Third-grade co-teacher Rebecca Leach helps pupils select the best words for a sentence at Lima’s Heritage Elementary on Tuesday.
David Trinko | The Lima News
LIMA — John Parent sat in the kindergarten classroom in wonderment as he saw the “science of reading” paying off in October 2023.
“They’re reading CVC words, three-letter words with consonant-vowel-consonant, and I’m just astonished,” said Parent, Lima schools’ English language arts curriculum leader. “I remember the year before and the year before and the year before, hearing from those same kindergarten teachers in December and January that their students didn’t know their letters yet.”
That’s been the power of a different approach to teaching reading in area schools, which has become a statewide requirement to shift the focus back to the way letters sound and breaking down words, using scientific knowledge about how the brain learns.
Ohio’s fourth-graders are about half a year behind where they were in 2019, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard, with remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic affecting their outcomes.
Still, all but six area school districts had 100% of their pupils pass Ohio’s third-grade reading guarantee during last year’s fall and spring tests, including all of Lima’s elementary schools. Educators are hopeful the science of reading can help build better readers, increasing the children’s capacity for learning.
The reading challenge
“At about the third or fourth-grade level, you switch from learning how to read to reading so you can learn,” said Cheri Hocanson, an assistant professor of education of Bluffton University. “… If you’re not fluent readers by about third grade, you could fall even more behind.”
That’s why the state created the third-grade reading guarantee in the first place. Originally it required pupils to pass the test before advancing to the fourth grade, although that requirement was loosened following the pandemic. Starting this year, pupils must have a higher score to advance to the fourth grade.
Lima schools first shifted to that approach during the 2017-18 school year, but it doubled down on the approach with a voluntary pilot program called “Letters” for K-6 teachers. It builds off phonics but includes interesting topics, such as how the human body works or about ancient civilizations, as it teaches people to read.
“One of the biggest changes is that we were able to really focus on the phonological awareness, hearing the sounds in the words, being able to pull those apart,” Parent said. “Really that leads into a systematic phonics approach, where you’re mapping those sounds with the letters that you’re seeing on the page.”
Finding ways to improve
At Heir Force Community School in downtown Lima, struggles on the third-grade reading guarantee on the state report cards concerned executive director Dr. Willie Heggins, who saw passage rates increase from 79.31% in 2015-16 to 100% the last six years, the second-highest improvement rate in the region. Staff there focused on improving on first-time passage as part of a five-year strategic plan to improve literacy.
“You take the spoken word, from phonemic awareness, and you add it with the written word in the phonics program,” said Nancy Junkins, curriculum coordinator for Heir Force. “If a student can take that spoken word and identify it as a coded written word, they are going to become a confident reader.”
It’s important to still follow good teaching principles, Parent said.
“I mean, yes, it’s phonics, but it’s also all of the other things,” Parent said, who is in his sixth year leading the Lima schools’ English language arts efforts. “That’s including making sure your instruction is direct and explicit, allowing the students multiple opportunities to practice what you’re teaching them and then using the data to determine where best to align your instruction to address the students’ needs.”
Columbus Grove schools, in Putnam County, saw the biggest improvement in 10 years of the third-grade reading test, going from 79.25% passage in 2015-16 to 100% each of the last six years, the largest percentage improvement in the area.
“We had staff members that began exploring and implementing (science of reading) strategies prior to the state mandate,” Brad Calvelage, the elementary principal at Columbus Grove, said via email. “I believe this gave our staff buy-in from the very beginning and made science of reading very teacher-driven at CG. The students have benefitted as our interventions and instructions are all aligned behind the same strategies.”
An important aspect to improvement is targeting strengths and weaknesses of each reader, area school officials agreed, and they found state testing data helped them understand how to help individual students.
Switching gears
It’s a change in perspective, said Dr. Vicky Shurelds, an English teacher at Heir Force.
“When I was in college, wanting to be a teacher, they always talked to you about being motivational in the classroom and how you captivate the students and make a personal connection,” she said. “What they don’t tell you is there is a way that the brain has to be able to function in order for you to read. Reading is not a natural thing. … There are actual connections in the brain that we had skipped over when teaching children.”
It sounds easy enough to say you’ve learned how students learn to read and try to teach to it, but it’s more difficult to put it into practice, especially after years of a different philosophy.
“The reliance of the ‘whole language’ method, or ‘balanced literacy’ we also call it, is not focusing as much on those little pieces on the phonemic awareness side of things but just showing children a book and giving them clues about what the words mean,” said Polly Rodgers, an assistant professor at the Center for Teacher Education at Ohio Northern University in Ada.
The state invested more than $160 million in aligning all public schools’ coursework toward the science of reading approach. Gov. Mike DeWine continues to push schools to use the system to improve the state’s reading comprehension scores. The people teaching the teachers urged some patience for it to catch fire.
“Humans need time to change, right?” Rodgers said. “We need time from a teacher’s point of view to learn this new curriculum. We need time to feel confident in teaching it.”
Maintaining success
Some schools saw success prior to the state’s edict to use the science of reading. Six area schools had a 100% passage rate on the third-grade reading guarantee test for all 10 years of the test, including Crestview Elementary, Franklin Elementary in Delphos, Fort Jennings Elementary, Kalida Elementary, Miller City Elementary and Ottoville Elementary.
Bob Hohlbein, the principal at Franklin Elementary, credited teachers, students and parents and guardians working as a team to the success.
“If all these people don’t work together for the success of the students, we would not be nearly as successful on our percentage of passage,” Hohlbein said via email. “Franklin Elementary also spends countless hours on making sure that our (Intervention Assistance Team) meetings and interventions are intense and designed around each student’s individual needs.”
Delphos Superintendent Jeff Hobbs added, “The success over an extended period of time shows the commitment our teaching staff and parents place on early literacy.”
The real joy is watching the children enjoy reading, Heir Force’s Junkins said.
“If they would choose to read a book over getting on their phone, you know you’ve got it,” she said.
READING RATES
A look at the Ohio School Report Cards’ Third Grade Reading Guarantee passage rates in 2023-24, with the percentage change in passage rates since the first tests in the 2015-16 school year:
100%: Ada (0.0%), Allen East (1.5%), Bath (1.4%), Columbus Grove (26.2%), Crestview (0.0%), Cridersville (2.0%), Elida (7.5%), Fort Jennings (0.0%), Franklin (0.0%), Freedom (0.0%), Glandorf (6.7%), Heir Force Community (26.1%), Heritage (14.8%), Independence (8.7%), Kalida (0.0%), Leipsic (0.0%), Liberty Arts Magnet K-8 (0.0%), Lima South Science-Technology Magnet (7.1%), Lincolnview (0.0%), Maplewood (0.0%), Miller City (0.0%), New Bremen (0.0%), New Knoxville (4.5%), Ottawa (0.0%), Ottoville (0.0%), Pandora-Gilboa (0.0%), Ridgemont (8.0%), Spencerville (6.2%), St. Marys West Intermediate (0.8%), Unity (15.8%), Upper Scioto Valley (6.9%), Van Wert (3.1%), Wapakoneta (2.1%), Waynesfield-Goshen Local (3.1%)
99.2%: Kenton (1.1%)
98.4%: Minster (-1.6%)
96.9%: Hardin Northern (-3.1%)
96.4%: Continental Local (-3.6%)
95.8%: Perry (-4.2%)
95.1%: Bluffton (-0.7%)
Reach David Trinko at 567-242-0467 or on Twitter/X @Lima_Trinko.