Here is my letter of appreciation to Ms. Natalie Wexler, keynote speaker at this conference which took place in Halifax last weekend.
Dear Ms. Wexler,
I was very interested to hear your presentation at the ResearchEd conference in Halifax last weekend – unfortunately the link was sent to me late, so I missed the first part of it. However what I heard impressed me very much, as well as other things you have written.
I was pleasantly surprised by your talk at what I had expected would be a “Science of Reading” conference. So much of what you had to say about literacy and trying to narrow the gaps (Achievement, knowledge etc) between various groups – disability, racial, language – resonated with me. The recent move towards structural phonics and the teaching of reading as a series of isolated skills without a knowledge base has not addressed this gap in the USA or Britain after 20 years, and I am discouraged to see it being adopted here in Canada. I was particularly interested in your critique of standardized reading tests which are often based on texts in which children have no knowledge base, and which therefore challenge their working memory. Children’s poor performance on these tests in early elementary are often used to justify “going back to basics”.
I was also impressed with your emphasis on the importance of writing in consolidating literacy skills. At Halifax Independent School where I taught for many years, the youngest children (age 4) start writing as soon as they can form letters about the topics which they are “studying”, and this continues throughout elementary school. When they get to the age of 8 or 9 most students are writing copiously and learning all the grammatical conventions they need as they need them. Most of them don’t need isolated lessons and practice about “how to use a comma” or “what is a paragraph” – some of course need extra practice, but in small multi-age classrooms this is easy to get.
After your talk , the rest of the conference (or as much as I could see online) seemed a bit surreal – it consisted of talks by teachers who seemed to be doing the opposite to what you had recommended – reading meaningless passages unconnected to anything else, learning to recognize inferences by looking at a single paragraph etc. I felt sad for the child in the video who was competently reading a passage consisting almost entirely of 3-letter words with an “a” in the middle, who ultimately “failed” because he had not realized that the cat and the rat were sitting on a mat – he had drawn a picture of them on a bed!
Your comparison of the 2 classrooms was most interesting and I hope to read more about them. The second one, which was using a more integrated, content heavy approach seems very much like Halifax Independent School which is described in my book, “The Best School in the World” (Formac, 2017). I firmly believe its approach to literacy would work for every child, even those with disabilities or from culturally distinct groups. What is needed is not a “new” approach to teaching reading, but smaller classes, teacher training plus autonomy, and more classroom supports along with a knowledge, theme or inquiry-based curriculum! And sure, more innovative ways of teaching phonics and phonemic awareness are always welcome. I’m always happy to be part of adding to our knowledge of the “Science of Reading” which I and many other teachers have been contributing to for the past 50 years.
Thank you so much for your work in this area. I look forward to reading more about it.
Warmly,
Molly Hurd
Check out this link I discovered just yesterday:
https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trtr.2258
and Natalie Wexler’s blog:
The Inquiring Teacher 