Better Readers

The biggest challenge we faced while I worked in the Houston public schools was getting kids to learn to read and then read to learn. Now, new research suggests that both activities are grounded in a time much earlier than when young learners report to pre-K or kindergarten.

The 74 reported last month that,

“Given the complexity of the process, it’s astonishing any human has ever mastered the ability to read. Although written language is ancient – we’ve been at it for roughly 5,000 years – it’s not an innate skill. There is no ‘reading center’ in the brain; human brains aren’t designed to automatically decipher the symbols on a page that add up to reading.”

“And yet, new research shows that the skills needed for reading begin developing before a child is born, and that signs of reading challenges can emerge as early as 18 months old.”

“’People don’t understand that children don’t start kindergarten with a clean slate,’ said Nadine Gaab, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Education involved in the research. Learning to read ‘is a long process with many milestones that unfold over many years, and it starts primarily with oral language. Years of brain development lead up to the point where formal instruction puts it all together and enables them to read. The process starts in utero.’”

“The human brain evolved specifically for spoken language, said Perri Klass, professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University and the national director of the nonprofit Reach Out and Read. Every society across the world uses spoken language, but the transition from spoken to written language is a giant leap for the brain.”

“That jump, Klass said, requires the brain to recruit structures and networks throughout its many layers and folds just to recognize a letter on a page, involving the vision and memory portions of the brain. The brain then must remember the sound the letter represents and connect that letter with others to make sounds that associate with the picture on a page. Finally, at lightning speed, the brain recognizes that those letters work together to say, ‘Cat.’”

“’Learning to read is a challenge for all children,’ she said. ‘And for some children it’s really a struggle. It’s not that you develop spoken language and then, boom, you get to school and develop written language. Spoken and written language have been developing together directly from birth, and all the exposure to language from the environment – what they hear from their parents, whether they’re read to, talked to, whether someone sings to them or holds them – are there. So, it’s the brain the child takes to school that helps them succeed at this impressive task of learning to read.’”

“Klass points to the new Harvard research to underscore how early that ‘brain the child takes to school’ begins developing. For years, a prevailing attitude has been that a child starts learning to read in pre-K or kindergarten. A longitudinal study by Gaab and her colleagues using MRI scans and an array of other assessments confirmed that the bases for reading skills begin to develop in the child’s brain by birth and continue building between infancy and preschool.”

“’We wanted to see how early the development trajectories of children who later develop good versus poor reading skills diverge, because that can give us a really important clue for when we should intervene, as well as what some of the risks and protective factors are,’ Gaab said.”

“A key finding of the study is that the developmental trajectories of children with and without reading disabilities start to diverge around 18 months, rather than at 5 or 6 years old as previously assumed.”

“And yet, Gaab said, a wide gap currently stands between the time children are identified as having a reading impairment and the start of intensive intervention. This is particularly problematic for children diagnosed with dyslexia, she said, adding that researchers call this the ‘dyslexia paradox.’ The majority of school districts in the U.S. employ a ‘wait-to-fail’ approach, meaning that many children are only flagged by the school system after they have failed to learn to read over a prolonged period of time – often years – even though there’s evidence that reading intervention is most effective earlier. The experience of failure can erode self-esteem, she said, and lead to the higher rates of anxiety and depression that are found in struggling readers.”

…

“Babies are born with the raw material they need to hear, see, move and remember. The nerve fibers, or axons, that connect these disparate brain regions don’t grow automatically. They are cultivated by babies’ environments. MRIs of the participants as infants showed predictably smaller brains that appear more solid or smooth in the images. By the time the children were 5, the scans showed a robust network of branching pathways of these nerve fibers, said coauthor [Ted] Turesky.”

“’The infant brain is very different compared to all other stages of life,’ he said. ‘But if you look at the scan of a child at 5 years and then at 10 years, you can see there’s hardly any change in [those pathways]. Those early years are a time of very rapid growth.’”

“Though the human brain remains plastic and mutable for a lifetime, Turesky said, the scans underscore that earliest years are the busiest for building brain architecture – a fact that has important policy implications for early intervention and improved literacy curricula in preschools.”

“Some brains are better equipped to build the neural scaffolding that ultimately leads to reading, Gaab said, and some brains are less optimized, which means those children might struggle to read. It doesn’t mean their brains are faulty, or that there is something seriously wrong with them.”

“’They’re built differently, and they’re optimized for other things, because every brain is different,’ she said. ‘But it does point to the need for good early pre-reading instruction ands the games and good oral language input, and home and school interactions that we know build these connections. Some brains just need more of the good stuff.’”

“’Call it preventative education, just like preventative medicine,’ she said. ‘Help these kids build these connections before they struggle and prevent them ever seeing a special educator or ever getting a dyslexia diagnosis.’ A large number of studies now show that early intervention and prevention are leading to better outcomes for children at risk of dyslexia, Gaab said, and the research has led to some major policy changes aimed at early identification and intervention.”

…

Traditional school districts would be wise to take three steps immediately given this new research:

1. Partner with your community pediatricians to make sure families understand the importance of modeling reading to newborns.
2. Create and launch a parent reading academy, whereby moms and dads are exposed to curriculum and instructional strategies to make their newborns ready to listen to words, sentences, and language.
3. Create and launch young learner reading academies whereby kids are able to spend more time on building their reading skills, compared to the normal school day when students travel from class to class while everyone knows about their inability to read well.

Why is it that kids are allowed to follow a class schedule that seemingly emphasizes everything but reading when everyone knows about their reading struggles? This is one of the weakest links of the traditional K-12 system, and it needs to stop.

Otherwise, it’s time to find a learning organization committed to making young learners skilled readers, even if those young learners are little babies unable to speak – yet.

Til tomorrow. SVB