Changing Conceptions of Kindergarten Literacy Learning: Elfreida "Freddy" Hiebert

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2014 Helen Kelly Symposium for Excellence in Education:

Changing Conceptions of Kindergarten Literacy Learning

Elfreida "Freddy" Hiebert

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[00:00:00.427](light guitar music)
[00:00:14.430]Get your attention and welcome you to
[00:00:16.829]Helen Kelley Symposium for Excellence in Education.
[00:00:22.919]I'm Richard Bischoff, I'm the department chair
[00:00:25.276]of Childbirth and Family Studies
[00:00:27.719]and I'm grateful that you all braved the weather
[00:00:30.726]to come to this event.
[00:00:33.787]I'm confident that you will be richly rewarded.
[00:00:37.894]Marjorie Kostelnik, the dean of the
[00:00:39.622]College of Education and Human Sciences
[00:00:42.427]will say just a few words about our donor Helen Kelley
[00:00:46.469]and then I'll introduce our speaker.
[00:00:54.917]Well, good afternoon.
[00:00:56.805]This is going to be a wonderful way
[00:00:58.597]to end a very cold and breezy day.
[00:01:01.946]I am sure that by the end of this session
[00:01:04.687]you will feel warm of heart and stimulated of brain.
[00:01:08.879]Now, I am very pleased to tell you something
[00:01:11.844]about the person who is responsible for
[00:01:14.990]our getting together, and that is Helen Kelley.
[00:01:18.894]Now, you know, I introduce a lot of people
[00:01:22.670]and very often we read, read or we describe
[00:01:26.830]all of the different things that they've done.
[00:01:29.497]And Helen Kelley certainly has a very esteemed resume.
[00:01:35.832]She's a graduate of UNL, she has her certification
[00:01:40.525]in Secondary Education.
[00:01:43.052]She worked as a literacy and language teacher,
[00:01:47.115]an English teacher in the Westside schools,
[00:01:50.870]but she is someone, who beyond, I mean,
[00:01:53.409]she's done a lot of things.
[00:01:55.009]She's been on her school board, she's been on the
[00:01:57.473]National School Board Association,
[00:02:01.473]and she has done a lot of work and service in the community.
[00:02:06.432]But one of the things that strikes me, Helen, when I look
[00:02:09.825]at all of the different things that you've done,
[00:02:12.651]is this is a person who appreciates learning,
[00:02:16.694]and a person who wants to share that learning
[00:02:19.904]with people around her.
[00:02:22.891]You know, you have touched the lives of students
[00:02:26.848]at every level of education, from the very smallest
[00:02:32.095]ones through elementary and secondary.
[00:02:36.458]Some directly and some through the good works
[00:02:40.745]that you have sponsored in your community.
[00:02:44.340]Yeah, but you haven't left it there.
[00:02:47.081]You've said, "You know, if you're an administrator
[00:02:49.033]"you need to know something more about
[00:02:51.517]"teaching and learning and have a deep grasp of that."
[00:02:55.698]And you have helped academic faculty, also,
[00:03:00.327]revisit those ideals.
[00:03:04.114]So all the way from preschool to higher education.
[00:03:09.245]That is a wonderful record of passion and a wonderful
[00:03:14.429]mission to help people think about teaching and learning
[00:03:19.634]in all of its facets and all of its populations.
[00:03:24.081]So we are particularly pleased and proud to have you
[00:03:28.977]and your family here for this
[00:03:32.389]Helen Kelley Symposium.
[00:03:35.462]Please join me in thanking our benefactor.
[00:03:38.907](applause)
[00:03:46.160]You are a great inspiration, and you have made
[00:03:50.736]it possible for us to be inspired,
[00:03:53.765]not only by your good works, but by the guests who have
[00:03:57.828]come to the university over the past three years
[00:04:02.263]and who have enlightened us in a whole variety of ways.
[00:04:06.732]And today will be no exception, so thank you.
[00:04:09.356]Rich?
[00:04:14.273]It's my pleasure to introduce our speaker
[00:04:16.736]Dr. Freddie Hiebert.
[00:04:19.552]Dr. Hiebert is the president and CEO of
[00:04:22.037]TextProject, a non-profit who provides
[00:04:24.267]open-access resources to support higher reading levels,
[00:04:28.661]and she's a research associate at the
[00:04:30.836]University of California, Santa Cruz.
[00:04:33.450]Dr. Hiebert received her PhD in Educational Psychology
[00:04:36.713]from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
[00:04:39.487]She has worked in the field of early reading acquisition
[00:04:42.282]for 45 years, first as a teacher's aide and teacher
[00:04:45.673]of primary-level students in California
[00:04:47.886]and subsequently as a teacher, educator and researcher
[00:04:51.299]at the University of Kentucky,
[00:04:52.942]University of Colorado, Boulder, University of Michigan,
[00:04:56.732]and the University of California, Berkeley.
[00:04:59.095]Her research addresses how fluency, vocabulary
[00:05:02.913]and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate
[00:05:05.591]use of texts.
[00:05:07.383]Dr. Hiebert's research has been published in
[00:05:10.732]numerous scholarly journals, she has authored or edited
[00:05:13.898]10 books.
[00:05:15.553]Through documents such as
[00:05:17.183]"Becoming a Nation of Readers" and
[00:05:18.454]"Every Child Reader,"
[00:05:20.371]she has contributed to making research accessible
[00:05:22.974]to educators.
[00:05:24.841]Dr. Hiebert's model of accessible texts for beginning
[00:05:27.795]and struggling readers has been used to develop
[00:05:30.451]numerous reading programs that are widely used
[00:05:33.193]in schools throughout the US.
[00:05:35.678]Dr. Hiebert was the 2008 recipient of the
[00:05:38.558]William S. Gray Citation of Merit,
[00:05:41.203]which was awarded by the International Reading Association.
[00:05:45.106]She is also a member of the Reading Hall of Fame,
[00:05:47.944]a fellow of the American Educational Research Association,
[00:05:51.485]and the 2013 recipient of the American Educational Research
[00:05:55.282]Association's Research to Practice Interpretive Award.
[00:06:00.166]Dr. Hiebert chaired an advisory group on early childhood
[00:06:03.783]for the Common Core and serves on the
[00:06:06.257]Item Quality Review panel of Smarter Balanced.
[00:06:10.364]She has spoken and provided workshops throughout
[00:06:12.987]Nebraska, I had an opportunity to be able to go to dinner
[00:06:16.762]with her last night and thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.
[00:06:19.430]I'm confident that you will enjoy her talk today.
[00:06:22.310]Please welcome Dr. Hiebert.
[00:06:24.229](applause)
[00:06:30.831]Thank you so much, to the Kelleys
[00:06:34.095]and to the University of Nebraska
[00:06:37.573]for giving me this opportunity and really the
[00:06:40.132]first opportunity since I finished graduate school
[00:06:43.012]at Wisconsin to unabashedly wear red.
[00:06:46.457](laughing)
[00:06:48.943]So you all have heard the litany of universities
[00:06:52.302]that I was at, so if you think about the
[00:06:54.116]University of Colorado, Boulder and their attitudes
[00:06:57.763]toward red, given Michigan and Ohio State,
[00:07:01.678]and then Berkeley and Stanford, you'll get an idea
[00:07:04.846]that this was very special for me to
[00:07:07.576]return to my Wisconsin roots.
[00:07:14.296]I thought a lot about what I could say
[00:07:19.384]in a community that has been devoted to
[00:07:23.002]early childhood in the way that this
[00:07:26.021]College of Education has been.
[00:07:29.541]Evidenced by this lectureship, also by the
[00:07:34.351]Buffett Center that Sam Meisels
[00:07:37.657]is the executive director of.
[00:07:40.867]You've had a long history of a commitment
[00:07:45.986]to young children and I'm
[00:07:51.427]hopeful that some of the things I share with you
[00:07:54.520]today aren't happening in Nebraska.
[00:07:58.883]And I am sharing this with you with the hope
[00:08:03.715]that leadership can help
[00:08:08.966]maybe stem the flow
[00:08:12.174]and also act as a resource
[00:08:16.868]for alternative models to things that you're doing here.
[00:08:21.295]So I want to give a couple caveats in starting out.
[00:08:26.617]In talking about how kindergarten has been changing
[00:08:30.541]over the last 15 or 20 years in particular,
[00:08:34.819]I want to emphasize that I'm not talking about
[00:08:39.756]Kathy Wilson's darling grandchildren, she just
[00:08:43.437]showed me the products of their preschool today
[00:08:48.312]and the things that Lila is writing at age four.
[00:08:53.312]I'm talking about the 63%
[00:08:56.351]of the kids here in Nebraska
[00:08:59.787]that on the National Assessment of Educational Progress
[00:09:02.643]in 2013, didn't reach the proficient mark in literacy.
[00:09:09.416]I'm talking about the kids who depend on schools
[00:09:13.373]to become highly literate.
[00:09:15.645]That's who I'm dedicating this talk to.
[00:09:18.823]I also recognize that I'm in a non-Common Core state
[00:09:23.482]and I think that's becoming increasingly more
[00:09:26.291]non-Common Core state, but you have not been
[00:09:30.174]one of the original states, and so
[00:09:34.301]saying some of the things that I'm gonna talk about,
[00:09:37.469]I recognize that you might not yet have seen some of
[00:09:42.525]the pressures that some of the other states are seeing,
[00:09:47.015]but typically, as some of the very, very large states
[00:09:50.322]in the nation go, so do some of the smaller states.
[00:09:53.820]Unless you have a lot of courage, knowledge and commitment,
[00:09:57.841]and that's what I'm speaking to today.
[00:10:00.561]I also want to be clear that I'm going to talk about
[00:10:02.822]materials and materials are only
[00:10:08.405]make a difference, right, in the hands of teachers.
[00:10:12.415]So we can give you a sense of what's been
[00:10:15.477]happening nationally.
[00:10:18.239]So, in talking about changing conceptions
[00:10:22.164]about kindergarten, I start with this statement
[00:10:26.996]from the Common Core, again recognizing that
[00:10:31.188]this isn't something that you are dealing with
[00:10:33.619]quite the same way as some of the other states,
[00:10:36.425]but the statement was made and this has been
[00:10:38.718]immensely influential in the last four years
[00:10:42.312]across the country.
[00:10:44.755]So, I understand actually, that a fairly large
[00:10:46.770]school district that we might be standing in
[00:10:49.554]just adopted Core reading program.
[00:10:51.890]So if they did, it was Common Core aligned
[00:10:54.876]and in doing that, it complies with this notion
[00:10:58.343]that K through 12 texts have been trended downward
[00:11:02.962]over the last 50 years.
[00:11:05.276]And my talk today is really going to look at,
[00:11:08.167]could that be true, has that really happened.
[00:11:11.921]Because, for those of you who aren't directly
[00:11:14.651]involved in the educational enterprise, when kids
[00:11:17.840]started school in 2011, if you were reading in grade 4
[00:11:23.386]the year before, you know the grade 4 texts,
[00:11:27.429]the kids are now reading the grade 5 texts?
[00:11:31.898]And the grade 5 kids are now reading the grade 6 texts.
[00:11:35.536]At least the levels are designed in that way,
[00:11:39.055]so text levels have been upped across the grades,
[00:11:43.770]including kindergarten.
[00:11:46.447]I also want to have, as a reference, this study
[00:11:49.945]in Ed. Week, coming from one of our most prestigious
[00:11:54.190]journals, American Educational Research Journal,
[00:11:59.449]where the statement was made based on the
[00:12:03.267]early childhood longitudinal study findings of 1998
[00:12:07.662]that kids benefit from having more challenging content.
[00:12:13.457]And we're not going to argue with that, but we're going
[00:12:15.761]to ask, what's the content that is given when people
[00:12:19.249]think you need to challenge kids more?
[00:12:21.776]That's what I want to ask today.
[00:12:24.123]Okay, so in Education Week's language, they just
[00:12:27.803]declared kindergarten is too easy, and they
[00:12:30.512]came away with that conclusion.
[00:12:32.294]So what I'm saying is, the message that we're hearing is
[00:12:35.216]the text in kindergarten has been dumbed-down,
[00:12:38.576]and secondly, kindergarten is too easy.
[00:12:41.402]So let's take a look.
[00:12:42.821]So what I want to do today is, by the way,
[00:12:45.829]the people on eBay who sell used books absolutely
[00:12:49.178]love me, I've not gotten premier status because
[00:12:52.676]I've ordered a lot of books to do this presentation.
[00:12:56.292](laughing)
[00:12:58.041]Okay, so let's look at the evolving expectations
[00:13:01.230]of kindergarten.
[00:13:02.233]So I'm gonna go over what Common Core was in 2010,
[00:13:04.590]I'm gonna go back to 1960.
[00:13:07.779]So, here we've got 1966, and I picked that kind of
[00:13:10.926]intentionally because that's where I could get the copyright
[00:13:14.296]but it also turned out that that's really when
[00:13:16.515]I started in education.
[00:13:18.669]So, I started being a teacher's aide in 1966
[00:13:22.178]and this little book, Getting Ready to Read
[00:13:26.018]from Houghton Mifflin first appeared in the
[00:13:29.090]Houghton Mifflin program.
[00:13:30.433]Before 1949, there were no kindergarten materials.
[00:13:36.047]So if you think about 1949, I was sorta there,
[00:13:40.154]but, you know the baby boomers are going to
[00:13:42.575]start kindergarten or start school soon
[00:13:45.049]and suddenly we have a component of the core
[00:13:48.121]reading programs for kindergarten.
[00:13:51.470]And what I've done, for all of the copyrights
[00:13:54.404]that I'm going to take a look at today, is I've taken
[00:13:57.305]the middle lesson from the program.
[00:14:01.304]So in the middle of kindergarten, right about January,
[00:14:04.419]this is what kindergartners in 1966 were doing.
[00:14:09.779]This is what we were told has been dumbed-down.
[00:14:13.096]This was 1966 and had gone on for about 25 years
[00:14:17.725]because it started in about 1950.
[00:14:22.194]So, my math is not a strong point today.
[00:14:25.266]Okay, now in 1986, I actually did a study of all the
[00:14:30.183]programs in kindergarten at that place, at that time.
[00:14:34.503]I had just finished my PhD,
[00:14:40.114]I couldn't figure out why there were absolutely
[00:14:44.474]no books that kids held in their hand in kindergarten.
[00:14:48.495]They were still doing these exercises,
[00:14:51.823]so they were copying letters, they were matching sounds,
[00:14:54.713]picking pictures out for sounds, that's what they were doing
[00:14:59.076]and I published that in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.
[00:15:02.223]Now, in 1986, the same program,
[00:15:05.337]do you see how they actually modernized the
[00:15:07.492]little book, right?
[00:15:08.601]Same book, but it looks a little different.
[00:15:10.798]So we've had it around now for about 22 years.
[00:15:13.944]They also had a little book called Ready Steps
[00:15:19.255]that was to precede this workbook that kids were getting.
[00:15:24.290]So kids only got workbooks.
[00:15:26.711]So in all of the programs that we looked at in 1986,
[00:15:31.095]only workbooks, and here they still were getting letters,
[00:15:35.522]tracing the letters and letter sounds,
[00:15:37.836]but they also, now, got some comprehension activities.
[00:15:41.655]So they actually got to sort pictures.
[00:15:44.279]Okay, so that was new.
[00:15:46.700]And then, they got to actually read some words.
[00:15:51.574]In this program and most of the other programs
[00:15:54.273]there were about 10 words that kids got to see.
[00:15:58.518]And these pages were ones that were perforated
[00:16:02.155]so the kids could actually take home some text to read.
[00:16:05.995]But that's what life looked like in 1986
[00:16:09.226]and this was across the board.
[00:16:12.053]So, colleagues and I, in a movement which was called
[00:16:14.655]Emergent Literacy, we asked a lot of questions about this.
[00:16:19.306]Couldn't kids be involved with real books?
[00:16:21.887]Couldn't there be big books?
[00:16:23.956]Couldn't they do lots of writing?
[00:16:26.249]Couldn't they move little cards around and make words?
[00:16:29.812]Well, sometimes you should be careful what you wish for,
[00:16:32.916]because that, in fact happened in 1989 and 1991
[00:16:36.979]in a movement that came to be called Whole Language.
[00:16:42.611]So, California and then Texas, and then followed by Florida
[00:16:47.869]and then New York, so there you've got all the big
[00:16:50.109]states, right?
[00:16:51.688]They called for having a different perspective
[00:16:56.061]in kindergarten.
[00:16:58.012]So now, this book, that used to be the workbook,
[00:17:03.431]is followed by another book that's actually a
[00:17:07.783]little bit ramped up.
[00:17:10.524]And we still have all the other activities you've just seen,
[00:17:14.097]the comprehension activities and the letter-tracing
[00:17:17.467]activities and the sound activities,
[00:17:19.665]but you also have big books.
[00:17:22.512]And they're very good big books.
[00:17:25.147]So, at this point, in about 1989, big books enter the scene
[00:17:30.661]and for some of you who are in businesses other
[00:17:33.253]that the educational enterprise, that means an
[00:17:36.144]enlarged book that the kindergarten teacher can read
[00:17:38.927]and all the kids can participate as the teacher is
[00:17:41.445]tracking the print and they're reading along,
[00:17:44.313]or looking along, okay?
[00:17:46.810]Keep remembering that these are five year old kids,
[00:17:49.284]right, but this again, comes from the middle of the program.
[00:17:52.249]Another thing that we see is, there's a little bit more
[00:17:55.620]opportunity to actually participate.
[00:17:58.329]So, in addition to the letter-naming activity,
[00:18:02.243]now you've actually got a page where you can draw
[00:18:05.070]pictures, or if you can actually write words,
[00:18:09.539]you can write things that start with that letter.
[00:18:13.709]So, these were the things we'd been writing about
[00:18:15.981]in this movement called Emergent Literacy
[00:18:18.946]and it actually turns out that this was a program
[00:18:20.493]I was involved with, and at a very early point in my career,
[00:18:24.962]I got to see these things come to fruition,
[00:18:27.852]and we just were so excited.
[00:18:30.231]We also had some inventive comprehension activities.
[00:18:33.964]You know, where you would draw the ending of the
[00:18:35.735]story rather that have to just pick it
[00:18:37.985]as a multiple choice thing.
[00:18:39.937]You could, in There's an Alligator Under My Bed,
[00:18:43.275]actually draw some pictures of what make
[00:18:45.185]the alligator big.
[00:18:46.721]Okay, so we were really trying to be open-ended here.
[00:18:50.080]And we gave kids a story book, so for that very first
[00:18:54.827]kindergarten level you got a story book that
[00:18:58.752]didn't have any words in it, so you could
[00:19:01.578]re-tell the story.
[00:19:03.978]Because pedagogically this is the kind of thing
[00:19:06.250]we really wanted young children to be able to do.
[00:19:09.482]But, in the second level of kindergarten,
[00:19:12.586]you actually got little books that had stories
[00:19:18.505]that were summaries of the stories your
[00:19:21.652]teacher had read to you.
[00:19:23.924]Now I want you to take a look, if you can see that,
[00:19:25.651]the quality of the art.
[00:19:27.497]It was very well done.
[00:19:31.155]Now, one of the things that I learned about in my career
[00:19:35.955]is you should always think about unintended consequences.
[00:19:39.549]So, now the expectation is there that you can
[00:19:41.746]put words for kindergarten kids to read.
[00:19:46.354]And what happens in the interim, is that we
[00:19:48.957]have the very first state by state comparison
[00:19:53.724]of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
[00:19:57.159]And California doesn't come out very well,
[00:20:00.742]and California had been the first state
[00:20:03.281]to go in this direction.
[00:20:05.692]And there were statements that were made,
[00:20:07.825]that Whole Language was the reason California
[00:20:10.694]didn't come out very well.
[00:20:13.904]So, there were some responses, and one of them
[00:20:19.408]was a set of books that were really institutionalized
[00:20:25.221]in 2003, with No Child Left Behind.
[00:20:29.562]So now think about kindergarten.
[00:20:31.439]Everything I've shown you, except the really interesting
[00:20:33.732]pictures in children's books, everything is still
[00:20:36.591]in the program, but now we have something new.
[00:20:41.615]You can't see this, but I'm gonna read it to you.
[00:20:44.697]We have something new called decodable
[00:20:47.812]and I want you to understand that the 2003
[00:20:51.651]program, this is the middle lesson in kindergarten.
[00:20:55.896]Now I don't know if it's aspirational, we only
[00:20:58.318]think we should expose kids, but this is
[00:21:00.653]what we're exposing kids to.
[00:21:04.355]The book is called Pal Has Ham.
[00:21:07.885]Bill has one big ham, Bill has one big pot.
[00:21:12.962]Bill can fill the pot.
[00:21:15.181]See the very big pot hiss.
[00:21:18.284]Excuse me, I actually made a reading miscue there.
[00:21:21.260]I added the word "very" and you might be asking
[00:21:23.937]if I have dyslexia, we can talk about that later.
[00:21:26.700](laughing)
[00:21:28.150]Bill has ham.
[00:21:29.697]Lil has ham.
[00:21:31.276]Hal has a big ham.
[00:21:33.942]Okay, so starting with 2003, this is the first time
[00:21:38.517]this level of text appears.
[00:21:41.419]The texts haven't been dumbed-down,
[00:21:44.139]this is an incredible acceleration
[00:21:47.061]and if you think, in my state,
[00:21:51.680]of about a quarter of a million kids
[00:21:56.212]coming to kindergarten who don't speak English
[00:21:58.868]as a first language, trying to read that Lil has ham,
[00:22:04.297]if you want to sit and listen to something
[00:22:07.583]that's agonizing, go into a kindergarten classroom,
[00:22:13.556]work with those kids attempting
[00:22:15.059]to make sense of what this is.
[00:22:17.822]Okay, oh and by the way, there's a follow-up.
[00:22:20.467]This is about Bob, Bob hit it,
[00:22:23.208]and I think you get the gist of these stories,
[00:22:26.056]and then there's also, so starting in 2003
[00:22:29.448]with No Child Left Behind, there are three
[00:22:32.082]little books for every kindergarten lesson.
[00:22:35.698]This third book teaches high-frequency words
[00:22:39.314]like "the and "is" and "a," okay?
[00:22:43.175]So that's 2003.
[00:22:46.759]Okay, so that brings us to 2010
[00:22:49.724]and the Common Core state standards.
[00:22:52.422]And I'm gonna suggest that the revolution
[00:22:56.529]in what's happened in kindergarten is so great
[00:23:00.571]that no one even asked any questions
[00:23:03.152]that the K-1 band was put together in the
[00:23:06.619]Common Core state standard.
[00:23:08.976]And a list of books was given for kindergarten
[00:23:13.733]and first grade that didn't distinguish between
[00:23:16.297]what should be at the beginning and
[00:23:17.711]what should be at the end.
[00:23:20.292]American teachers have been left not knowing
[00:23:23.566]what kindergarten really is.
[00:23:26.456]Now, the big difference with the Common Core
[00:23:29.763]is that now we have informational texts.
[00:23:33.219]And so when you go to the same program,
[00:23:35.576]keep thinking, everything that we've gone before,
[00:23:37.987]these are just some examples of what's on the
[00:23:39.693]Common Core for K-1.
[00:23:42.114]So it goes from having wordless books
[00:23:45.282]to books with some pretty hard words,
[00:23:47.458]but not that many of them,
[00:23:49.549]to books that used to be in the
[00:23:51.607]second grade curriculum.
[00:23:55.494]Okay, so here we've got now the
[00:23:56.977]Common Core Edition, this is 2014,
[00:23:59.697]this is their brand new program.
[00:24:01.712]Everything you saw before is still there,
[00:24:05.392]but now we have a big book with science
[00:24:09.125]and we have little books on top of the other
[00:24:11.802]ones you saw, having to do with science.
[00:24:15.204]And keep remembering, this is what kids
[00:24:16.559]are gonna see in January, okay?
[00:24:19.834]So, with respect to that first question,
[00:24:23.919]have the texts been dumbed-down?
[00:24:27.247]I don't know what those people were thinking.
[00:24:29.743]Now, you heard that I was one of the advisers.
[00:24:32.729]Just because you advise someone, doesn't mean
[00:24:34.862]they always listen to you.
[00:24:36.249](laughing)
[00:24:37.667]I actually run a free consulting service for my
[00:24:39.299]nephews and nieces, and it turns out
[00:24:41.699]they very rarely take my free consulting.
[00:24:44.685](laughing)
[00:24:46.083]I also do a lot of free consulting for the airlines
[00:24:49.357](laughing)
[00:24:50.819]and I have yet to have any of them take my
[00:24:52.834]very, very good ideas.
[00:24:55.714]So yes, did I consult?
[00:24:57.848]I did, but I can assure you that my consulting
[00:25:02.871]seemed to fall on the same deaf ears as a lot
[00:25:04.865]of my other really good ideas.
[00:25:07.937]So, have texts been dumbed-down?
[00:25:10.657]Well, that's what they looked like 50 years ago,
[00:25:14.167]and that's what they look like now.
[00:25:16.972]So the answer to the first piece of evidence,
[00:25:19.596]I kept asking, when I was preparing this talk,
[00:25:23.723]what could we look for in terms of evidence?
[00:25:27.051]So this is one piece of evidence.
[00:25:29.707]A second question is, do we have any evidence that
[00:25:33.739]if you push down the expectations
[00:25:37.728]to kindergarten,
[00:25:40.021]or what if, when the Common Core results come out
[00:25:44.511]and lots of the states haven't done very well,
[00:25:48.084]we start saying, maybe we should start doing
[00:25:50.378]some of this in preschool.
[00:25:53.108]Do we have any evidence that the earlier you start,
[00:25:58.388]the better you do?
[00:26:01.129]And in fact, in the national assessments, the evidence
[00:26:04.723]says that by fourth grade, when you look at average
[00:26:08.563]scores of comparable nations, you can't tell
[00:26:12.958]who started early and who started late.
[00:26:16.573]But if you look at the standard deviation,
[00:26:19.272]that is the index of the amount of variation
[00:26:22.973]there is between kids, the standard deviation
[00:26:26.770]is larger when you start out earlier.
[00:26:30.300]In other words, you can actually
[00:26:31.527]do things to increase the gap.
[00:26:33.084]Now, I'm not saying that Lila shouldn't
[00:26:36.540]have lots of great opportunities to write
[00:26:40.380]and write and read and read and read
[00:26:43.494]and to read all the books that kids want to read.
[00:26:47.473]I'm asking about the demands on the kids
[00:26:49.926]who aren't ready for some of this.
[00:26:51.718]So the real question that I want to ask
[00:26:53.670]today is, are the expectations for
[00:26:56.656]task mastery, we could ask, is the content
[00:27:01.125]that I've just shown you just something
[00:27:03.173]that people think is nice?
[00:27:05.353]We're gonna expose kids.
[00:27:07.166]If you think back to our view of Emergent Literacy,
[00:27:09.662]we just wanted to expose kids to big books.
[00:27:12.137]We wanted them to have these little books
[00:27:13.950]that they retold the stories in.
[00:27:16.670]But now, these tasks are actually tested.
[00:27:21.768]Not by statewide tests, but by
[00:27:24.029]teacher-delivered tests.
[00:27:25.939]So, the question is, the expectations for task mastery,
[00:27:30.322]did they match the capacity of the majority of the kids?
[00:27:33.394]Especially those in the bottom 66.
[00:27:35.773]And I use 66 because that's the national number,
[00:27:39.527]in Nebraska it's about 63%.
[00:27:42.652]Well let's take a look at some data.
[00:27:45.233]Is this seeable? I tell ya, using all this red,
[00:27:49.820]after a while I just didn't know how much more to use,
[00:27:52.870]you know, but I couldn't stop myself.
[00:27:55.121](laughing)
[00:27:57.073]I was so happy about it.
[00:27:58.683]But, if we look at the early childhood longitudinal
[00:28:01.968]study, so this was a study of kindergartners
[00:28:07.269]who entered kindergarten in the fall of 1998,
[00:28:10.992]and they actually followed them through high school
[00:28:13.061]graduation, okay.
[00:28:16.879]And one of the questions is, are kids coming
[00:28:19.546]better prepared?
[00:28:21.679]And right now, it looks like, on the 2010, so we've
[00:28:27.023]just started another cohort of kids,
[00:28:30.575]that they actually are doing just a tad bit better.
[00:28:34.190]The kids in the fall of 2010 are getting 42%,
[00:28:38.617]they've also increased the items, and I haven't been
[00:28:41.710]able to get access to those items yet.
[00:28:44.760]This is all pretty new, okay?
[00:28:46.787]So I'll be able to tell you in a couple months
[00:28:51.480]about whether, in fact, it's formal reading skills
[00:28:55.746]that they got better at, okay?
[00:28:58.445]But, if we look at, so this is the specific data
[00:29:03.917]from 1998 for the kindergarten cohort.
[00:29:10.540]So the first line, the black line is how the kids
[00:29:12.854]did when they came into kindergarten.
[00:29:15.638]Then the next line is how they did in spring,
[00:29:18.518]and then the final, the third line in the set,
[00:29:22.379]is how they did in first grade, okay?
[00:29:27.296]So, you see that by the end of first grade,
[00:29:30.059]the basic things like letter naming, letter sound matching,
[00:29:33.536]initial consonants and final consonants, we've got that.
[00:29:36.480]I want to have you take a look here,
[00:29:39.797]at how they're doing on sight words.
[00:29:42.815]So the sight words, that's like "the," "a," "of," "is,"
[00:29:47.252]turns out, oh and by the way, you were needing
[00:29:51.113]to read all of those words, right, in the text
[00:29:53.502]that I was showing you.
[00:29:55.433]It turns out only about 14% of the kids leaving
[00:29:58.547]kindergarten in 1999 could actually read those words
[00:30:04.030]to mastery and when we look at reading the text,
[00:30:10.045]about 4% of them could actually read the text.
[00:30:14.610]So what I'm suggesting here is that there's a big
[00:30:17.640]mismatch between what we're asking kids to do
[00:30:23.431]and what kids are actually capable of doing.
[00:30:27.271]One of the questions I raise is,
[00:30:30.279]are we potentially increasing the numbers
[00:30:34.012]of students who could be relegated to interventions
[00:30:40.092]very early on because they aren't meeting the standard
[00:30:45.338]as soon as they come into kindergarten?
[00:30:50.425]Now, this is the expectation, the words in red
[00:30:54.094]are the high frequency words, and the words in gold
[00:30:57.208]are decodable words.
[00:30:59.054]So after we've got the Common Core state standards,
[00:31:03.203]you see that, in terms of decodable words,
[00:31:07.042]you need to know well over 250 at the end
[00:31:09.944]of kindergarten and about, almost 100
[00:31:12.994]high frequency words.
[00:31:14.135]Let me tell you, if some of you aren't people
[00:31:17.548]who teach a lot of kids to read,
[00:31:19.618]if you can do that, you're pretty much set.
[00:31:23.724]If you can do that, you're set.
[00:31:25.772]We should be having 100% of our kids
[00:31:28.332]reading very, very well if kids can actually do that.
[00:31:32.861]So I wanted to show you here the mid-kindergarten
[00:31:35.378]texts, and what we've been doing in our work,
[00:31:39.783]these are some of the ones I read to you, right?
[00:31:42.205]Hal and ham, so this is what we're asking kids
[00:31:44.519]to read in the middle of kindergarten.
[00:31:48.647]And from a huge database that we use, we're able
[00:31:53.393]to predict what words kids at the 50th percentile can read.
[00:32:00.645]And this is about how much they can read
[00:32:02.821]at the beginning of first grade, of kind of like the
[00:32:06.981]Bob and ham words, right?
[00:32:11.609]This is what it looks like in winter,
[00:32:15.362]and this is what it looks like in spring.
[00:32:17.559]I'm saying that these kindergarten books,
[00:32:24.244]that's a pretty high diet in relation to what kids
[00:32:27.433]are actually able to do.
[00:32:32.124]So, I haven't painted the most optimistic picture,
[00:32:35.740]I've been raising questions here about
[00:32:38.417]what we're asking kindergarten kids to do.
[00:32:42.321]It actually turns out, in terms of the Common Core,
[00:32:45.734]what we know is that you can get young kids
[00:32:50.022]to learn some of this, you can push hard.
[00:32:55.120]But where the real problems come is in about
[00:32:57.541]fifth or sixth grade, when kids' level of engagement
[00:33:01.050]seems to drop.
[00:33:03.343]And in terms of our national patterns,
[00:33:06.415]that really seems to be where some of the problems lie.
[00:33:10.276]Now, I'm not suggesting here today,
[00:33:12.718]that now that the horse is out of the barn,
[00:33:15.759]that we pull back on what we're giving kids
[00:33:20.110]in terms of books when they start school.
[00:33:23.545]You remember my original commitment,
[00:33:25.817]lots of invented spelling, lots of big books,
[00:33:28.889]lots of opportunities to leaf through books.
[00:33:32.973]But I'm gonna ask what might be some next steps
[00:33:37.239]so we don't go down the slippery slope
[00:33:39.533]too much more quickly.
[00:33:41.218]I use that metaphor really wisely because
[00:33:43.469]today I was a little worried about the slippery slopes,
[00:33:46.402](laughing)
[00:33:47.170]I mean not that there are that many slopes,
[00:33:48.759]you know of course there are lots of hills,
[00:33:50.338]but it was pretty icy.
[00:33:53.228]Okay, in terms of next steps, I'm gonna call
[00:33:55.884]on two things that I think are really appropriate
[00:33:57.633]for a research community to think about.
[00:34:01.228]Some of you are thinking that this woman is speaking
[00:34:04.342]kind of a foreign language, but this is
[00:34:06.998]what we deal with in beginning reading right now.
[00:34:09.248]This is what kindergarten teachers are dealing with.
[00:34:12.458]I'm saying that we need to debunk the
[00:34:16.619]"lesson-to-print-match" model of these
[00:34:18.891]little books like Bob and Pal and ham.
[00:34:22.325]We need to actually take a look at those books
[00:34:24.640]and I'm gonna tell you how they got built, okay?
[00:34:27.690]Somebody had a good idea, and got it into policy
[00:34:30.517]actually first in the state of Texas and then
[00:34:32.319]California thought that would be really cool.
[00:34:35.210]So, this is what the guidelines say
[00:34:37.408]in California right now, and we're getting ready
[00:34:39.733]for new books in California, but this is what it says.
[00:34:43.403]Decodable means that at least 75% of the words
[00:34:48.650]consist solely of previously taught sound-spelling patterns.
[00:34:54.441]Okay, so if a pattern has been taught, then you can
[00:34:57.994]have it appear in a book.
[00:35:01.385]And 15-20% of the words can be previously taught
[00:35:05.023]high frequency words and story words, okay?
[00:35:08.724]So this is how it plays out.
[00:35:11.038]In kindergarten, and this is the standing part
[00:35:14.793]of the legislation in California,
[00:35:17.128]kindergarten you have to have at least 35 of these books,
[00:35:20.744]and take a look here, below, if it didn't take
[00:35:25.053]in kindergarten, you get them up through grade eight.
[00:35:29.852]You just keep giving kids the same diet of decodables.
[00:35:32.797]So let's take a look at what decodable is.
[00:35:35.965]So, on the left hand side is a book that's decodable
[00:35:39.826]by lesson 16, which is what I was showing you.
[00:35:43.505]So that means that all of those letters,
[00:35:46.031]T, H, I, S, B, O, all of those letter-sound patterns
[00:35:51.324]have been taught.
[00:35:53.546]So that means, even if that letter-sound pattern,
[00:35:57.567]the new letters in this book are H and L.
[00:36:02.239]Kids have never seen those before in this program,
[00:36:07.358]but here you see, if the book set, and I actually
[00:36:11.966]wrote this one myself, it took me about three minutes,
[00:36:15.401]which gives you some idea of how quickly some of
[00:36:17.598]these books are written, and that they are really
[00:36:20.318]not literary quality.
[00:36:22.599]So this is Deb the hen, well Deb the hen,
[00:36:25.788]you can't ever have in the program, because they
[00:36:29.746]haven't been introduced to the letter E yet.
[00:36:33.703]Now they've seen it in "the," but they haven't
[00:36:37.138]had a lesson on it, and if you haven't had a lesson,
[00:36:41.202]is this making any sense?
[00:36:43.153]It's hard, okay Carolyn is saying it doesn't.
[00:36:45.489]Okay so, what they're saying is that,
[00:36:49.009]if a letter has been introduced, with its sound,
[00:36:52.646]and kids have practiced it in one of those
[00:36:54.460]worksheets, you can see a word, any word
[00:36:57.585]with that letter in it, provided all the other
[00:37:00.539]letters around it have also been taught.
[00:37:05.008]But, for example, they haven't seen U and E yet,
[00:37:08.859]so they can't see words like Jud and Jeb and Deb and hen.
[00:37:14.874]That would be illegal, it wouldn't get counted
[00:37:17.252]as a decodable text, and they wouldn't make the grade
[00:37:20.329]in Texas and California and Florida.
[00:37:25.812]Where did this come from?
[00:37:28.052]Is there any evidence that a little kid only has
[00:37:30.772]to see a pattern once to learn it?
[00:37:35.506]And the answer is, there is absolutely none.
[00:37:39.078]This was a lobby group that thought this
[00:37:40.891]was a really good idea.
[00:37:43.878]I just wanted to show you what it looks like
[00:37:45.680]in other languages.
[00:37:47.611]I thought this was interesting because,
[00:37:49.851]see one of the other problems with these little books,
[00:37:52.655]is it's really weird to see a lot of these little
[00:37:54.843]three-letter words.
[00:37:57.264]You know? It gets to be like tongue-twister.
[00:38:04.187]So I looked to see what it would be like if you had
[00:38:06.191]this text in Spanish, and you see how the
[00:38:09.178]words have a lot of distinction and differentiation?
[00:38:14.642]Now I also want to show you the two countries
[00:38:16.328]that did particularly well in the international
[00:38:20.402]assessment this past year.
[00:38:22.461]This is what the books would look like in German.
[00:38:26.357]And this is what they would look like in Finnish,
[00:38:29.809]and I thought I also put Polish, but I guess I
[00:38:32.604]hadn't pulled that out.
[00:38:34.759]So, the point that I want to make here
[00:38:37.895]is that this model was built on a study that claimed
[00:38:43.292]that this had all been tested out,
[00:38:47.110]but the texts in this study are very different.
[00:38:50.747]Words have a lot of repetition in this program.
[00:38:54.427]So all the words with the phonetically regular pattern
[00:38:58.832]are repeated over and over again.
[00:39:02.042]I think I've inspired a lot of people
[00:39:03.653]to go and teach a kid to read.
[00:39:06.234](laughing)
[00:39:08.463]Either that or, class is over, the time for the
[00:39:10.970]class is over, and we can go, okay.
[00:39:14.564]I always think when people leave, they're going to
[00:39:16.634]find a kid and make sure this doesn't happen.
[00:39:23.223]Okay, so I'm also gonna suggest,
[00:39:27.447]I know that for a couple of reading people in this room,
[00:39:31.511]that what I just have talked about makes some sense,
[00:39:34.413]I'm saying this is driving beginning reading
[00:39:37.517]for a lot of young children, and if it isn't happening
[00:39:40.876]here in Nebraska, just wait.
[00:39:46.517]And I'm saying it's an incredibly horrendous
[00:39:51.625]introduction to literacy, especially if your culture
[00:39:57.386]is a different one than the mainstream.
[00:40:00.479]And especially if you speak a language like Spanish.
[00:40:05.087]Spanish functions very, very differently,
[00:40:09.076]and doesn't, as you saw, doesn't have a lot of
[00:40:13.545]those little short words.
[00:40:18.668]You can actually get a sense here the distinction
[00:40:20.802]and differentiation that you'd be able to have.
[00:40:24.332]Words of different lengths, right?
[00:40:26.241]Rather than words of all the same length.
[00:40:30.976]Okay, I want to make one more point,
[00:40:32.906]and that is, I don't think we have right now,
[00:40:36.906]in our learning community, a sense of what
[00:40:40.234]comes before what,
[00:40:43.459]so in 1975 to 1986,
[00:40:47.576]there was a really distinctive, there were some ideas,
[00:40:52.376]right or wrong, there were some very distinctive
[00:40:55.522]ideas of what preceded what,
[00:41:00.439]in terms of learning to read.
[00:41:03.671]And you didn't learn the letter L at the same time
[00:41:08.503]you were expected to read about 15 different words.
[00:41:13.281]Okay, there was a progression.
[00:41:15.520]Now, the progression kind of looks like this.
[00:41:19.116]Everything is kind of presented in a big blob.
[00:41:23.862]And I'm saying that for those of us in this room
[00:41:26.848]who are part of a research community,
[00:41:30.080]I'm suggesting this is a critical thing
[00:41:32.159]for us to be looking at.
[00:41:35.157]For all of the millions of dollars that have been spent
[00:41:37.354]on interventions in reading, billions of dollars,
[00:41:40.896]I'm saying we're doing things that just don't make sense.
[00:41:44.714]We're having kids learn the letter L at the same time
[00:41:48.714]we're asking them to read a word like "one" or "seed."
[00:41:52.692]And I'm suggesting that that is, just doesn't
[00:41:56.617]make a whole lot of sense.
[00:41:59.688]We need people to actually have good descriptions
[00:42:03.710]of what is needed to learn particular
[00:42:08.382]skills in the beginning reading sequence.
[00:42:13.857]Boy, I think I maybe went a little too technical here,
[00:42:16.780]but I had a lot of fun learning this stuff.
[00:42:19.500](laughing)
[00:42:22.710]And for those of you who did have the class
[00:42:25.215]ended and you're still here, thank you,
[00:42:27.584]for those of you who could have left,
[00:42:29.279]thank you also.
[00:42:30.965]But I want to just tell you a couple things
[00:42:33.685]that's changed 'cause especially
[00:42:36.874]if you taught reading some time ago,
[00:42:39.455]you're kind of wondering, when did this all come about?
[00:42:42.719]So something becomes fashionable,
[00:42:45.065]and one of the things that we stopped doing
[00:42:47.604]in reading, is we stopped believing that
[00:42:50.366]repetition was important.
[00:42:53.810]When we had Dick and Jane, some of you
[00:42:55.644]remember Dick and Jane,
[00:42:57.917]some of you don't know who Dick and Jane were.
[00:43:00.317]Dick and Jane were a duo that 80% of the
[00:43:03.484]baby boomers in North America learned to read with.
[00:43:07.239]And they were very, very dysfunctional little family,
[00:43:11.303](laughing)
[00:43:12.337]because Dick and Jane actually had repetitive,
[00:43:16.060]kind of a compulsive disorder,
[00:43:18.310](laughing)
[00:43:19.536]where they had to do everything a certain
[00:43:21.563]number of times, so they would run, run, run, you know?
[00:43:25.691]And then, actually, part of the baby boomer generation
[00:43:28.838]actually would have songs that would go with that
[00:43:31.216]like "Fun, Fun, Fun," like that.
[00:43:33.445]But, in Dick and Jane they did things so many times
[00:43:38.405]that Gene Shaw came out in 1967 and said,
[00:43:41.999]"Enough already."
[00:43:43.973]And then what do we do?
[00:43:45.071]We throw the whole thing out.
[00:43:47.162]And I'm suggesting that, now that we have these
[00:43:49.540]huge databases that we can look at
[00:43:52.463]of kids learning to read.
[00:43:54.681]You know, computers have let us now look
[00:43:56.430]at just huge, huge digital sets of texts
[00:43:59.940]and kids' performances.
[00:44:01.849]And what we've found, these are the prototypical
[00:44:05.123]words that kids know in winter, spring, fall,
[00:44:09.859]and then grade two.
[00:44:12.099]And we are seeing an almost perfect relationship
[00:44:16.440]with how many times those words appear in print.
[00:44:19.714]In other words, the words that kids are learning,
[00:44:23.554]so let me explain this again,
[00:44:24.994]the words that kids are learning, are the words
[00:44:28.962]that appear a lot in the text, not some of those
[00:44:31.596]random words like "pal" and "ham" and "Lil."
[00:44:35.884]In fact, we don't see the kids learning
[00:44:38.870]a lot of those words at all.
[00:44:41.334]Especially because a lot of them are very, very weird,
[00:44:44.544]and very, very infrequent.
[00:44:48.523]Okay, what you see here is very little repetition
[00:44:53.515]of the words in texts, right?
[00:44:57.280]And if you think about learning a language
[00:44:59.435]without repetition, that's a pretty
[00:45:02.336]difficult thing to do.
[00:45:04.245]So I'm saying, one of the the things we need
[00:45:05.727]to return to is some understanding of repetition
[00:45:08.821]in learning to read.
[00:45:10.773]It's not a popular concept.
[00:45:12.863]Dick and Jane kind of made it very bad for us.
[00:45:16.095]What I'm saying here is not very popular at all.
[00:45:19.764]And I'm suggesting we've got to ask how much
[00:45:23.276]kids need to see some of these patterns
[00:45:25.697]before they can learn to read.
[00:45:28.555]Here's an alternative in a set of little books
[00:45:30.550]that I've developed.
[00:45:32.117]Where, within the same book, there's lots
[00:45:35.115]and lots of repetition of the same word.
[00:45:39.221]They're learning about phonics,
[00:45:40.864]but they're also getting to see these words
[00:45:43.306]across stories, and also across the levels in the program.
[00:45:49.973]Okay, so kids are getting to see these words a lot
[00:45:53.205]in an intentional way.
[00:45:55.028]This isn't Dick and Jane but it still has
[00:45:58.527]a modicum of repetition
[00:46:01.204]and I'm suggesting we need to understand
[00:46:03.785]developmentally, what comes before what,
[00:46:08.073]and we also need to know what you need to see often.
[00:46:13.171]In an interesting way, not in a pedantic, repetitive,
[00:46:18.696]Dick and Jane.
[00:46:24.851]I have typed in all the Dick and Jane books,
[00:46:27.368]I have got copies of all of them, and sometimes
[00:46:30.482]I don't even know if I've typed the page yet, you know?
[00:46:33.565]Because it all seems like it's the same one.
[00:46:36.093]So that was a silly as the Pal had a bad ham,
[00:46:40.028]but I'm saying there needs to be some balance,
[00:46:43.057]some middle road that's based on better knowledge.
[00:46:46.854]And I think we have it, but we've let some state
[00:46:50.395]policies really run the way we've been going.
[00:46:53.969]So, I want to end with showing you what I believe
[00:46:58.576]kindergarten classrooms should look like.
[00:47:02.150]So I haven't been suggesting, as people
[00:47:07.109]from the Gesell Institute do,
[00:47:09.978]that we can wait until seven for kids
[00:47:11.109]to learn to read, that's not gonna happen.
[00:47:13.935]You don't go backward,
[00:47:17.146]but I think we need to move away from these
[00:47:21.956]didactic, incredibly tedious
[00:47:27.701]kinds of little books that kids have been looking at.
[00:47:33.077]And we need to come to a center
[00:47:35.860]where we're ensuring that kids get some sense
[00:47:40.308]of the system.
[00:47:42.953]And I know that Nebraska, you're doing that,
[00:47:47.314]and it's a state where you have a lot of communication.
[00:47:50.620]My friend Sam Meisels says he came today from a meeting
[00:47:53.383]where all, what, 11 universities were there.
[00:47:56.796]You're able to communicate and maybe this is a place
[00:48:00.926]where we stop some of this silliness
[00:48:03.892]that we've been seeing in early childhood, in literacy.
[00:48:07.283]Because we have absolutely no evidence
[00:48:10.537]that is going to make the difference for the kids
[00:48:13.150]who need the difference made.
[00:48:16.754]So, let me stop with some pictures of kids
[00:48:19.905]having a lot of books read out loud to them, a lot.
[00:48:26.544]Kids doing an enormous amount of writing,
[00:48:30.970]I think writing is the primary way in which
[00:48:32.741]you come into reading.
[00:48:37.423]Kids doing a lot with sorting words.
[00:48:41.422]I'm all for words, I'm all for the letters of the alphabet,
[00:48:45.230]I'm all for beginning sounds, I like sounds a lot, but
[00:48:49.379]we also want to bring words from their environments in.
[00:48:52.867]I was in the most delightful four year old class today
[00:48:55.714]here on campus, what those kids are getting to see,
[00:49:00.535]the kids who depend on schools should be getting too,
[00:49:04.045]and we shouldn't be panicked that they're not
[00:49:06.594]gonna get it, and then start pushing some
[00:49:08.461]of this stuff down.
[00:49:11.042]I want them to do lots of word sorting, a lot of it.
[00:49:16.162]I want them to see lots of little books.
[00:49:19.191]Not being responsible for reading them,
[00:49:21.441]but picking out some words that they
[00:49:22.743]might be able to read.
[00:49:24.630]I want them to see hundreds of little books.
[00:49:28.022]And to ensure that, I've actually gotten
[00:49:31.883]WeGiveBooks.org to take some of my old books,
[00:49:36.619]that the publisher forgot to sell,
[00:49:38.998](laughing)
[00:49:39.872]and give them away.
[00:49:41.866]So there's lots of little books there for kids
[00:49:44.544]that have a pedagogical base to them.
[00:49:48.832]And I want kids to learn about things
[00:49:53.567]while they're seeing these little books.
[00:49:57.482]I've written about 120 of these little books,
[00:50:00.223]and they're on my website, all for open access,
[00:50:02.995]free download, somewhere,
[00:50:10.241]and I want kids to be inundated with these books.
[00:50:14.961]Do you see how this is very different?
[00:50:18.438]There's some repetition here.
[00:50:20.465]There's something of interest, there's actually
[00:50:21.990]something to learn.
[00:50:24.144]You know, explain to me about Pal and that ham.
[00:50:27.013]Actually, it looked to me like that dog had a bone,
[00:50:31.237]not a real ham, you know?
[00:50:33.466]So, that might really cause some problems.
[00:50:35.748]Oh, by the way, you do intensive comprehension
[00:50:38.405]activities with those books too, like the Pal had ham.
[00:50:43.268]Kids like, why do you think Pal did that
[00:50:45.230]and so on and so forth.
[00:50:46.639]I'm saying I want them to have something of substance
[00:50:49.891]and that's the commitment that I've made
[00:50:51.492]at TextProject where we're generating material
[00:50:55.492]like this and making it available.
[00:50:58.137]And my hope is that for the kids of Nebraska,
[00:51:02.542]they don't have to
[00:51:07.622]deal with Pal and Bob,
[00:51:10.981]whatever he hit, and Hal and a host of other books
[00:51:16.133]all the way through eighth grade.
[00:51:18.437]Keep thinking that that's what some of those
[00:51:19.749]kids are seeing all the way through eighth grade.
[00:51:22.746]To me, that's not what my vision of literacy is.
[00:51:27.599]And I want to tell you thank you, for what it is
[00:51:31.013]that you've been committed to in this state.
[00:51:33.145]I think that there's an enormous amount of leadership
[00:51:36.826]that's available here in terms of getting kids
[00:51:42.127]on to the page and getting them to stay there,
[00:51:45.294]because that's what we really want.
[00:51:48.258]I also want kids to have a lot of
[00:51:49.923]great children's literature.
[00:51:51.352]We're in an amazing time of children's literature
[00:51:54.979]and I provide a lot of examples of this.
[00:51:58.840]We still have one of the last independent bookstores
[00:52:01.464]standing in the country in Santa Cruz, California,
[00:52:04.450]where I live.
[00:52:05.730]You know Santa Cruz, where we have a lot of
[00:52:07.767]individualistic people there, so you buy at the
[00:52:12.535]bookstore and we have the best book buyer in the world
[00:52:16.172]and she gives me ideas, and I put that on my website.
[00:52:20.620]I want kids to have books about stuff that matters.
[00:52:28.101]Poems old and new, lots of stories, fables and so on.
[00:52:32.858]So that's my vision of literacy.
[00:52:36.132]I look forward to continuing to interact with my colleagues
[00:52:39.844]here in Nebraska as we
[00:52:44.034]stay the course and map out for
[00:52:48.419]kids the futures that they so desperately want.
[00:52:52.003]Thank you.
[00:52:53.401](applause)
[00:52:55.288](light guitar music)

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Changing Conceptions of Kindergarten Literacy Learning: Elfreida "Freddy" Hiebert

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