Constructivist Leanings

A Critical Analysis of Eight Informal Reading Inventories, from The Reading Teacher

2008-07-19T07:25:00.000-07:00

This post was originally published here...

While not technically a research article I suppose, I thought Nina L. Nilsson piece in April 08 issue of The Reading Teacher was useful and interesting. Nilsson compares eight IRIs on a variety of issues and discusses aspects of their validity.

The eight tests she looks at are:

Analytical Reading Inventory (ARI; Woods & Moe, 2007)

Bader Reading and Language Inventory (BRLI; Bader, 2005)

Basic Reading Inventory (BRI; Johns, 2005)

Classroom Reading Inventory (CRI-SW; Silvaroli & Wheelock, 2004)

Comprehensive Reading Inventory (CRI-CFC; Cooter, Flynt, & Cooter, 2007)

Informal Reading Inventory (IRI-BR; Burns & Roe, 2007)

Qualitative Reading Inventory-4 (QRI-4; Leslie & Caldwell, 2006)

The Critical Reading Inventory (CRI-2; Applegate, Quinn, & Applegate, 2008).

She concludes with a section on picking a test to use.

Social Networking in Plain English

2008-07-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

Duane Lewis posted this video in Webtop (a closed social networking site for WV teachers and students). I thought it was interesting and I posted the comment below...

Hi Duane,

Interesting use of the word real in the blurb "Social Networking in Plain English." Lee LaFever used the phrase real world at least three times. Kind of begs the question... Are my relationships in cyberspace real? Virtual reality games like Second Life are starting to create substantial space between what's "real" and what's "not real." I thought it was fascinating back in the primary season that political candidates actually opened offices in Second Life.

Obviously my connections in Facebook are something other than imaginary. In the 1980's an American philosopher named Hilary Putnam described a puzzle. He asked a question somthing like this: "How do I know that my brain hasn't been removed from my body and suspended in some kind of a vat of nutrients to keep it alive by a mad scientist who is stimulating my brain with electrical impulses to make me 'see' and 'feel' all the things that I think are around me?" It was a modern restatement of Descartes and his skepticism. Both men functioned on the assumption that their choices where binary: either my dog (sitting here staring at me) is "real" or it's "not real."

Lee LaFever's language is typical in discussions of the Internet, and it makes me wonder if were not developing a third alternative in the real/not real dichotomy...

Figuring Out Ian Jukes (The Story of the Committed Sardine)

2008-07-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on July 9, 2008.

Well, Monday August 4th my school district is bringing in Ian Jukes to kick off the
McDowell County 21^st Century Learning Expo at the Armory in Beckley. So I've been reading up on Mr. Jukes....

Jukes advocates change. He thinks change is required to effectively reach the digital natives that are today's students. And he uses the story of the committed sardine to illustrate what it means to be an agent of change. The gist of the story is that individual teachers may feel small (like sardines), but if they advocate change, move in a different direction than those around them, then eventually other people will move with them in the direction of that change. It takes between 10% and 15% of a school of sardines moving in a new direction to bring about a change of direction for the whole group.

So I'm guessing Jukes is going to try and tempt us to go against the flow...

I May Not Be a Native, But I’m a Naturalized Digital Citizen…

2008-07-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on July 8, 2008.

I was a little miffed when I first came across the distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants. The tone of the piece I was reading seemed to imply that it was somehow better to be a digital native. I didn't grow up with technology, so that makes me an immigrant to the digital world, regardless of my level of proficiency...

My first memorable experience with technology was in high school. I had this thing that was a cross between a typewriter and a word processer. Its memory held a full page and it printed that out on thermal paper. Jimmy Carter was President at the time and there weren't a lot of actual laptops around. I was almost an adult, and I'd grown up with a pencil in my hand, listening to music that was recorded on cassette tapes or pressed in vinyl.

Having acknowledged that I didn't actually grow up with technology I must say that, as I look back now, I've had a keyboard for as long as I can remember. I don't remember when I got my first email address. Today my music is mostly in MP3 format, my camera is digital, I write HTML, I transfer files, I email my Mom, I take classes online, I use a SmartBoard in my classroom, and so on. I've blogged and I've telecommuted. And (I admit it) I've even Googled myself. But I'm not a digital native, I learned. For some reason I found that irritating, at first.

As I became a little more familiar with the concepts, I realized that being a digital immigrant (as opposed to a digital native) had more to with learning styles and social patterns than with competency per se. That made it a little easier to accept. And after thinking about it for a while I decided that I am as at home in the blogosphere, in cyberspace and in digital reality as most teenagers I know. Whether I am a native or an immigrant, I'm a digital citizen. Naturalized, perhaps - but still a citizen...

As a naturalized digital citizen (an NDC) I've thought occasionally about the people around my school (and other places) who aren't very digital. What to call them? One suggestion I've heard is "dinosaurs" - digital dinosaurs. That may be nice imagery, but it seems inconsistent. It's, well, dehumanizing (since, after all, dinosuars weren't human). Somewhere else I came across the term digital refugee. That's closer. My problem I suppose is that refugee is a legal status. A refugee is a type of immigrant. I don't think of myself as anything like a refugee in the digital world - wishing that I could leave this place and go home.

Eventually I came up with the idea of a digital alien. There are teachers (and parents) who roam the halls of my increasingly digital school - and, yet, they don't speak the language. They don't understand that I wear my flash drive on a cord around my neck sometimes because it's geek jewelry. Oh well...

I'll probably talk more about the digital native v. digtal immigrant thing - especially since Ian Jukes is coming to speak to my county's teachers in August. For now I'll close by saying that I'm pleased to have an address in the blogosphere and proud to be an NDC.

The Death of Reading First?

2008-07-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on June 30, 2008.

Appropriations committees in both the House and Senate have now approved budget bills for the 2009 fiscal year that have no funding for Reading First, according to Alyson Klein at Education Week.

While it looks like Reading First will disappear from the federal budget on October 1st if Congress has its way, education funding would be up by about 4% overall. Title I and special education funding for IDEA would both increase.

To me the issue looks partisan. And I have to question the wisdom of Congress on the issue since the report card on Reading First is still out...

Hugo’s New Book…

2008-07-12T09:10:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on June 28, 2008.

I have a review of Hugo Kerr's new book, The Cognitive Psychology of Literacy Teaching: Reading, Writing, Spelling, Dyslexia (& a bit besides) available at Suite101. You can read it here...

What Is a Disability?

2008-07-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on June 26, 2008.

What is a disability? That sounds like a simple question. But if you work in special education in the U.S. you probably know that it isn't all that simple. The definition of "specific learning disability" has changed considerably in the last few years.

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an interesting story last week in its news blog. Congress has been tinkering with the definition of the term "disability." They eventually decided to leave it unchanged for the purposes of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Congress looked at broadening the definition. Here's how the Chronicle explained it:

The bill maintains the existing definition that a disability must “substantially limit” a “major life activity” to be considered for coverage under the law. An earlier bill, opposed by college officials, had defined a disability as any “physical or mental impairment.”

This highlights a couple of ideas. First, disability is a social construct. Often we codify it in law. But even then, the definition varies somewhat from law to law, depending on the purpose of the particular law we're discussing.

Second, a disability is not a medical condition. It may be the result of a medical condition. But some people with epilepsy have a disability and some people with epilepsy don't. Substitute whatever medical issue, condition, syndrome or disorder you like for "epilepsy." The issue remains how it affects you, how it limits your activity. And very similar disabilities can be the result of very different medical conditions.

Society is interested largely in accommodating disabilities. How well we protect the disabled in our society is a measure of the maturity of our civilization and of the value we place on human life.

Reading the Chronicle blog post made me think back to the dyslexia discussion with Hugo Kerr (and others) last month that I had on the Reading Teachers listserv (hosted by the International Reading Association). Hugo wanted to define the term "dyslexia" more clearly and called it "an innate, neurological condition." He wants dyslexia to be a medical condition. And yet both the International Dyslexia Association and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes say that dyslexia is a disability.

If we accept the idea that "dyslexia" is the name of a disability (not of a medical condition, per se), it becomes much easier to understand why so much disagreement exists about the causes and symptom of dyslexia. If we see dyslexia as the name of a disability, it becomes easier to understand why rates of dyslexia vary from place to place. In a society without books and reading there'd be no dyslexia - even if the same neurological problems that lead to dyslexia in the US or Britain were common. (An example of such a society is the Lashi of Myanmar; the 30,000 or so Lashi-speakers have only a 1% literacy rate in their own language.)

Does dyslexia exist? If it is a medical or biological condition, the research is still not completely in on that question. But if it is simply a name for a disability, for a set of problems or symptoms that impede the way an individual copes with an important part of life (reading) in modern society, then dyslexia exists. Its status may be in danger; it could be completely subsumed into the legal/educational concept of "learning disabilities." But at the moment it exists. And it exists simply because we say it does. What we mean by the word "dyslexia" may change. It may have more than one cause. But it exists in the realm of ideas, and it will continue to exist as long as it is a useful idea...

A “Diagnosis” of Dyslexia? Is That Good?

2008-07-12T09:08:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on June 8, 2008.

When I first mentioned last month's dyslexia discussion that I was involved in on the International Reading Association's listserv for reading teachers, I said basically that I agreed with Hugo Kerr that dyslexia isn't a very useful concept at the moment - at least not within the framework of American education.

The usefulness of the concept isn't what drives Hugo's passion, though. But before I get into that, let me refresh your memory as to who Hugo is...

Hugo Kerr is a vocal member of the Reading Teachers listserv (hosted by the Internetional Reading Association). Hugo live in Wales and has worked as a veterinarian for almost 40 years. For the last 25 years he has also been involved in adult literacy (he has an MEd degree). And he has a new book available (for free at his website) that, among other things, provides a "teacher-friendly but properly sceptical scrutiny of dyslexia." Hugo doesn't believe in dyslexia.

I love the way Hugo describes himself in the About Me section of his website:

I love to debate with like minds of like enthusiasms. It has been my experience that great fruitfulness often results. Sometimes heat is generated, but so is light.

If you search the archives of the reading teacher listserv you will find where we've generated some of that heat and light over the past few years.

If you're keeping score, I've conceded that Hugo's position has made me question the usefulness of dyslexia as a concept in American education and I've concluded that his definition of dyslexia is far too narrow to make much sense in the context of the current stage of dyslexia research.

I'm writing this to concede another point to Hugo. He feels that a diagnosis of dyslexia is often a harmful thing. Probably, he'd say it is usually harmful (or perhaps even always harmful). In this recent posting to the reading teachers listserv he calls a diagnosis of dyslexia "pseudo-science" and says of such diagonses: "they do real people real harm." Hugo's biggest complaint seems to be that the adults he works who have been "diagnosed" as dyslexic have often accepted the idea that something is wrong with them, and that they can't learn to ready. He characterizes the result as learned helplessness.

At this point in my professional career I think I agree with Hugo that a diagnosis of dyslexia probably does as much harm as good. Why? Well, first of all, there's so little agreement as to what dyslexia even is. Picture this conversation in the office of a private psychologist that some parent has employed to find out why their child has reading problems...

Psychologist: Ms. Jones I'm afraid I have bad news about Johnny.
Ms. Jones: Oh no. What is it? Why is his problem?
Psychologist: Johnny has dyslexia.
Ms. Jones: Oh my! What does that mean.
Psychologist: Depends on who you ask...
Ms. Jones: Well, what do we do?
Psychologist: I'm sorry, but that depends on who you ask, too.
Ms. Jones: This is so horrible!
Psychologist: It gets worse...
Ms. Jones: How?
Psychologist: You owe me $1,800 for the dozen tests we did on Johnny.

Does dyslexia exist? Maybe. I think the verdict is still out. But there's no clear definition for it beyond "trouble reading" (which is simply too vague), no agreed upon method for diagnosing it (professional judgment usually plays a hefty role in the process), and such a broad set of possible symptoms that no one single instructional method adequately addresses the problems of all "dyslexics." And Hugo's point is valid: people learn to accept that there's a reason for the difficulty they have with reading, and that's counterproductive.

Does that mean all labels are bad? I'd have to disagree with that conclusion. And you can read about my feelings on that issue in Why Labels Matter - Part I and in Why Labels Matter - Part II. While I admit that there is a disconnect sometimes between special education labels and medical opinions, avoiding labels altogether in the educational setting is naive and can result in kids not getting the attention they need.

So What EXACTLY is Dyslexia? (Part II)

2008-07-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on June 4, 2008.

(Read Part I.)

Below you will find a few of the more popular, formal definitions for dyslexia:

According to the British Dyslexia Association dyslexia is "a combination of abilities and difficulties that affect the learning process in one or more of reading, spelling, writing. Accompanying weaknesses may be identified in areas of speed of processing, short-term memory, sequencing and organisation, auditory and/or visual perception, spoken language and motor skills. It is particularly related to mastering and using written language, which may include alphabetic, numeric and musical notation."

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes says that dyslexia is "a brain-based type of learning disability that specifically impairs a person's ability to read. These individuals typically read at levels significantly lower than expected despite having normal intelligence. Although the disorder varies from person to person, common characteristics among people with dyslexia are difficulty with phonological processing (the manipulation of sounds) and/or rapid visual-verbal responding.

The International Dyslexia Association says that dyslexia "is a language-based learning disability. Dyslexia refers to a cluster of symptoms, which result in people having difficulties with specific language skills, particularly reading. Students with dyslexia usually experience difficulties with other language skills such as spelling, writing, and pronouncing words. Dyslexia affects individuals throughout their lives; however, its impact can change at different stages in a person’s life. It is referred to as a learning disability because dyslexia can make it very difficult for a student to succeed academically in the typical instructional environment, and in its more severe forms, will qualify a student for special education, special accommodations, or extra support services."

The definitions have some common threads. The IDA's definition seems gear toward asserting the legal status of dyslexia as a educational disability. All three definitions are broad and general. And none are particularly clinical in the sense of providing much criteria for testing or for distinguishing people who have some of the symptoms but are not dyslexics from people who are dyslexics.

So now I'll return to my conversation recently on the International Reading Association's listserv for reading teachers. Hugo Kerr put forward a proposed definition for dyslexia as part of that discussion. I think the definition comes from his new book, but I haven't finished it yet. Hugo's definition is

An innate, neurological condition specifically disabling the acquisition and use of literacy.

You can find it here in a post he wrote to the Reading Teachers list, hosted by the International Reading Association. (You can read posts from the larger discussion here, in the archives of that listserv on the IRA's site.)

If you contrast Hugo's definition to the three put forth at the beginning of Part II here, it has some advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it is more concise, more portable than any of the three definitions we started this piece with. The phrase "the acquisition and use of literacy" keeps us from having to specify particular problem areas and covers things that might be involved in literacy even though research hasn't discovered them yet.

Two words make the definition difficult to deal with. The first is innate. I'm not sure it's clear to us what is and what is not innate in humans yet. I know what the word means. I just don't know how we measure it. How do we determine whether a particular behavior is innate - especially if it is a behavior that emerges after birth during some developmental stage.

The second problem word for me is specifically. From discussions with Hugo on the listserv, he seems to me to feel that the problems commonly called dyslexia will eventually be attributed to disorders that don't primarily have to do with literacy. Hugo doubts that we'll ever identify a neurological disorder that specifically affects literacy. In fact, he has said repeatedly that he doesn't believe in dyslexia (for example here, in the listserv post from the IRA's site).

So why write a definition for something you don't believe in? My conclusion is that Hugo's definition is so narrow in order to define dyslexia out of existence. The definition is in itself a tool for helping to promote the idea that dyslexia doesn't really exist.

Does dyslexia exist? I'm not sure. I do know that it is a persistent concept. Over a century of work on the idea hasn't killed it yet. And I know that brain science is a relatively young field in light of the explosion of technology in the last 25 years.

As someone who provides reading interventions in an elementary school, my primary concern is with what prevents reading. Whether reading failure is the primary cause of some brain problem or is more secondary, the growing importance of literacy in our society probably makes literacy the most important area of impact.

One of the most common complaints about dyslexia research is that the definition is so poor. How do we know what we're testing for in an experiment? Hugo is among those who complain about that problem. Shoddy research: that's the accusation. The difficulty with that is that with the advances that have taken place in technology (and therefore in the types of data we can collect) we don't seem to be sure what we're looking for at the moment. The research is exploratory, and hopefully well soon know enough to design better research. That's how science works.

One thing that will not happen: we will never arrive at some final conclusion about dyslexia, one that allows us to simply say, "so there you have it." That's not how science works.

Want to know exactly what dyslexia is? Ask me again in 10 or 15 years...

So What EXACTLY Is Dyslexia? (Part I)

2008-07-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on June 3, 2008.

That is the ten thousand dollar question...

I recently participated in a discussion on the International Reading Association's listserv for teachers, a discussion in which the exact definition of dyslexia featured prominently. As a backdrop to that discussion, let me show you what I found when I went looking for a definition online.

Speakability, a UK-based support group for people with aphasia, defines dyslexia simply as "difficulty reading."

The Communications Forum, another UK-based support group for people with communications disorders, dresses their definition up with a few details: "Difficulty with written language. Dyslexia affects reading, spelling, writing, memory and concentration. Sometimes called a specific learning difficulty. Dyslexia can be developmental or acquired."

Shannon Booth, a neuroscience major at a college in Minnesota, has a definition online that seems simplistic to me, but reflects common perceptions: "A disorder where things are done or read backwards. For example, a "d" and a "b" might be confused."

inURarea, a UK-based childcare group, expands the definition slightly to exclude some reading problems based on "sensory defect" and specify that it is a neurological condition: "Difficulty in reading due to a defect of brain function other than sensory defect."

The Nebraska Department of Education says dyslexia is "a developmental reading disability, presumably congenital and perhaps hereditary, that may vary in degree from mild to severe."

Child Care Aware defines dyslexia as "an impairment in the brain's processing of information that results in difficulty reading, spelling, writing, and related language skills."

One high school science teacher says that dyslexia is an "impairment in the visual cortex that leads to difficulty in learning to read, write, or spell."

You can probably guess from those seven examples that definitions of dyslexia are spread out along a continuum ranging from the simple two word "reading difficulty" to formulas that are tediously long and complicated. They also range from vague generalities (half the people I know have difficulty reading) to somewhat more specific ideas (like being congenital and hereditary) and the nature and location of the disorder.

The term "dyslexia" was coined by an eye doctor in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1881. While the scientific community has been tinkering with the condition for over 125 years, most of the definitions during the first hundred years are best described as "exclusionary." That is to say that a doctor or therapist would exclude causes for poor reading (is it poor eyesight?...no; is it low IQ?...no; is it a hearing problem?... no; is it lack of access to education?...no), and when the doctor ran out of other choices, the reading problem was determined to be dyslexia. Theories existed about what caused dyslexia, or how dyslexia worked to cause the problems seen in a patient; but the technology to test those theories, to observe brain function, didn't exist until recently.

The growth of linguistics led to new ideas about dyslexia in the 1970's - ideas that revolved about brain function and the processing of the sounds in a language. Phonemic awareness has become one focus of research into dyslexia. If children had some problem identifying the psychological sound units of their language, associating those sounds with symbols (letters) would obviously present problems - and reading would be affected.

The development of neuroimaging in the 1980's and 90's has further served to promote research into dyslexia. It is now possible to observe some aspect of brain function in a living person without invasive techniques like surgery. And far more data on brain function can be obtained than was possible in the past.

Why Teach About Blogs and Blogging?

2008-07-12T08:35:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on June 2, 2008.

(Reprinted from my personal blog...Nov. 26, 2007)

Blogging is a literary form. It has become very much a genre in its own right. It’s a growing genre, an influential genre, and it is a genre that we need to acquaint students with at an early age.

The word “blog” is a shortened for of the word weblog. The “we” gets amputated from the front of the word. That word formation process is just one example of the new level of creativity that online writing brings to our language.

Blogging has become for literature today something like what keeping a diary was in the 18th and 19th centuries. But not exactly. On the one hand, a blog can be private and personal. On the other hand, it can be designed to promote an opinion, a perspective, or to give advice – to the point of being commercial. It can be closed, accessible only to people you allow to see it. Or it can be very public, easily accessible.

Because blogs have become so numerous and influential, it’s important that students be aware of them and have some understanding of how to evaluate a blog. The skill of discerning fact from opinion is more important now than it has ever been. It’s important that students have some idea of how to find a blog if they want to look at one. Google, for example, has a special search engine that only searches websites it classifies as blogs. And, finally, it is important that students know how to create a blog for themselves if they want to – and that they understand the privacy issues and the liabilities that come with setting themselves up with a blog at a site like MySpace or FaceBook.

I personally think that digital self-expression is a wave of the future that could revive and regenerate the skill of composition in our language. Blogs have a profound impact on literacy in America and we need to be sure our kids are positively impacted by that…

Recent Study Shows Public School “As Good As Private School” - at Least in Math…

2008-07-12T08:28:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on June 1, 2008.

Live Science carried a story last week about a recent study by Christopher Lubienski of the University of Illinois. The study looked at math scores for about 10,000 students and, by controlling for socio-economic factors (among other things) determined that public school performed significantly better, on average, than private schools in teaching math in the elementary grades.

The study looked at math achievement scores for students in kindergarten and fifth grade.

A Kentucky blogger named Ben said this about the study:

This is at the crux of every education debate ever–Republicans are fans of private education because it introduces market forces, and Democrats scream to protect the public schools from the dangerous school vouchers, which would of course lead to mass desertions. Personally, as a product of a public school, I don’t know if private schools are better...

No Child Left Behind punishes failing schools by requiring that school districts make educational alternatives available to parents when their child's school doesn't make adequate yearly progress. While the federal law confines those alternatives to other public schools at the moment, President Bush campaigned in 1999 for the office of President on the promise of private school vouchers.

Copyright, Fair Use, and Public Forums

2008-07-12T08:07:00.001-07:00

Originally published here on May 31, 2008.

The conversation on the International Reading Association listserv with Hugo about his views on dyslexia brought up an issue that is related more to 21st learning than to the actual content of our discussion: copyright. So I thought I'd try to clear up for myself what I know about copyright as it applies discussions like this...

Can you copyright an email?

The first question that comes up is pretty simple. Can someone copyright an email - or the words they say in an email that they send to a public forum? The short answer is yes. In fact, the author doesn't have to actually do anything to protect his work in an email format. Protection is assumed under the law at the moment of creation.

Actually going through the steps of registering your work (even if it is just a 3-sentence email) increases the amount of protection you have against seeing your words misused. If you haven't down that after three month, the amount of protection you have decreases (at least in terms of the penalties that can be levied against someone who violates your implied copyright).

The general public often has difficulty understanding what exactly is being protected by copyright laws. You cannot copyright facts or ideas. You can protect ideas in some other way (like with a patent), but if someone else talks about it then I'm allowed to talk about it. Copyright becomes a problem (possibly) when you begin using someone else exact words - especially if you use a lot of their exact words.

Copyright vs. Plagiarism

Among the most common and difficult problems I have when I discussion copyright law with other people is getting them to understand the distinction between copyright and plagiarism. Plagiarism is an ethics issue. It is presenting other people's ideas as though they were your own. Copyright is a commercial issue that has to do with reducing the value of someone else's work. One result of confusing these two ideas is that people think they haven't done anything wrong it the reprint something in its entirety - as long as they attribute it properly to the author.

A good example... Ken Nesbitt writes children's poetry and publishes it at his web site: Poetry4kids.com. There are advertisements on his site that probably help pay the bills (nothing wrong with that). If I reprint his poems on my site - even if I give him credit for them - I'm violating his right to make money off of his poems because the changes are pretty good that people who find his stuff at my web site won't spend as much time at his web site. It's certainly not plagiarism (since I gave him credit for the poems) but it is copyright violation (unless I have his permission to re-publish his poems).

Fair Use

While the email that you send to a listserv is copyrighted more or less automatically, copyright has never been intended as a total and complete prohibition against other people reprinting some portion of your words. A large portion of copyright law is devoted to explaining when you can reprint someone else's words.

"Fair Use" is an idea based on the concept of free speech and designed to allow limited exceptions to copyright protection to promote public discussion. While the concept is called "fair use" in America, I think many Commonwealth nations use the term "fair dealing" instead.

The law on fair use isn't particularly exact. Four factors described in the law help a judge decide whether or not you are violating someone's copyright or exercising fair use. Ultimately though it comes down to a matter of, well, judgment on the part of the judge if you are sued for infringing on someone's copyright. Those four factors are:

The "purpose and character" of your use of someone else's words. If you are making money yourself from someone else's work, a judge is more likely to see that as copyright infringement than if you're quoting them in a non-profit or educational context. If you re-publish a portion of someone else's work to promote dialog and discussion of ideas, a judge are more likely to see that as fair use.

The nature of the copyrighted work. The more important a topic is to the welfare of the general public, the more relaxed judges tend to be with copyright.

The size of your quote. The more you quote, the closer you come to violating copyright. But this is a very grey area where in some cases quoting just a few words will get you into trouble and in other cases you can get away with reprinting a complete work under fair use.

How your action in quoting someone impacts the market value of the work you're quoting. Giving away large parts of someone else's book for free might reduce the amount that they make from selling their book; judges don't like that. On the other hand, reprinting someone's email... well, no one make much money off of expressing their opinions on a listserv.

Reasonable Expectations

One of the keys when you consider quoting what someone has said on a listserv is reasonable expectations. When I send an email to a listserv, I do so knowing that they are going to save my work for others to access in an archive of some kind. I also know when I send my thoughts and words to a listserv that members of the listserv are going to forward my words on to colleagues, friends and relatives - an action that could be construed as violating copyright laws.

It is reasonable for me to assume that my work will be republished in part (or perhaps as a whole) when I send a comment to a listserv, and it is reasonable for me to assume that the person who republishes my work will see it as an act of fair use on their part.

What Good Is Dyslexia?

2008-07-12T08:06:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on May 29, 2008.

In recent days I've been involved in a discussion on a listserv hosted by the International Reading Association (I'm an IRA member) about dyslexia. The listserv promotes discussion among professionals who work in the field of reading.

The discussion recently has been fruitful for me. We have a listserv member who (for a variety of reasons) objects whenever the word "dyslexia" is mentioned on the list. He doesn't believe in it. Some listserv members seem to think of him as a curmudgeon; others seem to see him as something more like light unto the gentiles, a savior for the reading community. And many wish, simply, that he'd shut up (which is about what they also think of me). His name is Hugo Kerr. And he resides in Wales (where I myself have some ancestral ties).

Without going into much detail about Hugo at the moment (I'll do that in future posts), I'll just say this for now. Hugo has made me think recently about what usefulness the concept of dyslexia has. My conclusion is that it has very little usefulness.

My county's school district brought in a woman to speak to us a few years ago at a workshop for elementary grade teachers. Her name was Susan Barton. She was impressive and convincing as a speaker. She talked about dyslexia. We pursued the issue. Many in the county (me included) were trained in instructional methods designed to address problem associated with dyslexia. And we looked into methods for identifying dyslexia in our student population.

What we discovered was that identifying dyslexia is time consuming and expensive. And the issue went away.

My recent conversations on the listserv with Hugo have made me think again about dyslexia. And what I've clarified for myself is this: There is no apparent benefit in the framework of American education to going the whole nine yards and determining (with whatever degree of certainty is available) that a student does or does not have dyslexia.

IDEA 2004, the law on disability in the US for American education, runs to just over a gajillion words. The term dyslexia appears in the law exactly once - as part of a definition for the far more important legal term specific learning disability. It is given as an example of conditions that may be included under the label of specific learning disability. Dyslexia itself is never defined in the law.

Nor is it defined (or even mentioned) by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM-IV). That document gives medical diagnostic criteria for ADHD, Asperger's syndrome, autism, bipolar disorder, conduct disorder, mental retardation, tourette's, and much more. It doesn't acknowledge the existence of dyslexia.

If a child can't read (or can't read as well as they should), my job as an interventionist is to ask why. I start to look for approaches to instruction that would help them. The truth seems to be that the concept of dyslexia doesn't help me with any compliance issues related to federal or state law (my state's special education law merely parrots the single mention of dyslexia in federal law). And while I know that some children benefit from a multi-sensory approach to reading, or from particular types of structure in the instructional framework, I can't see that being able to say that this or that child is "dyslexic" is helpful in any way.

So I guess Hugo wins that one...

No Child Left Behind: Half Way There?

2008-07-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on May 21, 2008.

The Associate Press had a story today on reaching the halfway point of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The law was enacted in 2002. States had 12 years (until 2014) to fully implement the accountability provisions of the law that require 100% proficiency for student in core subjects.You can read the AP story here.

The law's accountability provisions required states to set benchmarks for the amount of improvement they expected to make along the way to achieving the 100% requirement of NCLB. Failure to achieve those goals, to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward the 100% mark, could under the law result in punitive action against individual schools...

The release of a study by the non-partisan Center for Education Policy (CEP) triggered the AP story. The CEP says that about half of the states set their benchmarks in a manner that might best be described as back loading- something like a balloon payment at the end of a loan. Those states set small goals in for the first half of NCLB and larger goals for the second half. One state, for example, has seen a 10% improvement in math scores in the last six year - from 14% proficient to 24% proficient. Now, in the next six years, they need a 76% improvement to satisfy the laws requirements...

Among the states described in the CEP study as back loading: West Virginia.

The AP article and the CEP study describe the 100% requirement of NCLB in a negative light. The AP article quotes Michael Petrilli, vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based education think tank.

Educators look at that goal and say, 'These people must be kidding,'" Petrilli said.

They also quote one California lawmaker who says that the 100% provision is a disincentive because it is frustrating and unachievable. The national economic downturn hasn't helped because it means fewer resources for local education budgets at a time when the results being expected are on the rise.

It will be interesting to watch the education (and political) scene over the next as the balloon payment on NCLB's accountability provisions comes due...

Autism and Vaccines: The Courts Take a Broader Look

2008-07-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on May 19, 2008.

Last month I wrote about an autism court case in Georgia. The case was settled out of court with the government conceding that, in this particular child's case, vaccines contributed to the development of autism in a child.

Now the issue is back in court, according to Reuters:

More than 5,300 cases have been filed by parents who believe vaccines may have caused autism in their children and are seeking payment under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault system that pays out for vaccine injuries.

A vocal community of autism advocates believes that the rise of autism in the last few decades can be blamed on the use of a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal. The substance is routinely used in vaccines for children - or at least it was until 2001. Since then the substance has been removed from all of the normal childhood vaccines in Europe & North America. But autism rates continue to climb in those regions - raising doubts about the link between autism and thimerosal.

A CNN story on the legal proceedings says that two 10-year-old boys from Portland, Oregon, are serving as test cases to determine whether the thousands of families who have filed complaints can be compensated. Attorneys for the boys will try to show they were happy, healthy and developing normally -- but, after being exposed to vaccines with thimerosal, they began to regress and developed autism.

Autism comes in a variety of forms. The two boys in this court case have a relatively rare form of autism known as regressive autism.

One of the sideline discussions in these autism court cases is the differences involved in defining "proof" for different contexts and purposes. The scientific community has largely rejected the idea that there is a connection between thimerosal and autism because there is a lack of scientific evidence. Civil courts deal in a less rigorous world where "plausible association" could justify monetary awards. In other words, we could be looking at a situation over the next decade where the idea that thimerosal is a "cause" of autism is considered true (or at least plausible) in the court room and false (or at least unsupported by evidence) in the research lab...

The Broader Impact of Reading First

2008-07-12T08:00:00.002-07:00

Originally published here on May 14, 2008.

Bear with me for a moment while I describe the state of reading at my school...

I teach at a very rural elementary school where over 90% of the students qualify for free lunch. This year we implemented a new reading curriculum: The Pearson Scott Foresman Reading Street curriculum. In the last couple of years we've increase our reading blocks to a standard 90 minutes and instituted a policy of "no interruptions" for reading blocks school wide. We DIBEL regularly and religiously in grades K-3 and track fluency and comprehension skills more-or-less weekly by other means in the higher grades.

We've put a response to intervention program based on the three-tiered model in place for all grades (well, not for preK) and we meet in collaborative planning groups (the classroom general education teacher, our reading specialists, our special ed staff, and the principal) to discuss the progress of students in intervention. In addition to the intervention program built into the Scott Foresman series, we have an Orton-Gillingham program available to use with students and a phonemic awareness intervention program for the early grades.

Professional Development in reading has been a major focus over the last year or so. Every teacher involve in reading instruction has been trained in using our new curriculum. Reading specialists, elementary level special education staff, kindergarten teachers, and (I think) first grade teachers were all given 35 or 40 hours of training in an Orton-Gillingham approach before the school year started. Reading specialists and other members of our staff attended workshops, book studies and conferences throughout the year.

Technical speaking, we are not a Reading First school. Just one of the elementary schools in my county has a Reading First award. And yet, we are implementing many aspects of the Reading First grant requirements district wide because someone decided that they constituted good instructional practice.

We are not alone. I quote Reid Lyon from a recent interview in EdNews:

The findings of no significant differences in reading comprehension outcomes presented in the Interim Report are difficult to interpret. This is because, as noted earlier, many non-Reading First schools were implementing the same programs and professional development opportunities as the Reading First schools. This impact evaluation is not a true experiment which could have certainly been done given the tremendous financial resources allocated for the evaluation. As Tim Shanahan has pointed out, the comparisons made were not Reading First with non-Reading First schools, but Reading First with less-Reading First schools.

The most serious problem faced by any attempt to interpret the findings of the Reading First Impact Study is that the ideas and mandates found in Reading First have impacted all reading classrooms, not just the ones in schools where grant money has been directly spent. Reading First 's budget, according to Lyon, allowed for 20% of the billion dollars a year allocated for the program to be spent on professional development for any and all reading teachers. The result has been that instructional practice funded by Reading First awards have been implemented in non-Reading First schools (like mine). That has created an overlap in the practices of reading First and non-reading First schools, and made it hard to know what is really being compared by the impact study and how meaningful those comparisons are.

Lyon says this about the value of the report:

It does not appear that the current impact study specifically addressed this overlap in the evaluation, although the final report may present these data. In many cases, one would expect Reading First and non-Reading First schools to be more similar ... in their impact on reading outcomes.

Lyon feels that the schools in the study were poorly chosen and that the study itself fails to measure what Congress mandated to be measured. Many of the schools in the study show little increase in reading achievement, Lyon thinks, because they were doing fairly well when they got their Reading First money to start with. The poorer schools with greater needs started getting Reading First awards as part of the late award group of schools mentioned in my previous blog post. Those schools showed significant gains in reading.

One last quote from the Lyon interview that I'll leave with my readers:

It is hard not to be taken aback by the degree to which many in the reading community want to see Reading First fail, particularly when the programs, methods, and approaches advocated by this constituency or that constituency have never come close to any systematic impact evaluation of the scope implemented with Reading First.

Delphi Chief Steve Miller Talks About Job Skills for the Future

2008-07-12T08:00:00.001-07:00

Originally published here on May 14, 2008.

I heard this three minute interview this morning on NPR and thought that the 21st Century Learning advocates out there would just love it.

Steve Miller recently took over Delphi Corp., a giant auto parts manufacturer, with a view towards pulling it out of bankruptcy. NPR asks him how he's doing with that, and along the way he says this:

The main thing in the U.S. that we have to keep in mind is that people are going to get paid for the global value of what they do. And the way that we can keep the U.S. economy strong is to do a better job of educating our people so that they will have the technical skills that are needed to compete in the future.

Talk about hitting the 21st Century nail on the head...

You can listen to the whole interview here.

Conclusions About Reading First’s Effectiveness

2008-07-12T07:59:00.001-07:00

Originally published here on May 13, 2008.

The Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report begins with an Executive Summary that includes a bulleted list of general conclusions. The top item on the list is this:

On average, across the 18 participating sites, estimated impacts on student reading comprehension test scores were not statistically significant.

If you stop reading there (after only 175 words of the report), it is easy to walk away with the conclusion that Reading First is ineffective. Of course, there are still over 190 pages of the report left to read at that point. And if you are willing to read further, to even just finish that particular page, you find the following statement right there in the same set of bullets:

Study sites that received their Reading First grants later in the federal funding process (between January and August 2004) experienced positive and statistically significant impacts both on the time first and second grade teachers spent on the five essential components of reading instruction and on first and second grade reading comprehension. Time spent on the five essential components was not assessed for third grade, and impacts on third grade reading comprehension were not statistically significant. In contrast, there were no statistically significant impacts on either time spent on the five components of reading instruction or on reading comprehension scores at any grade level among study sites that received their Reading First grants earlier in the federal funding process (between April and December 2003).

In other words, not all the findings of the report cast a dark shadow over Reading First.

I should take a moment for some self-disclosure before telling you more about what I think the Reading First Impact Study says. I am not a fan of No Child Left Behind - at least not of the accountability provisions. I talked about that last month. And I've discussed my feelings about it in other places, too.

That said, it's hard for me to read the Impact Study and come away with a completely negative view of Reading First's performance. The most obvious question is this: why did schools that got their Reading First grant later in the process see a significant impact when schools that got their awards early in the process did not?

Two obvious (though speculative) answers stand out to me. The first is that there is probably a learning curve with a new federal program of this nature. The early award schools served as guinea pigs to determine what worked and what didn't; the late award schools benefited from the experience of those early award schools.

The second answer is money. Early award schools got on average $432 per student. Late award schools got on average $574 per student. As cliché as it sounds, maybe money really is the answer to everything.

If you're willing to accept the study as scientifically valid, the most reasonable conclusion seems to be that Reading First wasn't very effective in the beginning, but it is becoming effective. If you're not willing to accept the study as scientifically valid, there are no reasonable conclusions that you can draw from it...

It should also be pointed out that the study measured two main things: teacher behavior (time spent on highly explicit instruction in the five components of reading) and reading comprehension in students. There is no information in the study as to whether fluency increased significantly in first graders. There's no information on vocabulary development in the grades studied, no information on either phonics or phonemic awareness at any level. Only one of the five components of reading is measured in students. To me, that seems incomplete.

There's one last issue that needs to be brought up in any discussion of the effectiveness of Reading First. That issue is the question of what impact Reading First has had on schools where no grant has been awarded. And I'll look at that question in my next blog post.

The Reading First Impact Study - What the Press Didn’t Say About It

2008-07-12T07:58:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on May 13, 2008.

I've been in and out of some form of journalism since high school - and that's been 30 years ago now. I've worked for rural weekly papers, covered a local beat for a daily paper, blogged niche topics for the New York Times Company (and others), and covered education along the way.

I sympathize with the difficulty involved in creating a fair, meaningful news story about the Reading First Impact Study - one that fits into a limited number of column inches and holds the public's attention. At the risk of sounding arrogant, it doesn't surprise me that the NY Times, USA Today, the Associated Press, and the Washington Post all failed to accomplish that feat.

The media in general reported on what politicians said about the study. If we were to look at the news reports on the study in light of Bloom's Taxonomy we'd find that the media offered us mostly knowledge (the taxonomy's lowest rung) of the report and perhaps some comprehension (the taxonomy's second rung), but very little in the way of analysis, synthesis, or evaluation - the upper rungs of the Bloom's Taxonomy, all of which require higher thought processes. In fact, if you read the news reports closely you'll discover that most of them are not concerned ultimately with the report, but with reaction to the report. The stories quote congressmen and senators saying what they have always said about Reading First.

Here are some things you didn't find in the news coverage:

You did not hear that there are concerns about the scientific validity of the study, partly because it was not a random study. (The irony: after all the emphasis on scienctifically-based reading research, the Department of Education can't come up with a valid scientific study on this.) If the study's science is bad, it's conclusions don't mean much.

You did not hear that there are concerns about the method used in the study (an interval method) to measure how much highly explicit instruction occurs at Reading First schools. Because an interval method was used, teachers who mentioned some detail of one of the five components of reading (phonemic awarenes, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension) just once in a three minute interval received the same score as teachers who touched on the components repeatedly.

You did not hear that reading scores are up across the board in the US since Reading First was implemented.

While you heard generalizations about the Reading First schools used for the study, you did not hear that the Reading First schools in the study were not a homogeneous group. The study distinguished between schools that received Reading First award money early in the program's history and schools that received Reading First award money later. And you did not hear that the Impact Study's conclusions were not the same for the two groups. (We'll talk more about that another day...)

While most news sources mentioned in passing that there is still another report in the works, they tried to leave readers with the impression that this current report was somehow conclusive and final. Neither of those to things seems true after actually reading the Impact Study. There's a reason the words "Interim Report" appear in the study's title.

In my next blog post I'll talk about what conclusions we can draw from the Impact Study.

The Media’s Take on the Reading First Report

2008-07-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on May 12, 2008.

Nancy Zucherbrod, writing for the Associated Press, questions whether Reading First has any value. In a story headlined Reading First Nothing Special? Study Calls Value Into Question, Zucherbrod concludes with this:

So, while elementary school students appear to improve in reading across the board, there's no difference in gains being made by students participating in Reading First and those who are not, according to the study.

You can read her whole article here. The problem Zucherbrod points out is simple: Reading First schools have seen improvements in reading, but so have most other schools. Does that mean that Reading First has no impact, or does it mean that Reading First has had such an impact that even schools not directly participating in Reading First funding have been impacted?

The NY Times did a piece on the report on May 2nd. They used the word "ineffective" to describe the report's conclusions about Reading First. But Greg Toppo at USA Today had beaten them to that by about 24 hours. The Times was astute enough to at least acknowledge that there was a follow-up report yet to come.

The Washington Post did a slightly more detailed article on the report. The Post's story makes it clear that the news value of the report has to do with politics, not education.

Among the better stories on the report in my opinion was Gerald Bracey's write up at the Huffington Post. Here's some of what he said:

Reading First students didn't do any better than students in similar schools without the program. How come?

My guess is a mismatch between the program and the outcome measure. RF was supposed to include five "essential elements" in reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. From what I have heard, though, and from what a number of reading experts said in articles about the study, the program concentrated on the first three. Well, if you emphasize decoding and fluency and then test for comprehension, well, duh, why would you expect improvement?

There are other possibilities. Some of the non-Reading First schools used the same curricula and Reading First schools. We don't know how well the program was implemented. In the lore of education, many a fine program has failed because of implementation problems.

Bracey raises some questions about the report that I intend to examine - next time I blog...

Reading First Ineffective?

2008-07-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on May 11, 2008.

The headline in USA Today was pithy: Study: Bush's Reading First program ineffective. It was also, I've come to believe, fairly mercenary. It did the job - peaked readers' interests and drew attention to the story. And the language of the headline, particularly the word ineffective, was picked up and has come to characterize discussion of the report.

Of course, few of the people who express some opinion about the report will ever actually read it. I did. The report, Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report, is available for download as a PDF document. But most people will rely on reporters like Greg Toppo to tell them what they should think about it.

The report is 211 page as a PDF file. Toppo, who left teaching after less than a decade in the classroom to become a reporter, boils it down to this:

Advocates of Reading First, an integral part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law, have long maintained that its emphasis on phonics, scripted instruction by teachers and regular, detailed analyses of children's skills, would raise reading achievement, especially among the low-income kids it targets. But the new study by the U.S. Education Department's Institute of Education Sciences (IES) shows that children in schools receiving Reading First funding had virtually no better reading skills than those in schools that didn't get the funding.

A mighty pithy summary of 211 pages. And while the report does point to problems with Reading First, I don't believe Toppo's analysis is entirely accurate. It plays to the crowd without really examining the contents of the study or discussing the validity of the study (which might have become a topic had the conclusion been that Reading First was the best thing since sliced bread). Toppo also ignores the fact that this is only part of a larger research project, with a final report yet to come.

I said that I read the study. I thought it seemed to say that Reading First sometimes makes a difference and sometimes doesn't. And I thought the report looked at when the program made a difference and when it didn't.

Toppo's article reminded me of why I enjoy telling people in my rural community that I worked as a reported once, but that then I found honest work...

In my next blog post I'll look at what others in the media have said about the Interm Report.

Coming Next Month: The TEST

2008-07-12T07:45:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on April 12, 2008.

It would be inaccurate (melodrama or hyperbole, perhaps) to say that we have just started at my school to get ready for the test. My West Virginia readers will all think of the WESTEST without me specifically mentioning it. If you are from some other state, I'm talking of course about the annual high stakes test that helps meet the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)...

The truth is that we began getting ready for the WESTEST during the first or second week of September at my school. We looked at last year's scores (along with other data) and began identifying our weakest reading and math students. We began building interventions into their schedules (for my readers who aren't professional educators, that's jargon - a technical term for extra help in a subject outside the time when it is normally taught to the whole class). We met regularly to discuss how those particular kids were doing and to look for ways to improve their grasp of core subjects. To the extent that the test is just a measure of academic progress and success at a school, we've been preparing for the WESTEST for over seven months.

That said, we have recently begun to prepare more specifically for the test in the last few days. When you're only nine or ten years old, a year is a long time. So we've tried to remind our students about what the test is like and re-impress upon them the importance of the test. We've tried to re-examine some skills specific to test taking. And we've tried to identify particular weaknesses that our students still have and look for ways to pay additional attention to those weaknesses as we go through our normal instructional day. We have three weeks of school left to find our problems as "fix" them...

At this point, my polite description of the month to come and the process of accountability is complete, and I intend now to become more philosophical (perhaps even political) as I consider the test. If you are easily offended or have a weak heart you should find something else to read...

The test (whether it is the WESTEST or the SAT9, the Iowa test of Basic Skills or the Virginia Standards of Learning test) is not what the school year is all about. When someone says it is, I'm usually offended. I try to hide it; but occasionally I slip up and correct them - sometimes with vigor.

I would never argue that accountability is wrong or bad. The primary purpose of school is to teach. But I've said elsewhere that it certainly isn't the only purpose. And while high stakes testing is certainly one way to measure learning (and, by implication, teaching), it is not the only way.

NCLB's emphasis on disaggragate data has been good for American education. It protects minorities and shows weaknesses in the process of education.

The moral judgments that NCLB's accountability provisions make on a school are too narrowly defined. The bottom line is that we have to make a certain score (at least in Math and Reading) in order to be seen as having made adequate yearly progress (AYP). A certain percentage of our kids have to display mastery of the subjects tested, or we're a "bad" school. Mastery is like a low "B" and the students could score in categories above mastery on the test. At the moment the percentage of students that have to score mastery on the test is probably reasonable for our school. Next year it will be higher.

Eventually (2014), every child will have to score mastery on each of the tests. That, of course, is ludicrous considering that No Child Left Behind says it doesn't matter that the child may

have a learning disability

not speak English fluently

have an IQ of 62

have recently moved to the school from somewhere else

I have no problem with the test itself. My problem is with the use of the test. The test is being used to eventually show that the concept of public education is flawed. The Bush Republicans want to privatize education - or at least justify the creation of a large scale private alternative to public education. And they want it to be church-based and paid for with vouchers. They are willing to use the disabled and minorities to accomplish their goal.

No industrialized country on earth sets the standard as high as 100%. It is an unreasonable standard, and at the moment we move a little closer to that unreasonable demand each year. The purpose of the unreasonableness is simple: the Bush agenda (dating back to his 1999 campaign for his first term) is to eventually be able to say "most public schools are bad schools and we need an alternative."

It is not clear to me that this years requirements are either reasonable or unreasonable. But it is clear to me that the requirements will eventually become unreasonable, and unachievable.

I work at a good school. I think we'll make AYP this year. But I work at a good school whether we make AYP or not. I work with highly trained people who try very hard and who care about the kids they teach. And because I know that the accountability requirements of NCLB are purposefully designed to eventually become absurdly unachievable, those requirements lose a great deal of their meaning. Maybe this is the year that they become unreasonable...

Perhaps the next President will change the law and make the accountability provisions more meaning. Perhaps.

Autism, Vaccines, and the Girl in Georgia

2008-07-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on April 12, 2008.

The NY Times had a good piece today in its Health section on the case of 9-year-old Hannah Poling of Athens, Ga.

Hannah made the news recently when her family settled a case in which her autism was blamed on the ill effects she suffered after receiving five childhood immunizations in 2000.

The issue of what causes autism is a hot potato in both the political and medical arena. Many in the medical community have resisted the conclusion that some vaccines can be linked to autism. Hannah's case has given new energy to the advocates of the vaccine theory. But the situation is still not particularly clear.

The NY Times piece provides a good summary of the case and its implications...

The Future of Cursive

2008-07-12T07:43:00.001-07:00

Originally published here on April 2, 2008.

Almost a year ago now I wrote a post on my personal blog about cursive. The gist of the post was that

There's nothing particular sacred about cursive and it changes over time

Elementary school are under pressure to teach more and more, and sooner or later the time factor will require that we remove something from the curriculum to make room for the new demands.

Cursive is (in my opinion) an obsolete skill that gets little use today.

The post on cursive has become one of my most visited pages on the personal blog. I solicited opinions on the matter from the International Reading Association's listserv. You can read some of the responses I got at my blog. You can also see some writing samples that show the development of cursive - from the Mayflower Compact to the penmanship of President Lincoln.

My hope is that the education community will soon decide that cursive in a 19th century skill that needs to make way for 21st Century Learning sorts of skills - like keyboarding...

“Correct” English

2008-07-12T07:41:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on April 1, 2008.

Since I mentioned the International Reading Association's listserv just last week, I thought I'd share a little of another recent thread from there.

Periodically someone on the listserv brings up the concept of "proper" or "correct" spoken grammar and I always respond to that thread at least once. I approach the issue from a linguistic point of view (I studied general linguistics at the Australian National University in the early 1990's) and I've always thought the prescriptive view of grammar was problematic. Here's my response to the issue (with a minor revision or two), from the IRA listserv...

As a linguist I would argue that the term "correct" references values or morals. I don't think there's anything immoral about the use of double negatives, for example. Inappropriate occasionally? Yes. But not immoral.

Using non-standard grammar often communicates meaning more naturally and clearly than the actual standard. Since I brought up double negatives, I'll use them as an example. English teachers are fond of saying that two negatives make a positive. That's true. Provided you're multiplying. (You'll notice the non-standard use of sentence structure there, purposely employed for emphasis. I'm well aware that "Provided you're multiplying." doesn't actually stand by itself as a sentence.) If you are adding, two negatives make a stronger negative (a number even futher down the negative side of the number line). If you ask me how I like a restaurant, an answer of "I don't believe I'll eat there again." doesn't carry near the power of "I ain't NEVER going back to that place..." Double negatives may be non-standard, but they serve to place emphasis on the negative statement.

Other forms of non-standard English grammatical constructions often serve the same purpose. For example, no one ever corrects the grammar of the figure of speech "That dog don't hunt." To say "That dog doesn't hunt." would make people wonder if English was your second language - not because the grammar is incorrect, but because the grammar is correct (but the idiom is mauled).

I think Standard English exists. I would probably go further and say that there is a Standard American English, a Standard British English, and maybe even a Standard Australian English. But I think those standards are abstract concepts that provide a reference, not a dialect anyone actually speaks. Everyone's English dialect varies at least a little from their standard.

Instead of the moral term "correct," I try to impart the idea to my students that there are levels of formality in our language. Linguistic fluency includes knowing what level of formality is acceptable for a variety of circumstances. The closer you are to the standard, the more formal your speech. Since speaking exactly standard English isn't natural for anyone (in my opinion), it takes effort to do so. If the mayor of our small town visits the school, I hope my children will use their most formal speech patterns in discourse with her. But I don't mind if they tell me in the lunch line that they "Ain't interested in having no spinach" on their plate today. I know exactly what they mean, and they don't get graded on lunch....

Richard Allington PodCast on Response to Intervention

2008-07-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 26, 2008.

If you're looking for some insight into RtI, there's an excellent podcast available at the International Reading Association's website. If clicking on the word "podcast" above doesn't get it for you, you can go here and you'll find the podcast under "online resources" about halfway down the page.

I'm a fan of Richard Allington - and not just because he teaches at the University of Tennessee (thoguh I do know all the words to "Rocky Top"). Dr. Allington is a past president of the IRA and has several good books out.

Among the insights in this 13 minutes podcast (the download is about 12 megabytes):

RtI does not necessarily mean a three-tier model

Not all RtI curriculum are appropriate for all reading problems (duh)

There is not a huge amount of research yet to show that RtI will be effective

I especially appreciated two points he made. First, in order for an RtI curriculum to be useful in solving the problem of a student being behind, it has to deliver more than a year of progress in one year. It doesn't help (not much, at least) to take a student who is two years behind and learning 5 months worth of skills each year, and put that student in an intervention program that gets them to learn seven months worth of skills a year. Slowing the rate at which students fall behind is not the goal. The goal is for them to catch up. Second, students are rarely the problem. If a program doesn't work, it's probably because the program isn't suited for that student.

I also learned a new term: sound outable. Dr. Allington used that phase a couple of times. I'd never heard that before; usually I hear people say "decodable." I smiled and put the term away for later use...

Listen to Dr. Allington's podcast on RtI.

Thoughts on Response to Intervention as a Means of Identifying Learning Disabilities

2008-07-12T07:39:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 25, 2008.

As an IRA member, I subscribe to the International Reading Association's listserv. Recently, someone brought up the subject of response to intervention and how it relates now to identifying learning disabilities. I thought I'd share my statements on the listserv here, as well...

My perspective is this:

RTI is a useful model; but it is a concept, not a curriculum. How effective it is depends on what specific curriculum package you're using.

Abandoning the old discrepancy model allows students with real disabilities to be identified and placed earlier - sometimes MUCH earlier. That's good.

Reading and/or learning disabilities come in varieties. They are not homogeneous and generic. RTI may serve to tell you that there is a problem, but it will not necessarily tell you what the problem is. Figuring that out may require some sort of a more technical cognitive evaluation (which may or may not include an IQ test). Federal law no longer REQUIRES IQ tests to legally identify learning disabilities, but psychological or cognitive tests are sometimes still useful.

The old discrepancy model provided a mathematical definition for learning disabilities (achievement is 71, IQ is 88, in our state that big of a discrepancy implies a learning disability). RTI by itself leaves much more room for professional judgment - and people will disagree when a committee sits down to discuss it. One person will say, "Johnny is responding to our intervention; so he doesn't seem to me to have a disability." Another person will say, "Johnny's response to our intervention, while it exists, is not adequate to allow him to ever catch up with his peers; so he DOES seems to me to have a disability." At the end of the discussion the group will either flip a coin to decide whether to place Johnny in special education or fall back on other tools for determining whether he has a disability.

As I understand IDEA 2004, it says that:

the discrepancy model cannot be used exclusively by your state anymore

RTI has to be one choice available for considering whether a student has a learning disability

and your state is free to look for other methods of determining whether a student has a eligible disability.

I don't think IDEA 2004 makes clear exactly HOW you use RTI decide whether a student has a disability. It is a marvelous general education tool, especially when employed as Allington suggested, in a manner where they curriculum in the tiers compliment each other instead of competing with each other. It may well prevent reading disabilities in particular children from becoming such profound problems that the child will have to be identified as needing special education services. But it's effectiveness and usefulness in identifying learning disabilities is only now beginning to be tested...

The role of RtI in identifying learning disabilities is sure to be the topic of much more discussion as IDEA 2004 gets further implemented in individual states...

I Think, Therefore I Blog…

2008-07-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 23, 2008.

I think, therefore I blog...

I stumbled across that phrase a few years ago, surfing the Net. Regrettably, I didn't think to save the link. The author took a fairly academic tone (I think) that included references in APA format. Now though, you can find the expression on t-shirts as a manifestation of pop culture.

That first time I saw it, the author used the phrase to discuss the preoccupation our society has with introspection. Justly or unjustly, he blamed that preoccupation on Descartes. Descartes is generally considered the Father of Modern Philosophy, and most lay philosophers (like me) are familiar with his famous conclusion: I think, therefore I am.

Okay, the truth is I'm not that big on René Descartes (1596-1650). But I know a little about him...

The author of the piece that got me thinking about this topic years ago suggested that the entirety of European culture might be different if Descartes had said something else - something like, I think, and I think I'm bored, so I'll go read, and since I'm reading, I must exist. Or, maybe, something like I think, and what I think is that I need to go for a walk; and since I'm walking, I must exist. Or (of course), I think, and I think I'll go blog about what I think (and leave the idea of whether I exist at all to someone else).

I understood the author's point. But I'm not sure it holds up after a closer look at Descartes. I think Descartes' original statement was something more like "I doubt, therefore I'm think, and that must mean I exist." The Latin: Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. That chain of thoughts would make Descartes' statement somewhat more active than the simple introspection that my forgotten author was bemoaning.

There is a distinction, I think, between introspection and reflection. Introspection becomes self absorbed; and while it might be personally gratifying, it can also be pointless. We become Narcissus, paralyzed by contemplating our own image. Reflection (in contrast to simple introspection) has purpose, and that purpose usually involves our impact on those we claim to serve in our profession...

I've seen the statement reversed a few times recently. I blog, therefore I am. I guess that's true of your existence in the blogosphere. But a large number of the software packages for blogging allow you to drip blog posts on at a future date. You could be dead for weeks (or even months), yet your blog would make people think you were still alive...

Many later philosophers have assumed that the only thing Descartes knew for sure (at least at that point) was that he existed. And I suppose that part of the foundation of Constructivism as an approach to ontology is the idea that thinking is central to existing. Somehow the rest of reality is there because we think about it.

I'll have to think about that...

I'll leave you with a quote from Isaac Asimov: Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers.

Strengthening Ties Between Special Education and Reading Services

2008-07-12T07:37:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 19, 2008.

I went to a week long workshop last year at the end of school. It was presented in our country by the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education and (if memory serves) we had reading specialists, kindergarten teachers, and elementary school special education teachers at the workshop. At the time it didn't occur to me that I might be watching an actual change in philosophy. But I've come to realize that the workshop was a turning point in the relationship between special education and reading...

A few months into this year I was sitting at the table where most of our teachers eat lunch. It was me, our school improvement facilitator (SIF - a math person), two reading specialists, a general education teacher, and a couple of other school staff. The reading specialists and the SIF had been to a meeting at the central office the previous day and one of them explained to me as we ate our lunches that now we were all married. In retrospect, I thought it was ironic that I wasn't invited to the meeting

I said something profound - like, "huh?"

One of the reading specialists said, "They told us yesterday that we should think of ourselves as married now to the special ed people at our school..."

"Mmmmm..." I offered. They laughed. Maybe giggled is a more accurate term. I have a very nice wife whom I'm extremely fond of. They all know her. So the metaphor had humor.

The truth is that special education and reading have worked more closely together this year than I recall in my short career. When I started teaching a few years ago, the two were in separate worlds. I realized quickly that we dealt with the same problems, but often didn't have a shared vocabulary to discuss those problems in. I've met many a reading person that doesn't have much understanding of disabilities and many a special education professional who was weak (to be polite) on reading issues. The chasm between the two has puzzled me.

So I was, well, positively tickled to hear Dr. Lynn Boyer (Executive Director, Office of Special Programs, Extended & Early Learning) express support for the Reading Research Symposium last week in Charleston. The Reading Research Symposium is searching for next year's funding (or was last week) and Dr. Boyer suggested that special education money might be used to ensure that the Symposium came off next year. I was sincerely thrilled.

My hope is that more special education people will be pulled into reading issues. And the truth is that funding the Symposium with special education funds might result in more special education people attending. Hopefully the day is not far away when reading people will be well versed in learning disability issues and special education professionals will have a much greater understanding of reading issues...

Tuesday at the Symposium (Is Anita Archer a Rock Star?)

2008-07-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 11, 2008.

This morning I went to the workshop session on vocabulary that Dr. Anita Archer was holding. I got there early - and it was a good thing...

Dr. Archer's presentation room turned out to be too small. The 200 or so chairs were full before the 9am start of the session. Symposium organizers shuffled room arrangements and moved her to a larger room. My guess (that's all it is) is that about 500 Symposium participants came to hear Dr. Archer this morning.

Dr. Archer spoke on vocabulary and modeled explicit vocabulary instruction for the gathered crowd. I've commented in a previous post on her unique style of turning professional conference-goers into her own second or third grade class so that she can model her teaching methods.

Dr. Archer wasn't alone in her emphasis on vocabulary at this year's Symposium. The topic seemed to be a theme from Dr. Carol Tolman's opening remarks straight through to Dr. Patricia Mathes' closing remarks today in the third session.

The message, regardless of the speaker, was fairly simple. Children of poverty start school with significantly less vocabulary than children from more professional, affluent families. Good instruct can help close the gap; but in the past that has been the exception, not the rule. Vocabulary and background knowledge are intimately tied together. The weaker a student’s vocabulary and background knowledge, the lower their reading comprehension...

I enjoyed the Symposium (my first) and hope to attend again next year.

Pictures from the WV Reading Research Symposium

2008-07-12T07:32:00.001-07:00

Originally published here on March 10, 2008.

Today was a very worthwhile day at the Symposium. But rather than comment in any detail at the moment, I thought I'd simply post a few pictures. Details on some of the sessions may get posted later this evening...

Integrating RTI with Cognitive Neuropsychology

2008-07-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 10, 2008.

I attended Dr. Steven Feifer's session this morning on the cognitive neuropsychology of reading. Dr. Feifer is a school psychologist who now works in Maryland and I enjoyed the session enough to buy his new book.

Dr. Feifer discussed the areas of the brain that process reading. He answered my question about whether dyslexia is genetic. He said that it is inherited, but pointed out that there are a variety of factors that influence each other and that the issue was a little more complicated than a "yes" or "no" question allowed for.

Dr. Feifer looked at the nature of reading (learning) disabilities and at the brain activity behind different reading problems. I asked him if he thought that learning disabilities could be prevented (something I've been skeptical about) and his answer was that if we catch problems early enough and apply the proper types of interventions with those problems, that good instruction can change brain chemistry - and that yes, we can actually prevent disabilities. He was convincing and I'll now have to delve more deeply into the research on that issue...

Dr. Feifer was also very practical in his suggestions as to how to decide which interventions to use with what reading problems you see in a student.

I enjoyed Dr. Feifer and I look forward now to reading his book...

Dr. Anita Archer on Reading Comprehension

2008-07-12T07:30:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 10, 2008.

I attended the session this afternoon by Dr. Anita Archer on reading comprehension.

Dr. Archer was an enjoyable speaker. She has a unique approach of modeling her suggestions as she presents them. It leaves you feeling a little like you're a second grader in her class. But it also serves to make the ideas seem more logical and more memorable.

Dr. Archer examined a number of common practices and discussed their value for comprehension. She also introduced a few new possibilities to the repertoire of comprehension tools and discussed why those new ideas have merit.

I enjoyed Dr. Archer and plan (at the moment) to attend her session on vocabulary tomorrow morning.

Sixth Annual WVDE Reading Research Symposium - Opening Night

2008-07-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 9, 2008.

The Reading Research Symposium started off well on Sunday night with Dr. Carol Tolman as the keynote speaker.

I had no problems getting to Charleston and the people at the Marriott were kind enough to let me check in a little early. Dinner was nice. There was sliced turkey and a Mexican lasagna dish. The vegetables were good: red skinned potatoes, green beans, corn. There was a variety of breads and a number of different desserts. I enjoyed dinner.

I enjoyed the company as well. My school managed to sit together at one table.

Dr. Tolman spoke in general terms about the history of reading research, especially as it had been coupled with brain research. She gave us a new model to think about and a few sources to look at on reading research. She is an engaging and enjoyable speaker.

Our welcome packet included a jump drive that we were told had all the presentations on it, so I didn't take many notes. I got back to the hotel and discovered that it had all the presentation for tomorrow and Tuesday on it, but not Dr. Tolman's from tonight. I'll have to see if I can get the notes from someone...

Tomorrow I intend to go to the presentation by Dr. Steven Feifer, Integrating RTI with Cognitive Neuropsychology: a Scientific Approach. I will probably go in the afternoon to Dr. Anita Archer's workshop on reading comprehension.

I hope to have pictures tomorrow.

Is Response to Intervention a Money Grab?

2008-07-12T07:28:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 8, 2008.

Dr. John Wills Lloyd published a short post on Response to Intervention (RtI) on Wednesday at his Teaching Effectively! blog. Dr. Lloyd is a professor at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education and has been on the faculty there for 30 years now.

Dr. Lloyd linked to a video by George Buzzetti, from the Association for Accountability and Equitable Education. I listened to the video a couple of times. You can listen yourself and see if you hear the same things...

Buzzetti sounds as though he believes that RtI (as it is set forth in IDEA 2004 related to the process of identifying learning disabilities) is little more than a tool for moving special education funding into the general funds of school districts. Under IDEA 2004 a school district can use 15% of Federal special education funding to work with general education students who haven't yet been placed in special education. According to Buzzetti, school systems can also mirror that process with state special education funds; whether that's true nationwide or just in California where he works is unclear to me.

Buzzetti goes on to say that not only does funding from special education get used to work with general education kids under this scheme, he points out that the goal of RtI is to reduce the number of students in special education - and that that would also reduce special education funding. Buzzetti's conclusion is that IDEA 2004 and the RtI approach to identifying learning disabilities could reduce the money being spent on children with disabilities by as much as 50% in some districts (at least in California).

Is Buzzetti right? Well, I'd say he's both right and wrong. IDEA 2004 does allow special education money to be spent on services to general education children in the framework of RtI. But I think it also allows specialists outside the framework of special education (Title I reading specialists, for example) to be used to provide direct services to special education students.

I work at a school that implemented RtI this year. I'm a special education teacher providing Tier II and Tier III instruction to mixed groups of special education and general education students. I provide RtI instruction in those tiers to four different grades. The special education students that are in those classes have their needs met along side general education peers, which makes me feel good about least restrictive environment issues. And the truth is that some of the general education students in my RtI classes have disabilities that just haven't been formally identified yet. I like that fact that someone trained in disabilities (like me) is already working with them.

It's not like a child comes into an eligibility committee meeting one day without a disability and leave with one just because the committee recognized his disability and placed him. So while Buzzetti is right when he says that we 're moving money, I'm not sure that bothers me as a special education teacher. And I don't see the instant cynicism in it that he seems to see.

Will we reduce the number of students placed in special education by using the RtI model? I expect two things to happen. First, I expect some students to be place in special education by the first or second grand when before they might have had to wait until the fourth (or even fifth) grade because of the nature of the old discrepancy model. I think that's a good change. I also expect some children to be kept out of special education who might otherwise have eventually been placed. I'm less sure how I feel about that...

Can we prevent learning disabilities? I've expressed my doubts on that topic elsewhere. The discrepancy model was broken. The RtI model seems to leave a lot of room for ambiguity in the process. If most learning disabilities are caused by dyslexia (which seems to be true) and dyslexia is a genetic, neurological condition (there's some evidence of that) - I have a hard time believing that RtI will prevent dyslexia.

The question is this: Do we have a clear enough idea of what constitutes a learning disability?

I don't think identifying learning disabilities less often is the same thing as preventing them. And I think that the answer to the above question is probably "no."

Is Dyslexia Genetic...?

2008-07-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 7, 2008.

Well, is it? That's one of the questions I hope to update my answer on at the Research Reading Symposium (although it doesn't look like there'll be much of a focus on the issue).

The NY Times wrote a piece in 2005 that seemed to imply that a genetic test for dyslexia wasn't far off.

I talked about dyslexia some in a couple of pieces on the pros and cons of Response to Intervention.

Response to Intervention plays a double role in education. On the one hand, it is a strategy for helping perfectly normal kids when they have problems with reading. On the other hand, it is a new model for the process of identifying learning disability.

If there really was a new way to say with some certainty that a child had dyslexia, that might turn the disabilities process upside down again. The problem now is diagnostic: we suspect a child has dyslexia, but knowing for sure is expensive, time consuming, and not that valuable a piece of information within the current framework.

If a medical test for dyslexia emerged, I think we'd have a new new model for identifying learning disabilities before we even got the current new model fully implemented...

Teacher Arrested

2008-07-12T07:25:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 6, 2008.

After several serious posts, I thought I'd share this humorous piece that I received in an email some time back. I enjoyed it. Hope no one is offended...

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual, later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, a representative of the US Justice Department said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

"Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," the spokesperson said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value.

They use secret code names like 'x' and 'y' and refer to themselves as unknowns, but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country."When asked to comment on the arrest, one politician said, "If God had
wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes."

What is Reality?

2008-07-12T07:24:00.001-07:00

Originally published here on March 5, 2008.

I touched on the concept of reality yesterday and talked a little about what the idea means to me in the context of Constructivism. Because the terms seem to be both ambiguous and important, I thought I'd spend a little time just look at the terminology I think matters...

In my very first blog post here I admitted to being at least partly an objectivist. I believe that reality is, well, real. What I mean by that is this: Had I never lived, reality would still be here (though, obviously, I wouldn't get to write about it). Reality is objective in the sense if we are all in the same place at the same time, what we see tends to be very similar. If all the teachers at my school come to my house and stand in my living room and look out the window, I suspect that all of them would agree that the animal in my neighbor's yard is a dog, and that it's black.

But while reality may be reality, and while we may all agree on what we see, it doesn't mean the same thing to each of us. And that's the second idea that seems central to Constructivism - meaning. Standing in my living room and looking out the window at that dog, my colleagues from school are all likely to attach at least slightly (maybe radically) different meanings to that dog.

Some will look at that dog and feel warm and fuzzy thoughts: "That reminds me of the dog I had when I was a child..."

Some will look at that dog and feel anger: "Why would someone keep nice dog like that outside on a chain? It's cruel..."

Some will look at that dog and feel disgust: "What a nasty creature. I never have understood why someone would own a dog..."

Some will look at that dog and feel close to nothing: "Hmm, a dog. Everyone has a dog. I wonder what's on TV tonight..."

All of them attach their own meaning to the dog they see, and it's meaning they've built themselves.

In my short experience with Constructivism, I've decided that there are people who think that reality is not objective and that people really do build their own - so they say that we build our own reality (and they mean it). There are also Constructivists who believe that we build our own meanings to attach to a more-or-less objective reality, and for reasons that seem aesthetic, perhaps poetic, they call those meanings "reality." But they understand that we only build meanings for ourselves to associate with reality, not reality itself...

A couple of other words that come up also create some ambiguity. Those words are knowledge and information. When Constructivism gets applied as a theory to the idea of learning, Constructivists often talk about building knowledge.

Knowledge is a complicated thing. I cant think much about Chinese history without thinking about the development of the Chinese language. The ideas are connected, as I see them. Other people know a lot about Chinese history without knowing much of anything about the language; they don't make the connections that I do. But the fact that the Han Dynasty was founded in 206 BC is a piece of information that stands by itself, relatively undisputed.

My knowledge of China is different from someone else's knowledge of China because I connect this or that singular piece of information (like when the Han Dynasty was founded) to different things than they connect it to. And one result of that is that we form different opinions, analyze the information differently and synthesize it differently. If knowledge is the whole of a body of facts and information (including their connections to one another), we build knowledge. But we do not build information. Information is part of reality...

I could go on. I could go on, mostly because I haven't really clarified completely for myself the ideas involved. Perhaps I never will. But the distinction between reality (which we encounter, I think) and meaning (which we attach to reality), between knowledge (which we build in something like webs that are unique to us) and information (which exists without us) - those are important distinctions, I believe...

Phonemes and the Construction of Reality

2008-07-12T07:20:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 4, 2008.

Before they have words in their heads, before the speech of others has semantic content for them, toddlers begin to parse up the sounds they hear and create categories in their minds. We call those cognitive categories phonemes.

Phonemes are one of the clearest examples of how we take the world around us and building chunks of meaning for ourselves. Call that "reality" if you want. It is, in a sense. It's our reality, at least. I'd rather say we build our own meaning to attach to reality, but whatever. Same thing...

One of the easiest ways to explain how we class sounds (vibrations of the air that have physical properties and can be measured with a machine) into phonemes is to look at the phoneme we usually call "L."

"L" is not a sound, it's an idea - an idea about how to group all the sounds together that you call “L” – different sounds that together make up “L” in your mind.

I know what you're probably thinking: “What do you mean? L is L.” And I have to say, “Not really.”

I explained it somewhere else like this:

Think about it for a moment. When you say “like,” you take the tip of your tongue and press it fairly hard against the back of your two top front teeth and you spread your tongue out like it was a hammock inside your mouth. When you say “full,” your tongue may not touch your front teeth at all; instead of spreading it out, you bunch it up in a ball in the back of your mouth and maybe the tip of it rests gently on the bony ridge you have behind your top teeth. You make a different sound at the beginning of “like” than at the end of “pull,” but you call both of them “L” if you speak English, because English speakers group them together as one phoneme.

Doesn’t everybody do that? No. In Russian those two sounds each get their own letter. You can put the “L” in “pull” at the beginning of Russian words and the “L” in “like” at the end of Russian words.

That's how it works. You group sounds together and (eventually) give them a name.

A couple of thoughts...

First, don't we all build the same reality? An "L" for you is an "L" for me, right? So how is that Constructivist? Well the answer to that is that we pretty much all build the same reality here, in our little piece of Appalachia. But if we were Russian (or Japanese or Korean), the reality we'd build would most likely be different from Appalachian reality. The fact that, as a group our different "realities" look a lot alike lends weight to the ideas of Lev Vygotsky and the Social Constructivists. They thought that constructing reality was a social activity.

Second, if you're dyslexic you probably have problems with phonemic awareness. You might build the phonemes in your head just like the next kid (which is why you can talk and understand people), but you have problems recognizing them as such. And that means that the next layer of your reality (which has to do with reading) is a little different from the reality of the other kids around you...

Reading Research Symposium Coming Up

2008-07-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 3, 2008.

I'm looking forward to the Reading research Symposium coming up next week in
Charleston. I've been to the reading conference at the Greenbrier before, but not the Research Symposium.

I love research. And being at something like this will hopefully give me more insight into the direction that research is taking us.

Look for an update middle of next week on how it was...

Trust the Spiral

2008-07-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 2, 2008.

I was introduced to the idea of a spiral curriculum almost three years ago now when the University of Chicago's Everyday Math curriculum was put in place in McDowell County. Like almost all the other teachers, I hated it for the first three or four weeks. Some teachers hated it longer than that, but I came to appreciate the new emphasis it brought to math and how math seemed to permeated much of the school day. I like math. After all, we all use math everyday...

The concepts inherent in a spiral curriculum are simple.

Learners usually need repeated exposure to new ideas before they fully "get" them.

Everyone learns at their own rate, in their own way (and isn't that a very Constructivist idea!?!).

There's no sense trying to get students to swallow a whole new idea now, all at once; which, translated, means you don't always have to teach to mastery.

If this or that student doesn't get something this time, don't worry. They'll get it (or at least come closer to getting it) next time.

There will be a next time. The concept of a spiral curriculum is one in which things get come back to.

You teach in something like a circle. We'll work on regrouping in the first week of November. We'll do it again in the second week of December. And again in the third week of January, the first week of March and the middle of April. We'll sneak a day of it in a few other times and mention it in passing a few times beyond that. It will stick in almost every child's mind. Some will master it a year ahead of time, most will begin to understand it when it's introduced and master it at grade level, and for a few we'll lay a foundation for future success and they'll understand it eventually (though a year or two later than we would have liked).

It was hard to stop always teaching to mastery. But I like the spiral now.

Of course the problem we face now is that the philosophy of the spiral curriculum doesn't really line up with the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind. As an educational interventionist, I have no problem understanding that some kids will take an extra year or two to "get it" - but that they probably will eventually "get it." The spiral will come back around and pick those last kids up. You should trust the spiral to do that.

But in a few years the accountability provisions of NCLB will mean that schools don't make AYP because a handful of kids haven't come to their spot on the spiral yet. The question then will be this: "How do we make the law reflect what we actually believe about learning?"

My only answer in this election year is that if helps to vote...

Away from Ontology…

2008-07-12T07:10:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on March 1, 2008.

I should admit that my discussion of Constructivism until now has been more about philosophy than learning theory. And I suppose I've purposely confused the two because I don't see how you can discuss one without first discussing the other.

After months of neglect, I dusted off my copy of Plato's Republic a few nights ago and looked back over the Allegory of the Cave. Reading about Plato's cave was what first got me interested in ontology - the study of our conception of reality.

But I suppose that Constructivist learning theory can be discussed without reconciling yourself completely to a particular philosophical view. I reserve the right to periodically return to philosophy, but I'll try and talk more about learning theory when I deal with Constructivism in the future...

Using Base 10 Blocks

2008-07-11T16:54:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on February 29, 2008.

If you teach math to elementary school grades or to special education students, manipulatives are essential. They allow you to take abstract concepts and make them tangible and concrete.

I fumbled around with base 10 blocks a couple of times, but this year I had the opportunity to watch Ms. K. East use them in class and it became much more obvious to me how productive they can be.

If you're looking for help in using base 10 blocks, I have two pieces online:

Teaching Place Value: Base Ten Blocks Help in Making Abstract Ideas Concrete

Teaching Subtraction: Base Ten Blocks Help Make Subtraction Concrete

Hope they help...

The Role of Play in Executive Function

2008-07-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on February 28, 2008.

If you listened to Alix Spiegel over at NPR you could get the impression that Mickey Mouse is to blame from the state of today's kids. She might be right...

The first Mickey Mouse shop in 1955 heralded a change in the way toys were marketed. As that marketing change took hold the toy market grew and, according to author Howard Chudacoff at Brown University, the nature of play changed. And changes in the nature of play have altered children's imaginations - and even the way their minds develop.

Before the advent of the toy industry as we know it today, children played in groups usually and had to use their imaginations to create play. They also had to use a process called executive function to regulate their play. Executive function is "a set of cognitive abilities that control and regulate other abilities and behaviors," according to one source. The NPR piece describes it as "private speech." Children "talked" to themselves inside their heads (minds, whatever) in order to bring order to what they were doing.

The gist of the NPR story is that today's toys take away much of the need for imagination and for the sort of self-regulation involved in executive function. One result is that executive function is weaker in today's kids than it was in 1955 when Mickey Mouse debuted.

If you teach reading at the elementary level, you're probably familiar with a concept that is sort of a subset or application of executive function that is essential to reading comprehension: metacognition. Metacognition (in the context of reading) is the process of monitoring your thought processes as you proceed through a story or text. You ask yourself, "Do I remember who the main characters are?" And "Now where is it that this happened." Being able to answer those sorts of questions along the way is essential to understanding a story. We model it in class by thinking aloud and we try to teach it.

So the logical question is, "Are reading skills becoming weaker as a result of changes in the way kids play?" I'll leave answering that question to the researchers...

You can listen to the NPR story yourself by clicking here.

It Is What It Is… Really?

2008-07-11T16:47:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on February 27, 2008.

You hear the expression from time to time: It is what it is.

Sounds kind of objectivist, doesn't it? Like, there's this thing out there and it's obvious what it is - even though we're probably having trouble talking about it, which is why the expression gets used. Since it's so obvious what this thing is, why discuss it any further...?

The expression got a lot of attention recently when Congress itself decided to try and figure out what it meant. They were trying to decide what to think of secretly taped conversations involving baseball pitcher Roger Clemens; the expression is used on the tape. For their purposes, the Congressional committee involved seems to have decided that the phrase means something like "I don't want to talk about it anymore" - though no new laws about speech or idioms came out of the hearings.

I have an alternative to "It is what it is" that I like much better. My alternative is "It is what you make it." After all, if it always really was want it is, why would anyone write poetry about it.

As I type this, it's snowing outside. Snow is what it is, right? I think Robert Frost would disagree. If he agreed, there wouldn't have been much point in writing Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening . Like most poems, this one helps you think of something differently - or at least see it better.

Poetry helps you construct new meanings for yourself around things that you encounter. You can shrug off the poem and say, "I don't think I'll build that meaning for myself." Or you can embrace the poem and say, "Maybe snow is more beautiful than I realized..."

Even if you reject the poem's ideas about snow and woods, reading the poem almost forces you to further define what those things mean to you. It's an illustration of Constructivism that's hard to deny.

Without Theory… (Why Think About It?)

2008-07-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on February 26, 2008.

I had a professor at the Australian National University who used to say, "Without theory, there is no practice?" His name was Phil Rose and I think he still lectures there, 25 years after I left.

He was right, for any practical purpose. Oh sure, you can do stuff in a classroom (or wherever, depending on your field) without having a clear theory to justify your actions. Probably, the stuff you do in such circumstances you do either because you were told to (in which case the person who told you to do it likely has a theory) or you do because it's the path of least resistance, the easiest thing to do (which usually makes it bad practice).

If you practice your profession in any meaningful way, though, you almost certainly have a theory that drives your actions at work.

I don't know if Dr. Rose was consciously quoting Louis Pasteur or if great minds (Dr. Rose's and Pasteur's) just think alike. Pasteur said this:

Without theory, practice is but routine born of habit. Theory alone can bring forth and develop the spirit of inventions.

So the question becomes, "Why am I doing this?" Why am I doing it this way? Why don't I try that, instead?

If I can clarify and articulate my own theory, however eclectic it may be, I have a frame of reference within which I can access my practices in the classroom. Doing that might make me a better teacher.

That's why I think about it. At least, that's one of the reasons...

Objectivism, Constructivism, and the Times Table

2008-07-11T16:41:00.000-07:00

Originally published here on February 25, 2008.

I had a student once. They* had memorized their math facts through the tens before they became my student. But they seemed to understand those facts as unrelated pieces of information - unconnected data islands.

Nine times three is 27. Eight times six is 48.

If I asked them for seven times 11, or for two times 12, they gave me a blank look. They didn't know, and they didn't know how to find out. The idea of a pattern of numbers, a pattern that could be extended beyond what they already new, seemed foreign.

I'll come back to that...

I recently came across a page on Constructivism by Bonnie Skaalid done while she was a doctoral student in the late 1990's at the University of Saskatchewan. She wrote something that struck me as epitomizing one of the problems, I think, in the articulating Constructivist theory.

It is impossible to discuss constructivism without contrasting it with its opposite, objectivism.

And down the road we go to an "either/or" discussion of whether I'm a Constructivist or an Objectivist....

I'm willing to be both. When we set those positions up as opposites, we set up extreme positions as straw men that we can beat the stuffing out of in order to prove that our position is right. It seems more productive to me to think of those extremes as ends of a continuum.

The problem with objectivism is that no one is objective. Science builds safeguards against bias into its methodology because objectivity is so difficult to come by. So, assuming reality is real, that doesn't mean you see it accurately. Acknowledge some inaccuracy in your perception of reality and you've moved a notch down the continuum toward Constructivism. You don't really even have to acknowledge an inaccuracy; you just have to acknowledge that sensation (which happens at the finger tips) and perception (which happens in the brain) are different things.

Let's go back to my student.

It wasn't a problem I ever solved. We parted company at the end of a school year. They knew 100 math facts, I knew they thought of them differently than most students. And I felt like that they managed to learn those math facts without learning the process of arriving at them or the connections between them.

I come back to my experience with that student often. I use that experience to consider definitions for terms like meaning and knowledge.

I think when enough people share some experience, especially if it can be quantified, the chance become good that it is an objective reality. I think I could win an argument with most reasonable people about whether nine times three is 27. The biggest problem would be finding someone who wanted to bother to argue about it. The idea that nine times three is 27 is, well, reality. Objective reality, I'd say. There are first and second graders at my school who don't know that. It’s knowledge they'll get later.

For the student we've been talking about, though, something other than knowledge was involved. They knew what nine times three was, but knowing didn't hold much meaning for them - at least nt in the context of math. And because it wasn't meaningful to them, they couldn't really use the knowledge very often.

The student had a disability. Their disability served to illustrate the profound difference between knowledge and meaning. And seeing that difference in them makes me consider what it is that we construct - knowledge, or meaning.

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*I use the plural "they" instead of "he" or "she" on purpose as a way of protecting confidentiality. English doesn't have gender neutral singular pronouns in the third person like (for example) Finnish. So I use the plural because, in the setting of the small schools where I've worked, doing so makes it hard for a reader to guess a student's identity...

Why Constructivist Leanings? (About the Blog’s Title)

2008-07-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

Originaly published here on February 23, 2008

I grew up thinking that reality was, well, you know - real.

I did my undergraduate work in psychology at a small Georgia college. Gerald Ford was President when I started and BF Skinner was still held in pretty high esteem. Constructivism was just beginning to come into vogue. And the psych faculty of my college thought that the best way to study behavior was to begin small, with something like rats, and come up with principles that could be generalized.

It was general psychology, not educational psychology. The idea that the mind could be meaningfully studied was largely scoffed at because the mind (if it existed at all) was unobservable. Don't get me wrong. We got a nice dose of Piaget and a sprinkling of Bandura, statistics, the philosophy of science, and Behaviorism took pride of place in the department.

In retrospect, I remember one professor we had who was a registered nurse before she got her PhD in psychology. She was dyslexic. She would write on the board a lot. Periodically she'd realize that students were either puzzled or snickering, and she'd begin to point at letters and say, "Is it this one?" She'd erase the offending letter (usually written backward) and write it correctly. I suppose it should have dawned on someone in the room, what with all of us studying psychology, that maybe observable behavior could prove that not everyone perceived reality the same way...

I didn't recognize it as such at the time, but I suppose my constructivist leanings began as a graduate student in linguistics at the Australian National University. It's amazing the amount of perceptual diversity that you come across by looking at languages. An easy example is that we're communicating at the moment in a language that doesn't assign gender to very many inanimate objects. A Mercedes in Germany, for example, is seen as somehow masculine: der Mercedes. A newspaper is feminine for some reason: die zeitung. And water, for reasons that escape me (but seem obvious to German-speakers) is neuter: das wasser. That's a pretty different perception of reality. A newspaper is a newspaper (or so I'd always thought), but Germans see them differently than I do.

I've since discovered that Noam Chomsky shredded Skinner's ideas about language all the way back in 1967, when he began to review Skinner's 1957 book, Verbal Behavior.

I graduated from the Australian National University with a Graduate Diploma in General Linguistics (with Merit) in 1993.

My real interest in Constructivism as a learning theory and philosophical school began only recently when I wrote a short piece for Suite101 on the 21st Century Learning Initiative. I realized that in order to understand and evaluate 21st Century Learning I was going to have to understand Constructivism better. So I started reading about it.

I learned that I have Constructivist leanings. I'm not sure I'm a full blown Constructivist (though that could come with time). And some of the more extreme forms of Constructivism still seem almost silly to me. But it's clear to me that meaning is personal and happens inside a student's head.

Can I change that word, meaning, to knowledge? I suppose that depends on your definition of knowledge. But ask me again in a few months.

In the mean time, I'm trying to come to grips with my Constructivist leanings...