Buckle up… this is a long one. I got a little carried away.

The priority of foundational phonics is important. I don’t want you to think I’m saying to stop teaching kids foundational phonological awareness and decoding.

These are important skills.

I’m suggesting a more holistic approach to teaching kids HOW to read and write.

The problem with programs is that they are, by nature, insular.

To be clear, Orton-Gillingham as an approach is a synthesized way of teaching students to read, write, and think about their reading. Dr. Sam and June Lyday Orton along with Anna Gillingham, Bessie Stillman, and Dr. Paul Rome were interested in helping folks become skilled readers and writers.

Their names have been ascribed to programs whose primary goal is create fluent decoders. Let’s be clear, sounding good is not the same as being a skilled reader.

Let’s zoom into the problems with phonics programs for a moment, since they are the hot new thing.

The phonics programs tend to choose high frequency words that don’t help develop vocabulary.

For example, when teaching the FLoSS rule, the words are almost always dress, mess, boss, stuff, fluff, stiff, spell, tell, etc. It would be ideal to also include 2-3 stretch vocabulary words weekly like crass, truss, scuff. These words should be included in word-level dictation, but students should also be taught how to use these words in their writing.

These programs also tend to teach isolated skills and include very little cumulative review. News Flash: This is why spelling isn’t generalizing to authentic writing.

These programs also somehow manage to move too slowly and yet too fast to make meaningful gains in more diverse populations.

Orton-Gillingham practitioners move prescriptively based on their students’ unique needs and circumstances. Kids who receive dynamic instruction from well-trained OG practitioners make meaningful progress towards becoming not only automatic decoders, but they are skilled readers and writers.

If you are paying for OG tutoring and your kid isn’t working on developing vocabulary and writing skills, in my opinion, you’re not working with a well-trained practitioner. Many of these phonics programs have become exhaustively obsessed with linguistic minutia. There is no reason to segment blends into individual targets across a series of 8 weeks. WHY would you spend an entire week on fl and gl alone??

Blends are simply consonant sounds. Anna Gillingham didn’t even have a blend deck because these are phonemes that can be segmented and, at some point, will become consolidated by more skilled readers and writers.

Teach them all. At the same time. Go wild.

Various ones will be tricky for different kids. I know why this is. Does your program explain what to do about it, or are you simply stuck there until Joey gets to 90%? Don’t get me started on these mastery targets.

I had a trainee who wrote in her lesson log the other day, “I was nervous about this [blends]. I didn’t even give these a name. We just started reading longer words. 😊 G [first grader with diagnosed dyslexia] did a great job. In the beginning, I noticed while writing he was omitting the second letter of the blend. Example: plan- pan. We went back to counting sounds and recording in our elkonin box.”

She didn’t even give them a name! She taught first. She let him encounter success. She error handled when necessary.

For everyone out there hyperventilating over the omission of academic lingo, she did eventually tell the kid he was doing blends. It’s easier for kids to use the verbiage when they actually know what they’re doing. But also – does it impede his ability to read and spell if he doesn’t know what a blend is? Hmmmm…

Back to the problems with programs-

The sentences used for dictation and targeted fluency practice of the new skills inside programs don’t model natural speech patterns and are often simplistic in nature. Teachers aren’t mentioning grammatical structure of even asking kids what these sentences mean. Yall. Reading connected text is all about meaning!

Decodable readers that come with phonics programs are perhaps some of the most boring books on the market (sorry - but you know I’m right!), and they aren’t doing anything to help kids know how to visualize when they read. Many of these little books contain illustrations that reinforce bad strategies of using images to guess at words. YES- decodable text is important when kids are barely able to read, but let’s talk about sequencing in a way that gets kids into authentic text asap.

Additionally, the dog sat on the mat isn’t doing anything for oral language development.

Teachers are asking kids to reread with expression before even asking a comprehension question because the program says “the kid must read with prosody and fluency,” or he can’t possibly understand it.

False.

Some kids read slowly because they are actually processing what the text means. Some kids will always read slowly. - see my blog on fluency for more rants around this.

Ask the questions first. If the kid doesn’t get it, have him reread. Engage the visualizer. Patricia Lindamood and Nanci Bell have been talking about the value of this since 1986.

Inside classrooms they often have a hodgepodge of programs for phonics, phonemic awareness, writing, grammar, and 86 million packets they’ve downloaded from Teachers Pay Teachers.

How much money does a district spend on programs yearly, only to swap for the next new hot thing that promises better, faster results?

And yet, our kids aren’t being taught how to synthesize all this information to become strong thinkers and writers.

How many of you work with or parent an older child or young adult?

How is their written expression and comprehension of scientific or academically dense text?

Here’s the issue: To become a skilled reader and writer, kids still need to be decoding, spelling isolated words with rules and generalizations WHILE developing vocabulary, background knowledge, and writing skills.

I know. There’s not enough time to do all the “programs” that do this. I’m arguing that there are more efficient ways to teach ALL this inside a single day.

I’ve talked about the re-imagined ELA block. This is why it’s essential to rethink how we teach kids to read. There isn’t enough time to do all these programs and somehow knit them together.

Remember- Reading is not just about sounding good.

We have loads of kids who make it to middle school, and they sound great- BUT- they can’t answer the higher order thinking questions.

Why?

They were never actually taught HOW to read.

We were so focused on fluency and decoding accuracy that we forgot the actual purpose of reading. Skilled readers visualize while reading.

Skilled readers stop and highlight when they’re learning new complex information.

Skilled readers ask questions about words they don’t understand.

Skilled readers take notes.

Skilled readers read slowly when reading complex text.

Skilled writers know how to craft various types of sentences.

Skilled writers know how to maintain verb tense.

Skilled writers know how to craft arguments and how to answer questions.

Skilled readers and writers aren’t created from a hodgepodge of programs.

Skilled readers and writers develop when they are TAUGHT from kindergarten onward that words matter. The words you choose matter when you write. The words chosen by authors inform the images that you make in your mind’s eye.

All these skills have to be explicitly taught but also authentically modeled and practiced time and time again.

No program can do all this.

Teachers have to be trained to reach the unique diversity of the students in the room.

Teachers have to be trained to meet kids where they are AND move them forward.

Teachers have to be trained how to read aloud and model notetaking and highlighting techniques from 1st grade onward. (Yes, my first-grade teachers do this in their classrooms.)

No program takes the place of knowledgeable teachers.

To be a strong teacher, you have to understand a concept so well that you can teach it simply.

This type of training is more than a self-paced online learning experience.

It’s more than a one-time training.

My trainer told folks it takes at least three years of active practice with mentorship to do this work confidently and successfully.

Programs will inevitably come and go- training lives inside the teacher for a lifetime.

Training can’t be siloed to ONLY focus on decoding and foundational phonics.

Mentorship is a foundational piece of training. I worry that my own accrediting body and all the other phonics oriented accrediting organizations out there are so focused on procedural precision in the decoding/encoding lesson that they’re missing the opportunity to provide mentorship on how to teach the skills necessary to develop strong adult readers and writers. They’re definitely missing the opportunity to mentor folks who work with more complex kids. Programs don’t meet complex learners where they are, and they rarely help them get where they need to go.

So many of my own colleagues, who I know do more inside their personal practices with kids, are only training teachers to think about reading and spelling accuracy alongside fluency metrics to reach the mastery benchmarks.

I’ve spent years thinking about and worrying over how to provide mentorship that reaches ALL kids. I think I’ve finally designed a mentorship model that works for me and helps teachers integrate all the necessary skills in meaningful ways to help kids become skilled readers and writers.

This kind of mentorship goes beyond the standards of my certifying body, not because I’m required to, but because I am driven to help all kids reach their full potential.

It’s not a program. It’s an ever-refining, constantly shifting mentorship model that is centered around building a community of seekers- Folks who are invested in helping ALL kids be successful.

This type of mentorship takes years. It’s not fast. It’s not cheap. It’s not easy- but our kids deserve the very best we can give them.

Imagine a world in which at least 5 teachers at every public-school K-12 in America were trained deeply to develop strong readers and writers. What could our world look like if that level of knowledgeable teaching could live inside every building.

For now, let’s start small. When you read aloud or your kids read to you, ask, “What do you see? What do you imagine?”