The Family Backpack Project: Sounds Good But Where's the Data?

Last year, in Language Arts, Deborah Rowe and Jeanne Gilliam Fain shared findings on their Family Backpack Project.  At 249 urban students (48% African American, 35% Latino, 8% Middle Eastern, 7% European American, and 1% African) the program is large, especially so considering that, by design, it enlists not only students but their families as well.  The goal of the project is to promote school-home connections in a way that honors diversity.  The program divides the school year into six one-month units, and once during each unit a backpack is sent home with each student.  The backpack contains two books which are relevant to the unit, audio recordings of the books in English and in the student's home language, translations of the books into the student's home language, and an open-ended response journal to be completed by the student and family.

The program enlists a broad range of research to support it practices, including the 2008 article by Roberts referenced in a previous blog post, seeming to synthesize all the current trends around multiculturalism in the classroom today.

For all its research though, and for all the theoretical frameworks it attempts to employ, their assessments of the program are surprisingly sparse.  The bulk of the data seems to come from end-of-year survey responses.  The authors claim very encouraging feedback despite the fact that less than a third of families actually bothered to respond.  The low response rate suggests two things to me.  First, it implies a low degree of average engagement for the typical family.  Second, for those families who were sufficiently engaged and enthusiastic to have responded, the general tone of the response is likely to skew toward the positive.  Taking these responses as indicative of the general sentiment among all participating families seems very imprudent to me.  Adding to that the fact that, in general, good research looks at what people actually do and not simply what they claim to do on surveys, the findings discussed in this article seem very dubious indeed.

On a marginally brighter note, the family reader response journals indicated a slightly broader spectrum of participation.  Two thirds of families responded at least once in their journals (keeping in mind that there were six total opportunities to respond).  19% of all families responded once.  17% responded twice.  10% responded three times, 11% four times,  6% five times, and 4% responded all six times.  I am not sure whether to feel encouraged by these figures.  If I consider that two thirds responded in some way that sounds somewhat encouraging, but conversely, if I consider the fact that less than a third responded half the time I am not so encouraged.  When I consider that only 4% participated fully I am downright discouraged.  One piece of information which could have helped me make sense of these figures was the general trend of participation, that is, were families losing interest in reading at home over the course of the school year, or was the program picking up steam so that finally, by the end of the year, two thirds of families were participating?  The fact that this key piece of information is so conspicuously absent along with the fact that the authors seems a little overeager to present the program in a (dare I say “unrealistically”) positive light leads me to believe that the more unfortunate of the two trends was the case.

L1, L2, Electric Boogaloo: ELLs' Primary Language Literacy Probably Helps and Certainly Can't Hurt English Language and Literacy Acquisition

In an article from Reading Research Quarterly Theresa A. Roberts examines the results of a study involving preschool students who were English language learners.  In the study, students were randomly assigned to one of two groups, either a group composed of students whose parents read English-language storybooks at home with them prior to class readings, or a group composed of students whose parents read those same storybooks at home with students in their first language.  At the end of six weeks, students then switched: the students who had read the English storybooks at home now began to read storybooks at home in their primary language, and the students who had been reading storybooks at home in their primary language began reading storybooks at home in English.

The findings are very interesting indeed.  Although Roberts notes that the study would need replication before drawing any firm conclusions, students who read with parents at home in their primary language did significantly better on targeted English vocabulary acquisition after reading those same books in class in English than those students who read the book at home in English and again in class in English. 

After the switch, the students now reading at home in their primary language fared no better than the students who now read at home in English.  Interestingly though, both groups' rate of target vocabulary acquisition actually increased.

As the author is quick to point out, the tentativeness of these findings should not be taken to strongly suggest the implementation of any particular ELL literacy model.  There are a number of variables that should be considered in future studies.  For example, how might students who didn't make the switch at week six have fared against students who did?  Is the increased rate of vocabulary acquisition a result of the switch itself or just a consequence of the multiplier effect of acquired knowledge facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge?

At any rate, one thing is clear from the study: students who read at home in their primary language at home do at least as well as those that read at home in English, so that the use of one language clearly does not detract from the learning of another.  It seems to me though that results of the primary-language-at-home readers' rapid acquisition in the first six weeks suggests a definite possibility that a brief literacy unit involving primary-language materials at home at the start of the school year would, at the very least, do no harm, and quite likely do a great deal of good to scaffold ELLs' language acquisition and overall participation at this critical time of the year.  At the very least, cooperative development of materials and training of parents in at-home storybook reading techniques could go a long way in building community among ELLs and their families that will continue to be valuable throughout the school year and beyond.  The sort of parental involvement implicit in Roberts's method is likely to have ancillary benefits far down the line. 

Translocal Discourse in Biliteracy

In "Reading Across Communities" in Biliteracy Practice: Examining Translocal Discourse and Cultural Flows in Literature Discussions, Carmen Medina looks at how bilingual/biliterate kids construct meaning following a read-aloud and during group storytelling sessions.  Medina argues that these discussions open up spaces for meaning-making that move across time and geographical distance.  Furthermore, children who bring with them non-dominant cultural elements are keenly aware that the understandings they bring are not always appreciated or are appreciated less fully than they might be.  These kids come to recognize that certain forms of knowledge are valued only in their home countries or cultures.  But by allowing for a greater range of accepted responses that includes kids' personal histories, cultural knowledge, and pop culture or popular imaginaries (sets of symbols and knowledge in a particular social group), teachers can improve student engagement and sense of belonging.  

I remember a number of instances in China when I observed an apparent breakdown in knowledge across space even among adults.  For example, there comes a point in any friendship between a Chinese person and a foreigner when the concept of 上 火 (shang huo) eventually comes up.  In traditional Chinese medicine, certain foods are known to induce a fire-type reaction in the body.  Naturally, my Chinese friends at some point would want to know how to say this in English and I would have to explain that this concept does not really exist in the West.  Try as I may to be sensitive to this cultural difference, this stark contrast in knowledge is difficult to reconcile.  A typical response might be something like "well, in China, chillies cause you to break out" as if chillies and human bodies agree to operate according to different rules depending on their geographical location.  Another example where the "knowledge" I bring seems to invalidate Chinese knowledge came about when I asked my friend not to feed my dog chicken bones.  Chicken bones, I explained (somewhat paternalistically, I am sure) can splinter and get stuck.  "Yeah, but this dog is Chinese though.  She'll be fine." 

At a global scale, Western knowledge may be perceived as occupying a dominant position relative to traditional Chinese knowledge.  When these two types of knowledge reveal themselves to be at odds, even within China, the explanation may lie in different knowledge sets being applicable in different geographical locations, much in the same way that Medina observes children applying cultural understandings differently in one location versus another.

Having seen how easily knowledge can be invalidated, even when the non-dominant culture has a "home court advantage", I will be doubly aware of how I can expand the range of valued understandings.



 

Playshop

During a recent session with a five-year-old preschooler, he and I created a collaborative movie involving props, characters, and settings.  Previously, I had worked with this child on reading, writing, and drawing, so integrating these activities into the creation of a story shouldn't have been too difficult.  As I final condition to the project, we used the popular film/merchandise franchise Star Wars as the backdrop to our story-making.

In my earlier literacy work with this child, it became apparent that collaborative story-making was right up his alley.  During my first writing activity with him, I found that he needed to work with another person to make the story as he wrote and drew.  For him, stories were not just a thing that flowed from his mind to the paper, but rather a plastic discussion and a social event.  This lent itself nicely to the activity currently under discussion as we set about creating hand-drawn character cutouts, whole-page backgrounds, and props.

As he created the characters, he created the story, and as he created the story, he created more characters.  It was a looping process.  Finally, a more or less stable version of the story seemed to have emerged involved a lava monster who calls on Jay and Kitty Paw Paw Sidekick, as well as Emperor Palpatine and General Grevous at their house.

During filming, however, it seemed that simultaneous manipulation of the objects and narration were impossible.  Without breaks for narration during filming, the story started to change owing to a lack of grounding.  In a future session, we would need to perhaps sit down and write out the story to be narrated by a third party (not only was he unable to simultaneously narrate and manipulate, but I also was unable to simultaneously narrate and operate the camera!).

New Literacies and Multimodalities: Looking Back as Well as Forward

Jane Hare recently published the results of a study in The Journal of Early Childhood Literacy looking at how indigenous knowledge and schooled literacy intersect in Head Start programs on five First Nations reserves.  Though her study focuses on western Canada she draws on research from, and provides implications for, indigenous communities in the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia as well.

One major point to note is that many forms of literacy are already present in indigenous communities and families before children ever get to school.  Literacy, in this context, does not always take the form of reading text from books.  It may include books, but it will also include traditional forms such as storytelling, ceremonies, dance, and the consideration of landscapes as readable texts, as well as more recent forms like television and computers.  The current trend in teacher education programs of valuing multiple modalities and literacies is often used as a sort of short-hand to talk about appreciating different technologies as readable texts, but Hare extends this thinking backward in time as well as forward to recover traditional forms of literacy.

The problem arises out of the troubled history that indigenous communities have experienced in "educational" institutions that have ruthlessly and systematically attempted to destroy Native cultures and languages by severing the inter-generational lines along which they were traditionally transmitted.  These schools removed children as young as four from their families and attempted to indoctrinate them into European epistemologies.  As a consequence, many parents today who may very well desire their children to succeed in school-type literacy, narrowly defined, are still less than eager to engage educators.

And educators, for their part, perhaps ignorant of the scope of historical abuse, don't do enough to value indigenous culture and literacies which, research shows, is critical in successfully bridging the gap from home to school.  Teachers must be proactive in educating themselves.  Only by meaningfully engaging these communities can non-Native teachers learn to recognize and enhance opportunities to forge links between these literacies.  In a sense, they must take a page from indigenous forms of education which are experiential and holistic, experiential because their is no shortcut to engaging parents and other community members, and holistic because we cannot parcel out knowledge as European and Native.  Only when children see continuity in the valuing of (supposedly) different epistemes can they proceed on sure footing.

Transmedia: Legos' Logos

In the opening chapter of Literacy Playshop Karen Wohlwend uses the term transmedia to describe popular media that is bound up with the sale of consumer goods, be they toys, movies, etc.  She cautions us not to be too quick to dismiss the literary potential of such media forms.  She writes that teachers often steer students away from these types of media for fear that it is likely inappropriate for young children.  The result, she writes, is that "children with fewer economic resources are particularly disadvantaged" by this policy, going on to quote Seiter who claims that toys "most available to and popular with working class children are the toys most likely to be excluded from the classroom." 

In my own field experience this year, however, I have noticed what, at a gut level, seems to be a disturbing trend in the other direction.  I am referencing the Legos books that a number of children have brought into the classroom.  I call them "books" when, upon closer inspection, they seem to be cleverly disguised catalogs.  I find this (again, I am speaking from the gut and am happy to be corrected by anyone who knows better) particularly egregious since Legos, in their origin, were intended to be simple blocks which could be used to build any toy a child might desire.  But since their inception, they seem to have become training wheels for a generation of compulsive consumers.  A quick walk through the toy aisle will confirm that the "special" sets command outrageous prices, considering what they are.  Made of cheap molded plastic, I can't shake the feeling that the company is stockpiling and rationing their toy sets like the De Beers would blood diamonds. 

These slick catalogs market the expensive special sets exclusively.  The end result, from what I have observed, is the opposite of that described by Seiter.  By using a book or magazine format to create such a fascination with these pricey products, Legos effectively monetized literacy in my classroom.  We are accustomed to well off students bringing in toys that other children may not be able to afford, but bringing in text that markets toys (that creates an entire subculture around them) that many children's families can't afford feels like salt in the wounds.

Biliteracy: Beyond Bilingualism

As a teacher with no small interest in the ways that multiple cultures interact in classrooms, I have recently started researching how I might effectively implement policies that respect languages other than English in my future classroom.

Previously I taught English to students of all ages in China.  In that setting, I used a fairly strict English-only policy because total immersion is generally touted as paramount to second language acquisition, using English to teach English as the saying goes.  While an English-only policy may be appropriate with Chinese students for whom the classroom may represent the only opportunity for any significant degree of immersion, now that I am facing teaching in the US, I am concerned about showing respect to other languages and ensuring that the colonialist attitudes that have historically devalued other languages do not persist in my classroom.

During my field experience at a local elementary school with a relatively high number of ELLs, I have already observed how easily I am able to gain students' trust and inspire their confidence by speaking even a few words of their own languages.  In some instances, on the occasions when I have used another language (typically Chinese), it has been to clarify an instruction, but more often I have used the other language simply to demonstrate to an ELL, as well as to others, that his or her language has value in the classroom.

This will be of particular importance in the Navajo Nation where I will do my student teaching.  Historically, English-only policies in boarding schools have done much to disrupt the transmission of Navajo language and culture.  The colonialist attitude of the white educators at the time (until fairly recently, in fact) invoked the mantra "kill the Indian to save the child" as a way of justifying its own racism, and Navajo language was a principal target of the killing.

Furthermore, as a language learner myself, I am keen to practice my own Spanish in a way that honors Spanish-speaking culture in the American southwest, potentially in a bilingual school.  With that in mind, I read  Iliana Reyes and Patricia Azuara's "Emergent Biliteracy in Young Mexican Immigrant Children" in Reading Research Quarterly.

This article focuses on the first year (preschool) of a 3-year longitudinal study of 12 children living in Tuscon, Arizona.  The authors, themselves bilingual in Spanish and English, used multiple methods including in-school assessment tasks and at-home interviews with students and their families.  The in-school activities included children's analyses of environmental print such as food labels and of book print concepts such as directionality and sound-letter correspondence.  Additionally, the authors identified children's metalinguistic understandings of their own and others' language use.  At the children's homes, the authors observed the children during various types of naturalistic literacy activities with family.

One of this study's more relevant implications for the classroom is that biliteracy development is highly situated, relying much more on the environment (particularly the social environment) in which literacy takes place than on mere exposure (p. 392).  Of particular interest is that the children in this study often switched roles of literacy "novice" and "expert" depending on the language being used (p. 392).  When experiencing a literacy event in Spanish, a monolingual parent may be the expert and the child the novice, but upon switching to English the children may well find themselves in the role of expert, explaining for their parents.  The authors suggest that these interactions produce higher-order thinking and that by differentiating between one language and another children developed better metalinguistic awareness (p. 392).

All of these points could be used to argue for a more situated type of literacy activity in the classroom (like the one mentioned in a previous post).  If in-school literacy activities can be made to more closely resemble the socially mediated literacy events the study's authors have claimed to be at the heart of acquiring biliteracy, then paying particular attention to our ELLs could be a rising tide to lift all boats.  That is, from a universal design perspective, a situated literacy curriculum that accounts for how bilingual students learn best may benefit all of our students.  

More from the Radical Middle

In 2011 Language Arts edited and published a podcast interview with Richard Allington and P. David Pearson discussing the unanticipated ways in which NCLB, and other policies since, have actually undermined literacy education in this country.  At worst, out-and-out corruption lie at the heart of the mandated adoption of proprietary methods like DIBELS.  At best, we are simply guilty of merely looking at how we can get money to fund our literacy programs rather than looking at what research tells us actually works.  In any event, the upshot is by now familiar: we don't trust teachers to be professionals.  More than that, we don't want them to be professionals.  Said one policy-maker: "we don't want teachers making these, you know, professional and differential decisions about how we're using [literacy] materials"  (p. 73).

While supposed research-based methods like DIBELS are not necessarily hurting students (apart from the fact that they take time away from comprehensive reading instruction), they are hurting teachers.  Teachers become less capable and less flexible in adapting to the changing demands of the job and curricula.  Rather than learning broad concepts that they can tailor to meet specific needs, they are being trained to robotically apply specifics with no thought to how those specifics fit into an overall literacy framework.  No wonder that, as Allington and Pearson point out, half of teachers leave the "profession" at the end of five years, the point at which they would actually start to get the hang of the job.  My guess would be that the half of teachers dropping out within five years is not the half we would like to keep.   

From the radical middle...

On The Voice of Literacy Dr. P. David Pearson describes himself as a member of "the radical middle," meaning that he is an advocate for balanced literacy.  Dr. Pearson is an expert on Reading First, the literacy component of NCLB.  His review of the literature suggests mixed results for Reading First with state-funded research claiming success and national research noting very modest gains in children's ability to decode nonsense words (think DIBELS) and no gains in actual comprehension.  These facts are made more distressing by Pearson's claim that there is no research which actually suggests any correlation between an ability to decode nonsense words and an ability to read real text.  Furthermore, the trend of teaching skills such as these (and the "big five" of the National Reading Panel's 2000 report in general) in isolation is, says Pearson, like teaching players to dribble, pass, and shoot without ever actually letting them play a game of basketball.  

How is it then that we arrive at a point where so many educators are teaching skills in isolation?  Do administrators and policy-makers put too much stock in the NRP's report at the expense of balanced literacy?  According to Pearson, no.  In fact, a close reading of the report would inform us that the types of skills identified by the report (Pearson uses the particular example of phonics instruction for K-1) have only been shown to be effective when they are part of a more holistic reading program.  That is to say, the document that people who advocate teaching skills in isolation point to as evidence supporting their approach doesn't support this approach at all.

Call me cynical, but I have to wonder how much these kinds of educational fads are the result of private companies' salespeople doing their jobs a little too well.  A quick look at the webpage for Dynamic Measurement Group (the producers of DIBELS) suggests the money to be made (money coming from Reading First) on professional development alone.  It's pretty scary when we take our cues on what to teach from the companies selling the products we would teach, all of which begs the question: do we teach products or concepts?

Kramer: Whole new lifestyle! Jerry: What are you doing? Kramer: Levels.

According to Kath Glasswell and Michael Ford's recent interactions with elementary classroom teachers, there is a frenzy underway among educators to use strict systems of leveled texts for young readers.  But while assigning levels to texts is, at heart, a sound idea, the authors note that educators rely too much and too rigidly on these systems at the expense of using their professional judgement.

In considering matching texts to readers, Glasswell and Ford examine one curriculum planning guide issued by The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction in 1986.  The guide suggests that teachers consider five text characteristics: content, format, concepts, organization, and author's purpose.  And certainly any leveled reading program will probably take these factors into consideration when assigning a a level to a text, but what about assigning a leveled text to a reader?  That same document suggests we also consider five additional factors about the child (motivation, subject knowledge, background experience, vocabulary, and purpose) as well as four factors about the learning environment (physical setting, activity, outcome, and emotional climate) for a total of 5 x 5 x 4 = 100 combinations of factors.  What has happened since 1986?  We seem to have retained only the textual considerations, and by only considering a text's assigned level when helping a child choose a book we are ignoring the bulk of considerations that should go into a good match.

Even more disturbingly, because these leveled text systems often deny a motivated reader the opportunity to read longer and more complex text, the students who need the most practice often end up reading the least.  Furthermore, the authors note this means that although below-level readers may progress, more advanced readers progress much more due to more practice with more advanced texts, and the gap between these two groups actually widens.  In a school that uses leveled texts year on year, these gaps accumulate year on year.

At the heart of all this is a fairly obvious problem:  Teachers rely on leveled text curricula too strictly.  They seem to believe in the power of leveled text systems more than in the power of their own professional discretion.  And it is professionalism that is the issue here, as with the implementation of so many other educational frameworks.  Teachers respond to ingrained cultural assumptions that they are not professionals, that they are not to be trusted to implement their own understandings, by falling back on systems like leveled reading which they perceive to be professionally beyond reproach.  Needless to say, blindly implementing these types of programs without a strong enough understanding of the underlying reasoning to know when they cease to be useful is not very professional.  As educational trends come and go, professional teachers cannot place their faith in acronyms or proprietary curricula.  To do so is to acknowledge what many people already feel about them: teachers' methods should be standardized and interchangeable because teachers simply can't be trusted to do their jobs properly on their own.

Thinking Thinking

As I was reading Debbie Miller's Reading With Meaning: Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grades I was struck by her use of the word "schema."  Miller opens a read-aloud/think-aloud by telling children that "[t]hinking about what you already know is called using your schema, or using your background knowledge.  Schema is all the stuff that's already inside your head, like places you've been, things you've done, books you've read--all the experiences you've had that make up who you are and what you know and believe to be true" (p. 57).

Now, I thought That all sounds great, but why use the actual word "schema"?   What could be the use of bogging down the children's comprehension with this strange new vocabulary word?  Why not just teach the concept and leave the teacher jargon out of it?

But as I read on I started to see how very explicitly Miller was teaching her kids to think about thinking about texts.  Her explanation of her metacognitive approach to reading used a number of concrete metaphors for an abstract concept.  She explains that schema is like "files in their heads" (p. 67) and that to activate background knowledge, we "search our brains for that mental file, open it, and make connections between what we know and the new information" (p. 129-130).  She shows them paper files and files on the computer, and over two days she models the process of "activating, building, and revising schema" (p. 68) by making a physical chart with a file folder and connections written on sheets of paper that are candidates for inclusion in the folder.

Now the first thought that occurred to me was those kids are going to be pretending to be robots with computer brains any time they read.  But hey, maybe that could be a good hook to attract young kids to this strategy.  Then I thought about the mental process that kids might go through when first hearing Miller use the word "schema."  If they are anything like me, when they are presented with an unfamiliar word they might look at the way that it fits into the overall structure of what is being said to decide if it is worth paying attention to.  The way Miller is speaking clearly indicates that "schema" is the main idea that she's talking about.  So I say to myself Hey, this word is important! and then go on to figure out how this idea is like and unlike other concepts I already know about.  So, in effect, the jarring sensation that encountering this word in a piece of speech meant for children had on me is probably quite like the effect it has on children.  How different is that sensation that tells them Hey, this is important from telling their brains to make space for a new idea, or from telling a computer to create a new file and name it "schema"?

Any skepticism I still had that the children would meaningfully incorporate this strange new word was put to rest by one student's definition of schema which is as concise and eloquent as any I've ever heard: "It's kind of like your old schema comes out of your head and grabs the new schema and pulls it back inside your head" (p. 69).

Sound It Out, Shmound It Out

In “'Sounding Out': A Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading”, Catherine Compton-Lilly details her own research indicating that, despite students', parents', and even teachers' reliance on the mantra sound it out as a strategy for approaching unfamiliar words, successful readers actually use a range of strategies including, but not limited to, relying on the structure of language to guess the unknown word and using cues like pictures. In fact, it turns out the sound-it-out strategy is pretty low on the list.

Last semester, during my first field experience, and in the absence of practical knowledge about teaching literacy in K-2, I certainly found myself falling back on the familiar mantra. In one particular case, a second grader (who had been held back a year) asked me how to spell the word 'ready' (a spelling strategy in its own right) during a writing activity. Although reading and writing are not the same thing, the two processes do have a reciprocal relationship, and so I instinctively told her to sound it out and to try to think about which letters would correspond to those sounds. And I did this in spite of the fact that she had an Fudd-like speech impediment. To her credit, she knew that the word ready involved the vowel digraph “ea” and that the word ended in “y”, but because of my over-reliance on the sound-it-out strategy, she naturally ended up spelling the word 'weady.' Looking at it now, I see all the strengths she brought to the table and that my only contribution resulted in her only spelling error.

Although this student who was held back had a generally positive disposition toward reading, there was another student in this K-2 class who was feeling very frustrated with his own efforts to read. He enjoyed books and loved to be read to, but when individual reading time rolled around he focused exclusively on pictures and often refused to attempt to work with text. It occurs to me now that this first grader also had a (much more serious) speech impediment, and I wonder whether his frustration was the result of a clash between his own ability to reproduce phonologically Standard English and the general cultural insistence on the sound-it-out strategy.

Compton-Lilly suggests that the sound-it-out strategy is of limited use to all students and that it is of particularly limited use to students who speak a dialect other than Standard English. I wonder then, do speech impediments present another distinct dimension of complication to phonetic reading strategies? What particular considerations should we keep in mind for these students?

2.15.14 UPDATE:  It turns out that they reciprocal relationship between reading and writing is not quite as strict on the sound-it-out strategy.  While it is true that this strategy remains of limited use for reading, for a particular stage of writing development, this strategy is actually very useful.  Of course, I didn't know that at the time!

Two-year-olds' Writing?

On another Voice of Literacy podcast, Dr. Baker interviewed Dr. Deborah Wells Rowe about her research into the writing of two- and three-year-olds.  Yes, that's right, two-year-olds writing!  Dr. Rowe is quick to point out that if you weren't present to observe the child at work you might not know that it is writing-oriented, but that, in fact, children start to distinguish reading and writing activity as early as two and certainly by three years of age.

This writing may consist of nothing more than lines, as opposed to circular shapes which might indicate drawing, but nonetheless Dr. Rowe points out that children observe the way that writing is part of grown-ups' daily lives and attempt to emulate it.

As Dr. Rowe went on to describe how we should encourage children's imaginative play to include writing, as well as how we as adults might fold children into our own writing activity, I couldn't help but be reminded of The Donut House.  In both cases, the authors mention play and pretending as fundamental to improved literacy development.  In The Donut House, Powell and Davidson advocate for situated literacy (i.e. real-world contexts) in pretend scenarios, and here Dr. Rowe would have that extrapolated to preschool.

If nothing else, I have to imagine that this sort of play would at least foster a productive disposition toward reading and writing, something which my field experience has indicated is definitely a problem for the most struggling readers.

Literacy Dig: Digging the Bus

Last week I, along with five of my peers, performed a literacy dig on a public bus.  We rode the bus for about half an hour, observing a) the physical environment including the layout of the bus and any artifacts, b) the people on the bus and what they were doing, c) spoken conversation on the bus, d) vocabulary, written or spoken, unique to the bus, and e) evidence of literacy on the bus, i.e., what reading and writing are required in this environment.

I specifically focused on the type of speech present on the bus.  In general, it was difficult to grasp the complete content of conversations over the roar of the engines, but taking the tone of conversations together with body language and ritual forms of hailing, the bus is clearly a place where "regulars" catch up with each other and compare notes or seek connections with newcomers.  There were, for example, a man and a woman with a baby in a carriage covered with bath towels (it was very cold that day).  The man stood attending the carriage while the woman sat some distance away.  A second woman inquired about the baby (age, gender, name) before going on to describe her own children.  Somewhat unsolicited, she offered, "They grow up too fast.  I got a fourteen-year-old and an eleven-year-old."  The man, evidently aware of the social literacy required in this environment offered responses that seemed calculated to provoke the least amount of further conversation without giving offense.  While he was not particularly eager to share personal details about the child with this second woman (who, he may have noticed, wore work boots that must have been four or five sizes too large for her, the interpretation of which fact I leave to the reader), he was apparently aware that the bus is an environment where people are expected to share, a place that is only semi-public where physical proximity and coincident schedules mandate a certain level of intimacy.

There were another two women sitting in adjacent seats although there was ample room for them to find a less crowded arrangement.  Although I could not fully make out the content of her speech, the tone of the woman sitting in the aisle seat suggested that she was complaining about something.  The woman sitting near the window (and consequently boxed in by the first woman) slumped away from the first woman with her head leaning against the glass.  Toward the beginning of this conversation the second woman dutifully indicated her interest with monosyllabic comments.  As the conversation went on, these signals of interest became less and less frequent though the other woman's speech did not abate as a consequence.  It would seem that the woman in the window seat, like the man above, while not particularly interested in the conversation, understood the expectation that she participate to some degree.  I thought initially that her drop in interest-signaling was calculated to discourage further conversation, but the cheerfulness with which she offered her parting salutation suggests to me that she simply realized that the other woman was content to go on with or without much response and that her interest-signaling need not be frequent to keep the conversation going and avoid awkwardness.

At this point a man boarded the bus with grocery bags and sat down opposite the woman with the oversized boots.
     "Hey, how are you?" she asked.
     "Cold." was the response.
     "Other than that?"  From there what had initially seemed a terse interaction opened into a lengthy and warm session.  The conversation initially focused on work.  The woman had recently started a new job which she hastened to add started at $7.50/hour.  "A job is a job." was the response.  And this was the general subject of the conversation, work and money, with an overall tone of commiseration tempered by a stoic disposition toward labor.  The two compared their work schedules, how to get overtime pay, how much money they each spent on Christmas gifts, the best methods of transportation to and from home, and how long they had been employed at certain jobs (eighteen years at his present job which fact seemed to inspire a new sense of reverence from the woman).  The conversation then turned toward the health of family members with the woman detailing the recent death of her father and the man offering his stepmother's dementia.  Again, there seemed to be a certain degree of pride in the adversity they faced though this pride did not manifest itself as any sort of one-upmanship, but rather as a sort of comradery.  In this instance one sees most clearly that the bus offers not only a means of conveyance, but also a social support system.

But beyond being socially literate about the forms of interaction expected on the bus, what other types of literacy are required in this setting?  Upon consultation with my peers, we observed that although the bus was plastered with warnings, notices, advertisements, maps and timetables (which require a very particular type of reading), these artifacts did not seem to be used by the habitual rider.  In fact we speculated that the types of literacy most immediately useful in this setting would be the use of maps or timetables which utilize visual literacy and numeracy more than traditional literacy, as well as the ability to read the landscape.  In particular, reading the landscape for propriety logos (i.e., the "golden arches" or the eponymous bell of Taco Bell) might be the most practical form of literacy.

That thought might be enough to raise the hackles of any Language Arts teacher, but if more proof is needed that traditional forms of literacy are strange in this setting, consider the quizzical looks I received.  I did not stand out in any particular.  I was not particularly well- or poorly-dressed.  I was not very young or old, or thin or obese.  I was not in any way remarkable to look at except that I was writing down my notes.  Try as I may to look perplexed, as if I were trying to remember that last item for my shopping list, or to look engrossed, as if I were writing a letter to a friend, try as I may to somehow normalize the behavior of writing, people just kept staring at that notebook.

Reconciling Learning to Read with Reading to Learn

I recently read an article from Language Arts that detailed the joint efforts of an experienced kindergarten teacher and a college professor to situate children's reading in real-world contexts, specifically a donut shop.

In this program, the children opened their own donut shop in a corner of their classroom, starting by researching how a donut shop works on a field trip, applying for a building permit with actual building inspectors, applying for a loan and soliciting shareholders, all culminating in a grand opening at the end of the project.  At each stage, literacy was worked into the tasks (taking notes at the donut shop, writing to prospective shareholders, filling out a loan application, etc.), and students engaged with real members of their community.  Not only was the project undertaken to facilitate the children's literacy, but also to provide them with a sense of empowerment and engagement which is often absent in traditionally under-served urban communities.

The merits of this type of program seem manifold and obvious.  But it is precisely in the type of urban communities addressed by this article that administrators and policy-makers are calling for less of this sort of situated literacy and for more and more "schooled literacy," that is, literacy addressed as discrete skills alienated from any sort of real-world context.

Given the increasing time restraints imposed by ever more data collection and test preparation, how can this sort of holistic program really be integrated in the communities where it is most needed?

Mixed Messages on RTI

Responsiveness-to-Intervention (RTI) is a topic that has educators divided.  Some may see the strategy as yet another instance of a teacher's autonomy and professional discretion being eroded.  Others may find it a useful tool for getting help to at-risk students quickly.  But as Dr. Jennifer Gilbert pointed out on Voice of Literacy in October, RTI isn't going anywhere anytime soon with a number of states now mandating its use.

In a paper written with her colleague, Dr. Donald Compton, Gilbert studied the efficacy of a 14-week RTI program involving 649 first-graders.  The study utilized three tiers of instruction.  Tier 1 was general instruction.  Of the 649 students, 212 were identified as "unresponsive" to the general-education setting.  Of these, 78 remained in that setting, and the other 134 were assigned to Tier 2 where they received small-group instruction, typically three times per week.  Of the 134 students assigned to Tier 2, 45 were identified as unresponsive to that instruction.  Of these 45, 21 stayed on in Tier 2, and 24 were assigned to Tier 3 and received one-on-one instruction fives day per week.  So the final composition of the students was:

Tier 1:  437 responsive, 78 unresponsive
Tier 2:  110 responsive, 21 unresponsive
Tier 3:  24 students

The results don't offer much in the way of settling the RTI debate.  Even the two researchers themselves seem unsure of how they feel about RTI. The paper's abstract states that Tier 2 students "made significantly higher word reading gains" compared with the non-responders who remained in Tier 1.  However, in the Voice of Literacy interview, Gilbert characterizes the effect as small and says that these modest gains dissipated quickly.  The situation for Tier 3 students is much more dire: these students saw no gains when compared to non-responders left in Tier 2.

But when asked for recommendations for parents, teachers, principals, and policy-makers, the two researchers still generally advocate the use of RTI even as they claim that their results challenge the model.  Gilbert postulates that possibly the method and timing of intervention offered at Tier 3 were not effective.  Possibly some variation on the one-on-one, five-times-per-week intervention would have yielded more promising results.  Furthermore, Gilbert suggests that a 14-week period of intervention is perhaps too short a time.  But taking these two considerations into account, longer periods of intervention and larger groups of students (larger than one anyway), one notices that this type of RTI starts to look a lot like the old tracking model that RTI is, in part, meant to move away from.

So while the efficacy of RTI remains in doubt, there is at least one silver lining: unlike previous methods of recognizing learning disability, RTI, when properly implemented, does not assume that because a child doesn't know something, the child can't know something.  According to Gilbert, prior to RTI, a student's lack of knowledge in a particular area might have indicated a learning disability.  With RTI, the student is supposed to be examined on the basis of how she or he apprehends new knowledge, not on the basis of whether she or he comes to class with certain knowledge.  RTI then distinguishes between learning disability and a lack of educational opportunity.  In this respect at least, it is an improvement.


UPDATE:  I just came across this:

After years of research working with proficient and struggling readers, Marie Clay developed Reading Recovery as an early intervention program. Reading Recovery teachers train extensively to work with the lowest 20 percent of children in first grade. They provide thirty-minute daily lessons to individual children. The majority (75 percent) of students reach grade level standards in just twelve to twenty weeks. Reading Recovery has had amazing results worldwide. Tens of thousands of teachers have been trained, and 1.7 million first graders have become successful readers, having accelerated their learning to reach the average reading level of their classmates. It should be noted that these numbers also include children who are labeled learning disabled.

Pat Johnson. Catching Readers Before They Fall: Supporting Readers Who Struggle, K-4 (Kindle Locations 323-327). Kindle Edition. 

I am not quite sure what the implication is in comparing these two programs.  The duration is comparable (14 weeks compared to 12 to 20), and the method of Reading Recovery very much like that of Gilbert's RTI (half an hour of one-on-one instruction).  Could a possible conclusion be that perhaps the 75% of the bottom fifth of readers who respond to Reading Recovery would also have responded to small group instruction like that received in Tier 2, differing only in how much previously lost ground students made up for?  What about the 5% (25% of 20%) of all students who are unresponsive to Reading Recovery as compared with the approximately 3.7% (26 out of 649) of students who were unresponsive to any kind of intervention in Gilbert's program?  What is going on with these kids?

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