Teacher Training Lags as State Shifts Its Strategy on Reading : Education: ‘Whole language’ method recommended eight years ago falters on basic skills, task force found. Getting 7,700 schools to heed the message is difficult.

The last time the state of California set out to fix reading instruction, it issued a treatise on language, ordered new textbooks and left the details of implementation up to 1,000 or so school districts and their teachers.

The result was that, either by design or by mistake, many school districts all but abandoned the teaching of basic skills, to focus instead on awakening their students’ love for books.

Eight years later, California is undergoing another change in the way reading is taught. But like a clumsy ocean liner, the state’s vast, decentralized, 7,700-school system is difficult to turn around.

A high-level state task force has concluded that beginning readers need more than interesting stories; they need systematic, intensive instruction in phonics. But critics worry that, if the past is any guide, the recommendations will be undercut by the lack of statewide training in how to effectively meld the two approaches.

The task force, appointed by state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, recommended that new teachers be required to take a class devoted to beginning reading and that all teachers receive ongoing training.

But top education department officials acknowledge that the state has no way to make sure that training matches the instructional approach sought by the task force. In fact, most local training efforts now under way do little to help teachers teach basic skills and instead support the current “whole language” method.

“The weakness of the [whole language] framework was there was no effective staff development at the state level,” so each district was left alone to find its own way, said Adria Klein, president-elect of the California Reading Assn. She said the task force’s insistence on a stepped-up training effort is among its most important recommendations.

Educators complain that the state often fails to back up its words with actions. New math in the 1960s, and the so-called “new new math” that schools are struggling with now, also have been weakened by a lack of state support for teacher training programs.

In the past two years, stung by tests that show California’s children lagging behind the rest of the nation in reading performance, many districts have launched their own teacher training efforts. But most of those programs are geared toward the very teaching methods that are now blamed in many circles for holding the state’s children back.

Districts up and down the state have begun sending teachers and administrators to workshops, bringing in consultants from New Zealand, where “whole language” was born, and stationing specialists at schools to give teachers one-on-one help.

But “whole language” training sessions continue. At planned five-hour training sessions for all its teachers next month, the Los Angeles Unified School District will focus on the uses of literature, journal writing and collaboration among students--all central tenets of the whole-language approach.

Topics stressed by the task force--phonics, the need for teachers to determine if children are able to hear the sounds of letters, and the importance of spelling--are not part of the agenda.

Amelia McKenna, the 632,000-student district’s top instructional official, said she was chagrined that the agenda will not help teachers learn the balanced approach recommended by the task force and has promised to make sure those topics are addressed.

Even teachers who advocate the whole-language approach admit that the method was introduced without adequate training, and that teachers were left to figure out how to provide their students with basic skills on their own.

“When we introduced whole language, many teachers . . . did not have the expertise to teach skills,” said Linda Garza, a curriculum specialist in the ABC school district, which is running a whole-language-oriented training program for its teachers. “We just took the teacher manuals that said ‘on this day do this’ out of their hands . . . and just said meet the needs of students.”

Now, many districts are ruing such decisions. But teachers, and policy makers, remain split over how to add skills back to the curriculum.

Proponents of “whole language” consider phonics to be but one of several ways children can learn to figure out unfamiliar words, and they introduce phonics in the context of stories. That means if students reading aloud seem to have trouble with a certain letter or blend of letters, the teacher helps them sound it out only as a last resort.

But Marion Joseph, a Palo Alto grandparent who was a vocal member of Eastin’s reading task force, said that method explains why many students are not getting the full complement of skills they need to become good readers.

“That is not what systematic, explicit phonics is . . . that’s foolishness,” she said. “You do, in fact, start with words, letters, and patterns and build up.”

That debate has split California teachers for nearly a decade and the task force report, in isolation, will do little to settle the issue unless it is accompanied by enough training to overcome resistance and demonstrate that the two approaches are not incompatible.

And the state Department of Education is itself in disarray and has added to that confusion in attempting to respond to the concerns of teachers that they were not well prepared.

The largest literacy improvement project in the state is a Department of Education effort called REACH, which involves hundreds of schools and points teachers toward a “literature-based curriculum” and “student-centered literacy activities.” Phonics is not even mentioned.

The Department of Education’s Dennis Parker, who created the REACH networks, said he is concerned that the course correction recommended by the task force will be exaggerated and schools will return to an overreliance on phonics.

“What the task force is focusing on is necessary . . . but often not sufficient . . . for high literacy for every child,” Parker said.

Parker and his staff also have promoted a controversial document called “Ready, Set, Let’s Read,” which his department is now disavowing. The 96-page compendium of teaching strategies acknowledges that “the systematic, explicit teaching of skills [is] . . . important,” and it advocates a balance of literature and phonics.

It suggests, however, that skills ought to be taught primarily in the context of reading stories, which runs counter to the approach favored by the task force members.

Nearly 300 teachers in Los Angeles County were trained using that document this summer. Two groups of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers will begin the training in November. But Glen Thomas, who is Parker’s supervisor and who is responsible for implementing the task force report, said the document has never been approved by his department and should not have been issued.

“In my view, it’s got like 50 interesting ideas . . . [but] it doesn’t talk much about what balance means and what primary teachers need to know,” he said.

The state still has many opportunities to right its course, he said: It will distribute new research on reading that forms the basis of the task force’s report; it has set new specifications for textbooks that restore a balance between literature and skills; it is re-evaluating what new teachers need to know about reading instruction, and it is rewriting the state’s “framework” for reading and language.

But, Thomas said, “our Achilles’ heel is that most people are going to treat this a little too lightly and say, ‘I’m headed in the right direction.’ ”

Rose Walker, a first-grade teacher at Allendale School in Pasadena, agrees with the need for more training. After years of teaching in traditional ways that use extensive drills and work sheets, she spent a summer in a “whole language” training program and underwent a transformation.

Now, a lesson on the letter C means reading a book with her pupils about a cat named Cookie and the chaos she causes. Then, she asks her students sitting in a circle on the floor to give her examples of words that begin with C, which she writes on a sheet of paper to be posted on a wall. Later, students will draw a picture involving cats and use that list of words to write a sentence.

But those techniques don’t work for every class or every teacher.

Edna Medinilla started teaching at Heliotrope Avenue School in Maywood three years ago, even as she was taking teacher training classes at Cal State Los Angeles. She learned to ask her students about their feelings about whatever story she was reading to them, teach them how to write their own books and keep journals. Workshops offered by the school district taught her more of the same.

But, she said, the methods didn’t seem to work. So she turned to veteran teachers at the school. “They were teaching phonics, syllables, blends,” she said. “I started using it, and I found that it worked.”