What Do Balanced Literacy and Red Meat Have in Common?
When people find out that I’m a vegetarian, I usually hear something along the lines of: “Good for you. That must have been really hard. How do you live without various INSERT VARIOUS RED MEAT here?”
But I have a confession to make. It actually wasn’t hard for me to give up meat. Growing up, my family didn’t eat red meat, and I never really liked chicken and fish to begin with. In other words, I wasn’t sacrificing anything when I became a vegetarian. It wasn’t a hard change to make.
So…think through the following questions for a minute:
When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
When was the last time you changed your mind and then changed your behavior as a result?
When was the last time you changed your mind, abandoned a habitual practice that you cared about, and adopted a new practice to replace the old one?
I can think of some personal and professional examples for questions one and two, but I’m coming up short on question three. I struggle to think of a time I replaced a deeply-entrenched, preferred habit or practice with a new one.
Now, let’s think for a minute about structured literacy. Think about the shifts that we are asking teachers to make around teaching reading.
Shift 1: We’re asking teachers to change their minds about how to teach reading. We’re asking them to embrace an approach that contradicts how they were taught to teach AND how they’re accustomed to teaching.
Shift 2: We’re asking them to implement a lot of new stuff in their classroom, including but certainly not limited to:
a systematic phonics program that covers phonology, decoding, and morphology.
a knowledge-building curriculum that includes new books, new approaches to reading, writing, and discussion, and likely new social studies and science content.
a new approach to screening students.
a new approach to grouping students.
Shift 3: We’re asking them to discard instructional practices (three-cueing, leveled literacy groups, predictable texts, Benchmark assessments, etc.) that they may have been using for decades, that they have been told were the gold standard when they were in graduate school, that they may have trained student-teachers and mentees to use.
In other words, we’re asking teachers to change their minds, adopt new practices, and stop doing things that they’ve always done. All at once!
This effort is not even accounting for the time and money and effort teachers will need to spend to understand the research AND learn how to implement the new practice. This is not accounting for the psychological toll and inner strength required to accept that you were previously doing something wrong, that your teaching may have been harmful, and was an impediment to student learning. This is also not accounting for all of the other things teachers need to do to keep up with their jobs and personal lives.
We are not wrong to emphasize the urgency of making these changes. But we are wrong when we do not acknowledge how difficult these changes are to make. Change, under any circumstance, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, is really, really, really difficult. Homeostasis rules.
So what’s my point here? Here are several:
We must intentionally study and learn from teachers and school leaders who are making these changes and de-implementing ineffective and inefficient practices.
We must seek to understand the conditions under which teachers are more likely to change their minds about literacy.
We must focus at least some of our time and efforts on replicating and supporting these conditions.
We should celebrate, honor, applaud, and support every single teacher who is taking even the most tentative step in the direction of structured literacy.
After all, when was the last time you changed your mind, abandoned a habitual practice that you cared about, and adopted a new practice to replace it?
