Columbia University's Teachers College Reading and Writing Project is dissolved and the New Advancing Literacy Unit Takes Its Place

Teachers for many years have criticized the reading program forced upon them by the Department of Education.

The reading program was created by Lucy Calkins and released through the prestigious Teacher's College at Columbia University, and all schools had to follow it's prescribed rules. The politics of education is very powerful. Many were unhappy about this.

Chancellor Banks is ending this long reign. Finally.

See here:

Columbia University dissolves program behind literacy curriculum used in NYC public schools

My opinion - it's about time!

The news is that Calkins is leaving Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project and is starting a new organization called "Mossflower Reading and Writing Project at Mossflower.com.

It will be interesting to see the futures of Mossflower.com vs Advancing Literacy as both move forward in 2023-2024. Follow the money.

just sayin'.....

 Betsy Combier

betsy@advocatz.com

Editor, ADVOCATZ.com

Editor, ADVOCATZ Blog

Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice

Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Advancing Literacy Through Teachers College Programs, Research and Partnerships

Literacy affects every part of a student’s life and life chances. Communities with high levels of literacy experience less poverty, are healthier, and have greater access to their civil rights and to full participation in our democracy. 

Teachers College has a deep bench of scholars studying literacy from multiple angles using different approaches (curriculum and teaching, special education, inclusion, human development, neuroscience). And throughout the College’s academic programs and research agenda, there is an unwavering commitment to inclusion — among students, faculty and staff on campus and in our scholarship. TC faculty, students and staff are national leaders in preparing teachers to support diverse classrooms and are engaged in integrative research, both translational and basic, that is contextualized with respect to marginalized communities across race, culture, ethnicity, language and neurodiversity.

This diversity of approaches, and TC’s commitment to supporting teachers and schools in different ways (e.g. research, academic programs, professional learning communities and development) has served the College well, but moving forward, TC wants to foster more conversations and collaboration among different evidence-based approaches to literacy, and ensure our programs are aligned with the needs of teachers and school districts looking to partner.

To support this objective, the work of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP) and its staff will transition to an Advancing Literacy unit within TC’s Continuing Professional Studies (CPS) division for the 2023-2024 year, a return to its original professional development roots. The entity TCRWP, founded in 1981, will be dissolved as part of this shift. TC is working to align the work of TC staff with the needs of school districts and changes in reading curriculum locally and nationwide.

Lucy Calkins

For many years, TCRWP’s founding director Lucy Calkins led efforts to support teachers as they develop students as readers and writers. Dr. Calkins has stepped down as Director of the Reading and Writing Project. She is Robinson Professor in Children's Literature at Teachers College, a tenured faculty member in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching, on sabbatical during the 2023-2024 academic year.

“Many teachers credit TCRWP for creating communities of practice where teachers gain valuable resources and support,” says KerryAnn O’Meara, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Provost and Dean of the College. “TC is grateful to Dr. Calkins for her service.”

Dr. Calkins shares her expertise as a consultant through her own LLC. Teachers College is not involved in the operations or provision of services provided by Dr. Calkins in her LLC.

As TCRWP transitions to work as part of the College’s Continuing Professional Studies division during the 2023-2024 academic year, Mary Ehrenworth, Beth Neville and Emily Butler Smith — longtime members of the TCRWP staff — will provide leadership. 

The new Advancing Literacy unit will offer a variety of curricular support. Across the U.S., some school districts use the Units of Study curriculum and need professional development to support their teachers. Other school districts around the country use different curricula and are looking for professional development. TC staff are poised and ready to support teachers and school districts using different curricula and approaches. Advancing Literacy staff will be enhanced by their placement in CPS, which offers many dynamic noncredit courses and other professional development opportunities annually for thousands of teachers in NYC and beyond — including in areas such as inclusion, education leadership, digital learning and literacy. 

As the College looks towards the future, Provost O’Meara highlighted three reasons she is excited about the ways in which Teachers College can advance literacy and reading instruction moving forward. 

First, the College can learn and support students and teachers by listening to its partners. TC has many well-established relationships with NYC school-district personnel, teachers and leaders through decades of work together across professional development programs — not only in reading but in teaching about inclusive classrooms, coaching for leaders and early career teachers, arts education, classroom technology, climate change, nutrition and school psychology, among many others. 

“As we move forward to align our professional development programs with the greatest needs of our school partners, teachers and community organizations, we will be building from these relationships, and listening to our teachers, and school districts. TCRWP created some powerful communities of practice and those communities of teachers can still find connection in the work of the broadened Advancing Literacy unit,” says Provost O’Meara. 

Second, TC will ensure that its professional development programs are informed by the latest research and evidence and that the College continually finds new ways to translate faculty scholarship into timely assessments, interventions, and research-based practices. Provost O’Meara notes several examples of this through certificate programs, coaching and symposiums — and will be able to report more on that soon.

Third, the national conversation about literacy must include the experiences of students who are multilingual, are enrolled in special education programs, and live in high-poverty and marginalized communities. “TC’s expertise in centering inclusion and equity is unmatched and distinct. Moving forward, we need to integrate these three strengths to make a greater impact in literacy development, and we look forward to sharing our next steps to do so soon.”

More information about the Advancing Literacy Network will be forthcoming. 

Stanford University Professor Bruce McCandliss Finds That Phonics Works Best For Beginning Readers

 OK, NYC Department of Education - and all other school districts, listen up. I think it is time to stop the incessant changing of curricula in our nations' schools, and listen to the people who know the brain best, or at least more than most administrators.

Below is an article from May 28, 2015 on the work of Professor Bruce McCandliss at Stanford University. He has studied the value of teaching reading by using letter-sound relationships, or phonics:

Stanford study on brain waves shows how different teaching methods affect reading development
 Stanford News
Stanford Professor Bruce McCandliss found that beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading.

BY MAY WONG

Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading, according to new Stanford research investigating how the brain responds to different types of reading instruction.

In other words, to develop reading skills, teaching students to sound out "C-A-T" sparks more optimal brain circuitry than instructing them to memorize the word "cat." And, the study found, these teaching-induced differences show up even on future encounters with the word.

The study, co-authored by Stanford Professor Bruce McCandliss of the Graduate School of Education and the Stanford Neuroscience Institute, provides some of the first evidence that a specific teaching strategy for reading has direct neural impact. The research could eventually lead to better-designed interventions to help struggling readers.

"This research is exciting because it takes cognitive neuroscience and connects it to questions that have deep meaning and history in educational research," said McCandliss, who wrote the study with Yuliya Yoncheva, a researcher at New York University, and Jessica Wise, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.
Instructional strategies

Theories on reading development have long supported the importance of a phonics foundation, especially for early learners and struggling readers, yet investigating the way in which brain mechanisms are influenced by the choices a teacher makes is a fairly recent endeavor, according to McCandliss.

As the field of educational neuroscience grows, however, both brain researchers and educational researchers can improve their understanding of how instructional strategies can best be harnessed to support the brain changes that underlie the development of learning, he added.

In the study, released this month in the journal Brain and Language, the researchers devised a new written language and contrasted whether words were taught using a letter-to-sound instruction method or a whole-word association method. After learning multiple words under both approaches, the newly learned words were presented in a reading test while brainwaves were monitored.

McCandliss's team used a brain mapping technique that allowed them to capture brain responses to the newly learned words that are literally faster than the blink of an eye.

Remarkably, the researchers said, these very rapid brain responses to the newly learned words were influenced by how they were learned.

Words learned through the letter-sound instruction elicited neural activity biased toward the left side of the brain, which encompasses visual and language regions. In contrast, words learned via whole-word association showed activity biased toward right hemisphere processing.

McCandliss noted that this strong left hemisphere engagement during early word recognition is a hallmark of skilled readers, and is characteristically lacking in children and adults who are struggling with reading.

In addition, the study's participants were subsequently able to read new words they had never seen before, as long as they followed the same letter-sound patterns they were taught to focus on. Within a split second, the process of deciphering a new word triggered the left hemisphere processes.

"Ideally, that is the brain circuitry we are hoping to activate in beginner readers," McCandliss said.

By comparison, when the same participants memorized whole-word associations, the study found that they learned sufficiently to recognize those particular words on the reading test, but the underlying brain circuitry differed, eliciting electrophysiological responses that were biased toward right hemisphere processes.

"These contrasting teaching approaches are likely having such different impact on early brain responses because they encourage the learner to focus their attention in different ways," McCandliss said. "It's like shifting the gears of the mind – when you focus your attention on different information associated with a word, you amplify different brain circuits."

While many teachers are now using phonics to teach reading, some may be doing it more effectively than others, McCandliss said.

"If children are struggling, even if they're receiving phonics instruction, perhaps it's because of the way they are being asked to focus their attention on the sounds within spoken words and links between those sounds and the letters within visual words," he said.

"We can direct attention to a larger grain size or a smaller grain size, and it can have a big impact on how well you learn."
Monitoring brain waves

The study involved 16 literate adult participants, yet, according to McCandliss, gained its statistical power by teaching all participants in two different ways, much like what a typical student may experience when learning from different teachers or trying to master irregular words that don't conform to letter-to-sound mapping, such as "yacht."

The new written language was based on line features that formed symbols representing different letters of a new alphabet. The symbols were joined to represent a distinct visual word.

Each participant was trained to read two sets of three-letter words under identical conditions that provided practice viewing words and listening to corresponding spoken words. The only difference between the two training conditions was a set of instructions at the beginning that encouraged the readers to approach learning the words in one of two ways.

One instruction asked learners to approach the task of learning each word by picking out each of the three-letter symbols and matching each to the corresponding sound in the spoken word. The other focused on teaching the association between whole printed and spoken words.

After training was completed, participants were hooked up to an electroencephalograph, or EEG, that monitored brain waves while they took a reading test on word-figures they had already learned. Following the letter-sound style of training, participants were also tested on their ability to read new words composed of the same letters.

"When we looked under the hood, we found that the participants could learn to read under both forms of instruction but the brain activation showed that learning happened in very different ways," McCandliss said.

He said the results underscore the idea that the way a learner focuses their attention during learning has a profound impact on what is learned. It also highlights the importance of skilled teachers in helping children focus their attention on precisely the most useful information.
MEDIA CONTACT

Bruce McCandliss, Stanford Graduate School of Education: brucemc@stanford.edu

Brooke Donald, communications manager, Stanford Graduate School of Education: (650) 721-1402, brooke.donald@stanford.edu