Balanced Literacy Statement

as prepared by Terry Starko in response to a district wide initiative for Balanced Literacy

Date: Thu, Apr 26, 2001, 8:56 PM


Dear _______,

I received your note today about the early literacy meeting  and I wanted to send you some thoughts of mine on the subject.

I teach if I can use that word a "balanced literacy" program.  However, most people think that you can only use the term balanced literacy if you are using the ________ program. It may be useful to establish what is meant by the term Balanced Literacy during our meeting.  I find the idea of balanced literacy as belonging to _______ a little disturbing because:

  1. It is only one program based on a great deal of research and reporting by many people, like Marie Clay, Tarasoff, Adams, Cunningham, Pinnel, etc.  This program is based on many authors.
  2. That  the way they have organized it , time suggestions, sequences and structure are arbitrary.  Their sequence is the choice they made, not the only or right way.  It is better to allow for the interests and teach the skills that the children are exploring through an important project, or just happen to be interested in at the time.  Teacher choice counts too but there must also be student input.  Balanced Literacy is not only this very structured program.
  3. The term balanced literacy  is now used  to replace the notion of either/ or.  Not all phonics, not all whole language but a mixture.  There is a place for phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, phonics, in the learning of literacy.  Texts are repetitive, pictures provide clues and they are short and graded texts.  Texts are predictable using whole sentences and ideas.  Skills are taught in context, in wholes to parts etc.  It was the phonic/ whole language war that did so much damage.  As Marie Clay says "Different paths to common outcomes."
  4. The components, word construction, word walls, guided reading, shared reading, guided writing, shared writing, interactive writing have come from brain research and again from Marie Clay's work and others.  Children construct their own language systems.  From brain research we know that the brain is a pattern finder not a rule applier, especially among emerging and fluent readers. So we do word construction tasks and teach things like onsets and rimes (word families) so that the children can learn the patterns and find those.  It is easier when reading and helps children to maintain their comprehension.  They do not have to break and remember a rule like "two vowels go walking, the first does the talking" and then try to remember what they were reading about.
  5. To develop a program for kindergarten, one would first have to consider the following things:
    • The need for a strong social context for language learning.  The idea of working together, supporting one another is essential.  Not sitting and working by themselves.
    • The need for a supportive environment that can be used by the children for their various literacy pursuits. 
    • The need for modeling and a strong oral base.  The need for rhymes, poems, chants, songs, and  movement.  This 
      is done simultaneously with the other language activities.  The old idea that we must teach letters before sounds,  writing before reading, or any this before that, has been disproved.  Marie Clay says "The little they know in reading, supports and furthers the little they know in writing and vice versa.  Both functions are reciprocal."   It is this
      reciprocity that is so essential.
    • The need for play, long periods of uninterrupted time,  for children to use their language skills to solve social
      problems; to negotiate space; to create representations of their interests, theories or ideas, books, stories,
      pictures, murals,  sculptures, etc; and for skills and practice skills within the context of their interests, needs,
      desires, etc.
    • The need for high quality representational work, not worksheet type things, but  work generated from the childrenšs ideas, expressed through many mediums.
    • The need to return again and again to the same skills over and over, in many ways, reviewing a lot and
      reconnecting.  Always making connections to what the children are doing and to what is going on in the classroom,
      and in their lives.  The learning connections are very essential.  Forward and backwards.
    • They need time to revisit ideas, reflect and make new connections to what they  already know. The children need to build and reconstruct what they are learning and to  experience  knowledge and skills in new situations.  They
      need to be active learners,   proceeding  from where they are and being allowed to borrow skills being modeled   "working in the zone of proximal learning" , scaffolding tasks, as they go.
  6. Any program needs to honour the potential of children, honour their differences, honour their need for choices, their need to be active learners, honour the way in which they learn best, honouring the fact that learning needs to be flexible.
  7. Any program needs to be organized around what a teacher holds to be important to their beliefs about learning and to their beliefs about children.  Their philosophy should be reflected in the environment they create in their rooms as well as to how their programs are organized, and the materials they use.  Even the ways used to communicate learning to
    parents should fit these beliefs.  I call it walking the talk.

    These are some of my concerns and beliefs and understandings I would like to share with you first.  

                                                                                                                                                                                                Terry

* Webmaster's note: Too often we are short of the "right kind of words" to use to explain our knowledge to parents, administrators and colleagues. The key points (1-7) that Terry has stated here could be printed off and used by any of us to help articulate a developmentally appropriate and pedagogically sound statement. She has taken what we know implicitly and given vocabulary and organization for us to share explicitly. Thanks, Terry!