Twitter debate about promotion of Reading Recovery by Dylan Wiliams versus 'everyone else'...Greg Ashman weighs in...

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

An increasing number of people from various countries in the world are joining in the Twitter debate with Dylan Wiliam sharing his views about the role of Reading Recovery at the heart of the debate.

Teacher/blogger, Greg Ashman, explains:

The Reading Recovery moral dilemma

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2018/1 ... l-dilemma/

There has been a debate raging in my Twitter notifications between Dylan Wiliam and, from my perspective at least, everyone else. Wiliam’s position, as I understand it, is that Reading Recovery is an effective intervention for struggling readers that, perhaps more importantly, has been shown to work at scale. Although Wiliam thinks it is based on flawed science, it is better that struggling readers are given access to an intervention that is available now than given nothing at all. Although systematic synthetic phonics is a promising approach that aligns with cognitive science, there is no reason to think it will be quick or easy to either change the way reading is taught in schools or develop and deliver systematic synthetic phonics interventions to remedy poor reading instruction. Why let the best be the enemy of the good?

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Greg Ashman's thought-processes continue providing interesting food for thought for others:

What if we are thinking about implementation in the wrong way?

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2018/1 ... wrong-way/

Education researchers spend a lot of time worrying about implementation issues. In an ideal world, a promising approach would first be tested by its developers. It would then be tested on a relatively small scale by researchers who are independent of the developers before being rolled out for a much larger test ‘at scale’. Many promising approaches stumble along this path.

Indeed, on Twitter, Dylan Wiliam has been pointing to the fact that Reading Recovery has seemingly passed through all of these stages and has challenged advocates of systematic synthetic phonics to point to a programme they prefer that has done the same.

However, I can’t help wondering if we are thinking about implementation in the wrong way. We may be viewing it as the purely technical exercise of getting teachers to do and say certain things and neglecting the values and beliefs of those teachers. Nobody operates in an ideological vacuum and there are as many ways to subvert, consciously or otherwise, the intentions of the developers as there are teachers and classrooms.