Whenever seven-year-old Jack returned home from a day at Toronto’s Brighton School, his parents would ask how the day went. “Fine,” he would respond. “What did you do?” they prodded. “Nothing, I can’t remember,” he would reply.
Jack’s reactions had nothing to do with shyness, disinterest, or disrespect, as it may seem at first glance. Instead, the reason has to do with his mind. It was the same reason he had trouble recounting a hockey game he watched to his teacher, and also why his reading comprehension lagged a few grade levels behind his ability to sound out words, or decode.
The act of reading entails much more than just reading a language. For most of us, the words we read are turned into pictures or movies in our heads, which we then analyze to draw conclusions, extract facts, and make inferences – in other words, take meaning from the material. But many students, like Jack, lack this ability. When they read a sentence about a fire in a building with a red fire truck spraying water on the flames while a dog barks in front, a child may only see the dog and ignore the fire and truck behind. This is called weak concept imagery, and can lead to increased difficulty in reading comprehension, critical thinking, following instructions, and engaging in conversation.
Kathy Lear, Jack’s principal, grew concerned when she noticed a vast difference between decoding skills and reading comprehension in a number of her students. So this year she implemented a program called Visualizing and Verbalizing (V/V), developed by Nanci Bell of Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes. In the program, students work with teachers through a variety of phases, first learning structure words to effectively describe an image in front of them. From there, teachers use questions like “what do you picture?” instead of “what do you think?” to help students build strong visuals around a sentence, multiple sentences, a paragraph, or a page. Ultimately, the goal is for the student to be able to construct an imaged-gestalt, the “big picture,” in their minds.
As a school that specializes in educating children with learning disabilities and special needs, the Brighton students that took part in V/V this year had been struggling with reading comprehension for quite some time. But after only 12-15 weeks of group instruction, the average improvement in of the students, between junior and high school grades, was 1-2 grade levels. That surpassed even Lear’s greatest expectations.
Tanis Enright, a teacher at Brighton, was highly skeptical of the program at first.
“The theoretical reasoning sounded great, but I was unsure how it would translate into practice. I thought ‘We’re looking at pictures! What will this do?’” she said, laughing at herself.
But after personally witnessing Jack’s comprehension go from a low kindergarten level to over gr. 2 in one year, she can’t speak highly enough about V/V.
“I couldn’t pry it away from the teachers now if I tried,” said Lear.
And what excites both Enright and Lear about V/V is how it spills into other areas of school and life. Students can now easily visualize word problems in math, processes in science, and scenes in writing exercises. And high school students have just as much to gain from the program, developing effective note-taking and studying skills that play such an essential role in university. Now, every teacher at Brighton School will undergo training to help students create imaged-gestalts across all subjects.
With the success of V/V, Jack is not the only one winning. As she told Enright earlier this year, his mom finally has an idea of what her son is getting up to at school.
Good Intentions Notwithstanding the ‘Race to the Top’ Only Leaves Teachers Further Behind: “Freakonomics-Type Solution
There are some great teachers, and even some great Teacher Preparation programs, but these are random occurrences where consistency is essential. The reason is simple: Professional Education is missing fundamental standards found in all other professions. There is no standard curriculum, no sincere effort to identify Best Instructional Practices, and truckloads of weak consultants and players with diluted degrees serving up their own brands of Faculty Development. To be called a profession it is imperative that a profession, one way or another, needs to convene a rolling forum to collect and prioritize the core content of principles and practices that every member ought to know. Ironically, Teachers worldwide are being held to standards for annual yearly progress of their students. Meanwhile, Professors, Learned Societies & commercial schools, and some painfully self-serving non-profit foundations and Universities never even address the need for solid pedagogic content. The current crop of in-charge “Leaders” dangerously resembles the Investment Bankers who remain in charge of the economic systems that they nearly bankrupted. A leveraged operation like a major newspaper, teacher organization or more ideally the US Department of Education should hold an ongoing “convention” of the nation’s leading educators to consider and endorse a covenant of principles and more importantly prescriptive practices. This should be done on a website that transparently allows entries to be challenged, tweaked and further specified for different age-grade-situational conditions. Sadly there is no free market in which monitored packaged bids & buys help to identify the best ideas and practices (Sound familiar?).
While all of this remains a hope, please consider joining the websites below offering a potential catalyst for jump-starting and getting the current system moving in the right direction for all who teach and all who must learn. Taxpayers would be grateful since increasing classroom effectiveness (and adding differentiated staffing) could bring about efficiencies that could save billions of dollars with even the smallest degree of early adoption.
Please join the narrative at:
http://teacherprofessoraccountability.ning.com/… And…http://bestmethodsofinstruction.com/
Anthony V. Manzo, Ph.D.
Emeritus, Professor Education, Director
Center for Studies in Higher Order Literacy,
Governor, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies,
U. of Missouri-KC; (ret,) CSU-Fullerton
Teaching reading for creative outcomes:
http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=24537…
Good Intentions Notwithstanding the ‘Race to the Top’ Only Leaves Teachers Further Behind: “Freakonomics-Type Solution
There are some great teachers, and even some great Teacher Preparation programs, but these are random occurrences where consistency is essential. The reason is simple: Professional Education is missing fundamental standards found in all other professions. There is no standard curriculum, no sincere effort to identify Best Instructional Practices, and truckloads of weak consultants and players with diluted degrees serving up their own brands of Faculty Development. To be called a profession it is imperative that a profession, one way or another, needs to convene a rolling forum to collect and prioritize the core content of principles and practices that every member ought to know. Ironically, Teachers worldwide are being held to standards for annual yearly progress of their students. Meanwhile, Professors, Learned Societies & commercial schools, and some painfully self-serving non-profit foundations and Universities never even address the need for solid pedagogic content. The current crop of in-charge “Leaders” dangerously resembles the Investment Bankers who remain in charge of the economic systems that they nearly bankrupted. A leveraged operation like a major newspaper, teacher organization or more ideally the US Department of Education should hold an ongoing “convention” of the nation’s leading educators to consider and endorse a covenant of principles and more importantly prescriptive practices. This should be done on a website that transparently allows entries to be challenged, tweaked and further specified for different age-grade-situational conditions. Sadly there is no free market in which monitored packaged bids & buys help to identify the best ideas and practices (Sound familiar?).
While all of this remains a hope, please consider joining the websites below offering a potential catalyst for jump-starting and getting the current system moving in the right direction for all who teach and all who must learn. Taxpayers would be grateful since increasing classroom effectiveness (and adding differentiated staffing) could bring about efficiencies that could save billions of dollars with even the smallest degree of early adoption.
Please join the narrative at:
http://teacherprofessoraccountability.ning.com/… And…http://bestmethodsofinstruction.com/
Anthony V. Manzo, Ph.D.
Emeritus, Professor Education, Director
Center for Studies in Higher Order Literacy,
Governor, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies,
U. of Missouri-KC; (ret,) CSU-Fullerton
Teaching reading for creative outcomes:
http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=24537…