“We are now recommending that for readers in the early stages of reading development, there are times for prompting for meaning and times for prompting for word solving.” When a student is “stuck on an unfamiliar word,” she wrote, “it is important that teachers prompt kids to draw on their phonics knowledge.”Ĭueing is a commonly used strategy in early reading instruction, in which teachers prompt students to draw on multiple sources of information to identify words. (Calkins declined an on-the-record phone interview with Education Week.) “The TCRWP has always recommended that teachers coach kids who encounter unfamiliar words to be active word solvers, but until recently, we have encouraged kids to draw on all their resources to word solve, which meant both asking, ‘What word would make sense there?’ and also asking, ‘What do the letters say?’” Calkins wrote in an emailed statement to Education Week in late October. And it outlines a new approach to word-solving for the organization that steps away from cueing. The recent document covers a range of issues, from phonics instruction to text types to addressing dyslexia. Lucy Calkins, the founding director of TCRWP, is one of the biggest players in the early reading market: Her Units of Study curriculum, commonly known as “reading workshop,” is used by 16 percent of K-2 and elementary special education teachers, according to the 2019 EdWeek Research Center survey. In a document that circulated this fall, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, which develops the popular Units of Study for Teaching Reading curriculum, lays out a series of changes to its philosophy of early reading instruction.
Recently, one of the most influential reading programs in the country took a step away from the method-raising questions about whether other publishers will follow suit, and whether changes to written materials will lead to shifts in classroom practice. Now, there are signs that cueing’s hold on reading instruction may be loosening. In 2019, an EdWeek Research Center survey found that 75 percent of K-2 and elementary special education teachers use the method to teach students how to read, and 65 percent of college of education professors teach it.
Reporting over the last few years, from American Public Media, Education Week, and others, has demonstrated the extent to which these strategies pervade early literacy instruction, and explained why the research suggests they aren’t effective tools for instructing young readers in cracking the alphabetic code. Still, three-cueing is everywhere: in curriculum materials that instruct teachers to prompt students with “think what kind of word would fit ” in classroom anchor charts that encourage making a guess after looking at the first letter of the word and the illustration on the page in popular assessment tools.
0 kommentar(er)
