This is the reading instruction show.
I'm your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.
The topic of today's podcast is the dance and the joy of reading.
Now, I recently had the chance to be part of a local Dancing with the Stars competition
to raise money for the American Red Cross.
And since I had never really danced before, it took me four weeks to learn my two minute
routine. But I can say that every minute of that four weeks was joy.
I enjoyed learning the dance, practicing the dance, and performing the dance.
And I saw many of the parallels between learning to dance and learning to eat.
I saw that good dancing instruction, like good reading instruction, is born of joy.
Which led me to ask the very reasonable question in my last podcast, where is the joy?
This is not only a reasonable question to ask, it's a responsible question to ask.
We must ask it.
Where is the joy in reading?
And where is the joy in teaching?
Now, whenever a new science of reading law is passed, the science of reading zealots
gather a bunch of children together for a picture and they're told to smile.
And what you get is pictures of happy smiling children with happy parents all around them
smiling and being happy.
And it is wonderful.
But it's a joy facade.
Then the facade is the unwritten narrative that they're trying to push.
The story is that these children were once unhappy and oppressed because of the type
of reading instruction they were getting.
But then a reading law was passed and now look at them.
Glory, hallelujah.
They've got science of reading in their heart.
They've been saved by orthographic mapping and their lives are better because of decodable
text and just look how happy they all are.
How can you possibly argue with happiness?
And why would you balance literacy devils make these happy children unhappy with your
hell-based three killing systems?
Except the cameras eventually go away and the rigor mortis which is structured literacy
sets in as the children are forced to sit in reading classrooms where every centilla
of joy has been removed.
Everything joyful has been taken from them.
They're forced to read quote decodable unquote books so their books are taken away from them.
They can't engage in authentic writing so their ideas are taken from them.
They're shoved into a one-size-fits-all reading program so their individuality is taken from
them.
They're told they must sound things out in the correct way to read the correct way so
their culture is taken from them.
And their teachers can't be creative, can't individualize instruction and can't adopt
and adapt based on their needs so their teacher is taken away from them.
So what are they left with?
The schwa sound.
They're left with the schwa sound.
Oh, the joy of that all.
They spend their days sitting in little chairs at kidney-shaped tables responding to meaningless
letter patterns, nonsense words and words presented out of context.
And they're told to sound it out.
And so they do.
They spend their days sounding out things like train seals and they spend their days
not reading but decoding.
The Scarborough's rope wrapped tightly around their little necks.
They're told to make graphing phoneme connections and break words into syllables.
And we ask, where is the joy in that?
Meaningless drivel which is structured literacy is actually joy-free literacy.
All of literacy has been de-joyed.
Joy has been replaced by nonsense words and controlled vocabulary texts.
Damn the man sat on a fan.
Yes!
Where's the joy in that?
Where's the joy of good books?
Where's the joy of writing?
And where's the joy of sharing ideas about books and writing?
Like vampires, the science of reading zealots are sucking the life out of literacy instruction.
There is no joy except when the class ends.
But they're decoding and who doesn't like to decode a good book, right?
And my wife decodes the newspaper first thing in the morning.
And I can't wait to decode a book that's been on the bestseller's list, right?
The joy of teaching.
Where is the joy of teaching?
Once upon a time, teaching was a joyful, creative endeavor.
It was creative.
It was fun.
You could experiment.
You could use your knowledge to design instruction and you could be innovative.
It was an intellectual endeavor.
It was exciting.
But where's the joy?
And why are so many good teachers leaving the classroom?
Literacy and the dance of joy to the topic at hand.
What can dance tell us about reading instruction?
The first thing, motivation.
Have I mentioned joy?
Yes, I did.
My dance was born out of joy.
It was something I wanted to do.
And I didn't dance to earn points.
I wasn't forced to dance.
I didn't dance because someone made me.
Learning to dance was closely aligned with my natural inclination to want to learn dance.
And there's something to learn here, yes?
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.
And in that classic movie, Wayne's World 2, Wayne says to Garth, book the bands and
they will come.
The same with reading.
Bring the books and they will read.
Have lots of good books that are of interest to students at their independent level or
below and children will read.
They will want to read.
Align reading instruction with children's natural inclinations and dispositions and
developmentally appropriate task and teaching and learning will be effortless.
Students will be motivated to read if reading is motivated.
Hmm.
Imagine that.
And I can see your are you saying that everything has to be fun?
You ask.
And I say absolutely not.
All of reading doesn't have to be fun.
But that doesn't mean that none of reading can be fun.
If we empower creative, intelligent, knowledgeable teachers, they can use their
creativity, intelligence and knowledge to align instruction with children's interests
and natural inclination.
The second thing I learned was about practice.
Now, I come from a music background and an athletic background and from choir and band
and wrestling.
I know that to learn anything, you have to practice and to get better at anything.
You have to practice every day.
And a little practice every day is much better than a lot of practice on one day.
And a little practice where you're focused and engaged is much better than a lot of practice
when you're disengaged and not on task.
These are just some of the basics of human learning.
So practice.
I did.
I practice my dance routine every day.
My instructor made a video that enabled me to practice at home or in my office or even
in the airport.
And the home practices weren't long, but I touched the dance every day.
I practiced my dance every day both at home and at school, not because I had to, but because
not because I was going to be tested on it, but because I wanted to.
I wanted to dance.
I wanted to get better.
To get better at anything you must practice.
Reading volume is strongly correlated with reading achievement.
Now we can't do a controlled experimental study because we know how important reading
is and we can't deprive a control group of the right to read.
But children need to practice reading.
Children need to be immersed in good books.
They need to be read to and they need to read every day.
Every day children need to read starting in pre-K and they need to practice reading every
day in grades one through 12 and beyond.
And as a matter of fact, Nancy Atwell suggests that 70 to 80% of reading class be used for
reading practice.
And here children would choose the books that they wanted to read.
That's called self-selected reading.
And she recommends that 20 to 30% of reading class be used for skills instruction.
So instead of calling it reading class, we should call it reading practice because just
like wrestling practice, there needs to be some skills work, but children need to practice
their skills in authentic reading and wrestling contexts.
Now real reading science has determined that children need to read and to read a lot in
order to become good readers.
And that's a research-based fact.
It's been well established.
So allowing children to read could be said to be a research-based reading task.
Reading strategy.
Real reading science has found that.
Now go spend time in a structured literacy science of reading classroom and keep track
of the activities you see taking place and how much time is spent on each.
And create a pie chart in your head of the types of activities and how much time.
And you will find that 80 to 100% of the time is spent on things other than self-selected
silent reading practice.
Children are allowed to get a book to read once they finish their all important work.
But here's the thing.
Reading good book should be the work of reading class.
That's why they should call it reading practice instead of reading class.
Just like choir practices and band practices and wrestling practice and piano practice
and any other practice, you need to spend time practicing the thing in order to get
better at the thing.
Now back in the day, they used to call student teaching practice teaching.
It was recognized that someone coming out of a teacher preparation program was far from
a finished teaching product.
So they needed demonstration and modeling, guided practice and scaffolding and a gradual
release of control and then independent practice.
Those are the elements of good skills instruction that applies to dance, to reading and to learning
to teach.
The third thing I learned is called dance dyslexia.
Now, the dance studio was a very positive place.
I loved being there, filled with the dreams and the joys of children.
And the dance teachers took them where they were at.
They took me where I was at.
My dance teacher didn't make me feel deficient because I was below average on some dance
measure.
Because of my total lack of dance, I'd be considered dance illiterate or a dance dyslexic
or dance learning disabled.
Like young children coming to school without certain kinds of school related experiences,
we tend to classify them and define their potential based on school ways of measure.
And I'm sure if you did a brain imbing study and compared my brain to a real dancer, you'd
find that different areas of the brain light up.
And if dance were like reading, you'd say, aha, dance dyslexia is a brain disorder.
And then, I'd be sent to an expensive one size fits all dance program and give an explicit
instruction in dance sub skills.
That's if dance were like reading.
But my teacher took me where I was.
I wasn't viewed in terms of what I couldn't do.
I wasn't measured by my distance from average.
And I was allowed to make mistakes.
I could be less than perfect.
I was allowed to engage in successfully successful approximation.
And I danced.
The dance wasn't perfect, but it was perfect for me.
Our reading classes need to be places of safety where children can still dream, where they
can read without being made to feel like failures.
They need to read, not fail.
In some reading classes, all children learn is that their failures.
The instruction should be built on what children can do.
Literacy learning should be based on children's social cultural context using the types of
language and experiences with which they're familiar.
And children should not be asked to decode, but to read.
They shouldn't be asked to transcribe or fill in the blanks, but to write.
The fourth thing I learned is called whole dancing, just like whole language.
Humans learn best any complex skill from whole to part to whole.
We learn complex skills best if we are immersed in the activity first, that's the whole.
Then we learn the skills in the context of that activity, that's the part.
And then we're able to practice, that's the whole.
Whole to part to whole.
Now I learned my dance not as a series of moves or steps, but seeing the individual moves
in the context of the whole dance.
Humans learned to read best if they're immersed in the active reading first, then learn the
reading sub skills as they're ready.
Awake just a darn minute there, he said, how do you get kids to be immersed in reading
if they can't read?
He asked.
And I said, how do they practice reading if they can't read?
Yeah.
Well, let me tell you this.
Every kid knows how to tell a story.
Every kid can tell you things.
Every kid has been exposed to language and even if a kid grew up with wolves, that kid
was exposed to wolf language.
Every kid can read the first day of kindergarten.
Yes, they can.
They may rely more on picture clues than letter clues, but every kid can read.
We teach them the steps, but always in the context of the dance.
It's all about the dance.
Using strategies like language experience activities, sentence strips, choral reading,
echo reading, and shared reading.
Every child can read the first day of kindergarten.
Yes, they can.
Oral communication and retelling is an important and developmentally appropriate part of reading
development.
Reading is not representing the text accurately.
Reading is not decoding.
Reading is not sounding out words.
Reading is creating meaning with print.
The fifth thing, context.
The thing I learned about dance is that not only do you have to learn stuff, but you have
to remember stuff.
First, you have to learn how to do the moves.
Then you have to remember when the dance moves occur and in what order.
And you're not learning just a single dance move.
You're learning many dance moves in the context of a dance.
And when I forget what came next, my dance teacher would say, let the music tell you
what to do.
Context is important.
I wasn't doing a series of individual moves.
I was doing a dance.
And dance moves within the context of a dance.
We never encounter single words floating in space.
They're always found in the context of a label, a sign, or a sentence.
And when a child doesn't recognize a word and stops, we often say, sound it out, as
if they hadn't thought of that before.
Instead, we should tell the child, let the music tell you what to do.
What word makes sense there?
The dance.
Children know how to dance.
They hear the music and they move.
They've seen adults do this.
They understand every child can dance.
However, as I've learned in this formalized way of dancing, there are dance moves that
must be learned.
Dance and specific dance steps, they must be learned.
But developmentally appropriate dances are taught in order to enable all dancers to reach
their full dance potential.
And younger children learn from older children.
And the dancing of young children looks much different than that from older children.
And we don't expect error-free dancing when we begin.
And when we dance, when we really dance, it's out of joy.
Rarely do we dance to earn rewards or avoid punishments.
We dance.
We dance to music and not a set of steps learned in isolation.
And there's a social element to it, joy.
The dance of literacy.
We have much to learn from dance.
Now I came back and I practiced every week my dance.
I didn't have any rewards or punishments.
I practiced because I loved it.
I was excited to do the dance.
And there was much to learn here about teaching, reading.
I wanted to dance.
I looked forward to it.
I had people cheering me on.
So should be reading instruction.
It should be born of joy.
This has been the Reading Instruction Show.
I am your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.