The Science and Art of Literacy Teaching and Learning: Part One

About sev­en years ago an inves­tiga­tive pod­cast called “Sold a Sto­ry” by jour­nal­ist Emi­ly Han­ford, came out on APM (Amer­i­can Pub­lic Media — pro­duc­er and dis­trib­u­tor of radio and pod­casts for pub­lic radio sta­tions). Many lis­ten­ers would agree that this six-part pod­cast served as a major cat­a­lyst for the “Sci­ence of Read­ing” (SoR) move­ment that took the nation by storm. Since 2018, the way we teach kids to read has under­gone sig­nif­i­cant shifts, with many states hav­ing passed leg­is­la­tion chang­ing the require­ments for how schools teach lit­er­a­cy (includ­ing MN, with the READ ACT).

I must admit that I was skep­ti­cal about this resur­gent wave stress­ing phon­ics instruc­tion (which dates back to 1690 with the pub­li­ca­tion of the New Eng­land Primer). Hanford’s report­ing also appeared to reignite the “read­ing wars” that raged through much of the 20th cen­tu­ry. This arti­cle from Yale’s pub­li­ca­tion The Politic sums up the back and forth tug between phon­ics (SoR) and whole language/balanced literacy.

Despite my reser­va­tions about what felt like a seis­mic shift in lit­er­a­cy instruc­tion, I’ve ben­e­fit­ed great­ly from the pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment man­dat­ed for edu­ca­tors in MN.

I’ve come to real­ize that the “art” of teach­ing lit­er­a­cy sim­ply isn’t enough for kids who need a more sys­tem­at­ic and struc­tured foun­da­tion to “crack the code.” I still stand by all the things I offered in my teach­ing and yet I wish I could go back and take it a step fur­ther for all those learn­ers who need­ed explic­it lessons in phonol­o­gy (the study of how sounds are orga­nized and used in lan­guage to make meaning).

For­tu­nate­ly, I have always embraced the ide­ol­o­gy of the impor­tance of being a life­long learn­er. As a vet­er­an edu­ca­tor, I find myself immersed in the adage “bet­ter late than nev­er” as I take on the excit­ing explo­ration and dis­cov­ery of help­ing kids unpack the won­der­ful world of words in the Eng­lish lan­guage. Which brings us back to my rumi­na­tion of affix­es at the start of this column.

As a grade 4 and 5 teacher of Eng­lish, I am intent on apply­ing the recent knowl­edge I have acquired about word study. At this stage, almost all stu­dents have a good grasp of decod­ing (sound­ing out words) but still have areas of need­ed growth in encod­ing (writing/spelling) and com­pre­hen­sion. Mor­phol­o­gy and ety­mol­o­gy are the key to what’s been miss­ing in my won­der­ful world of lit­er­a­cy. Oppor­tu­ni­ties for learn­ers to study affix­es and base words along with the his­to­ry of words, pro­vides a more log­i­cal, mean­ing based structure.