Did you know that faulty teaching methods can cause learning disabilities?
How schools trick you into dumbing-down your child… and how to stop them cold. Early reading the right way!
"If the student doesn't learn, the teacher hasn't taught." (Tarver, 1999)
Is your child’s school really telling you the truth? Five ways to tell:
1. Does your child’s school teach by the look-say method?
2. Does it use the child-led discovery method?
3. Does your child’s teacher say s/he can’t concentrate and needs medication?
4. Does your child’s school blame his/her misbehavior on you, the parent(s)?
5. Does it use “reform” mathematics?
If your child has been “diagnosed” with dyslexia, ADHD, or other learning disabilities, AND was taught by any of the above methods, the LD was probably induced by those faulty teaching methods. Or your child may be gifted, but bored. Or has lost confidence due to the self-fulfilling prophecy of being told that s/he has problems.
To help your child to be his best, keep him away from the Whole Language (look-say, sight-word) methods of reading. I often focus on phonics in my columns, and there is a very important reason for this. Bright children usually know how to read well – it is the foundation of everything else – and that is impossible with the Whole Language method. Why, you ask?
The Whole Language dogma is a pernicious propaganda that has nearly destroyed reading ability in all the English-speaking countries; not just the in United States, but it also invaded the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and possibly New Zealand. What surprises me is that the governments, universities, and public school administrators turned a deaf ear to those of us proclaiming that this “emperor has no clothes”.
(Of course, the children of our government elite usually attend private schools where proper phonics is taught.)
The Whole Language fiasco convinced leaders and teachers that phonics was low-level sub-skills. It indoctrinated them to think that explicit, systematic phonics was lower-order thinking. This is completely the opposite of the truth, but several nations swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Is there a purposeful, dumbing-down of future voters, here?
What the Whole Language doctrine put in place of intelligent phonics was a system of ‘natural’ learning (we know that even though language* is natural to humans, reading is not. It must be taught).
*I must insert here that language is not as natural to children as anthropologists, linguists, and science would have us believe. A study on feral children, those who have survived on their own in the wild from young ages without nurturing from other humans, shows that if not caught early enough, they are never able to learn to talk. The critical window for brain-mapping of language is in the early years. Without human interaction, the brain loses that ability.
Whole Language taught a ‘cueing system’ where looking at the context of the sentence helped the child guess at the unknown word. Yes, it said guess. What a slow, frustrating, error-filled process.
There is no more damaging method that guessing. My youngest son is a perfectionist. If he guessed incorrectly, he would be distraught, give up, and his self-esteem would suffer deeply. Luckily, his mother taught him phonics early and right.
Then Whole Language goes on to say that children can get others to help them guess, called cooperative learning. They ask the question, ‘What would make sense, here?’ They see what letter the word started with and how long it was, and guess at possibilities from the limited words that they learned by sight-reading. How horrible! And it doesn’t help them with isolated words, such as signs, where there are no pictures, clues, contexts or cooperative partners. The children are confounded and confused. Basically, a Whole Language reader is still illiterate.
True comprehension and 'meaning-making' come from decoding a word properly by phonics, getting it right in a short amount of time, knowing what it is, and knowing the rest of the sentence words with confidence. Never from guessing.
As mentioned in Vol. 5 of It’s Not Rocket Surgery!, the causes of many remediation classes in education are two-fold: discovery-learning and sight-reading. Each of these alone is damaging, but the marriage of them together in many preschools and schools is devastating. I’m not the only one raising the red flag. Listen to these experts:
“The most extensive evaluation of Follow Through data covers the years 1968-1977; however, the program continued to receive funding from the government until 1995. Stebbins, et al. (1977, pp. xxiv-xxviii) reported the principal findings as follows:
“Models that emphasize basic skills succeed better than other models in helping children gain these skills” (p. xxv)
“Where models have put their primary emphasis elsewhere than on the basic skills, the children they served have tended to score lower on tests of these skills than they would have done without [Project] Follow Through” (p. xxvi)
“Models that emphasize basic skills produced better results on tests of self-concept* than did other models” (p. xxvi) [i.e. better self-esteem.]
“One outcome of Project Follow Through was that it clearly documented the most effective instructional approach. The Direct Instruction model placed first in reading, arithmetic, spelling, language, basic skills, academic cognitive skills, and positive self-image.[2]”
Previous chapters of It’s Not Rocket Surgery! have discussed the role of auditory processing in children with dyslexia. Even children who are gifted in other areas may struggle with speech and reading. Here are a few more notes about the key role that early reading has in repairing auditory processing and preventing dyslexia.
Back in the 1980s it was thought that dyslexia was caused by visual processing difficulties. The theory was that children saw a letter backwards, so wrote it backwards. This is an impossibility because the backwards letter would now look forwards to the child, which still wouldn't match the way s/he saw the printed one.
The more likely explanation is that the same slow, temporal-lobe processing in the brain that affects audio signals affects visual signals as well, but that the main cause of dyslexia is the audio processing and hearing difficulties. Using the remedial methods given previously, as the child's audio processing capabilities speed up, so do the visual ones. As the temporal lobe increases its timing ability, it spills over and affects visual signals and handwriting, too.
To a child, letters are 3-dimensional objects. A dog is still a dog whether you're looking at it from the front, behind, or either side. In the same way, a child thinks the letter b should still be a b in any position, whether flipped over or upside down, and doesn't understand why it changes names to d, p, or q. Learning that the ‘dog’ (specific letter) is no longer a dog in a different orientation - takes time. Proper phonics teaching helps a child differentiate the letters. Continuing with Project Follow Through results:
“On March 31, 1978, Senator Robert (Bob) Packwood inquired about why the Direct Instruction model was not being funded at a higher level given that it was the only model that showed strong academic and affective gains at all sites.
“In his reply Ernest Boyer, U.S. Commissioner of Education, acknowledges that "the evaluation found that only one (Direct Instruction) of the 22 models which were assessed in the evaluation consistently produced positive outcomes."
And yet, the U.S. Government did/does nothing to promote the truth to the teachers and parents who do the hands-on educating of our children. The dumbing-down of America obviously has a political basis, whose end goals may be chilling if known. “No Child Left Behind” has become ALL children left behind. See section (e), below.
1. Education as experimentation: A planned variation model, Stebbins, L.B., St. Pierre, R.G., Proper, E.C., Anderson, R.B., & Cerva, T.R. (1977). (Vol IV-A). Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates.
2. War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse, Engelmann, S. (1992) Halcyon House, Portland, OR.
Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Follow_Through
“The main idea behind these critiques is that learners need guidance (Kirschner et al., 2006), but [much] later as they gain confidence and become competent than they may learn through discovery.”
3. "Intensive intervention for students with mathematics disabilities: Seven principles of effective practice". Learning Disability Quarterly 31 (2): 79–92. Fuchs, L. S., Fuchs, D., Powell, S. R., Seethaler, P. M., Cirino, P. T., & Fletcher, J. M. (2008).
4. "Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: an analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching". Educational Psychologist 41 (2): 75–86. Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., and Clark, R. E. (2006).
Note: experiential is based on experience. Small children, ages 2-11, don’t have enough yet. I would also add experimental learning in the list of failures above. (Sight-readers may not understand the difference of experiential vs. experimental, but both are wrong for young children.)
5. "Should there be a three-strikes rule against pure discovery learning? The case for guided methods of instruction". American Psychologist 59 (1): 14–19. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.14. Mayer, R. (2004).
6. Education Deform. Kauffman, J. M. (2002). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Just reading through the titles of the above studies and articles is enough to make us parents cringe at what sight-reading and discovery-learning (whole-language, with all its other names) are doing to our children! We have to change what we’re teaching the teachers to teach!
Those of us who do or have homeschooled still have a responsibility to push for educational changes because public education students are part of the world our children will inherit as adults. We owe it to every child to help him/her be his/her best self. And we need to resist letting the misguided ideas of “Your Baby Can Read” and/or complete “unschooling” become the norm.
I have always been proud of the fact that homeschoolers traditionally support phonics. Kudos to those public and private schools that teach phonics properly and have teacher-lead lessons. Early reading the right way for all! Data over dogma, reason over rhetoric. Continuing on:
“Direct Instruction is a general term for the explicit teaching of a skill-set using lectures or demonstrations of the material, rather than exploratory models such as inquiry-based learning. There is usually some element of frontal instruction and a general concept of the skill or lesson, usually with a formal lesson plan or scripted teaching.
“This method is often contrasted with discovery learning, student-led learning, [*self-esteem first,] tutorials, participatory laboratory classes, discussion, recitation, seminars, workshops, observation, case study, active learning, inquiry-based learning, practica, or internships. [The hinge-pin in these failed methods is usually sight-reading – a dismal failure, which often induces dyslexia.]
“While many support discovery learning, because they feel students learn better if they "learn by doing," there is little empirical evidence to support this claim, quite the contrary in fact. Instead, fifty years of empirical data does not support those using these unguided methods of instruction.”[4]
Unguided methods don’t like measuring student progress. Of course they don’t want their students’ progress measured – it proves there isn’t much. In addition opponents suggest that aptitude tests focus on students' ability to solve problems. As if that’s a problem?!
Ernest House and Gene Glass had a large hand in convincing the U.S. Education Department that phonics and direct-instruction don’t matter. As reported by Bonnie Grossen, http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adiep/ft/grossen.htm, “Glass wrote another report for the National Institute of Education (NIE), which convinced them not to disseminate the results of the FT evaluations they had paid 30 to 40 million dollars to have done.
“The following is an ERIC abstract of Glass's report to the NIE: The discussion is based on the following [false] assumptions: (1) Past evaluations of FT have been quantitative, experimental approaches to deriving value judgments; (2) The deficiencies of quantitative, experimental evaluation approaches are so thorough and irreparable as to disqualify their use; [You might as well cancel all science data then!]”
7. "FT" Evaluation, National Institute of Education, Glass, G. & Camilli, G., 1981, Washington, DC. ERIC Reproduction Service ED244738.)
http://thegodfreymethod.com
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