I wonder what Carl Hendrick has by way of evidence to back up his authoritative statement that "Kids do NOT learn to read by discovering it for themselves." All I know is that there's plenty of evidence going in the opposite direction, and that dyslexia is so much less common in self-directed learning environments (such as the unfortunately named 'democratic schools') that people within such an environment often don't know that dyslexia and the associated industry for remedying it actually exists.
I have to agree that there's far too big a gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged, but I doubt that discovery learning as such is likely to increase it. Discovery learning doesn't simply equate to: "Buzz off and discover how to read, but leave me alone while I do this tax return / washing / video game etc." It means providing an environment in which children feel invited to explore in a (reasonably) safe place, observe what skills and tools appear to be useful/essential and acquire them in whatever way suits them best (very often by mimicking what the others are doing). We still don't know exactly how it works, but we do know that it does work.
What feels like an important parallel point here is how the development of executive functions increases rapidly at 3-6 years of age, and leading scientists state that we ought to allow children to engage in play based learning in particularly this age bracket to enable the brain to direct energy into those sections of the brain for it to happen. To delay academic learning in what you can call instructional ways (phonics, etc) until after that age for the brain to mature as it ought to. Without it, children don’t have the necessary emotional regulation and impulse control to be healthy learners in a classroom.
I wonder what they think discovery learning is. I'm not clear on where the boundaries are either but I do remember that a little before starting school at 6 I'd started trying to piece together how to write myself: I hadn't been to nursery more than a few months because I hated it and its food and they hadn't had the time to teach me any writing but I did see my parents and brother write and I wanted to try so I pieced together a few sounds and figured out simple words like 'mamma' (I missed the double M, so I wrote 'mama').
I doubt anyone ever learns in a vacuum, and my inkling is that discovery learning might be even more taxing than pure instruction and that it's not completely absent from MS classrooms either. But there is a lot that children are made to learn when not all are ready and in many places there's less flexibility and I wonder whether that's why we have the number of HE children we have and the high percentage of them being SEND.
As an aside, when I was 15 I dropped out of school (undiagnosed Autistic) and I played loads of videogames. At the time the only copies of FF7 and Castlevania you could buy in Europe were in English and I wanted to play them, so I armed myself with a dictionary (which had grammar rules on as well) and went through the games with it. By the end of them I'd learned how sentences worked very well, whereas at school prior to me leaving we mostly focused on learning many vocabs a week, which I found boring. Past that I found anime communities online which were mainly in English, so I further refined my written English.
I did have a base from school, but I can really say that it was very basic and nowhere near where my English got when I started learning to get access to stuff I wanted.
I abandoned my career as a teacher eight years ago. One of the SLTs had sent a memo reminding everyone that discovery learning was not evidence-based and was not supported by the Senior management team. I strongly disagreed and handed in my notice.
My oldest son "discovered" reading before he was two and his brother when he was 6 or 7, each in their own time and their own way.
We read to them morning and night, as much as they wanted, and I read aloud anything I was reading (signs, labels, recipes, etc.) when they were with me which was most of the time as I was a stay-at-home dad. But neither needed to be formally taught to read or write anymore than they needed to be taught to speak.
They did not attend school until they chose to, college for the oldest when he was 15 and 7th grade for the youngest a year later when he was 11. Our oldest is now studying for the CPA exams while finishing his master of accountancy degree. Our youngest is studying to be an engineer. They are both near the top of of their class and have been since their first semester.
BTW, neither are vax'd except for tetanus when the oldest volunteered at the zoo.
Remember, Carl and his co-author Paul Kirschner are selling books and consulting, like many SoL proselytizers. I see them as salesmen and consider their comments as such. Many kids learn to read without instruction, and the weakness of SoR is not being able to explain that. Dylan Wiliam said recently in a podcast - “People always say reading is biologically 2ndary it has to be taught step by step, well actually that’s not true.” Robert Pianta estimates, Uni Virginia: 25% of students can read no matter how bad the instruction is. https://wegrowteachers.com/thoughtstretchers-education-podcast-sorting-evidence-teaching/
This is the kind of nonsense that braindead authoritarians say because they can't face up to the fact their schooling and what they believe constitute their achievements was a pointless waste of time that's made them into braindead authoritarians and not much else. In addition to that, they are likewise serving the same brutal rubbish to their own offspring which also makes them cling to their stupid braindead authoritarianism.
So funny story, my daughter did indeed learn how to read by herself. All we did as parents was just read to her as a young baby. And we kept reading books. We noticed that she started leafing through books herself. She just turned 5 in October, and she can read our texts we send, she can read signs at the grocery store, and she knows words that I never even expected her to. I never officially taught her how to read. She just picked it up. I'm genuinely surprised by how she just picked it up. But there you go. Kids are definitely discovery learners
Are you the reincarnation of the beloved Jeanie Ginsburg? Back in the early 1960’s she formed a cooperative school for children under the age of five. It was Playhouse, and it still exists today in West Orange, New Jersey. My children attended during the late 60’s and early 70’s. Parents were major participants in day to day operation of the school. Each parent assisted the teachers by providing one day of time carpooling the children and assisting on their carpool day. We all became part of the school spirit. Jeanie’s philosophy was discovery learning and the encouragement of individual creativity. It was for many years exactly what you describe in your Substack. The children who are now middle-aged adults, are successful in careers that require creativity and critical thinking. I know many of the pathways these children have taken because as an 81- year-old, former playhouse parent, my closest friends today are women I met and befriended when my children attended the school. We join each other on Zoom every Sunday morning ever since the pandemic began. I am so happy to know Jeanie’s philosophy is alive and well. I also received an education by participating in my children’s attendance at Playhouse. It was there that I learned to let go of all the black and white BS from my own childhood education. Thanks to Playhouse, I was able to no longer foresee a future as suburban housewife. Instead I pursued my bliss.
This is so interesting. I wondered yesterday as I was listening to one of your talks ‘what if she’s an antivaxxer?’ (Don’t worry I don’t think you are). I actually work in vaccine research and watch antivaxx sentiment with interest but we have the benefit of double blind RCTs which is as close to ‘true’ as you can get. But as parents struggling to find the best ways to parent and educate our nd children we have to weigh up and assess the relative merits of entire fields of standard educational belief vs psychology. And often we end up going with intuition which has its limitations. No wonder we are tired.
My early childhood practice is instilled by Anna Ephgrave’s ‘In the Moment Planning’, where by she refers to THE SPARK- That special moment during child led play where a children display an eagerness to create, discover or explore something.
That there, is when a ‘teachable moment’ can make all the difference for learning to take place. And
I believe that all talk of learning and school is completely uninteresting if one does not at the same time explain one's relationship with the new technology that is coming along. Thus, I cannot say whether you are spreading misinformation or not.
When you speak about how important it is to understand brain development and tailor teaching accordingly, that makes so much sense. I find myself unsure of what you're thinking when it comes to reading instruction and how that should take place. Could you clarify your position as it specifically relates to reading pedagogy? In your ideal learning environment, would children only learn to read once they had evinced an interest in learning? Would they learn to read through discovery learning or direct instruction? Or some combination of the two, or something else I'm not thinking about?
Interesting point you make about the reading bell curve, I wonder how much capability is masking readiness, I.e. if the range at which self taught readers can vary from 4-14, then if you look at who needs more help at 8yo, a larger percentage of those will probably be the dyslexic kids who by definition find that skill harder to pick up and so are likely to be those learning to read later, if there isn't so much pressure applied beforehand that they write off ever being able to master the skill at all.
I wonder what Carl Hendrick has by way of evidence to back up his authoritative statement that "Kids do NOT learn to read by discovering it for themselves." All I know is that there's plenty of evidence going in the opposite direction, and that dyslexia is so much less common in self-directed learning environments (such as the unfortunately named 'democratic schools') that people within such an environment often don't know that dyslexia and the associated industry for remedying it actually exists.
I have to agree that there's far too big a gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged, but I doubt that discovery learning as such is likely to increase it. Discovery learning doesn't simply equate to: "Buzz off and discover how to read, but leave me alone while I do this tax return / washing / video game etc." It means providing an environment in which children feel invited to explore in a (reasonably) safe place, observe what skills and tools appear to be useful/essential and acquire them in whatever way suits them best (very often by mimicking what the others are doing). We still don't know exactly how it works, but we do know that it does work.
What feels like an important parallel point here is how the development of executive functions increases rapidly at 3-6 years of age, and leading scientists state that we ought to allow children to engage in play based learning in particularly this age bracket to enable the brain to direct energy into those sections of the brain for it to happen. To delay academic learning in what you can call instructional ways (phonics, etc) until after that age for the brain to mature as it ought to. Without it, children don’t have the necessary emotional regulation and impulse control to be healthy learners in a classroom.
I wonder what they think discovery learning is. I'm not clear on where the boundaries are either but I do remember that a little before starting school at 6 I'd started trying to piece together how to write myself: I hadn't been to nursery more than a few months because I hated it and its food and they hadn't had the time to teach me any writing but I did see my parents and brother write and I wanted to try so I pieced together a few sounds and figured out simple words like 'mamma' (I missed the double M, so I wrote 'mama').
I doubt anyone ever learns in a vacuum, and my inkling is that discovery learning might be even more taxing than pure instruction and that it's not completely absent from MS classrooms either. But there is a lot that children are made to learn when not all are ready and in many places there's less flexibility and I wonder whether that's why we have the number of HE children we have and the high percentage of them being SEND.
As an aside, when I was 15 I dropped out of school (undiagnosed Autistic) and I played loads of videogames. At the time the only copies of FF7 and Castlevania you could buy in Europe were in English and I wanted to play them, so I armed myself with a dictionary (which had grammar rules on as well) and went through the games with it. By the end of them I'd learned how sentences worked very well, whereas at school prior to me leaving we mostly focused on learning many vocabs a week, which I found boring. Past that I found anime communities online which were mainly in English, so I further refined my written English.
I did have a base from school, but I can really say that it was very basic and nowhere near where my English got when I started learning to get access to stuff I wanted.
I abandoned my career as a teacher eight years ago. One of the SLTs had sent a memo reminding everyone that discovery learning was not evidence-based and was not supported by the Senior management team. I strongly disagreed and handed in my notice.
Interesting…. Given that Early Years pedagogy is based on it 🙄
Yes my daughter teaches early years, but even there she feels she is constantly challenged and the pedagogy is under threat.
My oldest son "discovered" reading before he was two and his brother when he was 6 or 7, each in their own time and their own way.
We read to them morning and night, as much as they wanted, and I read aloud anything I was reading (signs, labels, recipes, etc.) when they were with me which was most of the time as I was a stay-at-home dad. But neither needed to be formally taught to read or write anymore than they needed to be taught to speak.
They did not attend school until they chose to, college for the oldest when he was 15 and 7th grade for the youngest a year later when he was 11. Our oldest is now studying for the CPA exams while finishing his master of accountancy degree. Our youngest is studying to be an engineer. They are both near the top of of their class and have been since their first semester.
BTW, neither are vax'd except for tetanus when the oldest volunteered at the zoo.
Remember, Carl and his co-author Paul Kirschner are selling books and consulting, like many SoL proselytizers. I see them as salesmen and consider their comments as such. Many kids learn to read without instruction, and the weakness of SoR is not being able to explain that. Dylan Wiliam said recently in a podcast - “People always say reading is biologically 2ndary it has to be taught step by step, well actually that’s not true.” Robert Pianta estimates, Uni Virginia: 25% of students can read no matter how bad the instruction is. https://wegrowteachers.com/thoughtstretchers-education-podcast-sorting-evidence-teaching/
This is the kind of nonsense that braindead authoritarians say because they can't face up to the fact their schooling and what they believe constitute their achievements was a pointless waste of time that's made them into braindead authoritarians and not much else. In addition to that, they are likewise serving the same brutal rubbish to their own offspring which also makes them cling to their stupid braindead authoritarianism.
Is that giving too much benefit of the doubt?
So funny story, my daughter did indeed learn how to read by herself. All we did as parents was just read to her as a young baby. And we kept reading books. We noticed that she started leafing through books herself. She just turned 5 in October, and she can read our texts we send, she can read signs at the grocery store, and she knows words that I never even expected her to. I never officially taught her how to read. She just picked it up. I'm genuinely surprised by how she just picked it up. But there you go. Kids are definitely discovery learners
Discovery learning sounds like a fancy name for the “A-ha moment.” I think what you’re trying to say is lecture does not equal understanding.
Are you the reincarnation of the beloved Jeanie Ginsburg? Back in the early 1960’s she formed a cooperative school for children under the age of five. It was Playhouse, and it still exists today in West Orange, New Jersey. My children attended during the late 60’s and early 70’s. Parents were major participants in day to day operation of the school. Each parent assisted the teachers by providing one day of time carpooling the children and assisting on their carpool day. We all became part of the school spirit. Jeanie’s philosophy was discovery learning and the encouragement of individual creativity. It was for many years exactly what you describe in your Substack. The children who are now middle-aged adults, are successful in careers that require creativity and critical thinking. I know many of the pathways these children have taken because as an 81- year-old, former playhouse parent, my closest friends today are women I met and befriended when my children attended the school. We join each other on Zoom every Sunday morning ever since the pandemic began. I am so happy to know Jeanie’s philosophy is alive and well. I also received an education by participating in my children’s attendance at Playhouse. It was there that I learned to let go of all the black and white BS from my own childhood education. Thanks to Playhouse, I was able to no longer foresee a future as suburban housewife. Instead I pursued my bliss.
This is so interesting. I wondered yesterday as I was listening to one of your talks ‘what if she’s an antivaxxer?’ (Don’t worry I don’t think you are). I actually work in vaccine research and watch antivaxx sentiment with interest but we have the benefit of double blind RCTs which is as close to ‘true’ as you can get. But as parents struggling to find the best ways to parent and educate our nd children we have to weigh up and assess the relative merits of entire fields of standard educational belief vs psychology. And often we end up going with intuition which has its limitations. No wonder we are tired.
My early childhood practice is instilled by Anna Ephgrave’s ‘In the Moment Planning’, where by she refers to THE SPARK- That special moment during child led play where a children display an eagerness to create, discover or explore something.
That there, is when a ‘teachable moment’ can make all the difference for learning to take place. And
I believe that all talk of learning and school is completely uninteresting if one does not at the same time explain one's relationship with the new technology that is coming along. Thus, I cannot say whether you are spreading misinformation or not.
When you speak about how important it is to understand brain development and tailor teaching accordingly, that makes so much sense. I find myself unsure of what you're thinking when it comes to reading instruction and how that should take place. Could you clarify your position as it specifically relates to reading pedagogy? In your ideal learning environment, would children only learn to read once they had evinced an interest in learning? Would they learn to read through discovery learning or direct instruction? Or some combination of the two, or something else I'm not thinking about?
Children reveal the appropriate pace of development of their own accord. Leave them alone, just listen.
Interesting point you make about the reading bell curve, I wonder how much capability is masking readiness, I.e. if the range at which self taught readers can vary from 4-14, then if you look at who needs more help at 8yo, a larger percentage of those will probably be the dyslexic kids who by definition find that skill harder to pick up and so are likely to be those learning to read later, if there isn't so much pressure applied beforehand that they write off ever being able to master the skill at all.