Kirsten Duncombe, Learning and Support Teacher, takes a 'critical thinking' slant on the reading debate - and comments, "Effective literacy instruction is too important an issue for any of us to take a public or professional stance on without having done our homework. Have we engaged in wide reading and research on this issue, from both sides of the divide? And are we modelling best practice critical thinking methodology that would do our students proud?"
Our IFERI site shows over and again - through historic and current research-evidence, leading-edge practice and critical thinking - that we have a major, global problem with regard to reading instruction practices.
This includes problems with initial teacher-training; long-standing and popular flawed literacy programmes; mistrained or untrained teachers in reading and spelling instruction; widespread weak or flawed teaching and learning practices; provision based on beliefs, philosophies and unambitious mindsets rather than research findings; the same publishers producing contradictory literacy material under their own label; wide-scale unnecessarily high levels of 'dyslexia' in the English language; vociferous ongoing debate laying bare that teachers' professional understanding and children's literacy provision is based on 'chance' and NOT on the wealth of available research-evidence; widespread misunderstanding about the nature of the English spelling system and how best to teach reading and spelling amongst the general public, the teaching and teacher-training profession, literacy organisations, politicians, children's authors, and teachers' union leaders.
This mess is a huge problem.
As Kirsten points out in her very important article, is everyone discharging their duty, however, when it comes to their stance in the reading debate?
https://kirstenduncombe.wordpress.comTHINK ON THIS
A response to the NSW Teachers Federation's public stance on the teaching of reading
...It is notable that the NSW Teachers Federation has recently weighed in on matters of effective literacy instruction. Specifically, the NSW Teachers Federation commissioned Sydney University Professor Robyn Ewing to write a report on the teaching of reading. This report, published in mid-2018 and entitled Exploding Some of the Myths about Learning to Read, was commissioned after a departmental research paper was published that supported an emphasis on synthetic phonics when teaching reading. In her paper, Robyn Ewing makes clear her belief that phonics in context, as already embedded in most initial teacher training programs, and as currently practised in the majority of primary schools across Australia, is enough.
It is not my intention here to weigh in on the specifics of this ongoing debate.
Instead, I wish to come at this from the perspective of a subject close to the heart of all of us in education: critical thinking.
Carl Sagan wisely noted that “science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge”. This quotation dovetails nicely with the Oxford dictionary’s definition of critical thinking as “the process of analysing information in an objective way, in order to make a judgement about it”.
One of our 21st Century teaching objectives is to foster and reward critical thinking in our students, preparing them, in as much as we ever can, for the unique challenges that the coming decades will bring. It is only fitting, then, that we hold ourselves, and each other, to high standards in this domain also, actively engaging in, and acknowledging, critical thinking methodology.
If the NSW Teachers Federation, or anyone else for that matter, wants to comment or advise on the place of systematic synthetic phonics in early reading instruction, it is imperative that they first acquaint themselves with the research and the theory on both sides of the debate.