Science of Reading Classroom
Over the past six months, I’ve become increasingly obsessed with growing the science of the reading movement. I’ve also become increasingly aware that the science of reading movement isn’t reaching enough teachers and school leaders. I’ve written about this here, here, here, and here.
So, last week, I decided to take some of my own advice, and I started a Twitter account: SoR Classroom. The account does one thing. It shares videos, photographs, and work samples to illustrate what the Science of Reading looks like in the classroom.
One post might be a photograph of kindergarteners learning about the “CH” sound. The next might be analytical writing samples from fifth-graders. Another might be a video of an entire third-grade class working on building fluency and content knowledge by reading aloud about Congress. All posts offer followers a snapshot of what Science of Reading could look like in their classrooms.
In addition, the posts demonstrate how joyful, vibrant, and interactive these classrooms are. They also showcase the brilliant work that students and teachers are doing in these classrooms. How many 4th graders are equipped to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence? How many kindergartners can use the word “barter?” Impressive stuff.
If you’re a teacher who is doing cool stuff, get in touch!
Here are a few observations from the project, thus far:
The Science of Reading community on Twitter needs more teachers, specifically/selfishly, more teachers sharing images and videos from their SoR classrooms. But more generally, it needs more teachers talking about what they’re doing and learning in their classrooms, sharing ideas, and asking questions of each other. This would help expand my Twitter content, to be sure, but it would also help connect more teachers to researchers, more researchers to teachers, and above all more teachers to teachers. It would help parent advocates understand what’s happening in their children’s classrooms and give them better ideas about what to ask about and advocate for. Everyone wins. Of course, many teachers don’t have the time to document and share what’s happening in their classrooms. And doing so would subject them to even more scrutiny and criticism, so the incentives aren’t all that great here…
A lot of teacher-to-teacher conversation about the science of reading is already happening on Facebook. The group Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College is the go-to spot. The majority of the conversations in the group revolve around responding to a specific question about the efficacy of a particular curriculum or a request for a certain type of instructional material. That said, there is not a lot of work product sharing happening in this group, so while teachers are actively trading ideas, group members don’t get to see them play out in practice. This is a loss! And we hope to work with group members to change this...or at least share some of their work on Twitter.
More practice-sharing! More practice-cataloging! More everything! Doug Lemov showed us the value of sharing and documenting pedagogical best practices, but he was a little too prescriptive for my tastes (and almost certainly the tastes of a veteran teacher that you’re trying to convince to remake his literacy curriculum). That said, we need a Lemov-ian catalog or video library for science of reading classrooms—one that illustrates the different contours of the reading rope, one that teachers can analyze and discuss in PD sessions, one that makes translate the theoretical science into actual, messy classroom practice. We need a library of possible practices, not just a Twitter account. We need a catalog that considers scope and sequence across grade levels and reflects practices at urban, suburban, and rural schools. I’ve been operating this account for just one week, and the interest in the material I’ve shared is broad and wide-ranging. Let’s go!
