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Teaching literacy, no illusion of knowledge

1/12/2019

5 Comments

 
A while back I was asked to write a response to the following 4 questions. Now is as good a time as any to post this slightly revised version.  This is my journey as an educator and parent bound by determination to fix my little boy and my students who were meeting massive challenges while learning to read because of learning differences, dyslexia, the lack of knowledge about literacy education, and recognizing that I didn't know what I did not know.

We must remain open to learning in education, not be led by businesses or put all of our eggs in one basket of research.  Much of the research has led us to better information but none of it looks at the structures of our language and how it affects the brain when studied with the interrelationships of morphology, etymology and phonology.....yet. 

                        “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance,
                                          it is the illusion of knowledge.”
                                                                                                        -Stephen Hawking
What is your background?
I grew up in the middle of the mitten state, Michigan. When I was a young teenager, I spent a year living abroad in Amsterdam with my mother and brother at our oma’s house.  

I attended Eastern Michigan University where I earned a bachelor’s degree in education.  I hold an elementary teaching certificate with an endorsement in Emotionally Impaired Education K-8. When I was halfway through my master’s Degree in Learning Disabilities I had a high-risk pregnancy that caused me to place everything on hold. As life goes, raising four kids and working full-time has kept that on hold.  After we finish helping our kids through college, I may consider finishing what I started, but then again, maybe not. While I have not gone through a university to continue to learn about dyslexia, assessments and literacy, I have continued to read, devour really, books, research, webinars, online classes and conferences in these areas.  I’ve amassed quite an education outside of the university and in truth, I’ve learned more about the structure of the English language than I ever did in all of my undergraduate and graduate coursework or professional development.  There is a great meme that says….a worried mother does better research than the FBI!   


What is your profession?
I have been a Special Education Teacher at a public elementary school for the past 25 years (2 of those years in general education).  I am one of the Founding Members of the Michigan chapter of Decoding Dyslexia. I have served on the Department of Education’s Standards and Practice Revision Committee. I am the owner of Empower Learning Center where I tutor individual and small groups of students and I teach classes to help teachers, administrators, and parents begin their journey in understanding the structure of the English language through Structured Word Inquiry.    

What are your experiences with the writing system and how does your work fit into the writing system?
How much time do you have? Should I start at the beginning or in the middle? Because technically, I thought I only had a middle but now realize I had a beginning when it comes to experiences that led me to study the writing system.  Let me explain: in short, I thought I was just not cut out for learning--like I’d stood in the wrong line when brains were given out. I didn’t feel this way right from the start of elementary school because I was good at decoding and encoding, that is, I can read, which really just means announce, just about any word -- I’m great with patterns.  In elementary school, learning to decode and encode by patterns was easy for me. My visual memory fund is large and it helped me “look” like a good reader and speller. But I wasn’t good at comprehending or written expression.  As the vocabulary increased in middle school, my comprehension decreased. Teachers began asking more in-depth questions, I had no idea what to write because I had no idea what they were asking. My ability to word call was masking the underlying holes in my ability to comprehend.  I felt dumb. I appeared lazy.

Pretty soon, my attitude began to mimic what my teachers & I thought of me. My 8th grade year was spent in a foreign country, learning the language, using the skills I had been given in spades --learning by pattern.  I quickly picked up the language but, we were given aptitude tests to place us in the right classes in an international school. I was placed in level C, there were only 3 levels. However, my teachers soon recognized I had more skills than a test showed and they looked out for me so they moved me up to some level A classes.  Coming back to America, my parents felt it would be good for my self-esteem to stay with my friends and go on to 9th grade even though my placement tests again showed it was an academic gamble.

High school was by far, the worst experience.  I tried to sink into the walls and be forgotten and have since tried to forget most of those years, save a few people and experiences.  Any place I found success was always outside of the classroom except for my anatomy and computer programming classes -- looking back it was the teachers in each of them, and my ability to recognize and work with patterns or memorize lists and lists of medical terms. My algebra teacher was the same for computer programming, however, my experiences in each was totally different as was my attitude -- I fulfilled what I expected of myself. I failed geometry and barely passed some others.  But, in the end, I earned a bare minimum GPA to get into a mediocre university.

Despite my challenges with learning, no one saw them that way.  I’d let myself get in my own way. Teachers who might’ve wanted to help, didn’t recognize or know how to help me and I probably hindered their drive to want to help because my attitude was how I felt -- like I just didn’t have the capacity.  I got tired of hearing how I could do so much more “if you just applied yourself” I didn’t know what they meant by that and once it was explained, it made me mad, I was applying myself! I was trying but I was failing, I must not be smart enough.  

In every success story is usually a parent who never gives up, thankfully I had such a parent.  My dad put Herculean efforts into my education, oh, and highlighters were invented, or at least at my disposal mid-way through freshman year of college.  I learned how to highlight the text that was important (yes, my early textbooks were pretty much painted in yellow) but then I began to learn how to discern the really important parts and I put a lot of energy into trying really hard to learn.  My dad’s words always sat on a shelf in my mind that told me, “Grades don’t matter as much as long as you learn the material in your own way”; “Tests aren’t all they’re cracked up to be”; and, most importantly, “This education is costing me a lot of money, and you’re worth it.”  

Fast forward a bunch of years, my ability to recognize patterns --visually and  intuitively, skills that I thought were weird and useless, have served me well when it comes to recognizing challenges children face in school and then educating them.

Now onto the middle where I once thought it began….
My youngest child met language and literacy with a locked door.  From his earliest ages, even before he could talk, language processing challenges were evident.  When asked a yes/no question, he would shake his head yes, then no, then back to yes again, or vice-versa.  We were always guessing at what he meant. When he began talking, things did not go much better. When he announced a choice, inevitably, he meant something else which usually ended up with him in tears or even a melt-down. He would tell detailed stories of an event he’d had years earlier but give all the wrong names of the people involved -- like saying one grandpa when it was the other grandpa or calling his aunt, “Uncle” or not remembering the name of someone/thing that was common and familiar to him. His inconsistency with recall was concerning. His preschool teacher recommended he wait a year before entering Kindergarten. His Kindergarten teacher recommended he be held back from 1st grade. As a Special Education teacher, and due my husband’s serious struggles with reading, I recognized clear markers of learning disabilities and knew that another year of any grade was not going to suddenly unlock this door so instead of holding him back, I opted for an evaluation for learning disabilities.  The school felt his needs were more due to emotional issues because his frustration level was so high. I was certain it was learning issues that were causing the melt-downs not the other way around. I saw my son outside of a learning environment, where he was a completely different child.

Eventually, my son qualified for special education services as a learning disabled student. A tough pill to swallow. I felt he was doomed for a lifetime of struggles, just like his dad. I became his resource room teacher, a gift that has never stopped giving.  Not only was I happy to see him more often every day, I could also quell his emotional fears of academics on an hourly basis instead of at the end of a long day when all events had already played out. In addition to that, I was gifted with a perspective I had not been privy to yet -- I was the mother and the teacher so I knew what he’d been presented with at home and at school and I could see it wasn’t enough to make him a reader.  I could remove all the variables, as a teacher I could not say his parents weren’t reading enough to him and as a parent I couldn’t say the teachers weren’t doing enough for him because I was both. What I could truly say was that the education I had been provided wasn’t enough to educate this bright young boy who presented himself very differently in school than the kid I saw at home.  At school he quickly met with frustration or sadness -- he looked like a kid who didn’t apply himself. At home, he was a fast learner when it came to hands-on things, he could plan and build architectural structures from blocks that marveled city planning zone committees.  Without that view, as a teacher, I’m afraid to admit, I might not have approached him as capable of a child as he truly was. He was just like his dad, locked out of the printed word and little did I recognize at the time, also challenged by language processing and recall like his mother. The obvious challenges of not learning the alphabet or being able to name the letters or sounds was like a marquee sign, so bright it drowned out the rest of his challenges.

As I mentioned earlier, a worried mother does better research than the FBI, so I set off to learn as much as I could about programs that might do a better job than the ones I’d had access to in my classroom.  The more I learned about dyslexia, the more I began to recognize the varied characteristics in my other students, both past and present. I knew I had always put my best effort into reaching and teaching all my students but I began to wonder if that was enough.  Was effort going to make a difference? So far, it had been making enough of a difference for my students but up until that time, I felt that there were other variables hindering progress that were out of my control. I began to look for better and deeper programs and demanded training and professional development that would fix my broken little boy and his friends and classmates.  Eventually, I won the battle to get more training in a new sound-based system. My administrators treated it like it would be a good tool to put in my teacher toolbox. I thought I’d hit the jackpot and adamantly argued that it was going to be the training that would turn these kids into readers and every teacher needed it! I must have appeared like an overwrought mother instead of a teacher seeking to teach her students to read.

I took that new sound-based training, teaching kids to “trust your ears” and chunking words into their spoken syllables and memorizing the letters that made those sounds.  There was a period of excelled progress. I have data that shows it. I was happy that the kids picked up on this system faster than they did with OG, Sonday, Barton or Project Read lessons.  But there was something missing, while kids’ fluency increased, their comprehension did not and neither did their spelling. In addition, by that time, my son was onto middle school and I continued to tutor him after school with that method.  I saw a bit of progress in his reading too, but not enough and not in comprehension or spelling.

At the end of the year, my students were faced with a brand new state test to take that blew buckshot holes in the consistency and frequency of instructional lessons. Because that infrequency and inconsistency would likely result in minimal progress, (if not back-sliding) and the fact that I had begun noticing problems with the sound-based system anyway, I recognized a good moment in time to try something different. I decided to forgo the sound-based systematic lessons for the last marking period of the year and replace it with Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) studies. Earlier in the year, I had stumbled upon a video conference by Pete Bowers of Word Works Kingston in Ontario, Canada that made a lot of sense with word structure and hit an inquiry-based approach that was big in my school as we were an IB (International Baccalaureate) school.  I hadn’t ignored it completely, armed with a teensy bit of knowledge, I’d exposed the students to looking for the meaningful unit, base elements; suffixes and prefixes all year on top of our sound-based lessons.  Since SWI didn’t rely on my students mastering each lesson before moving on to the next like sound-based lessons did, the timing of this was ripe for giving it a go full force. I was astonished at the end of the marking period to find that despite the inconsistencies in our schedule and infrequency of lessons that their skills increased anyway!  

I began taking as many classes from Real Spelling, Pete Bowers and LEX as I could.  I found a true understanding of the English language and that spelling isn’t crazy because words have structure and a history that influences they are spelled. My teaching has evolved from teaching kids about sounds and rules to teaching them to analyze a word: look for meaning, relationships and history. They learn to investigate the function of a grapheme, detect relationships among morphemes, research etymologies, to think critically, to discern possibilities and reason them out by finding evidence to support or deny a hypothesis about the structure and the make-up of words. They study one word and get a bunch more in the process. They read for meaning now, not to decode a letter or syllable. They seek relationships among the morphemes which builds connection to other words that share the morpheme or share a history back to the orthographic root.  This causes something profound….an increase in comprehension and thinking skills. Through the building of our understanding of words, one at a time, (really, study one word, get a bunch more for free!), kids’ lives are being changed. So is mine.  Reading words in this way causes me to see connections and relationships to other words.  It has caused me to recognize how much of my own brain’s power was allotted to visual memorization and recall of those visuals when reading/spelling. I can now read with less energy usage and gain more comprehension; I allot my brain power to thinking about the content of my writing instead of speed-searching for the visual or mnemonic to spell words, something I wasn’t even aware I had been doing my whole life. I see this phenomenon happening with my students as well and have listened to them express how much more energy they have when reading, that it isn’t as hard anymore. I watch their data points soar and continue to climb. But most importantly, I witness behavioral changes: a drive to learn; increased self-esteem and self-reliance because they have tapped into the tools of their own mind. I know they are paving roads to successful futures by increasing their vocabulary, reading, writing, spelling and thinking skills.  

Little did I know when I set out to learn more about how to help my son, it would turn into something much bigger than just us.  I’m honored each time I am able to play a small part in influencing the learning journeys of kids, parents, and educators around the world.  

Where can we find out more about your work & SWI?

Website:  www.seethebeautyindyslexia.com

Empower Learning Center  
Facebook
Twitter

SWI Blog: http://barnettsbuzzingblog.edublogs.org/

Word Works Literacy Centre  
Real Spelling
MaryBeth Steven
Rebecca Loveless
Learning About Spelling

5 Comments

start the year with something new in your teacher toolbox!

12/31/2017

3 Comments

 
Introductory SWI CLASS

2018 Class Forming NOW
    
3 Days; approx 90 
min each day

 All times are Eastern Daylight Time

W -- Jan 17, 2018  Day 1  6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
W -- Jan 24, 2018 Day 2  6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
W -- Jan 31, 2018 Day 3  6:30 pm - 8:00 pm



Please register at:      https://goo.gl/forms/tpRfu0youDsZWhtg2 

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Please note:  MIchigan observes Daylight Savings time on November 5th this year -- we turned our clocks back 1 hour -- Please keep this in mind as you make plans especially if your area does not observe daylight savings time.

This link will help you convert to your time zone.

Currently booking classes -- if you the above session does not work for your schedule, set up one of your own.  You'll need 3 people to sign up with you, contact me or wait until I post another one! 


All times are listed in EDT (MI time zone)



What Now Sessions Available:

Ready to begin using SWI in your classroom or tutoring sessions but just not sure where to begin or how to move past the first few lessons?  Try these opportunities:

SWI Coaching!   30-60 min once a week, twice a month... you set the pace 
based on your needs. 
              ~Coaching sessions:  $30 per half hour 
              ~Times available:  Weekdays 4:00-5:00 pm other spots available 


Tutor the Tutor/Teacher Group sessions now forming

             ~Word Work -- discover the structures of words that interest the group
             ~Group sessions --working with words 50 min $15/session; min. of 3 participants 
             ~Times available:  Weekdays 4:00-5:00 pm
                            W/F :  7:00-7:50 pm
                            Sat:    11:00 am-11:50 am  

All times are listed in 
EDT (MI time zone)



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3 Comments

Interview on Language Innerviews

11/10/2017

3 Comments

 
Click on this link to read the article -- there are many more wonderful innerviews from educational professionals, experts in SWI and others who teach the structure of the English language.  ​https://languageinnerviews.com/interviews/lisa-barnett/  
3 Comments

visit my edublog on SWI --linked below

2/20/2017

2 Comments

 
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In the year since writing the last blogpost, Transforming a Resource Room Teacher, I've begun a new blog about my classroom experiences.  The new blog is an educational one in which I write about lessons we've taught. It is an interesting glimpse into the orthography of the English language. Please visit our new blog at Barnett's Buzzing Blog. 
2 Comments

transforming a resource room teacher

2/9/2016

11 Comments

 
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     About a year and a half ago I was heavily engrossed in continuing to research the best ways to teach my struggling students to read.  I had oodles of programs at my disposal in my Resource Room and had tried them all with only mediocre results, at best.  Some of my students had stagnated, their skill development flat-lined.  I had also tried Orton-Gillingham methods with small groups only to find the individualized nature of the lessons difficult to reach all the varying skill sets of the group especially when new students joined.  It was effective, but took far longer to teach than I kept the students (most OG-style programs recommend 2-3 years of individual tutoring-- a far cry from the Resource Room experience).  I had recently discovered and been trained in an evidence based literacy method that promised faster results even in a group setting.  I was eager to try it with my students and so I began.  However, as excited as I was with how the students were responding to this new phonetic method, there was still a huge gap in the fullness of this approach.
 
     Somewhere along the way, I'd stumbled upon a webcast in which a gentleman, Pete Bowers, was giving a presentation on Structured Word Inquiry (SWI).  I was intrigued by the very nature of Inquiry Based instruction since we were, at the time, an IB World School and his method of teaching the structure of words appealed to my small group environment, but I was too immersed in the new training and teaching with my students to put a lot of energy into understanding more about SWI. I did however, identify with the concept that many words were built on a base word and so I taught my phonics-based units along with the concept and fun sing a-long phrase of, "It's all about the BASE, 'bout the BASE, no trouble", to the tune of a very popular song of the times.  My students were engaged and intrigued with finding the base of many multi-syllable words--that were obvious to us at the time.  
 
     For the next few months, I enjoyed seeing the gains my students were making with the combination of these two types of instruction --phonics and meaning of bases.  One major problem with the phonics lessons we kept encountering however, was spelling. While some people are fortunate to have a large memory-fund for spelling, most of my students do not.  I didn't realize how much I, myself, had built my own skills on "tricks and memorization" until I learned this new phonetic method of developing literacy skills. I had always "said" words in my head the way they should look-- for instance, if I wrote <sincerely>, I would say, /sin--cer--e--ly/ to remember the letter <e> before the  <l y> or I'd say, /ques-t-i-on/--while quickly imagining the last place I'd see that word written in a book or something. Although this method seems quite lengthy--it served me well at a rapid pace--I had a large visual memory. I actually took pride in my ability to remember spelling patterns and mneumonic trickery with words.  But, soon after the phonics training, my own spelling began to decline. Because  they taught us, in their unique approach, that there are 7-8 ways to write the long vowel sound /e/ and 17 ways to write /sh/, I had too many options in my repitoire to draw from! It became taxing and unreliable.  If this was causing me problems, I knew it was not going to help my students enough and I feared it would cause them more harm in the long run.  And so the search for a better method of teaching literacy skills continued.  

     During this same time, I found myself immersed in an epic battle with researchers, educators, professors and scholars from around the country in an online Listserve group who were debating the merits of teaching English as a phonetic vs. a morphophonemic language.  I was enjoying the view from several perspectives; and as I sided with the phonics crowd, I was very intrigued by the morphology arguments.  It was within this battle that my mountain of knowledge and research about the phonetic system began to crumble.  

 
      Outside of that listserve, a very nice lady named, Gail, had begun a conversation with me about SWI and my phonics theories; she asked very pointed (and poignant) questions of me and my evidence-based phonetic method.  I answered them, wisely I thought.  She asked for evidence to support the phonetic theories of words or letter patterns.  I had consistent answers with rhyming words or so-called 'word families' but many times, the only answer I had was the one I'd heard echoed across many lips, "Well, English is crazy!"  She led me to some interesting queries of my own and to a trail that if I chose to follow, promised a deeper understanding of the structure of English orthography.  It felt a bit like Hansel and Gretel being led by a trail of bread crumbs, only very welcoming, kind and open-minded.  I trusted this new friend and the trail she led me on so I spent the long, early morning hours while my children slept, researching these trails she'd led me on. Wow--was I amazed at what I learned:  English is NOT crazy! It is very orderly, well structured and deep ingrained in connection of meaning and history. I was shocked, dumbfounded, and baffled at how this understanding could have been kept from me and my teaching & tutoring friends around the country for so long.  
 
       At one point along the way, an epiphany struck that caused my 20+ year career in the world of explicit, systematic phonics to shift.  I could finally see that SWI fully embraced the importance of  sound in our language -- only placing it where it belongs, AFTER morphology, meaning and history. So I decided to fully immerse my students in SWI without the explicit, systematic phonics lessons -- this was a gamble because I was alone on this journey. There were a few small pockets of teachers approaching literacy with SWI around the country and world, but not in my district or school, maybe not even anywhere in my state! I could find no others.  I am used to being the one out on a limb but if this failed, the kids would be the ones to lose, not just me.  I didn't take this decision lightly and lost a lot of sleep over it, but I couldn't be happier that I did!  My students are soaring.  They are making gains in their reading and writing abilities and their confidence in their own ability to use the brains God gave them to think - not be told an answer or to memorize something without purpose.  
 
     Structured Word Inquiry has been the single most effective way of teaching orthography and reading with my students.  It is not a program or a method per se, it is an understanding of how the written word works that propels an educator to be able to teach effectively, the skills necessary for spelling and reading.  This understanding is what empowers students (of any age) to apply logical, meaningful connections within orthography while reading & spelling.  
     
     As an educator, I am expected to remediate my students skills as well as provide avenues in which students converse with their peers, regardless of skill-set, developing communication skills for explaining themselves, their thinking and to defend a stance they are taking with clear ideas.  This has seemed like an impossible task in a resource room in years past.  However, SWI is helping kids discover their own abilities to think, reason and defend the orthographic system because we've discovered that "English is NOT crazy".  It is built on structure and meaning.
    
     In a traditional phonics-based instructional setting, we teach phonemes and their grapheme correspondences which, unfortunately, fails quite often.  
Think about these words:  <ear>  <great>,  <learn>, & <react>,   all of them have the vowel letters <ea>  in them, but, they all sound differently. Students have much to memorize without any meaning attachment or connections to other words whose structure and meaning make sense.  In a phonics-based approach, we would have spent a lot of time teaching word families with each of these words.  We would have studied <ea> words that rhyme and categorized them into charts to discover which spelling or pronunciation was more frequent.  We would have looked for quantity vs quality.  Spending time with traditional word families focuses on building a phoneme-grapheme relationship only, which is just a memorization task.  For those who have great visual memories for orthographic patterns, this works.  For those who do not have such a large bucket in their brain, this is a nightmare.  
 
     The difference in teaching with SWI, is that it's approach is to teach connections words have with each other via their meanings, history and morphological structures first, then look at its pronunciation.  With SWI, we look at how words are related in meaning and history (etymology) to find trails and nuggets of knowledge that lead to a deeper well of meaning and connection.  We would study the words that share a quality relationship with one another such as with <ear>, our word list would be:  ear, hear, hearing, heard, ears, earring.  We would find that the structure, history and meaning connect.  We would discover affixes such as <-ing> in <hear> + <ing> but how <earring> does not share that same suffix, it is a compound word:  <ear> + <ring> and that the two <r>'s exist to preserve the meaning that an earring is a ring that is placed on the ear.  In words such as <react> we would learn that a phoneme does not cross a morphological boundary. The <ea> is not functioning as a digraph in this word.  It is made of a prefix and a base word:    
<re> + <act> --> react. 
 
     There is so much more depth and quality going on in a SWI lesson than memorization.  Kids (and adults) begin to make connections to many other words.  Their spellings begin to unveil themselves.  Think of the way this word sounds:  /reeakshun/  
If you were a beginning speller, spelling by the sounds you hear, you'd probably spell it something like the way it is pronounced: <reeacshun>  or <reeackshin> but when kids are taught that structure of words is based on the meaning and morphological structures, they are likely to recognize the word's relationship to <act>, plus the affixes to build the word in this way:
          <re> + <act> + <ion> -->  reaction
 
     Programs do not offer what exceptionally well-trained teachers can offer our students (struggling through advanced).  There are thousands of dollars of wasted programs buried in the cupboards of many classrooms.  With SWI, there is no need for big business to sell a program – teachers just need exceptional training in understanding how the written word works.  The classes I’ve taken through Real Spelling and the sources below have minimal costs with maximum education.  The hardest part of this transformative journey has been recognizing the fettered years spent in my previous research of teaching students with dyslexia, professional development and university classes and the students who did not benefit the way my current students are. 

     I am grateful for this community to learn from.   This past month I started running a mini-workshop with my colleagues to help others bring this to their classrooms for all students to advance to their potential. This Spring/Summer I will begin teaching educators how to get started with SWI, I am enthused by the growing numbers of educators beginning their learning journeys by attending the classes, presentations and workshops offered by the best scholars in the world.  The Whole-Language World has been turned upside-down and the Phonics World is about to be as well – all for the good of the student –to bring up a more literate society.  All along, I've been on a journey of transformation in my teaching, only I didn't know it until now, as I watch my students free themselves from the cocoon they've been in and transform into beautifully, literate butterflies.  

 

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                               “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance,
                                       it is the illusion of knowledge.”

                                                                              -Stephen Hawking

edited for clarity May2016

To learn more about SWI, the following websites and scholars offer amazing resources and a wealth of knowledge.  

 
 
Word Works Kingston by Dr. Pete Bowers
LEX: Linguist-Educator Exchange by Gina Cooke
DTI: Dyslexia Training Institute by Kelli Sandman-Hurley


     


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11 Comments

The Spiderman effect of teacher training

8/9/2015

5 Comments

 
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Picture this...... 


The moment has come for your 5 year old to ride his bike without the training wheels on.  You are both filled with trepidation, unsure if the training you provided will be enough to keep him from falling. You reflect on the skills you've given him...a shiny new bike with all the bells and whistles, the best training wheels money can buy, a sturdy seat and even a cute little horn!  You showed him the bike on Saturday, told him how to ride it, let him sit on the seat, test out his balance with the training wheels teedering back and forth.  You celebrated with joy and laughter when he honked the horn and placed his feet on the pedals.  He rode it up and down the driveway all day Saturday and Sunday, grinning from ear to ear.  It's Monday morning, time to take the wheels off, letting him ride independently.  As he gets on the bike, he asks, "Hey Dad, do you think I can ride it now?" You answer, "Of course you can son, you've trained for a couple of days, you have all the equipment you need and it looks great!"  You wave at him, wish him well and walk away back into the house, you have many things to do after all so he's on his own.  You're sure the training you provided for the couple of days is certain to be enough, you couldn't afford to hire the best professional bike trainer nor do you have more time to invest in his training, a momentary thought crosses your mind,  "I hope it was enough, ahww, he'll do alright."  

How do you think he'll do?  Will he take off down the driveway and around the block like a seasoned pro or wobble a few feet before he falls?  If he falters, will he keep trying or throw the bike down in disgust?  If he gets back on, how long do you think it will take him to master bike riding?  What if he never learns how to balance properly and yet learns how to ride in an awkward fashion just enough to get by?  Will that be determined as successful?  


This father never came back outside to see how his son faired with learning to ride his bike.  He never checked on his progress.  But, a long time later, he found the brand new bike in the back of the garage under a pile of other toys that were barely used.  He confronts his son about wasting money on toys and equipment he isn't using.  His son says he tried, but just wasn't making enough progress without proper training.  His son has a great idea though, he has talked with his friends in the neighborhood who all ride their bikes like pros, up and down the street.  They've made tremendous gains with their skills, even starting to learn to jump small ramps.  They have found a really good trainer who spends weeks on training, not just a couple of days.  His son has researched this method and found it to be highly recommended all over the country.  He asks his dad for this training.   His dad says he has a perfectly good bike, just get on it and ride, soon he'll be sure to show progress.  The son argues that excellent training is the key to using his shiny new bike properly, that it's not very resourceful to have something he is ill-equipped to use.  Not much progress can be made if he isn't sure he's using it right and that no one checks in on to be certain progress is being made.  His dad agrees that something must be done.  The next day, his dad calls him into the garage to discuss a new plan .......he's bought him a brand new bike!  This one is a different color, made by a different name brand company and get this, ..... the horn is on the cross bar instead of the handles, this will surely be exactly what his son needs to master bike riding!  

We would not use these methods to teach our children how to ride a bike, but this is often how we approach professional development with our teachers.  Recently, The Washington Post printed an article about how wasteful much of the annual teacher training is.  While I think the amount of $18,000 per teacher per year is astounding and may be over-estimated, I agree that much of the annual teacher training is wasteful.  

Teacher training is determined based on the Spiderman Effect.  The Spiderman Effect is just a term I've made up, but the image that runs through my mind when I picture administrators choosing which Professional Development (PD) opportinities to provide their teachers is much like Spiderman casting out a large web from his wrist.....whatever throws the widest net and will reach the MOST teachers, wins.  Whether it is necessary, wanted or even relavant may never be part of the equation.  

Administrators are tasked with the same job as every teacher is, to DIFFERENTIATE their instruction to the group that sits in front of them.  This is a VERY difficult task if one appraoches it in its truest form, provide PD for each of the type of teacher---gym, art, music, resource room, reading interventionist, math interventionist, science, social studies, robotics, yearbook, videography, speech, reading, math, spelling, writing, special education, etc., this list is not complete....but you get the idea.  That is a very long list of very specified PD.  On top of just this basic list, is the fact that teachers come with differing strengths and weaknesses.   Teachers are likely going to have a variety of skill levels in their teaching; some due to their university education, the number of years they've been teaching, their outside/personal education interests, etc.  With this long list of variables, many administrators pick an area of study for school or district as a whole that suits the majority of teachers, whether it applies directly to their job or not.  Trainers are expensive, the really good ones are even more expensive and booked well in advance.  There are too many trainers who sell themselves well but aren't worth hiring. 

In addition to all those variables, much of the collective billions of dollars handed over to schools (according to the article) has stipulations tied to it that must meet minute, detailed government criteria.  It makes the job of providing PD even more difficult for administrators--how in the heck can they begin to pay attention to the varying needs of their staff when they have to complete mounds of paperwork and meet mounds of criteria in order to receive these billions of dollars?!?  The job of the administrator has shifted from looking at the needs of the staff to keeping up with paperwork.

Many teachers' dedication to their passion for teaching leads them to find amazing resources but because the training is suited to their individual area of need or interest, funding is often not available.  The administrator is usually only willing to put monetary resources toward PD that casts a wider net or they cannot figure out how the request ties to the long list of criteria they are allowed to spend the money on.  On occasion, they will pilot a program, but follow through with studying its effectiveness is often lacking, mostly due to time constraints and future funding cuts.  

I've sat through hundreds of hours of PD in my 20+ years as an educator.  I ALWAYS find something of value from each one, because my very wise father (who was a great teacher of bike-riding and all other skills) taught me that nothing is valueless unless YOU choose not to seek and eek out what is useful to YOU.  So, while I've gained something from every PD opportunity, sometimes I've had to look very hard to find it.  

I spend a lot of looking for and finding the perfect PD that will make me a better teacher and lead more children to become readers and writers only to be told the money is not there.  I need more hours in a day to find grants that meet my needs and can be applied for--there are thousands--but not many for teacher development, and the amount of time it takes to apply and then wait to hear if your idea met their criteria is wasteful.  Boy, that's hard to say, applying for grants can be of great benefit, but unfortunately, in this stage and in this time of my life--it truly is wasteful.  With the hours in a day spent teaching, researching, educating oneself, and taking care of family, the little time left is precious.  This time is needed to spend on my own children so they grow up to reach their potential and not only be productive members of society but problem-solvers or grant-givers or provide some other way to be of benefit to their communities and the world.  My wish is for educators to be entrusted with a set amount of funds to use as they see fit to educate themselves in ways that make the most of their skills. 

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Don't try to fix him, he's not broken

2/14/2015

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This blogpost comes from a dad who posted in the Homeschooling Dyslexic Kids Facebook Group.  My daughter and I just had a conversation about this same topic this morning.....Paul Godwin's post says so much about digging deeper for the root cause of unexplained behavior and adults often-too-quick explanation of mislabeling behavior as lazy. 



To borrow a quote from Autism Awareness             

                       "In order to label it Dyslexia, you have to first TALK about Dyslexia."

Paul Godwin wrote:
     I have been contemplating writing a post for the Dads for quite some time. This will be a long post, but please take the time to read it. I wanted to give my perspective as a Dad who probably did everything wrong before we found out our child was dyslexic.
     Academics came very easily to me. I did not have a lot of patience with my son when it came to his struggles. I did not understand what the problem was and I thought it was just a lack of effort on his part. As men we are taught that, although not everything may come easily, if you just work hard enough you can accomplish a set goal. I could not fathom why it took my son so long to accomplish basic tasks such as reading a single word on a flash card. I had ZERO patience. Once he finally started getting the flashcards down, we moved on to sentences with the words from the flash cards. This was a disaster. He could not read anything. I was livid. I would berate him for what I deemed was a lack of effort. I did not get my “Compassionate and Understanding Dad” merit badge. There were other things that drove me crazy. He had great difficulty in doing things that I thought should have come easily. Tying shoes, riding a bike, and other fine motor skill functions did not come naturally. I remember becoming so frustrated when trying to teach him how to ride his bike that I picked up the bike and threw it into an empty lot in our neighborhood.
     My son had originally been diagnosed PDD-NOS, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified. At that point this was considered part of the autism spectrum which basically meant “we know there is something wrong but we are not quite sure what”. My son did not fit into the a typical autistic category, but there were definitely some issues. My wife started doing some research about his behavior. The more she read, the more she became convinced he was dyslexic. Once we had him tested we found that he had moderate to severe dyslexia. I still did not fully grasp all that this entailed. I obviously felt like a complete and utter jerk for how I treated my son concerning reading and his academics. I still look back and think how much differently I should have done things. That being said, I did not buy into how dyslexia could affect the other areas of his life. What did a reading disorder have to do with tying your shoes?
     The reality is that dyslexia affects almost every aspect of a child's life. Motor skills, memorization, math, remembering sequential steps (both in academics and in daily tasks), and organization skills are all impacted by dyslexia.
     As men, we are wired to fix things, no matter what it may be. My best advice to you dads is that you can't fix your child because your child is not broken. They are different. They think different, act different, and react different, but they are definitely not broken. Don't try to fix them, try to understand them. Be patient. Do research, this is not just your wife's job. The better you understand why they are the way the are, the better you can help.


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How effective is reading recovery?

9/7/2014

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     Reading Recovery's origins began more than 30 years ago in New Zealand, long before the best, tried-and-true research was conducted on how to effectively teach our most struggling students to read.  However, Reading Recovery programs continue to be used in our schools and have a cult-like following that is difficult to penetrate, despite their ineffective results as proven by the high number of children who are not reading at grade level and by the existance of the large gap between the highest and lowest achieving students in the areas of reading & writing.  Most non-Reading Recovery minded people are baffled by the strong beliefs held by RR teachers and schools because of the existance & abundance of brilliant, scientific-research on the BEST teaching methods for teaching students how to read.  The article below, from Learning Difficulties Australia, November 2013, discusses the ineffectiveness of the Reading Recovery Program, the manipulation of data by its teachers in New Zealand and the current data which shows 66% of its students still not reading proficiently.  

     Reading Recovery is missing the essential elements of the actual teaching of reading skills:  "systematic teaching of phonemic awareness (the ability to reflect on and manipulate the phonemic segments of spoken words) and alphabetic coding skills (the ability to translate letters and letter patterns into phonological forms)."   Why would a program that has proven itself to be inadequate continue to be used?  Its Gestapo-like administration of the program is run so that no changes can be made to the program, thereby hog-tying the adminstration of the program despite its ineffectiveness.  Schools have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into training, adopting its philosophy, integrating its philosophies into every classroom and intervention programs and through the purchase of tons of materials.   If and when schools recognize its ineffectiveness, they will have to scrap some of what they currently use and their beliefs that have been ingrained for the past 20-30 years.  They will need to investigate better programs--hopefully NOT be SOLD by big business companies--and provide training for all staff and purchase materials to use.  This investment would NOT cost as much as it would seem.  Most scientific-based phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, decoding and reading fluency skill programs are inexpensive and highly effective at teaching children to decode and read fluently.  They don't require schools to throw out all the materials used in their guided-reading programs, those could continue to be used to read in small groups after decoding lessons--AS LONG AS the teachers DROP the terrible strategies adopted by Reading Recovery methods such as:  find a chunk within a word; use picture clues to guess the word; use context clues to figure out the word, get your mouth ready, etc.  These strategies appear to be good on the surface because they help with overall comprehension, but they do NOT help one DECODE; the basic necessity of reading.  
 
     The Barton Reading & Spelling Program is continuallly touted as one of the best and simplest programs to implement .  Recently, I began using Levels 1 & 2 in my resource room and actually saw data points rise on nearly all students.  Prior to implementing that program, nearly all students' data points had flat-lined with the programs I had access to.  Unfortunately, I had to fight hard to get the program and the only way I received it was to seek donations from myself, friends and family through Donor's Choose.  After I began using level 1 and finding success with it, my district bought level 2.  I don't mind raising funds in some ways, and yet, I do; having to find the money caused a great delay in providing the best instruction to my students.  In addition to that travesty, my own family's budget had to suffer and my extended family and friends had to dig into their budgets because I was so passionate about this program.  Thankfully, they trusted my judgement because while providing the program to my students, I saw their eyes light up with new knowledge and confidence in their skills.   I saw the confusion lift slightly for them and can't wait for this school year to start so we can continue to rid them of their confusion with the alphabetic code.  With the ease of use and DVD training methods, others are eager to use the Barton System with students.  Over the summer I spent several days training in a newer program called, EBLI (Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction) which is a method of instruction to teach reading that should give results in a lot less time than other methods.   I have spoken with many educators and adminstrators all around Michigan who use this program and love it because of its effectiveness; ALL of their students are making gains --general education, learning disabled, even cognitively impaired students are making progress....the rate of progress varies but the program is not limited to just those who struggle to read or spell.  Many of those I spoke with, use it school-wide and are finding great results in their reading scores which are transferring to their state assessment scores.  The cost for this program is in training only, no materials to purchase with the exception of dry erase markers and white-boards.....cheapest program I know of with highly effective results in teaching how to decode & encode fluently. I am excited to see how my students respond to EBLI this year! 

     Reading Recovery methodology is antiquated and ineffective.  It's time our schools recognize that and start making changes.  More of our children need to learn how to read; they deserve to have our undivided attention to this end with every ounce of our energy.  Our schools need to look at the research--NOT what the big business companies say or attempt to show them--they must be able to discern a sales pitch with weak research from the peer-reviewed research & studies to implement the best remediation techniques that teach our students how to read fluently (see Resources Tab on my website for more info)
     
     Which program(-s) have you found to be the most effective in teaching skills of reading and spelling?  


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Dyslexia--label it or not?

7/19/2014

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Some people do not believe in labeling children with a learning disability or dyslexia.  They feel that labeling puts limitations on their potential for achievement. I can see this point to a degree, but while I think labeling has the potential to limit ones' expectations, I feel more strongly that NOT labeling has the capacity to limit one's potential even more.  

Take the memoir of Nelson Lauver for instance, which is resonating with thousands and thousands of people all over the world because it rings true to their own stories.  Nelson grew up in an era when the label Learning Disabilites (LD) was not well known or used.  He started out life as a happy, intelligent, rambunctious little boy.  When he started school, life began to take a wrong turn.  Without a label for his struggles, he was viewed as stupid by his teacher and classmates.  Without knowledge of LD's, dyslexia, etc., his education created a 'monster'---he was so intelligent, that he learned how to act, how to manipulate situations and outcomes, he even manipulated the testing by professionals.  He chose his own path, and at the age of 6-8 years old, he chose that path with the maturity and breadth of knowledge of merely a child.  He chose the 'bad kid' path so that he wouldn't be called on in class to read or write in front of his peers, so his peers didn't ask him for help with reading and writing but most importantly, to preserve his own self-esteem; its easier to choose to be viewed a certain way than it is to be 'labeled' erroneously by your peers.  The intelligence & insight that it takes for a child to instinctively chose self-preservation leaves me awe-struck.  The path that he chose, allowed him to bumble thru his academic life, to eek out a meager education and graduate.  It also allowed him to surface from the depths of the dungeon that trapped him for 12 years to begin to tread water as a young man, earning a living by creating his own destiny.  Society is damned lucky he didn't falter--his life could have had a totally different outcome.  

By not putting a label on kids, society often adds its own labels instead, most of the time these are WRONG labels.  Without proper diagnosing of an issue, we miss some very important steps.  By having an avenue in which to meander, we can recognize some of the most odd characteristics of dyslexia in young children that are so common among our kids when we look at them collectively.  If I had known these characteristics (like calling familiar objects/people by the wrong name; being unable to tie shoes; etc.) when my son was in preschool--I would have been able to begin a targeted intervention instead of floundering around, wondering if it was this or that.  When he could not identify many letters of the alphabet, but was beginning to read stories, I would not have been so relieved that the process appeared to be beginning.....I would have recognized sooner that he was using his awesome memory skills to memorize the stories he'd read in small group at school to read to me at home.  I was questioning his memory instead because it appeared that while he could read larger words on a page, he would miss the simplest ones like 'the, and, is'; what he was really doing was using his intelligencce to figure out the larger words using the context clues.  

Analyzing errors can be tricky when you don't know what you're looking for, labeling allows us to lump characteristics together (the odd ones and the main ones), giving us possible approaches that lead to help!   Recently, I sat in a meeting where the evaluator was shocked at the responses the child had given on a word reading task, she reported that the child was so close in her responses that she felt the child just wasn't paying attention to the details, therefore, it was clear to her that AD/HD may be an issue.  I was sad, angry and filled with anxiety because I was analyzing the errors--writing down the words the child should have read and on top of each, the response that the child had given--quite clearly a pattern was developing.  With the knowledge of dyslexia that I have, I was able to disway the laser focus of AD/HD discussion to one of a decoding issue.  The parent said that while the school had been advising her of attentional issues for the past few years, she had held off because while she saw the attention issues they weren't consistent.  She also shared that the child's doctor had prescribed medication but was 'on the fence' about it--they were in a trial period.  Within a short time of informal testing, working with the child and observing her learning patterns, I was confident in recommending that the mom consider researching dyslexia.  She was so relieved --it made sense because of the struggles her child faced daily in school but were so different than her behavior and performance at home or in situations that weren't academically related.  Additionally, she was relieved that this may lead to some targeted solutions.  It is wonderful to feel like you made a difference in that person's life, but also disheartening at the same time---it's only one--why isn't this knowledge more common?  Why isn't this knowledge sprayed out like a firehose instead of a trickle of water in an abandoned warehouse?  

Decoding Dyslexia organizations around the country (and now beginning to reach its arms around the world!!) are working hard to raise the awareness of dyslexia.  Celebrities and important business leaders and entrepreneurs are doing their part too which is making great impacts in ways that a group of parents simply cannot reach alone.  People like Nelson Lauver are brave enough to tell their stories and are such good writers that their stories leave us laughing, crying and most importantly, connecting.  Please read this humorous, touching and eye-opening book, Most Unlikely to Succeed; The Trials, Travels and Ultimate Triumphs of a 'Throw-Away Kid', you will be glad you did and if you haven't yet volunteered to take some action with your local chapter of Decoding Dyslexia, maybe this will inspire you to do so, we're looking forward to your help!  

                                                    
Nelson Lauver--Motivational Speaker, Voice-Over Artist; Literacy Advocate; The American StoryTeller
 

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Decoding Dyslexia, a grassroots movement sweeping the country....world!
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Michigan Chapter of Decoding Dyslexia
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why do i fight for dyslexia?  Farmer's Son

5/27/2014

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Farmer's Son is a great novel by N.E. Lasater!  It is a work of fiction but so true to life for many who are either dyslexic or who live with dyslexic individuals.   In this novel, the McAllister Family suffers from one of the most devastating effects of growing up as a slow reader---shame.  This story emphasizes one of the many, but main reasons I am so passionate about changing how we view and educate dyslexics.
The current educational system does not recognize dyslexia, does not educate their teachers enough about the science of reading and thereby continues to miss the opportunity to re-mediate this issue early on in a child's life.  Because people with this learning difference have average to above average intelligence, they KNOW they are not keeping up with their peers and generally feel ashamed of that --as early as preschool where they watch their friends catching on to the alphabet.  This feeling of everyone knowing something they don't, gets imbedded into their way of thinking and if not remedied early in their school careers, can lead to devastating results.  

Schools are unintentionally teaching kids to hide their inability to read or spell well, causing them to learn stealth-like methods of coping to survive the school day.  The processing of language comes at a much slower pace than learning how to copy a neighbor's paper, listen closely to class discussions to answer questions; cajoling others into doing papers;  being so charming that people want to help or see them pass; being loud; a class clown; avoidance tactics; or causing a distraction to alter the course the teacher is about to take so they don't have to read aloud or write in front of their peers.  Even larger consequences happen....some kids stop trying, quit school, and too many go on to lead lives of crime or blight.  Perhaps the greatest consequence is the reduction or extinguishing of the joy in simply being a thinker about things read or expression of ones knowledge and thoughts.   These kids without access to print, don't get their ideas out often enough to grow as much from their experiences or feel joy often enough to continue to push themselves to express their ideas or gain more knowledge thru print.  

Kids use these coping strategies as a form of self-preservation due to the shame they feel with not being able to break the code or by the fear of being "found out" by their peers.  This causes ones' emotional state to be in a flight or fight mode.  Children grow into adults who often continue to feel ashamed of their skills and practice these same strategies in their working lives.  One of the greatest human tragedies is to go through school feeling ashamed of oneself; to never discover or uncover your talents; to never believe in yourself enough to strengthen your talents; to fall short of your potential because you didn't believe you could just because you don't read or read as well as others.  Every human being needs a champion in their life, someone who is willing to help uncover their strengths and make you feel good about yourself, who teaches you how to overcome your weaknesses and bring out the best in you.                 

I try to imagine what the world will be like when we stop all this nonsense,  allow all kids to think, feel good about themselves and intervene with the right remediation programs at early ages.    Lasater's novel has left me feeling even more passionate about this quest I am on with Decoding Dyslexia to make large scale changes in this country.  Thank you for writing a novel that will resonate with all kinds of learners; one that will allow them to connect with the feelings that can lead to making a positive difference.  

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