Early literacy: What works, what doesn’t….
The Christian Science Monitor does a good job distilling yesterday’s National Early Literacy Panel report about how preschoolers should be taught literacy skills. It’s an important issue: My former colleague at USA Today, Greg Toppo, reminds us that 1 in 7 Americans can’t read in this story he wrote.
I haven’t had time to digest the entire report. If there are gender observations there I’ll report back later. But the summary includes some observations that overlap with anecdotal material I’ve heard about why overly prescriptive preschool reading lessons can backfire for boys.
From the CSM:
Early-childhood education has been expanding in many states, and during the presidential campaign, Barack Obama proposed $10 billion a year in additional investment. The report is well-timed, panelists say, to guide such investments.
Training for preschool teachers in Little Rock, Ark., has already shifted based on an early glimpse that district leaders had of the panel’s findings. “When a child gives a one-word answer, the teacher will … encourage the child to explain further,” says Glenda Nugent, director of early childhood education.
Another practice doesn’t fare so well against the report’s findings. Having kids memorize lists of words is “creeping into a lot of preschools,” says Mr. Shanahan, who is also director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But it turns out that it’s much better to also know word meanings and exhibit skills such as listening comprehension.
One strain of educational philosophy posits that such young children should simply play, with no intentional instruction. But that view represents less than 20 percent of early education now, estimates Susan Landry, a panel member and director of the Children’s Learning Institute at the University of Texas in Houston. “The biggest challenge now,” she says, “is to not go to the other extreme, making it too highly structured.”
Little Rock’s preschool classrooms aim to reflect the balance that panel members say is best: Children spend a lot of time on fun activities of their choice, but in each learning area there’s printed material - books, word labels on objects, an alphabet chart. Teachers help students understand the parts of spoken words, such as syllables, and how they fit together.
The panel found strong evidence that such skills are best learned in “small-group, short, targeted activities,” Ms. Landry says. “That could inform policy about teacher-to-child ratio or aides in the classroom.”
Tags: Literacy
