Doug Fisher, Ph.D. is a professor and Department Chair in the Department of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University. He co-founded the charter school, Health Sciences High and Middle College, where he is also Dean of Faculty Affairs. Doug is a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at San Diego State University (SDSU). In 2017, he received the SDSU Outstanding Faculty Monty Award. He was past president of the International Literacy Association (2017-2018). While he’s a prolific author and a renowned educational leader, he’s down to earth, inspiring and easy to talk to.
I first met Doug over 20 years ago, while I was a second-grade teacher at Central Elementary School in San Diego. Since I've known him, I've been lucky to learn a great deal about literacy, have many wonderful educational experiences, and gain deeper insights in education. At the 2019 International Literacy Association conference in New Orleans, I sat down to chat about Doug and Nancy Frey's new book; This Is Balanced Literacy, Grades K-6.
Doug and I at ILA 2019, New Orleans
Since our interview, my step-daughter moved back in, meaning my office was boxed up with the recorder and recordings of a couple of interviews. The new year started promising with a new consulting job... and then a global pandemic, international protests, natural disasters, man-made disasters, and not to mention a politically divisive and economically hurt country also got in the way. I wonder what the word of the year will be for 2020 - globally cruel, bewildering, turbulent growth, hellacious? Personally, I gained a job and lost a job, but on the bright side, I found my recorder, and because I've found some time on my hands, loaded the interviews onto my laptop and became friends with writing again.
Also, since this interview, Doug Fisher came out with a new book, The Distance Learning Playbook, Grades K-12: Teaching for Engagement and Impact in Any Setting, it is an excellent resource - pragmatic, practical, relevant and functional. Whether you're familiar or not with Drs. Fisher, Frey, and Hatties' work, this book is a great refresh, review, and a gathering of new ideas around what good purposeful teaching looks like at a distance. This book is also a powerful resource to use for professional learning communities as a collective wealth on the process of the implementation and sustainability of teaching, learning and the care of teachers and students.
Grab a cuppa coffee and enjoy our talk around balanced literacy.
LJ: When I started teaching in the mid-'90s, Balanced Literacy was huge and then it kind of disappeared. What's the impetus for you and Nancy Frey's new book, This Is Balanced Literacy, Grades K-6?
DF: As far as I can tell, the last time we had the reading wars, in California specifically, our state superintendent said we had to have a balance. He was specifically talking about more phonics, and foundational skills and more of the meaning-making kind of strategies. So, the origin of the idea of balanced literacy was we can't just go off and help kids make meaning from text, they have to be taught explicitly. So, when you and I started our professions that was the focus.
I read recently that some people treat phonics/ foundational skills as if salt at dinner, a little here and a little there, and we may have seen a little retreat from that. There are places where it's very clear it's not happening. But this time around balance is a little more encompassing. So, how do you balance reading and writing instruction? How do you ensure that kids are getting sufficient writing instruction and not 90% of the minutes in reading and only a tiny bit of instructional time left for writing? That's part of finding the balance.
As Nell Duke taught us, you have to balance informational text with narrative text - children have to read both narrative and informational text. We should have direct instruction, there's nothing wrong with it. There are certain things that develop quickly and well through direct instruction, and other things need more of a dialogic approach, where kids are interacting, and talking and developing their thinking.
Then we started thinking about how 'balance' was being interpreted in most school districts. It was a lot about whole group and small group instruction, and we were thinking 'balanced literacy' was becoming everything and nothing. So maybe it was time to redefine and take back and define what we mean by balanced literacy instruction. Some people have argued that maybe we should have come up with a new term, and there are new terms out there. We decided, no, this balanced literacy term has been around for a long time. It dates back to the time where kids might not have received enough foundational skills instruction. So we said, let's come back to this term and try to reach clarity on this word and the things we are balancing.
How do we have kids get a really good set of learning experiences in a scope and sequence? It's not like we teach language structures or phonics or phonemic awareness just randomly from the text they encounter. There's a scope and sequence to teaching. There's a flow and development of phonemic awareness, there's a flow and development to fluency. That's part of the balance.
The whole motivation was to be able to redefine, reconceptualize, and recommit to the idea of balance and what it takes to get there in the classroom.
LJ: As a reading intervention teacher working with first-grade students, I would have to fight for systematic phonics in the classroom, some of the children I taught didn't always need to be pulled out for one-to-one instruction. They needed a different instruction and purposeful systematic instruction.
DF: And if they're not getting purposeful systematic instruction then they end up in intervention, and we think they're not learning to read well. Some people call these students curriculum casualties. They are a casualty to the curriculum as it was delivered to some kids. That's the whole point, what are the things that need to be in place? For example, I think we've lost what interactive writing is. It was so common and it works! It's an opportunity to watch students compose. It's an opportunity to watch them spell. It's an opportunity to watch them think through the letters and sounds and how they work as they write individual words, by sharing the pen and constructing a message. It seems like no one is doing this anymore. Why not? It's a really good approach.
I think some of the small group instruction has kind of gone astray in the kinds of texts kids are asked to read in small groups and the over-reliance on the teacher doing the work. I think we have to be very careful about using the picture to make sense of words. I think we have gone way overboard on this. If we have pictures we look at them, we analyze them, we think about them, but we don't use that to figure out what the words are because we can read and we've been taught to read. In retrospect, I think there was a time where we did way too much frontloading, way to much preteaching, way too much on the picture walks. We all did that because we thought this was going to work. It turns out they didn't read the words as a result of those things.
LJ: I agree I had to cover up pictures because students were over-reliant on them or they were making up a story. That's good when in preschool.
DF: or they made guesses, educated or otherwise based on the pictures.
LJ: Then those educated guesses continue to fifth and sixth grade and they don't have any systems to read unknown words. They have a cognitive imbalance by working so hard to figure out those words and comprehension is lost.
LJ: What's the best way to dive into, This Is Balanced Literacy, Grades K-6? Is it best to start from the beginning or can we jump in with any chapter?
DF: The first chapter where we define balanced literacy in the present is a great discussion point. Then I think people should look at their instruction of literacy and ask, "What are areas that are not strong right now?" So, if you need direct instruction there are chapters in the reading section (Chapter 2), and writing section (Chapter 3). If you need more work on dialogic instruction, there are chapters in there. If you're wondering what to do with the other kids when you meet with a small group to push them based on their needs and not because of some random text collection, you might want to go to the collaborative section (Chapter 4). I don't think you must read them in order. A needs-based approach would be useful.
I also think the videos are very interesting. There's no teacher video that's ever going to be a perfect lesson. We're human, we're fallible, and the lessons aspire. The idea of real teachers in the book is so we can have a discussion around them. One might say, I wouldn't do it this way, I would do it that way. GREAT! That's the whole point of the conversation. The videos are not scripted, they are not planned in advance. We don't stop and say kids say it over differently, or teachers do it differently. These are real lessons where teachers are working hard to get kids to high levels of literacy.
LJ: You've mentioned direction instruction several times. Can you elaborate on the meaning? I think of Paul Kirshner's work.
DF: Direct instruction goes way back and there's some great researchers on it. I think it gets disparaged because some think it means it's just telling kids information or drilling and drilling and drilling. When you read into the direct instruction research you find it is relevant, there's some teacher input, there's some checking for understanding, there's some guided practice or monitoring, there's closure or independent practice. It's about building certain kinds of skills and concepts with kids in a more direct way than an indirect way.
In our field of reading, there's a lot of us/them dichotomy, where direct instruction is evil or direct instruction is the only thing we do. There has to be a balance. Direct instruction has a research base, there are things that work well when you use direct instruction in the classroom and things that don't work as well with the direct instruction approach. So why not learn about the range of strategies we have for direct and dialogic instruction?
I think conversations are powerful. I think talk helps us mediate what we're reading and thinking about. If that's a gap in our classroom, then we have to build collaborative routines and accountable talk procedures so kids will communicate about things they want to read and write about.
LJ: Anything else you'd like to add?
DF: I think we need to reinvest in getting kids to read at home. There's evidence about how to raise the volume in reading outside of school, so there can be a practice effect when they're at home. I feel that in a lot of communities we've given up. Since many educators assume students don't read at home, we don't ask or encourage them to. We don't use the evidence around choice, or access to books, or getting kids to talk about reading.
We can get kids excited about reading with Book Talks. I feel in many places we've given up hope that they will do the practice at home. Instead, we sacrifice a lot of instructional time for practice at school. We've must double our efforts to get kids to read and write at home.
LJ: What do you believe is especially important for educators to understand about literacy?
DF: It's complex. It's super hard to learn to read, and I think we dismiss that. Every single brain has to be taught all over anew. There's no reading gene passed down generation to generation. Every single brain has to be taught to read. There is evidence of how that works and it varies around age. There are differences between 5-year-olds and 9-year-olds. Sometimes we neglect that evidence and we fight about the evidence. I think it's been oversimplified. For example, "Let's read aloud to them, and then they'll read." Read aloud helps and I love it but it's not instruction. Let's recognize that reading is difficult, it's not passed down generations and you have to teach every brain to read if we want to get to high levels of literacy.
LJ: You're hosting a dinner party, for literary heroes, authors or educators, literacy leaders, dead or alive, who would you invite and why? Tell me, who's on your guest list?
DF: I would love to have a dinner conversation with Vygotsky. People quote him all the time and draw on his work, but he died young. I would love to get inside his mind and hear his inner speech and his Zone of Proximal Development. I would also love literature authors such as Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou and hear their thoughts. I did have a chance-meeting with Obama at a restaurant in Chicago and be around that charisma. It was amazing. There are major figures who shape my thinking: Albert Bandura on the efficacy and collective efficacy. I would love to have dinner with him and talk about how he developed his theory. This whole idea of efficacy and what we do matters in our belief in ourselves.
Read more great dynamic educators interviews: Cornelius Minor, Dr. Nancy Frey, Dr. Tim Rasinski, Dr. Diane Lapp, Ralph Fletcher, Heather Anderson, and Aida Allen
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