Occam's Razor to the Rescue

Simplify the subject, not the student.

Image from ChatGPT

Occam's Razor is a philosophical principle that suggests the simplest solution is often the best one. In essence, when you're faced with multiple explanations or solutions to a problem, Occam's Razor advises choosing the one that makes the fewest assumptions — the most straightforward, least complicated option — unless there's strong evidence to support the more complex one. (ChatGPT)

The Pursuit of Happiness

Several weeks ago I had the idea for this post perfectly clear in my mind: I was going to talk about the importance of simplifying our reading instruction to make it as efficient as possible. Then I received this comment on my last post:

Reading instruction is not the place for the simplicity longings of Occam's Razor. Readers are different, learners are different, and instruction must be multi-layered.

It came from a former colleague, Mike Mathews. His message carried a blast from the past: a fond memory of my high school teaching days from decades ago. We were fortunate to find ourselves in the midst of an amazing group of teachers across all departments (Mike was head of social studies; I was head of English), and we capped off our classroom successes by winning the California Distinguished School Award. How lucky we were to be surrounded by these amazing educators, who remind me of President Kennedy’s comments at a state dinner:

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

I could say the same about my colleagues—an extraordinary collection of teaching talent—with the possible exception of when Socrates dined alone.

What Mike’s comment helped me realize is the importance of separating our subject-matter from our students. I still believe that we are overcomplicating reading instruction (more on that), but I also want to acknowledge the complicated souls and circumstances of the children we teach.

Those of us who have spent our entire careers working with high-need students know there is nothing simple about the challenges they face. A decade ago I was in a second-grade job share, teaching 50% and doing reading intervention for the other 50%. I will never forget sitting with my co-teacher at the back table for parent-teacher conferences, twenty minutes with each family. When the morning break came around, we looked at each other, exhaled in unison, and agreed that what we had experienced felt a whole lot more like counseling than conferring. The stories we heard were harrowing, but they didn’t so much shock us as remind us that there are other reasons for lack of progress beyond poor instruction. However, that fact didn’t excuse us from doing everything we could to get the instruction right. In fact, it made effective instruction that much more imperative.

Tolstoy’s famous line is the first sentence of Anna Karenina:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

That day we discovered exactly how many different ways our families were unhappy and how their challenges were often interfering with their child’s progress. All the more reason, I believe, why we need to simplify reading instruction so that we can build a secure academic foundation that holds steady once the roller coaster comes to rest.

The Same But Different

Is Robert Pondiscio the Mark Twain of our time? So much of what he says is so commonsensical. Like this:

Teaching is immensely satisfying work when you are successful. So the goal is, how do we make more people feel successful at this? . . . We have 3.7 million teachers. They're going to be ordinary people, so therefore make the job doable by them.

Previously, he’s referred to teachers as mere mortals—an important concession because it acknowledges our limitations when teaching minds and treating souls. Since we don’t get to choose our students, we teach the ones we have, not the ones we want—and since they come to us in many different ways, the teaching isn’t always so straightforward. I remember a colleague remarking how pleasant our staff development day was going without the students present. My principal struck the right tone of sarcasm when she agreed that life would be wonderfully carefree and uncomplicated with no kids in our classrooms.

We are ordinary people facing children with extraordinary challenges. How can we simplify instruction to deliver curriculum effectively as well as efficiently and save everyone’s sanity?

Education consultant Dylan Wiliam (Creating the Schools Our Children Need) says:

Teaching is interesting because students are so different. It's only possible because they are so similar.

Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene explains what makes it possible for us to teach reading to all of our students despite their differences. In How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now (2021) he states:

All readers learn to connect symbols with sounds and meanings in highly similar ways, because of how the brain is wired . . . Whole-word or discovery-based methods ignore the constraints of how the brain actually learns written language.

This acknowledgement that all readers learn to connect symbols with sounds and meanings in highly similar ways is comforting because it tells me exactly what I need to do to help all my students become proficient readers. If I can find the simplest ways to facilitate these connections, I have more time for teaching other literacy components across Scarborough’s Reading Rope.

Less Can Be More: The Virtue of Ignorance

Mark Twain beautifully captured what ails many institutions, including schools:

It’s not the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know for sure that just ain’t so.

Unfortunately, some of the things we don’t know can in fact get our students into trouble if what we don’t know is how to teach them to read. Similarly, the things we know for sure that just ain’t so can have adverse effects. Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story showed us the circuitous paths taken in reading instruction that people knew for sure worked even though the research was telling them it just ain’t so. Recently, she highlighted the value of simplicity in Episode 11 where the Steubenville teachers simplify letter knowledge instruction by emphasizing sounds rather than names at the very beginning. This is what I did for my kindergartners, in part to circumvent Halloween stories about ‘yitches.’

As knowledge about how the brain reads accumulates, the path to successful reading narrows, which makes decision-making easier. When I discovered in Reading in the Brain that Stanislas Dehaene encourages sounds over names because the hook-up only concerns phonemes, I was grateful that my lessons could be even leaner.

Recently, I experienced back-to-back school years that illustrated the importance of streamlining instruction. I coached two first-grade teachers who had no teacher training and no experience teaching. I gave them the nuts and bolts of reading instruction and showed them how to tighten them with simple, straightforward routines that freed-up instructional time. Since it all made sense to them—and since it meant they didn’t have to dig through all the lessons in their bloated basal—there was no pushback. My motto: KISSS—Keep It Simple for Students and Staff.

We seldom refer to the complete title of the remarkable film, Birdman. It’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), a notion in the sub-title that validates my desire not to overburden my colleagues with too much knowledge. By contrast, one of my college professors had a sign on his office door that read: Ignorance is not bliss; it hurts.

So which is it? Can both of these statements be true at the same time? Certainly, teacher ignorance about reading acquisition has hurt many children over many years as Emily Hanford’s reporting has highlighted. But paradoxically, ignorance may be a virtue if it prevents the overteaching of foundational reading skills.

Marnie Ginsberg (Reading Simplified) believes we are teaching too much, and I agree. Marnie writes:

[Anita Archer] gave the example of a teacher insisting that students needed to know the term diphthong when learning the /oi/ sound, pointing out that she had read proficiently for decades before encountering the word!

When one of my kindergartners asked me what the sound /oi/ looks like so he could write about a new toy, I simply showed him on his white board and made sure he said the phonemes as he wrote each grapheme: /t/ /oy/—but I didn’t refer to a diphthong. On the Reading Road Trip podcast, Anita Archer expresses her concerns like this:

One of the things I’m concerned about a little bit with the science of reading—so many of you have taken classes—LETRS classes, AIMS classes, CORE classes, other classes on the science of reading . . . And that was to be certain that we had the best understanding of all of the aspects of language possible involved in reading. But it didn’t mean that we had to teach all of that to our students. And what I’m concerned about is that sometimes we are increasing the cognitive load that students have—that may actually slow the acquisition of reading.

We need to seriously question the rationale behind what we’re teaching teachers. One colleague, looking downcast—in fact, downright dejected—had just come out of a training session that provided her with an 800-page sourcebook. Without questioning the value of the contents of this book (which comes from a reputable PD provider), the sheer heft is enough to send a teacher sprinting back to the printable handouts from Teachers Pay Teachers.

The Chicken Emergency

We had 29 students in that second grade class with reading levels ranging from kindergarten to sixth grade, and with a similar range of complex personalities. One student had a type of Tourette’s and could not contain his ongoing commentary during a lesson, so it felt like teaching with the radio on. Another student punctuated lessons by periodically standing up, thrusting out his arms, and yelling CHICKEN! That was it: just a solitary salute to poultry.

In the moment, an ordinary lesson can feel like a minor emergency. At the end of the school year, after we all watched the theme song to Super Chicken and I handed my clucking-loving student his parting gift—a copy of Daniel Pinkwater’s The Hoboken Chicken Emergency—he knew that all had been forgiven. Teaching is interesting because students are so different.

Kindergarten teacher and podcast host, Kate Winn (Reading Road Trip), recently stated:

I know we all believe in social-emotional learning. I do as well. But what I have found is that sometimes if you just teach children to read and write and give them the academic skills, behavior decreases.

If we lean on simplicity, we have more time for social-emotional learning. In Saying the Right Thing in 100 Words or Less, Daniel Pinkwater recounts the most concise piece of writing he’d ever seen. It comes from a personals column:

Baked Ham. Lasagna. Roast Beef. Apple Pie. I know what you like. I have what you need.

My message to my kindergartners:

Letter Sounds. White Boards. Books. Journals. I know what you like. I have what you need.

It really can be as simple as that. Really! Faith Borkowsky (The Literacy View) has many views on literacy including: Give me a piece of chalk, and I’ll teach a child how to read. And watch Marnie Ginsberg use the bare minimum to teach a three-year-old to build a word. Let’s not make reading instruction any more complicated than necessary. Marnie says: If it’s not simple, it’s not sustainable.

Robert Pondiscio might add that what isn’t sustainable isn’t doable—so do it differently to make it sustainable. Any reading approach—including Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, and Structured Literacy—that features elements that are unnecessarily complicated for teacher and student alike is not doable in the long-run.

Our Compact with Students

I like to take credit for inspiring my older son to follow politics by playing Neal Conan’s radio show Talk of the Nation out loud—though it was not love at first sound by any means. Conan’s farewell broadcast ends with two words that have become family favorites. Conan’s final paragraph:

So right here, I form my own private compact with NPR and my member stations. I will listen and, yes, I will open my checkbook, but I need some services in return. Go and tell me the stories behind everything that happened in the world today. Explain why it happened, and how it affects our lives. Do it every day. Tell me what's important, and don't waste my time with stupid stuff.

What is our compact with our students? Are we burdening them with too much superfluous stuff? I'm watching with great interest the development of a new movement, still in its infancy, that is straddling Structured Literacy and Balanced Literacy—a group of teachers, tutors, and program creators who have come together to highlight a third way. Their goal is to move quickly through research-informed foundational skills instruction—what Mark Seidenberg calls achieving escape velocity—to allow meaning-making within authentic books to make its way into the hands of students as quickly as possible. We should all be rooting for their success.

The Day after Yesterday Is the First Day of the Rest of Our Teaching

I don’t know anyone who captures the urgency of the moment better than Claude Goldenberg (“The fierce urgency of now”). I remember four years ago reading with trepidation his EducationWeek article, Science of Reading Advocates Have a Messaging Problem, about the fog of war engulfing the science of reading movement. My concern: I really was afraid he would rain on our parade—or just throw a big wet blanket over the whole movement and dampen our enthusiasm. A quintessential killjoy.

But what I found instead was common sense clarity that convinced me of the importance of making sure we acknowledge all the shades of green coloring our reading landscape. The binary is blind to nuance and can undermine progress, as we’ve been witnessing since the science of reading movement first began for many of us with Emily Hanford’s Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?

Claude’s comment on my post last week humbly asking—how DO we get unstuck so we can move ahead—says it all. I believe simplicity can save us because before you can pare something down you have to understand the thing you’re dealing with, the difference—as Anita Archer keeps reminding us—between the stuff and the fluff. Becoming unstuck means agreeing on the same stuff and the implications for our instruction. This agreement is long overdue.

In the article, Claude writes:

To some, the science of reading means findings based on principles of scientific research. To others, the term invokes a narrow and reductionist view of the world or at least the world of reading . . .

Instead of spelling out what they mean, “science of reading” advocates wrap themselves in the protective mantle of science, as if invoking science is all that anyone needs to be credible and persuade others to join them . . .

The right kind of instruction, for both speakers of English and English-language learners, includes explicitly and systematically teaching students (or anyone learning to read) the letters that represent sounds, how letters are used to sound out words, and how to fluently read words, sentences, and paragraphs so that reading development can proceed. These so-called foundational skills, often grouped together under the not entirely precise label “phonics,” constitute what most people would consider common sense. Here, I am happy to report, common sense and educational research converge . . .

Once we get past the logjams, wars, ad hoc recriminations, and so forth, we can make sure anyone teaching our kids to read has, understands, and can use the best knowledge and tools available. For that to happen, we must stop getting distracted and mystifying others with opaque language. It’s just not helpful.

Has anyone ever said it better? Join President Jefferson at the dining table, Dr. Goldenberg.

All this can help unstick us: demystifying reading instruction by sidestepping distractions and discarding opaque language. What’s the stuff that really matters that we can all agree on?

Recently, one of my first graders began to tell the group about his weekend by saying: The day after yesterday . . . I so very much wanted to say: You mean today? But I just smiled and listened to his story.

The time for change was yesterday—but the day after yesterday will also do. Our children are telling us their stories. Are we listening?

Always striving to make sense—please let me know when I fail.