This is the Reading Instruction Show.
I'm your host as always, Dr. Andy Johnson.
Topic of today's podcast is the merchant and beginning writers.
Yes, writers.
Now, during COVID, I did some online tutoring with kids who struggled with their reading.
This is an important professional development activity for me because it keeps me in touch
with what I do and why I do it.
And it also gives me a chance to test out a lot of the new strategies and ideas.
Now with each kid I work with, I have a general plan worked out in my head before I began
working with them.
This plan is based on the diagnostic data that I've collected using a qualitative reading
inventory.
But here's the thing.
Once I start working with a kid, I always find that I need to make changes.
So it was with Tilda.
I was working with Tilda twice a week.
She was my niece who was in first grade and she was struggling with her reading.
She hated reading because she wasn't good at it.
She's a sensitive young lady and her emotions were triggered by her constant failures.
So when we started, I continued to collect data.
Now not the test kind of data, but the important kind of data where I watch students and see
their reactions as we interact.
And I could see by Tilda's facial expressions, the tone of her voice and her constantly looking
away that she was a bit apprehensive, maybe even fearful.
By the way, this type of data is the good stuff.
The data that can't be quantified by standardized measures.
Students' emotional state, their social context and their life experience cannot be reduced
to a metric.
So back to Tilda.
We started each session with a language experience activity.
This is a simple yet powerful writing activity to use with beginning and struggling readers,
but also writers.
Here the student describes an experience and the teacher writes it down on a computer,
a touchscreen, a poster or a notebook, someplace where they can see the print taking place.
This can be done individually in small group or even in large group.
And as you transcribe, you change students' incorrect grammar into correct grammar and
demonstrate punctuation.
Scaffolded oral reading is then used to practice reading using students' own words and experiences.
The story, that's what we call their individual daily writings, is read until fluency is achieved.
And this usually occurs after two or three rereads.
Finally, analytic phonics is used to do many lessons related to letter sounds and patterns.
And these stories are saved for reading practice on another day.
That is the language experience approach or activities.
Now during the first sessions, I'd asked Tilda what she wanted to write about.
Her minimum was two sentences, which is very appropriate for first grade.
At first I had to drag these two sentences out of her.
Even though I was her uncle, I was still just a bald-less bald head that popped up on the
screen twice a week.
Before this tutoring, I really hadn't spent a lot of time with her.
There was no relationship.
There was no reason for Tilda to trust me.
So to get her to talk so we could do language experience, I'd have to ask her questions.
What should we write about today, Tilda?
I don't know.
Should I write that down?
I don't know.
No.
Did you do something fun yesterday?
Yes.
What did you do?
I played on the swings with Molly.
Can I write that?
Yes.
Okay.
So I wrote, I played on the swings with Molly.
What else should I write?
I don't know.
Was it fun?
Yes.
How about if we write that?
It was fun.
Okay.
I played on the swings with Molly.
It was fun.
That's how it went.
You get the picture.
Each new tutoring session started by reading what we wrote the last session.
Then we'd write our new story.
Now after a bit, Tilda began to trust me.
This was because I didn't make her experience failure.
And she found that I was interested in what she did.
And I listened to what she had to say.
I didn't have to work so hard to get the two sentences from her after a bit.
And then after a couple more weeks, she became a bubbling geyser.
She had stuff she wanted to say.
She started thinking about what she wanted to say before our sessions.
Our stories went from two sentences to four, five, and six sentences.
And then a very interesting thing happened.
She started writing on her own at home using temporary spelling.
She began using writing for real purposes.
She wrote notes to her parents, little reminders, and she used writing to express her feelings.
It was incredible.
And since writing is the best way to develop the syntactic queuing system used to identify
words while reading and it reinforces letter sound relationships, her reading began to
improve.
Imagine that using real authentic writing to enhance real authentic reading.
And then the head of her younger sister, Frida, who was four at the time, began popping up
on the screen as Tilda and I were working.
She wanted to see what Tilda was doing.
She decided that she wanted reading lessons as well.
And Frida saw her sister using writing to communicate ideas, so she decided that she
wanted to do this writing stuff.
That shows that writing is best learned in a social context.
So she began using letters and mostly scribbles to write.
Now this shows the power of the social and emotional context of learning and the modeling
that naturally occurs when younger children observe older children.
And this is why a multi-grade classroom can be such a powerful learning model.
Now there are three big ideas to take from the Tilda story.
First, it was the power of ideas and the response to ideas that invited Tilda to start writing
on her own.
Second, the scaffolding provided by the language experience activities gave her enough confidence
to write on her own.
Without the language experience activities, Tilda would have never started writing on
her own.
And third, writing isn't a skill that's taught as much as it's a skill that emerges and develops
over time.
When we invite students to write for real purposes, allow for lots of practice of authentic
writing and teach little bits of things along the way, this skill emerges faster.
However, when we focus only on teaching a bunch of low-level grammar, punctuation, and
letter formation skills, it emerges more slowly.
Now let's look at two approaches to early writing instruction.
There are two basic approaches in these early grades.
A skills-based approach and a child-centered approach.
These are the two approaches.
I guess there's a third approach, which would be no approach at all or no skills instruction
at all.
And, of course, this would be incredibly silly.
I can't imagine anybody advocating an approach where you do not have any skills instruction
taking place.
So let's look first at the skills-based approach to early writing.
A skills-based approach to writing instruction is built on the assumption that students
must acquire certain skills before they can write.
It assumes that children require a great deal of explicit instruction of a prescribed set
of grammar, punctuation, and letter formation skills, handwriting, and spelling skills
to be able to someday write.
To which I say, pish posh.
This approach does not reflect what we know about the brain and human learning.
It's a Humpty Dumpty approach where children are taught to write by putting all the teeny
tiny writing pieces together, one teeny tiny piece at a time.
And when a teeny tiny writing skill is taught and mastered, the skills-based researchers
all over the world screech with delight and flap their arms about exclaiming, see, we
told you.
A skills-based approach is the best.
It's better than all the rest.
And they march around the room with high knees singing their teeny tiny songs.
However, mastering a teeny tiny skill does not mean that students know what to do with
that teeny tiny skill when they're writing.
It does very little to move students forward as writers, and it does not enhance their ability
to express meaning with print.
Now let's look at the child-centered approach.
The child-centered approach is based on the child and how developing children learn best.
And they learn best by messing about, by play, and by doing stuff.
They learn best by approximating the end product in developmentally appropriate ways.
To children, the teeny tiny skills-based approach is a series of meaningless abstractions
that have nothing to do with celebrating stories and ideas.
It also doesn't reflect what we know about the brain and human learning.
Students learn complex skills best from whole to part.
That is, they see the whole, they practice the whole, and they learn the skills within
the context of this whole.
In this way, the teeny tiny skills that are taught along the way make sense.
With a child-centered approach, the child becomes the curriculum.
New skills are taught as the child is ready for them.
It's recognized as well that we aren't simply putting teeny tiny cogs on an emotionless
machine, rather we're engaged in real learning.
Real learning for children is intertwined and interconnected with children's language,
social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development.
That's part of an interconnected system.
You can't really pull out a single teeny tiny element and address it effectively without
considering the complete system.
The child-centered approach is based on the theories of Piaget and Weigatzky and Ericsson
and Marsha and Montessori.
These were outstanding researchers whose theories were developed by observing real children
learning within natural settings.
They did not seek to isolate a variable in controlled settings like they were studying
mice in a skinner's box.
Children's literacy emerges naturally.
Skills of any kind are best taught as students are ready for them.
Instruction that takes place must be developmentally appropriate.
If children are exposed to certain conditions, their global skills that are writing emerge
faster.
Consider this.
Learning to write and learning to speak are a bit different, but there are some common
elements.
Let's just consider how children learn to speak.
They're immersed in actual real-life speaking experiences.
They're provided small bits of instruction in authentic speaking contexts.
They're encouraged to speak about things that make sense to them and are of interest
to them.
They use language for real purposes and we expect them to learn differently and at different
rates.
We respond to them instead of correct them and we encourage their early attempts at
successive approximations.
We encourage their creativity and humor and language is used in play and social interactions.
Using a child-centered approach, teachers create the conditions whereby all children
can develop their full literacy capacities.
We can learn a lot.
Children learn to write when they're immersed in authentic writing experiences.
They learn to write when they're provided small bits of instruction in their authentic
writing contexts.
They learn to write when they're encouraged to write about things that make sense to them
and are of interest to them when they use writing for real life purposes and we expect
children to learn to write differently and at different rates.
We respond to their writing instead of correcting their writing and we encourage their early
attempts and successful approximations.
We encourage their creativity and humor when they write and writing is used in play and
social interactions.
This has been the reading instruction show.
The next podcast will talk more specifically about creating the conditions for writing
to emerge.