“I was the teacher and the mom who had been trained in the very practices that would later fail my own child”
Lucy Calkins was a huge part of my preservice teacher training at the University of Georgia. I still have my copy of The Art of Teaching Writing. Later, my district introduced me to Fountas and Pinnell’s Guided Reading. Balanced literacy wasn’t something sitting on the fringes of my professional life. It was thoroughly embedded in how I had been taught to think about literacy.
I believed it, and I taught it with fidelity, and then I had a child with dyslexia.
Anyone who has been through that knows that it changes the way you look at everything.
I watched a system that was supposed to teach my child to read cling to practices that didn’t teach him to read. I was actually told that the balanced literacy approaches being used in his school were appropriate for children with dyslexia. I have emails from that time explaining that they weren’t going to focus on sounding words out.
I still get emotional thinking about that.
Now I know what my child needed. I know what the research says. And I know how deeply entrenched this methodology has become in our schools.
So standing in the same physical space as Lucy Calkins at a conference devoted to advancing the science of reading was complicated for me.
For clarity, I don’t have a problem with Lucy Calkins learning.
Everyone should be learning.
If someone discovers that what they believed, taught, promoted, or sold does not align with the evidence, I absolutely want them sitting in the room learning something different.
But learning creates a responsibility to act on your new knowledge.
Lucy and I had a short conversation at the conference. She talked about teachers learning all this information and then having to go back to their districts and figure out how to actually implement it.
And I kept thinking: Teachers have been trying.
