. You can spend years surrounded by people politely agreeing with you and mistake the absence of challenge for being right.

You also get better at disagreement by doing it. You learn when to push and when you’ve misunderstood somebody. You discover which arguments survive scrutiny and which ones need to be abandoned. You learn that someone attacking an idea you hold is not necessarily attacking you. Eventually you may even discover that somebody being cross with you on Facebook need not lead to an existential crisis.

So I’d like to see more of us speak up. You don’t have to be rude, spend your Sunday arguing with strangers on Facebook or develop my apparently inexhaustible appetite for walking directly towards an argument. Just say what you think when it matters. Challenge bad ideas. Defend good ones. Bring evidence. Change your mind when you need to. Let people disagree with you and risk being unpopular occasionally.

Most of all, don’t leave it to the same handful of people every time. The people who pay most dearly for our professional cowardice are unlikely to be the ones with the platforms, consulting businesses or comfortable reputations. They’re the children sitting in our classrooms.

You want respect? Talk the talk.

Yesterday I spent the whole day with 5 leaders from a K-12 school north of Sydney. Their incredibly supportive principal ducked in from time to time whilst doing everything else he needed to do, and you could see he had complete trust in his team.

Indeed, these teachers have been on a long journey, the best part of a decade, to find training and coaching that will help the whole school keep on improving in delivery of high quality literacy instruction.

They have consistently risen above the state and national average in standardized tests over the past ten years and are known far and wide as a highly effective school.

It warms my heart to see such dedication, but it also makes me wonder, with sadness, about how much easier it would have been if the training those teachers received in the first place, as part of their tertiary studies in education, had been aligned with what is known about how children read and learn.

Think about it. A DECADE. A decade spent wondering why some kids didn’t make it. A decade having to unlearn the preposterous notions about reading and learning that the majority of teacher training courses promote.

I have spent much of my career working with children who are damaged by dysteachia (the inability of educators to facilitate learning). I have now almost completely retired from tutoring in order to focus on school consulting. My works on spelling, grammar, language, reading and writing were born of frustration at having to remediate bad teaching and advocate for children who really ought to have had a better deal.

Even yesterday, I received a copy of a school report on one of my students who first came to me with very little alphabetic knowledge, zero understanding of the orthography and no notion of morphology after FIVE YEARS of schooling, and it said:

“She uses a range of reading strategies to comprehend texts and can interpret sequences of images in texts. She has made steady progress in Reading [sic] and when she comes across an unknown word should continue to focus on chunking and blending, as well as reading on and thinking about what word would make sense in the sentence.” [my emphasis added]

I will leave the word “chunking” alone in my analysis below, but if you know me, you know how much I HATE that stupid word. Let’s pick our battles and pull the rest of it apart:

Ranger danger

“…a range of reading strategies to comprehend texts…” – There’s that vague ‘range’ again. What range? What is in that range? Which part of that range should she prioritise? Which part of that range will lead her to be a better speller? You don’t actually know do you? Does that not cause you to question the wisdom of this prescribed ‘range’? Does it exonerate you when your students (who aren’t having private tutoring) fail to make progress? What do you wonder about them? Did they not select the appropriate strategy from the ‘range’ and that’s kind of their fault or what? You don’t know, do you? And you don’t know how to find out either, because you assessed these kids using running records. And so, in six months, they will leave your class literally none the wiser. That’s deeply shameful.

Because hieroglyphics are still a thing, apparently

“…interpret sequences of images in texts…”: what even IS that? I can tell you this, though, it’s not reading. What have you been told? Is there something in your reporting rubric that allows you to evaluate and report on your students’ ability to look at pictures? That’s something a monkey can do. Is this the standard you’re setting for your students? Is it in your rubric to help you feel better about not teaching them to read and write well? Seriously, do you have no cause to question the value of this item in the rubric?

Too hard basket

“…as well as reading on and thinking about what word would make sense in the sentence.”: Reading on and thinking about what word would make sense is death to working memory, death to comprehension, death to orthographic mapping. She cannot be allowed to develop these habits of poor readers. She is already a poor reader. She doesn’t need to be encouraged to get worse. Every single week for eighteen months I’ve had to say to her, “Don’t skip, don’t guess, pronounce all the sounds from left to right.” I have actual video footage of her sounding through and successfully reading words like ‘creation’, ‘oxygen’, ‘clusters’ and so on. Each time I had to waste a part of her valuable lesson by reminding her to do this. No wonder, if what you’re telling her, day in and day out is the exact opposite.

My student has made significant improvement in reading, going from well below the normal range on all measures (regular, irregular and non-word single reading) to below or within the normal range. Her spelling has improved by two years since beginning our lessons 18 months ago.

This has been the direct result of high quality instruction that has caused her to stop guessing and read the actual words on the actual page. It has been the direct result of showing her, explicitly and systematically, how the writing system works and building her background knowledge as we did it. It took a while, and she still has a lot of catching up to do before her final year of primary school.

And yet her teacher blithely, innocently even, prescribes techniques that can and do negate our hard work because the teacher has absolutely no idea about how children read and learn.

And much as it makes me mad to watch adults in positions of authority cast these blights on the progress of vulnerable children, it’s doubly clear, now that these adults have become my own students, that they are not the problem. Their degrees are the problem. The piece of paper they paid tens of thousands of dollars for are not fit for purpose.

Will it take a decade before this teacher changes her approach? How long until she realises the damage she’s doing? My student doesn’t have a decade. She needs high quality teaching all day every day now but her teacher, and every teacher in that school and in every school in the anglophone world isn’t trained for that at teacher college.

They have to seek high quality training elsewhere after suffering the painful realisation that they’ve let a whole bunch of kids down. They have to pay consultants like me to show them why the bad stuff is bad, why the good stuff is good, and where to get the information they need to support all their learners. How come that’s my job? That shouldn’t be my job. I shouldn’t have to offer comforting phrases to adults who regret their interactions with children. It’s distressing and sad for everyone.

I know that in a lot of cases, we have to wait until those teacher trainers in colleges all over the world, with their flawed philosophies about reading and learning, leave the profession. Such is their hold on their jobs and their status that they cannot and will not improve. So year after year, decade after decade, they churn out under-equipped graduates because their jobs and their feelings are so much more important than the lives of well-meaning teachers and children in need.

For what it’s worth, my message is simple: If you, in your faculty of education, spend time teaching teachers that ‘ranger danger’, ‘hieroglyphics’ and the ‘too hard basket’ above are worthwhile for them to learn, then I for one hold you in the highest contempt. You are harming people. You should be sued by the teachers and families you’ve misled, stripped of your titles, retrained and never allowed to work with teachers again until you can demonstrate understanding of the process of literacy acquisition that goes beyond Ken Goodman, Frank Smith and Marie Clay’s twisted, demonstrably false garbage.

There’s a particular kind of exchange I see increasingly often on social media: someone describes an education problem involving a child, and within minutes, a a handful of people who have never met the child is trying to work out what might be going on and what should be done about it. It’s usually well intentioned, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.

It comes up with frightening regularity and it is one of the areas where education and health have parallels: groups and forums dedicated to people seeking remedies, from fairly innocuous non-mainstream alternatives through to genuinely ill people being encouraged into dangerous methodologies such as freebirth and black salve.

We’ve all been tempted to ask a professional a casual question. “Oh, you’re a chiropodist. I have a painful nail on my big toe. Should I do anything?”

There’s nothing particularly sinister about that (unless you’re the poor chiropodist), but putting a case onto social media and asking a collection of strangers what they think you should do is different.

Recently, someone asked me about a student whose spelling “will not stick”. She gave me some details about the instruction the student had received and the difficulties she was seeing, and asked whether I could help make sense of it. I declined.

Much as I would love to help, it would be unethical for me to offer advice without knowing the student’s history and the details of past instruction. Without that information, I risk giving the wrong advice.

I run a tutoring practice precisely so these situations can be properly dealt with. That isn’t me drumming up business. In fact, I’d be perfectly happy for the educator to consult another appropriately qualified professional. The point is that the child deserves more than guesses assembled in a Facebook thread.

Someone then stepped in with a long list of questions for the educator to consider. They ranged across spelling, reading, handwriting, posture, pencil grip, sensory sensitivities, executive functioning, hypermobility, EDS, motor processes, vocabulary and comprehension.

The person offering these questions was very clear that she was not a professional in the area. She was a parent who had done a great deal of research while seeking help for her own child. Her intention was plainly to help, and her own experience had taught her that asking questions can eventually lead you towards the right professional. I understand that. However, the context here was different. This was an educator responsible for making educational decisions about somebody else’s child. Once we start generating possible explanations for that child’s difficulties, particularly across multiple clinical and educational domains, we are moving beyond general discussion. Good intentions don’t remove that problem.

I was trained early and rigorously in a range of assessment methods while working in private practice. Later, in a speech pathology clinic, I was trained to administer and interpret a standardised spelling test. I was not a speech pathologist, and I never pretended to be one. I knew where the boundaries of my training and expertise lay, including when a student needed to be referred elsewhere. Over the years, I’ve continued to add to my assessment training and now use a robust battery to begin building a picture of what is happening for a student.

I say begin deliberately.

We are responsive tutors. We observe our students, confer with them, refer to their external assessments where appropriate, and change our approach over time. We don’t simply apply a program. There is no single path.

That is why putting a case onto social media and asking for suggestions is such a poor substitute for professional consultation. The people responding do not have the child in front of them. They do not have the history. They do not have the assessment data. They do not know exactly what has been taught, how it has been taught, or how the child has responded. They are working from a paragraph on Facebook.

There is already enough guesswork in literacy instruction.

So if you find yourself needing advice about an individual student, I think there are better questions to ask:

• Who is within my professional vicinity who has the appropriate expertise?

• What information do I actually have?

• What information am I missing?

• Is this within my scope, or do I need to refer?

Seeking another professional opinion is entirely appropriate. Referral is entirely appropriate. Asking a qualified colleague to help interpret assessment data is entirely appropriate.

What we should be discouraging is the idea that a public social media thread is an appropriate place to work out what might be going on with an individual child.

And that applies to those of us answering as well as those asking.

Sometimes the most professional answer we can give is: I don’t know enough about this child to advise you.

The latest NAPLAN results are in and, once again, the commentary has begun.

One in three Australian students is below expectation in reading. Cue the familiar chorus: “Poverty. Screens. COVID. Parents. Phonics. Attendance. Motivation. Teacher workload.”

Everyone has a theory and some do list valid and significant factors, but here’s mine, prefaced with a little story as to how I came to hold this theory in the first place:

Back when I was a newly graduated and fresh-faced linguist with qualifications in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (or TEFL, as it was known back then), I decided that I really liked working with students, so I got a job in a literacy clinic.

This was private practice, not a government funded organisation and not part of a larger system. Our bread and butter was student success. Without it, we would have sunk. That’s what distinguishes private practice from public systems: instant accountability.

Back then, and to this day, none of us batted an eyelid at our students’ success. That was a given. They came in unable to read, they left reading. We assessed them, identified what they needed, taught it explicitly and consistently, and watched them improve.

No-brainer.

It’s rather like taking a car to a mechanic. It doesn’t matter what model it is, where it came from or how old it is. The mechanic assesses the problem, does the work and sends you on your way. There are some cars that require a lot of work, and there is a small number of cars that simply won’t be able to get on the road, but it’s not a full third of all cars.

Students are no different.

If a child struggles, we don’t blame the child. We simply work harder, stay consistent and keep teaching.

So what really piqued my interest was my observation that many of these students were being told to do strange things when they encountered an unfamiliar word. I’ve written about whole language, three-cueing, and balanced literacy elsewhere. In fact I wrote an entire book about it and other myths and legends in literacy instruction so I won’t go into that too much except to say that at first, we blamed their teachers.

And we were wrong.

Of course there are teachers who resist professional development. I call them the blissful plodders. There are others who cling passionately to outdated ideas despite overwhelming evidence. They’re the rigid idealists.

But they are not the majority.

Most teachers I meet are curious, hardworking professionals who desperately want to do right by their students. They spend evenings attending webinars, weekends reading books, holidays paying for conferences, often with their own money, trying to fill the gaps. This then raises a rather uncomfortable question:

If teachers aren’t successfully reaching a full third of Australian children, what is it they don’t know?

And why don’t they know it?

Here’s the part that usually gets me into trouble:

Teaching children to read is relatively easy.

There.

I said it.

You can quote me.

That doesn’t mean teaching itself is easy. Managing behaviour isn’t easy. Supporting trauma isn’t easy. Meeting the needs of thirty children day in, day out in one room isn’t easy.

But teaching people to read?

That’s not the difficult bit.

Reading is not magic. It isn’t an art form bestowed upon the gifted. It isn’t a mysterious process that only works for two thirds of children.

Reading develops when knowledgeable teachers explicitly teach children how our writing system works and provide sufficient practice for those skills to become automatic.

So if one third of Australian children are struggling, we need to stop pretending that reading itself is impossibly complicated.

The real question is whether we’ve equipped teachers with the knowledge they need. Increasingly, I don’t believe we have.

For years we’ve demanded that teachers undertake more professional learning. Buy another course. Attend another conference. Read another book. Watch another webinar. Think about how extraordinary that is.

Imagine qualifying as a mechanic and then discovering that nobody had actually taught you how engines work. Or graduating as a physiotherapist only to realise you never learned anatomy. We would never accept that.

Yet we routinely accept teachers graduating without a deep understanding of orthography and its parts: phonology, morphology, etymology, handwriting, spelling, sentence construction and written expression. Then we wonder why they’re desperately searching for answers five, ten or twenty years into their careers.

Professional learning should deepen expertise. It should not be delivering the foundational knowledge that universities failed to provide.

This is also why schools become vulnerable to commercial programs, consultants and competing ideologies. When graduates leave university without a secure understanding of how reading and writing develop, somebody else will inevitably fill the vacuum. Sometimes that’s with excellent principles and practices. Sometimes it isn’t.

I’ve spent over three decades teaching struggling readers. I’ve trained thousands of teachers across Australia and internationally. Sadly I’ve spent much of my time helping educators, schools and systems to unlearn what they’ve once held as true about orthography. Learning is hard, but unlearning is even harder.

We continue to debate how schools teach reading, while universities continue graduating teachers who must search elsewhere for the knowledge they were entitled to receive in the first place. Every year another cohort enters classrooms underprepared. Every year another cohort of children pays the price.

So as the headlines roll in and another round of hand-wringing begins over the latest NAPLAN results, perhaps we should stop asking what’s wrong with children/teachers/schools, and start asking a far more uncomfortable question:

Why are we still graduating teachers without giving them the basic knowledge they need to teach children to read?

For the past two decades, literacy instruction has undergone a powerful and necessary reform movement. As a result of several national inquiries into the teaching of literacy, focus on phonological awareness, phonics and the alphabetic principle has helped drag countless classrooms away from guessing, cueing and balanced literacy. But something else is happening now. A new wave is emerging, and it’s changing the way in which educators think about the English writing system itself.

I’m always reminded of a talk given by Dr Steve Dykstra where he outlined three major papers in 1967:

The Psycholinguistic Guessing Game by Ken Goodman

Learning to Read: The Great Debate by Jeanne Chall

The First Grade Studies by Bond and Dykstra (no relation)

He said that whatever approach educators take, there are several similarities:

“We agree about reading for meaning. We agree on the importance of writing. We agree comprehension is the goal of everything. We all want children to love reading. We all want children to be successful. We’re all sincere. We’re all dedicated. We all work hard.

There is one great difference:

What is the thing to do when you come to a word you don’t recognize?

That’s it. That’s the disagreement. Every difference flows from how we answer that question.”

For decades, that was the central question in literacy instruction. But there are some new questions that stretch beyond the works of Goodman, Smith, Clay, Chall, Orton-Gilllingham, Moats etc.:

1. How are words built?

2. How do we remember them?

Having watched literacy instruction evolve over three decades, I think we’re witnessing a second major wave of reform. The old wave correctly established the importance of phonology. The new wave is forcing us to recognise that phonology alone cannot adequately explain the structure of English orthography.

To help me think about it, I drew up two lists of strengths and weaknesses of both waves.

OLD WAVE

STRENGTHS

• Rejected guessing

• Eliminated early reading material that forced guessing through pictures and repetition

• Re-established the importance of phonology

• Created pathways for teachers to explore related fields such as cognitive science, linguistics and educational psychology

• Brought systematic instruction back into classrooms

• Increased the professionalisation of literacy instruction by promoting engagement with research literature

• Produced scalable systems teachers could immediately use

• Encouraged the view that many spellings are arbitrary

• Improved early decoding outcomes for many students

• Raised expectations of systemic success so that socio-economic factors played less of a role in student outcomes

WEAKNESSES

• Elevated phonological awareness activities beyond their useful role

• Elevated ‘sounding out’ above other explanatory tools available within the writing system

• Oversimplified the writing system

• Created problematic categories such as irregular words, false graphemes, and syllable types

• Often treated morphology and etymology as optional extras to be bolted on after phonics instruction

• Over-emphasised reading instruction at the expense of spelling and writing

• Extended the use of decodable readers well beyond the early stages of literacy development

• Treated successful decoding as the primary goal rather than one component of literacy

NEW WAVE

STRENGTHS

• Recognises English as a morphophonemic orthography

• Explains spellings that previously appeared arbitrary

• Helps students see relationships between words rather than study words as isolated wholes

• Encourages teachers to keep learning throughout their careers

• Is accessible for students with severe phonological deficits where ‘sounding out’ isn’t particularly productive

• Prioritises writing as a normal, integral process in instruction

• Has high expectations of students and does not shy away from difficulty

• Recognises English orthography as a coherent system rather than a collection of sound-symbol correspondences and exceptions

WEAKNESSES

• Requires levels of linguistic knowledge that many teachers have not yet had the opportunity to develop

• Has not yet produced universally accepted scope and sequence documents or implementation pathways for teachers

• Has not yet demonstrated how its principles can be implemented consistently across whole systems

• Is vulnerable to superficial commercialisation and “morphology washing” by publishers

• Has occasionally been hindered by personality conflicts and ideological gatekeeping

• Risks confusing understanding with memory

• Risks confusing explanation with instruction

• Does not speak out clearly against whole language and balanced literacy but does target phonics

I recently read an article that stuck with me, Bron Ryrie Jones’s “Principles and Practices”. It got me thinking about the old and new waves:

One of the mistakes we as educators can often make is confusing principles with practices. We can agree that morphology matters without agreeing on how it should be taught. We can agree that English orthography is morphophonemic without agreeing on the best classroom routines. We can agree that English spelling is more coherent than previously thought without agreeing on scope and sequence, lesson design or curriculum structure.

The old wave asked an important question: What practices are most likely to succeed in teaching children to read words? The new wave is asking two equally important questions: How are those words built? How do we know that? The next challenge is to connect those questions. The future of literacy instruction may depend on our ability to hold all those ideas in mind at the same time.

From the Lifelong Literacy blog archives: This article was first written several years ago, but I think it deserves another airing here in light of the rathe extreme reactions a recent Facebook post of mine triggered in some Reading Recovery supporters who didn’t take well to my critique of the program.

One of the best aspects of my job is when I get to observe other practitioners in action. I’ve been very lucky to have such generous colleagues. This is the story of the first time I saw someone using Reading Recovery. Yes, it’s a story, an anecdote, and therefore not data, please bear that in mind. If you would like the science on Reading Recovery, you can find it here and here for starters.

When I started my private practice, one of the programs I kept hearing about was Reading Recovery. It seemed like every child who came to me for intervention had had this teaching.

Most of the local schools had a Reading Recovery teacher and every workshop I presented would have a of couple Reading Recovery-trained people there.

I found this slightly odd, as, from what I could glean, it was meant to be a long-term, highly effective intervention for struggling readers. Why did these children, who had accessed this program, then need further intervention?

At this point in my career, I was fairly unaware of the deep divide in theories of reading, known as the Reading Wars. I was on neither side of the fence, since I had no idea the fence existed. I had come straight from a linguistics background and into a working environment that was basically an uninterrupted flow of logical information put to good use.

I had already watched hundreds of children and adults become readers and I really didn’t think that helping people learn to read was a big deal. It was relatively easy to do and my colleagues and I spent our working lives fully expecting our students to read.

The hardest part of my job was getting people to spell well and write fluently. It still is. Spelling and writing are extremely complex processes. They make reading seem easy by comparison.

What caught my attention at this time though, was that Reading Recovery-taught children behaved differently to those who had not had access to the program. I observed three distinct habits in these children that others tended not to have:

1. When getting ready to read aloud to me, the first thing their eyes would do would be to search around the page for a picture or ask me what the story was about. I use pictureless texts in my clinic because I want the children to decode the letters, not use comprehension strategies to guess words. My training and experience all pointed to this being logical and effective.

2. When actually reading a text and coming across an unfamiliar word, their eyes would leave the word and start scanning around, again, looking for a clue external to the word.

3. When they weren’t doing this wild, panic-stricken scanning, they would sometimes blurt out a word that began with the same letter as the unfamiliar word and carry on reading. For example, if I had a dollar for every time a child said ‘house’ for home, I’d be retired by now.

Not only did these children need explicit instruction in the alphabetic code, in sequencing, in segmenting and in blending sounds in words, and in the orthographic structure of English, but they needed to spend time undoing the awful habits 1-3. Their time in the clinic sometimes tripled because of the re-learning they had to do.

I began to be able to identify a Reading Recovery child at 50 paces. This made me very curious about how their lessons were conducted. To help gain a more informed opinion, I decided to take a look at the program and its underpinnings.

I started finding answers by observing a Reading Recovery session. I was invited to do so by a friend and colleague who worked in one of the local Catholic primary schools. I had the greatest admiration for this friend. She was a caring, intelligent person dedicated to doing the best she could for her students.

Taj was a seven year-old boy who had made no progress in reading and writing in two years of schooling. As such, he qualified for Reading Recovery. Surprisingly, no formal assessment had been given and no diagnosis had been made.

He had been informally assessed using the Observation Survey and several Running Records from Reading Recovery itself, but this was hardly an indicator of his underlying deficits and gave no instruction about how to tailor his intervention. Instead, he was put at a certain ‘level’ and the goal was to move him up to the next ‘level’.

Marie Clay, the author of Reading Recovery explains:

“For Reading Recovery we do not need an elaborate definition of reading difficulties. One simply takes the pupil from where he is to somewhere else.”

Oh if only that were true. But such a scattergun, vague approach is folly. We have the tools and knowledge to pinpoint a wide range of cognitive and linguistic deficits that impair reading. Good assessment is a gift to any practitioner. I found it disturbing that none of these had been used to gain a clearer picture of Taj.

Still, he was there and my friend was trying to help him. And besides, I’d watched many sessions with other practitioners and had been to dozens of professional development seminars, and I had never failed to come away with some good ideas about how to improve my practice. There was always some nugget, or innovation or something I could learn from watching others in action.

This time it was different. This time I sat there in shock and surprise. As part of my job as a mentor at Lindamood Bell Learning Processes, I would sit back and evaluate other clinicians, so I was used to novices making rookie mistakes. That is not what this was.

I myself have had observers suggest a slightly different approach for a problem encountered by a student and I have embraced that approach with success; a need for tweaking you might say. That is not what this was.

It was quite evident that my friend had spent many hours practising the elements in the lesson. She was no rookie. She delivered clear and precise instructions with confidence and ease. Her pacing was flawless, her manner was perfect, her equipment was organized and on hand and she really did come across as a seasoned professional. She and Taj had an excellent rapport and she genuinely cared about him and treated him with gentle deference at all times.

But for the first time in my career, I spent my observation time holding myself back from screaming, “What are you doing?! How is that going to help this child? What on Earth are you doing?”

I have not reacted so strongly to any teaching I’ve witnessed, before or since (except other Reading Recovery sessions on YouTube). Let me take you through it as well as I can remember it. The order of proceedings may vary from a standard Reading Recovery session since I’m recalling from over a decade ago, but these are the parts that stood out.

Taj came in and pulled out a book they had been practising. It contained surprisingly complex words but was predictable and repetitive with great big pictures and he read it from memory. I thought that this must have been some kind of warm-up, since nothing useful was being taught or learned. I was looking forward to the “enchantingly interesting” texts coming up that Clay talks about in her guidebook.

The teacher then pulled out a new, equally predictable book, but instead of getting down to reading the words, she asked him to point out the front cover, the back cover, and other things about the book that he plainly knew. Time was ticking away and still no teaching or learning had taken place.

The teacher then did the most incredible thing. She told him what the story was about and what was going to happen in the book. Spoiler alert! I don’t know about you, but if you want me to throw a book on the bonfire, just tell me what happens in the story. It’s the same with films. Tell me the plot and I can guarantee I’ll never watch it. You will have spoiled it for me.

So now there is a child sitting there with a big frown on his face, fidgeting, about to stumble his way through an already boring story that he knows is going to go a certain way and who, ten minutes into the lesson, has learned nothing.

More incredulity followed when the teacher, after some lengthy talking about the book, opened it up to the first page, pointed to the picture and then asked him to find a certain word. My memory won’t deliver the precise word to me, but let’s say she asked him to look for the word tree. Here is the dialogue:

Teacher: There is a tree in this story. What does tree begin with?

Taj: …umm, t.

Teacher: Good, now find the word tree.

Taj: Points to top.

Teacher: No.

Taj: Points to tree.

Teacher: Good.

Me in my head: Wait. What? Why aren’t you getting him to read the sounds in the word top and comparing it to the word he’s looking for? Why would you leave that opportunity to teach him to read just sitting there? You’re just getting him to guess based on incomplete information. What on Earth are you doing that for?

And so, after a bit more of this pointless shilly-shally word-searching, and after looking at all the pictures, page by page and talking about each excruciating plot point in the story, this yawning boy is directed to the first page again and told to read the book.

He came to a word he couldn’t predict. For the life of me I cannot remember the word, but he made a clear error of omission, in that the second letter, an embedded consonant like the <t> in stop, wasn’t pronounced. The teacher let him continue to the end of the sentence and then the crazy questioning began. For the sake of an example, let’s say he read ‘sap’ for slap. The dialogue went as follows (with me climbing the walls trying not to interrupt):

Teacher: Let’s look at this word here. What does it say?

Taj: Sap

Teacher: Would that make sense?

Taj: I don’t know.

Teacher: What do you see in the picture?

Taj: (Mutters something about the picture.)

Teacher: What is the first letter of the word?

Taj: S

Teacher: What would make sense here?

Taj: (frantically looking at the picture): I don’t know.

Teacher: What other letters do you see?

Taj: (naming the letters) l-a-p

Teacher: Can you see any words inside that word?

Taj: No.

Teacher: (pointing to the l) Okay, what is this letter?

Taj: L

Teacher: Do you know the sound it makes?

Taj: /l/

Teacher: Good. So what does this word say?

Taj: Sap.

This went on for precious minutes until the teacher told him the word and moved on.

Afterwards I asked the teacher if she was aware that Taj couldn’t perceive that he was saying ‘sap’ for slap. And that saying each sound in sequence and being aware that he had to articulate an /l/ sound straight after the /s/ would have helped him. I asked her if she was planning to do any follow up work on embedded consonants with him. She said she wasn’t planning to, no.

Then it was time to write a sentence. Again, I can’t remember if Taj wrote the sentence or the teacher wrote the sentence, but they did the funniest thing with it afterwards. They cut it into pieces, word by word, and Taj had to reconstruct it. It had to be the most pointless ten minutes of teaching I have ever seen. It was the kind of mindless busy-work a casual-relief teacher dreams up in order to take an unofficial break from teaching.

They also played about with some colourful magnetic letters, sorting them into groups based on their colours (!) and naming the letters, but making no reference to the sounds they represented, again, with no real purpose, sequence or system.

This was truly the worst reading lesson I have ever seen, even to this day. Taj was not being helped in any significant way. His needs were being overlooked. The causes of his difficulties were being ignored. The strategies he was being given were nonsensical and went against everything I’d ever learned about literacy acquisition.

And it wasn’t the teacher’s fault. As I said before, this was a friend and a colleague; a nice person with the best will in the world, intelligent, highly trained and experienced, believing she was helping him. It was bizarre.*

I read everything about Reading Recovery that I could get my hands on. I spoke to countless Reading Recovery teachers and watched more excruciating Reading Recovery lessons on YouTube to make sure that this teacher was not an anomaly. Indeed she wasn’t.

What I found most disturbing was that she believed she was being helpful, and with no valid pre or post testing, nothing was contradicting her. Taj may very well have progressed through the program, memorizing and predicting the books, but I shudder to think where he is now.

It saddens me to see this execrable program being so widely embraced. Part of the reason is that Reading Recovery is incredibly systematic. Marie Clay wrote with clarity and authority. Her books, from a prose perspective, are a pleasure to read (provided you don’t know anything about teaching reading).

Its adherents are rigorously trained and the organisations behind it have means to distribute it that are staggeringly efficient. It’s just that it’s wrong.

Moves are afoot to rid schools of it in some systems. It’s very expensive and some in power recognize its ineffectiveness, but remnants of those techniques are everywhere; a story for another day.

Some approaches to reading instruction are more likely to bring success, while others bring an unacceptable rate of failure, no matter how well they are designed and implemented.

We need to ensure teachers are equipped with far better approaches than Reading Recovery and its whole language cousins such as PM Benchmarking and LLI, and we need to ensure that teachers are trained to implement these better approaches with the greatest skill possible. It is not enough for teachers to believe they’re helping children to read.

*This brilliant teacher, by the way, went from that to phonics training to being a deep consumer of Structured Word Inquiry and absolutely does not practise Reading Recovery any more. Know better. Do better.

[caption id=”attachment_4598” align=”alignright” width=”960”]My messy Morrissey and Marr corner[/caption]

If you don’t like music, you obviously have a worse life than me.

Or perhaps I’m being silly. If you happen to be indifferent to music, as many people are, how would you feel if I sincerely made statements like that?

Is it condescending of me to assume that I lead a better life than you because of my hobbies and interests?

How about I express pity at your music-empty life and tell you, with concern, that I hope you find a song that hooks you one day? Would you welcome my pity?

So why are statements like the one below accepted?

“If children develop a love of reading, they will have better lives.”

I recently had a small Twitter spat with a librarian who proudly quoted this as her ‘why’ (whatever that means).

I know many people who don’t read. I have two children who have not developed a love of reading. How dare anyone comment on the quality of their lives? In response to the quote, I wrote:

“My literate but non-literary daughter would beg to differ. She lives a rich and full life but does not enjoy reading.”

The librarian misunderstood my statement and continued to press the preposterous point by saying:

“Does she ‘read with her ears’ audiobooks? Does she enjoy being read to? Maybe she will fall in love with reading later.”

The fact is, she has a developmental language disorder, known as dyslexia. Reading is laborious, time-consuming, unpleasant and effortful for her. She can do it. She’s a fluent reader with excellent comprehension who graduated high school with good marks, but reading takes more effort than she’s particularly comfortable with.

My response:

“Nope. She likes sport, films, music. Of course she’ll listen when I read books aloud, but my point is, why should she HAVE to love reading?”

At this juncture, another librarian chimed in (I had no idea they hunted in packs):

“She doesn’t. I think you’re misunderstanding the quote. Studies show readers vote at higher rates, volunteer more, more involved civically.”

Yes, I’m sure those who can read are more likely to vote etc. This has nothing to do with loving reading. So I asked for some sources:

“Could you point me to the studies which show actual causation between a love of reading and those attributes? Again, my daughter would deny.”

I’m still waiting for those studies. In the meantime, the second librarian had more to say:

“The quote doesn’t mean the inverse is true. I hope she finds her ‘hook book’ someday.”

I replied:

“She feels patronised and condescended to by such a hope. As do I.”

I may have hit a nerve, as the next response attests to:

“I don’t understand your negativity. I can also say: children who develop a love of exercise will have better lives. Would you object? Peace.”

Yes I bleeding-well would object actually. I hate exercise. So does my youngest (the bookworm). We like dancing and tennis and swimming in the sea. These activities give us exercise, but we don’t do them for their exercise value. I have to force myself to go to the gym because I know it’s good for me, but there isn’t a personal trainer in this universe who would be able to make me love exercise.

You know that feeling you have when you’re doing something and you think, “This. This is the purpose of my life. This is what I was born for.” That’s the feeling I don’t get when I do housework. I hate housework. It puts me in a very very bad mood. My two younger children know not to ask me for favours if there’s a laundry basket or a broom in my hand. As infants they had extensive vocabularies but when I once showed them an iron, neither of them had a word for it.

So, I can do exercise and housework, but there are six million other things in the world I’d rather be doing. Would you really call your life better than mine because my house is messy and I can’t touch my toes? I would call vapid smugness if you dared. So I said:

“Actually, the negativity stems from false pity of those who don’t share your love of reading.”

The original librarian decided she wanted the last word by saying all she was trying to do was share her passion for inspiring children to love books.

This is a noble passion. I love books too. I work with children to help them become readers and writers and if they become readers for pleasure, I’m very happy for them. But I wouldn’t dream of sharing my passion for books through condescension. This would be very uninspiring indeed.

I’m perfectly happy with my daughter’s stance on reading for pleasure. She is literate. She got good marks in all her subjects at school. She chats away on social media, shops online and does all the other things a literate person does. She just doesn’t like books. She, like many people in this world, simply prefers other things to reading.

I did a quick Facebook survey of my friends and received many interesting replies. The survey said:

How many of you are prepared to come out of the closet as non-bookworms? How do you view statements like: “Children who develop a love of reading have better lives”?

Here is a list of other people from that survey who don’t like reading:

Illustrator - “I get bored easily when I read, I lose focus and can’t follow the story.”

Chemical engineer (a very successful, senior chemical engineer)- “I never read as a child or even a teen and I think I’m doing okay.”

Mum of a very bright pair of twins – “One of my daughters doesn’t like to read, I have one book worm twin and one non book worm twin. It won’t stop her from doing well, she just prefers to learn from doing not from reading.”

Photographer and disability care worker – “I no longer read fiction. After growing up in a family of bookworms and being one myself until my mid 30s, I often found myself reading until the wee hours of the morning, even when I had to get up for work early. I finally made the decision that I simply don’t have enough time to spend hours of each day in other people’s fantasies.
I read fiction to my children for half an hour most evenings but my personal reading is focused entirely on text books and factual information.”

When I asked him if his early immersion in fiction gave him a better life he replied that it didn’t, though it did help him escape some horrible reality for a while. We all have means of escape: films, hobbies, friends. It doesn’t have to be books.

Another photographer (with, might I say, one of the most enviable lifestyles I know) – “I’m such a non-reader!! I plan on staying that way, so happily. Yep that comment is as stupid as my opinion that children who horse ride live happier lives....oh hang on...no that one is true!”

Mum of very bright ex-student of mine – “He reads to learn about the things he’s interested in, he can follow diagrams and instructions that baffle me. He has an organised, sequential approach to putting complex machines together.”

Mum of an accountancy student – “She rarely reads, doesn’t enjoy it and finds it a real struggle. She only got diagnosed as dyslexic last year though, which kind of explains it. She has an awesome life, she’s studying accountancy and loves maths! She is also a brilliant artist and rides her mountainbike really fast! People who ride bikes have better lives than those who don’t! FACT!”

Translator at the European Commission – “For the record, I’m still far from being an avid reader as an adult. There are other things vying for my attention and by the time I do pick up a book in the late evening I rarely get through more than a page before I fall asleep. This doesn’t make my life any better or worse than anyone else’s.”

Graphic designer – “Non reader and my life is frickin’ awesome! I was married to an author for nearly 10 years, so books were a huge part of our lives. I read a lot for a while there, probably because I thought I should. I loved those books, but it never made me thirsty for more... one crappy chapter and I was gone...”

Disability support worker (yep, I know a few) – “I hate reading. Give me pictures any day.”

I know many more people who don’t love reading, including a screenwriter, a hedge-fund manager and several successful business people. I’m sure we all do.

One comment did pluck at my heartstrings though, from the mother of a little boy:

“I guess it makes me feel slightly anxious as he doesn’t enjoy reading at all and me and his dad absolutely love it. It was the background to both our childhoods.”

It’s that sort of fear and anxiety that makes me cross with the ‘better lives’ statement. Make no mistake, being literate is an essential part of being able to function in a complex society. But a love of reading is a personal thing, not a quality of life deal-breaker. Parents all over the globe fret about their children reading for pleasure because of this fallacy. For goodness sake, relax. Literacy and love of literature are two completely different things. The former is essential and the latter is personal.

I do think, though, that you should give Hatful of Hollow (second down on the left of my picture) at least three listens, and if that doesn’t change your life for the better, then you might very well be dead inside.

She’s been on my mind a great deal lately. Some anniversaries don’t wait for the date itself. They arrive in little reminders that seem to be everywhere. A kid in a wheelchair. A hospital scene on television. An ambulance speeding past. They take me straight back to her and, especially, to her final weeks.

They also remind me how much she continues to shape the way I think about my work. Every now and then I come across those familiar slogans: “Every child a reader.” “100% literacy.” “All children can read.” I understand exactly what people mean by them. But every time I hear them, I think of Chloe.

I wrote the piece below a few years ago. If anything, I feel even more strongly about it now.

Can I please remind you of something? Not every child will learn to read. Even in the most advantageous circumstances, not every child will learn to read.

Take my Chloe, for example. Let’s list her educational advantages:

• white

• middle class

• read to from birth

• literate parents

• curious

• determined

• emotionally stable

• free from trauma

• well fed/cared for/sheltered

• daughter of an educational linguist

That’s a winning formula right there. Just about every positive factor you can think of in the psychosocial lottery was present. And yet she didn’t learn to read. Of course she didn’t learn to read. She was profoundly physically and intellectually disabled.

Out of all the kids in the specialist school she went to, there was maybe one kid with higher needs than Chloe.

Firstly, when I realised how profound her disabilities were, I didn’t give up. I did everything I could possibly do to try to teach her how to walk talk, read and write. One day I’ll write a whole book about all of it, but suffice to say, no stone was left unturned.

But there did come a point where I ceased literacy instruction. There did come a point where I knew my time and effort were not well spent there and could and should be diverted towards the development of other, more productive, useful skills for her. Hours were poured in to teaching her to use a spoon so that she could at least feed herself. Setting her up to be able to crawl and walk were so important, as it gave her choices. But talking? Reading? Writing? That wasn’t going to happen. For the most part, I was happy to re-divert my efforts. But you can’t make a decision like that and not have doubts, especially when your working life frequently leads you to encounter slogans like those above. Of course I’d like 100% literacy. Of course I’d like all children to read. I didn’t want to jeopardise the momentum gained by those campaigns. So I didn’t challenge them.

The turning point for those doubts and the beginning of my now very strong urge to challenge them, came at the DSF Conference in Perth in 2019. One of the keynote speakers was Professor Simon Fisher. Professor Fisher is a geneticist and neuroscientist who has pioneered research into the genetic basis of human speech and language. Chloe’s disabilities were the result of a particularly thorough deletion of the short arm of chromosome 5 (Cri du Chat syndrome), so as you can imagine, Professor Fisher’s talk, What Genes can Tell us about the Development of Speech and Language Problems, was of particular interest to me.

I approached him at the conference and asked him, in his experience, did he think all children, no matter their genes, no matter their neurological architecture, could potentially learn to read? He said he didn’t think that. I said I was glad, and told him a little bit about Chloe. He then very graciously explained to me that there have to be certain structures present for reading to take place, and that if they were missing or severely damaged, that reading would be an impossibility. A factual, neurological, biological, scientific impossibility. Not an improbability. Impossible. Not going to happen.

You could call that confirmation bias I suppose. But it was after this conversation that I truly felt I had indeed done the right thing by her.

So when you say “Every child a reader”, you say to me and parents just like me, one of two things:

Every child a reader but not yours – then why say “every” if you don’t mean every?

Every child a reader but your child doesn’t qualify as a child – even worse.

There are countless alternative ways to express your keenness to raise standards of literacy instruction and the educational outcomes that follow. There’s a subtle difference between asking for high quality literacy instruction for ALL (like on the cover of my third book) and getting ALL children to read. High quality means knowing who can and who can’t. And knowing why.

Some alternatives:

• Instead of every child a reader, why not say: every child a learner?

• Instead of 100% literacy, why not say near zero illiteracy?

• Instead of all children can read, why not say all children can reach their potential?

I can guarantee you, I am not alone in this. Please listen. When you use those other terms, you hurt people, and I know that’s not what you want to do. So there. I said it. And I do feel better for it.