What Can SoR Learn from Balanced Literacy?
It feels uncomfortable, wrong even, to type the following words. But bear with me. Today, I want to explore what the Science of Reading movement can learn from balanced literacy. To be clear, I’m not talking about borrowing three-cueing or resurrecting the Reader’s Workshop or anything like that. Instead, I want to consider how we can grow the movement by imitating aspects of balanced literacy’s successes.
So here are the top three lessons I have for you:
Lesson 1: Tap into emotion, and drop the stats.
Balanced literacy just feels good. It’s pleasant to think that children learn to read at their own pace. It’s lovely to imagine that the teacher’s number one job is to cultivate a love of literature in her students. It’s reassuring to think that reading comprehension skills can be developed discreetly. It’s intuitive to think that spelling and handwriting and content aren’t very important.
So where does that leave the SoR movement? I think it means we need to talk about data less. Data might activate and convince people who don’t already have strong opinions about reading instruction. But it’s not going to work on the teachers and administrators who already have their own methods and lived experiences. Instead, tell stories about your students and children who benefited from structure literacy. Watch the Purple Challenge with your coworkers and your parent friends. Talk about Bethlehem or Goose Rock, but save the data for later.
Lesson 2: Paint a (more) beautiful picture.
Critics paint structured literacy classrooms as a joyless dens of rote memorization and phonics drills. This stands in sharp contrast to the warm, balanced literacy classroom full of beautiful books and joyful children learning to read through discovery and at their own pace.
Instead of telling them that they’re wrong, we need to highlight and celebrate educators like Becky Pallone. Showcase the beautiful, engaging books that are students are reading. We need to show how interactive and playful and beautiful and satisfying decoding words and sentences can be. We need to show that it fosters a love of reading too. And we need to move the image of SOR beyond just phonics. Knowledge-building curricula lead to joyful, curious, and thoughtful students! So share student writing samples. Interview your students about what they’re learning. Let them tell the story of your SOR classroom.
Lesson 3: Respect the teacher.
Whole Language took off in the 1970s partly because Ken Goodman and Frank Smith wrote to teachers directly about their instructional theories. Smith cleverly aligned himself with teachers by arguing that structured phonics programs actually reduced teacher autonomy and diminished teacher voice and authority. Smith and Goodman were wrong about a bunch of things, but they were right to translate their research and theories for teachers. And moreover, they were right to respect and praise teacher expertise. SoR advocates would be wise to follow suit. That means stop maligning, mocking, and complaining about teachers who use balanced literacy on Twitter and in the media. Stop questioning their motives. Respect the teachers.
And to be clear: the best messengers on SOR are not professors or journalists or parents or non-profit leaders (ahem…oops). The best messengers are other teachers, more specifically teachers who have transitioned from balanced literacy to SOR. We need teachers to normalize this transition, to let their colleagues know that it’s okay to change, that it’s not your fault you didn’t receive adequate training and knowledge, that it’s normal to feel sad or angry or disappointed or confused.
