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This is the reading instruction show. I'm your host as always a doctor Andy Johnson that the topic of today's podcast is angels

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vampires lies and

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Educational overlord overlords. It's an excerpt from a podcast. I did a little bit earlier

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so the first part let's look at the big lesson and

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There's a lesson and there's the lesson beyond the lesson

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And the lesson beyond the big lesson here is that when teaching from your highest place

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The teacher and the student become one

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When you're teaching from your highest place

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Learning goes both ways like electrons on an alternating current wire

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Meaning that you're learning from your students and your students are learning from you

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Now teaching from your highest place doesn't mean that you're always teaching most effectively

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But usually you are

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We all have lessons that don't go just right and that's okay

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If you've never failed you haven't tried enough things

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Failure is an important part of success

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But when you're teaching from your highest place you're teaching with good intent

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This means you're teaching from a place of humility

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caring and compassion not ego

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You're teaching from love

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Ouch, and I said it right there love that word

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Let's take a look at the word love

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Now did you ever think you'd hear that word in a podcast about reading instruction?

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And I admit I was more than a little uncomfortable when it first came out of my fingers and slipped onto the page

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Right away. I wanted to pull it back. I

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Started looking for another word like kindness or compassion or care

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But these words just didn't get to where I wanted to go

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Love is a powerful word

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But if you're uncomfortable with that word love we can use the term unconditional positive regard there

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Does that make you feel better?

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They're relatively similar

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With love or unconditional positive regard

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You seek to nurture to give to yourself to others and to your environment without

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conditions

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Love or unconditional positive regard is first a disposition or state of mind

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That then manifests itself into action

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Now let's talk about secrets vampires angels and lies. I

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Had no plans to write about these things when I started this podcast

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But like the word love

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This part of the podcast just slipped out of my fingers and onto the page

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First I want to tell you about the secret

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You may think you're teaching reading and this may be so on the surface level

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But on the deep level if you're really teaching if you're using

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Meaning-based reading instruction

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You're really teaching your students life

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Reading good books

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Talking about good books writing and sharing our stories listening to the stories of others is life

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Helping students to use literacy to find out who they are and what they may become

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Helps them come alive

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Teaching students to develop their full literacy potential is bringing them fully to life

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Teaching students to be and become literate is life-giving

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We're not here just to teach children to sound out words that would not be life-giving

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We're here to help children be and become literate and

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To be and become literate is to use reading and writing for authentic purposes

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Don't let the phonics penguins the number monkeys and the educational overlords distract you from this

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And let's talk about vampires

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Vampires are real. Yes, they are

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They seek to suck the life out of us

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In education the vampires try to suck the life out of us through their top-down standards

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Their mindless mandates and their really silly laws related to skills-based reading instruction

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They seek to make teachers merely technicians on an assembly line

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who mindlessly implement standardized curriculum and

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obediently followed the dictates of the educational overlords

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The educational overlords don't want teachers to think they only want them to follow directions

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And they don't want students to think only to respond to letter stimuli

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The educational overlords see the world of education through the scratched and distorted lenses of

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standardized tests and

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profit

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Let's take a look at the lies

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The educational overlords in Minnesota who assigns standards to teacher education courses would have me teach my students lies

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For example, they want me to teach my students quote the ways in which reading achievement is related to

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phonological and phonemic awareness

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Including the ability to recognize word boundaries to rhyme and to blend segment

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substitute and delete sounds in words and

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To teach this would be a lie

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These people of the lie are asking me to lie to my students to teach them the lie

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Yes, there is a correlation between phonological awareness of which phonemic awareness is a subset and

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Reading achievement

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They co relate or they appear together

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That does not mean that one thing causes another thing

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Correlation does not infer causation

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Phonological and phonemic awareness do not cause reading achievement

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Now if you were to spend a lot of time teaching phonological and phonemic awareness

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Yes, students will score higher on tests of phonological and phonemic awareness

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absolutely

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But would the results be persistent meaning would they last and more importantly would the results would the skills

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Transfer to authentic reading situations in which students were asked to create meaning with print

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That's what reading is creating meaning

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Both the national reading panel and I would say no and

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Would teaching these things be more effective than reading a lot of good books writing our stories and learning

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Skills within this context and again, there's a good chunk of research that says no

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Now I'm not saying that you shouldn't teach these things

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To your students if you're a reading teacher, I don't want anyone to pull this out of context, but they will

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These are important but small parts of early literacy instruction

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The problem is that the over emphasis on these small parts

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Get students focusing on small parts, which is individual words instead of the big parts which is meaning and ideas

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And besides we never encounter individual words floating in space

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Outside a meaningful context

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We always see them in the context of something

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Even words and words on signs and labels are in the context of a place or a product

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And context is an important part of recognizing words and creating meaning

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Here's another lie the state of Minnesota wants me to teach my students

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Quote the instructional progression of phonological awareness

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For example words syllabi's on sets and rhymes and phonemes

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Well, this too is a lie

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There is no instructional progression of when or in what order these things should be taught or even if they should be taught at all

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They made this up

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Show me a bit of supporting research that might indicate that teaching these things has a causal effect on reading achievement

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Or that it's more effective than reading lots of good books and writing our stories with skills instruction taught in the context of this

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Is that more effective than teaching them in a specific order?

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Rather than teaching them as students are ready for these skills

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Now early on when children are learning concepts of print in pre-k

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They do need to know what a word is

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Absolutely they need to be able to see that a combination of squiggles on the page

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They need to be able to point to it

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Know that's a word

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They need to know that one group of squiggles is separate from another group of squiggles

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They should also know that combinations of squiggles mean something

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They need to know that sentences contain these things and they're called words

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And each word is a separate thing

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They need to know that words have sound parts called syllables

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They don't really need to know what a syllable is but they should know that words have sound parts

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For example the word silly has two sound parts, sill and e

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Why is this important?

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Well it gets them ready to put letters to sounds when writing and to see and hear word parts when using phonics to recognize words

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And there is no instructional progression that must be

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There's no research to support the proposition that teaching the instructional progression of syllables or any other of these things has a causal effect on anything other than the profits of the educational overlords

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Now let's talk about the angel

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These are some of the lies I've been asked to teach my students

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And why does the state of Minnesota want me to lie to them?

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For-profit entities and a radio journalist who wanted to make a name for herself and lots and lots of money

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Have convinced lawmakers that the lie is real

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And I will teach these things to my students, yes I will

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But at the same time I have a moral obligation to my students to teach them why these lies are lies

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I owe it to the taxpayers who pay my salary and the students my students will someday teach to teach them the correct thing

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So I've been wrestling with an angel this semester

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I have a moral dilemma

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I want to help my students develop their full teaching potential so that they in turn are able to help their students develop their full literacy potential

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And I want to get them ready to take the stupid teacher licensure test which has no predictive validity but I want them to pass that

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Now I can do this and not lie at the same time

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I can't lie but I can show them the lie

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So I've been wrestling with an angel this semester

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This has been the Reading Instruction Show, I am your host Dr. Andy Johnson