11 Thoughts on the Over-Teaching Conversation

The literacy world is abuzz about Liana Loewus’ excellent article, The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics. If you haven’t read it, you should. I’ve shared a few reactions to it in a bunch of different places, and I wanted to collect them all here.

1. Some places are definitely overdoing phonics instruction.

2. Some places are definitely under-doing phonics instruction.

3. We don’t know how many places are overdoing and under-doing phonics instruction.

   School initiatives and state legislation are terrible proxies for what’s actually happening inside classrooms. Curriculum adoptions are a little more accurate but still not great. Different teachers are going to do different things with the same curriculum, even in the same building. If you’ve never worked in a school, you probably don’t realize this.

4. As we try to improve and right-size phonics instruction, the term “over-teaching” is not particularly helpful. Here’s why:

   1. A pedantic reason: It’s not that we want teachers to teach “blends” just a little bit. We don’t want to teach blends at all. We don’t want teachers spending 5 minutes on oral phonemic awareness. We want to get rid of oral phonemic awareness entirely. There are other practices (like an overreliance on decodable texts) that we do want to scale back but probably not eliminate completely.

   2. A strategic reason: This critique is likely to resonate with places that are already under-doing phonics instruction, not places that are overdoing it.

5. When we talk about over-teaching phonics, we’re talking about at least different two things:

   1. Inefficient and extraneous phonics practices that slow students down and prevent them from learning how to read as quickly as they are able. Example: Requiring students to read decodable texts when they’re reading chapter books at home.

   2. Inefficient and extraneous phonics practices that overwhelm students’ working memories with rules and jargon and prevent them from learning how to read as quickly as they are able. Example: Teaching students to mark-up and label words by syllable types.
      In other words, we’re holding back high-fliers, AND we’re unnecessarily complicating the work for striving readers and holding them back too. Both of these things are bad. We should talk about this impact relentlessly.

6. Instead of talking about over-teaching, we should talk about right-sizing phonics instruction for the students in front of you. This might mean adding more phonics. This might mean subtracting.

   We should also acknowledge that right-sized phonics is going to look a little different, depending on student population and depending on the individual student. To be clear, most of this difference is going to be around time for student practice and corrective feedback, not around actual instructional content.

7. We need to be extremely specific about which practices are inefficient and overwhelming. This is my favorite part of Loewus’ article. She actually goes through and identifies specific examples.

8. I think it’s helpful to provide these practices in a list form for easy consumption. Off the top of my head, here is my list. I’m sure I left stuff off of it.

   1. Teaching blends

   2. Teaching syllable types

   3. Teaching syllable division rules

   4. Teaching random rules

   5. Teaching linguistic jargon

   6. Annotating/marking up words

   7. Oral phonemic awareness

   8. Advanced phonemic awareness

   9. Sound walls

   10. Keeping kids in decodables for too long

9. Some questions for you: what’s on your list? What’s missing from my list? Where do you disagree with me?

10. We also need to reevaluate the programs and institutions that are promoting these unnecessary and inefficient practices.

    As Loewus points out, there are numerous, popular curricula that promote inefficient practices and slow kids down. We need to be wary of adopting those programs. But this is more than just curriculum problem.

    Well-regarded reading science university programs promote these practices too. When I sent the Loewus article to a friend who is pursuing a doctorate at one of those programs, she said that her professors and classmates were outraged by it! These are our current literacy leaders and future literacy leaders. They care deeply about getting reading right, and they bring a completely different perspective to this conversation.

    Popular professional development programs promote these practices as well. It’s no surprise that teachers are teaching syllable types and syllable division, when they’re learning about them from state-sponsored and mandated professional development.

11. So how do we move forward? For one, I think we need to have way more conversations about actual instructional practice.
    We need to sweat the small stuff: the 10 minutes we’re spending on oral phonemic awareness, the pictures of lips we’ve unveiling in our classrooms, the time spent defining “fricative.” We need to discuss the tradeoffs of including or excluding these practices. What do our students gain from them? What do they lose? And perhaps most importantly, how do these practices accelerate or delay students learning how to read real books independently?

    These conversations also need to be grounded in real examples from real classrooms, ideally with video and student data. In my experience, video is the best way to keep the conversation focused on instruction and not on personal beliefs or biases.

    And to be clear, I don’t think that we’re going to reach any kind of consensus any time soon, but I do think that instructional conversations make us wiser and smarter over time. That’s what continuous improvement is all about, and that’s where our conversation about phonics needs to go.