THE OLD PEDAGOGY - Chalk and Talk n.
Derogatory term used to describe the traditional model of
classroom instruction, in which a professor delivers a
monologue, punctuated by chalkboard scrawling, before a passive
group of students.
Teaching Dialect Speakers, who do not know the language, to
read, with phonics, whole language or a balanced-reading
approach
while using culturally irrelevant material that has simple
short sentences and small words, not real literature, has not
raised reading levels or changed literacy statistics in the
past 20 years.
Neither has hoping that dialect speakers who are learning the
alphabet will be able to decode not just the beginning of the
word but also the middle and the end of the words nor hoping
that somehow these students will learn to internalize the
rules of language, that they don't speak.
The schools have a strategy to test well enough to receive
federal dollars by diagnosing more and more dialect speakers
with learning disabilities and moving them into special
education.
Special education children are exempt from the state
assessment tests. Their absence improves the schools' scores.
University departments of education and the textbook
publishing industry all promote a failed pedagogy, but they
have managed successfully to keep the supply chain intact.
University research departments get federal grant funds, but
do not conduct research and develop materials that incorporate
the new pedagogy.
It is just business as usual for the last 50 years.
One solution that has been demonstrated to work . . .
is to integrate literacy, music and technology into the classroom
using indigenous playground poetry to bridge from the home language to
the standard using a cross curricular, thematic reading module that
has culturally relevant content.
This outstanding resource was created to explain the connections
between human evolution, the brain, body, music, speech, and literacy.
For the first time, you have 10 pages of selected and compiled
research that I have made available in one place for teachers,
professors, parents, policy makers, and politicians who care about
literacy.
