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Melanie Chaves: I totally agree with the podcast. In the last 5 years of my teaching career, every year I feel like I am jumping into something new to teach these kids how to read. I see them struggling and often not motivated to pick up a book and try to read even in first grade! I think this is especially hard for my kiddos with learning disabilities. I have worked in a couple districts and we are always teaching to the standards, exploring new programs, and essentially teaching to that program, but are we really listening to the science? It is so important to me to make sure my Kindergarteners foster a love of reading and go into first grade with some good foundational skills. I am excited to finally be learning more about this so I can support my students in the best possible way.

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Alyssia Pacileo: After listening to the podcast and reading the article, I had a big “aha” moment when I heard the research backed behind how explicitly teaching phonics improves reading, whereas there’s absolutely no evidence to show that “whole language” or reading-by-doing improves reading abilities. One connection I can make after listening and reading is thinking about my own school and the push for explicit phonics instruction within the last couple years. There has been some push back from some teachers and I think a lot of that stems from lack of excitement and engagement involved in teaching phonics (for example, someone in the podcast mentioned the boringness of decodable readers). I do hope that this program offers different fun and engaging ways to explicitly teach phonics instruction! With that being said, I do believe that explicit phonics instruction is a key component to the science of reading and that it helps to create strong readers. I am excited to learn more about this program and I look forward to learning more about the benefits of phonics instruction and finding ways to bring the fun and excitement of explicit phonics instruction back into my own classroom!

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Becky Scenna   I am so excited by the podcast and the article and that the research/science is out there that kids learn to read through explicit phonics instruction and explicit phoneme instruction. I grew up in the 70"s as did the author of the podcast and I had explicit phonics instruction but I also feel I was able to crack the code fairly easily. Therefore, I didn't think of myself as a good teacher of reading because I felt that I did just pick it up somehow and it was easy. On the contrary, math was a bit harder for me to learn (although I was a good math student) and so I am more aware of HOW I learned different math skills/concepts and so I am able to explicitly teach math skills and concepts. I have never felt like a GOOD reading teacher and infact I often find myself saying outloud that I do not think I am very good at teaching reading. Perhaps it is also because I taught 4th grade for 10 years and we did not teach phonics or how to learn to read in fourth grade. It was as if it was a much more whole language based approach. I have lots of AHA moments- we tell kids to use context to figure out a word they cannot decode... but the research says good readers do not do this. Instead the research says good readers decode and use what they know about phonemes to figure out words. This struck a chord with me... not the best approach! I have heard a lot about the fact that learning to read does not come naturally to people. However, although I know that and I have read about that, I have never been taught to teach reading-explicitly...until now I am hoping! I loved the idea that classrooms should not have alpahabetical bulletin boards of trick words, but rather classrooms should have the 44 phonemes... I LOVE this idea! I also like the discussion of the 5 components of reading; phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. Finally, I also connected with the quote, "When we know better, we do better"... I am excited and energized about what we will be learning and piloting because I think I have been wanting this training for a long time. I wrote something of a case study when I was earning my Master's Degree in Special Education at Simmons College, about a program that my district was using, called the Benchmark Word Identification/Vocabulary Development Program: An Alternative Approach to Reading for the Dyslexic Student. It was developed between 1982 and 1987 by two women at the Benchmark School in Media, Pennsylvania. The program was created because "language rich experiences" were not successful in teaching ALL students to become readers. They found that poor readers require explicit instruction as they are not able to "discover clues about these orthographic relationships as good readers do."  I actually pulled out my paper to re-read it and found it very relevant to the podcast and article. However, one of two main strategies in the program is the context strategy. I find this interesting.                                    Equity plays a large role in foundational skills instruction. Lower income populations seem to have more difficulty reading and do not have the means to access private tutoring or extra help or specialized scools/programs. However, if we explicitly teach phonemes and sound/symbol relationships with the 4 other components of reading, everyone should be able to learn to read, as in Bethlehem.

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After reading the article and listening to the podcast, I kept returning to one specific "aha" moment.  During the podcast she mentions the struggling reader who comes upon the word horse, and guesses "pony" because they have been told to make a guess using context clues and the pictures. I found it interesting to hear that skilled readers do not guess at the print on the page, they identify the sounds and letters in the word and then they may guess, but it is only at the meaning of the word. The same is not true for struggling readers because they lack the foundational skills necessary to decode the word, they use the context clues to guess at the print on the page.  I agree that during my undergrad I did not explicitly learn how to teach students how to read, however I did learn about teaching reading when I went back to school and obtained my Master's Degree. I still find it difficult to take the time in the general education classroom to truly teach children how to read, and feel that in order to help level the playing field for all students we are in need of programs that support the science behind teaching students to read.  Equity in reading instruction is important within our diverse population. Every student should have the opportunity to learn the foundational skills necessary to become a proficient reader.

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After reading the article and listening to the podcast, I am wowed by the fact that many schools are still against the science of reading. Also, very interesting that teachers in different regions of our country are so far behind other  regions.  After listening to the podcast, it has become apparent that we do  blame poverty, and ignorance is a real problem. Teaching basic foundational skills is so important in my 1st grade classroom,  we have seen lots of success with struggling students when we use a basic systematic approach.

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Kate Mancinelli: I couldn't agree more with both the article and the podcast. I have been both a special educator and a general classroom teacher for almost 25 years. As a special educator, I was trained in a number of systematic, science based reading programs. I saw the results, first hand, that these types of programs can make with our most struggling learners when taught with fidelity. These programs were based on science and followed a well laid out path that involved intensive and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonological processing. As a special educator, I evaluated so many students who did not have the most basic understanding of sound/symbol correspondence, simply because they hadn't been taught. Looking back at my college course work for both special education and general education, neither provided me with much training in phonemic awareness. As I moved into the primary classroom, I have been able to incorporate the knowledge that I gained as a special educator. However, that is not always the norm. I have seen many "good" readers who have great difficulty spelling. They have managed to use various strategies to read and comprehend text but they lack the word attack skills and understanding of sound/symbol relationships to become proficient spellers. I have seen the pushback from classroom teachers regarding phonics instruction. They feel that many of the stronger students are bored and don't need the intensive instruction. I feel that couldn't be further from the truth. Providing all students with the foundational skills necessary to become proficient readers levels the playing field.

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Tess Dever: I agree with both the podcast and the article that there is a pushback in education because reading has been taught the same way for so many years- under the assumption that reading comes naturally. To hear that this only works for about one third of students surprised me. If this is true than why is there such a pushback? Why hasn’t every district opted to follow the science? This has been especially hard for my special educations students with reading disabilities. Their “go to” is to just make a guess, and these strategies are teaching them to do just that. If we teach them to crack the code, then they won’t have to rely on guessing. It broke my heart to hear that in one study, it was found that  half of prisoners have dyslexia. Statistics like that make you think about how their lives may have been different if they were given explicit phonics instruction as a child.

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Thanks Alanna! I too have make major leaps from ensuring that students make good guesses towards learning effective ways to support students on the educational journey of reading by shifting my instructional strategies towards explicitly teaching learners to decode, prepping for fluency, and checking for comprehension. - Tanisha Heaston

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Alanna Melendez Seiferth: The article and podcast both discuss the realities of a shift that is happening in teaching kids how to read. When I first began teaching 8 years ago I was taught that all students learn by exposure and through texts that they have an interest in. I was told that students should be making "good guesses"  based on context. I always struggled with this, because when planning my guided reading and phonics lessons I would often find myself struggling to teach these abstract concepts to my students that are predominantly ELLs. My students needed basic foundational phonics skills because they often didn't understand the concepts that are in the book. For example, if the story was about a farm, my students wouldn't know the words in the story like "barn, pig, cow, goat, etc." in their own vocabulary. So they aren't able to use context clues to make "good guesses." I would often make the conclusions that this idea that "exposure" and "access to books" was something that my students didn't have, and that this road to reading that I was being told to take didn't work for my students, but rather their suburban counterparts. I would find myself at a roadblock, and I would have to take a different road to teach my students how to read. I would pull phonics materials from different curriculums, create my own comprehension questions, CVC building, and teaching things like bossy E/silent E, tapping out words, and the list goes on. All and all this is a BIG problem when it comes to the equity within teaching students how to read. But if ALL students, regardless of their socioeconomic status and language proficiency were taught foundational phonics skills could these students could we shift the achievement gap? Would we even have an achievement gap in reading? Decoding is based in science. Letter sound correspondence is how we figure out words we don't know, so why aren't we teaching that? As the article stated, "To become a good reader, you must know how to decode words."