Teacher needing reassurance/advice

>I am a 4th and 5th grade special education teacher in a southern state. I teach students with LD, BD and mild intellectual disabilities. I have been teaching students with these types of disabilities for the past 10 years with programs such as Herman Reading and Wilson Reading.

Sounds appropriate. Unless the mild intellectual problems are under 80 IQ, I think that is the rough cut-off on Orton based approaches like Herman and Wilson.

> I was told today by a woman with her Dr. in children’s literature and I believe her master’s in special education that the “research” suggests that these programs are not as effective as programs like Patricia Cunningham’s 4 block.

Well I don’t know who this Dr. is but she is totally off base. 4 Blocks a program featuring “balanced literacy” which is another term for Whole Language. We know that the WL is only “effective” for about a third of the kids, who would learn to read regardless of what you put in front of them.

There’s all sorts of info here:
http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/moats.htm
Of particular interest is an article called “Reading IS Rocket Science”.
Very readable.

This is a little commercial but this puts all the big research on one page:
http://www.bartonreading.com/research2.html

> Can someone out there please offer some reassurance that Orton Gillingham based programs have not been thrown out with the bath water?

We can do better than give you reassurance— we can give you the research. People who do WL avoid the research; say their approaches are “research based” even though they aren’t; or say the research is flawed in some way.

Any child with learning difficulties needs the a systematic, explicit phonetic system. Some kids need the multisensory component.

—des

des is absolutely right.

Go to the LD In Depth page by clicking above, go to Reading, and find the National Reading Panel report. The results are unequivocal; the systematic approaches win hands down.

The “whole-language” folks try all manner of very fuzzy argumentation; you got classic line #1 “I am an expert and I know better than you”. The answer to that is “I’m from Missouri; prove it.”

That PhD apparently hasn’t been reading any research herself! I strongly recommend that you join the International Dyslexia Association so that you will be aware of the best research on reading disorders. Then you can defend yourself if this ever happens again. Children are in special ed. because they [b]couldn’t [/b]learn to read with balanced literacy! They require a multi-sensory structured language reading method!

Janis

No, she’s been reading “research” - I read it, too. There is a lot of research by enthusiastic proponents who will have had success with their programs. Most of it is rather “fluffy” research… biggest issue being the Hawthorne Effect and the fundamental idea that if you start out really wanting things to work, they probably will. (And that’s not a bad thing, necessarily — but confusing that with *research* saying that something is better than another method which, if you had wanted it to work, also would have worked and perhaps better, is where things fall apart.)

IT doesn’t stand up too well… but aAtalking to the other True Believers, you can keep yourself convinced.

I’ve met a fair number of htese folks in the education field. I even did a paper on WL vs. Phonics for one of ‘em … he simply ignored arguments he couldn’t answer, had some insightful comments about some of them, and had many “well, if it’s done right that doesn’t happen” comments.

Imagine if your doctor accepted the kind of “research” that goes down in education — you’d be back with the health care of the fifteenth century and fifty percent infant mortality.

Just imagine if your doctor said “I don’t use the germ theory of disease; the Four Humours theory is so much easier, my patients understand it and they like it better.”

In every field eccept education (and some really fuzzy subjects like sociology), there are specific rules on what qualifies as *research*

Research has to have numbers in it. You have to measure and compare things.
Research has to have clearly defined and stated goals and outcomes.
Research and measurements have to be transparent. You have to have strict systems to obtain those numbers, everyone has to know how they are obtained, and different people have to be able to perform the same measurement and get the same numbers.
Research has to be replicable. Another person must be able to repeat your experiment in the same situation and get the same results.
Research on variable populations must have control groups (which must be equivalent and unbiased), must be tested for statistical significance, and wherever possible should be double-blind.
Research that realy counts is published in peer-reviewed journals, where people who have themselves proved genuine results must pass on a paper before it gets the stamp of approval.

The stuff that gets called “research” in educationist circles generally fits none of these criteria, and so anyone with any scientific training at all will not pay any attention to it.

The old argument of why teachers are not treated as professionals — well, one of the things that is desperately needed is a professional standard of research and publication. There would be a lot less stuff published — according to the Ntional Reading Panel about ten percent* — but it would be a lot more worth reading.

*which reminds one of Sturgeon’s Law, invented when discussing science fiction novels but it certainly applies: Ninety percent of science fiction is cr*p; but then, ninety percent of *everything* is cr*p.

One of my faves, Theodore Sturgeon, even if “Killdozer” probably could go in his 90% classification :-)

I am a sped teacher going through the same thing. You’ve got to remember the bottom line: different children have different ways of learning. I use a myriad of methods, including the Herman (even with an MI student!). Just because someone says “the research….” doesn’t mean the research is accurate. You have enough experience to know what works. Trust yourself.

Doug, your answer makes very little sense. If the research is any good — and as I said, there is a lot of stuff called “research” that isn’t — but if it is good, it will point out what is successful, what isn’t, with how many students it succeeds, and with what types of students.
I have said before and will repeat: suppose you were given a choice of college courses to take. In one course 90 % of students passed the GRE’s for grad school, and in the other fewer than 50%, and even those who passed had lower scores and poorer predictions for further success. Which one would you bet on for yourself or your children? Is there really any question in your mind? Well, this is the situation we are in with reading methods; we know methods that work 90% and we know methods that work poorly less than 50% — which would you choose?
The old “every child learns differently” may sometimes be meant well, and I do hope you mean well, but it is far too often used as an excuse and a cover-up. A teacher prefers a certain program because it is familiar, because it is fun and creative, because it is easy, because the kids are easy to manage (at least for a while — she doesn’t have to deal with the high school illiteracy) when you do lots of fun and games; when nasty skeptical people like myself question the benefits of her favourite fun programs, she retreats behind “every child learns differently” rather than coming up with any facts.
Facts are intractable objects, hard and inflexible. Happy talk is so much more pleasant, so much less conflict. Trouble is, high school and college and adult life (which come upon all kids try as you might to ignore it) hit you with hard cold facts and all your conflict avoidance comes back to get you.
Lat night another new bit on CNN: fewer that 50% of the students taking the ACT have the basic reading skills needed to succeed in college. That is those who *are* graduating and taking the ACT, around 60% of those who enter high school; the ones who never finish and those who don’t even try for college are not even counted. 50% of 60% is 30% of students with even basic levels of success. Doesn’t this concern you? Can you keep yourself happy with “every child learns differently” when faced with the fact that 70% of those kids are NOT learning, period?
Oh yeah, even fewer for math, in the 40% range, and down around 25% for science, multiplied again by the 60% who actually took the tests.
Keep smiling — how can this possibly matter to you?