Jill Turner

As someone who taught reading intervention at middle school in a school that focused on a phonics-centric Science of Reading approach, here are a few concerns I see with this new trend and how it might be applied to older students: 1. I worry that we will focus so much on skill development that we fail to see the need for reading for pleasure in order to develop reading endurance. At the middle school level, one of the key elements in helping students increase their reading scores was the role of endurance. 2. An emphasis on phonics, blending, and phonemic awareness at the middle school level sometimes fails to recognize the role of critical thinking, vocabulary, and prior knowledge in reading comprehension. I’ve seen highly fluent readers fail reading tests for these reasons. 3. The one-size-fits-all systematic approach that rejects balance might work at younger levels but the reasons a 13 year old is behind will often be far more varied. 4. I’m really worried that some of the people screaming the loudest about research haven’t read the research in-depth and seen the limitations in actual studies, the nuances in the finding, and the context of the studies (rarely about middle school) 5. I want to make sure we are paying attention to accessibility. I know many people who are dyslexic and became avid readers once they could use voice-to-text and audio readers. My fear is that readying will be defined solely as decoding written text and certain people who might thrive as readers will be forced to do drills where they lean into their weakness without learning about assistive technology. I’m no expert in early literacy but I am concerned with prescriptive approaches that treat middle school students in the same way as a second graders. I’m worried about prescriptive, singular solutions.