What does it mean to follow a reading program?

Blast from the Past: This blog entry first posted on May 5, 2018, and re-posted on April 20, 2024. The reason for this re-post is twofold: I received the letter below from an educational consultant who was troubled about how some school districts were using commercial reading programs and wanted my take on it. Also, recently, some critics have been making claims about the appropriate design of commercial reading programs if they were to be used successfully to enhance literacy achievement – unproven design claims that seem to come out of the same camp that this letter was reacting to. Given that I have reprinted the 2018 blog entry, but have added research references, several new paragraphs at the bottom, and a link to an even older blog that carries additional relevant information. The original blog post generated a great deal of discussion, so be sure to follow the link at the end to see the 62 comments. I think readers will find those to be thought-provoking as well.

Teacher question: I am currently working in two large school districts that have purchased certain commercial programs and materials that claim to be SOR. Both districts insist that all schools implement these programs with ‘fidelity.’ The schools within these districts vary enormously. Some serve majority ELLs and recent immigrants, some serve mostly children from professional families, some serve a majority of low-income families. I cannot understand how it could make sense for teachers in such widely varied settings to read the same words from the teachers’ manual, present the same information with the same materials to expect the same outcomes. The notion of fidelity seems very confusing to me. What am I missing?

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Shanahan response:

Years ago, I was invited to coach some teachers. I’ve done a lot of that over the past almost 50 years. I watch a lesson, and the teacher and I sit down and discuss how it may be improved.

But this was going to be a strange situation.

The school had adopted a curriculum program I’d developed. They hadn’t told me that. Now I was to critique teachers who were using my lessons. Uncomfortable territory.

The principal assured me it would be fine since the classes using my stuff were doing well—better test scores than in the past. I wasn’t so sure.

Two teachers were using the program: one was experienced but she’d never taught reading before, and the other was a rookie.

I watched the first teacher, had the follow up meeting… nothing remarkable.

But then I sat in on the neophyte’s class. She wasn’t a superstar—yet. But she was darn good, one of those lessons that probably couldn’t get much better. What she may have lacked in artfulness, she more than made up in fundamental teaching chops. Heinemann probably wouldn’t sign her to a book contract, but you’d be pleased if she were teaching your kids!

During that lesson I started to think I was pretty wonderful. Here was a fresh-faced beginning teacher, a greenie, working with a challenged bunch of kids and outperforming past teachers… using my program. Magic!

Then I came to my senses.

For instance, when presenting the brilliant vocabulary lesson that I’d designed, the rook would sometimes add an extra example of a word’s meaning; other times, she omitted one.

The same kind of thing happened during the comprehension portion of the lesson: Sometimes she’d ask the wonderful questions as I’d written them, sometimes she’d recast one or omit one or add one.

It looked like she was following my lesson plan, and she was, kinda. But she was also sort of teaching her own lesson.

When we sat down for our debriefing, she immediately thanked me for designing such a wonderful program. She explained that she wouldn’t have known what to do if it hadn’t been for me. That was true—in a way. And, yet it was only part of the reason for her pedagogical success.

That incident came to mind while reading a new research synthesis (Parsons, Vaughn, Scales, Gallagher, et al., 2018) published this month in Review of Educational Research that examined studies of “teachers’ instructional adaptations;” the kind of instructional responsiveness that rookie had demonstrated.

Parsons and company reported that studies over the past 40 years have described the phenomenon in a variety of ways: instructional decision-making, scaffolding, reflective teaching, adaptation, teacher metacognition, dialogic teaching, etc. But whatever it has been called, it’s an essential, and too often ignored, component of effective teaching.

Coaching has been found to enable adaptive teaching (Vogt & Rogalla, 2009), and six studies reported that focusing teacher attention on student learning (assessment) improved both teacher adaptability and student outcomes. Teaching experience also tends to improve adaptability (my rookie was an outlier—it usually takes a while to gain the kind of “teacher vision” she exhibited).

What was it that I had seen in that observation? A complex pedagogical dance between a teacher trying to adhere to the major outlines of a program—I’d provided the bones of the lesson and sequenced the major activities—while she observed the students’ responses and reacted accordingly. If she saw confusion, she reworded my script or added an example or helpful explanation. If the lesson was clear, but student interest was flagging, she added a teaspoon of enthusiasm and kept their heads in the game.

That reminds me that there are two really important things underlying effective teaching.

On the one hand, as teachers we need to have a profound understanding of what needs to be taught. It matters that primary teachers possess a depth of knowledge of the alphabetic system, or that high school algebra teachers be well schooled in math. That’s where great curricula come in; a coordinated body of texts, lesson plans, and activities that have a strong chance of engendering the desired knowledge and skills.

On the other hand, slavishly following such a curriculum is unlikely to succeed, unless teachers are wisely adaptive. Effective teaching will always be more than following a script. Teachers must assess on the fly and note whether the kids are getting it and if they are not, then something needs to happen. Teachers must make both immediate adjustments—adding explanations, changing examples, requiring more practice—and more ambitious changes, too (“today’s lesson was a bust, I need to reteach it tomorrow”).

I worry these days about the idea of teaching with “fidelity to program.” Was my rookie evidencing fidelity? In a way she was. But any careful analysis of a transcript of her lesson would reveal that she was making important adaptations to my brilliant handiwork. She was taking a good lesson and making it go. Both components are essential, and one is no more important than the other if learning is the goal.

I’m a big fan of shared curriculum because without it, it is virtually impossible to get large-scale school improvement. Likewise, it makes no sense to adopt such a shared curriculum and then tell everyone they can do whatever they want with it. But such a collective commitment to a common program of instruction in no way should limit a teacher’s ability to adapt lessons to student response. Follow the research, teacher adaptation matters.

Since this entry was first published, there have been various criticisms of curricula – including some that I have helped to develop. The non-research-based complaint has been that there is too much good stuff and that teachers can’t possibly make appropriate choices to teach in the kinds of varied situations that your letter describes.

The problem with that approach is that it leaves so many kids high and dry. What if you work in a school with many kids above grade level? Or who struggle with dyslexia? Or who are English Learners? Or minority kids who want to learn to read but also to feel some connection to their culture?

Then, of course, there are the schools that are happy with what they are doing with spelling, so they don’t need spelling lessons, while other schools won’t even consider a program – no matter how much they like the other features – if it doesn’t have weekly spelling plans.

I’m personally more concerned about programs that assume one-size fits all more than I am about those that intentionally include more than any single classroom could possibly digest.

The critics have a point though, some teachers may have difficulty making sound choices when there is a lot of good stuff there.

The critics approach is to try to “idiot proof” the programs, narrowing them down to the point that fidelity is the only possibility. They believe – without any evidence, of course (so much for the “science of reading,”) – that this narrowing will raise literacy levels, even if the programs can’t easily be adjusted to meet the needs of diverse students.

I recommend two different solutions to this problem. Rather than narrowing the possibility of addressing varied children’s needs, I suggest the following:

1.     My plan, oft described here, of dividing instruction into quarters or quinters (I made that word up), allocating time on word knowledge, text reading fluency, reading comprehension, writing – and possibly, certainly with English-learners, oral language. Schools that have adopted that scheme often find that it guides them to increase attention to some areas that a program might be a bit short in, and to cut back when too much time is accorded to some areas of concern. Knowing, for example, that you must teach phonics for 30 minutes a day can serve as a kind Occam’s razor, both ensuring that enough time is invested in that essential, while making sure that it doesn’t prevent sufficient attention to the rest of the curriculum.

2.     A second solution is to facilitate some kind of group planning process. Involve your reading specialists and special education teachers in this, too. Basically, allow your teachers some latitude in omitting or insisting upon certain lessons, but do that as a group rather than a free-for-all in which every teacher does whatever she wants to do with the curriculum. I wrote about that years ago and have a link to that here. These kinds of discussions or meetings can both identify problems the teachers may be having with a program or lessons that are duds – dealing with those as a group will increase the chances that good choices will be made.

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/in-defense-of-textbooks-core-programs-and-basal-readers

References

Parsons, S. A., Vaughn, M., Scales, R. Q., Gallagher, M. A., Parsons, A. W., Davis, S. G., Pierczynski, M., & Allen, M. (2018). Teachers’ instructional adaptations: A research synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 88(2), 205-242. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654317743198

Vogt, F., & Rogalla, M. (2009). Developing adaptive teaching competency through coaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(8), 1051–1060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2009.04.002

Link to past comments on this topic:

https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-follow-a-program

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