Keeping the Balance: Woodroffe’s Word Warriors

Three students sit at a round table in the library. They are in the ELD program.

In front of them is a pile of wiry pipe cleaners and a ziplock bag full of colourful beads. The students smile as they reach for a pipe cleaner and pluck some some beads out of the bag. They know the drill. They string them onto the pipe cleaner and wait for instructions.

“Do you remember what we did last week?”

The students nod.

“This is Ms. Woods. Can you introduce yourself to her? Ali, why don’t you start.”

He pushes all of the beads to the left side of his pipe cleaner.

“Hello, Ms. Woods. My name is –

He slowly glides one bead from left to right as he sounds out the first letter in his name,

Ah…”

He glides a second and a third bead over from left to right until he has sounded out all three phonemes in his name.

“ell…iie”

The next student follows suit, “My name is Mmm — ”

They ask me to try.

They watch as I glide the beads from left to the right, nodding encouragingly, smiling with their eyes.

This small group phonemic intervention is the work of one of Woodroffe’s Word Warriors, Katie Ritter, who plans, implements and responds to student needs, often filling curricular and policy gaps. Today she is using evidence-based approaches to support the explicit instruction of phonemic awareness.

In addition to the time she spends with the students in her own classroom, she runs reading intervention sessions, tracks student progress, and supports teachers in ESL, ELD and regular stream programs to embed language instruction. Along with other Word Warriors at the school, she developed a list of “Can-Do” statements that clearly and succinctly communicate skills necessary to access understanding (including tech literacy, curriculum, STEP, and implicit & presumed cultural competencies) to communicate progress to students and families.

She also asks questions, lots of questions, when memos and policies roll down from the ministry, board or school. For example, who should be ticking the ‘modification’ box on a student report card and what is the process for informing families when this happens. And whether families understand the implication of doing so, and whether have a say in it. And seemingly more contradictory questions related to equity, like whether social promotion is equitable for students who are lacking the phonemic readiness and literacy skills to access course content in ESL and regular stream courses.

Within the context of destreaming and inquiry-based approaches to learning, the questions Katie and others ask are the beginning of important conversations with colleagues; conversations informing decisions that will profoundly impact students’ lives.

Katie, along with other Word Warriors at Woodroffe, is leading literacy work at the school and in the broader educational community. They keep the balance —adjusting strategy, approach and focus based on student needs and in response to how far the pendulum has swung (from contextual word-reading strategies to structured literacy and back).

I think about the challenges of this work: of supporting teachers to supplement recommendations and curriculum documents with structured literacy in a context where equitable practices are largely focused on inquiry-based models & constructivism. And more challenging still, modelling and teaching others responsive approaches to literacy instruction.

The OHRC’s recent publication on the Right to Read reinforces Katie’s current focus. It recommends to move from contextual word-reading strategies to more structured evidence-based instruction. But it does not make explicit or encourage the more important focus of her work: responsiveness.

The document could have negative impacts if it is adopted without a deep understanding of the contextual landscape and students to see whether the recommendations meet student needs.

When sharing her thoughts about her current focus, Katie notes that “the challenge becomes dovetailing and knowing what’s right for whom…I still like the balanced approach too.”

As she says this, I imagine Katie running back and forth alongside a larger-than-life pendulum as it swings from context based approaches to structured literacy, trying to slow its momentum & to hold it in place where it is needed, at *that* specific moment in time, for her students.

Back in the library, Katie pulls out some laminated cards each divided into four sections: the larger section has a picture and word with a main vowel sound that she would like students to recognize and connect to the pictures in the other three sections.

Students take turns reading the main word then matching the sound in the main picture to one of the pictures on the side.

“Good, good. Now, how do you say apple in Farsi? What are the sounds in that word? Can you match it to a different word in your first language?”

Today, Katie’s focus is morphology and phonemic instruction. I imagine this is partly in response to the dominance of inquiry-based instructional approaches, the curricular emphasis on the three-cueing system and contextual reading, pandemic interruptions and resulting literacy gaps, and pandemic reporting policies which encouraged promotion despite these gaps.

But tomorrow, I know will be different. A Word Warrior’s work is not about the application of recommendations or curriculum. It’s about anticipating that jarring swing of that pendulum and responding to student needs.