CEO Bristol Standard, LLC Atlanta, GA, United States
To many, memory seems simple, and memorization seems even simpler, yet when we teach reading to certain students, the results often seem counterintuitive. Some students make puzzling errors, skip words, and—despite frequent injunctions—guess repeatedly, frustrating everyone. Some adults, even parents, accuse their children of being “lazy,” but is this really true? Explanations for these phenomena are found in a surprisingly simple theory of memory formation that can be explained fairly well in about 14 minutes with nothing more than Venn Diagrams and a superficial understanding of something called “fractal geometry.”
The memory theory was “reduced to practice” over the course of about 15 years of reading tutoring, group instruction in traditional settings, and continual program refinement. A subsequent study of the mature reading curriculum revealed—among other things—that word memorization basically doesn’t work. The memory theory explains why and describes the memory formation that results from traditional sight-word memorization attempts. As that memory formation grows, it becomes a self-sustaining, random sight word generator that erodes comprehension and almost certainly persists throughout the reader’s life. Early study results and other lines of reasoning suggest that dyslexia is over diagnosed and that some students who are grossly normal simply need much more repetition to memorize the things that MUST be memorized—letters & their sounds. When the reading curriculum was used as a phonics supplement in a controlled study, average inner-city students learned six to seven times faster per contact hour than the controls who relied on Orton Gillingham alone. They also wound up reading much faster and made far fewer decoding mistakes. Struggling districts which deploy this supplement will be able to reduce reading failure by about 50%.
A 20 minute discussion follows the 20 minute presentation and promises to be lively.
Learning Objectives:
Explore & Engage, ID 1881203: At the half-way point, district leaders will understand how a “balanced literacy” teaching practice that is standard in many districts interacts with memory formation during K-3 instruction to foment habitual guessing, puzzling errors, “laziness,” frequent word skipping, and creeping comprehension issues in subsequent grades. Participants will be able to recognize the decoding errors that are rooted in this practice, implement straight-forward solutions, and use handouts to explain to their teaching personnel how to capture and quantify related errors during testing.
Using a handout and the Venn Diagrams on it, participants will be able to explain to other educational leaders how rote memory differs from comprehension-based memory, why rote memory is so hard to form, and why teaching reading can be so hard within some student bodies. Due to time constraints, extra handouts will cover: Proper record keeping during reading instruction, proper record keeping during testing, a second type of decoding error that's also common, and decoding error classification. A final handout lists seven simple steps district administrators can take to improve reading scores district-wide without swapping reading curricula, buying a curriculum supplement, or paying for extensive training. Leaders will leave with some idea of how to use the techniques modeled in the presentations and the handouts to identify other weaknesses in their reading curricula and to evaluate potential reading curricula in the future.
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