Instructional Casualties and Systemic Blindness
In 2011, Malaysia’s National Service revealed that 1,000 out of 11,000 trainees were illiterate. But after just 30 credit hours of instruction, they could read and write. What happened during their years in school?
If 30 hours can reverse years of illiteracy, then the problem isn’t the students—it’s the system.
This part is quite interesting and I hope that I am not misinterpreting what Anna is saying.
Anna Stokke:
If we immerse kids in books and we make reading fun and we start with meaning and understanding, the reading will just come.
And I hear this sort of thing in math. all the time. So it's sort of like a top-down approach to teaching instead of a bottom-up approach. So in other words, the idea is to start children with problem-solving. They'll get excited about the problem and the foundational skills will just come after that. But as a matter of fact, you can't solve a problem, right, if you don't have the skills to solve the problem if you don't have the foundational skills to do it or the techniques to do it. Does that resonate with you in terms of what happened with reading?
This morning,19.7.23, I read the following tweets
Secretary Miguel Cardona @SecCardona
Every student deserves the opportunity to have a career in what they’re passionate about.
That’s why we are raising the bar in education.
Angie Neal @angie_neal Replying to @DoctorSam7 @AGoninan @reading_league @ReadWellAlaska
Part of the reason it’s difficult to have a strong dyslexia screening is because it’s difficult to tease out instructional casualties who have never received systematic and explicit instruction in PA and phonics.
Readers of this thread - note that dyslexia screener difficulties are BECAUSE OF INSTRUCTION THAT IS NOT EVIDENCE-BASED!
I then twitted.
I believe you got this wrong. Tell me, please, how there can be instructional casualties if no PA and phonics have been taught.
My comment now:
It was Dr. Reid Lyon who first coined the words ‘Instructional Casualties’ more than 20 years ago. However, no one has ever said what it is that has been instructed wrongly that cause kids to disengage/ shut down from learning to read. I believe I am the first person to have written on why kids shut down/ disengage from learning to read. Read more in my post here.
Dr. Nancy Hennessy, President of IDA between 2003 and 2005 said “We still don’t have the capacity nor the will to change what it is that we are doing with reading early on and so consequently unless we make those significant changes we are not only going to lose the dyslexics but I am also concerned about these other children; these other struggling readers.” Read more here.
What does Angie mean when she says; note that dyslexia screener difficulties are BECAUSE OF INSTRUCTION THAT IS NOT EVIDENCE-BASED!
It is such misinformation that is spread by SoR proponents that irks me.
Angie Neal @angie_neal Replying to @DoctorSam7 @PATSTONE55 and 5 others
I’m not arguing for the sake of argument. I’m responding to baseless claims in the name of every parent who has told me their child wanted to kill themselves because they were taught to read using approaches and curriculum that had no evidence kids should have learned to read.
My response now:
This SoR advocate wants us to believe that kids told their parents that they wanted to kill themselves because of 'approaches and curriculum'. What utter rubbish is this? Would you ever believe that a child would ever say 'they wanted to kill themselves because they were taught to read using approaches and curriculum that had no evidence kids should have learned to read'?
Lessons for instructional casualties or so-called dyslexic kids.
Dr.Timothy Shanaghan: The point isn't that phonics is an important thing to learn for English Learners, it is that it is not the only thing they need to learn. There is a reason that English proficiency is the top predictor of literacy learning for English learners.
