GoBigEd

Posted 11:29 AM by Susan Darst Williams

POINTY-HEAD ED GURU
GETS IT RIGHT -- OVERCOMPLICATED, BUT RIGHT

Here's a long, but interesting article about someone high up in teacher education who actually understands how bad sight reading and whole language is for kids. Unlike most ed school professors, she recognizes how badly children need phonics as the central core of their reading instruction instead of the lick-and-a-promise treatment most teachers are taught to give.

She very much overcomplicates things, but makes these three points that are right on:

1. Too many rules and things to memorize are bad.

2. It's important to keep the reading matched to the instruction so that the child's error rate for decoding will be low and the child will feel good about his or her reading progress.

3. Directionality is key; kids who grow up on TV don't know they have to decode text and write it from left to right, and from top to bottom, so they need to be explicitly taught those skills.

Her website, www.phonicsplusfive.com, might be worth a look.

Here's the article:
http://www.educationnews.org/writers/michael/An_Interview_with_Dr_Marion_Blank.htm