"The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading.
"But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary."
Ultimately, this sounds like a difficulty in translating research into application. The cueing theory was incomplete but has taken over because it usually works. The newer theory is better, but has to fight its way in.
Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.
> The cueing theory was incomplete but has taken over because it usually works.
Except it doesn't.
> The newer theory is better, but has to fight its way in.
The “newer” theory is one of the two older theories mentioned in the article, both of which work better in practice and well as having better support in terms of research on how people actually read that the three-cue approach.
Three-cues seems to have taken off because it was easy to frame in terms of being a broad holistic approach at a time when that was fashionable for ideological/aesthetic reasons, and now it's gotten entrenched minds share and a bunch of commercial interests around it making it hard to dislodge organically. Kind of like MBTI only more prone to being abused where it actually matters.
> Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.
It's actually fairly directly addressed, as the vendors of both material for teaching reading and educational material and training on teaching reading are among those shoveling the debunked woo.
And in many cases it's not a matter of what teachers choose, but what district administrators have chosen and purchased decades ago.
> Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.
Absolutely. And actually, the breakdown starts with teaching education, where many classroom teachers are taught how to teach broadly, but not the sort of (more specialized) subject knowledge that lets you get inside a student's head to see where the errors are coming from. Elizabeth Green's book "Building A Better Teacher" was eye-opening to me.
"But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary."
Ultimately, this sounds like a difficulty in translating research into application. The cueing theory was incomplete but has taken over because it usually works. The newer theory is better, but has to fight its way in.
Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.