Influential Literacy Expert Lucy Calkins is Changing Her Views
In a major shift, the controversial figure in the fight over how to teach reading now says that beginning readers should focus on sounding out words, according to a document obtained by APM Reports.
First-graders in Oakland, California, practice reading. [Hasain Rasheed for APM Reports]
The author of an influential and widely used curriculum for teaching reading is beginning to change her views.
The group headed by Lucy Calkins, a leading figure in the long-running fight over how best to teach children to read, is admitting that its materials need to be changed to align with scientific research. In an internal document obtained by APM Reports, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, where Calkins has served as founding director for more than 30 years, says it has been poring over the work of reading researchers and has determined that aspects of its approach need “rebalancing.”
Calkins’ changing views could shift the way millions of children are taught to read. Her curriculum is the third most widely used core reading program in the nation, according to a 2019 Education Week survey. In addition, her group at Columbia works with teachers in at least 30 countries, including Mexico, Singapore and Japan.
The shift comes amid a national debate about how schools teach reading, prompted in part by APM Reports’ coverage of the topic in the past three years. A spokesperson for Teachers College didn’t respond to a request for comment on Friday.
The United States has long struggled with teaching kids to read; 65 percent of fourth graders read at a level considered basic or below, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. Reading scientists say part of the problem is that popular curriculum materials, including those written by Calkins, rely on a disproven theory about how people read. That theory says people use meaning and sentence structure to predict words as they read when, in fact, decades of cognitive science research show that skilled reading requires an ability to decode, matching the sounds in words with the letters used to spell them.