This is the Reading Instruction Show.
I'm your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.
The topic of today's podcast is called or the title, Reading Implicit Order and Time.
Now, sometimes when you're working things out in one area of your life, you're really
working things out in another.
And sometimes when you're figuring out some things out, you're really figuring other things
out.
And often you're not even aware of the parallel processes taking place.
Sometimes it hits you much later.
After the fact, in fact, it hits you much later.
Oh, you say to yourself, I thought I was working on this when I was really working on that.
Now, this happened with me in terms of reading instruction, religion, and teacher preparation.
I was thinking about one thing, but I was in fact thinking about another thing.
And what's really weird, my thinking happened across time, completely asynchronously.
The thinking was synchronized, but not by time, not by time in explicate reality, but
in implicate reality.
Now time exists as a linear concept on this plane in what we call explicate reality or
explicate order.
However, time also exists in the psychoid realm, or what physicist David Bohm calls
implicate reality or implicate order, and this is sometimes referred to as the unfolded
order.
This is seen as a deeper and more fundamental order of reality.
In implicate order, time is not in a line, but more like a puddle that you stick your
finger into, you're touching the past, present, and future all at the same time.
Now let's talk about religion.
I've always had a unique relationship with organized religion, and I guess I prefer
disorganized religion or unorganized religion or no religion at all.
However, I've had this relationship with organized religion, and relationship is probably not
the best term to use here.
It's less like a relationship and more like a hemorrhoid.
I've always had a hemorrhoid with organized religion.
At times it's been a very big part of my life, and at other times it disappears.
But unlike hemorrhoids, there's no creep or suppository to make organized religion
go away, and it just keeps popping up, it seems.
I grew up in the 60s and 70s in the small, rural town of Gransburg in northern Wisconsin,
and back then there were 900 people living there.
And within the village of Gransburg, there were seven gas stations, two bars, four churches,
and three TV channels, and back then public TV didn't count as a channel.
In the townships around the village of Gransburg, what we called out in the country, there was
a smattering of small Lutheran and Baptist churches sprinkled about.
And I went to Faith Lutheran Church every Sunday for all of my life.
Now I hated going to church as a kid.
There was nothing about it that was remotely interesting or enjoyable.
You just went there and sat there in a pew for an hour and said nothing.
And an hour in adult time is like five hours in kid time.
Now let's take a closer look at time, how it applies to reading and reality.
In explicate order, time moves from left to right, going from past to present to future,
always in the same order, over and over and over again, never deviating.
Present always comes after past and before future.
It never changes.
It never varies.
It stays the same.
In this dimension, explicate order, we can break up time into units and quantify it.
There are 8,700 hours in a year.
And as a kid, I spent half these hours sleeping, eating, looking for my shoes, and getting ready
for things.
So as a kid, I had about 4,000 hours available each year.
Now there were 180 days of school each year, so that's a total of about 1,260 total hours.
So now we're down to 2,740 hours available in a year for me.
And when you take in getting ready for church, going to church, Sunday school, choir, stinking
practice, coming back from church, Vacation Bible School, that's about 156 hours a year.
That means that about 6% of my total available childhood time was spent in church.
All that time spent in church, and I could have been watching cartoons.
How many episodes of Heckel and Jekyll went unwatched?
Oh, the horror, the horror of it!
So let's take a look at time as it applies to school reality.
States Ferry, but again, on average there are about 180 days of school each year.
It's suggested that 90 minutes a day be devoted to literacy.
This could include, however, reading, language arts, and spelling.
Now the average length of reading class, according to Rosian's sign he had a study in 2015,
is about 60 minutes a day.
But time alone is not a good indicator of quality or of learning.
You could spend 60 minutes every day doing baloney.
And also time is not always the same.
There are different types of time in school reality.
There are five types of time we'll look at.
First, there's a lot of time.
That is the amount of time allocated for instruction.
That would be the 60 minutes from the start to the end of class.
And within this time, it's assumed that there's going to be student movement and organization
and some kind of take and care of business kind of stuff.
That's the first kind.
There's off-task time.
This is when students are doing things unrelated to the lesson or learning objective.
And this usually means they're doing what you don't want them to do.
And this is not a good type of time.
We'd rather not have off-task time, but kids being kids, you have to expect a certain amount
of this.
There's also time on task.
This is time where students are actively engaged in learning activities.
This is good, better than allocated time.
You can see by their behaviors that students are doing something and that something is
related to the lesson or designed learning experience.
But just because they're doing something doesn't mean they're thinking about it.
It doesn't mean they're engaged.
It just means that physically they're doing what you want them to do.
You can do this without learning a thing.
Kids can do this without learning a thing.
And usually in reading class, when students are back at their desk filling out worksheets,
they are doing time on task.
But that doesn't mean any learning is going on.
The fourth type of time is called academic engagement time.
This is the time where students are cognitively and behaviorally on task or engaged in learning
activities that are within their ability to do within the zone of proximal development.
Here, students are paying attention, completing work, listening, or engaged in relevant discussion.
You can see that and this is better than time on task.
Students aren't just going through the motions, rather they're thinking about what they're
doing and learning.
There is cognitive manipulation of the content or skill that goes beyond drill-in practice.
And the teacher provides scaffolds to enable students to complete more challenging tasks
without being frustrated.
And if students are both cognitively and physically engaged, you're more apt to have
learning and good learning, academic engagement time.
The last type of time is called flow state time.
This is similar to Mahi's description of the flow state.
This is the best kind of time in our schools.
Here the student is completely absorbed, focused on a single task or activity.
They're directing all their attention towards something and they're motivated to do it or
to be engaged with it.
Kind of like when you're reading a good book or thinking and writing creative new ideas
or watching a great movie or when children are immersed in a project or activity that
interests them.
Now young children will spend a whole lot of time in the flow state absorbed in activities
that interest them and activities that they want to do.
They'll spend hours immersed in play or pretend activities.
You don't have to worry about their attention span.
You don't have to worry about using rewards and punishments or averse of conditioners to
keep them on task.
They want to do the thing in flow state time.
And this is where real learning happens.
And often here instruction is mega-multicentry.
That means it engages student's senses, see, hear, feel, do, as well as their emotions,
their imaginations, their social-cultural experiences, and their social interpersonal
selves.
Flow state time often occurs when children are able to read the good books that they
have selected when they're able to write the stories that they want to write and talk about
their books and their stories.
This flow state is the ultimate in learning.
And when you're in flow state time, the activity is reinforcing in and of itself, and you don't
have to worry about manipulating or controlling behaviors.
Well, what about unflow state time?
This occurs usually when students are filling in worksheets, reading decodable books, or
practicing sounding out words.
You never get flow state time when you're doing this stuff.
It never happens.
You may have time on task, but these sorts of direct instruction, science of reading
activities that involve low-level thinking rarely engage students' higher cognitive
functions.
And when students are engaged only in low-level tasks, only low-level learning occurs.
Academic engagement time rarely occurs here with direct instruction.
And I'm not saying that students shouldn't have direct instruction, that it shouldn't
occur.
I'm saying that direct instruction of skills should be kept to a minimum, and all direct
explicit instruction should take place within the context of real-life books and writing
to the extent possible.
There's a balance.
Now there are magic teachers out there, but they're going to disappear.
The state of Minnesota is driving them out of the classroom with their top-down mandates.
But these magic teachers design learning experiences around students' natural inclination, what
they want to do, what brings them joy.
They lie standards and objectives to the greatest extent possible, with that which students
want to do, with things that are of interest to them.
And these ways they don't have to learn a bunch of tricks for behavior management.
They don't have to manage behavior at all.
If students want to do the behavior, the behavior is reinforcing in and of itself.
If students want to do the behavior, not to do so is punishment.
But if students find the behavior unpleasant and don't want to do it, the behavior they're
being forced to do becomes an adverse condition.
That is, they associate unpleasantness with the behavior they are being forced to do.
What this means, science of reading zealots, is this.
If you're making reading class, god-awful boring and frustrating, children will associate
reading with awfulness and boringness and frustration.
And that means they won't do it unless they're manipulated or controlled to do it.
And we know, by the research of Stephen Crescent and Richard Allington and others, that reading
volume is good.
It's correlated with a lot of good stuff.
The more you read, the better your comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, word recognition, and
conceptual knowledge.
Reading a lot, reading practice, is important in one's development as a reader and thinker.
Just like playing the piano, one gets better at reading with practice.
And just like playing the piano, one does not get better without practice.
Now I would invite you to experience it.
I would invite my zealot friends to experience reading instruction.
Whenever a state mandate is passed related to one of these top-down things in Minnesota,
is the Read Act, the science of reading zealots post happy pictures of happy children and
happy classes, happily learning to read, and there's parents and teachers and kids all
happy all over the place, and who can argue with happiness.
Everyone wants happy.
But happy pictures just means that people are smiling.
It doesn't mean that happiness is going on or anything is producing happiness.
People just look happy.
And I would posit, my good zealot friends, that your structured literacy instruction,
your one-size-fits-all scripted reading programs, are doing the exact opposite of creating happiness.
They are creating a lot of unhappiness, which research has shown to be the very opposite
of happiness.
So take the challenge.
I would invite you, dear listeners, to go into a structured science of reading class.
Go into a classroom in which the teacher is forced to use one of these scripted one-size-fits-all
programs, spend 60 minutes there watching quietly in the corner, and then tell me what
you see.
What do you feel?
What do you experience?
Do you see any joy?
Do you see students motivated to be engaged?
Do you see students absorbed in classroom activities?
Are you enjoying being there?
So let's consider the time in these science of reading classrooms.
How much allocated time is there?
Then create a pie chart in your head.
How much off-task time do you see?
Time on task, academic engagement time, and flow state time.
What do you see taking place?
Create your pie chart.
Are there students who seem to be enjoying themselves?
Is there any joy here?
Is it a joyful place?
Do you want to spend time here?
And how much actual reading is going on?
Not worksheets, but reading.
Now if you were to go into a reading workshop class, reading workshop, when done correctly,
is a balanced approach to reading instruction.
This means skills instruction is balanced with opportunities to use these skills in
authentic reading experiences.
So I would invite you to go into a classroom where a master teacher is using reading workshop
to teach reading.
But you probably can't find one left in the state of Minnesota.
They've been stamped out.
But if you could spend 60 minutes in a reading workshop, what do you see, feel, and experience?
Create the pie chart in your head and you see a much different picture of off-task time,
time on task, academic engagement time, and flow state time.
You'd see students enjoying themselves.
You'd see joy.
It would be a joyful place.
And you'd find that you want to spend time there.
And you'd see actual reading going on, students reading good books, and talking about good
books, and writing about what they've read.
And you'd see reading taking place, reading practice.
So there are five kinds of time that you will find in a reading class, allocated time, amount
of time set aside for that class instruction, off-task time.
Students are doing things unrelated to the lesson or learning objective.
Time on task.
Students are actively engaged, but just behaviorally.
Academic engagement time, where students are cognitively and behaviorally on-tasked or
engaged in learning activities that are within their own approximate development.
This is good.
This is better than time on task, academic engagement time.
But the best of all is flow state time, where students are completely absorbed, focus on
a single task or activity.
They're directing all their attention towards something that they're motivated to do or
to be engaged with.
Academic engagement time is good.
Flow state time is best for learning.
Magic teachers, if they are empowered to make the choices that are best for their students,
know how to align reading instruction with students' interests to create flow state time
in their reading classrooms.
I've seen it.
I've done it.
A teacher's number one job is to help children fall in love with books.
After that, much of reading instruction takes care of itself.
This has been the Reading Instruction Show.
I'm your host as always, Dr. Andy Johnson.