Can: David Ayer 'Taking Our Teachers out to the Wood Shed: Phonics is a Fake Controversy & Our Kids Are Getting Shafted'

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Can: David Ayer 'Taking Our Teachers out to the Wood Shed: Phonics is a Fake Controversy & Our Kids Are Getting Shafted'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

David Ayer writes, Taking Our Teachers out to the Wood Shed: Phonics is a Fake Controversy and Our Kids Are Getting Shafted via linkedin:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/taking-o ... david-ayer
...Virtually all kids need to go through the stage of sounding words out. As long as you don’t skip this step, the vast majority of kids will learn. (Some will start seeing sound-sight patterns immediately and go from strength to strength, others will need more time, and kids who struggle greatly trying to sound words out can be identified and screened much earlier for signs of dyslexia.) Yet teachers in 2017 act like English’s relatively inconsistent spelling is some kind of sadistic impediment that can only slow learners down. This is preposterous for two reasons: all words have some predictable sound-spelling correlation (even a weirdly spelled word like ‘enough’ isn’t spelled ‘dzerchlevrg’). But even more crucially, a school-aged child’s emerging fluency and already-considerable spoken vocabulary in their mother tongue is a massive resource that simply must be put to use when learning to read and spell. Experts shudder at the thought of not making full use a child’s emerging mastery of spoken English to assist as much as possible in starting to decode written words. Yet our teachers are taught that simply creating an Enriched Environment is going to induce their poor charges to shimmy their way up a rock wall with no, ahem, scaffolding to grab a hold of...
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Can: David Ayer: Taking Our Teachers out to the Wood Shed: Phonics is a Fake Controversy and Our Kids Are Getting Shaf

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

David calls upon information internationally in his piece - this would not be so easy if it were not for the internet.

If only all student-teachers and teachers could be alerted to the information available via the internet in a 'direct' way.

That is why it would be good to see on all Universities' reading lists the website of the International Foundation for Effective Reading Instruction! Please make this recommendation if you have links to Universities and schools.
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Can: David Ayer 'Taking Our Teachers out to the Wood Shed: Phonics is a Fake Controversy & Our Kids Are Getting Shaf

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Here is another piece featuring teacher education - based on an open letter headed up by Canadian Steven Dykstra and signed by an international group of academics:
Another blast in the reading wars

Valeria Strauss
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ans ... d2d538c1af
The reading wars continue.

Last month I published two pieces by literacy experts who raised serious objections to key parts of a report released over the summer on teacher preparation by a group called the National Council on Teacher Quality. The first one is here, the second here.( I had earlier published posts on the report, here and here, which criticized its methodology in determining which colleges of education were worthwhile and which aren’t.) The literacy experts (some of whom have served as president of the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association) were concerned, among other things, that the council was promoting an old and narrow idea that direct instruction of phonics is the best way to teach reading and that other methods have little or no value.

Not surprisingly, a number of scholars with different views has taken issue with the group’s objections and signed a letter about their position. This letter was written and circulated among like-minded scholars by Steven Dykstra, an adolescent psychologist and a founding member of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition.
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Can: David Ayer 'Taking Our Teachers out to the Wood Shed: Phonics is a Fake Controversy & Our Kids Are Getting Shaf

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

The Wisconsin Reading Coalition is another very informative organisation well worth noting:

http://www.wisconsinreadingcoalition.org
On a Mission

The Wisconsin Reading Coalition is a grassroots movement of parents, educators, advocacy organizations, health professionals, and business leaders committed to bringing scientifically-based reading instruction and intervention to all Wisconsin students.
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Can: David Ayer 'Taking Our Teachers out to the Wood Shed: Phonics is a Fake Controversy & Our Kids Are Getting Shaf

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Here is another example of an open letter demonstrating the total lack of transparency regarding official curriculum content.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19cZ ... t?hl=en_US


We see this state of affairs (lack of transparency and accountability) over and again in the reading wars. I myself got involved in the reading debate when, as an ordinary primary teacher, I was being instructed (compulsory) to attend training of the new (then) initiative, the National Literacy Strategy, in England in 1998.

When I queried being told to instruct my children to guess from the picture cues and context and asked for the research behind the multi-cueing 'searchlights' reading strategies, none could be provided. Thus began my journey into challenging the official status quo of promoting multi-cueing word-guessing.

England has now changed its official guidance to 'systematic synthetic phonics' with no multi-cueing word-guessing strategies (as a consequence of parliamentary inquiries and Sir Jim Rose's independent review - 2006) and this is now written in law in the form of the National Curriculum of 2014. Of course this is not the case everywhere that English is taught for reading and writing - the reading wars still continue in different guises.
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