Front Page: Front Page: The World of Literacy
By Theresa Kelly Gegen“But there’s so many words out there.”
So said Dan Cocoran, who grew up in Michigan, attended school, joined the Navy, and started a family business in construction, without learning to read. His experience is related in “Sold a Story,” the unique podcast that accelerated change in the literacy industry.
There are indeed so many words out there. My job with the Illinois Association of School Boards is to communicate, with clarity and consistency, the many ways the Association can help Illinois school board members fulfill their roles for the benefit of the communities and students they serve.
Words are what I do.
Before I put the words on the page, I listen, research, read, and contextualize ideas for the school board member audience. Many of these ideas are complicated, sometimes deceptively so. Others are straightforward, also sometimes deceptively so.
For this issue, I read and reflected, and listened to “Sold a Story” with school board members in mind. It is unique in scope and unveils an important revelation: The education community made mistakes. No one was trying to thwart kids’ progress in literacy. The conventionally accepted systems worked for most children. But for many, literacy remained out of reach.
Many Journal readers will have joined their boards of education to effect change. Some of those, especially in the past decade, will have done so because of how their districts were teaching reading. You may have read or heard about the “Reading Wars,” the debate in education about the most effective method for teaching children to read. Different terminology is used to explain the factions in the Reading Wars, but at its core, it’s phonics vs. whole language, and which is the best way — or what’s the best way to combine them — to teach kids to understand written language.
Phonics is the basis for the science of reading. Phonics helps children sound out unfamiliar words, promotes reading fluency by developing understanding of word structure, and, as has been recently established by research, it helps struggling readers and those with dyslexia. On the other hand, phonics can be boring to teach and to learn. And time spent on phonics is time not spent on comprehension and critical thinking skills.
Whole language (meaning, in this conversation, no phonics instruction) emphasizes comprehension, context, and enjoyment of reading, and encourages children to see reading as a meaningful activity, not just a skill. It was preferred for those reasons. But it does not teach children how to decode unfamiliar words. And time has shown that many children can’t learn to read without explicit phonics instruction.
We’ll get into that and more in the World of Literacy, starting on page 11 of this, the Literacy issue of the IASB Journal. The next resource stop for school board members is the School Leaders Reader’s Guide to the Illinois Comprehensive Literacy Plan, available from the Illinois State Board of Education website.
If your interest is further piqued, listen to “Sold a Story” if you haven’t already. You’ll discover the fate of Dan Cocoran and many other children and adults. The podcast takes the story of the Reading Wars and makes it personal. Cocoran’s tale is one of many, tragedies and renewals and redemption arcs for children and adults for whom the science of reading would have made a world of difference.
Theresa Kelly Gegen is Director of Editorial Services for IASB and is the Editor of the Illinois School Board Journal.