Reading Failure is Terrifying for Kids:

David Boulton: One of the things that we particularly want to draw out is the correspondence between how children feel about themselves, how they feel about their minds and how they feel about reading. We often think of reading in terms of all the good things that it enables, (or that lacking it doesn't), but there is another consideration which is: what happens to children who struggle too long with it in terms of how it affects who they are and how they feel about how they are functioning?

Dr. Alex Granzin: I can talk about that both as somebody that’s worked with children that are having substantial difficulty in school, and also as someone that has taught children and taken them through part of the reading process. As part of my training I did quite a bit of instructional work in reading, not primarily in the classroom but more small group focused instruction that was in a research setting and was involved with youngsters in the very early stages of reading. I think one of the things that anybody that spends any time in the classroom becomes quickly aware of is that there are lots of things going on in classrooms that tell kids how important reading is.

There are lots of things that are print driven, there are materials, there are instructions, there’s the amount of time during the day that is given to reading, there are all the books that are all over the place. There’s also the very obvious excitement of the kids that are progressing normally and doing well. All of these things tend to deliver a pretty powerful message to the child that is struggling that is very threatening and frightening; that you are not progressing as other kids are, you are not learning, you’re not unlocking this great mystery.

We have all of these words on the board, words on posters, words on paper, words in books… everywhere a kid turns in school they’re confronted with print. And if you see yourself being excluded from the process of becoming familiar with this, learning how it works, taking pleasure in it, being excited about being able to be autonomous and independent, then I think that’s a very potent emotional message that children get, and potentially a very damaging one. It’s difficult sometimes to pick this apart empirically, but certainly again, spending any amount of time in classrooms where children are working on beginning reading instruction you can almost watch children who are struggling begin to turn off and exhibit behaviors that are going to interfere with their learning; beginning to develop a set of defensive postures. Sometimes it looks like inattentiveness, sometimes it looks like, 'I don’t care,' sometimes it looks like 'I am interested in anything but this.' It can take a lot of different forms.

Nonetheless, you can see kids trying to do whatever it is they need to do to protect themselves in that situation because none of us are comfortable being one down all the time. If you are not learning to read, you are being left behind in probably the single most important process that occurs in early schooling because it’s the key to everything else that occurs. When you can’t read, you are lost the rest of the day, it’s not just during reading time. You’re also lost during all of the other times, except perhaps P.E. and recess, which might account for their popularity with some kids. Even though sometimes we might look at kids and say, ” Gee, I wish they valued this more. I wish they were more motivated to learn." And actually, I think that many of them are. They are just frightened. Failure is terrifying at that level, and not something to be taken lightly.

Shame Avoidance:

David Boulton: Lets go into that a little bit more, the fear is of the shame.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Yes.

David Boulton: And human beings generally tend to want to avoid things that bring about feelings of shame.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Absolutely. So, a lot of the behaviors that I described just a few minutes ago, essentially you can look at attempts to avoid situations where you’re going to be compared negatively to other children. Even just by yourself. I don’t want to imply that teachers are going around intentionally shaming kids, but it’s clear that the kids develop a sense of shame around their lack of capacity. And again, this manifests in lots of different ways: disinterest, defiance, inattentiveness, etc. Difficulties with reading aren’t the only reason for those sorts of behaviors, but it explains a surprising amount of it considering the difficulty that many kids have. In spite of the fact that the acquisition of reading skills goes fairly well, fairly smoothly, almost without a hitch for maybe half the kids, the other half are going to have struggled to one degree to another, ranging from mild to very severe, with the severity then impairing their performance in almost all areas of schooling.

David Boulton: Yes, and to the extent that they don’t feel good about their performance, that shame is associated with a certain kind of confusion. This learning to read challenge brings forth a kind of confusion that is unique and different than the other kind of confusions children encounter with spoken language and in their interactions with people. It’s different than their physical, somatic interactions with their environments.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Well, it is a very different sort of task. I think one of the things that we are the beneficiaries of at this point in time is an enormous amount of research into the act of reading and the acquisition of reading skills. One of the things that has become a fairly established conclusion is that reading is not a terribly natural process. This is not like the acquisition of language. We don’t witness the same level of discomfort in preschool children around their language skills because language, particularly conversational language, develops for the most part in the vast majority of children fairly naturally. We don’t have to go around exerting a tremendous amount of energy to teach kids how to communicate with us and with each other. Of course, there are always exceptions; kids with speech difficulties might have some very real issues around that. But for the most part we don’t see that. Reading is not as natural a process as it was once thought to be.

David Boulton: What about it is natural? You said, “It’s not terribly natural, it’s not as natural." But my sense is that it is radically unnatural.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Well, I think that is probably fair, given that human beings were around for a fairly substantial period of time before the development of print. That in itself tells us the fact that it’s not just something that comes with part of the biological package.

David Boulton: Right, and the unique code processing challenge of the English language is only five hundred years old. Only about twenty generations have been doing it at all.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Yes. I’d say, actually in contrast, it’s interesting that we ever did assume that it was a natural process, and that basically all we needed to do is provide structure and guidance and exposure to print and reading would happen. We know, in fact, that reading doesn’t happen that way for a pretty substantial number of kids. Now, for whatever reason, there are a substantial number of kids that regardless of what approach is taken, how careful we are, how careless we are, they learn to read. If we put them in a room with books and a little bit of instruction and guidance they’re fine.

On the other hand, we also have a very substantive number of children that experience mild to moderate difficulties in ways that impact their emotional development and their school performance. It would seem that based on what we know now, that when these deficits begin and are entrenched early on, they are very difficult to undo. The longitudinal studies that we have regarding the evolution of reading development suggest that if you are substantially impaired in first grade you are very, very likely to be substantially impaired in the fourth grade. And if that’s the case in fourth grade, you are probably looking at a school history of academic failure to one degree or another. So, it’s a fairly depressing picture when looked at in that light.

David Boulton: Which doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the development of an individual child, but rather the probabilities of the entire pattern of home, school, and world that contribute to making it very difficult for a child that experiences difficulty to escape that trajectory.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Exactly. It doesn’t really illuminate the specific parameters that contribute to that picture.

Statistical Models, Individual Instruction and Early Prevention:

David Boulton: On another track, we know that we can help ninety-five percent or more of all the children that are struggling if we met them with what they needed.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Absolutely. That is the encouraging thing. At this point in time we know a great deal more about, for instance, how to identify kids who are likely to be at risk. We know what the early markers of reading failure are. We know how to track those systematically, which gives us really critical information so that we can adjust instruction for kids as they proceed through school and not document their failure at the end of the year. We have access now to good continuous performance measures that give us the kind of information we need if we are going to adapt instruction for children and make it responsive to their individual needs, rather than just offering them a package of instruction and essentially saying, ‘Good luck, we’ll check at the end of the year to see if your doing okay.’

David Boulton: When we say ‘individual needs,' there’s a big difference between being in contact with an individual child and from that developing an assessment of needs based on actually connecting with them in sync as they struggle from the inside-out in this challenge, and what we are calling ‘individual needs’ as it fits over our aggregate statistical models of the population. For the most part, what we are talking about is still a statistical approximation of ‘individual needs.'

Dr. Alex Granzin: Absolutely. And that model and that conversation exist, in part, because of the structure of public schooling. The fact is that most elementary school teachers, depending on whether they’re in states that support reduced classroom sizes, are going to be confronted with providing instruction for between twenty-five and thirty children. At that level it’s often difficult to have the sort of individual relationship that you would want to have, for instance, with a student who was beginning to struggle and have difficulty. Given that scenario and the limitations on resources that I think are likely to continue, possibly even worsen, I think we are forced to adopt statistical models for when to implement the preventative measures for trying to do the absolute best that we can to reduce reading failure from the outset.

Again, there is a fairly substantial volume of literature in remedial and special education suggesting that remediation is really not the ideal way to go. The early prevention of failure is absolutely critical. We know a little bit more now about what we need to do if we want to try to remediate students who are failing, for instance, in second and third grade, but the level of effort and the intensity of effort needed at that point is considerable; and often, in all honesty, beyond the resources of many districts to provide to individual students. It’s very difficult because of the fiscal constraints.

So, we get back to looking at what can we do to determine as soon as possible when a student is going to be at risk for reading failure, and intervene in the most effective and efficient way? And then, obviously, do what we can for those students that don’t respond and that we know are experiencing not just academic failure, but emotional trauma as well.

Downward Spiral of Shame: A Maladaptive Feedback Cycle:

David Boulton: Let’s take another step into the emotional dimension. Are you familiar with affect work, like for example discussed in our interview with Donald Nathanson, where we talk about the ‘compass of shame’ and affects?

If a reader is struggling as their mind is trying to catch and stay entrained in the processing that is necessary to reading this code, and their frustration and confusion leads to them feel ashamed of themselves, or feeling bad about themselves, their attention becomes split. What they are processing is no longer the self-transparent code work. It now involves self-conscious feelings.

Dr. Alex Granzin: That’s right.

David Boulton: The moment that they enter such self-consciousness, it’s draining their brain's capacity to work the code.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Absolutely.

David Boulton: So, this leads to a downward spiral. The more that they become self-conscious in their reading, the harder the reading becomes. The harder the reading, the more self-conscious they become and this loop begins.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Absolutely.

David Boulton: Do you have a particular language for describing this?

Dr. Alex Granzin: Well, you have described it very nicely, I think. Basically, it is a very maladaptive feedback cycle, that you approach a task with anxiety because of concerns about your own performance and that distracts from your attention, your ability to focus on and process the information which is being provided, which impairs your performance more, which increases your anxiety and the cycle continues to amplify itself. I think that is what becomes then inappropriate behavior, intentional tuning out, doing anything that you can so that you give the appearance either that 'I don’t care about this,' or 'This isn’t an important activity, don’t try to tell me this is important, I know it’s not important because I am not doing well at it and I’m never going to do well at it and if I acknowledge it’s importance I would just have to sit here and be sad.'

We don’t work that way as human beings. We don’t acknowledge these sort of things. We have all these wonderful defenses that we put into play, which, unfortunately, many times don’t serve us very well. But we can see those at work all of the time. It’s very clear when you work, for instance, with students that have experienced more than a little reading failure, we know that one of the most important things that struggling readers can do as they begin to acquire the code is to read more. And one of the most difficult things to get them to do is to read more. How do we defeat that cycle? It’s very, very difficult. There are all sorts of products out there to try to get kids to read more and not just to acquire reading.

Reading is the Gateway For New Language and Vocabulary:

Multiple exposures to words builds vocabulary. As vocabulary grows, you enhance your capacity to participate in all of these content areas of discussion: science, social studies, history. All of this is going around you now and you’re increasingly being left out, even if you’re a poor reader, not just a non-reader; if you’re a kid who chooses not to read, if you’re the kind of youngster that is never going to pick up a book and is going to put it down and soon as you can after someone puts it in your hand. So, once again the cycle builds on itself.
 

Nation’s Greatest Learning Disability:

Reading Difficulty - Why Don't We Just Full Stop?

David Boulton: We’re not trying to pin it on schools or teachers or parents or any one thing. Rather, as a society it is our ignorance and our negligence that is perpetuating a relationship between children and this code and how we teach them to get into it that has these massive implications and that most of us aren’t paying very much attention to.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Right. I think that’s absolutely true, and it’s a very complex interaction between what’s provided at school, what the child brings to school, their language backgrounds, the amount of emphasis in the home that’s placed on reading, and the importance of reading.

So, there are a lot of factors there, but I think you’re right. As a practitioner at the ground level in the public school system watching kids longitudinally, watching what happens to kids that don’t learn to read well, kids that are less than proficient, I have often wondered why don’t we just stop everything when kids aren’t learning to read? I mean why are we even doing anything else? When kids don’t master this process why doesn’t the red light start flashing immediately and say, 'Wait a minute, we’re not moving on.' We’re not going to treat this as though it is some sort of a small problem that we can solve by just sending you over here for a few extra minutes a day and possibly monitoring your progress a little bit more closely and hoping for the best. 

Why aren’t we pulling out all of the stops and saying, 'Wait a minute, if you don’t learn to read there are so many disastrous consequences.' It would not be a good idea for kids never to get their early grounding in science or social studies, but I don’t know that the life consequences would be anywhere nearly as dramatic as they are for kids that don’t learn to read.

David Boulton: I like what you are saying. I agree there ought to be an emergency stop, red alert, we’ve got a problem here, we aren’t going anywhere until we do something about it.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Right, but that’s really not the response that we have. Again, that is not a choice typically made by an individual principal, by an individual teacher or by an individual parent. It’s almost as though the system imposes this limited solution on children and says that when you have difficulty with reading, this is the way we are going to respond to it.

Self-Reflective Abstract Capacity is Built by Reading:

David Boulton: Right, but look at what the stats are adding up to. In regards to what you were saying before about science and other things… sure we want kids to understand that, but the self-reflective abstract capacity to do that well is built by the reading process.

Dr. Alex Granzin: That’s right. It’s built into the reading process and if you don’t learn to read, ultimately, your acquisition of science information, historical information, political science, you name it, is all going to be extraordinarily limited by that.

David Boulton: So, to participate in the world, to have a good job, to understand science, to understand the complexity of the world, how you feel about yourself, all comes down to how well these children engage and survive and thrive in the course of learning to interface with this few hundred year old technological contrivance, a code.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Right. Cracking that code to gain access to these stories and information is absolutely critical. The code is a marvelous thing. It really allows us to, in a very simple way, to store and codify enormous amounts of information. But if you can’t access that information, because you don’t know the code, then you are also excluded from the incredible resource that that code has provided us with.

The Longer We Wait, The Harder It Gets:

David Boulton: Let's go back to the emergency stop for a second. By failing to do that, it’s like we’re allowing them to sink deeper and deeper away from being able to see the daylight; in a sense that the further behind they are and that we don’t pull the stop, the curriculum starts to get more and more complex and more dependent on their ability to read. So, if they’re having any kind of emotional reactions or they’re having any kind of struggle with respect to it, it’s going to get harder and harder.

Dr. Alex Granzin: Absolutely. I think that’s a logical conclusion that you would draw just from looking at the way schooling tends to proceed and the demands that are placed on the kids and what they are asked to do. We also know from some of the more fine grained remediation research that the longer we wait, the harder it is to make up these deficits as the kids slip behind in this language acquisition process.  

School Psychologists:

For instance, school psychologists are in an excellent position to provide support to schools that want to implement school wide monitoring and early assessment systems that identify very early on the deficits and critical skills that we know are related to reading acquisition, such as phonological awareness, and then to provide help with interventions that address those deficits.

Dr. Alex Granzin: I think one of the things that has made it difficult for us to have this conversation is that, somewhat tragically, educators have been embroiled for a very lengthy period of time arguing about how to best teach reading. Often our methodological differences have prevented us from acting cooperatively in the children’s best interest. It has been very difficulty to put aside these differences, as reading is a very politicized activity in schools. So much so, that often times it’s difficult to even have conversations about it in certain contexts because the feelings run so high. That if the conversation begins to take this, then what you’re telling me is that probably I am going to have to teach in this way or that way, or you’re telling me as a principal that I couldn’t promote this particular style of approach to reading and that would be extraordinarily unacceptable. I think we are working individually and organizationally to get beyond that. Thirty or forty years ago it was phonics verses Dick and Jane. Later it became whole language verses structured phonics instruction and we’re trying to move beyond that now.

We Have a Crisis on Our Hands:

Dr. Alex Granzin: It’s an enormous amount of money and the impact is absolutely huge.