Manitoba teachers and school leaders have been urged to change how they spot struggling readers and intervene sooner to boost literacy rates.
The inaugural Manitoba Universal Screening Symposium made the case for mandating standardized check-ins with all students in at least kindergarten and grades 1 and 2 to detect early signs of struggle with research-backed “screeners.”
“Early identification of reading difficulties is imperative. Without it, struggling readers are left playing catch up, their gaps growing wider while families scramble — or worse, remain in the dark,” said Carrie Wood, an elementary school teacher in Winnipeg who helped put on the event this week.
Wood was teary-eyed as she spoke to roughly 150 attendees about her eldest child’s challenges and how she felt like a “fraud and phony” because neither nightly story time nor her training was of help. The stress led her to take a mental health leave from work, she said.
Her son Emmett, who just began Grade 6, was diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disability in reading and written expression, about three years ago.
It was only then he started receiving the explicit and systematic phonics instruction he needed to become literate, but it has not been a quick fix, his mother said. He receives early morning tutoring four times a week.
Provincial guidelines are vague in promoting observation and early screening. They tout comprehensive instruction that is responsive to specific student needs instead of taking a stance on “reading wars.”
Simply put, one side of the debate on how to teach reading effectively prioritizes decoding words systematically and putting sounds together. The other, which is under widespread scrutiny, focuses on the meaning of words and context clues.
The Ontario Human Rights Commission — a supporter of the former — identified universal early screening as an effective and necessary tool that reduces potential for bias in its groundbreaking “Right to Read” report.
The 2022 document indicated ages four to seven are a “critical window” for teaching foundational word-reading skills and intervention, and concluded student difficulties were not being caught early enough, and were allowed to snowball.
Many students were failed because of delays, combined with flawed core instruction and intervention efforts that were not evidence-based, the commission said.
Its Manitoba counterpart is currently probing concerns about limited explicit instruction and local reading lessons at-large that generally mirror Ontario’s, pre-Right to Read.
Wood and Dyslexia Canada organized a symposium to discuss how Ontario’s findings and recent changes, including a new requirement for universal screening, could make positive change locally.
“Every child has the right to be taught to read within our public school system. It shouldn’t be something reserved for those who can advocate effectively, afford tutoring and access private assessments, as my family has been fortunate to do,” Wood said, after which the conference room erupted in applause on Tuesday evening.
School leaders, clinicians and classroom teachers listened to various speakers stress the need for change due to the number of struggling young readers.
“As a Grade 1 teacher, there was always a group – about 15 per cent of my students – who weren’t learning to read the way we taught,” said Kim Turner, a teacher of about 25 years, speaking about her interest in shifting instructional practices.
Some Manitoba schools, including Turner’s employer, Linwood School, have already overhauled their programs.
“Many school divisions are using universal screening as a practice in the early years and the department continues to monitor with a view to future steps the province might take,” a spokesperson for Manitoba Education said in a statement.
The spokesperson said the province is committed to improving literacy outcomes and building teachers’ awareness and skills to meet the needs of students who have reading disabilities.
Gimli-based Evergreen School Division has shifted to structured literacy and introduced the DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) screener last year to quickly assess how every early years student reads.
“Using a universal tool helps us to compare apples to apples. Prior to this, our teachers were just nominating students from their class for interventions,” speech-language pathologist Britney Morrish said.
Morrish said the old model made it difficult to determine who needed support and what that help should look like.
Students were often being referred without details about the interventions they’d received or the intensity of them, she said.
Dyslexia Canada’s chief academic officer noted that a 2015 research report found Fountas and Pinell’s benchmark and assessment system, a common tool used in Manitoba, was only 54 per cent accurate at predicting reading performance.
An effective screener needs to quickly and reliably tell a teacher if a child is on track and the above “doesn’t do that very well,” presenter Una Malcolm said.
Malcolm, an Ontario teacher and advocate, repeatedly spoke about how reading challenges worsen over time because students tend to avoid activities that are difficult for them.
Universal screening speed ups intervention so it can happen when it’s faster to fix, less resource-intensive and “preserves the dignity and mental health of the child, preventing them from experiencing the challenges that can come when reading is really, really hard,” she said.
Malcolm added it is also an effective way to pinpoint systemic issues.
maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca
Maggie Macintosh
Education reporter
Maggie Macintosh reports on education for the Free Press. Originally from Hamilton, Ont., Maggie was an intern at the Free Press twice while earning her degree at Ryerson’s School of Journalism (now Toronto Metropolitan University) before joining the newsroom as a reporter in 2019. Read more about Maggie.
Funding for the Free Press education reporter comes from the Government of Canada through the Local Journalism Initiative.
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