Why Didn’t I Learn this in College?
Last weekend I had a glorious time catching up with college roommates in the small Ohio town of Wooster. We were able to catch up and chat over yummy Asian fusion, eclectic cocktails, all why saying a big thank you to our hubbies for watching our small people and shuffling them to their various spring activities.
As the majority of my roommates were fellow education majors from our alma mater, we all have elementary age children, and education is often a topic of discussion. As we chatted about recent changes to Indiana’s licensing requirements for teachers to obtain a literacy endorsement in order to renew their teaching certificates, and what all that currently entails, a common theme emerged from our dialogue… why weren’t any of us taught the components that go into learning how to read?
If you too have found yourself in this place, where you’ve never heard of Gough and Tumner’s Simple View of Reading, or Scarborough’s Reading Rope, much less McClelland and Seidenberg’s Four Part Processing System, Ehri’s Phases of Reading Development, or any of the recent FMRI results of the reading brain, then I can sympathize! It wasn’t until spring of 2021 that I first stumbled across Amplify’s Science of Reading Handbook, and encountered the simple yet complex model of thinking of reading as two essential components, Word Recognition (think decoding automatically) and Language Comprehension (think all the complexities that go into understanding a language, from background knowledge of the topic, vocabulary, syntax, etc.). Each one of these two parts is teased out into individual strands of literacy knowledge as modeled through Scarborough’s Reading Rope.
These models and the research around them has been around since the 80’s. This isn’t new… however where this research is taking place, mostly in schools of cognitive psychology, have struggled to communicate successfully with the schools of education. This has resulted in silos of information, and teachers left in the dark about what research says about how we learn to read, how to create the conditions necessary for reading comprehension to occur.
I’ve noticed this in too many areas of life, everything is segmented and information is segregated, that we struggle to know how to synthesize and integrate multiple components. But that’s where the beauty lies, isn’t it? Can you imagine eating separate ingredients from your favorite meal? Or a watercolor without the intricacies of one shade blending and melding with another? Reading is much the same way, we need multiple components coming together to support understanding what the author is trying to tell us. As teachers, we must know how these different elements come together, and which are more important to a learner at which points in their educational career.
I’m sad that I didn’t have this information sooner, and that I wasn’t taught this in college, however I am grateful for the opportunities to dive in deeper to the Science of Reading, learn from what the research says as it becomes more and more available to educators, and to share my learning with you all!
