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Making sense of reading's forever wars
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Making sense of reading's forever wars

A Conversation with Michiko Hikida and Leah Durán

In this episode, Mary Howard, Debra Crouch and I speak with professors Michiko Hikida and Leah Durán, authors of the article “Making sense of reading’s forever wars” (Phi Delta Kappan, 2022).

Leah Durán is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Michiko Hikida is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University, Columbus. They wrote this article to make the information “accessible to a lot of readers in a way that most academic journals aren't.”

Our conversation was guided around three primary questions:

  • Have we learned anything from our past debates, or are we just going in circles?

  • What are your thought on the idea that these “wars” may be part of a thesis - antithesis - synthesis that we need to go through in order to move forward as a profession?

  • Students need institutional changes, not just individual instructional change. What can K-12 practitioners do to support institutional change?

I hope you find this discussion as helpful as we did for better understanding the context and the conversation around the science of reading.

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Full Transcript

Matt Renwick:

Hi. Want to welcome Michiko and Leah to our conversation. They wrote a wonderful article for Kappan Magazine of Phi Delta Kappan titled Making Sense of Reading’s Forever Wars. Subtitle is, “Adopting a new science-based methodology is not enough to address students' difficulties with reading.” And we were chatting prior just how much we appreciate how well you were succinct in your article, but yet covered so much ground. I'm going to share my screen here so we can all see it. And yeah, and I'm just going to scroll down here to your bylines and your well sourced cited article. So Leah is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural studies at the University of Arizona Tucson.

And Michiko is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. So welcome again. And yeah, I guess I'll start with the first question here. And it's actually your question, is have we learned anything from our past debates or are you just going in circles? And I'll open it up to Leah or Michiko first, but everyone else here feel free to chime in and offer your thoughts. And when you do, if you can introduce yourself when you speak. Michiko and Leah, we've already introduced you before. For our other guests here, just make sure you state your name.

Michiko Hikida:

Leah, do you want to take this or do you want me to give it a shot?

Leah Durán:

Yeah, yeah. I think that we have not learned as much as we should have from past debates, and I think that was part of the reason why Michiko and I really wanted to write this, is that it seemed like No Child Left Behind is very recent history. And at least the way that people are legislating science of reading, it is pretty much identical to scientifically based reading research, the term from the Bush era. It's still the big five from the report of the National Reading Panel.

So in some ways it seems like there's this real energy to do exactly what has already been done without really grappling with why that didn't lead to the transformative changes that people hoped it would. And I think it's very important that we do that, if we don't acknowledge the way that No Child Left Behind and Reading First really fell short of I think the big dreams that people had for it. And think about why. Then there's no chance of not doing that again. So I really hope that the article gives people a chance to think about what we've already tried and what that means about what we haven't tried, and should try, and do differently, in order to not just do the same old thing over and over again every 10 to 15 years.

Michiko Hikida:

I do want to add to that a little bit and say that from a research perspective, I do think that there has been some consensus. And that consensus is that phonics instruction is helpful as a part of a more robust literacy curriculum. I think a person would be hard pressed to find a researcher that is anti-phonics. But I reiterate what Leah's saying is that at a policy level that doesn't feel like how it's being taken up.

Matt Renwick:

Yeah, I won't put anyone on the spot here, but I think the “be reading by third grade” retention policies might be one where we're not really learning from the past and repeating some mistakes. Yeah. But yeah, to me it sounds like this article's intent was just to create a pause for us and just to take stock of where we've come from, where we're at, and how might we proceed forward. So yeah, that's how I read it too. And I'd just open it up to our guests here. We have Debra, Mary and Sonya. So any thoughts on this too? What have you've learned, if anything from past debates?

Mary Howard:

Well, one of the things, and I'm Mary, I'm been an educator 51 years and now living in Honolulu, and I'm connecting back to something that you said in your piece that I keeps capturing my a attention. Some have argued that a permanent sense of crisis in K-12 education has been manufactured by those who aim to undermine the institution of public schools and scapegoat educators as a way of diverting attention from America's deepening social problems. And I think for me, a lot of that is wanting a thing. And that's always been what I've seen in all of these years in education, but never so much as now when social media makes it so easy.

But wanting to blame all of these, we don't have enough programs, we don't have enough phonics, we don't have enough this, we don't have enough this and this is the way to fix it. And for anyone who's been in education longer than a day, the one thing that we know is that nothing is going to work all the time for every child. And it's certainly not going to work when we're fixated on that. So I just always keep coming back to that quote because the one thing we don't want to talk about is those deepening social problems. And so the article really meant a lot to me because you did that so beautifully.

Matt Renwick:

And Mary, if I can just then transition what you just said to maybe a question to Michiko and Leah is you mentioned that not one thing's going to work for everyone. And I appreciate you surfacing that because in the article too, you mentioned that students, they don't need individual instructional change, they need institutional change. And I think that's what Mary's pointing to here too is that's a big, big thing to take on. As practitioners, what are some ideas you might have for us to move on, a next step? That would probably might be helpful.

Michiko Hikida:

I have a couple of thoughts, and they are maybe outside of the classroom more than inside of the classroom because we are talking about institutional change. So I think a lot about teachers as public intellectuals. So when you've been teaching for 51 years like Mary has, you have a wealth of knowledge that you can stand on in a public context. So I think speaking publicly, posting on social media, having podcasts, those kinds of things, as well as organizing and doing things like voting.

Leah Durán:

Yeah, and I would say my answer is pretty similar in that I think maybe part of what we can do is redefine what counts as reading policy. Things that are about housing are also reading policy. Things that are about poverty are also reading policy. And I think that we sometimes compartmentalize them and think that those belong in a different arena or somebody else's expertise. But I think that they should be part of a conversation and part of our efforts around improving reading have to do with improving everything, even though that's a lot and hard to do, but it definitely won't happen if we don't try as part of it.

And the other piece that related to that I think is that one thing that has been hard for me about watching this current round of the reading wars is that there really is a tremendous amount of money being spent, but to my eyes, it's being spent on things that I wouldn't reasonably expect to cause huge changes based on the research. But there are other things that we're not spending money on because I think we don't categorize them as being about reading. So I think that's part of it too. People are willing to spend money. Millions of dollars of money, but maybe I think they, legislators need some push around what counts as doing something about reading.

Michiko Hikida:

And I would say that that comes back to this question of what have we learned? And I think there is some consensus in the field about the impact of poverty and trauma and housing insecurity on reading scores.

Matt Renwick:

Yeah, that's one of the few correlations I've seen is poverty and trauma and some of these challenges as a principal and as a former teacher, and that correlation with reading achievements. So I'm glad you pointed that out. We mentioned this latest round of the reading wars, we use these metaphors to try to describe it. But I also noted in there too, instead of the pendulum swinging, you talk about incremental progress as a better way to gauge growth as a profession with reading instruction. And what things have you seen now that you've studied this in terms of specifically around reading instruction, you mentioned that we know phonics does work as a instructional strategy, and other resources or practices that are promising and that you'd like to see. You mentioned we have all this money, what buckets would you want to put the money in? Certainly outside of education, poverty and those issues are super important. Within the school, where would you want to put some of those resources?

Leah Durán:

Well, one of the things that I think about in terms of what all schools need to do a good job is based on an experience I had when we were both doctoral students at UTS. And one of the pieces of our training there was to supervise student teachers. And so we did that in schools all across the Austin area, so in the urban core and the suburbs. And one of the things that has really stayed with me was how different, even within the same district, classrooms were and schools were in terms of resources, depending who was enrolled there. And so I think about one particular school where I sometimes supervise student teachers, that was just really lovely and I would want everyone to have that experience. The teachers there were terrific, really talented teachers. They had huge classroom libraries. And just a lot of care and expertise went into mediating kids', access to books, kids' instruction, and were very inclusive.

I remember seeing the whole classroom labeled in braille when there's a child who would benefit from them. So there's all these things. I think if you look at some of these schools that are already serving more affluent communities. I feel like everyone deserves that. And part of that is making it an attractive working condition. So one of the reasons I think that teachers like to work there and experience teachers that gravitated towards it was that they had money to pay for extra specialist teachers so that they got more planning periods. And I think that was part of what went into really thoughtful lessons. And they had tons and tons and tons of children's books. And I think that's an important piece that we should also take from the whole language side or the meaning focused side of these different pendulum swings, is that there's value in thinking about meaning and there's value in children's literature as a resource.

And that doesn't have to be opposed to teaching about phonics, teaching about the code. So I guess that's my answer is I think if you look at a really wonderful school in an affluent neighborhood and think about what are all the resources that they have right there, even just in the school, that's even leaving outside all of the different things that kids have access to. But I would want all children to get to go to a school that looks and feels like that one in terms of a good place to learn, a good place to work.

Matt Renwick:

Any thoughts from the rest of the group on what was shared there?

Debra Crouch:

So, hi, I'm Debra Crouch. I'm a literacy consultant, so I go in and support schools. I live in San Diego. And you're echoing a conversation I had with the principal this morning as we walked around and we were looking at classroom libraries specifically. And just thinking about what it looks like. And at one point I asked, so I said it's that getting that picture, what would an affluent school look like? Why can't we create spaces that feel like that? Because one of the things that we were noticing were some of the jumbles in classrooms storage. It's the classrooms got the classroom, but then it's also got storage stuff all over. And we were starting to brainstorm ways that we could even take some of that out. And is there a space in the building that we could use as a storage because another principal had shared that idea.

I think that envisioning, what are some of the possibilities that we could create around this, because I'm not absolutely positive that it is, like you were saying, it's like we have the money. So it's not like we don't have the money, it's the way that we're using it and the way that we're thinking about what happens at these schools. I go into classrooms sometimes and they've made black and white photocopies for the kids as opposed to giving them these really gorgeous books that they have access to. And for some reason they decide that a printed off black and white, and I keep saying to them, don't children deserve color in their books? Come on, this is not an acceptable way of treating the children. So maybe it is some of that conversation that we have around how we're using what we have and what those spaces could look like for kids. Yeah. So I so appreciated your article. Oh my goodness. This was brilliantly done. Yeah.

Michiko Hikida:

Thank you.

Debra Crouch:

You're welcome.

Matt Renwick:

You've already answered my last question, which was a colleague of mine, we were talking about science of reading, the reading wars, and he mentioned these things go on cycles. There's a thesis and then there's an antithesis, and then there's synthesis. And it goes back, goes around and around. And do you see that? I guess the question we had was, are these hard conversations of these issues necessary to go through in order to get to a better understanding of good reading instruction? I don't enjoy arguing about the science of reading, but is it also the obstacle is the way of thinking too?

Michiko Hikida:

My initial thought of that about that is it depends on who's having the conversation. So I think about the field of literacy research and how this conversation started in the 1960s. And in the field of literacy research, there has been a synthesis. And part of that synthesis is that, yes, phonics is an effective instructional tool, but it is not the entirety of a literacy curriculum. So within that field, I feel like there has been that thesis, antithesis and synthesis of this conversation. I think within the public sphere, the motivations for it are different. It's complicated, there's a lot of money involved, there's a lot of a lot of things involved. But I don't think that that conversation, the more public discourse on it is coming to it necessarily earnestly. And willing to engage with all of the research and evidence that we do have. So I think it depends on who's having the conversation and for what purpose.

Matt Renwick:

And then the context, it sounds like too, if you're debating stuff on Twitter, it's going to be a different conversation. [inaudible 00:19:08].

Michiko Hikida:

Or you know what? Policy makers like things that are very measurable and concrete and that I can legislate, and learning isn't really that clean. But gosh, that would be so much more convenient. [inaudible 00:19:25] with people and we're messy.

Matt Renwick:

Yeah, we can measure engagement, you can measure those more messier kinds of things, but not in the way you can measure some of the things that seem to get more of the attention. That's a great point.

Mary Howard:

And one thing that worries me in this day and age, and in my mind more so than ever it's been in history, is the level of mandating and the laws that are coming out from schools that are saying here are things that are not research based, like choice reading is not research based. We just shake our heads and go, "What?" So I think too, it's really important for us to be very cognizant that teachers are in schools where these horrifying mandates are being put in place. And so at the same time that we're thinking about all of the important things, I love the discussion of let's envision what is possible, and I know that teachers do that every day, but how do we help teachers to understand how to maneuver a school where there is a ball and chain attached to their arms and legs and persona, so to speak.

Debra Crouch:

See, a lot of it comes to leadership. It's the leadership in the schools. Because you can have that legislation piece, but it's interpreted so much by the school leadership. So that piece is so powerful and important in school leadership.

Matt Renwick:

Yeah. Leah or Michiko, did you see when you were visiting these schools during your dissertation, your studies, did you see a correlation with leadership? And you mentioned affluence, did you see a leadership factor there with supporting teachers?

Michiko Hikida:

I'll actually talk out of my teaching experience. So I taught third, fourth, and fifth in Texas. So they were all testing grades. And we had a remarkable principal and she protected us from the district. So when the district would say every elementary school in the city has to do this professional development, she would appeal to them and say, "Hey, I would love to do this with professional development with my teachers instead." So absolutely, and this was a title one school. I think 97% of our kids were on free and reduced price lunch. More than half of our kids were bi or multilingual.

This was a school that I think people would think of as low performing, and it wasn't. And it was a joyful place to work as a teacher. I felt like I had a lot of autonomy. I felt like I had a ton of administrative support. And because of that, our students performed very well on high stakes testing and enjoyed reading. So I think that in my own experience, having a supportive administrator willing to go to bat for us made all the difference in the world.

Matt Renwick:

Well, that's great. We're running close to our time here together and I want to be respectful of that. Any closing thoughts that you might have, Leah or Michiko? If not, you can also share what you're reading right now. That's an option. But yeah, just any closing thoughts as we close our time together?

Leah Durán:

Yeah, I mean, one thing that I've been thinking about, and it was part of the reason why we wanted to write specifically in Phi Delta Kappan, is a place that's accessible to a lot of readers in a way that most academic journals aren't. I think that the state of the field is a very difficult thing to know. It requires a lot of time devoted to reading, to get a sense of what's going on in the field, what does the research say, what are points of contention? And I do feel like as people who have institutional access to all of these scholarly journals and that time is part of our jobs is to be current, that that's an important thing that I want to do is try and translate that or make more accessible the complexity or the synthesis that the field has arrived at in ways that I think are not always very easy to see if you can't get access to a lot of scholarly journals or go to AERA or any of these other conferences.

Michiko Hikida:

I'll just add a couple of things. So first thank you for having us. It's fun for Leah and me to talk about this. This was an important piece for us. But second, there is a piece that was just published in one of those journals that of course is behind the paywall that I would be happy to share with you about this that was written by David Reinking, and just came out in January, called Legislating Phonics. And he and a couple of others go through the history of this and challenge some of the arguments that phonics only people are making, which I thought was really helpful. The second thing I thought about is a book called Rocking the Boat, How Tempered Radicals affect Change.

So when thinking about what teachers can do in their classrooms, when we know that there are some institutional constraints and some other challenges that they face, that's what comes to mind to me. So if I can share my screen for a quick second, I can just show you the cover.

Matt Renwick:

Yeah, I don't mind.

Michiko Hikida:

And as a classroom teacher, this is how I felt. I felt like I was a tempered radical. I, of course, had to operate within the constraints of the school and what I was expected to do. And I really worked to try to find those spaces where I could do something else. So that I would just share.

Leah Durán:

Oops. I wasn't fast enough.

Michiko Hikida:

Oh, sorry.

Leah Durán:

It's all right.

Michiko Hikida:

There you go.

Leah Durán:

Thank you. Let me do a quick screen-

Matt Renwick:

Rocking the Boat. How tempered Radicals Affect Change Without Making Trouble. Okay.

Leah Durán:

Oh, I love that title.

Matt Renwick:

[inaudible 00:26:27].

Michiko Hikida:

It really resonated for me as a teacher where we do operate with systems and how we might be able to make change from the inside without just burning it all apart.

Leah Durán:

Wow.

Matt Renwick:

And still be able to teach and lead and study and do research. And this has been great. We really appreciate you all being here, and we look forward to reading more from you. So thank you.

Mary Howard:

Thank you so much for the invitation. It was really great to get to talk.

Leah Durán:

Thank you.

Debra Crouch:

Thank you.

Mary Howard:

That was wonderful.

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