I was first introduced to the Reading and Writing workshop by my wife about a decade ago. At the time she was teaching 4th grade social studies at a fancy-pants school in Menlo Park. We didn’t talk much about phonetics as these kids could already parse text. For these kids the goal was to get them to read and write.
For this purpose the program is much better than the standard curriculum. Also notice that this was social studies and not English class. Reading and writing is a holistic experience that is required for any academic subject and should be reinforced in every subject.
My wife has informed me that phonetic instructions for first-time readers was already in the program when she was trained almost a decade ago, a revision based on clinical feedback.
My wife fought tooth-and-nail to get rid of the 1960s curriculum of hammering grammar into 9 year olds at the school she was dean of curriculum at here in Austin.
Unfortunately, the Reading and Writing Workshop has been under assault from the popular media recently so now a few teachers are rallying to bring back the 1960s.
The truth is that reading and writing have very little to do with sounding out words and following rules. They are key epistemological activities for humankind.
There’s not much point in teaching people “good grammar” (of which I am a big fan of because I’m a word nerd) beyond social signaling. It certainly isn’t very useful.
The goal of education in our republic is to create an ever-expanding citizenry capable of self-reflection and self-governance. These are Enlightened ideals but so is this entire political project that we’ve been undertaking.
Is this even possible? Look at who could vote in 1781. Would you call them literate? What does literate mean? Does it stop at a 12th grade level? Are you somewhat illiterate if I make a reference to Greek mythology yet you don’t know what the word means? Sure, maybe I should pick “rock” and “hard place” instead of Scylla and Charybdis, and maybe I could limit my vocabulary to just 1,000 basic words, but that comes at a cost.
What self-governance requires is not utilitarian but deeply philosophical in nature. It require a deep love of knowledge for the majority of people who are polled.
This seems to be the motivating factor behind the Reading and Writing Workshop, instilling the love of reading and writing in students, at least from what I have seen second-hand.
These are all incredible goals to strive for once the kids are literate in the trivial basic sense of being capable, when handed an unfamiliar text, of working out what the words are.
If they are literate in that simple trivial way, instilling the love of reading and writing is a worthy goal and they are capable of becoming literate in the various wider political / social senses you describe. Even if they can't yet read in the sense of knowing what all the words and concepts mean, they can at least now encounter and name the things they don't know, and so have paths they can follow to find those things out.
If they are not in this way literate, no amount of instilling the love will help. The texts they are presented with might as well be in Linear A. There is no path to get the words from the page into the child or vice versa, and so the child cannot come to love the activities of reading and writing, wrestle with the ideas they encounter or any other fun enlightened things.
Teaching must begin with the basic building blocks before any other structure can be built above them. Any call to skip that first step before a child has mastered it is a call for lifelong ignorance.
I agree and so do the people who run the Reading and Writing Workshop!
What is missing from the criticism is any sort of purpose or ideal for education in the first place.
Literacy starts with phonics but it must never end there!
It’s sort of like bikeshedding. I guess we can all agree that, yes, we use a phonetic alphabet and learning how to sound things out is going to be a valuable lifelong skill. It’s also hilarious when the technique is applied to names from other languages.
For this purpose the program is much better than the standard curriculum. Also notice that this was social studies and not English class. Reading and writing is a holistic experience that is required for any academic subject and should be reinforced in every subject.
My wife has informed me that phonetic instructions for first-time readers was already in the program when she was trained almost a decade ago, a revision based on clinical feedback.
My wife fought tooth-and-nail to get rid of the 1960s curriculum of hammering grammar into 9 year olds at the school she was dean of curriculum at here in Austin.
Unfortunately, the Reading and Writing Workshop has been under assault from the popular media recently so now a few teachers are rallying to bring back the 1960s.
The truth is that reading and writing have very little to do with sounding out words and following rules. They are key epistemological activities for humankind.
There’s not much point in teaching people “good grammar” (of which I am a big fan of because I’m a word nerd) beyond social signaling. It certainly isn’t very useful.
The goal of education in our republic is to create an ever-expanding citizenry capable of self-reflection and self-governance. These are Enlightened ideals but so is this entire political project that we’ve been undertaking.
Is this even possible? Look at who could vote in 1781. Would you call them literate? What does literate mean? Does it stop at a 12th grade level? Are you somewhat illiterate if I make a reference to Greek mythology yet you don’t know what the word means? Sure, maybe I should pick “rock” and “hard place” instead of Scylla and Charybdis, and maybe I could limit my vocabulary to just 1,000 basic words, but that comes at a cost.
What self-governance requires is not utilitarian but deeply philosophical in nature. It require a deep love of knowledge for the majority of people who are polled.
This seems to be the motivating factor behind the Reading and Writing Workshop, instilling the love of reading and writing in students, at least from what I have seen second-hand.