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This is the Reading Instruction Show.

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I'm your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.

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The topic of today's podcast is called or the title, Reading Implicit Order and Time.

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Now, sometimes when you're working things out in one area of your life, you're really

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working things out in another.

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And sometimes when you're figuring out some things out, you're really figuring other things

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out.

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And often you're not even aware of the parallel processes taking place.

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Sometimes it hits you much later.

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After the fact, in fact, it hits you much later.

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Oh, you say to yourself, I thought I was working on this when I was really working on that.

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Now, this happened with me in terms of reading instruction, religion, and teacher preparation.

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I was thinking about one thing, but I was in fact thinking about another thing.

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And what's really weird, my thinking happened across time, completely asynchronously.

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The thinking was synchronized, but not by time, not by time in explicate reality, but

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in implicate reality.

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Now time exists as a linear concept on this plane in what we call explicate reality or

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explicate order.

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However, time also exists in the psychoid realm, or what physicist David Bohm calls

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implicate reality or implicate order, and this is sometimes referred to as the unfolded

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order.

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This is seen as a deeper and more fundamental order of reality.

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In implicate order, time is not in a line, but more like a puddle that you stick your

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finger into, you're touching the past, present, and future all at the same time.

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Now let's talk about religion.

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I've always had a unique relationship with organized religion, and I guess I prefer

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disorganized religion or unorganized religion or no religion at all.

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However, I've had this relationship with organized religion, and relationship is probably not

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the best term to use here.

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It's less like a relationship and more like a hemorrhoid.

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I've always had a hemorrhoid with organized religion.

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At times it's been a very big part of my life, and at other times it disappears.

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But unlike hemorrhoids, there's no creep or suppository to make organized religion

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go away, and it just keeps popping up, it seems.

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I grew up in the 60s and 70s in the small, rural town of Gransburg in northern Wisconsin,

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and back then there were 900 people living there.

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And within the village of Gransburg, there were seven gas stations, two bars, four churches,

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and three TV channels, and back then public TV didn't count as a channel.

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In the townships around the village of Gransburg, what we called out in the country, there was

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a smattering of small Lutheran and Baptist churches sprinkled about.

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And I went to Faith Lutheran Church every Sunday for all of my life.

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Now I hated going to church as a kid.

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There was nothing about it that was remotely interesting or enjoyable.

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You just went there and sat there in a pew for an hour and said nothing.

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And an hour in adult time is like five hours in kid time.

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Now let's take a closer look at time, how it applies to reading and reality.

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In explicate order, time moves from left to right, going from past to present to future,

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always in the same order, over and over and over again, never deviating.

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Present always comes after past and before future.

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It never changes.

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It never varies.

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It stays the same.

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In this dimension, explicate order, we can break up time into units and quantify it.

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There are 8,700 hours in a year.

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And as a kid, I spent half these hours sleeping, eating, looking for my shoes, and getting ready

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for things.

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So as a kid, I had about 4,000 hours available each year.

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Now there were 180 days of school each year, so that's a total of about 1,260 total hours.

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So now we're down to 2,740 hours available in a year for me.

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And when you take in getting ready for church, going to church, Sunday school, choir, stinking

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practice, coming back from church, Vacation Bible School, that's about 156 hours a year.

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That means that about 6% of my total available childhood time was spent in church.

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All that time spent in church, and I could have been watching cartoons.

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How many episodes of Heckel and Jekyll went unwatched?

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Oh, the horror, the horror of it!

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So let's take a look at time as it applies to school reality.

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States Ferry, but again, on average there are about 180 days of school each year.

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It's suggested that 90 minutes a day be devoted to literacy.

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This could include, however, reading, language arts, and spelling.

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Now the average length of reading class, according to Rosian's sign he had a study in 2015,

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is about 60 minutes a day.

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But time alone is not a good indicator of quality or of learning.

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You could spend 60 minutes every day doing baloney.

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And also time is not always the same.

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There are different types of time in school reality.

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There are five types of time we'll look at.

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First, there's a lot of time.

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That is the amount of time allocated for instruction.

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That would be the 60 minutes from the start to the end of class.

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And within this time, it's assumed that there's going to be student movement and organization

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and some kind of take and care of business kind of stuff.

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That's the first kind.

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There's off-task time.

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This is when students are doing things unrelated to the lesson or learning objective.

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And this usually means they're doing what you don't want them to do.

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And this is not a good type of time.

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We'd rather not have off-task time, but kids being kids, you have to expect a certain amount

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of this.

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There's also time on task.

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This is time where students are actively engaged in learning activities.

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This is good, better than allocated time.

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You can see by their behaviors that students are doing something and that something is

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related to the lesson or designed learning experience.

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But just because they're doing something doesn't mean they're thinking about it.

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It doesn't mean they're engaged.

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It just means that physically they're doing what you want them to do.

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You can do this without learning a thing.

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Kids can do this without learning a thing.

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And usually in reading class, when students are back at their desk filling out worksheets,

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they are doing time on task.

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But that doesn't mean any learning is going on.

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The fourth type of time is called academic engagement time.

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This is the time where students are cognitively and behaviorally on task or engaged in learning

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activities that are within their ability to do within the zone of proximal development.

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Here, students are paying attention, completing work, listening, or engaged in relevant discussion.

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You can see that and this is better than time on task.

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Students aren't just going through the motions, rather they're thinking about what they're

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doing and learning.

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There is cognitive manipulation of the content or skill that goes beyond drill-in practice.

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And the teacher provides scaffolds to enable students to complete more challenging tasks

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without being frustrated.

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And if students are both cognitively and physically engaged, you're more apt to have

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learning and good learning, academic engagement time.

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The last type of time is called flow state time.

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This is similar to Mahi's description of the flow state.

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This is the best kind of time in our schools.

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Here the student is completely absorbed, focused on a single task or activity.

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They're directing all their attention towards something and they're motivated to do it or

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to be engaged with it.

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Kind of like when you're reading a good book or thinking and writing creative new ideas

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or watching a great movie or when children are immersed in a project or activity that

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interests them.

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Now young children will spend a whole lot of time in the flow state absorbed in activities

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that interest them and activities that they want to do.

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They'll spend hours immersed in play or pretend activities.

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You don't have to worry about their attention span.

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You don't have to worry about using rewards and punishments or averse of conditioners to

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keep them on task.

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They want to do the thing in flow state time.

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And this is where real learning happens.

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And often here instruction is mega-multicentry.

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That means it engages student's senses, see, hear, feel, do, as well as their emotions,

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their imaginations, their social-cultural experiences, and their social interpersonal

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selves.

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Flow state time often occurs when children are able to read the good books that they

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have selected when they're able to write the stories that they want to write and talk about

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their books and their stories.

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This flow state is the ultimate in learning.

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And when you're in flow state time, the activity is reinforcing in and of itself, and you don't

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have to worry about manipulating or controlling behaviors.

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Well, what about unflow state time?

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This occurs usually when students are filling in worksheets, reading decodable books, or

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practicing sounding out words.

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You never get flow state time when you're doing this stuff.

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It never happens.

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You may have time on task, but these sorts of direct instruction, science of reading

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activities that involve low-level thinking rarely engage students' higher cognitive

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functions.

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And when students are engaged only in low-level tasks, only low-level learning occurs.

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Academic engagement time rarely occurs here with direct instruction.

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And I'm not saying that students shouldn't have direct instruction, that it shouldn't

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occur.

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I'm saying that direct instruction of skills should be kept to a minimum, and all direct

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explicit instruction should take place within the context of real-life books and writing

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to the extent possible.

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There's a balance.

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Now there are magic teachers out there, but they're going to disappear.

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The state of Minnesota is driving them out of the classroom with their top-down mandates.

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But these magic teachers design learning experiences around students' natural inclination, what

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they want to do, what brings them joy.

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They lie standards and objectives to the greatest extent possible, with that which students

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want to do, with things that are of interest to them.

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And these ways they don't have to learn a bunch of tricks for behavior management.

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They don't have to manage behavior at all.

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If students want to do the behavior, the behavior is reinforcing in and of itself.

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If students want to do the behavior, not to do so is punishment.

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But if students find the behavior unpleasant and don't want to do it, the behavior they're

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being forced to do becomes an adverse condition.

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That is, they associate unpleasantness with the behavior they are being forced to do.

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What this means, science of reading zealots, is this.

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If you're making reading class, god-awful boring and frustrating, children will associate

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reading with awfulness and boringness and frustration.

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And that means they won't do it unless they're manipulated or controlled to do it.

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And we know, by the research of Stephen Crescent and Richard Allington and others, that reading

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volume is good.

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It's correlated with a lot of good stuff.

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The more you read, the better your comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, word recognition, and

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conceptual knowledge.

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Reading a lot, reading practice, is important in one's development as a reader and thinker.

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Just like playing the piano, one gets better at reading with practice.

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And just like playing the piano, one does not get better without practice.

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Now I would invite you to experience it.

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I would invite my zealot friends to experience reading instruction.

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Whenever a state mandate is passed related to one of these top-down things in Minnesota,

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is the Read Act, the science of reading zealots post happy pictures of happy children and

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happy classes, happily learning to read, and there's parents and teachers and kids all

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happy all over the place, and who can argue with happiness.

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Everyone wants happy.

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But happy pictures just means that people are smiling.

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It doesn't mean that happiness is going on or anything is producing happiness.

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People just look happy.

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And I would posit, my good zealot friends, that your structured literacy instruction,

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your one-size-fits-all scripted reading programs, are doing the exact opposite of creating happiness.

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They are creating a lot of unhappiness, which research has shown to be the very opposite

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of happiness.

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So take the challenge.

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I would invite you, dear listeners, to go into a structured science of reading class.

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Go into a classroom in which the teacher is forced to use one of these scripted one-size-fits-all

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programs, spend 60 minutes there watching quietly in the corner, and then tell me what

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you see.

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What do you feel?

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What do you experience?

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Do you see any joy?

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Do you see students motivated to be engaged?

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Do you see students absorbed in classroom activities?

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Are you enjoying being there?

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So let's consider the time in these science of reading classrooms.

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How much allocated time is there?

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Then create a pie chart in your head.

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How much off-task time do you see?

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Time on task, academic engagement time, and flow state time.

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What do you see taking place?

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Create your pie chart.

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Are there students who seem to be enjoying themselves?

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Is there any joy here?

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Is it a joyful place?

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Do you want to spend time here?

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And how much actual reading is going on?

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Not worksheets, but reading.

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Now if you were to go into a reading workshop class, reading workshop, when done correctly,

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is a balanced approach to reading instruction.

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This means skills instruction is balanced with opportunities to use these skills in

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authentic reading experiences.

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So I would invite you to go into a classroom where a master teacher is using reading workshop

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to teach reading.

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But you probably can't find one left in the state of Minnesota.

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They've been stamped out.

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But if you could spend 60 minutes in a reading workshop, what do you see, feel, and experience?

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Create the pie chart in your head and you see a much different picture of off-task time,

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time on task, academic engagement time, and flow state time.

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You'd see students enjoying themselves.

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You'd see joy.

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It would be a joyful place.

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And you'd find that you want to spend time there.

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And you'd see actual reading going on, students reading good books, and talking about good

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books, and writing about what they've read.

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And you'd see reading taking place, reading practice.

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So there are five kinds of time that you will find in a reading class, allocated time, amount

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of time set aside for that class instruction, off-task time.

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Students are doing things unrelated to the lesson or learning objective.

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Time on task.

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Students are actively engaged, but just behaviorally.

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Academic engagement time, where students are cognitively and behaviorally on-tasked or

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engaged in learning activities that are within their own approximate development.

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This is good.

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This is better than time on task, academic engagement time.

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But the best of all is flow state time, where students are completely absorbed, focus on

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a single task or activity.

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They're directing all their attention towards something that they're motivated to do or

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to be engaged with.

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Academic engagement time is good.

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Flow state time is best for learning.

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Magic teachers, if they are empowered to make the choices that are best for their students,

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know how to align reading instruction with students' interests to create flow state time

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in their reading classrooms.

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I've seen it.

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I've done it.

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A teacher's number one job is to help children fall in love with books.

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After that, much of reading instruction takes care of itself.

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This has been the Reading Instruction Show.

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I'm your host as always, Dr. Andy Johnson.