Changing Conceptions of Kindergarten Literacy Learning: Q&A Session with Elfreida "Freddy" Hiebert

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11/20/2014 Added

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2014 Helen Kelly Symposium for Excellence in Education:

Changing Conceptions of Kindergarten Literacy Learning

Question and Answer Session

Elfreida "Freddy" Hiebert

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[00:00:00.139](relaxed music)
[00:00:14.804]What a fantastic resource textproject.org is.
[00:00:20.531]If you have not gone to that website,
[00:00:22.896]please do,
[00:00:24.496]because there are so many resouces for teachers
[00:00:27.685]and for children on it.
[00:00:32.100]All right, okay. Are you ready?
[00:00:34.266]All right, Freddy.
[00:00:37.115]Why did the researchers you cite
[00:00:39.430]say that kindergarten has been dumbed down?
[00:00:50.714]So the first slide that I started with, right?
[00:00:55.930]I don't think I'm gonna go all the way back there.
[00:00:58.671]The first slide I started with was the common core.
[00:01:05.926]Why did the people who wrote the common core
[00:01:09.182]say that K through 12
[00:01:11.475]had been dumbed down?
[00:01:13.480]If you've been in a school
[00:01:18.192]in the last 10 years,
[00:01:20.144]you knew that that wasn't the case for K.
[00:01:22.704]It logically wasn't possible,
[00:01:24.752]because until No Child Left Behind,
[00:01:26.746]there were no books for kids in kindergarten.
[00:01:30.117]Why did they say that?
[00:01:32.773]I think it was
[00:01:38.141]a provocative stance.
[00:01:40.199]They had three studies--
[00:01:43.456]First of all, it wasn't true
[00:01:45.297]all the way through sixth grade.
[00:01:48.592]So the data that they were using,
[00:01:53.917]for first grade they actually based it on
[00:01:56.694]the Dick and Jane books,
[00:01:58.347]on Jeanne Chall's 1967 analysis.
[00:02:01.899]Why did those people do it?
[00:02:03.403]Well, just like Mussolini, they got the report in on time.
[00:02:08.459]I mean, to their credit, they did it in a year.
[00:02:11.552]And I guess there was lots of not fact checking.
[00:02:14.090]I think they wanted to tell a story.
[00:02:16.672]There were some industry reasons
[00:02:21.142]why this story was cool,
[00:02:23.252]to say that the texts had been dumbed down,
[00:02:25.546]and I think they believed it.
[00:02:31.401]I don't think they needed data,
[00:02:32.820]I think they believed it.
[00:02:35.241]Now, in terms of the Closens statement,
[00:02:38.430]Closens was using the 1998
[00:02:41.855]early childhood longitudinal data
[00:02:44.266]and those data were gathered before
[00:02:47.743]No Child Left Behind.
[00:02:49.514]And basically what she was saying is,
[00:02:51.380]you know how I showed that every copyright,
[00:02:54.036]they just kept adding on more stuff?
[00:02:56.564]She was saying that when the schools use
[00:03:00.459]the letter naming,
[00:03:03.969]and the letter sound matching,
[00:03:05.744]and the kids already know it,
[00:03:06.981]that's a waste of their time.
[00:03:08.655]And I would completely agree with that.
[00:03:10.906]But to come out in 2013 with a statement that
[00:03:15.462]kindergarten is too easy,
[00:03:17.700]or to let that interpretation be made of your research,
[00:03:21.849]they're actually saying it needs to be more advanced.
[00:03:24.611]That, to me, again is one of these issues of
[00:03:28.836]what are the consequences
[00:03:32.921]of the research that we do?
[00:03:36.067]I think as researchers we have to think of that.
[00:03:39.662]So if this comes out
[00:03:44.792]and it could be misinterpreted,
[00:03:46.591]how can I stop those misinterpretations?
[00:03:54.407]So the Closens one,
[00:03:55.938]I mean we can actually validate that with the next,
[00:03:58.742]the 2010, whether, in fact,
[00:04:01.729]the kids have gotten smarter
[00:04:03.841]as a result of more stuff in preschool.
[00:04:05.876]I hope that all of you don't think that...
[00:04:09.205]You know, I'm looking for a really rich
[00:04:10.794]kindergarten experience.
[00:04:12.213]I think we had the model in 1990.
[00:04:18.210]I think we had it.
[00:04:20.940]I think it was great.
[00:04:26.343]One of the things we've been talking about
[00:04:28.021]at some of the tables is also
[00:04:29.322]the consequences for teachers,
[00:04:31.412]of having to teach some of this.
[00:04:35.071]And that's hard, to teach these little kids,
[00:04:40.309]to recite this stuff that doesn't
[00:04:43.305]make a lot of sense.
[00:04:48.675]Just a question from me.
[00:04:50.175]When you're talking about teachers,
[00:04:53.651]and you're thinking about teachers,
[00:04:56.083]do you find that there is
[00:04:59.805]some misinterpretation of what's being asked,
[00:05:06.278]in some ways, from the original policy
[00:05:10.919]or the original suggestions
[00:05:13.479]to how it filters down to teachers in the schools?
[00:05:20.615]I think kindergarten teachers
[00:05:22.972]have been one of the last bastions
[00:05:25.191]of child centered-ness.
[00:05:31.526]And what I see, in the state of California at least...
[00:05:35.760]I mean, one of the good things about coming from California,
[00:05:38.416]and about the whole state,
[00:05:39.718]one of the reasons we have California,
[00:05:41.381]is because they can do a lot of this stuff
[00:05:43.579]and you can watch them do it.
[00:05:45.272]You can watch them do it and then decide not to do that.
[00:05:47.440](audience laughs)
[00:05:48.869]You know, so they're always a case study
[00:05:50.490]in maybe we shouldn't do it that way.
[00:05:52.985]But what I see is a lot of retirements
[00:05:55.747]of kindergarten teachers,
[00:05:57.840]long time, very good kindergarten teachers.
[00:06:00.036]Maybe it was time.
[00:06:01.380]But I'm not seeing the misinterpretations were the teachers.
[00:06:05.316]I'm seeing the misinterpretations
[00:06:07.636]with the administrators,
[00:06:11.860]I'm seeing the misinterpretations with
[00:06:14.889]the people who are concerned about test scores.
[00:06:17.769]I'm not seeing it with teachers.
[00:06:19.251]I think the teachers have held out as long as they can,
[00:06:22.099]and I've sat with kindergarten teachers
[00:06:24.659]who've described what it's like not to be able to
[00:06:29.356]have kids do some of the art and some of the conversations
[00:06:33.325]and some of the play acting that they used to be able to do.
[00:06:38.220]Now, Marjorie just left, and she--
[00:06:40.603]No, I'm right here.
[00:06:41.788]She's here.
[00:06:42.684]Why don't you tell about that study
[00:06:44.447]that you just found today.
[00:06:45.947]Some of us get a little exchange,
[00:06:49.851]the little exchange notes,
[00:06:51.824]and some of you read this study about kindergarten.
[00:06:55.173]So Caroline, do you want to tell what it said.
[00:06:57.776]Well, I think it said that at kindergarten,
[00:06:59.844]that all our focus is only on outcomes
[00:07:01.882]and not on learning.
[00:07:03.952]There was also how they spent their time,
[00:07:07.344]and they spent more time on
[00:07:10.414]direct instruction and reading...
[00:07:12.647]Spent more time on direct instruction and reading
[00:07:15.813]than everything else combined.
[00:07:18.575]And less than ten percent of the time
[00:07:20.675]was spent on science, math, social studies,
[00:07:23.396]health, physical activity.
[00:07:26.039]So we really are seeing a kindergarten curriculum
[00:07:30.061]that used to be a whole child focused curriculum,
[00:07:33.543]And this was a study of children from,
[00:07:36.697]it was over, like, a seven year period.
[00:07:39.640]Did I get this right, for those of you who saw that?
[00:07:43.340]Yeah.
[00:07:50.828]What do you think of the Montessori approach
[00:07:52.599]to teaching reading?
[00:07:54.444]I believe that it involves writing to read.
[00:08:00.951]So the Montessori approach...
[00:08:07.733]I think it's great, the question is who gets it, right?
[00:08:11.553]I mean, in my community...
[00:08:16.267]I think the notion of kids
[00:08:18.282]doing a lot of hands on activities...
[00:08:21.312]I mean, if you think about it,
[00:08:23.199]the alphabet is one of the most abstract
[00:08:26.004]notions little kids encounter.
[00:08:31.124]Then the next abstract thing they encounter,
[00:08:33.129]and I'm gonna come back to describing that a little bit,
[00:08:35.508]the next abstract thing they encounter
[00:08:37.503]are the high frequency words.
[00:08:39.891]So for those of you who aren't in literacy,
[00:08:42.698]a guy made his name, his name was Ed Dolch,
[00:08:47.208]and he made his name by putting
[00:08:50.174]together a list of the most frequent words.
[00:08:55.517]So about 25 words in English
[00:08:59.378]account for 33 percent of the words you read.
[00:09:02.388]Somebody figured that out around 1920,
[00:09:06.568]and then Ed Dolch took those 25 words
[00:09:09.745]and then added some more.
[00:09:11.080]And then now,
[00:09:12.786]that's typically what kids get
[00:09:15.816]after they learn the alphabet,
[00:09:17.094]so when you saw that one slide with the sight words,
[00:09:18.822]that's what they were talking about.
[00:09:20.327]Well, it turns out that "the"
[00:09:22.555]accounts for seven percent of the words in written English,
[00:09:27.218]for the texts all of us read, too.
[00:09:31.280]I've always thought that I should've copywritten them.
[00:09:33.285](audience laughs)
[00:09:34.683]I would still be doing this.
[00:09:36.345]But think about the word "the".
[00:09:40.538]First of all, it has an irregular sound for the T-H,
[00:09:47.811]and it also has an irregular sound for E.
[00:09:51.427]Now, turn to your partner, to somebody next to you,
[00:09:53.924]and define it.
[00:09:55.406]Not use it, but define "the".
[00:09:58.500](audience laughs)
[00:10:00.589]And then the word "a" and "of".
[00:10:02.659]You know?
[00:10:04.556]I mean, first of all, they don't teach you
[00:10:07.278]about the alphabet very well,
[00:10:08.919]about the letter sound system,
[00:10:10.734]and they're really abstract, weird words.
[00:10:13.676]So anything you can do
[00:10:17.410]to get kids hands on, in terms of sorting words,
[00:10:20.272]writing words, writing with magnetic letters,
[00:10:23.501]knowing why you have books,
[00:10:27.009]knowing why you would want to find things out from books.
[00:10:33.452]And see, the place that I do my work is where
[00:10:35.702]99 percent of the kids are the children of farm workers.
[00:10:41.900]And they are so amenable, when they're five years old,
[00:10:46.230]to doing what these people ask them to do.
[00:10:50.538]And I'll tell you, we've got
[00:10:51.456]the biggest gang problem on the planet
[00:10:52.971]in fifth grade.
[00:10:55.573]But you know, those little guys,
[00:10:57.162]I mean, yeah, they're starting to...
[00:10:58.687](imitates child speaking)
[00:11:02.506]I mean, in their language, if they're Spanish speaking,
[00:11:06.101]they have very few single syllable words.
[00:11:12.991]Turns out they've got a lot of these really great words
[00:11:15.711]that help you with literary and scientific text.
[00:11:19.774]Like, they don't use a word like "bug",
[00:11:21.577]they use "insecto".
[00:11:26.702]So what I've been doing is just trying to
[00:11:29.758]find things that are highly concrete
[00:11:31.976]and that you want know about,
[00:11:33.127]like cats, and dogs, and elephants, and snails,
[00:11:36.018]and firetrucks.
[00:11:39.143]Those are things that you want to learn about,
[00:11:41.053]and that's really concrete.
[00:11:43.047]But "the"? Not so much.
[00:11:46.641]So Montessori, anything that we can do
[00:11:48.913]to do some of the movement.
[00:11:51.580]But in my community, the kids that get Montessori...
[00:11:54.631]I mean, when Maria Montessori,
[00:11:57.222]she developed the program for the children of the poor.
[00:12:00.476]That's not how it's working out right now.
[00:12:07.184]This kind of tags along with what you were just saying.
[00:12:11.003]There's a nutrition benchmark
[00:12:13.296]for child case studies,
[00:12:16.794]and it says, "Teach children about food through books."
[00:12:23.175]Do you think that increasing familiarity
[00:12:25.722]with different kinds of foods in that way
[00:12:28.346]will help children be more likely to try it?
[00:12:32.281]What do you recommend about materials to use?
[00:12:35.652]Would it be, like, ham?
[00:12:37.038](audience laughs)
[00:12:46.032]I could give you almost any topic,
[00:12:49.869]with some content, and find you some interesting books,
[00:12:52.931]and we could get kids interested in it.
[00:12:55.416]So I think highly of the value of good books
[00:12:59.459]to be an educational source,
[00:13:03.809]if I'm understanding the question right.
[00:13:07.340]Is this stuff that we're giving them now
[00:13:09.900]that kind of diet?
[00:13:12.610]What would one of those books look like?
[00:13:14.593]Cake is not good. Cake is bad.
[00:13:18.252]I mean, I'm trying to write a book right now
[00:13:20.855]in my mind of what you would tell them not to do.
[00:13:27.398]Bob ate chips. Bob is dead.
[00:13:31.201]I don't...
[00:13:32.171](audience laughing)
[00:13:39.754]Chips are bad. No, Bob, no.
[00:13:44.309]I think we could come up with a series.
[00:13:46.111]Each table make another one of these.
[00:13:48.468]We could probably have a best seller,
[00:13:50.646]and we could probably go out to
[00:13:52.224]a local school district and sell it as common...
[00:13:55.317]Well, not common core in Nebraska,
[00:13:57.268]but common core compliant.
[00:14:02.259]I'm gonna ask a question that,
[00:14:04.660]I don't know if Guy is still here or not,
[00:14:06.269]but Guy and I have been
[00:14:07.977]very interested in, in the last few years,
[00:14:11.956]and that's the integration of technology.
[00:14:15.689]But you hear pros and cons about
[00:14:20.040]using technology with very young children.
[00:14:23.367]What do you think about that for
[00:14:25.767]getting them involved in all sorts of literacy?
[00:14:30.482]Okay, so the question about technology...
[00:14:35.710]My husband shared with me that on the charts...
[00:14:39.665]We're Canadians, eh. Watch a lot of hockey.
[00:14:43.773]So that on the charts the Rosetta Stone has now gone into
[00:14:48.017]some kind of little exercise for kids and literacy.
[00:14:56.239]So the one set of books that I showed you,
[00:14:58.258]we give books,
[00:14:59.600]those are all ebooks,
[00:15:01.627]and all of the books that I create are ebooks.
[00:15:04.378]I don't know the research in this area.
[00:15:11.487]There are a lot of reports coming out.
[00:15:14.907]I would also say that there are just some really stupid
[00:15:18.681]little exercises that really poor parents...
[00:15:21.998]You know, because a lot of poor families now have mobiles,
[00:15:25.177]mobile phones, and they're really selling to those families
[00:15:29.273]some really stupid little exercises.
[00:15:32.835]I mean, I try to change the world one kid at a time,
[00:15:35.355]you know, like in airports and grocery stores,
[00:15:38.199]but I don't think I'm gonna get around to all of them.
[00:15:41.947]So I'm just saying, to me it's an issue
[00:15:45.221]of what the technology is doing.
[00:15:48.240]And what I see is there's a lot of marketing, a lot,
[00:15:52.506]to places like Costco,
[00:15:56.544]for some really...
[00:15:59.917]Things that are a waste of money.
[00:16:03.515]But can some things be good?
[00:16:05.040]I mean, obviously we think that they are.
[00:16:06.746]You can have a lot of these books
[00:16:08.101]on ebooks and so on.
[00:16:13.104]But that's not my area.
[00:16:14.788]You guys know more about that than I do.
[00:16:19.994]Are there some more questions?
[00:16:22.106]Did all the tables ask me questions?
[00:16:25.539]Did you all have... Is this it?
[00:16:27.897]We didn't get a card for every table,
[00:16:30.307]so if that's what your question was.
[00:16:32.805]Anybody want to raise their hand and ask me something?
[00:16:36.712]Sam?
[00:16:37.436]So can you help us distinguish,
[00:16:39.922]and you know where I am in this,
[00:16:42.097]but can you help us distinguish between
[00:16:43.741]essentially dumbed down kindergarten curriculum
[00:16:46.214]and intellectually challenging, rigorous curriculum
[00:16:50.950]that doesn't fall over into
[00:16:55.612]curriculum that is really inappropriate.
[00:17:00.434]As you've been critical in terms of (mumbles).
[00:17:03.419]Well, I don't know how explicit I was
[00:17:05.594]through this process.
[00:17:07.196]So there was a group of us,
[00:17:09.690]in the late '70s through the '80s,
[00:17:13.754]who really raised a lot of questions
[00:17:17.657]about what we thought was
[00:17:19.877]intellectually impoverished kindergarten.
[00:17:24.590]Where kids were doing these these little exercises
[00:17:27.857]like the N how many times in front of "nail",
[00:17:31.311]and ticking off little pictures and so on.
[00:17:37.147]I think literacy is much more than that,
[00:17:43.023]and I think we had a model,
[00:17:44.985]and I think it was actually a fairly fleshed out
[00:17:48.301]and appropriate model
[00:17:50.776]at the end of the '80s,
[00:17:52.364]that was starting to enter into various programs.
[00:17:57.761]And I think the presence of big books was important to that.
[00:18:01.783]I think what happened in the Texas, California, Florida
[00:18:06.903]textbook adoptions in 1993,
[00:18:11.426]2000, and then No Child Left Behind,
[00:18:13.696]which modelled what had happened in Texas,
[00:18:16.011]I think that all that work got disintegrated.
[00:18:21.237]So I think we have a model
[00:18:23.416]of kids doing a lot of
[00:18:25.525]tracking print in interesting little books
[00:18:29.099]having to do with content around science,
[00:18:32.331]social studies, mathematics.
[00:18:35.434]I mean, from my perspective, if kids
[00:18:38.400]don't come to understand that a text
[00:18:41.205]is where you get information...
[00:18:44.414]Our information as human beings
[00:18:46.974]is stored in texts.
[00:18:48.681]That's why the literacy is so important,
[00:18:51.423]and you have to come at it through
[00:18:54.153]projects, inquiry, discussions,
[00:18:58.217]and books help you with that process.
[00:19:02.930]So I think we have a model.
[00:19:04.916]I think there are some good models of curriculum.
[00:19:12.690]I think that I'm not going on a tangent here,
[00:19:17.489]a rant about No Child Left Behind.
[00:19:20.101]I think there were some good parts to it.
[00:19:22.607]I think where the problem came is that
[00:19:25.083]it was assumed that it started in kindergarten,
[00:19:29.658]and it was a very direct, didactic model.
[00:19:34.309]That's where the issue is, and to me,
[00:19:36.441]Sam, it's neither challenging
[00:19:39.471]or appropriate.
[00:19:41.859]The stuff that I've been showing you
[00:19:43.161]with the decodable model.
[00:19:47.352]Some of the new things that have
[00:19:48.547]come in with the common core,
[00:19:50.031]like the big books around social studies and science,
[00:19:52.184]I think that's good,
[00:19:54.115]and the little books related to that.
[00:19:56.345]Again, Caroline raised the point today,
[00:19:58.456]Caroline Baxter, if some of you don't know her,
[00:20:01.858]about whether the standard are aspirational
[00:20:05.282]or mandatory.
[00:20:07.853]What's our view?
[00:20:09.436]Are we viewing it that a kid has to know
[00:20:12.300]these almost 100 high frequency words,
[00:20:14.903]and there's something wrong with the kid,
[00:20:16.428]not the curriculum, if they don't?
[00:20:19.532]And to me, it's a matter of incredible exposure.
[00:20:22.358]I've watched some very smart
[00:20:26.017]children in my acquaintance
[00:20:28.267]who have had so many books,
[00:20:34.362]including lots of little books,
[00:20:36.747]lots of good models, lots of opportunities to write,
[00:20:41.132]and I haven't seen any of those kids
[00:20:44.267]learn to read as early five year olds.
[00:20:50.336]Now, I'm not saying that they can't
[00:20:52.086]and that some don't.
[00:20:53.471]I mean, I did a dissertation, in Wisconsin,
[00:20:55.839]where I found a three year old who could barely talk
[00:20:58.239]who had been taught to read.
[00:21:00.075]The guy could barely describe what the words were,
[00:21:02.302]but he was reading them,
[00:21:04.436]and his parent were so proud.
[00:21:06.227]You know, I think I could start a whole industry
[00:21:09.492]just getting first class tickets on planes
[00:21:12.947]sitting beside young parents,
[00:21:16.286]and when they describe their 19 month old
[00:21:19.126]can do such and such with letters,
[00:21:21.315]and all I would say is, "And they can't read yet?"
[00:21:24.953]And I would start a whole consulting business right there.
[00:21:28.078]I think it's become kind of so fashionable,
[00:21:30.743]like, "Look at my three year old, they can do this."
[00:21:34.275]And that's great for those kids,
[00:21:36.301]so I'm talking about these other guys.
[00:21:38.723]And I think it's possible, I think
[00:21:42.945]every American child can read well
[00:21:45.633]by the middle of second grade.
[00:21:50.550]But some of them are gonna come at that
[00:21:52.129]very different times,
[00:21:53.537]and so I'll just have to see a lot of it
[00:21:55.362]to understand why they're doing it.
[00:21:57.579]And right now what we're doing is,
[00:21:58.817]you get one book, and then we throw in this
[00:22:02.006]Bob and ham stuff, and then
[00:22:04.053]you're kinda going...
[00:22:07.007]But hey, the lady said to do it, I'm gonna try.
[00:22:11.126]So to me, it isn't challenging or appropriate,
[00:22:14.336]is what I'm trying to say.
[00:22:15.615]And Sam, the thing that just troubles me
[00:22:22.456]is, other than this talk,
[00:22:25.066]and an article you wrote in a blog,
[00:22:27.956]and one that I wrote in a blog,
[00:22:29.440]I haven't heard people asking
[00:22:31.689]how this all happened so fast.
[00:22:35.860]I mean, what we're seeing now
[00:22:37.343]with the common core materials is
[00:22:39.657]there's another spike.
[00:22:41.832]Another what?
[00:22:42.847]Another spike in expectations.
[00:22:45.203]And I'm not hearing, at my professional conferences,
[00:22:48.328]people holding up their hands and saying,
[00:22:50.836]"This can't go on."
[00:22:56.521]I mean, all we're gonna do is we're gonna make
[00:22:59.794]more kids into problem readers earlier.
[00:23:04.828]But some of you in this room know more about
[00:23:07.772]things like this than I do, in terms of policy.
[00:23:09.864]I hope I'm wrong.
[00:23:13.382]But keep remembering, I'm in California,
[00:23:16.210]and we're always off the mark first,
[00:23:18.033]and it's not what I'm seeing.
[00:23:20.390]Yes?
[00:23:21.510]Given your opinions on expectations
[00:23:24.806]that have been put on kindergarten children,
[00:23:29.692]and some of the data that has reinforced that,
[00:23:33.715]what are your thoughts about
[00:23:35.774]those who would be interested
[00:23:38.611]in more universal preschool,
[00:23:40.221]or expanding Head Start and those kind of programs?
[00:23:50.419]So I'm all for giving every single child
[00:23:54.642]the experiences I saw today in, uh....
[00:23:57.116]Keep telling me the name of it was (mumbles)
[00:23:59.665](audience members call out inaudibly)
[00:24:01.149]I mean, I get chills.
[00:24:06.406]Wonderful.
[00:24:09.149]I want kids to have that.
[00:24:11.953]I guess my big question is
[00:24:13.553]is that what's gonna happen?
[00:24:17.520]You know, what I worry about is that
[00:24:21.157]when we get test results back
[00:24:24.016]in states like Florida and New York and California,
[00:24:27.453]from the common core tests,
[00:24:30.234]and the test results are gonna be with
[00:24:31.823]third, fourth, and fifth graders,
[00:24:33.243]not with kindergarten, first graders...
[00:24:36.778]The problems never were with kindergarten, first grade.
[00:24:39.586]We actually did a fairly good job with No Child Left Behind
[00:24:42.413]in making some modest gain.
[00:24:47.852]But I'm just afraid that
[00:24:49.953]it's just gonna keep going down.
[00:24:55.330]I mean, I want good stuff for all the kids.
[00:25:00.022]Somebody was just describing to me
[00:25:01.590]a program for two year olds.
[00:25:03.724]That was just absolutely delightful.
[00:25:08.949]But what I don't want
[00:25:10.464]is somebody starting to think like,
[00:25:12.928]"Well, it worked for my kid."
[00:25:15.782]You know? "It worked for me,
[00:25:18.776]"and look at me."
[00:25:23.287]You have to understand, you know,
[00:25:25.762]that if you walk into some place...
[00:25:28.365]You know, I'm never going to be an Olympic skier.
[00:25:31.512]I've been on skis once.
[00:25:34.219]I can go over the list of things I will never do,
[00:25:38.497]but I can tell you some things that I do,
[00:25:41.186]and I've put in my 10,000 hours in different areas.
[00:25:45.569]And some of these little guys
[00:25:47.649]haven't even put in an hour with literacy,
[00:25:50.348]and we're shoving this stuff down their throat.
[00:25:53.943]And I worry an incredible amount
[00:25:58.720]about...
[00:26:01.824]The first question was why the K to 12 dumbing down?
[00:26:06.357]Why the dumbing down all together?
[00:26:09.077]Well, what a great message, you know?
[00:26:10.719]Who wouldn't stand for more challenge?
[00:26:12.800]Americans, we need more challenge.
[00:26:15.401]I just worry, you know?
[00:26:21.472]Test results don't look good,
[00:26:23.689]you just push it down the little guys more,
[00:26:27.785]and I think we're gonna pay for it.
[00:26:30.857]I think that's what we're seeing in the middle school.
[00:26:35.124]They're not enrolled, they're not engaged.
[00:26:41.949]But if Sam and Caroline
[00:26:45.298]can be in charge of all the
[00:26:49.340]preschool, then I'm for it.
[00:26:53.500]And maybe you can do a model like that in the state.
[00:26:57.286]And that's actually why I spent
[00:26:59.357]weeks thinking about this,
[00:27:02.119]because I think you can here,
[00:27:05.713]and you can show what could happen with kids
[00:27:08.231]when they have those opportunities.
[00:27:12.661]Because it actually turns out that that gain
[00:27:14.866]that Closens talks about in the article,
[00:27:17.449]a half a standard deviation,
[00:27:18.952]by the end of first grade, you didn't make any difference.
[00:27:24.039]But what if you could show an enormous difference
[00:27:27.613]of these kids doing all these cool science books, you know?
[00:27:35.720]I think you can do it here, you know?
[00:27:37.872]You've got the infrastructure to do it.
[00:27:41.426]That's why I actually said I would do this.
[00:27:44.443]I know I depress some of the undergraduates.
[00:27:46.354]Some of them are crying, but...
[00:27:47.676](audience laughing)
[00:27:51.429]Maybe the Kelleys think,
[00:27:52.390]"I don't know about this symposium idea any more."
[00:27:54.683](audience laughing)
[00:27:56.208]But I actually think you can do it here.
[00:28:01.424]And, see, I think, in terms of all these things
[00:28:03.727]we think about young children, nutrition, whatever,
[00:28:06.629]I think when their first institutional experience in school
[00:28:10.692]is one of, essentially, being bullied,
[00:28:15.844]I think that that's wrong.
[00:28:19.044]And I think you guys have got a chance.
[00:28:22.575]If there's some way I could be part of it and help,
[00:28:24.571]I would like to.
[00:28:25.625]And we know what to do.
[00:28:27.577]We've done it.
[00:28:31.256]You know?
[00:28:32.206]And the name of the school that I can never remember,
[00:28:34.606]they're doing it.
[00:28:35.886](laughs)
[00:28:38.767]I'm the daughter of a minister,
[00:28:40.515]you all know that, right?
[00:28:42.061]And the first thing I could do when I was
[00:28:45.029]a little kid was do an altar call.
[00:28:47.586]I've been to so many revival services.
[00:28:50.125]But then they told me I couldn't be a minister in my church,
[00:28:52.483]so I found something... I found (mumbles).
[00:28:55.607](audience laughs)
[00:28:56.646]Did you have a question?
[00:28:57.819]What does that mean internationally?
[00:28:59.751]Are we experiencing the same titles
[00:29:02.000]in Germany, in England, and Poland?
[00:29:05.297](mumbles)
[00:29:07.525]No, actually,
[00:29:11.145]Finland's a case study of a country...
[00:29:15.124]Keep remembering that the orthography of a country
[00:29:18.452]makes a difference, right?
[00:29:21.683]And also the level of diversity in a country
[00:29:25.428]makes a difference.
[00:29:27.742]But I have to say that,
[00:29:29.760]being a Canadian originally,
[00:29:33.375]from the deep south of Canada, by the way.
[00:29:36.392]Most Canadians are from the deep south,
[00:29:39.175]if you think about it.
[00:29:40.274]Just think about it a little bit.
[00:29:41.415](audience laughs)
[00:29:44.776]Canada does not do this.
[00:29:47.634]And they do consistently better than we do
[00:29:50.077]in areas that are matched for diversity, okay?
[00:29:54.407]Like British Columbia, certain parts of...
[00:29:56.977]They take provinces of Canada and compare it
[00:29:59.506]to different American states.
[00:30:02.769]Germany and Poland
[00:30:05.191]increased their status on the last
[00:30:07.771]international comparison,
[00:30:09.595]and it wasn't by pushing down.
[00:30:16.097]And the German orthography, that's pretty hard.
[00:30:18.884]One of the things about our English orthography
[00:30:21.444]is we have two linguistic sources
[00:30:25.913]make up English.
[00:30:28.695]So we started out as a Germanic language.
[00:30:32.087]So words that you just saw on these little...
[00:30:35.096]Id and it and all those,
[00:30:37.473]those are from the German layer of English,
[00:30:41.164]and then in 1066 the Normans invaded England
[00:30:43.925]and they brought them French,
[00:30:46.400]and so then we have a whole Romance system.
[00:30:49.941]And that's what the little Spanish guys
[00:30:51.627]come to school good at,
[00:30:53.941]which we don't ever tell them.
[00:30:56.117]We forgot.
[00:30:59.935]I mean, our system is a little bit more complex
[00:31:03.060]than some, and I think one of the reasons we get nervous,
[00:31:06.208]but this pushing down, you know,
[00:31:09.162]Great Britain, no.
[00:31:13.086]The European countries aren't doing it.
[00:31:15.338]Maybe in China, I don't know.
[00:31:17.790]That one I don't know.
[00:31:18.911]Guy's gonna go there in a couple weeks
[00:31:21.512]and Guy will be our informant.
[00:31:26.413]I mean, we keep pushing down, and like I said
[00:31:29.054]the thing that we see in international comparisons
[00:31:31.570]is you can't tell from the fourth grade average
[00:31:34.311]who starts early,
[00:31:36.574]but you can tell from the size of the standard deviation.
[00:31:40.915]Yes?
[00:31:43.154]So you kind of talked a little bit about
[00:31:45.511]the sorting and norming that happens in schools,
[00:31:47.763]and the homogenization and these high frequency words.
[00:31:50.834]But when I think about, like, a Freirean approach,
[00:31:53.456]what are the words that are meaningful to you?
[00:31:55.975]How do we use this also have a social justice layer
[00:32:00.241]that's associated with it?
[00:32:05.724]Well, in the work that I showed you that we were...
[00:32:09.743]And this is probably about it, right?
[00:32:11.760]Because I think it looks like,
[00:32:14.542]I can always tell the glossy eyes.
[00:32:19.682]One of the things with some of the
[00:32:22.062]technology we have now, like fMRIs,
[00:32:25.625]we've learned a lot about how people learn vocubulary,
[00:32:30.190]and from my view,
[00:32:33.325]in American reading instruction,
[00:32:35.235]we went from Dick and Jane,
[00:32:37.410]and that was based completely on
[00:32:39.758]those 25 to 100 most frequent words, right?
[00:32:43.683]The theory was, of a guy named Thorndike
[00:32:47.052]and then his student Gray,
[00:32:48.760]if we could teach those words that you see the most,
[00:32:52.237]then you'll learn to read.
[00:32:55.510]The problem is about 40 percent of those first 100
[00:32:59.329]have variant vowels,
[00:33:01.035]and about 60 percent of them
[00:33:02.785]are just really boring words,
[00:33:07.657]that are really uninteresting to kids.
[00:33:09.449]Which is why Dick and Jane were so uninteresting.
[00:33:14.185]So then we go to this completely decodable perspective where
[00:33:18.718]if you've been taught that, you can learn that.
[00:33:22.674]One of the things we haven't done very well
[00:33:24.787]is to look at what are some core ideas
[00:33:26.867]that kids like to know about,
[00:33:29.031]and in terms of the fMRI work,
[00:33:32.284]what kinds of words do kids really learn quickly?
[00:33:36.913]And it turns out human beings learn concrete words the best
[00:33:40.614]and the fastest, and remember them.
[00:33:43.761]So, for example, if I teach you T-A-T,
[00:33:49.477]you know, like, with crocheting or whatever,
[00:33:51.323]and "that", and "bat",
[00:33:54.311]and "sat". and "cat",
[00:33:56.729]the kid will remember "cat" first.
[00:33:59.503]That's the word they'll know.
[00:34:01.905]We've never really done a good job of that.
[00:34:05.008]And in those little books that I was showing you
[00:34:07.225]up there that I've made available for free,
[00:34:09.114]that's what we do.
[00:34:10.863]We pick the most highly concrete, interesting words for kids
[00:34:15.290]that also have some regularity.
[00:34:19.811]Okay?
[00:34:20.683]So I don't want to leave you in tears,
[00:34:24.661]I think there's an incredible opportunity
[00:34:27.732]here in the state of Nebraska,
[00:34:29.502]and I hope that we get to see some of that
[00:34:32.510]come to fruition.
[00:34:33.727]Thank you.
[00:34:34.698](audience applauds)
[00:34:41.022]Thank you, Freddy,
[00:34:42.751]on behalf of all of us.
[00:34:45.822]A simulating presentation.
[00:34:47.709]I hope that the conversation continues,
[00:34:49.841]with what you've learnt here today,
[00:34:52.360]and thoughts that you've had, that you might take some notes
[00:34:55.243]and continue the conversation,
[00:34:57.531]and hope to be able to make a change.
[00:35:00.251]I want to thank again
[00:35:03.505]our benefactor, our donor,
[00:35:05.775]Helen Kelly.
[00:35:07.243]As well, of course, this would not have been possible had
[00:35:10.273]Helen not had the vision
[00:35:13.013]to be able to fund these kinds of events,
[00:35:16.724]to bring speakers like Freddy Hiebert
[00:35:19.477]in to talk to us about these ideas,
[00:35:22.804]but also her great generosity.
[00:35:25.524]So Helen, thank you so very, very much.
[00:35:27.839](audience applauds)
[00:35:34.916]On behalf of the Department of Childhood and Family Studies
[00:35:37.578]and the College of Education and Human Sciences,
[00:35:40.831]we do want to give you something
[00:35:44.115]that you can take with you.
[00:35:47.997]You're gonna need some help carrying that out.
[00:35:50.110](audience laughs)
[00:35:52.651]But thank you so very much.
[00:35:54.706](audience applauds)
[00:36:00.124]I hope you're all inspired,
[00:36:01.512]because learning is just so fascinating.
[00:36:04.615]And having had a mother who was a teacher who told me
[00:36:07.423]that if you don't make it fun, they don't learn,
[00:36:09.660]and then I taught seniors when I was 21
[00:36:12.443]in English literature courses,
[00:36:14.513]so I had my grill test.
[00:36:18.715]But I really appreciate the interest that you all have,
[00:36:21.585]and hope this really helps inspire
[00:36:24.329]all the things you can do with kids.
[00:36:26.779]Thank you.
[00:36:27.920](audience applauds)
[00:36:30.618](relaxing music)

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Changing Conceptions of Kindergarten Literacy Learning: Q&A Session with Elfreida "Freddy" Hiebert

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