Joseph Torgesen is a
Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology and Education at Florida State
University.
Dr. Torgesen is nationally known
for research on both the prevention and remediation of reading difficulties
in young children as well as work on assessment of phonological awareness and
reading. As Director of the Florida Center for Reading Research
http://www.fcrr.org/
he helps to provide leadership to the Reading First
initiative in Florida. He is the author of numerous articles, book chapters,
books, and tests related to reading and learning disabilities. He serves on
six professional editorial boards and has received numerous awards including the Samuel
A. Kirk Award for exemplary research publications from the Division of
Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children. For the
last 15 years, he has been part of the effort supported by the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development to learn more about the
nature of reading disabilities and ways to prevent and remediate reading
problems in children. For example,
Torgesen’s
co-authored book with P. Mathes, A Basic Guide to Understanding,
Assessing, and Teaching Phonological Awareness, published in 2000 by
PRO-ED publishers, has been very influential upon early reading assessment
and instructional practices.
"Respect for our profession will only
increase as we become more effective in dealing with the instructional needs of
all students. We [Reading First] are simply asking teachers to follow
instructional protocols that have a basis in scientific evidence about reading
growth and reading instruction." Joe Torgesen
Stanley: At the
Tampa Reads site you are quoted as saying “When teaching a bright child how to
read, it doesn’t really matter which reading approach to use.
However, if you are trying to teach children with below average reading skills,
you must teach using ‘explicit phonics instruction’ if
significant progress is ever going to be made. This means that we need to
teach the sounds of words and letters first – period.” (www.tampareads.com/intro-seminole.htm )
Isn’t recommending all struggling readers receive phonics instruction
a “one size fits all” approach? Shouldn’t instruction depend on diagnosing the
child’s individual needs? Isn’t there a danger in too much phonics
instruction?
Torgesen: If I
were allowed to rephrase the quote attributed to me at the Tampa Reads site, I
would prefer something like this, “Children who enter school with strong
abilities and good preparation in the areas required for learning to read can
learn to read well in classrooms that use a relatively broad variety of
instructional approaches. However, children who enter school less well prepared
for learning to read, or who have various kinds of learning difficulties, need
instructional approaches that are more explicit and systematic. These
children may need explicit and systematic instruction in a variety of areas,
including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading
comprehension strategies.
I did
not mean to single out phonics as the only area in need of explicit instruction
for many children, and I agree completely that instruction needs to be
responsively adapted to the needs of individual students. In point of fact,
there are many students in Florida who enter school either poorly prepared by
their preschool language experience, or with disabilities in the phonological
language domain, that will require some period of explicit and careful
instruction in phonics in order to become accurate and fluent readers by third
grade.
By
the same token, what we have learned about the development of vocabulary
(knowledge of the meanings of words) in young children suggests that there will
be many other children who require careful and systematic instruction in
vocabulary knowledge before they will be able to proficiently comprehend the
complex text they will encounter on the FCAT in third grade. The approach we
are advocating is straightforward: students who struggle to acquire critical
early reading skills profit most from instruction that is direct, systematic,
and carefully tailored to their needs.
With
children who enter school “at risk” for reading difficulties, we cannot make
assumptions about what they already know, nor can we assume that they will be
able to figure out our complex alphabetic writing system on their own. We must
carefully teach them “everything they need to know” to become good readers, and
that requires systematic and explicit instruction, lots of carefully engineered
and monitored practice, and the opportunity to apply their gradually emerging
reading skills to meaningful and motivating reading and writing experiences.
Stanley: In
a recent interview for FRQ, Jonathon Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities, said
that the debate about phonics instruction is really a political tactic he
called “the gifted evasion of the central point.” Kozol said that politicians
often like to change the subject to what reading methods to use instead of
solving the real issue of providing equal education access for poor children.
How do you respond to his comments and his body of work?
Torgesen: Kozol has clearly sensitized his readers to the inequalities of the educational
system that are attributable to poverty and cultural differences. I think this
is a valuable contribution, and it is the responsibility of all educators and
politicians to work toward correcting those inequalities. However, I don’t
agree that a discussion of reading methods for poor and/or minority students is
misdirected simply because it does not encompass a full discussion of all the
reasons why poor and minority students often to not achieve proficiency in
reading. Use of improper instructional methods can be one of the reasons why
students do not achieve reading proficiency, but it is almost never the only
reason. However, this does not mean that it is not productive to focus on
improved instructional methods as one of the ways to improve the performance of
poor and minority students in reading.
We
have clearly learned a great deal in the last 20 years about how children learn
to read, what makes learning to read difficult for many students, and how to
teach students who struggle in learning to read, and we have a responsibility
to see that our new knowledge in these areas is applied for the benefit of all
students. It seems to me that we have a particular responsibility to do all we
can to increase the quality of instruction provided to our poor and minority
students who frequently come to school with delayed development in the oral
language and print related skills and knowledge that are so critical to early
reading success.
It’s
important to understand that I would not limit our discussion of quality in
early reading instruction to the contrast between explicit and systematic
instruction vs. instruction that is not as direct or explicit (or that leaves
more for the student to figure out on his/her own), but would also hope that we
can improve the motivational and affective aspects of the classrooms within
which we work. Effective teachers are highly motivational in their
interactions with students, and teachers that are not as effective at engaging
student’s interest and motivation for reading or learning to read typically are
not as successful as they might otherwise be. And, this will be particularly
true for students who find reading difficult because they have to work harder
at learning to read than do other students.
Stanley: The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and Reading
First Initiative (RFI) are government sponsored initiatives to hold states,
school districts, and teachers accountable for the information that students
learn. What have been NCLB’s and RFI’s positive and negative effects upon
reading instruction and achievement? What still needs to be done?
Torgesen: First, it is important to note that the Reading
First Initiative involves much, much more than holding “states, school
districts, and teachers” accountable for how well students learn. In Florida,
for example, the RFI has provided and will continue to provide an enormous
amount of professional development for teachers, principals, and reading
coaches. It has placed a reading coach in every Reading First school whose main
responsibility is helping teachers acquire and implement increasingly effective
instructional skills. It has also trained thousands of individuals in Reading
First districts to administer valid and reliable screening and progress
monitoring tests that can be used to guide instruction and focus intensive
interventions where they are most needed. It has also provided a data
management system (The Florida Progress Monitoring and Reporting Network)
(FPMRN) that puts timely and informative reports about student progress in
reading in the hands of teachers, principals, coaches, and district staff.
Through Reading First in Florida, districts and schools also have available
objective reports developed at the Florida Center for Reading Research that
describe the quality, as well as the research support for, many of the reading
programs and intervention materials that publishers are selling to Florida’s
schools.
It’s also very important to understand that Reading
First is a six-year project, and that last year was the first year of
implementation of the initiative in Florida. One of the smart things about
Reading First is that it is a six year project, reflecting what we know
about the difficulties involved in producing real and lasting educational
improvements that effect large numbers of students in many classrooms. Although
we are just entering our second year of implementation we are very impressed
with what has been accomplished so far.
A survey last year of all the Reading First principals
in Florida indicated that most of them felt that the professional development
provided thus far had been helpful to their teachers, and they also expressed
appreciation for the new level of information about student progress in reading
that was being provided through the Reading First assessment plan and the
FPMRN. Further, most indicated that they appreciated having a new,
comprehensive core reading program in their school to serve as a scaffold and
support to their teachers in helping them deliver the kind of instruction their
students needed. It is interesting to note that, although principals expressed
appreciation for the amount of data they now had available about the progress
of individual students, they also expressed concern about the amount of time
required to administer the assessments involved. The state has worked this
summer to provide some streamlining to the assessment requirements for Reading
First schools, and we hope that they will be easier for schools to manage in
the coming year.
I don’t think that Reading First has had any
systematically negative effects on the quality of instruction provided in
Reading First schools; although that does not mean that everything is as it
should be in these schools. There is still an enormous amount of work to do in
helping principals understand and manage their complex role as instructional
leaders, and we have a ways to go in understanding and effectively implementing
the challenging role of reading coach. Further, we know that not all teachers
in these schools have the skills they need to provide effective classroom
instruction, and we are working on ways to help schools develop and manage more
intensive and effective interventions for their students who struggle the most.
Stanley: Richard Allington, author of Big Brother and
the national reading curriculum: How ideology triumphed evidence (2002) and
others have been critical of evidence-based instruction. Is the growing fear of
some educators warranted that reading mandates are ineffective, too political,
and economically driven? Is the research about teaching children to read being
misrepresented?
Torgesen: Reading mandates will be ineffective if they are
focused on the wrong dimensions and if they are ineffectively led and implemented.
Although, as I mentioned earlier, Reading First is not focused on improving all
the things that influence achievement in poor and minority students, it is
focused on many of the most important ones. For example, one goal of Reading
First in Florida is to increase the capacity of every K-3 teacher in Reading
First schools to provide systematic and explicit instruction in the areas of
knowledge and skill that have been shown to be critical to the attainment of
reading proficiency by the end of third grade. We are trying to do this
through a multi-faceted effort that involves Reading Academies, on-site
professional development through coaching, school-based learning communities,
and the provision of high quality comprehensive core reading programs. Professional
teacher educators from the University of Central Florida are responsible for
many of these professional development efforts, and they are doing their best
to insure that research findings on effective teaching are serving as the basis
for all the training that is provided.
There is also very consistent research support for the
idea that progress monitoring of student development in critical reading skills
leads to better reading outcomes. In Florida, we have developed a very
comprehensive assessment and reporting network that provides a truly amazing
amount of information to teachers about their students, and to principals about
every K-3 student in the school. Of course, it is a very large and ongoing
training effort to insure that this new level of information about student
progress is used effectively in guiding instruction. Finally, we are working
on many different ways to improve the intensity and focus of the interventions
in reading that are provided to struggling readers. The focus of these
interventions is based on a powerfully converging body of evidence on the
importance of broad and deep vocabulary to reading, on the importance of active
use of comprehension strategies to improve understanding, and on the vital role
that early acquisition of efficient phonemic decoding skills plays in the
long-term development of reading fluency and accuracy.
If these efforts fail to produce real improvement in
reading outcomes within Reading First schools, it seems to me that they will
most likely fail because of a lack of will to stay focused and a lack of will
to do the work required to make the necessary improvements. We may find as we
move forward that other things will be required to sustain the improvements
made in Reading First, and that additional areas of concern and needed
improvement will emerge, but as a first effort toward implementing the “big
ideas” that have emerged from scientific research on reading and reading
instruction, I’m very pleased with the beginning we have made thus far.
I know that there are many smart and experienced
people, such as Dick Allington that have expressed concern about what they
perceive as a relatively rigid and narrow interpretation of the last three
decades worth of reading research as it is being implemented in the Reading
First initiative. I also understand that there is always a danger, when things
are done on a very large scale, and when government provides a new level of
“top down” direction, that there will be local distortions and errors of
judgment as broad policy is implemented. I also acknowledge that Reading First
does not, and cannot, address every conceivable useful finding from scientific
research on reading. However, I am convinced of four important things that
provide motivation for my initial and continued involvement in Reading First in
Florida: 1) there is a clear and urgent need for improvement in instructional
practices and reading support systems in schools that serve a preponderance of
poor and minority students; 2) we have, indeed, learned a few major lessons
about reading instruction in the last 30 years that need to be more
consistently applied in these schools; 3) there is a clear need for more
effective organizational structures and leadership in these schools as it impacts
the delivery of instruction to our struggling readers; and, 4) the major
elements of the Reading First plan we have developed are a reasonable
reflection of many of the most important discoveries we have made about how to
improve reading outcomes in young children.
I would invite critics such as Dick Allington and
others to energetically seek ways to contribute their considerable expertise to
the effort we are currently making in this country, rather than simply taking
potshots at the parts of the effort they disagree with. It may be personally
challenging to participate in an initiative that has some points of emphasis
that might be personally disagreeable, but the effort is sufficiently complex
and wide ranging that there is a potential role for everyone with real
expertise to contribute. We need lots of help from professors, teachers, and
other professionals who know how to do things well in the area of reading
instruction and school management, and I would invite all who have something to
contribute to do so. The effort to positively improve the effort through the
contribution of additional knowledge and expertise seems likely to be more
effective for children in the long run than standing at the side and raising
concerns about what is not being done.
Stanley: The Rand report suggested that the National Reading
Panel (NRP) report has created an unintended, over emphasis on primary grades’
reading issues. How can we jumpstart disseminating specific recommendations
for improving comprehension in the content areas and thwart the infamous
“fourth grade” slump in reading achievement?
Torgesen: I don’t think that we are overemphasizing “primary
grades’ reading issues” at present, because I regard efforts to prevent the
emergence of reading difficulties as the key to our long term success in
improving reading outcomes at the end of high school. When children do not
become accurate readers in first grade or fluent readers by third grade, they
miss out on literally thousands of opportunities every year to add to their
verbal knowledge networks (vocabulary), to their knowledge of many content
domains, and to their ability to think in more sophisticated ways about the
content of what they are reading. It is exceedingly difficult to make up for
these lost learning opportunities if they extend many years beyond first grade,
given the way the demand for these skills continues to accelerate after third
grade. In addition to the effects of delayed development of reading skill on
cognitive development, children who struggle in reading through the middle of
elementary school frequently lose interest in reading and in school because it
is not a place they can experience many rewards for their efforts.
While I acknowledge that we have immediate and
pressing needs for improved literacy instruction in grades 4-12, I also hope
that we do not lose sight of the fact that, until we dramatically improve our
reading instruction and outcomes in grades (K-3), we have little hope of making
significant improvements in the percentages of proficient readers we have in
our high schools.
Now, what can we do to “jumpstart” changes in grades
4-12 that will lead to long-term improvements in the growth of literacy after
grade 3? I think we need to focus on three things. First, every school (late
elementary, middle, high school) needs the capacity to provide intensive
reading instruction to its lowest performing students. Students who cannot yet
read text accurately and fluently need specific help in this area to give them
more skills and better access to text. Many students may also need fairly
intensive instruction in a basic set of core reading comprehension strategies
and reasoning skills to allow them to make more sense of the increasingly
complex and varied text they encounter after third grade.
Second, content area teachers need to be trained in
and encouraged to use instructional strategies such as those developed by the
University of Kansas Center for Learning that help to insure that even students
with limited reading skills acquire the most essential content information from
each course they take. The essential idea here is for teachers to identify the
most important ideas in each unit of instruction and then use a variety of
“content enhancement routines” to increase the probability that this content
will be mastered by every child in the classroom, not just the most proficient
readers. If we employed procedures like these in every late elementary,
middle, and high school content class, not only would all students learn better,
but the learning of students with lower levels of reading proficiency would
also be substantially improved.
Third, we also need to train our content area teachers
to help students read more strategically in their content area. Ideally, every
content area teacher in a school would teach and reinforce a core of effective
reading comprehension strategies that are also taught in intensive instruction
to smaller groups of struggling readers. In this way, all students would be
supported in the growth of more sophisticated reading strategies while the
students who struggle the most would be reinforced and supported in the
strategies they learned in their intensive reading class. As children are
asked to process and comprehend increasingly complex text after fourth grade, I
believe, along with many others, that reading can be increasingly defined as
“thinking guided by print.” If the core of good reading comprehension is good
thinking ability and high levels of knowledge, then the job of improving literacy
in grades beyond the initial stages of learning to read clearly is a task for
all teachers and not just reading specialists.
Stanley: Finally, is there a question about the teaching of
reading I didn’t ask you would like to address?
Torgesen: I guess one point that might bear some discussion
would be the role of “comprehensive core reading programs” and other published
reading materials in supporting and improving the reading instruction provided
to students in Reading First schools. The emphasis both within the State of
Florida and nationally on the use of core programs to help guide reading
instruction has received considerable criticism from individuals who believe
that the emphasis on “research based programs” puts teachers in
“straight-jackets”, “dumbs-down” reading instruction, and undermines teaching
as a profession. They also claim that if teachers are forced to follow a
rigidly prescribed or scripted instructional program then the best, most
creative teachers will leave the profession. I do not deny that these are
potentially valid points of concern. However, I also do not believe that
Reading First’s requirement for schools to adopt a common core comprehensive
reading program has to necessarily produce any of the effects these critics are
concerned about.
I agree with Barbara Foorman, who in a recent keynote
talk at the International Dyslexia Association meetings in Philadelphia
indicated that effective schools are ones that consistently have a “sensible
reading curriculum”. What she meant by that was this. Schools need a reading
curriculum that provides sufficient support to new or less knowledgeable
teachers that they can rely on the materials to help them learn how to provide
explicit instruction in critical areas, to orchestrate effective practice, and
to align their practice materials with their initial instruction. They also
need to have guidance in how to engage students in meaningful assignments and
discussions that increase their authentic literacy skills. This “sensible
curriculum” should also allow more experienced teachers to use the wisdom,
judgment, and knowledge they have acquired through many years of teaching to
deviate from and enhance the core reading program in areas where they can
improve on it for their individual students. There is no such thing as a
perfect published reading program, nor are all the instructional routines in
these programs well adapted to the needs of specific teachers and classrooms.
There is always room for enhancement by smart, experienced, and dedicated
teachers.
The key here is monitoring student outcomes. If I
were a principal in a Reading First school, I would encourage my newer or less
effective teachers to learn as much as possible from implementing the
comprehensive core program with fidelity, and would monitor their own growth as
teachers as well as the reading growth of their students. As they acquired
more confidence and knowledge, and suggested reasonable ways to deviate or
enhance the curriculum, I would support these initiatives, while at the same
time keeping close tabs on the growth of their students. I would worry far
less about deviations from the core reading program in teachers whose students
performed strongly on the progress monitoring and year end reading assessments
than I would for those teachers whose students showed less progress. And, I
would encourage my more effective teachers to share their practices with the
teachers in my school who were having less success with their students.
We have required Reading First schools to adopt a
common comprehensive core reading program in grades K-3 to serve as a
“scaffold” or learning opportunity for many teachers who want to learn how to
provide more explicit and systematic instruction to their students.
Reading First schools typically have many less
experienced teachers who can profit from the guidance and support provided by
these materials. However, we are also not forgetting the needs of these
teachers for “broad and deep” professional development to give them understanding
of why they need to provide certain types of instruction as well as how
to do it. A profession is not defined by the rights of its practitioners to
practice their profession however they choose. Medicine is a respected
profession because doctors, by in large, follow well established protocols for
treating illnesses. It is a respected profession because it is reliably
effective in dealing with our health problems. There is a lesson here for us
in education, I think. Respect for our profession will only increase as we
become more effective in dealing with the instructional needs of all students.
We are simply asking teachers to follow instructional protocols that have a
basis in scientific evidence about reading growth and reading instruction.
This should result in increased commonality in many teaching procedures, but
there are still lots of room for creativity and personal initiative in dealing
with the specific problems of individual students.
