Self-teaching and other mysteries of learning to read.

[Dick]

All this worry about the potential of CCSS to undermine effective teaching is worrisome. I am especially worried about the CCSS call for using more difficult texts with all kids but especially with struggling readers. Basically, nothing in the CCSS documents that states signed on to support indicates that anyone other than a child's teacher or school district should be making decisions about what students read. The "advice" on implementing the CCSS offered by David Coleman and Sue Pimentel are "add-ons" available to anyone naive enough to take their advice. 

In this stream I hope we can think about what has been dubbed the "self-teaching" hypothesis in beginning reading lessons. Basically, the research on self-teaching demonstrates that some kids, perhaps many kids, maybe even most kids, rely heavily on self-teaching to develop their reading proficiencies. Self-teaching is what occurs when beginning readers get excited about reading and select texts they can read even if with a bit of difficulty. These readers engage in various problem solving behaviors when they come across an unknown word in a text. They use what they know about the print, about letter sound relations, about known words that share some features of the unknown word (e.g., cake and take and then stake), about what might make sense in that sentence in that story they are attempting to read. But to engage in this sort of reading requires first enthusiasm for learning to read and an awareness of all the different types of texts available. We can create classrooms that foster this kids of thinking and engagement but often we don't. 

As researchers we've learned a lot about what effective K and 1st grade teachers do every day. Unfortunately, much of what we see these effective teachers doing is absent from most K and 1st grade classrooms. One critical factor is these classrooms is access to many books that kids want to read and books they can read. As with every other human proficiency practice matters and a single story each week is unlikely to generate much reading practice, especially if that story is found in a commercial reading series. On the other hand, 10 stories a week in K and 1st begins to provide the sorts of practice that leads kids to take books home to read, thus fostering even more reading practice and reading development. 

What I am interested in here is accounts of self-teaching that you have observed in your students.