Too frequently the papers we write sit on shelves, even when the issues are well discussed, because we are not bold enough to move from the discussion of the issues to a discussion of practical strategies that might address these issues. Rowe points to the constraint of changing the critical variable via legislation and Professor Hattie's assessment of the folly of this course. Rowe leave us with a few thoughts from Ingvarson on how to stimulate change; yet these seem too few and too slow to be substantively matched to the magnitude of the problem before us – sound as they are(1). We often do not make attempts to set priorities so the money and resources go to those who have political influence and media nous. As John Menadue said of his reviews of medical systems, "the meek do not inherit resources".(2)

We are therefore going to make at least some preliminary strategic recommendations based on our understandings of the findings so far. It is not our intent to defend these as "the only" or "the best" strategies, for we recognise our ideas may be better developed in cooperation with others who are differently positioned throughout the scholarship field. We only pose them as starting points for a rich discussion of "where to from here?" We encourage critique, embellishment... even pilfering of them, if they will assist others to build real and solid strategies for the nation over the next decades.

Prioritise and extend current capacity via building new capacity
Too often discussion of what to do "new" starts with our extending the arm with palm open, expecting that only by new money or by adding on new "things" can we address the problems before us. While the modest proposals we provide will inevitably rely on resourcing, the bulk of our thinking is based around using what we currently have... in different ways.

Our proposals, however, do not ask teachers to do more with the same or less. This has
been our second principle in thinking about what to do (e.g. don't ask teachers to do more
without supporting this). This would be unfair. We agree with those who suggest that we have
already extended teachers roles far beyond the early conceptualisation of the teaching roles.
Rather, our proposals are based first on:

 

Prioritise what we do in schools
While education offers to every child the potential endowment of developmental tools required to survive in the modern, high-tech world, we have so laden the children's time with
matters that may not be critical tool subjects that we should at least revisit some sense of priorities for educational policy; e.g., to provide all students with the cognitive tools that are most important for understanding and adapting to a rapidly changing world.

We don't want to be seen as the ones saying 'the classics' aren't as important as economics, English literature is not as important as learning to read a newspaper, a foreign language is not as important as economics, trigonometry is not important as understanding a computer keyboard... so we hesitate to prioritise... however we appreciate that leadership must do so.

We cannot go on adding more and more to the curricula developed from the time of Socrates forward and ever hope to cover it all. From the examination of the evidence presented, the question is not whether trigonometry, or the "classics", or English literature is important, but "what matters" are: -

Thus, whilst there are those who argue that critical thinking is not a set of tools to be taught, but a natural capacity to be exercised(4), it does require a core set of tools to exercise with. No matter how valuable any subject beyond the core tool subjects is, we cannot leave any child without them, for in so doing we leave them behind, leave them out and thus they must hold ultimate priority.

 

Capture more time
There are less than 2,400 school days in a primary and secondary educational career, (15,000 hours according to Professor Hattie).(5) This resource is finite. Time is further reduced by absence, divided by class sizes and complicated in creating relevance by our primary grouping of students by age.(6) If we should ensure that sufficient time is spent developing the critical tools before they are sent exploring, we should know about how much time we currently spend.

One of the largest studies of reading ever conducted (659,214 students K-12) indicates that the time allocation for students is just a few minutes daily to engage in reading practice (7 minutes per day in primary school, reducing to 3 minutes by high school).(7)

This time is further reduced by some methods that rely on students being assigned to read rather than being taught to read, which may result in those who cannot read, "silently sitting" rather than silently reading; practicing maladaptive covers and engaging in "not so silent" activity that further deteriorates their likelihood of learning to read.(8)

Although it is hard to imagine such a small time is being devoted to reading in our Australian schools, it is not hard to imagine that such an amount of time applied to football or swimming would be acceptable. Since our reading difficulties are not dissimilar to those found in the American studies, this large study at least points to the need to discover if our time is anywhere near as poor as that reported in the American studies.

 

Instruct more, assign less
In the earlier discussion we addressed the need to prioritise the content. This discussion addresses the prioritisation of processes. Snow (U.S. National Research Council) suggests we know the processes that lead to learning to read(9) and yet these are not always found in the repertoire of experiences of the classroom.

Unfortunately we find assignments replacing teaching or are being confused as teaching. As the body of evidence presented points out, we know that children needs lots of models, guidance, demonstrations and explanations – some more than others(10) - and yet our current classroom scene and home embellishment too often deals with being assigned to learn rather than assisted to learn.

What most parents and students do not need are more assignments without the strategies to guide the student through them... and yet Allington and others suggest that is precisely what composes many classroom and homework hours.(11)

Silent reading is one common classroom example addressed by the National Reading Panel.(12) Assigned to read silently, the compliant non-reader "practices" avoidance strategies for an intense period each day. (In other words, getting better and better at avoidance, without actually getting better and better at reading). For those who can read but poorly comprehend, we too often assign questions without instruction in comprehension strategies. Researchers, including those in this review, suggest that many children then puzzle through but never discover the thinking patterns that skilful readers employ.(13)

Researchers, including those in this review, suggest and common-sense dictates that we make instruction more explicit in and out of the classroom for those who do not learn by immersion in assignments without the tools to complete them.(14) When one thinks of the 60 parents of the 30 children who face assisting children each evening with listening to read, it is not too big a leap to also see the potential power beyond the classroom walls that strategies to share instruction rather than merely sharing assignments with parents, might bring.

 

Speed it up versus slow it down
Slowing down the pace ensures children who are struggling will be even slower tomorrow. Slow plus slower never equals recovery. We should not be surprised that the age-old practice of slowing down the pace and reducing the content will create a widening gap between the struggling reader and peers.

Children who begin school with less experience or ability need not be left behind as Lyon and others point out.(15). However the longer we allow children to wait behind their peers, the more difficult it becomes to accelerate their learning to a pace that will allow them to reach parity or at least literacy. (Of course, we need to reject the notion that many will not learn to read... or read well... before we can set such ambitious goals).

Our experiences matches the evidence presented in the Review which strongly suggests that differential sorting of these factors is not the critical variable of determining who will read.(16)
Spending time is a factor for both and efficient use of that time has been a known important variable since the time of William Occum.(17)

 

Focus on principles of instruction versus particular curriculum and programs
The "reading wars" are somewhat a reduction of what are known as critical strategies to a dichotomy war over a couple of teaching ideas. We debate "explicit instruction" versus "whole language" as if "explicit instruction" were merely "phonics". We reduce the complexity of what each might offer and then argue the reduction as if these were the real and only matters of scientific variability. The dichotomous reduction has certainly achieved one thing: - it has moved us away from an evidence base, denying the possibility of objectivity and truth, dumbing down issues into these dichotomies by replacing facts and logic with (un)professional posturing.

Returning to evidence based on testing our strategies of instruction against student outcomes, as this review suggests, is only taking intellectual life out of its parallel universe and reuniting it with science and common sense. Study after study, including the US National Research Council, the US National Reading Panel, studies provided by our committee, studies conducted by those in our reference group, and those well known in the field, show that curriculum and materials have not proved as critical as how well a teacher orchestrates the key principles of learning (e.g., spending sufficient time in activity within the child's zone of proximal development exploring content and processes that are authentically linked to "their world".(18)) Of course programs and curriculum that capture these ingredients fair better in comparative studies as you have shown(19), however this somewhat misses the point: - good instruction is good instruction; material is merely the medium of good instruction.

 

Cooperate versus Demarcate
For too long we have operated as if we lived in silos where the work in one area of educational or academic life had little or no connection with those with whom we share the milieu.

In such silos, research is clinical, short term, clean and free from the infections of the world's chaos; classrooms and teachers - like doctors and therapists - are often separated by a closed door to the families and communities existing in a world outside. We have come to like it this way. It is part of an industrial specialisation of the past generation that allowed us to move from the farm to the factory but is it really a good model for addressing the significant number of children who cannot read?

Over the past forty years the conventional understanding pertaining to the aetiology of reading difficulties has shifted from discussions of "slow learners" early in the century, to limited intellectual functioning, to environmental disadvantage, to brain and other organically based impairments, and now combinations of all of these. But as your revealing evidence shows, these matter as merely "the little pimple".(20)

These changes have led to the training of specialist teachers, creation of specialist in each of these matters, multiple funding sources to train and design programs, which are exemplified in the types of articles, published in various professional journals. We have whole textbooks written about any one of the sub-types of aetiology. This has lead to student enrolments in a plethora of separate programs that serve students who all share one thing in common – they have difficulty acquiring reading abilities.(21)

If good instruction is good instruction, what is the point of all of this sorting? The separation goes so far as separate professional associations, certifications, funders, administrators, university curricula and separate State and Commonwealth funding sources – yet learning to read is the primary difficulty of students in both fields.

Further (as noted previously) the evidence suggests that there are not reliable indicators that separate program features for the many groups. "What works" – appears to works for all students and thus the design of partitioning suggests significant (possibly even more) time and resource is spent identifying, assessing, separating and scheduling the students; leaving less to be spent on the diagnostic testing and matching to vital instruction, as promoted by Rowe.(22)

There does not appear to be sufficiently well defined matches of the plethora of aetiology of learning disabilities to programs that work only with those sub-groups to justify separate funding, separate diagnoses, and separate instructional materials and techniques for students who basically are all having difficulty in learning to read and write at the same rate of their peers.

The best "news" about this separation is that both sides, "mainstream" and "special" are coming to realise that segregation, be it the result of placement in a special education school or "special" classroom, or even participation in remedial programs, can stigmatise students to a far greater degree than educators previously realised. This and the research evidence on learning potency has fostered the movement toward "inclusionary" education from the "special" education sector and fostered the movement of whole school literacy in the "mainstream" sectors.(23) Other conventional demarcations that can become co-operations are:

 

Make Every Reader a Partner
Cooperation across milieu is what it would take to put action into the words of recovery. We are a wealthy nation yet do we need to expend massively more money training massively more people to bring reading to all of our children?

The answer will surely be some new monies but where will we spend it? If we do not make everyone who can read a potential teacher to those who cannot – have we invested wisely? If we see all of the change coming only from one source - the teachers - are we really being fair to them? Are we looking at the reality of the slowness of which this system has implemented what Dr Rowe and others suggest has been essentially known for 20 years?(24)

We might take a page from the book of Dr Naicker, Director of Inclusive Education in South Africa, who discussed with us strategies to turn their policy of "Love all – Serve All" into a local reality in school communities where classes are 50 plus and readers are scarce.(25)

Our discussions lead to the practical notions of stratagem dating back to 1800's in rural India where Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster first began to teach tutors in his orphanage as assistants in addressing the fact that none could read.26 Programs such as these have evolved into an array of partnerships such as that of the National School Volunteer program that annually brings 7 million volunteers into 400,000 partnership initiatives in local school districts across the US.(27)

Strategies such as these not only tap into significantly untapped potential helping powers, give important partnerships with corporation who contribute staff as readers and teachers but offer and sustain valued roles to an aging population of wise elders from whom they can learn. An intergenerational program can also fill a personal gap left by the decline of the extended family.(28)

The breadth of thinking need not be restricted to mobilising unrelated volunteers. There are a number who have used the transdisciplinary model with parents of children who cannot read(29), a model supported by speech, language occupational therapists who view this model as "best practice" in early intervention.(30) Such strategies put practicality to the advice of Professor Hattie who suggests, "We ask parents to manage schools and thus ignore their major responsibility to co-educate..."(31)

Partnerships provide not only practical demonstrations into what is possible, should we go outside the classroom doors, but give additional rationale for putting into the hands of parents and other volunteers sufficiently structured processes so as to ensure every child gains from the experience. If we are to believe the research that suggests explicit instruction has its place in the teaching tool box, we see sharing this with the other major partners in the child's development - parents - as not only determine to be helpful by the NRP and others but rigorous in ensuring evidence based practice extends from school into the home.(32)

 

Rethinking the fence at the top of the cliff –
Relationships with doctors and therapists engaging the medical model of doing things begin between birth and school age. Those who will present with literacy problems later in life will also present with medical problems earlier, as do all children. For those with illness or impairment may present numerous times before school age. This primacy of pattern33 may set the stage for parents continuing to call on doctors and therapists to essentially address reading problems in later years.(34)

This is not to criticise the medical model; however we do leave educators out of the developmental picture until much later and thus an unnecessary demarcation pattern develops in the minds of parents, as well as many of the professionals involved.

 

Earlier Intervention
Earliest intervention is therefore better defined by the earliest hint that development is not proceeding as is typical and is best conducted in partnerships with those interested and involved, now and into the future. Intervening early in childhood development should be as primal a principle in education as it is in medicine – what is that saying about a pound of prevention being worth?

As noted earlier, the transdisciplinary model is supported by speech, language occupational therapists as "best practice" in early intervention.(35) What is missing from this earliest team is an educator. Although a few Australian projects employ educators, most early services dealing with language and intellectual delays will shortly become school matters. The demarcation is systemic, unnecessary and incorrectly trains the society that matters of developmental delay are a purely medical, often a "disablement" or primarily medical phenomenon.

This is exacerbated in later years by requiring medical or medical imaged assessment to receive educationally based services. How many referrals are sought or even required to "pad" or secure the evidence of silo-based funding? Is this pedagogically necessary? In later years many therapists and psychologists in private practice suggest that a large portion of their practice is around spelling or reading. Is this because this is "billable" and tutelage is not? Is it then any wonder that larger portions of medical time are now taken up with essentially teaching related problems?(36)

Should we move to partnerships, early teams need to include educators and educators need to take the lead when the matters of delay become primarily developmental... especially as the child comes closer to school age.

IF we are going to shift away from the costly medically based model and towards a cooperative model of co-addressing the delays of childhood development; early educational intervention needs to start in the early years before school when developmental delays are smallest.

Over the past quarter century we have demonstrated over and again that assisting the parent to "read to" and "read with" their child who is delayed in language or overall development, or labelled with some impairment, can add to the "head start" given to children by medical and allied services such as speech and occupational therapy. Such involvement is a developmental fence at the top of the cliff and counter to the stigmatisation of any label the child may wear. This is consistent with findings elsewhere, consistent with Rowe's suggestion that a key component that differentiates successful from less successful ones and yet we invest so little in this parent-teacher partnership.(37) Our view is that investment in demonstrative advocacy of this nature would offer a practical partnership to parents who are currently concerned and have only verbal advocacy through which to express their concern for their children who are struggling to read.

Working with speech and other therapists, the early intervention teacher can balance and "normalise" the intervention so that transition into schooling is a "follow through" of transdisciplinary work that can be more seamlessly interfaced with the classroom. What better support for ongoing literacy can there be than parents who learn early the power of reading to their child, and the sophistications of guiding their child who struggles with literacy?

 

Enhance partnerships beyond the school walls
The aforementioned topic brings us to discussions about extending teacher's time via other forms of partnerships. No matter how much we are able to sophisticate the repertoire of teacher talent, no matter how much we increase time by prioritisation and other efficiencies, as Professor Hattie points out, the valuable teacher's time is limited to about 1,250 hours of classroom time a year(38).

Even if exceptional, multi-level strategies are applied to keep all learners engaged, it is not too hard to see how often the time is not within the zone of proximal development of each and every student for these 1,250 hours. Subtract lunch, recesses and time spent on matters other than literacy and we can well picture the earlier number of just a few minutes the American studies show is spent on literacy each day.

It is therefore not too much of a conceptual leap to see that a parent, friend, relative or otherwise school community minded citizen (who can read) - could be an untapped source of literacy change. Even one interested adult to listen and guide each struggling child's reading for 20 minutes could add 75 hours of additional practice each year.

Partnerships such as that mentioned earlier (e.g., the National School Volunteer program that annually brings 7 million volunteers into 400,000 partnership initiatives in local school districts across the U.S.) are simple strategies which can significantly extend teacher time. Our ability to do more with what we currently have available in our local, school communities requires that we involve more of the people who share the interest. Of course, as we mentioned earlier, we cannot add this role to an already overstretched role. It will require new investment. We also cannot rebuild this role with parents unless we recover from the 'religious dogma' noted by Rowe and Edmonds as mythology about their causal role of family backgrounds in creating the chief problems of student performance.(39) Such outmoded, eugenic thinking should have been left behind long ago.

Every child has 2 parents and 4 grandparents (or more depending on the blending of families). This means every classroom containing 30 children has the potential vested interested untapped helping talent of 120 -180 adults. Investment strategies to instruct even a small portion of these and other unvested, interested adults brings the combinational power of helping in the processes of reading to logarithmic proportions. Investments to improve the internal repertoire of a singular teacher are severely limited unless one of these repertoires is mobilising the whole school community to participate in literacy in and outside of the classroom.

 

Make Every Teacher a Collaborator
We must think outside of the classroom box if we are to address the large portion of children who cannot read or cannot read well. We think all educators, as well as researchers would point to more TIME as a critical feature of what is needed. This is not to suggest that parents aren't already involved, that teachers aren't already using parents to do some of these things we suggest. They are. We are only suggesting that we are possibly not invested in doing so systematically.

We are possibly not funding the training and support of such projects. We are possibly not training teachers well enough in how to deeply involve the parents of the children in their classrooms with literacy. Our view is that we have considerable untapped resources that we are not yet tapping into because we don't recognise them, we do not value them, we fear involving them, we are demarcated from involving them and we are not trained in our universities about the powers, ethics and strategies of mobilizing all of a community's readers as potential teachers of those who cannot read.

 

Make Every Teacher a Researcher
The conceptual framework of our submission rests on the value statement of one of our current reading projects and 'fits' with our earliest and ongoing findings across children with labels and those without them; namely, we don't need to leave these students behind.(40) In the Review, Rowe point to the work of Lyon who vividly draws our attention to what others have also shown: - the sad, predictive future of children found to be behind as early as year one will rarely 'catch up' and yet he suggests that intervention confirms most do not need to be left behind.(41) The missing link, however, between an admirable goal such as this, and real outcomes that move us forward at the coalface is a framework of intervention based on responding to the evidence - in essence, make every teacher a researcher.

A common denominator among students with reading difficulties is their slower rate and trajectory of progress.

What is persuasive in the research is that students who begin with problems and thus develop literacy more slowly almost never become students who are average readers even though the framework outlined in the literature for recovery rates of this Review is clear.

 

The professional conundrum
Yet how many of our teachers have read these research and other critical pieces? How many have altered their early practices based on these findings? Rudland and Kemp's recent review of the previous 30 years of research suggest that teachers engage in relatively little professional reading, especially when compared to the reading habits of other professionals.(46) This may go some ways in explaining the limited repertoire presented by Rowe of Westwood's findings that 67% of teachers knowing of but one literacy approach.(47)

If we were to take Rudland and Kemp's advice(48) to encourage and support teachers to read and discuss research, we will be linking into a very convenient, cost-effective and normative method of professional development that would yield incremental repertoire enhancement.(49)

The evidence for evidence-based instruction is so strongly presented in this Review that it is almost incomprehensible that the field is so far removed from this position. Without a doubt, Woodward's data suggesting a single ideology dominating 67-79% of teachers coming from our universities that does not contain – and may even actively discourage this instructive tool set - must cause us pause when matched with Rudland & Kemp's disturbing analysis of the professional reading habits of teachers. With few knowing the benefits of explicit instruction before they arrive in the classroom and few trained or encouraged to read and discuss the literature, is it any wonder we have the protracted ideological, tool war?

 

Make Every Researcher a Teacher
The corollary of making each teacher a researcher is to bring researchers out of the university and into more classroom partnerships. We must not continue the disjointed, shortterm study of students "as if" the task were only to gain our practice at research. Rather we need to make the classroom teacher a valued partner so that depthful and meaningful research at the coalface of the classroom will provide help and support to structure everyday programs of intervention around what is already known in the literature. Evidence based replication-demonstration projects of known strategies may not be what attracts the research dollars but it is surely what is needed to narrow the gap between what we know and what we practice.

The semester or two of practicum are only the "L-plates" of learning to teach. We abandoned supervisory tutelage (albeit for some good and some not so good reasons) and turned principalship roles into modern human service managers; discarding a first principle of learning theory, the power of modelling. Professor Snow, Harvard Graduate School of Education and one of the principle authors of the NRC report, related a story about a taxi driver she had met on a recent trip. The taxi driver told her he was studying to be a barber and that it takes a full year of training plus a year of supervised practice to become a barber."Teachers don't even get a year of supervised practice before they are put in a classroom of 25 kids," she commented."(50)

We need to revisit the primacy of modelling and practice what we preach by bringing our best researchers into day to day contact with teachers at the coals face so that they may use potent design in addressing the most difficult to teach children.

We have used video with families and teachers to provide modelling and guidance in the "outback" of Northern Western Australia as well as the far reaches of our West Australian southern coast where populations are small and access to specialists is sparse. We are attempting to link the coalface with expertise using more sophisticated video link-ups in the same manner as the medical field is using these technologies. University researchers, professors and those in the D.O.E.'s with high, apparently very scarce, understandings of the literature need to be extended via these and other methods on a frequent basis.

Considering what Rudland and Kemp had to say about professional reading habits, it may be that some practical interplay among these 2 sectors may serve to add more day to day reality to the professional literature and in so doing create the day to relevance so that this, mostly overlooked, but most convenient and cost effective means of ongoing professional development can be actualised.(51)

We are certain, given leadership's willing to share and invest in these and other strategies; we can provide at least a part of the answer to our earlier questions: - Where are the largest numbers of children who cannot read? Who are the best educators in the country in terms of teaching the children who are not yet able to read as well as they should? Are the largest numbers of children who cannot read well, matched up with these best of the educators? If so, how can we extend, enhance and share their effectiveness? If not, how can we transfer knowledge to those teachers who have such students so as to broaden the repertoire of those who are faced with the children who most need it?

 

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Endnotes

Note: Reference to Rowe et al (2005) in endnotes below is for:
Rowe, K., Purdie, N., & Ellis, L. ACER. (March, 2005). A review of the evidence-based research literature on effective teaching and learning strategies for students with learning difficulties, especially in reading literacy. A draft discussion paper prepared for the Committee and Reference Group for the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy. Australian Government, DEST

 

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