Common Core Language Arts Is Developmentally Inappropriate for Elementary Students
Does Common Cadre Ask Too Much of Kindergarten Readers?
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Sandwiched between preschool and starting time grade, kindergarteners often first school at very different stages of development depending on their exposure to preschool, habitation environments and biology. For states adopting Common Cadre, the standards apply to kindergarten, laying out what students should exist able to do by the cease of the grade.* Kindergartners are expected to know basic phonics and discussion recognition too as read beginner texts, skills some childhood development experts argue are developmentally inappropriate.
"In that location's a wide age range for learning to read," said Nancy Carlsson-Paige on KQED's Forum program. Carlsson-Paige is professor emerita of education at Lesley Academy and co-author of the study "Reading Educational activity in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose," which criticizes the Common Core standards for kindergarten.
"Nearly five-year-quondam children are not really ready to learn to read," Carlsson-Paige said. "In that location are many experiences in the classroom that are beneficial for building the foundation for learning to read that will come up later." She favors a play-based classroom that gives students easily-on experiences, helping them to develop the symbolic thinking necessary to later recognize letters and numbers.
"Enquiry shows on a national scale there'due south less play and experiential based curriculum happening over all, and much more than didactic instruction, fifty-fifty though we have enquiry that shows long term there are greater gains from play-based programs than academically focused ones," Carlsson-Paige said.
While Common Core aligned assessments don't kicking in until third form, many teachers experience force per unit area to make sure kids are coming together the specified standards before they motion on to outset form. That pressure can mean more focus on academics, at the sacrifice of play fourth dimension.
Kindergarten teachers try to interpret the standards and translate them into developmentally appropriate activities. But they struggle when kids still don't see Developmental Reading Assessment benchmarks. "Teachers start to question themselves and waver even though they believe in doing what's developmentally appropriate," said Colleen Rau, a reading intervention specialist at Aspire Berkley Maynard Academy. "So I recall we really need to call back almost taking the pressure away and looking at student growth."
Rau says nether Common Core she'due south seen positive shifts at her school towards more thematic units and more easily-on learning, but she agrees with Carlsson-Paige that pushing immature children into skills they aren't developmentally set for can have poor results. Students can develop coping mechanisms that don't serve them well afterward when they are confronted with more than advanced texts.
"The lightbulb goes on for students at different times," Rau said, "But if we make students feel pressure level so that they close down, then that light bulb is not going to be equally likely to come on and they aren't going to develop the confidence that they demand to become successful readers later."
There are plenty of children who practice learn to read in kindergarten or even before, so for many parents the statement that young children aren't developmentally ready to read rings false. But non all learners are the same, and what's true for one child won't necessarily be true for the child sitting next to her. Young children learn differently from older children, adolescents and adults, Carlsson-Paige said. Early childhood educators have documented the progression of increasingly complex symbolic thinking that leads to understanding letters make sounds and sounds make words.
"If you present children with information that's likewise disparate from what they know so they give up or experience confused, or cry, or get turned off," Carlsson-Paige said. "Part of the art of teaching is to sympathize where a child is in developing concepts and and so be able to present information in ways that are new and interesting, just will cause a niggling bit of struggle on the part of the kid to endeavour to understand them."
AN IMPLEMENTATION PROBLEM
Advocates for the kindergarten Common Cadre standards agree that kindergarteners should not be sitting still all twenty-four hour period doing reading drills. Only they are articulate that the standards in no style crave that sort of pedagogy and were written with assistance and input from early childhood educators effectually the country. They are meant to offer challenging opportunities to advanced learners while supporting learners who may be coming into kindergarten with very little literacy exposure.
"What we ready out in the Common Cadre are those skills and concepts that will help students learn to read in first and 2nd grade," said Susan Pimentel, lead writer of the English Language Arts Common Core standards. She says early childhood educators were adamant that the language "with prompting and support" be used throughout the kindergarten standards in recognition that immature learners will be new to schoolhouse and won't be left to answer dozens of questions on their own.
"Then much of the business organization is about the implementation," Pimentel said. And while she agrees that educators need to be vigilant about pointing out poor implementation and working to ready information technology, the trouble is not new. Educational activity standards have always been implemented in a diverseness of ways. "What we're talking about is teachers who accept possibly not been trained and some attending on that would be important," she said.
Other advocates of the Common Core standards meet them as an of import step towards education equity. "The strongest argument in favor of reading by the end of kindergarten and Common Cadre's vision for early literacy is merely to ensure that children—particularly the disadvantaged amongst them—don't go sucked into the vortex of bookish distress associated with early on reading failure," writes Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Many children start kindergarten able to identify short words or enlightened of the difference between lowercase and capital messages, two of the kindergarten standards. Pondiscio and others believe information technology is completely advisable to brainstorm introducing these ideas in kindergarten, albeit in fun play-based ways.
"If teachers are turning their kindergarten classrooms into joyless grinding mills and challenge they are forced to practise so under Common Cadre (every bit the report'due south authors allege), something has clearly gone wrong," Pondiscio writes. "Mutual Core demands no such thing, and inquiry as well as adept sense supports exposing children to early reading concepts through games and songs."
Some other literacy researcher says the critique that the standards are developmentally inappropriate may be a misinterpretation of what the standards require. For example, one standard says children should be able to read emergent texts with purpose and understanding.
"The emergent-reader text is outset modeled by the teacher for the students, then joyfully read over and over with the students until eventually the easy book is independently read by the students with great joy and confidence," writes J. Richard Gentry, author of "Raising Confident Readers: How to Teach Your Child to Read and Write — From Babe to Age 7," and a former professor and elementary school teacher. Gentry says this process emulates "lap reading" which some children become with their parents at abode and which helps students gain confidence in their reading.
All of these educators agree that it tin can exist hard to teach the kindergarten standards in developmentally appropriate ways when teachers are worried almost how kids will practice on standardized tests. While Carlsson-Paige and others believe the standards are inappropriate and should be thrown out, Pondiscio, Gentry and Pimentel are among those who believe the standards are important to make certain reading gaps don't start immature. They favor the idea that implementation is the real problem and that more free energy should be put into helping early on childhood educators interpret the standards and integrate them into class in fun, approachable and developmentally appropriate means.
*An earlier version of this story suggested that Common Cadre was the first time bookish standards were set for kindergarteners. We regret whatsoever defoliation.
Source: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/39816/does-common-core-ask-too-much-of-kindergarten-readers
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