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Maybe if he had practiced “/p/ /i/ /b/”all year, he might have done better on the test
Here is the classic story of DIBELS trumping all. Teacher knowledge, judgment, and experience don't count.
by Rene’ Mendel Lebsock M.A.
During the past six years, I have worked with a principal who has been very supportive of my teaching philosophy and has been happy to let me teach reading using shared reading, predictable books, inventive spelling and phonics instruction in a meaningful context. He also knows I teach the Reading/Writing methods course (for teacher ed) at Fresno Pacific University. I have been insistent about keeping all of my students in my class during our daily school wide “scaffolding.” The “lowest” readers are pulled out for SRA. The rest of the school is using the Houghton Mifflin (CA edition).
Earlier this spring, my principal let me know he was expecting everyone to do the scaffolding next year. I know he could feel my disappointment as I said, “Do you mean you are going to take the least proficient readers out of my class and send them to a teacher who is using SRA?" He looked a little guilty but agreed that was what he was planning to do. After a conversation about the negative effects of phonics-only reading programs I asked him if he would be willing to look at my children’s progress at the end of the year and reconsider his plans. He said he would be willing to look at any data I had. (I believe my “low” kids will be doing as well, if not better than those taken out for SRA).
Here is one of my dilemmas. Tyler is a wonderful little boy in my first grade classroom. He has a number of physical “disabilities” and has been given services from special education since he was in preschool. Tyler had his "third year" evaluation yesterday. Among those involved in this meeting were his mother, the school psychologist (who has worked with him twice this year - once in fall and once in spring), resource teacher (who is very supportive of the writing process and inventive spelling), speech teacher (who has seen remarkable progress in his speech) a physical therapist (who gets frustrated with him because he won’t hold his pencil correctly and shows no desire to practice correct letter formation) and myself, his classroom teacher.
Our school psychologist (I will refer to him as Mr. Phonemic Awareness) is extremely vocal about his support of “very direct and explicit” instruction in phonemic awareness training (and reading in general). I have begun to believe our principal’s changes in philosophy are largely due to his influence.
Mr. P.A. explained to Tyler’s mother that Tyler has a normal range of intelligence with non-verbal kinds of assessments. However, when anything involved with oral language comes in to play he has real problems. Let me add here, that Tyler rarely talks to anyone because it is difficult to understand him. I’m sure it is very frustrating having to constantly repeat yourself because people keep asking, “What?”
I was delighted to see a wonderful change in Tyler about midyear. He began sharing in our class discussions. He regularly volunteers to share his thoughts and ideas and is actually becoming more understandable. He can spell inventively when he tells me the sentence he wants to write and I pronounce the words back slowly to him. I don’t think he trusts his own pronunciations because he knows he can’t seem to say the words like everybody else. (I’m very positive with all his attempts). He has grown in our DRA assessment (similar to running record). He even did well on the phonemic awareness portion of the end of year achievement test. His resource teacher asked if I wanted her to do the test with him separately. I said, “Let me try him with the small group and I will let you know” I was paying close attention to see how he was doing and he had no difficulty what so ever! (I will have those results to show the principal)
Of course, Mr. P.A, didn’t seem too impressed – He showed results that indicate Tyler has not grown at all in his phonemic awareness development. He explained how the [DIBELS] test works. Tyler has thirty seconds to “read” as many “sounds” as he can. It’s supposed to sound something like this. “ /p/ /i/ /z/, /t/ /o/ /f/ /k/ /e/ /p/ (you get the idea). Mr. P. A. explained that the sounds made up nonsense words because otherwise they might know the words by sight. He heard me whisper to the resource teacher “or use semantics”. At that point he wouldn’t even look at me but said, “good readers don’t need context clues, only poor readers do.” (Last night I put that phrase in a google search to see what came up – I’m still reading through the list of references).
I’d like our principal to understand that while Tyler made no visible improvements with Mr. P.A., he has grown a lot in his speaking and reading abilities. Maybe if he had practiced, “/p/ /i/ /b/” all year, he might have done better on the test. However, I don’t believe he would have made the same progress in real reading and speaking. Sadly, it comes down to is this, If P.A. training is not needed for reading development – why should he waste time learning P.A.? So he can pass the P.A. assessments? Just because successful readers are good at P.A. activities doesn’t mean it’s the P.A. that’s causing the reading success. (I wish I had a good analogy for that one!)
I feel better just getting this off my chest. (I kept re-playing the meeting over and over in my head all night long.) I would love any feedback that I may be able to use in the discussion I’m planning to have with my principal.
— Rene’ Mendel Lebsock M.A.
e-mail
2007-07-26
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