This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by - memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know - are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. Woodworth had stumbled on to American education's own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers - and educators may not even know it.įor decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. The teacher told her she was teaching reading the way the curriculum told her to. She went to the teacher and expressed her concerns. 'These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets.' 'I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do,' she said. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. 'There was a fox and a bear in the picture. The teacher said, 'If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here,' Woodworth recalled. The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use. That's why she was so alarmed to see how her oldest child, Claire, was being taught to read in school.Īs long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.Ī couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. She's determined to make sure her own kids get off to a better start than she did. Reading 'influences every aspect of your life,' she said. Woodworth, who now works in accounting, 1 says she's still not a very good reader and tears up when she talks about it. Molly Woodworth (left) with her aunt, Nora Chahbazi, outside the Ounce of Prevention Reading Center in Flushing, Michigan. Her reading strategies were her 'dirty little secrets.' No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. 'I'd get through a chapter and my brain hurt by the end of it. 'I hated reading because it was taxing,' she said. Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be? If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. 'Words were like pictures to me,' she said. Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text. She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. 'When a teacher would dictate a word and say, 'Tell me how you think you can spell it,' I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, 'How do they even know where to begin?' I was totally lost.' 'There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me,' she said.

Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented program.

Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast.

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