My response to Jan Richardson and Michele Dufresne, Part 3

Hello, Anna Geiger here. Today in Episode 111, I'm responding to Jan Richardson and Michèle Dufresne. They recently shared a webinar called Getting the Facts Straight on Guided Reading. Buckle up because this week, the first thing we're going to do is listen to Jan Richardson's defense of three-cueing.

Dr. Jan Richardson: So now I get to talk about the sources of information, and some of you have probably heard the term three-cueing systems. Now this is a tricky topic to explain because instructional practice has basically twisted it out of shape.

First of all, the three-cueing system is not a program for teaching reading. MSV is a simplified theory of the complex process of reading. In Reading Recovery circles, meaning, structure, and visual are better described as sources of information that students use when they try to figure out an unknown word in connected text.

On page 13 of the Science of Reading: Defining Guide, it says, "In recent years, our knowledge of how the brain acquires the skill of reading has evolved. We now have a deeper understanding of how the brain processes multiple sources of information while reading."

Anna Geiger: She says, "It's not a program." People who are criticizing three-cueing do not think it's a program. We know that it's exactly what she just said it was - when kids are using multiple sources of information to land on a word.

And nice try quoting from the page in the Reading League's Science of Reading: Defining Guide. Her quote is actually from the page about how reading is processed in the brain, so she's taken it out of context. She didn't bother reading the quote on page 22, which says, "Examples of instructional practices not supported by scientific evidence: implicit and incidental instruction in word reading, visual memorization of whole words, guessing from context, and picture cues.

Dr. Jan Richardson: So what's the problem? I wish we could just end the conversation here and go home, but the cueing systems have been attacked and even banned, not because anyone disagrees that students need to use these multiple sources of information, but because of misinformation and misunderstandings.

Anna Geiger: Hang on a second. We know that students use multiple sources of information to check their reading, right? If you read it and it didn't sound right or didn't make sense, you'll go back and fix it, but that's not how we IDENTIFY the word. We identify the word by actually reading it - looking at the word, sounding it out. She's being very tricky here.

Dr. Jan Richardson: See, these three points on this slide is why the MSV is under fire. I'm going to explain about the misinformation of the V, and about how the teachers are misunderstanding how to use MSV, and then the confusion that has aroused about the guessing versus the processing.

So a few months ago, actually it was last month, I watched a recording of the Virginia Education Summit and during the meeting, a senior policy fellow was asked to enlighten the group on MSV. Now, this first quote is what she actually said. I transcribed it for you. She said, "Children are being asked to rely on visual cues, to look at the picture to determine what the word is." She continued by saying, "None of the cueing systems require students to look at the word and decode it."

Now my friends, that is just flat out wrong. That is not true, but unfortunately, this is a common misunderstanding among science of reading cognitive psychologists. Just yesterday, I received an email from an expert, a science of reading expert who I respect, but she said, "With MSV, children are encouraged to use those three cues as the way to recognize a word without decoding it. They are taught to guess at the word based on its possible meaning."

If that's what people think V is, no wonder some departments of education are banning reading programs that mention MSV. They don't understand that the V is about decoding the word. I wish we could rename the acronym from MSV to MSP where the P is representing phonics. That would be a much more accurate description.

But another confusion is about the meaning. So a lot of people think the meaning is just about the meaning of the word, and that's incorrect as well. Meaning includes the knowledge of the word, your sentence structure, and the context of the word in the sentence. Children naturally bring meaning to the process of reading text. This component, though, this meaning, isn't relevant if the children are reading nonsense words or if they are reading just a list of words.

So this is just to clarify that the visual is letters and sounds. It is phonics, it is decoding. Meaning is context of the sentence of the story, and the structure is, of course, the grammatical feature of a word that's in the sentence.

Anna Geiger: Okay. So first of all, when I was a balanced literacy teacher, I had no confusion about what the V meant. I knew that it meant I was supposed to use phonics to some extent. However, the professional reading that I did from Regie Routman and Lucy Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell, and others like them, did not elevate the visual cue. In fact, sometimes I read that I should use it as a last resort; sound it out was a last resort because it took the focus away from meaning.

I don't like it that she starts this with some misunderstandings by a speaker at an event. I don't think that's representative of most teachers. I don't know for sure, but that seems to be a stretch for me.

Dr. Jan Richardson: So, what's my point? My point is that I think there's this misunderstanding that the visual is the picture. It's not the picture. The visual is all these things that are listed on this slide, and we need to help them get the facts straight.

Anna Geiger: Again, I really don't think this is the issue. I don't think people think that visual stands for picture. I think they know it stands for looking at the letters and sounding out the word. The issue is that we're also combining these other cues when really, we only need one to identify a word. Can we use other clues to confirm a word? Yes, but it's not how we read a word.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Multiple sources of information a child uses to decode unknown words and construct meaning; they're sources of information. And that MSV is grounded in an integrated, theoretical model of reading derived from observational and experimental research. And teachers, please, do not ever prompt a student to guess at the word.

Anna Geiger: You notice that she mentions observational research? I really think that's where three-cueing came from; watching people read. It looks like that's what they're doing, but now we know that that's not how we read words. It's not how efficient readers read words.

I really don't like it when people defend their program by saying that "research says" without putting any research up on the screen. It wouldn't be hard. If she really believes research proves that three-cueing is what we're supposed to be doing, she should pop up some studies right there, but there's nothing.

Her next slide tells that we should prompt readers for visual information, then meaning, then structure. In other words, have them sound out first. That's all well and good, but when you give them these books where they can't sound out the word, I'm not sure how that's going to work.

She says, "Avoid patterned text once kids know letters and sounds." Yeah. That's what they say, that's not what they do.

She says, "Teach emergent readers to crosscheck. Teach early readers to attend to every letter." It's just not true when they talk about in their material how you're supposed to cover the picture so that they look at the word and then try to read it, but then if they can't get it, then look at the picture. How are they attending to every letter? It just doesn't add up.

Here's a little video where she's teaching students who are reading a Level B text. Remember what they said about Level B and Level A? You move out of those when kids know letters and sounds. That's really important to remember. So, here you go.

Dr. Jan Richardson: I'm going to show you just a quick little video, less than a minute, of an activity that I do. I did it today. Actually, I did it several times today in kindergarten classrooms. That demonstrates, it's explicit modeling, of what crosschecking looks like for these kids that are reading actually at a Level B.

Children: Look at me. I am jumping.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Jumping. Are you right?

Children: Yeah.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Yes. Very good! Let's try this page, boys and girls.

Children: Look at me. I am walking.

Dr. Jan Richardson: You're walking. Now, let's do one more. Boy, you guys are really good at this. Okay.

Children: Look at me. I am sitting.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Sitting or swimming? What do you think?

Children: Sitting.

Dr. Jan Richardson: How do you know?

Boy: Because it doesn't have a W.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Wow, you are so smart! Very good.

Girl: It's because it swimmING, but it's doesn't have ING in it.

Dr. Jan Richardson: It does have an ING, let me show you. There's your ING part. So, every one of these words has an ING at the end of it, doesn't it?

Boy: 'Cause it's an action.

Dr. Jan Richardson: It is an action.

Anna Geiger: Okay. They said kids should not be using Level A and B if they know letters and sounds. That one very smart little boy knew that sitting could not be swimming because it's missing the W. Hello! He knows a lot about letters and sounds. Why is he not reading decodable books? And then you have that little girl who's really confused and who doesn't think the word has I-N-G. So, what is she really learning from this? This just seems very messed up to me.

I should note that after that lesson, she teaches them about I-N-G very quickly. We're talking maybe fifteen seconds, kind of as an afterthought, because that little girl got confused. But clearly, they're not following a scope and sequence for teaching their phonics skills, and they're not teaching in a systematic way.

Dr. Jan Richardson: Now in the last couple slides, I just have a couple prompts that will help you guide children so that they're not guessing.

If they do say a response that's not correct, you cannot let it go. You have to provide corrective feedback, but you don't want to tell them the word. If you tell them the word, you're actually making it harder for children to read the next word.

And then the other one, my go-to strategy, is always check the word. That means I'm making sure that they are using the letters and sounds.

Just yesterday, I watched a first grade classroom and two girls came to the word wants. Both girls sounded it out with the short A, /w/ /ă/ /n/ /t/ /s/, and I'm thinking to myself, "There is no way they're going to get that." One of the girls self-corrected, one of them did not.

You see, that's the role meaning has to play. When we try to reduce reading to a merely sounding out letter by letter, not prompting kids to use the meaning of the passage and think about what would make sense, we're actually making it harder for children to learn.

Anna Geiger: That example she gave there with the two girls who were reading and they sounded out wants as /w/ /ă/ /n/ /t/ /s/, and then one of them corrected it, that's exactly what we want kids to do in, quote, "the science of reading." Though that's not really the correct use of the term because as we know, the science of reading is a body of research.

It's called set for variability, where you read and then you realize it doesn't quite sound right, that's not how we say it. Then she fixed it, and sure, she used context to do that. That's great! If you know anything about the four-part processor by Seidenberg and McClelland, we know that we use these different processing systems, but that's not how we read a word. We read a word by decoding it and then we can check it.

But I think she's conveniently leaving out the fact that in many, many, many, many, many classrooms, because we've been taught to do this, we teach students to "read" the word by using context. It's very different than correcting it based on context.

In the next section, Dr. Richardson shares some of the phonics activities they do during their word study, which is part of their guided reading lessons. I don't see anything problematic with those. I think it just feels like an add-on, and that's the problem. It really should be what you start with, and then you can apply it in your reading. They've got it backwards because it's tacked on to the end of their lesson.

I think that these great activities that they have included can be confusing for people and they think, "Well, this must be the right program."

You need to make sure that the people whose programs you're buying have the big picture correct. Do they understand how students read words? Do they understand orthographic mapping or just use the phrase? Do they understand that three-cueing is not how we read words? Do they understand how best to teach high frequency words rather than memorizing sight words? I think that's what you really need to look at when choosing a program. Can you trust these authors?

We're going to continue on with the conclusion here, where Dr. Dufresne shares some general thoughts about research.

Dr. Jan Richardson: I hope what we send you away with today is really examining the science of reading, and when we claim something is settled science, we need to look and see if the study is referenced. Some of the stuff that I've been reading, when I try and find the reference to it, it's really almost like a circular thing. It's some other person that said this, that said there was research on this, but I can't find actually the research to read that shows that this is the settled science.

So we want to be asking, has the study been peer-reviewed and published? Was it just some little study of three kids somewhere that doesn't have any kind of peer review? Have the claims been over-generalized? Sometimes they will say things like, "95% of the children will be successful with this." Well, what's the evidence for that? Are there studies that dispute the results?

Recently there's been a lot about Reading Recovery, and one study showed some slight difference from massive amounts of other studies. We really want to make sure that we're really looking at all of the studies.

And really, do the results include the population you are teaching? We've seen some stuff that uses research on how adults decode words and it's being transferred to how we should be teaching emergent readers. We need to make sure that what we're looking at really makes sense for the population that we're teaching.

Unfortunately, I know we're all busy, we're in our classrooms, we're teaching. We say, "We don't have time to read the research," but our kids are really worth it. We need to make sure that we don't have a journalist that doesn't have the background, or sometimes it's legislators that are making decisions for what you're going to teach. We have to be aware of the research, and we have to be asking for it and looking for it and demanding that our administrators are really looking at the research.

There's a lot being said about what the National Panel had, and this was a very comprehensive look at certain amounts of research that was out there, and of course, it's pretty old right now. But I've seen things being said that the report said that it actually doesn't say.

So here's a few things. "Systematic phonics instruction should be integrated with other reading instruction to create a balanced reading program." That's what the National Panel found from looking at all the research.

"Phonics instruction is never a total reading program. Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program, neither in the amount of time devoted to it, nor in the significance that is attached to it." This is right in the National Panel, from looking at all this experimental research that was done.

And very little research has attempted to determine the contribution of decodable books to the effectiveness of phonics instruction. So there's a lot of people that are demanding that we use only decodable text. Ask them for the research. Ask them for the research because we need to make sure that we're doing the best kind of teaching that we can and not being swayed by people that sometimes have different agendas than what's best for our kids.

Anna Geiger: Okay. There's a lot to unpack there. I think when she talks about her basic caveats for looking at research, I think a lot of that is very worth looking at. When she talks about the National Reading Panel and some things that were shared there, yes, the National Reading Panel does say that phonics instruction is never a total reading program, but guess what? That's not what science of reading advocates are saying.

We're saying that phonics is important for the word recognition strand of Scarborough's Reading Rope, for the word recognition domain of The Simple View of Reading, and that we can't try to bypass that by having kids use context to identify words. We are certainly also advocating the teaching of vocabulary and the building of fluency and comprehension.

Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program? I think we have to think about what kids need when they need it. When kids are first learning to read, they have to learn the code, so yes, they need a lot of phonics. Is that going to be the main thing for all their years through school? Definitely not. It's a focus at the very beginning, and as they get proficient, then their cognitive load is freed up and they can focus on other things; more specifically, comprehending the text they're reading. But automaticity has to occur first, and we can't get there without attention to phonics. A lot of attention to phonics.

She talks about very little research determined the contributions of decodable books. That is absolutely true; however, we recommend the use of decodables based on research that shows us how kids learn to read words. If she's going to go ahead on that line and tell people to show the research, I would like to see her research that says that leveled books are best for beginning readers or even that a combination is best, because I don't know of any of that research either.

My final response to this webinar is that there are some things that are true, and there are some things that are meant to distract you from the big issues. There is a false representation of what people in the science of reading community are saying. I think this webinar is unfortunate because it confuses people and makes them believe that these authors really are in line with the science of reading, when, in my opinion, it looks like they're just trying to defend what they've always done.

Those are my thoughts. If you'd like to share yours, please leave them in the show notes for this episode, themeasuredmom.com/111. We'll be back next week for something different. I'll see you then!