Introduction
After a decade of working in public education and seeing the effort classroom teachers, intervention teachers and support staff put in to supporting struggling learners, I found the degree of failure in developing reading proficiency among young students alarming. I began a personal professional development journey in 2017 that evolved into my enrollment in the VIU M.Ed Leadership program and the topic of teacher perspectives on reading instruction in British Columbia.
Background
British Columbia’s 2016 curriculum reflects a Balanced Literacy instructional approach to Language Arts in general, and reading in particular. Research indicates that holistic, discovery-based orientations (whole-language and Balanced Literacy) towards teaching reading do not reflect the neurological processes of learning to read. Neuroscience has contributed a brain-based process of proficient reading: that the brain needs to connect three things when learning to read: the individual speech sounds in words, letters and letter combinations that represent individual speech sounds, and the meaning of a word that is in a learner’s oral vocabulary. Instruction that explicitly teaches sound-symbol connections is supportive of proficient reading.
Purpose
The primary goal of my study is to understand what approaches to reading instruction are currently being used in B.C.’s classrooms. In locations that have shifted away from Balanced Literacy and/or Whole Language approaches, the study aims to understand where the impetus for change originated.
Through the study, I hope to learn how instructional change occurs when pedagogical issues have a polarizing and combative history. Ideally, this will inform my understanding of how teachers and administrators can best lead learning in the B.C. context.
Methods
The study will use a survey with multiple choice questions. The survey will be distributed to teachers in British Columbia via social media; those who fit the target demographic of grade K-3 teachers as well as Special Education teachers, Intervention / Specialist teachers, and pre-service teacher candidates will be invited to participate.
