SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Taking the Joy Out of Reading

It’s not necessary to watch all of this 30-minute video of a grade 1 Balanced Literacy lesson to grasp one of the problems with this approach to teaching children to read. If you scrub through the video dipping into it here and there, you can easily grasp what is going on. The teacher (who does a fine job, given the premises of Balanced Literacy) spends almost half an hour teaching her students how to make a distinction between books that entertain and books that teach. So what’s that all about? Well, Balanced Literacy makes very heavy weather of teaching kids to read by adding the requirement that the kids be able to analyze their reading material to death.

While you are watching this video, ask yourself how important you think it is for young readers to be able to determine whether a particular story was written as entertainment or for instructional purposes (itself a bogus distinction in many cases, let’s face it). Then ask yourself how much the kids in the video are enjoying their books. Finally, once you have exited the video, scroll down our blog page to the video at “Changing Children’s Lives” and take a couple of minutes to watch the Direct Instruction kids in that video read with huge relish. You almost have to feel sorry for the Balanced Literacy kids. Being asked to dissect a story takes much of the fun out of reading.

It’s odd, really, when you consider that the proponents of Balanced Literacy criticize Direct Instruction as being too robotic and soul-destroying.