I'm a first grade, formerly a remedial reading, teacher in Sycamore. I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your presentation. Do you know of any good resources related to brain research and reading, especially early literacy? Dr. Einhorn replies: From a brain development perspective, the key concept is that different children will mature in different ways and at different rates. The main implication for teaching reading is the same as it is for any other subject: we shouldn't expect all children to learn in the same way, at the same time, with the same materials and approaches. The problem with "systems" for teaching reading (or anything else) is that they assume a uniform, homogeneous type of brain activity in children. We should be more flexible in our approaches, more active in searching out the strengths of each child and trying to tailor various approaches that engage each child through her strengths. Children learn to read at different times. Most children can read to some extent by first grade, but some children seem to have considerable difficulty with reading up into the third, fourth, and even fifth grades; then they seem to get it, all of a sudden. At the Goddard College nursery-kindergarten, I worked with a teacher who had been unable to read until age 11, when he suddenly got it, he told me, all by himself. One theory about this is that the brain is maturing, developing, as we go along, and one important way that this occurs is by myelinization of nerve fibers. The myelin sheath which surrounds nerve fibers in the brain and helps speed the electrical impulses along them develops for many years after we're born; I recently read research suggesting that it actually continues developing well into adulthood. Sudden cognitive spurts and catch-ups, like becoming able to read in a later grade, or maybe being able to sustain focused attention much better than one was previously able to do, may be due to late-occuring myelinization. Children also learn to read in different ways. Some children will learn better by reading to themselves silently, others by being read to as they read along, or reading aloud as they read. An adult patient of mine, a very competent professional, comprehends what she reads much better if she reads aloud than when she reads silently, and even better when she adds imagery. We should try to be alert to the cognitive diversity in our students and develop ways of teaching reading that allow for their cognitive diversity, rather than putting all our chips into one basket, so to speak, whether its whole language, phonics, or whatever. From this point of view, the question for a first reading teacher such as yourself is: What methods can help you to recognize the various ways in which your students can acquire reading? Try presenting material in different ways, partly from a diagnostic point of view, to see which students do better in one way or another. For instance, telling stories (my favorite, start short and get increasingly long and complex, to develop receptive vocabulary, attention span, and a host of other cognitive faculties), having children read from the story, showing them plays and videos and then having them not only discuss but also act out part or all of the plays or action on the videos, writing down experiences that they talk about from their lives and using that to teach vocabulary and encourage listening skills (for example, making a class play out of an experience that a student reports, or asking a student to describe what another has reported on, or asking several students to each say one thing about what another student has reported on). Tactilely oriented children might be helped by feeling letters in blocks of wood, then words; perhaps they could make letters they could feel out of thick paper, or cut them out of velvet. For such children, a velcro "board" on which they could place velvet letters to spell words might draw on their tactile talent and connect it with literacy. Kinesthetically oriented children might be helped by using dance or movement, for example, by associating letters with movements and thus choreographing the spelling of a word (this can be extended to words in a sentence, sentences in a paragraph, etc.). I'm not aware of specific materials about teaching reading through a multi cognitive approach, and I expect that you'd have to develop your own collection of materials and methods of approaching it from different directions. There is a growing number of books that purport to help us understand the different ways of teaching, learning, and knowing; some of these will be better than others. I've ordered one entitled "Seven Ways of Learning, Seven Ways of Knowing" (by Lazaer, I think), but not received it yet. I expect that it will mostly be up to teachers to become familiar with the various ways of learning and knowing, and then to tailor their curricula to engage children in various ways, cognitively, with their subject matter, whether its reading, world history, or whatever. |