CENTERBURG — A first grade class sits cross-legged on a colorful rug, their heads tilted up to focus on letter pairings on an interactive whiteboard.
“Can you come up and make the word seek?” first grade teacher Emily Hite asks a student.
The student drags the letter ‘s,’ the digraph ‘ee’ and the letter ‘k’ to make the verb.
“All right, sounds please,” Hite says, and the class responds in unison /sēk/, clearly articulating the sound each part of the word makes.
“Can you make ‘seek’ into ‘reek’?” Hite then asks another student.
“What does that mean?” a student asks. “Smelly,” Hite said, which received a collective response of “ewww” from the students.
The class is doing a chaining exercise, where a sequence of words can be built by changing one sound at a time. Reading instruction in Hite’s classroom looked different a year ago; Hite had prompted students to guess words based on context, such as looking at pictures and re-reading whole sentences to see what word fit.
This year, the focus is phonics — teaching reading by connecting sounds with letters.
Teaching students to read is expected to change for every teacher in Centerburg Elementary within the next year. Centerburg began piloting new literacy curriculums at the start of the 2021-22 school year in light of evidence that the method it has long used is ineffective and exacerbates achievement gaps.
Debunked but still in use
What Hite described — guessing words based on context — is part of an early reading method popularized around the 1960s called the three-cueing system. A similar method is known as MSV. Both systems teach students to guess whole words based on three sources of information: meaning, sentence structure and visual information.
“If they’re children that have been read to as little babies and toddlers, they’re going to be even better at that prediction as to what the next word is going to be,” Hite said.
While some students may be able to get by with guessing words in first grade, they run into problems when they get to more challenging texts in higher grades because they are unable to recognize words without context clues, Centerburg’s director of teaching and learning Barb Gentille Green said.
This trend is shown in Centerburg’s state test data, as state assessment results for grades six, seven and eight are 20-30% lower than grades three through five (according to 2018-19 and 2020-21 school year results).
“That’s kind of the hard thing to make teachers change, because they’re like, ‘Well most of my kids are reading,’” Gentille Green said.
“Especially the kindergarten, one, two teachers because they may not know that some of their readers that were doing OK go on to fourth, fifth, sixth grade and beyond and they’re given a textbook — a science textbook, a social studies textbook — and they cannot pronounce the words in that textbook because they’ve just been memorizing all these words all this time by sight, and they haven’t been taught how to decode the words.”
Decoding, understanding letter-sound relationships, is a main focus of Centerburg’s teaching shift this year — and not coincidentally a main challenge for people with dyslexia.
Hite first saw fault in the three-cueing method after one of her student’s siblings received a dyslexia diagnosis in the 2019-20 school year. When looking into the learning disorder, Hite realized she had been teaching students to rely on strategies people with dyslexia often fall back on when undiagnosed because they have trouble identifying speech sounds and understanding how they relate to letters and words.
“The old way just seems like we’re flying by the seat of our pants constantly,” Hite said of cueing. “So, for me to make the shift (to phonics) I was just so happy because I finally felt like I’d found answers.
“It’s way easier to diagnose the problem that they’re having in this manner than to think, ‘Well, they read to me out of this book, they’re kind of guessing the words, what is the problem?’ You can’t tell. But this way of teaching you can pinpoint exactly and intervene on that particular skill.”
What’s changing
Centerburg is piloting two reading curricula this school year that both place greater focus on phonemic awareness.
When choosing which literacy programs to pilot at Centerburg, Gentille Green said the district looked to EdReports, an independent curriculum review nonprofit that rates curriculum on three areas: text quality, building knowledge and usability.
The two curricula the district settled on — Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) and Into Reading — both met expectations in all areas.
Per grade at Centerburg, one teacher is piloting CKLA and one is piloting Into Reading, with the exception of fifth grade because there is only one language arts teacher, Gentille Green said. Fifth grade students are receiving lessons from both curricula, but more heavily from Into Reading.
CKLA and Into Reading both rely on something called, “the science of reading.”
As Centerburg’s educators are using it, the science of reading is understood not as a specific strategy or one-size-fits-all approach, but as a body of academic research supporting both explicit instruction in how to read words (decoding) and instruction that strengthens language knowledge and skills.
This idea is broken down into this simple view of reading, first proposed by Philip Gough and William Tunmer in 1986:
Word recognition (decoding) x language comprehension = reading comprehension
Gentille Green emphasized that it is the product, not sum, of these two components that lead to reading comprehension. A lack of skill in one area cannot be made up for by high skill in the other.
A 1987 study, called the “baseball study,” shows how reading comprehension varies depending on someone’s familiarity with a topic. In the study, seventh and eighth graders read a text describing a fictional baseball game and were tasked to move figures on a mock field to reenact the action described.
Prior knowledge of baseball made more of a difference in the students’ ability to understand the text than the students’ supposed reading level, and the students who had little prior knowledge about baseball (including the “good readers”) performed poorly.
This is why the curriculums Centerburg selected also decrease emphasis on another long-time staple of the reading instruction in American schools: reading groups. While students still read books independently, often in pairs grouped by reading ability, all students engage with challenging texts through oral instruction.
This is done in the knowledge portion of the curricula — or the language comprehension portion of the simple view of reading equation.
Changes can be seen in first grade, for example, where Hite uses CKLA and another first grade teacher, Kathy Compton, uses Into Reading.
Compton said she has had more in-depth discussions with her class and that there are more non-fiction than fiction stories compared to years past.
“I feel like there is more deeper-thinking questioning that translates into writing projects and conversation time,” Compton said.
In Hite’s first grade class, recent examples of knowledge units have been lessons on the human body and astronomy.
“We know they’re not going to be able to read these big words,” Hite said of the oral instruction. “But if we talk about it, eventually when they hear it again it’s going to be easier for them to comprehend what’s going on because they’ve heard that word before.”
Students are also assessed in the decoding versus knowledge differently, Hite explained. While students are tasked to read independently on grammar assessments, the knowledge assessments are given verbally and often involve true/false questions and circling pictures.
“You’re making sure everybody has access to the learning,” she said, adding that in college she had been taught to differentiate students.
“Maybe we’re differentiating to the point of closing some of the students off from important learning that they really needed to have access to. Maybe there is more of a fine line we have to walk with differentiating.”
Centerburg will pick one curriculum. So, how do the pilot curricula differ?
CKLA and Into Reading both teach reading based on the two components of the simple view of reading equation, but key differences include the pace of instruction, Gentille Green said.
For example, Into Reading has a quicker pace than CKLA in kindergarten. But differences in how the curricula are taught often vary by grade level.
CKLA typically spends more time on a given story compared with Into Reading, Gentille Green said as an example.
“(Into Reading) might read five stories to your one in CKLA,” Gentille Green said.
Another difference involves the knowledge portion of the curricula.
“CKLA goes deeper into topics than Into Reading, building background knowledge more deeply,” Gentille Green said.
Another district in Ohio that recently switched to CKLA — Celina City Schools — had also considered Into Reading. One of the reasons Celina ultimately selected CKLA was because CKLA focused more on background knowledge, said Celina’s curriculum director Vaughn Ray.
“We realized through our state test results, especially in our writing results, that our kids were really lacking in their depth in their answers — quality versus quantity,” Ray said. “They had a lot of words written down, but they weren’t the words that they needed to be. Our kids didn’t know enough about everyday topics to give better answers on the state assessments.”
Another part of Celina’s decision reasoning involved structure.
“Amplify (CKLA) has a lot more structure and gives you everything, whereas Into Reading, in some grades, you have around 16 different lesson options, different supplementary materials, different books, different pieces,” Ray said.
“So, we looked at teacher usage as well. Do we want our teachers to have to continually need to decide which 16 we’re going to use? Or do we want to go with Amplify (CKLA), where it was all right there for us?”
Ray said the district decided to revamp its literacy standards right around the time he began his role three years ago to align with the state’s literacy plan.
The major challenge Celina has had with CKLA this year is also a challenge Centerburg is grappling with during its pilot year — pacing. Celina’s literacy coach for second and third grade Karen Sudhoff said teachers had been used to pacing themselves previously.
“Now it’s ‘get this done in 120 minutes,’” Sudhoff said.
Hite and other teachers at Centerburg piloting CKLA mentioned similar challenges. While Hite had been spending roughly the same amount of time per day on reading previously — two hours — she said there are now smaller drills she must fit into that overall time frame.
“Everybody that’s piloting it is finding that it is very, very time consuming,” Hite said. “I also have to get my math in. We’re struggling to get our math in some days and we can’t just forget that. So I’ve had to really revamp my schedule.”
Hite and Compton from Centerburg as well as Sudhoff and Ray from Celina emphasized that adjusting to new curricula always takes time, and they anticipate that some challenges will work themselves out over time as teachers become more familiar with the content.
“We’ve heard a lot of times it takes five years for a system to truly be implemented with fidelity,” Ray said.
Based on Celina’s early data, there have not been drastic changes in assessment results for second and third graders so far, but improvements are already apparent at the kindergarten level.
Into Reading is newer than CKLA, as pilots for CKLA date back to the early 2000s whereas Into Reading’s early outcomes implementation research study was conducted in the 2019-20 school year — and interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Overall, districts across the country that have implemented CKLA and Into Reading have seen measurable achievement improvements — but it is important to note it is unclear whether the phonics or knowledge portions of the curricula have driven these improvements, or if separate factors are at play.
What curriculum will be here to stay?
Centerburg Elementary will be using the pilot programs through the duration of the 2021-22 school year, but the district is putting together recommendations in the coming weeks about which of the two curricula should remain for years to come.
Throughout the month of February, teachers completed a rubric evaluating their respective pilot curriculum. The teachers are meeting with Gentille Green and elementary principal Miguel Thompson to review the rubric and answer additional questions, before the elementary literacy team forms a recommendation.
The literacy team includes Gentille Green, Thompson, general education teachers, a speech language pathologist, two title reading teachers and two intervention specialists.
The team intends to have a recommendation to Supt. Mike Hebenthal in early March, with a tentative plan to take that recommendation to the school board on March 14.
The larger community will then be able to review the recommended curriculum and ask questions. Gentille Green said two review dates will be set up.
“Hopefully, the board will be ready to vote at the April meeting,” Gentille Green said.
While Centerburg is currently in the midst of a curriculum shift at the elementary level, the district has plans to reassess its middle and high school reading curricula in the coming years as well.
