Outside The Four Corners (Or “How Common Core Almost Broke Reading”)
The Reading Wars are a series of debates about how best to teach reading to small humans, and while the intensity of the debates themselves ebb and flow, the dates have been raging for only slightly fewer years than the printed word has existed.
One of the fronts in the debate has been the phonics vs. “whole language,” recently stirred up again by Emily Hanford, who has argued for the full phonics approach in several articles. But that debate feeds into a broader one, an aspect of the conversation might be called skills vs. content.
The skills camp views reading as a suite of teachable, transferable skills (making inferences, fluency, decoding), while the content crew leans toward that it is rich content knowledge that makes the whole business of reading work, but which is not transferable (just because I can read a high-level book about dinosaurs doesn’t mean I can also read a high-level book about knitting).
The “war” framing can seem awfully overblown to actual classroom teachers. While reading warriors may frame the choices as “either- CONTINUE READING: Outside The Four Corners (Or “How Common Core Almost Broke Reading”)