This is a question that baffles me. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that most teachers are doing their very best for students. So, there must be a (student-centered) reason teachers use the methods they do.
In conversations with colleagues, some have noted that certain instructional practices appear to produce faster results. Teachers may adopt them to help students catch up quickly, hoping this will allow them to engage more fully in core instruction and boost their confidence and motivation. That made a lot of sense to me. And yet, it is possible that some strategies offer quick wins but don’t stick or scale—because they’re shortcuts.
It’s a bit like teaching a child to swim freestyle by having them mimic the motions they see—circling their arms, kicking their legs. They might manage to get across the pool, which gives the appearance of success. But without learning proper technique—how to rotate their body, coordinate breathing with strokes, or maintain a high elbow during the pull—they’ll tire quickly, develop inefficient habits, and hit a performance ceiling they can’t easily overcome. The shortcut lets them move forward, but it doesn’t lay the foundation for becoming a strong swimmer over time.
Then I came across this research reference in Claude Goldenberg’s Substack – which is a treasure trove of insight; well worth a look if you are interested in literacy research and policy.
“Children read more words accurately in context than in isolation during self-teaching; however, children had better retention for words learned in isolation. Furthermore, this benefit from learning in isolation was larger for less skilled readers.” (emphases added)
This helped me understand why teachers might perceive that students taught with balanced literacy methods are picking things up more quickly—and in some ways, the research supports that perception. But picking something up isn’t the same as learning it optimally. There’s no reliable way for a teacher to know whether a student is truly putting a written word into long-term memory (part of a process known as “orthographic mapping”) or simply figuring it out, at least partially, from context. In both cases, the student may say the word aloud, but those who processed the full word, taking in all of the letters, will store it more efficiently for later retrieval. Conversely, students who used context clues to read the word are less likely to remember how to read it correctly when they encountered in print again. Without orthographic mapping, the word may be read correctly once; but it is more likely to be forgotten by the time the student sees it again.
This research doesn’t suggest that vocabulary is best learned in isolation—in fact, the opposite is true: words are most deeply understood when encountered in rich, meaningful contexts. What this research suggests is that the visual form of a word—that is, its orthographic representation—is most securely encoded into long-term memory when, on initial encounters with the word, decoding is used to map a word’s spelling to its pronunciation.
Students may rely on context to different degrees, which research suggests can take attention away from the task of mapping a word’s pronunciation to what it looks like in print, which is so critical to retaining the word long term. The bottom line is we can’t predict or observe which student does what. Thus, one instructional implication is that it is a good idea to challenge students to attend to the individual (decontextualized) word form and think about its pronunciation while paying close attention its spelling.
Shortcuts may look promising in the moment, but in the long run, they can lead students in the wrong direction entirely. Still, I don’t think teachers are wrong in what they observe—only that their observations (like those of any human) have limits. Reading happens inside the brain, and not all of it is visible. That’s where research insights can help.
I wish we spoke more respectfully about the validity of what teachers notice and used research not to dismiss their observations but to understand and build on them. Honestly, I wish more researchers brought the same curiosity to teachers’ insights as they do to more technical questions. That kind of curiosity—applied to understanding why people do what they do—could go a long way improving both research and practice, benefiting more students as a result. It would help us move beyond assumptions of ill intent, like the idea that teachers are ignorant or lazy, and instead open the door to dialogue that sparks new questions.
Teachers’ instinct to give children a sense of success in reading is vital—but it must be balanced with the imperative to build a strong foundation. How can we achieve both equally important goals at once?
This question brings to mind research–practice partnerships (RPPs), a model close to my heart designed to bridge education research and classroom practice. These collaborations gained traction in the early 2000s amid concerns that traditional research was too detached from day-to-day realities of classrooms. I have wondered whether these partnerships — when targeting specific, stubborn challenges related to reading instruction — might help us address problems more pragmatically rather than through value-driven debates, and ultimately help us move beyond the reading wars. In sum, learning to swim well, to read well, or to produce research insights that truly serve students takes no shortcuts.
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