Varied strategies needed for young readers

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Our Minnesota state legislators recently worked together with the state's strong reading advocacy groups to enact the Minnesota Read Act, a beautifully comprehensive plan providing millions of dollars to train our educators and provide instructional materials to incorporate the scientifically researched strategies that have been missing when teaching the children in our state to read.

(If you're wondering why our teachers need this training, listen to American Public Media's podcasts entitled "Sold a Story" and "Hard to Read" for more background.)

Teachers, college professors of reading instruction, district reading leaders and nonprofit tutor trainers all need to complete the LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) training the state is advocating. They will come to understand that along with the great strategies they have been using to build vocabulary, comprehension and fluency, they also must systematically teach the structures of the English language — to mastery.

They will also come to understand that we all fall on a continuum regarding how much instruction we need to master these structures. As a retired classroom teacher, reading intervention specialist and parent of two children with dyslexia, I can tell you that this is a complex task.

Some 15-20% of our children will struggle to master these skills unless they are taught to tap into their visual, auditory and tactile senses. This has nothing to do with overall intelligence. It is simply how their brains process language. These children thrive when they are taught using the scientifically proven instructional strategies that match their learning profile.

Another 40% of our children will master these skills very quickly without the need for more specialized instruction. The rest of our students will fall somewhere in between.

This is why marching through a mandated new curriculum as a whole class, at a single pace, will not magically fix the problem.

To achieve the greatest success, 20-30% of our students will need to read mostly decodable books while they are mastering the phonetic code and other structures of the English language. (Decodable books contain mainly words that can be sounded out phonetically.) But please, do not force all children to read only decodable books. Let teachers, using their professional expertise, decide which books will best serve individual students.

I was horrified to read about a district requiring its elementary schools to throw away the books in their current classroom libraries.

In my experience as a classroom and reading intervention teacher for more than 30 years, I found it took five full school years of scientifically based instruction and intervention to see the fruits of our hard work. Students come to us with limited English, a wide variety of language processing styles and sharply different levels of support from home. Many need to build social and emotional regulation skills.

Three years into our program, only 61% of our students passed the state's comprehensive reading assessment (MCA). We were given professional freedom to create the structures for providing needed interventions, and two years later, 77% of our fifth-grade students passed the state's reading MCA. It took deep knowledge in the science of teaching reading, trust in educators as professionals, the help of paraprofessionals and volunteers, and time.

Elementary teachers cannot do this alone. They teach five subject areas to 20-28 unique individuals. The needs of their students are different every year. Unless there is planning for how to help teachers provide the multi-sensory intervention lessons with the repetition many students need, they will not succeed.

The idea that no children needed explicit instruction in the structures of the English language was an extreme swing of the instructional pendulum that resulted in the deletion of scientifically researched instruction that a whole group of children must have to thrive as readers. I am worried that our response now will be to swing the pendulum to the other extreme. We don't need to take away what works for one group of children to meet the needs of another group.

Let's stop the instructional pendulum from swinging. True growth will take time and will not happen until all of our educators are fully trained in the science of reading instruction and then given the professional freedom to use this training to choose which research-proven instructional strategies they will use to meet the needs of the students in front of them.

Dawn Peterson, of North Oaks, is a retired teacher and reading specialist.