Helping Parents Understand Literacy-Learning: The Breakthrough Phase

By Margaret Y. Phinney, EdD

In our resource book, Reading Development: A Handbook of Assessment and Instruction (2016), we describe the seven phases of reading development through which learners generally progress as they become literate. For each phase, we offer suggestions for helping parents understand how their learners approach reading and writing, and ideas for helping them continue growing. Following is an adaptation of our section focused on the “Print-Focused Phase” of reading, the time when learners are trying to master how to use the visual cues on a page of print including word spacing, phonics, paragraphing, and punctuation and capitalization signals.

The Print-Focused Phase (PFP) may not only be a time of struggle for learners, but it can also be a time of anxiety for parents or, in the case of adult learners, friends and family members who are backing the learners. Parents usually understand how important it is that their children learn to read, and read well. For some parents, reading was a struggle during their own school years. Knowing how hard it is to survive with marginal literacy skills, they can become even more concerned for their children. Added to this, most parents have not had training in how the reading process works, so they tend to define the learning process simplistically, assuming a few basic skills will do the trick. For example, they hear politicians and uninformed journalists calling for “more phonics” as the one and only valid form of reading instruction, and they want to believe what they hear. What else do they have to go by, after all? For example, when their children come home with compositions written using constructed spelling, they can’t see beyond the “bad spelling” to the imaginative, unconstrained content beneath. Nor do they understand how much their children learn about the way print works by being able to explore its features through writing.

Parents, supporters, and backers have a right to expect accountability. They have a right to be informed of the rate and quality of their children’s growth as literacy learners. Above all, they have a right to understand what we are doing and why. Reading instruction has changed radically since the parents and supporters of today’s learners were themselves learning to read. Most of us who went to school prior to the 1990’s learned through the surface-level transmission model of memorizing decoding rules, sight words, and correct spellings so that all of our oral reading and written products were in perfectly standard form in the eyes of our vigilant teachers. New and newly surfaced research (e.g., Vygotsky, 1962/1986) that elucidates both the constructivist and social nature of the learning process, combined with ever-improving teacher education programs, is gradually changing the way we teach reading. We now know that literacy is a language process rather than a set of discrete, logically sequenced skills; that learning is a scaffolding process; that learning best occurs in a non-competitive social setting; and that literacy learning is a complex and multi-faceted enterprise. This knowledge results in what must appear to be a strange array of activities to today’s parents. Instead of working to achieve individual success, solely accountable for their own products, learners are working in pairs and groups. Instead of everyone reading the same text at the same time, learners are offered choices of reading material within the current topic. Instead of content material being “covered” by reading a textbook chapter, end-of-chapter questions, and a handful of worksheets, content material is explored through lengthy thematic study. Instead of writing practice in the form of fill-in-the-blanks worksheets or short, highly structured and closely corrected assignments, learners are producing massive amounts of choice-based writing that is only revised and edited when it is taken to publication. And, horror of horrors, instead of report cards containing letters and numbers that compare learners to each other and to arbitrary grade-level standards, some schools are using anecdotal progress reports that compare learners to their own past performances. It’s a heavy load for conscientious parents to absorb. It is our job to inform parents about what we are doing and to provide them with understandable material that explains why we are doing it. Parents don’t want their children to be guinea pigs: they want to know that the methodology being used is backed up by research and rational thinking and that we have credibility in circles beyond our own imaginations.

When Margaret taught grade one in the 1980’s, at the time when the notion of “invented spelling” was a radical idea, she had a lot of concerned parents on her doorstep. She wrote papers on “Invented Spelling” and “Whole Reading” to help her parents better understand why she was allowing children to use non-standard spelling in their daily writing and to learn phonics without worksheets. She raised her credibility further by getting the articles published in a magazine for parents (Phinney, 1987a; Phinney, 1987b) and re-printed in a book for parents (Phinney, 1990) and on a parent-education website (Phinney, 1992). At the beginning of the year during the opening parent meeting, she explained her philosophy and methodology and distributed copies of the published articles. Below are other, less time-consuming ways to help parents understand the constructivist teaching strategies we use with our readers in the Print-Focused Phase.

1. Explanatory Meetings:

We invite parents to an evening meeting to explain the basics of miscue analysis. We talk through an audio recording or video of a reader making miscues and show how the coding works and how miscues are interpreted for instructional focus.

2. Rubber Stamps:

We have a set of rubber stamps made with labels such as “UNEDITED,” “ROUGH DRAFT,” “SELECTIVELY REVISED,” and “ASSESSMENT PIECE,” and stamp all pre-final writing before it goes home. With the first round sent home, we include an explanation of why we allow such work out of our hands, and we provide a glossary explaining the process associated with each of our stamps.

3. Explanatory Notes:

On the back of selected pieces of writing, we note what we see in that piece of writing in terms of competencies, breakthroughs, and growth areas. This encourages parents to see the positive side of constructed spelling. For example, we might right on Mary’s paper, “This is the first time Mary has used vowel placeholders.” To encourage looking for competence beyond the surface appearance, we might say something like, “Jamal used three details to support his topic this time — this is progress for him.” To illustrate what we want to focus on next, we might say something like, “We’re working on end punctuation in this piece”.

4. Home “Book Bags”:

We send home “book bags” [gallon-sized plastic zipper bags work] containing: a short text that has been introduced during a guided reading session; a set of sentence strips matching the lines of print; and word cards matching the words on one of the sentence strips. We include an instruction sheet for a procedural sequence for working with the contents.

Figure 6.47: Photo of Book Bag Contents

5. Self-chosen Spelling Words:

We have our learners choose two or three frequently used words from their weekly writing that we have discussed as important for them to learn in standard form. These become their lists to practice at home.

6. Short Information Sheets:

We periodically distribute short information sheets that outline what the class is doing with respect to the current “Big Idea” theme (e.g., survival), what instructional strategies we are focusing on within the thematic study, and how parents can support the topic study and literacy strategies at home.

7. Read-Aloud Reminders:

We frequently remind parents to read aloud regularly to their children. We send home booklists based on our observations of the children’s interests and arrange for parent-child library times.

8. Re-read Familiar Texts:

We remind adult learners to practice reading familiar texts each day, such as a favorite poem, the written lyrics to a favorite song, or a small section of an interesting magazine article that has been read aloud to them two or three times.

9. Invitations to Visit:

We make sure parents know they are welcome to make an appointment to visit our classrooms. When opportunities arise during a parent’s visit, we explain what the children are learning, what our role is in that process, and why we feel it is important.

10. “Public” Performances:

We try to have several special events during the year that include demonstrations of progress in language and literacy learning. For example, at the winter assembly one year, Margaret’s students, most of whom were still working in the Print-Focused Phase, performed a group-composed song about different festivals of light around the world. Between verses, children took turns going to the microphone and reading short blurbs about the meaning of a particular holiday. At another time, the class acted out fables for the parents, reading the moral for each at the end. The classroom walls displayed the children’s written and illustrated versions of their favorite fables. Later in the year, they put on a Reader’s Theater event, dramatically reading traditional tales.

We welcome your additions to this list of parent-support ideas. Please add them in the Comments section, below.

References

Phinney, M.Y. (1987a). Whole reading. Mothering (42), Winter, 79-83.

Phinney, M.Y. (1987b). Invented spelling. Mothering (43), Spring, 79-83.

Phinney, M.Y. (1990). Whole reading. In A. Pederson & P. O’Mara (Eds.), Schooling at home: Parents, kids, and learning. Santa Fe, NM: John Muir Publications. [Reprinted from article in Mothering.]

Phinney, M.Y. (1992). Whole reading. http://naturalchild.com/guest/margaret_phinney.html.

Phinney, M.Y. and Ward, G.C. (2016). Reading Development: A Handbook of Assessment and Instruction. Amazon.