Guided reading, the system that Lucy Calkins and others promoted, was based on figuring out how struggling readers figure out words in text, and using those strategies to teach beginning readers. Here’s an example. If you are reading a textbook for a discipline that you know very little about, you might use strategies like using the context of the sentence to figure out the unknown word. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that!! But if a child is just learning how to read and they are relying only on those strategies that struggling readers use, they miss out on actually learning the “code” of the language. The books that kids were “reading” in their earliest grades were often pattern books that encouraged kids to guess the words. So the books would say something like “The boy runs. The boy jumps. The boy climbs. The boy plays. The boy has fun!” With a picture on each page to match. During instruction, the teacher would read the first page for the kids. Then, the kids would “read” the rest of the book by applying them pattern and then using the picture clue and the first letter of the word to “read” the unknown word at the end of the sentence. The result, at least from my experience as a grade 3/4 and Grade 7/8 teacher, was that once you removed the pictures and predictable structure of a book, kids could decode CVC words (cat, sit) and some CVCe words (made, late), but when they came to an unknown word without those simple structures or multisyllabic words, they were stuck. They knew short vowels and one spelling pattern for long vowels but were basically relying on context and instinct for everything else. So their skills for decoding new unknown words was extremely limited.
There is a LOT of research, going back literal decades, that shows that a systematic, explicit approach to reading instruction is the key for most learners. Many studies show that 95% of kids will learn to read when taught using a systematic, explicit phonics-based approach. Yes, there are always a few kiddos in my class who are reading when they come in to grade 1. But here’s what I find - the structured literacy approach that I am using in my classroom works wonders for them in their writing ability. Learning how to read words is one thing, but able to write them - and especially figure out how to write unknown words - is another thing. My kiddos who come in as strong readers are often frustrated writers. Because they want to write words that they can’t remember how to spell. And if they haven’t had a phonics based approach the only strategy they have for spelling is from memory. So kiddos who can already read well learn a LOT about spelling from me and end up being very confident writers. I personally also make sure that I talk about morphology and where the “rules” of English come from and how we apply them and my already reading kiddos LOVE learning these things.
The research (and my anecdotal experience) shows that using the 4 cueing approach that Calkins promoted taught about a third of kids well, a third of kids learned to read outside of school, and about a third weren’t learning how to read confidently. The structured literacy approach works for about 95% of kids. A lot of teaching relies on a “good for all, necessary for some” approach. Structured literacy, of which phonics is a part, falls into that camp. The 4 cueing method in early reading instruction was more like “worked for some, harmed some”. When a kid has been taught with the 4 cueing method and they don’t have a good memory, they rely almost entirely on guessing. It literally got in the way of some kids learning to read.
