Literacy Blogs

Blast from the Past: This blog entry first posted on June 22, 2019, and was re-issued on September 21, 2024. The reason I’ve resurrected this one is because recently many of my podcasts have been greeted by jeers on social media claiming that pretty much any research-proven approach to reading instruction would be better replaced by opportunities for independent reading in the classroom. I agree that the more students read the better readers they are likely to become, but that is not best accomplished by sacrificing instructional time since instruction does more for reading achievement growth than does independent reading. ...

Reading instruction is a faddish thing. We reading teachers can be as passionate and fickle as a gaggle of teens cooing over Billy Eilesh or TikTok. We go through periods of using textbooks or avoiding them; embracing phonics or eschewing it. The educational pendulum swings to and fro. A new reading program or approach is discovered, seems to be everywhere, then one wonders whatever happened to it…. Wisconsin Design, SRA cards, Whole Language, learning styles… the beat goes on.   One thing that never seems to change, however, is the ubiquity of “round robin reading.” This is the practice of having one child ...