On January 28, Columbus welcomed educators from across the country and the world for the homecoming of literacy leaders at the first in-person LitCon in three years! Attendees reconnected with literacy leaders and committed to their ongoing professional development. By the end of LitCon, everyone headed home inspired and ready to tackle the rest of the school year.

LitCon ’23 kicked off with a keynote presentation from Patrick Harris, author of The First Five, a love letter to teachers. The audience laughed and cried, feeling invigorated and reconnected to the profession; everyone was reminded why they love being an educator. Next up, attendees walked the purple carpet to The Big Win, a celebration for the Foundation for Struggling Readers with an evening of games and prizes. While the lucky winners got to shout BINGO, everyone had fun partying for a good cause.

Next, a day of learning kicked off with a day full of educational sessions! From Refining Our Teaching Expertise in Reading Recovery to Let Me Take a Selfie! Unpacking the Complexity of Identity, there was something for everyone. In between sessions, attendees browsed the Exhibit Hall and munched on bite-sized speed learning sessions led by LitCon speakers and exhibitors. Hallways buzzed with laughter, brainstorms, and discussions. The energy in the convention center was palpable as attendees reconnected in person for the first time in three years!

In the Monday keynote Teaching Readers (Not Reading), Peter Afflerbach shared how students need skills such as motivation and engagement, self-efficacy, metacognition, self-regulation, and healthy attributions — each representing a “science” of reading — to be successful. He advocated for teachers to teach successful readers, not just reading. After more days of concurrent and featured breakout sessions, LitCon wrapped up Tuesday with Change Over Time in Literacy and Research Policy by Rachael Gabriel. She shared how understanding where we are in the big picture of policy trends, advocacy movements, and broader movements will allow us to move intentionally toward a future that engages and protects liberatory pedagogies for developing literacy. 

By Tuesday afternoon, the convention center was quiet. LitCon attendees traveled home across the country, armed with new skills and techniques to apply to their lessons. Most importantly, attendees left recharged and reenergized from connecting with other educators. Save the date for LitCon ’24, January 27 – 30. We can’t wait to see you next year!

Originally published February 3, 2023 Republished with permission by Paul Thomas, author of the blog Academic Freedom Isn’t Free. https://radicalscholarship.com/2023/02/03/teaching-reading-and-the-goldilocks-dilemma-a-case-for-purposeful-literacy/

Everyone teaching reading is confronted with the Goldilocks’ dilemma.

Using terms offered by Stephen Krashen, I see teaching children to read falling on a spectrum.

Intensive phonics (often called systematic phonics) is serving porridge that is too hot. Zero phonics is serving porridge that is too cold. But basic phonics is serving porridge that is just right.

The current reading war, the “science of reading” (SOR) movement, is little different than any of the proceeding reading wars; once again, the war is being framed as one between intensive/systemic phonics and zero phonics.

And once again, the “just right” option, basic phonics, is being left out of the rhetorical equation.

Let me be very clear. What I am doing is not a call for compromise or for a middle approach. I find the pendulum analogy to be one of the problems with the recurring reading war, in fact.

My proposal is more akin to the conclusions draw in England that showed systematic phonics has not achieved what was promised and that students would be better served with “balance.”

Of course, the word “balance” often triggers the caricature of “balanced literacy” (BL) offered in the SOR movement, a misrepresentation that erases the philosophical and theoretical framing intended in BL (teacher autonomy grounded in serving the individual needs of students).

Where people get lost, I think, and what I am proposing is that the balance isn’t about reading theories (such as balancing phonics and comprehension in instruction), but about how any teacher serves the individual needs of any student.

The balance is about balancing student needs with instructional goals, and then, making sure the teacher and student are provided the appropriate teaching and learning conditions for students to learn to read.

This sort of balance de-centers reading programs and standards, and centers students. As a result most any program or set of standards can be effective or not depending on the teacher’s ability to serve the student’s needs.

Another aspect of this dilemma, I think, is that intensive/systematic phonics will always prove to be too hot because it over-emphasizes the role of the letter-sound system. Nonsense words and decodable texts mislead students about the complexity of decoding and making meaning from text.

Students may be compelled to see phonics as a simple plug-and-play until they encounter “wind” or “dove,” two words that have differing pronunciations in different contexts.

Also consider the maze of problems when exploring the letter “C”:

Cease

Crease

Cause

Cello

Checker

Climb

Slime

Coach

Cat

Space

Cough

Coffee

“C” shares sounds with “S” and “K,” but this series of words presents some satisfying patterns as well as some baffling exceptions that students could better navigate with some background in etymology and with greater experience reading (and thus building their toolbox for making meaning).

The question (which still hasn’t been fully answered by research) has never been if students need phonics, but how much, when, and how that is acquired (upfront v. by extensive reading).

Intensive/systematic phonics is too hot and misleading, I think, for the same reason that worksheet approaches to context clues are ultimately harmful. The “rules” for using context clues tend to work only in sentences designed to prove context clues strategies work.

As I have noted before, this is the training wheels versus balance bicycle dilemma.

The SOR reading war is fundamentally no different than any other reading war; see McQuillan’s debunking of the whole language reading war from the 1990s and note the similar patterns found in the current SOR movement.

Currently, the media misinformation and the misguided political response have made yet another claim that reading instruction has failed to provide systematic phonics (porridge too cold), and now state reading policy and reading program adoption are scrambling to implement structured literacy (scripted curriculum, porridge too hot).

In the US, we have never stepped back from the same old reading war rhetoric that centers all the adults and their (often petty) ideological biases.

Too often, everyone is caught up in selling their thing by demonizing other people’s things.

It is a tremendous failure of logic to shout that current popular reading programs have failed students because publishers and program creators are grabbing the cash, and therefore, we need to change to a different set of programs (with publishers and program creators who are also grabbing cash).

Again, we must stop centering adult ideologies and market interests, and start centering the students themselves and also providing teachers the resources and conditions to serve student needs.

What I propose is purposeful literacy, which has the following framing:

• The teaching of reading begins with individual student artifacts of reading (strengths, needs, etc.)—not programs, standards, or mandates.
• Centering the individual needs of students requires that we address the equity in their lives outside of school as well as in school.
• The effective teaching of reading requires teacher autonomy and teaching and learning conditions that allow teachers to serve individual student needs.
• Reading materials, programs, and standards must be tools that serve teacher instruction and not goals and frameworks for teacher accountability. The current “problem” with reading programs is not the quality of any program but that programs become the goal of teaching (fidelity, “is the teacher implementing the program” v. “is the student being served”).
• Purposeful literacy places reading skills (such as phonics) in both the context of comprehension and critical literacy (moving beyond mere understanding to interrogating text).
• The goal of purposeful literacy is students who are eager, independent, and critical readers.

The reading war approach to education reform is not a fairy tale; it is a horror story, and almost no one survives.

We must set aside the quest for THE program and the THE theory of reading.

Instead of centering all the adults and the concurrent pettiness, we must center the individual needs of students, which includes honoring the autonomy of teachers and providing both teachers and students the teaching and learning conditions that make a “just right” approach possible.

Mary Anne Doyle, University of Connecticut

Originally published in The Journal of Reading Recovery. Interested in full access to the journal? Learn more about becoming a member of RRCNA.

Why do all Reading Recovery® implementations submit data annually?
Each nation offering Reading Recovery has established processes for the annual, national evaluation of their implementations, and this entails collection and analyses of data on all Reading Recovery children served, including those participating in redevelopments of Reading Recovery in Spanish (Descubriendo la Lectura or DLL) and French (Intervention preventive en lectureécriture or IPLÉ). Procedures for the annual evaluations of DLL and IPLÉ parallel those of Reading Recovery and are not discussed separately.

In the U.S., centralized procedures are conducted by the International Data Evaluation Center (IDEC) at The Ohio State University. In Canada, the Canadian Institute of Reading Recovery (CIRR) directs this work with technical assistance as needed. In each case, procedures adhere to formal research practices and are designed to answer questions allowing evaluation of how well the national implementation is meeting its goals. What level of success is achieved by the learners struggling to acquire beginning literacy? What do the analyses reveal in terms of both (a) strengths of the implementation and (b) areas in need of attention and improvement?

Reports generated by IDEC and CIRR additionally provide local data (e.g., state/provincial data, site data, school data) to allow assessments by individual implementations. The data are examined to assure that Reading Recovery teachers are meeting the expectations of this trademark program for learners and schools and to identify any implementation issues.

Design of the evaluation of the Reading Recovery implementation research
The national data evaluation questions and processes are based on Marie Clay’s earliest studies of the implementation of Reading Recovery in the U.S. (i.e., beginning in 1984). As Clay initiated the implementation of Reading Recovery in Columbus, OH, she designed a replication study to examine the effectiveness of this new venture. Her initial inquiry was, Can the Reading Recovery innovation, with its impressive record of proven results in New Zealand, be replicated in the U.S. demonstrating success for children, teachers, and schools?

Clay was an astute researcher and theorist and asserted that, “Implementation and dissemination have their own bodies of theory and their own evaluation criteria and innovations do not last unless due attention is paid to these aspects of an innovation” (Clay, 1994, p. 139). Thus, her replication studies established formal procedures for the evaluation of implementation factors. In designing this research, two realities observed by Clay were of concern:

• establishing quality control over implementation factors in order to prevent changes (creative and uncreative) that would be detrimental to the effectiveness of Reading Recovery (Clay, 2009b), and
• establishing a system for confirming that the innovation is being implemented as designed by her in order to optimize results (Clay, 2009a, 2009b).

Only if implemented as designed could Marie Clay, and Reading Recovery trainers, offer specific guarantees for positive outcomes for Reading Recovery. These concerns remain today.

Annual data collection helps ensure quality of the implementation
Very early in her replication research, Marie Clay concluded that she needed to establish strong ‘guard rails’ for Reading Recovery, and she therefore turned to trademark law. In the U.S. she granted the royalty-free trademark for Reading Recovery to The Ohio State University with the understanding that the university would establish and maintain a center for the ongoing collection and reporting of annual data. CIRR fulfills this responsibility in Canada. The trademark is the guarantee to all participants of a quality intervention supported by research and monitored annually for effectiveness. With the collection and reporting of the annual data by all participants, the holders of the trademark confirm compliance with the trademark assurances and standards by each university training center and by all participating teachers and schools. These standards are presented in formal documents published by each nation (e.g., Standards and Guidelines of Reading Recovery in the United States; CIRR Standards and Guidelines).

The annual, national data evaluation provides an ongoing check on the implementation of Reading Recovery, and the data are examined to reveal implementation strengths and concerns. Any concerns are addressed by trainers who monitor implementation effectiveness and problem solve challenges with trainer colleagues, as well as with their respective sites’ teacher leaders, and site coordinators, as appropriate. The system for data collection, initiated by Marie Clay, entails a methodology that allows for outcome and process evaluations (Gómez-Bellengé, 2009) and the identification of factors that are key to answering the research questions in an objective and standard way (i.e., used in a consistent way by all participants). This is the research process that is applied to establish assumptions of reliability and replicability.

In conclusion
Continuing Clay’s evaluation research processes ensures that Reading Recovery is maintained with fidelity to Marie Clay’s theoretical perspectives. These include her theories of research designed to evaluate an intervention as well as her theories of literacy, teaching, and learning as they pertain to both training teachers and instructing learners struggling to acquire beginning literacy. In doing so, we are continuing critically important practices that have sustained the Reading Recovery innovation in North America for nearly 38 years. Without taking this position, the royalty-free trademark for Reading Recovery cannot be used to describe the intervention. It remains the responsibility of each trainer, teacher leader, and teacher to uphold and preserve the integrity of Reading Recovery nationally and within their respective sites.

References
Clay, M. M. (1994). Reading Recovery: The wider implications of an educational intervention. Literacy, Teaching and Learning: An International Journal of Early Literacy, 1(1), 121–141.

Clay, M. M. (2009a). The Reading Recovery research reports. In B. Watson & B. Askew (Eds.), Boundless horizons, Marie Clay’s search for the possible in children’s literacy (pp. 35–100). Pearson Education New Zealand.

Clay, M. M. (2009b). Implementing Reading Recovery internationally. In B. Watson & B. Askew (Eds.), Boundless horizons, Marie Clay’s search for the possible in children’s literacy (pp. 221–249).

Pearson Education New Zealand. Gómez-Bellengé, F. (2009). Monitoring Reading Recovery in the United States. In B. Watson & B. Askew (Eds.), Boundless horizons, Marie Clay’s search for the possible in children’s literacy. Pearson Education New Zealand.

Dr. Mary Anne Doyle is chair of the International Reading Recovery Trainers Organization Executive Board and has served as consulting editor for the Marie Clay Literacy Trust. She is a member of the North American Trainers Group, a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and former director of Reading Recovery in Connecticut.