Teachers at P.S. 84 said their own experiences with phonics training have been mixed, according to Chalkbeat Detroit.
“We have been through many different [phonics] programs, so it was a little bit all over the place,” said Johana Talbot, a first grade teacher who said she appreciated the training program at Gaynor. (The principal of P.S. 84 declined an interview request.)
The pilot program at Gaynor involves 45 minutes a week of training in a method called Orton-Gillingham that has historically been used for children with dyslexia, but is increasingly deployed with a wider range of students.
This approach is designed to break down the building blocks of language, teaching children basic spelling rules and sound-letter relationships, building in complexity over time. It also incorporates sight, touch, and movement to help make the ideas stick. Students may tap their fingers as they sound out words or move their arms to represent certain sounds.
Though officials at Gaynor said the approach has worked for their students, the evidence of Orton-Gillingham’s effectiveness more broadly is limited.
Talbot encourages students to tap out sounds with their non-dominant hand instead of their dominant hand, a small tweak that helps them use that strategy during writing exercises.
“The movements for every sound [and] chanting the rules — they feel very empowered by that,” said Talbot.
P.S. 84′s Carla Murray-Bolling moved this year from preschool to kindergarten, where she is teaching phonics for the first time. “I was basically just thrown in and told: ‘swim.’”
One practice she’s learned is how to encourage students to blend different sounds of a word together. “It’s been helping them by dragging the sounds out instead of breaking them down one letter at a time,” she said.
The goal is to help teachers understand the reading principles behind the lessons and determine whether students have actually mastered them.
During a recent training session, two teachers paired up to practice testing each other on “nonsense” words that still follow normal spelling rules, with words like “jetch.”
By presenting nonsense words, the teachers were learning a quick assessment to help identify whether any of their students had come up with ways to correctly guess a word’s meaning.
Chalkbeat Detroit
