P. David PearsonKey Idea
Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

Transcript from Critical Balances: Early Instruction for Lifelong Reading

DR. PEARSON: Well, good afternoon.

AUDIENCE: Good afternoon.

DR. PEARSON: I have been invited in here as a mediator. Actually not. And what I do want to do with you today, though, is to share some comments that I think is, that I hope -- do two things. First, to summarize our discussion and second to provide some guidelines in our quest for better approaches to teaching reading and building programs to help all kids become better readers.

And Karen Smith, from NCTE, is going to help me out here with the overheads. If you could turn it on, Karen. And by the way, notice that the first thing that's at the top is my Web site: http:\\Ed-web3.educ.msu.edu/cspds/home.htm. That's because there's no way I can ever possibly finish the remarks I have, and I'll put them on my Web site when I get home for anyone who really wants to see everything I had to say. It will be under the title of the Politics of Reading Research and Practice.

Well, being invited to participate in this forum is at once an honor, an opportunity, and a responsibility. The honor arises from the invitation itself and the thought that, however fleeting, that I might have something interesting to add to this important discourse. The opportunity emerges from the context in which the forum is constructed. Important things are happening, for better or for worse, regarding reading instruction here in Texas and around the country. We might actually influence what is happening. And the responsibility comes from the possibility that someone who affects decisions about educational policy and practice might actually take what we say here today seriously.

These assertions that I have for you are an odd mixture of research, policy, and ethical issues. Because the issue of early reading instruction is what we're talking about, this mixture of research, policy, and ethics is important. If we could only add religion to the mix, then I suppose we would have a complete characterization of the forces that drive early reading dialogue. (More on FAQ7) I will try to add a religious element, if not in substance, then in the zeal and the speed with which I present this message.

Point Number 1, research should inform our policies and our practices but only if filtered through the lenses of convergence, quality, comparability, and compellingness that Dick put forward this morning. (More on FAQ6) (More on FAQ8) It just won't do to have any old research that happens to fit our particular point of view and the like. We must subject all of our research to these sorts of criteria.

I want to give you some advice about research though. One is to be careful of leaps from basic process to research to pronouncements about practice. (More on FAQ6) And this is on both sides of the fence. It's one thing to know that good readers, when they're reading normally, read every word and take into account every piece of evidence on the page, as eye movement study shows, but that doesn't mean that they don't predict -- they don't engage in some sort of prediction along the way at certain points.

Notice also that if you look at the miscue research -- so the research on sort of like basic processes while people are reading normally says people, good readers don't use context. But if you look at the miscue research, what you infer from that is that good readers are much better at using context than are poor readers. Now, how can you reconcile those two points of view?

Well, it seems to me that ultimately they are reconcilable because in the one case it's kind of like an automatic process, right? You're just moving along, sailing through the wind. And in the other case, the strategic situation, when you say, hey, wait a minute, things are crazy -- it's not right here, and you sort of move from an automatic processing mode into a problem solving mode, right? And you sort of think, how can I make sense of all this? And that's when good readers resort to context. And when they do, they're much more skilled at using context to solve problems than are poor readers.

But the point on either side is that this may or may not have anything to do with how we teach early reading. I will reassert Dick's point this morning. The proof of the practice is in the data. Show me your data about what really helps.

And I forget that I have my powerbook screen, which has all my notes, on sleep, so I have to make sure I pay attention to it every once in a while or my ideas will go away, vanish into hyperspace.

The second point about research that I want to make is that -- is that research has a role at several points along the way in our process, including the role that it has when it comes time for us to put it into practice. (More on FAQ6) Then that is that we need -- even though we see ideas from the research that are appealing to us and that we think we ought to want to try out, local replication and evaluation are essential. It's the very essence of teacher research to make sure we do it for ourselves and see how we work -- how it works in our context. It's not enough just to know that it works somewhere else. So I encourage all of you to be very careful and very critical and very circumspect about new ideas that you put -- be enthusiastic about them, but also be circumspect about them.

And the second point in that is that beware of the halo effect of science. (More on FAQ7) I hear too many -- too many pronouncements these days that say, well, scientific research says thus and so. And invoking the halo of science does not make it scientific research. It's scientific research if -- if the proof of the practice is in the data, okay?

Now Point Number 2, while we do have serious literacy needs in this country, much of the current literacy crisis I think is manufactured. (Back to FAQ7) Several of our speakers alluded to this issue this morning, but both in our public and our professional arenas it's commonplace to complain about America's literacy crisis. Usually the crisis is cited as the basis for fixing the praise or blame on some educational policy or practice or movement or the solution to our nation's education ills.

I myself have cited the crying literacy needs and poor student performance of our -- of our students as the basis for seeking support for my own research and for my institution's teacher education programs. But it is simply not the case that this generation of students read, write, punctuate, or perform any other literacy test less well than previous generations.

In the aggregate, exactly the opposite is true. Dick cited some of that data this morning. But on all the major issues, including National Assessment of Educational Progress, even the Scholastic Aptitude Test, even the Graduate Record Exam -- Examination, and even on most popularized standardized tests, today's students either equal or outperform previous generations. Why do you think they renorm those tests every 8 or 10 years? It's because the old norms don't work anymore.

Furthermore, the data on National Assessment over the last two decades suggests that the greatest gains that we've made in the last 20 years have been among those students who entered that 20-year period at the bottom of the performance barrel, mainly our nation's poorest children. If you look at the opportunity that we have provided kids who aren't doing so well, as well as the actual performance of those kids, one of the things that you can say is that whatever else we've done, we have learned some things about how to help them achieve in the sorts of tasks schools consider important.

I mention these facts and these perspectives because I want policymakers everywhere to understand that in spite of the national rhetoric about our schools, in spite of the accusation that we have failed to provide children their natural literacy birthright, we continue on an upward trajectory of opportunity and outcomes. (More on FAQ2) And while we might be tempted to regard this overall trajectory, as well as the narrowing of the performance gap for low achievers, as good news for educators, they provide absolutely no laurels at all upon which educators can rest. It is still not good enough. First, the gap in performance and opportunity, while narrowing, is still unconscionably wide, unconscionably wide! And, second, our performance lags far behind our aspirations for literacy in a technological and informational age in which the demands for literacy seem to know no ends. That is, even if we're doing better, we're still not doing well enough in terms of where our kids need to be.

That leads me to Point Number 3. It's not the lack of literacy or opportunity, but rather their unequal distribution that frustrates us as a profession and a society. To repeat myself for emphasis, progress notwithstanding, what is most distressing to me is our inability as a country and as a profession to help all of our students acquire the literacy they need to lead -- live fulfilling lives. Poverty is still all too powerful a predictor of literacy performance in our schools and we need to do something about that.

In the -- we -- I said we have this performance gap that we're narrowing, but it's still far too wide and we need to -- we need to take extraordinary action with -- with those kinds of schools and children who most need our help.

The irony is, is that we seem best able to help those students who need our help the least. And that's the great irony, I think, that we all sort of suffer and live with.

One word, by the way, about -- there seems to be a temptation in a lot of our rhetoric to talk about the fact that some kids are going to learn to read in spite of what we do, but then there are those kids who really need our help and those are the kids who need the highly structured, highly structured curriculum, with lots of direct instruction.

That may or may not be the case, and I think it's an open question -- best decided by the evidence from our work -- whether it is or not. But let me -- let me point out that there is a kind of a conspiracy of good intentions lying just beneath the surface of that aspiration. Georgia Garcia and I call it the basic skills conspiracy. It's sort of like -- it's kind of like first you've got to get the words right and the facts straight before you can do the "what if's" and "I wonder what's." And if the price of making sure that we differentiate our instruction is that the kids who are not achieving never get a chance to get to the good stuff, then we haven't done them any sort of service at all. (More on FAQ2)

Point Number 4, there are no magical potions available to cure all these ills. (Back to FAQ6) It would be unconscionable, as well as wholly inaccurate, to attribute either of our success or our failure in meeting the needs of children of poverty to particular methods, materials, or philosophies. We know that thousands, even millions of children, including poor children, have learned to read with all manner of methods and approaches. We also know that thousands, even millions of children, including poor children, have failed to learn to read under these systems.

While it is surely our professional responsibility to create, select, evaluate, refine, and improve our methods, materials, and philosophies, we must recognize that the variability amongst individual students, as well as the complexities of learning to read and write, make it highly unlikely that we will ever find the perfect and infallible method, set of materials, or philosophy that will fit the needs of all children, all schools, or all communities. What we should be studying is how and why all approaches engender both success and failure. (Back to FAQ4)

Let me speak, since it has been raised by others, quite directly to the issue in terms of the currently popular array of research studies whose results have been popularized in the press and in the public forum in the last six months. And I'm speaking directly about the NICHD studies which Dick has mentioned and some others have mentioned.

Those studies, I think, are very useful and deserve to be supported. In fact, they are at the very least doing research about instruction, even if, as Dick suggested, they're doing it in a way that does not permit the simple attribution of their effects to any one -- one component of their instruction. But must these studies be asked to serve as the basis for a whole scale reform of early reading instruction in the United States? I think not.

Do they inform us? Yes. Are they star to hitch our wagon too? I doubt it.

Let me also, while we -- since everybody brought it up, the issue of decodable text, so let me get my two cents worth in about it. I think decodable texts are much better than phonics workbooks, and I think that's just about all they're good for. They do not constitute a corpus of literature to engage students in the big ideas of human existence, which is what our literature in our schools ought to be doing with kids, even at the very youngest levels of -- of schooling. (More on FAQ8)

By the way, and actually Michael Sampson's example brought it to mind -- there is a really interesting trade-off between decoding and comprehension. When you have these decodable texts, these really easy-to-decode texts, notice that they're really hard to understand, because you've got to draw kinds of inferences about what the author really meant, right? (Return to PI)

Point Number 5 -- let me finish Point Number 4. The sooner we admit that simple solutions are not forthcoming, the sooner we are likely to look elsewhere for our major investments of time, energy, and resources. And I think that's what we need to do.

Point Number 5, even if we mandated all the phonics in the world, there would still be a lot of work to do. (More on FAQ2) (More on FAQ8) This is Taffy's point. The business of decoding is just one little piece in a very large complex mosaic that we call reading instruction. If we blow it out of proportion, we will, I'm sure, live to regret it. And I think we just need to remember that, because, you know, even if we did it and did it right, there would still be a lot of other stuff to do. We still wouldn't have a nation of readers.

Point Number 6, if we travel down the phonics road -- and we seem to be traveling down it -- then let's get a phonics that recognizes the journey we have taken in the past 30 years. (Back to FAQ2) I was there. I was a -- I was a fourth-grade teacher and a fifth-grade teacher in the 1960s, and I remember the kind of phonics we taught. And I was there in the 1970s when -- when we really had the phonics revolution (even through I bet that the phonics advocates in this room would not label it so), and I'm telling you that's not a period of our professional lives that I want to go back to.

There was a reason, there was a really good reason why whole language, literature-based reading, and process writing established such a strong beachfront in the 1980s and '90s, and that was because there was something worth revolting against.

Now, if we're going to do this, I actually think we're in a position to teach phonics more effectively than ever before. So now it's time for that special one, Karen [transparency not available]. And I think it's really interesting, and I think we can have a phonics that respects what -- what the research says about effectiveness and reflects the journals -- journeys that we've traveled, that connects phonics to the rest of the curriculum. And if you don't connect phonics to -- phonics the rest of the curriculum, it won't survive.

Now, I think that's what happened to us in terms of these journeys is that we moved from reading as primarily a perceptual process to thinking about it as a cognitive, social, cultural, and political phenomenon. And it's cognitive in the sense that it's active; kids are engaged in it. They develop, if you will, schemata for phonics. It's sociocultural in the sense about how it's learned and how -- and how it's used to make meaning in social situations. And our journey has been a political journey, too, because we understand now that there are no neutral curricular activities, that they all have this sort of political overtone. And because of that, our phonics, I think, has to be different from what it was. (More on FAQ8)

And if you could put up the next page [transparency not available]. It seems to me also that we have -- that we can do phonics better because we know more about teaching phonics than ever. We have effective, delightful, and theoretically empirically grounded ways of teaching important components such as phonemic awareness and letter-sound knowledge. Connie mentioned the work of Linda Ayres.

She's got one of the most exciting phonological awareness programs I've seen. And it's -- you know, you go in there. Phil, you'd never even know it had anything to do with skills. Word sort activities, I think the kind of analogical approaches to phonics that Pat Cunningham talks about, all provide us with better tools than we have ever had before.

We also, in decodable texts, have materials for applying phonics and we don't have to rely on workbooks. And most importantly, we've been -- we have traveled where Connie and Taffy talked about our traveling. We have lots more new ideas to support good phonics instruction, principles like scaffolding, learning communities, authenticity of text, task and text, and the notion of self-assessment that really, ultimately, you are -- you are the person who has to figure out how to use this phonics. So I think we're in the position to really do this quite well.

Point Number 7 -- and, Phyllis, this is in honor of you. Our best hope is a substantial investment in teacher knowledge, professional development, and professional prerogative. (More on FAQ8) (Return to PI) I know -- I know it's sounds self-serving for a college professor to argue that teachers need greater knowledge, and since I cannot escape that criticism I will attempt to explain the rationale behind the claim, rather than hide from it.

It follows fairly naturally from the admission that there are no panaceas. If there is no -- if there is no magical solution, then what we need is teachers who are prepared for any and every eventuality. These will be teachers who understand language, literacy, and learning well enough to adapt teaching and learning environments, materials, and methods to particular groups, situations, and individuals. (More on FAQ5) (More on FAQ8)

By the way, there's a funny thing going on with professional development. Almost no one argues against professional development on the surface of it, but if you look at what we do, it's as if we didn't really believe in it. We enthusiastically support schemes that encourage entry into the teaching profession by individuals with little, even no teaching experience, and even less knowledge about the nature of language and learning. To stay within budget we offer one-shot workshops rather than long-term programs of professional development. And in the past decade, we've severely cut local funding provided for folks who know a lot about reading, who might actually possess the sort of knowledge that I am advocating.

It's hard to argue, based upon our performance, that we as a society value professional knowledge for teachers. Professional development is a strong part of our rhetoric, but our commitment does not extend to our pocketbooks. I think professional development is a hard sell, and I don't know why it is. I don't understand why we are regarded so differently than other professions. In other professions, we simply impute the relationship between knowledge and performance.

You know, I mean, we don't ask it of lawyers, we don't ask it of doctors, we don't ask it of plumbers, or even legislators, that they prove that their knowledge is related to their performance, but we seem to want to require that proof in education.

And I don't think there is any choice. I think we have to make the case in teaching for the importance of professional knowledge. I think we have to demonstrate to policymakers and the public that teaching is sufficiently complex an undertaking to merit the professional status and training that it deserves and, therefore, the societal investment in its development that it requires. (Return to PI)

We need to dispel the important myths that guide public opinion about teaching, such as the myth that teachers are born, not made, or the myth that teaching requires only expertise in the subject matter. We need to build conceptual, empirical, and political arguments to demonstrate that teaching requires a unique combination of subject matter knowledge, professional knowledge, experience, and reflection upon the ways in which these three dimensions interact. And we must not shy away at all from the challenge of associating teacher learning with student learning. I think we are required to demonstrate that if we have more knowledge our students learn better than if we don't. (Back to FAQ5) (More on FAQ8)

Point Number 8, and this is the last point, common ground is important, but so are our differences. (Back to FAQ8) And it's okay, even essential, to have both. A major goal for myself in the past three years has been to learn how we might reach some consensus as a profession of reading teachers on instructional goals and strategies.

I have grown weary of the ideological wars that have characterized the past 10 or so years of rhetoric about practice. I've grown -- grown even wearier of the lack of civility that I see in these scholarly debates. And my desire for consensus and civility has provided my motivation for a recent quest that I have had to build a new educational political party, which in honor of Dwight Eisenhower I have dubbed the Radical Middle.

By the way, that term was coined in the late six -- '50s by Jules Pfeiffer, the famous cartoonist and satirist -- that's exactly how he characterized Eisenhower and his politics, and he must have heard the quote cited earlier today. The problem, by the way, with the middle of the road, I must tell you, is not so much the gutters on the other side; it's the ideological 18-wheelers that travel in either direction.

But I don't want a consensus that requires us to hide our genuine and deep-felt differences, for without differences there would be no opportunity to learn. You know, difference is the basis of all learning. It's the tension between what we know and what somebody else is trying to help us learn, and I think that creates learning. So it's not only okay, it's essential to have conversations with one another, even perhaps even especially when we do not fully agree.

Let me end -- let me end my remarks today by inviting all of you to join that new political party, the Radical Middle. But I don't invite you in to that party in jest, but in all seriousness. My concern in this whole affair is that the voices of those who are as sympathetic as they are resistant to either extreme are not being heard. And my greatest fear is that if the only voices heard in this debate come from the far sides of the room, then one of them will win.

This is not a debate to be won. This is a conversation to provide insights, information, and greater professional knowledge, so that we can all do our jobs better and help those kids whose lives and whose futures we care so desperately about.

My motto for the Radical Middle is simple: "Better to be helpful than politically correct. Better to be involved than theoretically pure. Better to be searching for common ground than for ideological distinction. Better to be in the middle of a road headed somewhere than stuck in a ditch on either side."

DR. HOFFMAN: I have two -- we have two announcements to make before everyone rushes for their airplane. To save time, I'm going to make this announcement. Dialogue will continue -- dialogue will continue at the Greater Houston Area Reading Council's breakfast during the 1997-98 school year. First meeting is October 18, second meeting is January 10th. I see I'm listed as the first speaker. Third meeting is on April 18th. Mark your calendars now.

Let me make just one last comment. I think it was six weeks ago when the IRA board received a request to support this conference and there was quite a bit of exchange, and many exchanges that went on about the feasibility of putting together a conference of this size and the kind of scope that was intended in that sort of amount of time. Obviously we're going to be able to make a report back on the great success of this conference. I would like just for Leslie Patterson and the other people responsible for this conference to stand up. Great job.

Thank you very much.

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Posted October 1997
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