Everything I Need to Know About being an Educator I can Learn from a Book Published in the 1960's

Do you remember the book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? It was an

entertaining read that wasn’t without merit. Here are a few clever gems:

Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.

The book made for a fun read and had more than a few people who read it nodding in agreement with its ideas. I wouldn’t go so far as to write that we should hold these early-learned tenants to be truths because that’s not how day-to-day living goes. For better or for worse, adult life can never be shoe-horned into a kindergartner’s world.  It doesn’t mean the book and its ideas aren’t valuable and still have some credence today.

I refer to All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten because I feel like I’ve had in my hands this last decade a similarly worthwhile book. Only this one, titled Principals and Practices of Teaching Reading, was aimed at defining how an educator should teach reading. More and more, I find myself pulling this particular book from a nearby shelf at work to thumb through and compare what’s inside to “the latest research” I am reading.

The book, yellowed and missing a cover jacket, was given to me by a former colleague who has since retired. I recall how heartily he laughed when he’d given it to me, explaining “everything you need to know about being a good reading teacher is in here, Ralph!”  He then slapped me on the shoulder playfully, enjoying his joke because it’d been published in the mid 1960’s. My colleague believed he’d given me something dated and laughable, what’d he’d actually done was handed me 563 pages of irony.

Initially, I remember chuckling for a minute as I perused the table of contents, seeing a section devoted to “Sex Differences in Learning to Read”. How quaint, even droll, such a title seemed as we generally avoid ascribing any significant differences between male and female readers. But, because I am a curious type, I did continue to examine this published work and try to understand just how outdated it actually may have been.

As it turns out, it wasn’t that dated then and it’s not that dated now. Not at its core principals.

Here’s a specific. I am midway through Educational Neuroscience edited by David A. Sousa and published in 2011. The book is an examination of how the various parts of our brains function and how understanding these can assist classroom instruction. I would call it semi-dense as a text as I’m sure many teachers would find the terminology a bit much while medical students would consider it a children’s book compared to what they need to know about the brain. The attempt is made by the writers to bridge the complexity gap and make it useful to educators.

At its heart, the book seeks to show with empirical evidence the brain science behind student learning. It aims to support general understandings with scientifically researched proof. Here are some examples from a chapter on adolescents’ brains: the burst of growth in the frontal lobes means that teens over-complicate problems, idealize the world, and say one thing while meaning another, teen brains are particularly susceptible to novelty, feedback improves the brain’s efficiency, and the development of the parietal lobes helps teen athletes improve their pace and teen musicians improve their beat.

Teens idealize the world? Teens over-complicate problems? Teens are susceptible to novelty? Are these conclusions really anything we don’t already know? Nope, they’re not. It’s old news. It’s the kind of “news” that makes you think and possibly even say, Well Duhhhhhh. These conclusions are –without doubt- statements of the obvious. And yet, the feeling I get from the text is that somehow earlier generations of educators had no clue about these teenage affects.

Now, I am not as narrow-minded as I might seem, because I do realize that the authors are actually sharing the science behind what we’ve always known and that doing such can be valuable. Pinpointing the specifics of where and how this happens in the brain can lead to possibly doing more than understanding it. Someday it may even lead to correcting deficiencies in these areas.

Right now though it feels the same way people knew that smoking was bad for us long before science proved it. And yet, this book and the many others so eager to share the latest research don’t quite present it this way. It almost never comes off as, Hey you know all that obvious stuff we’ve known forever about teaching and learning? Well we’ve found where and how it happens in your head. We’ve proven it’s not just a collective assumption anymore. No, too often, it’s delivered to audiences as if it’s some new discovery, one that will make the teachers of today so much better than those of before.

Here are some additional conclusions presented in the first half of Educational Neuroscience, which is as far as I’ve gotten to this point.

For successful learning, students must want to learn.

To be able to read heavy volumes of printed materials requires lots and lots of reading of many different types of reading materials.

Clinicians assert that helping children to acquire an awareness of sounds and representative letters that make up words has a direct correlation to reading comprehension.

Successful reading beyond the primary years can only happen if children have become automatic decoders and readers.

The brain stores new information by identifying patterns in it. As it receives fresh material, the brain searches its established neural networks for a background against which it can comprehend the new knowledge. Anything familiar –sensory information (like a remembered scent), a pattern, a relationship – will serve as a connection to information already stored in the brain. If the brain finds nothing on which to build, it abandons the new information.

Use a variety of formal and informal assessments to communicate with your students.

Interestingly, parental assistance should be kept to a minimum; homework is no time for them to hover.

Did you find yourself laughing some as you read? C’mon. You had to because there’s nothing new in those statements. Nothing any teacher hadn’t already concluded decades and decades before.

A little more fodder for the cannon…

Also provided in the book is an educational sequence for combined word decoding and spelling programs.  The authors have created a year by school year approach to developing reading in students. Check out how novel their plan is.

Kindergarten: Phonetic sounds produced by one letter and corresponding letter name and some sight vocabulary.

First Grade: Consonant and vowels sounds and the letters that make them, more decodable words, some exceptions, and an expanded sight vocabulary.

Second Grade: More complex letter patterns and common patterns for word endings are identified and applied to spelling and writing.

Third Grade: Multisyllabic words, unstressed vowels, and common prefixes and suffixes are found in reading and spelling instruction.

Fourth Grade: Latin-based prefixes, suffixes, and roots add to a growing vocabulary for reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Fifth through Eighth Grade: Words based upon the Greek language and other words found in content level texts and reading selections.

(Side thought: I do find it interesting that Latin precedes Greek for instructional purposes as I cannot fathom why this is recommended. Possibly, Latin affixes and roots are more easily recognized by readers than Greek forms? I digress.)

The Educational Neuroscience plan looks sensible. It may even look remarkably new to those of you who are in the early stages of your teaching career. But, as I’m confident you’re grasping by no, it is not novel.

In thumbing through my trusty 1960’s manual, Teaching Reading, I discovered that all of the aforementioned skills and steps for learning to read are noted within. There’s a section on phonics instruction in which the authors note that “data from recent studies have reaffirmed the position that instructional programs which include considerable emphasis on phonics result in higher achievement at the end of grade one than do programs which include significantly less phonics instruction.”  It would seem that those 1960’s educators already had a plan mapped out for themselves.

More thumbing along and reading uncovers a series of lessons and overviews regarding the regular and consistent instruction of sight words, word families, spelling, root words, affixes, and contextual meaning to students in the primary grades. Again, all of this agreed upon and spelled out in the 1960’s. No brain science needed to prove its validity or value.

One giant difference between the 1960’s list and the Educational Neuroscience list lays in the Reading Teachers insistence that reading doesn’t occur by grade or even age but by practicing and improving in all the components listed above as is natural to the student. The term “ungraded” is frequently used in the Reading Teacher, meaning to group students in classes not by age but by their present abilities and needs. In other words, students aren’t first or fifth graders but rather fall into a broader spectrum of beginning, primary, intermediate reading students.

So, even while the book’s authors note that teaching and learning phonics early on is important, they do not limit it to one grade. Yes, yes, it’s likely the Educational Neuroscience writers don’t think phonics are only taught in one year and never again, but there’s a clinical tone or message to not noting as much, to merely listing the type of reading instruction that should occur at each year because they’ve determined that this is exactly when the mind is best suited to learn it. They’re focused on age and grade and not on the diagnosed ability of the student at that time. It’s an important distinction in my mind, because it puts social promotion further back on the stove, onto the back burner, focusing more on advancing students only when they demonstrate ability with certain important reading skills. Think about it. How often have you felt like a student of yours could easily pass for one much lower or higher than the grade level you teach? It happens, and often at that. Wouldn’t it be nice to focus only on them and where they are versus how far from where they should be? This is the drive behind Writer’s Workshop. Students ae frequently paired to texts they can work with, regardless of their age or grade, and asked to show understanding using what suits them.

Before I move too far astray, let us see what my 1960’s book on teaching reading has to say about sound teaching practices and developmental steps.

The book opens with 14 principals of teaching reading. Most I list as a principal without its accompanying and expanding text. With a few, I will include both the principal and a modicum of textual support as given by the authors.

1.       Learning to read is a complicated process and is sensitive to a variety of pressures. Too much pressure or the wrong kind of pressure may result in non-learning. Reading is not the simple sum of its parts, because in every case the reader must be considered in the process and each reader is unique. Reading always involves the simultaneous application of a great number of mechanical skills and comprehension skills, all of which are influenced by the reader’s attitudes, knowledge, and past experience. Reading is a complicated process.

2.       Learning to read is an individual process. Even though all children in the lowest group have the common characteristic that they are poor readers, grouping them physically in the classroom and psychologically in the teacher’s mind is of negligible value unless the teacher adjusts learning situations to each child’s need for instruction.

3.       Pupil differences must be a primary consideration in reading instruction.

4.       Reading instruction should be thought of as an organized, systematic growth-producing activity.

5.       Proper reading instruction depends on diagnosis of each child’s weaknesses and needs.

6.       The best diagnosis is useless unless it is used as a blueprint for instruction. Diagnosis itself has no salutatory effect on the performance of the child tested. If diagnosis alone had salutatory effects, it would be possible to raise a child’s level of performance indefinitely by more and more diagnosis. It may be noted that extensive testing and metal filing cabinets full of individual folders do not necessarily make a better school. Testing in many American schools has become an end in itself.

7.       No child should be expected or forced to attempt to read material which at the moment he is incapable of reading.

8.       Reading is a process of getting meaning from printed word symbols. It is not merely a process for making conventionalized noises associated with these symbols.

9.       Any given technique, practice, or procedure is likely to work better with some children than with others. Hence, the teacher of reading must have a variety of approaches.

10.   Learning to read is a long-term developmental process extending over a period of years.

11.   The concept of readiness should be extended upward to all grades.

12.   Early in the learning process the child must acquire ways of gaining independence in identifying words whose meanings are known to him but which are unknown to him as sight words.

13.   Children should not be in the classroom if they have emotional problems sufficiently serious to make them uneducable at the moment or if they interfere with or disrupt the learning process.

14.   Emphasis should be on prevention rather than cure. Reading problems should be detected early and corrected before they deteriorate into failure-frustration-reaction cases. However excellent the instruction in our schools, some children will not profit from as much as others. The early detection of impairments and immediate attention to them are cornerstones of effective reading instruction.

Pause and look at these 14 principals to teaching reading. Do any of them really standout as dated or unfamiliar to you? They don’t seem that way to me. In fact, the majority are highly recognizable in so much of “the latest research” being cranked out. I remind you, in case you’ve not done the math, that this book, which I’m comparing on some level to Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, is quite close to 50 years old; and, quite likely, was not  the leading authority on teaching reading at the time.

I remember that the educational wave prior to SRBI was an emphasis on demonstrating how I differentiated instruction in my classroom. If you’ll recall items 2, 3 and 9, you’ll see that there’s evidence of our forefathers-in-reading keen understanding of the importance of differentiation. Possibly, however, you think I’m reaching. It happens. Therefore, in support of my claim that earlier generations of teachers grasped how important differentiation is to students and instruction, I note pages 301 and 311 in Teaching Reading which come under the heading “Differentiation of Instruction”.  Not long after this this section of reading comes an entire chapter devoted to “Individualized Reading”.

Clearly differentiation, which was being presented to me and my colleagues just prior to the SRBI wave as “the latest research”, was actually a lot newer in the 1960’s. And yet, there was such a rave and fervor for differentiation in all the workshops and publications at the time that one couldn’t help but assume it was brand new.

Today, the reading world is afire with talk of common core goals and RTI practices. If you’ll refer back to principal 14 on the list above, you’ll see that Teaching Reading writers already had a strong sense of how important prevention was to reading success when they wrote “The early detection of impairments and immediate attention to them are cornerstones of effective reading instruction.”

The list of items in Teaching Reading that pre-date the recent research findings I see in today’s professional publications is at once unsurprising, affirming, enlightening, and amusing.

Wow, this is a long (and I’ll fully admit rambling) read. For that, I apologize and will curtail all the rest I’d intended to include. I do hope that my intent wasn’t missed, because while it may seem like I was forever bashing one book while championing another, I was really working to underscore the strangeness that has become education today. Too much is trotted out as "new" when it's actually something old but proven and merely better defined or understood. It is not new and not going to save education.

Today, we feel we’re uncovering one amazing discovery after another when it comes to students and education. And yet, what we’re actually doing is affirming what’s been know long ago by pinning down the specifics of what we already knew to be true. Educational Neuroscience is a fine book and does uncover the mysteries to how our brains function and how students learn. The thing of it is... I'm not sure I really need to know it. What I need to know is what works with my students. The science and data behind it is just gravy.Like I wrote, everything I need to learn about being a reading teacher I can learn from a 1960’s textbook. 

Last curiosity. A quick search of this book turned up a 10th edition on Amazon. It seems like this book has had some legs over the decades. It'd be interesting to know how much they're evolved over those years given so much of what was written so long ago still seems worthwhile and relevant.