My Aha! Moment as a Literacy Intervention Teacher
Marianne Brown is a Tier 2 Reading Intervention teacher at Central Normal School. She takes around 20 students a day for extra tuition in structured literacy, tutors students in her home and enjoys training other teachers to use the approach. Five years ago, she made the change to structured literacy and writes about her journey here. Download the blog post here.
I have been teaching for 28 years and I have been in the role of Tier 2 Reading Intervention teacher for eight of those years. For the first three years in this role, my mantra was “more sight words need to be learnt and then they will get there.” I was fully embedded in the Whole Language philosophy, in fact, I used to be very vocal about why it was the best way to teach, (notice I didn’t say the best way that children learn).
Then in 2016, my son was assessed as being dyslexic. He had gone through Reading Recovery and I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t succeeding….after all his own mother was a reading teacher! I went to school and spoke with the RTLit at our school about how I could help him. She responded that I needed to go and see Liz Kane, who had just returned from Australia with some interesting training and could maybe help me.
So off I went to an information evening she was holding for parents about dyslexia. I sat there with no idea what she was talking about. Phonemes? What are they? However, it was enough to whet my appetite, so I went again the following meeting. I was starting to realize that this could help my son, I could maybe try what she was suggesting with him. It was then, and I remember this as clear as day, that I grew hot and my mouth hung open as the penny dropped that this wasn’t just for my son, but for all those kids I saw every day! What a revelation! I was embarrassed that I hadn’t even considered the students at school until now, as I was so focused on my son, but what a game-changer.
However, as I imagine for a lot of you, management wasn’t fully on board. It wasn’t that they were anti, it was just they had never heard of structured literacy. After all, at this stage, there were only a handful of teachers I knew in the country that were starting down this path. For a full year, I read everything I could on structured literacy. I attended any course Liz was conducting when she started doing those. I learnt how to articulate pure sounds and I learnt the science behind reading. To say that it was a rollercoaster year is an understatement. My brain felt like it was exploding with information, but the biggest hurdle I had to overcome was my own prejudices and hesitancy in starting. I had to put aside, and unlearn, 23 years of thinking I knew how to teach reading. I started teaching structured literacy at school, ever so slowly and only a little bit (didn’t want to get too crazy! 😉) I got plenty of curious glances from my colleagues as to what I was doing. Then the results started coming in and teachers were noticing that the reading was improving with our intervention students, and I decided to go all in. I was lucky enough that after a few years we had a change of management, who were more on board, and it was implemented throughout our school.
It is important to note that as I look back on my feeble attempts to get started that I got plenty wrong, there wasn’t a lot of information or resources in NZ. But as misguided as some of my first steps were, they were not as far back as teaching using Whole Language. I was starting to teach using this approach and I was learning, and to this day I am still learning and refining my practice. If you are just starting on this journey and feeling totally overwhelmed, take heart. It is a process. It took me at least a year before I even dared take my first structured literacy lesson, and then I attempted to teach structured literacy for 6 months using PM books, as I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I was required to report using PM levels based on running records. My advice is to start, just start. Pick one aspect of the structured literacy approach like developing phonological awareness, educate yourself on what it should look like, and try it out.
I wouldn’t go back for the world. I have been using structured literacy for five years now as a Tier 2 reading intervention teacher and what a difference it has made compared to the first three years as a Whole Language intervention teacher. I could talk about data, assessment results and graphs, they all are impressive, but the biggest measurement of success isn’t what is on paper….it has been that I don’t get repeats anymore. Previously I would make progress with a child, discontinue them and the following year they had not matched pace with their peers and so they were back with me again. I had some children enrol into intervention for 3 years in a row. I very rarely have that anymore. The difference with structured literacy is that I am not increasing their number of sight words known, I am increasing their knowledge on how to decode any word that is put in front of them.
Not only do I get to teach using structured literacy to children, I am now starting to train other teachers as well. I love that moment when you can see the penny dropping for new teachers to the approach. I see the excitement and it makes me think, “Wild rollercoaster ahead! But how lucky are those kids this teacher is going to impact”.
I will finish with one other thought when starting out on the journey. Strive for gold standard. There is a lot out there at the moment, which is packaged as structured literacy, but while based on some reading of science principles they are a mix of Whole Language and structured literacy. I get it. Like me, when you first start out you will feel hesitant and don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and you will see this as a good compromise. Some resources may even come from a source of authority. But this is not gold standard, and our children deserve gold standard. Continue to learn more. Find out what is gold and what is bronze. Strive for the best, for the sake of our tamariki.