Reading Hearing Q: Can Teachers Pivot?

Amber Moye told city lawmakers she and her fellow teachers got a glimpse of how to change the way kids learn to read — how she believes New Haven is ready to follow the state in making the shift.

Moye, a third-grade teacher at Barnard Environmental Science & Technology School, spoke about that at a public hearing at City Hall Wednesday night. She urged New Haven to move from ​“balanced literacy” to ​“structured literacy” instruction. Structured literacy focuses on teaching kids how to sound out words and about rules of grammar and diction instead of, say, having them guess what words are based on pictures.

A public schools administrator charged with charting the system’s course, meanwhile, told alders officials aren’t yet convinced and have concerns about how quickly teachers can learn a new approach.

The debate took place at a City Hall ​“workshop” convened by the Board of Alders Education Committee. It mirrored a national debate about the two approaches to teaching reading.

It was the committee’s second workshop on the topic. (Click here to read about the first workshop hosted in April.) 

Hovering over the discussion was whether New Haven will comply with or seek a waiver to newly passed state ​“Right To Read” legislation. State Sen. Gary Winfield presented on the new rules during the workshop. Winfield informed the 15 attendees that the law will require school districts to switch to one of five state-approved reading models based on structured literacy by July 1, 2023; or seek an exception that would need approval from the state’s newly established Center for Literacy Research and Reading Success. 

The alders also heard from Margie Gillis, a certified academic language therapist who’s helping teachers learn the new approach and the founder of Literacy How; and New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Ivelise Velazquez, the point person locally on the issue. 

Education Committee Chair Alder Eli Sabin said the community workshops are designed to provide ​“hope for improvement” for all and ​“get to the bottom of the rights and wrongs” causing the district’s reading crisis, in which more than half of elementary school students are reading below grade level. (Click here to read a story about additional NHPS teachers’ advocacy for a shift to structured literacy; and here to read a New York Times article about how the leading national promoter of the approach used by New Haven and thousands of other school systems has renounced it based on newer brain research.) 

He added that the workshops will keep the public in the loop and involved in the decisions about whether and how to shift New Haven’s approach to reading instruction. (Click here to read an American Public Media story by former Independent education reporter Christopher Peak about a popular reading program that recent research proved to be ineffective.) 

Velasquez: Teachers May Not Be Ready To Learn System

Velazquez, who was a first-grade reading teacher for 27 years, spoke of how the district is embarking on its own research and process for deciding how to proceed with reading. She said New Haven’s teachers are underpaid and overworked; she said this will be factored into the district’s decision-making process on whether to train them in a new model over the coming year.

“We have to really prioritize how we use time,” she said. ​“Time is not on our side. We don’t have enough money to pay teachers for that time. We don’t have the luxury of saying, ​‘This week is going to be a four-day week, and on the fifth day teachers will be immersed in theory and lesson planning,’ which would be ideal.”

She announced that the district will host a symposium in coming weeks that will present teachers, parents, students, and community members with research findings on the science of reading. She said a panel at the symposium will feature students discussing their reading experiences in NHPS. 

“We’re bringing some scholars together to talk about all the science of reading,” she said. ​“There’s been a lot written about the science of reading. What is all the science of reading? What are all the different types of experts saying about what comes next?” 

Velazquez argued that the reading crisis is not just a result of the current reading model but also of students’ home lives and a need for more racial consciousness. 

“We have different kinds of households,” she said, recalling that she learned to read English in school in the Bronx while speaking Spanish at home. 

The district aims to factor in race, linguistics and economics to ​“eliminate the predictability of the scores,” she said.

“The theory and research is only one piece of this,” she said. ​“We really need to think long and hard about the structures that we have in place and how to make it so those teachers are able to turn that theory into good practice. And one of these things Is making sure they understand the stories of our children. Making sure they understand culturally relevant pedagogy. And that the lessons are not designed in the vacuum from theory to practice.” 

She said the district will spend a year inquiring about what is working and what’s not before deciding on a new reading approach model. She said it is not likely that the district will apply for an exception waiver from the state for a new model, though a decision has not yet been made. 

Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller asked why the second-grade curriculum doesn’t include grammar and sentence structure, at least according to her second grader’s teacher. Velazquez said the two are in fact in the district’s framework but may not be taught in the classroom due to a lack of professional development. 

“What do you have in the budget or what are your plans for PD [professional development] for the teachers?” asked Alder Sal Punzo, a retired principal.

“We are hurting there for sure,” Velazquez responded.

Teacher: We Saw It Work

In her turn at the mic, Moye spoke of an experiment she and fellow Barnard teachers undertook this year with the help of federal pandemic-relief dollars. They were able to break elementary students into smaller cohorts and teach them based on structured literacy principles.

Unlike in past years, Moye started off this year’s reading lessons with her third graders with time blocks to begin with phonics rules. 

Despite research saying students should learn to read by first grade, she said, over the years her third-grade students would come to her not ready to ​“read to learn” but instead still learning to read.

Gillis reported that only 1 in 8 students will catch up in learning to read if they don’t learn by first grade. 

Moye said the district’s reading model has gaps in phonics lessons and required teachers like her to teach students to rely on pictures and guess when it came to decoding a word rather than sounding it out. 

“When we say that [only] 30 percent of our kids in first, second, and third grade are at grade level, clearly it’s not working,” she said of the current district reading model. 

This year Barnard’s literacy team helped teachers like Moye meet each of their students’ needs with phonics by first teaching them the 44 sounds (phonemes) of the English language. By year’s end the number of students performing at grade level on assessments had doubled, she reported. The new method also boosted their confidence.

A year earlier, only 10 percent of Barnard kindergarteners were proficient on the​“phoneme segmentation fluency” assessment. This year 89 percent of that same group of students, now first-graders, are proficient, thanks to the program. This year 51 percent of kindergarteners are proficient.

“We shouldn’t be indebted to a system that doesn’t work,” Moye argued.

Trainer: Teachers Can Get It

During GIllis’ presentation, she discussed the history of research that worked to prove the effectiveness of structured literacy dating back to 2000, as well as research by Haskins Laboratories, which worked with several Connecticut school districts to offer reading intervention and professional development that increased dozens of districts’ reading scores. (Click here to view the presentation.) 

Gillis added that under the administration of former Mayor Toni Harp, a 2017 Blue Ribbon Commission on Reading Report identified gaps in curriculum, instruction, and assessment within NHPS. (Click here to read the 2017 report.) 

This spring Gillis began conducting a 16-session structured literacy course with 12 New Haven teachers to learn new teaching techniques. She added that a shift to a structured literacy model does not require a lot of material changes but instead primarily professional development for teachers.