It’s finally May and we are enjoying the flowers from April’s showers, wind, and rain. Marie spent the weekend working on her balcony planters, taking out the dead plants and adding new flowers that are ready to bloom. This made us think about how the best schools are constantly working on school improvement, planting and tending to their gardens in many ways—in the literacy realm, and beyond.
Many of you have planted and tended to your phonics plots. You’ve worked hard to ensure students receive structured, explicit, and systematic phonics instruction. In fact, despite what we often hear in the media, most schools that have used a balanced literacy framework already had this in place. (Of course, if you don’t yet, check out resources like UFLI to get started ASAP.) Once strong phonics instruction is in place, you are ready to focus your attention on the other things that might be getting in your way…the weeds.
As gardeners, we must weed. Weeds are not only unsightly; they compete with other plants in our gardens for resources. And we have noticed one type of weed undermining otherwise strong teaching around reading: leveled text assessments.
Despite making changes in literacy instruction, many schools continue to rely on assessment systems that focus on the use of leveled texts, such as running records. Leveled texts are written in ways that encourage readers to use three sources of information—meaning (the story, the picture), syntax (grammar, oral language structures) and visual (the letters in the word). They are not controlled for phonics concepts, meaning they often include words that students don’t yet have the skill to decode and therefore must guess.
As a teacher, you’ve likely already begun to weed your instruction by ensuring that your students aren’t being taught unhelpful compensation strategies for word reading— like guessing based on the picture or first letters.
If we acknowledge the fact that these types of teaching strategies are not helpful, why continue to leave time and space for assessment systems that use leveled text? Why let these assessments show up on report cards and drive conversations we have with parents? Why, in some cases, would we use them as part of teacher evaluations (i.e. New York State MOSL)?
When leveled book assessments take up so much time and attention, it means that teachers are torn between supporting students’ growth in phonics and supporting students’ ability to read leveled texts—potentially obscuring decoding needs that students have and leading students to develop poor habits. Really, it means that teachers have to continue using unhelpful teaching practices to help their students do better on these assessments. And no matter how carefully we tend to our plots, if we leave these assessment systems in place, we are letting a weed take over the entire garden.
You might now be wondering….okay, what next? Stay tuned for our next post on what you might include in your assessment calendar for next year. Read this Still Learning post about assessments for young readers to add to your knowledge. Most importantly, start these conversations with your school administrators and fellow teachers. We need to weed the garden so everyone can grow!