When Phonics is not Enough

The question for any program is when is it right for you…for your students, teachers, school, district. This blog is RAVE-O’s first Bill of Rights, that can guide answers to that question.

RAVE-O is right:

When Phonics is not enough. Over a decade of gold-standard, randomized control-treatment studies funded by NICHD and published in peer-review journals demonstrates that RAVE-O’s emphases on the multiple components of the reading brain (including but going beyond phonics) results in more gains than only phonics-based programs or classroom “business as usual”. These gains were found in multiple reading processes ---including decoding accuracy and fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Thus  the RAVE-O program includes analytic and synthetic phonics  and work on orthographic patterns in its daily routines, but explicitly connects them to the other essential processes  like semantic, syntactic, and morphological components that contribute to reading, particularly fluency and comprehension. Together we refer to this as the multi-componential POSSUM approach in RAVE-O. In addition, the 30-minute format of RAVE-O Lessons allows it to be integrated with existing phonics programs in a school. 

RAVE-O is right:

When a more comprehensive understanding of the Science of Reading  (SOR) is important. The same RCT intervention studies described above are a foundational part of the SOR and expand the too narrow conceptualization of SOR as largely phonics and phoneme awareness. Indeed there is a rich, long history of  contributions from  many disciplines that should be understood as part of the SOR. Further, since the original Five Pillars of Reading were articulated two decades ago, considerable research has expanded how we think about fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. It is this expanded knowledge that RAVE-O represents in its daily lessons, its scope and sequence, and its incorporation of research on the heterogeneity of dyslexia.

RAVE-O is right:

When a greater emphases on FLUENCY is required. One of the most significant changes in the translation from research to practice in the classroom and to intervention in dyslexia is the expansion of our understanding of fluency. While in the past fluency was often treated as a matter of speed of decoding with repeated reading as its typical treatment, cumulative research by us and our colleagues illustrates the many contributions made by  all the POSSUM processes, particularly morphology, semantics, and syntax. Thus there are often successfully decoding readers who do not understand the meaning of the word or how it functions in a sentence. English is a morpho-phonemic writing system, yet most of our work is necessarily but insufficiently directed to the phonemic components.  RAVE-O  attempts to address these missing elements in our interventions by daily emphasizing the meanings (often many in primer vocabularies), the grammatical function, and the changes  morphemes make to a word. Further RAVE-O helps children retrieve their cumulative knowledge of words ever more efficiently through daily routines. The fact that our research shows significant gains in fluency at word and text level is testimony to its effectiveness. Equally important to RAVE-O’s emphasis on Fluency is that second fact: that the great majority of individuals with dyslexia have pronounced fluency weaknesses.

RAVE-O is right:

When an understanding of How the English Language Works is important. The English language is a beautiful, complex accumulation of history’s never ending effects on its words, its grammar, its changing uses in oral and written forms. As Carol Chomsky described, all children have a great deal to learn in the acquisition and development of written English. As our census data describe, the number of our bilingual, multi-lingual students is increasing along with our societal  need to preserve their cultural and linguistic backgrounds as they acquire a new one. RAVE-O was not originally created as an intervention for the teaching of written English. It was the observations of teachers in schools where most of the children were Spanish speaking that we learned the usefulness of the RAVE-O approach for propelling knowledge about the structure of written English. The teachers told us that the RAVE-O students learned English better than the other children. Further, teachers from Japan have used RAVE-O to help their students learn English. We have no published research on the observations by these teachers. As researchers and practitioners,  we need pilot projects and future  RCT studies to replicate these observations.  That said, our present position is that we help any student learn how English works from our emphases on meanings and meaning making, to the often neglected knowledge about syntax and morphemes. 

RAVE-O is right:
When  educational goals and outcomes include students who are more engaged and whose assets and strengths are integrated in their learning. One of the most important aspects of past successes in the original RAVE-O was the way our students enjoyed the program. As one second grader opined, “I don’t like reading, but I really like RAVE-O”. With our intentionally whimsical characters who teach everything from polysemy (Ms.MIM the loveable spider) to comprehension strategies (T-Lex the three-headed dinosaur), we strive to bring joy to the learning of systematic strategies for learning to read. Within every lesson there are admittedly transparent ways to incorporate the strengths of learners from art and dramatic charades to motoric exercises aimed at blending. 

RAVE-O is right:
When the instructional materials for teachers is optimally efficient and the educational materials for students are multi-sensory-based and largely print. It is part of the research about what is now called implementation science that we learn what works and doesn’t work in classroom practice. Our last series of studies showed us that the classic RAVE-O with all its multiple cards, manuals,  and teaching materials for teachers was not efficient. The new RAVE-O brings everything teachers use to teach in a highly organized digital portal. From assessment materials to scripted daily lessons to Letters from the Author (Professional development about everything taught and why), the teacher portal makes organizing each day a matter of minutes. 

On the other hand, another direction of our research described in my last book, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, shows how important print materials are for the development of reading, particularly the development of what I call the Biliterate Brain that teaches reading largely through print, with digital activities largely to complement and/or practice for automaticity.

RAVE-O is right:

When teachers who are untrained in SOR, but well-trained in methods like balanced literacy need an onramp to a more integrated method of teaching. In a recent paper by me for Shanker Institute called “Elbow Room”, I use RAVE-O’s emphases on both Science and Story as a way to invite teachers unfamiliar with SOR to see how their emphases on vocabulary and authentic literature can be integrated in an intervention. The ultimate goal of RAVE-O are fluent, comprehending, deep readers who use their  background knowledge, inferential and critical analytic process, and their perspective-taking capacities for deepening their own thought. The E in the new RAVE-O stands for Empathy. RAVE-O is an evolving example of how the strengths of teachers and students can be incorporated in our instruction.