Rod Everson

Exciting news! The OnTrack Reading Phonics Program has been updated inside and out for a smoother teaching experience, with the same proven curriculum at its core. And due to popular request, we've also added a licensed digital PDF. Lots more to come! ontrackreading.com/phonics-progra…

@C_Hendrick Montessori emphasizes developmental processes. I suspect that's the difference. Time spent teaching early reading skills might be better spent working on development of gross- and fine-motor skills and visual perception skills first.

Children offered Montessori preschool showed stronger literacy and cognitive outcomes at kindergarten, not immediately after preschool. Students had had meaningfully higher reading, executive function, memory, and social understanding than peers in other programmes, at lower overall cost and in direct contrast to typical preschool fade-out patterns. pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.10…

@kevinbparry A dictionary giving in to persistent errors, rather than setting a standard. What's the definition in a 1950's dictionary? My guess is every two weeks, but I could be wrong.

A huge part of the problem is that the teachers who get the best results are not the ones guiding curriculum. If a math teacher (any grade) says that the new math curriculum being considered is crap, and that teacher has been turning out better-prepared students than his peers year after year, well, then the new math curriculum being considered is probably crap. And if that teacher is turning out better results that his peers while not following the current math curriculum, then the current curriculum is probably crap. And the teacher should be asked how he's doing it, and be safe in saying that he's using his own curriculum. He should then have input on changing the current curriculum. Unfortunately, I doubt that most school administrations go about it that way, although I could be wrong.

I’ve said this a million times and it stands repeating. 90% of school improvement lives in Tier 1 instruction. Full autonomy and teachers teaching what they want is not the way to increase achievement.

In a perfect world, parents would have thoroughly learned English phonics when they were taught to read, and would then easily be able to pass that information on to their kids while reading at home with them. In the imperfect world we live in, schools test letter-name knowledge of 4 and 5 year olds to assess a child's preparedness, so naturally parents think letter names are the way to go.

This tweet I found is not hateful or disrespectful or anything like that, but I’m shocked by it in a way I can’t quite articulate

Letter names are just one more thing to learn, and they're really irrelevant to learning to read. Our curricula avoid their use, both the curriculum for remediation and the beginning reading curriculum (which is currently being field-tested and is not yet available on our website.) In our beginner's curriculum, we gradually introduce letter names well after the sounds of the letters have been introduced. After vowel digraphs are introduced, it's handy to be able to refer to them by letter names. But before that, they're really not needed at all. The sounds, however, are essential from the very start.

@NTFabiano Absolutely true, but only one commenter even hinted at the actual reason. The only natural way to get sufficient vitamin D3 into your body is to expose your skin to direct sunlight. And people who are low on D3 are unhealthy, depressed, and shortening their lifespans.

The sun is an underrated antidepressant

I think your goal is admirable. Mine is the same. But in reaching that goal, there will be some inevitable choices that need to be made. The two that I think you should reconsider for sure are the /ng/ sound and distinguishing between the /oo/ sound in fool and the /ue/ sound in fuel. With /ng/ it will be very difficult to convince a child to blend /n/ and /g/ because that isn't a normal English blend. With /ng/, the tip of the tongue doesn't go to the roof of the mouth like it does with the /n/ sound. And sing definitely doesn't end with a hard /g/ sound. In fact, the /ng/ sound can be dragged out. Say "sing" and hold the /ng/ sound as an example. And fool and fuel are clearly pronounced differently, requiring both an /oo/ sound and a /ue/ sound (long-u) in the list of sounds. The /zh/ and "r" differences I raised are lesser matters. As for J sounding like soft g, yes, they're the same. I was using "beige" as and example of the /zh/ sound. We aren't that far apart and have the same objective.

@OnTrackReading @MrDanielBuck I simplified when no one except a linguist is gonna hear the distinction. OO 👉 long Ū as in: food, rude (or the other Û as in: foot, put) (never the short U as in: but, shut) NG 👉 is just a fast blended N+G (If you say ring 💍 slow… reen+g …both sounds are there.) 🧵👇

Teaching my daughter to read using phonics I never have to tell her to “guess” or “look at the picture” or “use context clues” Instead I say “look at the letters,” “say it slowly, letter by letter,” or just “look at the word” Because phonics actually teaches kids to read

The reasons to homeschool keep piling up. Public schools need a reset, and soon. Administrators just find it too difficult to resist trends and stay with what works. Usually, all that would take is some common sense.

Phonics courses tend to teach 42-45 phonemes. Linguists correctly argue that: 1) there are a lot more English phonemes and, 2) some phonics phonemes are blends of more than one linguistic phonemes. We could clarify the issue with a better name for phonics phonemes, something like "Our curricular phonemes are..." Then we could argue amongst ourselves which curricular phonemes should be included in a good phonics curriculum. Who knows? Maybe we'd even come to a basic agreement on the matter someday. We could then hand every parent a list of curricular phonemes they should know if they're trying to work on reading instruction at home. And it would be the same list as the one that their school handed out last year, before they moved across the country. Seems like a good first step before trying to tell them the sound(s) each letter or digraph represents.

@karenvaites @mattyglesias Teacher's unions don't want to allow merit pay, but they do want teachers to get pay raises beyond inflation. So they found another way to go about it. It's not surprising that they way they bargained for is nowhere near as effective as paying more for excellence.

I need to finish a piece collecting the rather depressing evidence that professional learning alone does not improve learning outcomes. The paper above is on point. @mattyglesias reminded me of it in his smart piece, American higher education is adrift: open.substack.com/pub/matthewygl…

“The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research.  In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact. This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers.  Ninety-six percent of the 112 major U.S. school districts included in the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) Teacher Contract Database pay teachers with MA degrees more than those with BA degrees, with an average difference of $3,205 in the first year of teaching, $4,176 in the fifth year, and $8,411 at the top of the salary schedule.  The size of this pay bump varies widely, topping out at over $30,000 in three districts in Maryland.”

@135dandan @karenvaites That's true, but it's true because so much of it is poorly done or even pointless to have done in the first place. But some of it is excellent and demonstrates important points. I think a gold standard study on the impact of no smartphones in school would be very useful.

@karenvaites You should probably know that research in the field of Education is largely seen as a joke.

Our curriculum adds two consonant sounds, the /ng/ sound in ring and rink, and the /zh/ sound in beige and seizure. But the /zh/ sound occurs in so few easy words that it's not really necessary for a parent to worry about when working with their child. We also add a vowel sound, the /oo/ sound in soon, flu, and suit. Some curricula don't, but you might have just forgotten to include it. And almost all easy words like fire and dear can be sounded out as /ie/+/r/ and /ee/+/r/, so we don't teach those sounds as a single unit. We do teach an /err/ sound, however, but only for words like there and very where the /ae/ spelling isn't obvious or where the /ae/ sound is treated as part of a digraph like in parent. That said, your main point that phonics isn't that hard to explain to a child is valid. And it would be even easier if all parents were taught phonics themselves in school. In time, that might even lead to a standardization of what sounds to teach. That would prepare them to simply point at the letter "c" and say, "Try the other sound" when a child says "kitty" for "city." They would know which spellings had two or more sounds their child must eventually learn. And, after they have that down, they should consider teaching their child an effective multisyllable decoding method like ours, free on our website. Link below: ontrackreading.com/phonics-progra…

@MrDanielBuck You’re helping them learn sounds. They’ve been mimicking you from the instant their 🧠 turned on; got rolling in the terrible twos when they could think it but not make their mouth say it. Don’t EVER let them begin to think it’s “hard”. Freaking educators over-complicate it.

What battle with the state? That was completely a district administrator's decision. You actually think the parents are going to come in and say , "But the state..." That administrator wanted to make some number look better, so the kid was passed along. No one benefited from that decision but the administrator, who obviously has higher priorities than how the kids under his charge are doing.

@OnTrackReading @educator4ever36 You can’t fight a battle with parents when the higher authority (state) won’t back you. But go off dude

Dropping failing high school students mid-year is one of the most used tactics by schools to fool people into thinking students are doing better than they actually are. This student will take PE instead next semester and make up the course online in two weeks in the Spring. 🙄

@grizzlybizzly @educator4ever36 That is definitely on the district. Just because there's an out, doesn't mean they should take it.

@educator4ever36 That’s not on the district, that is on the state for accepting those garbage online recovery classes where students submit some chat gpt work and pass in 9 days

@educator4ever36 "just because he didn't submit a single assignment for the semester." Right. Can't penalize a kid for that. Good grief. And "keep him out of his university of choice"? Those sorts of decisions tend to drive kids into the institution none would ever choose...prison.

I wonder what a study of the vitamin D levels of kids who struggle with reading would find? Has that question ever been examined, anywhere, by anyone? I think the results might be surprising.

@melbrethour @educationweek Often they're unprepared to decode multisyllable words efficiently and instead rely on a guessing strategy. Our Middle School Phonics Course was designed to help content-area teachers address that problem in ten short lessons. ontrackreading.com/phonics-progra…

Reading struggles don’t disappear after elementary school. Many secondary students still need explicit, targeted support but intervention time and training often fade as students get older. We need to identify the gaps and respond. @educationweek series: edw.link/9vc

About half the customers today would be bewildered if a cashier took a $20 from them for a $13.70 purchase and said 13.75, 14, 15, 20, while handing them a nickel, a quarter, 2 ones, and a five. They'd want to see what the screen says they have coming. Then they'd count it themselves to be sure. Some would be surprised that it came out the same.

@itsme_urstruly It’s crazy. My family owns a little ice cream shop. We hire high school & college students. I honestly don’t think any one of them could make change on their own.

Unpopular opinion: Schools should extremely reduce the use of chrome books and return to paper and pencil being the main use. There is a connection between writing and how the brain learns.

Reposting this so more than three people see it. People like this do far more to address reading struggles than most parents and teachers realize. Too many kids now suffer because educators remain blissfully unaware of vision therapy and the problems it addresses.

What you will find, Masha, if you ever win this unwinnable war of yours, is that the kids who struggle to read the current form of English will also struggle with yours. It's not the language. It's that they don't process visual images and/or sounds efficiently (or just exclusively sounds, if you're an O-G proponent.) Either way, the same kids will struggle. Granted, they might learn your phonics faster, but that generally isn't the reason they struggle with reading. After all, kids as young as four and five routinely manage to learn to read. And others at six and seven. It's not rocket science we're dealing with here

"With writing enjoyment on the decline" @Literacy_Trust it is mor urgent than ever to consider modernisation of English …provingenglishspelling.blogspot.co.uk. It dus not need to be made as perfect as Finnish. Amending sum of the spellings that handicap both reeding and writing wd help hugely.