The Science of Reading, the Art of Education: Where Waldorf Meets Structured Literacy
By Abigail Diehl-Noble
We’re hearing a lot these days about “the science of reading”—a shorthand term for a large body of scientific research on how children learn to read. It includes data from at least the last 50 years, and as it trickles out into schools, this work is shaking up the educational status quo across the country.
Now that the results of all these studies are in, schools have a chance to hone instruction to better match the way children actually learn. Since that is one of the central tasks of Waldorf schools—teaching in ways that align with how children best retain and integrate information at each developmental stage—many of us in the Waldorf movement have been following these changes closely. But the results of this research aren’t necessarily what we read about in news reports, which have to simplify complex research into sound bites.
Here’s a summary of the science of reading so far:1 oral language is the foundation of written language, so all reading instruction ideally starts with immersing children in complex oral language and teaching them to pay close attention to sounds. From there, children need to learn to systematically map sounds onto written symbols, and then to blend these letters into syllables and words. All of this only translates into reading only when children can attach meaning—feelings, ideas, sensory experiences, and imagination—to the words and sentences they decode. Looking at books without being able to decode the words in them is a formula for frustration. Decoding words without knowing what they mean, or being able to connect words to experiences, is equally pointless.
In a vivid image provided by Holly Scarborough2, a groundbreaking researcher in the connection between oral language and early literacy, reading is represented as a rope with two main strands. The two threads are word recognition (separating and blending sounds, decoding words) and language comprehension (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and understanding of narrative).
The good news is that Waldorf education as it has traditionally been delivered offers most of the ingredients for successful reading. From early childhood circles, puppet shows, and free play, through philosophy discussion in high school, students in Waldorf students are steeped in complex oral language, an important component of literacy. Beginning with forest play and continuing through outdoor education, hands-on science, field trips and back-country expeditions in the upper grades, students are provided with experiential, movement-based education that allow them to attach vivid experiences to the words they read. And of course, from their earliest years through high school, students are engaged in the arts, from music to drama to painting to handwork. This huge variety of sensory, practical, and artistic experiences helps students to infuse words with feeling.
Poet Ezra Pound said, “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost degree.” From the first lesson in which they were guided to draw a picture and find a letter related to the story in it, Waldorf students experience letters and the written word as filled with meaning. They are eager apprentices to the power and potential of language.
Unfortunately, Waldorf schools haven’t always delivered on the promise to make that power accessible. Anecdotally, we knew that many of our students became powerful speakers, debaters, conversationalists, story tellers, and communicators. They mostly showed excellent comprehension of oral stories and informational presentations. They often (though not always) loved to read. And many became strong writers, leveraging their grasp of oral language, their excellent comprehension, and their quick memory for facts to summarize and persuade.
Also anecdotally, there were other truths about Waldorf students. Some of them were poor spellers and poor standardized test takers. Waldorf teachers prided ourselves on not “teaching to the test,” but some parents told us their kids weren’t just poor test takers: they were actually slow and inefficient readers, even though they loved books and stories. Worse, some of our students never fully cracked the code of reading, relying on their strong intuitions about oral language to try to decipher ever more complicated texts. It’s a part of our legacy that we need to acknowledge and use to motivate ourselves to better teaching in the future. Waldorf teachers, who have the highest intentions of unlocking every child’s potential to meet their own destiny, did not use all the best practices for teaching literacy and some of our students didn’t become strong readers. We didn’t know a better way.
Neither, it turns out, did most other teachers in most other settings. Nationwide, reading scores were declining significantly for at least a decade before the pandemic.3 The gap has only widened since.4 Reading specialists have been talking about the problem for a long time, but it’s only been widely shared with the public in the last few years. An award-winning podcast by journalist Emily Hanford called Sold a Story helped bring the issue to national attention.
It turns out our children’s inability to read well on a national scale is closely linked to the move away from phonics instruction, which began all the way back in the 1930s, towards a “whole language” instructional approach. This approach reached its zenith in the 1980s but stuck around well into the 21st century. The goal of whole language sounded great–teaching children the behaviors of skillful readers, getting good books into their hands sooner–but the result was that many children learned to guess at words instead of building a foundation of structured literacy that would let them continue to grow as readers. Often, these students started strong, seeming to learn to read, but then leveled off and struggled to read more complex texts in middle and high school. The strategies they had learned in the early grades, using picture cues and what they knew about the story to guess at words, only worked for simple texts. It didn’t allow them to become strong and fluent reader in the upper grades.
This happened in Waldorf schools too, though the children’s facility with narrative, excellent comprehension, conversational abilities, and elevated vocabulary may have masked the problem longer and made it harder to figure out what was going on. Our kids were very good at guessing what text said; having heard so many great stories, they knew what would probably come next! Anecdotally, we also saw that many of our students were good at pushing through difficulties. The will forces developed in early childhood and the problem-solving abilities honed in many different social and artistic contexts were all tools they could leverage in facing academic challenges. But many students simply did not have the tools they needed to crack the reading code.
What Waldorf schools have lacked in reading instruction is what most U.S. schools have lacked over the last several decades: a systematic, neurologically-based approach to mapping sound to symbol, and a clear sequence for teaching the underlying rules of the English language. When we provide that, and match it to the strong oral foundation and rich sensory and emotional experiences that are hallmarks of Waldorf education, we create the ideal environment for life-long literacy.
Critics of Waldorf education have often pointed to the later start of explicit instruction as the problem in the Waldorf approach to literacy. A slower start in itself isn’t necessarily a problem; other countries with a more gradual introduction to direct literacy instruction, including Finland, fare far better than the United States in all measures of literacy (and most other subjects).5 But the science of reading does suggest there are a couple of reasons to make a gentle start to explicit literacy in the last year of kindergarten–assuming, of course, that we can do so without compromising the essentials of our Waldorf Early Childhood program: free, creative, dramatic play; an aesthetic, harmonious sensory environment’ strong, healthy rhythms of play, work, and rest; and meaningful work alongside a teacher who is worthy of imitation.
At Lake Champlain Waldorf School, we began to make significant changes to our approach to literacy in 2019. Today, our programs include a gentle introduction to formal aspects of literacy beginning in Early Childhood. But what hasn’t changed is the essence of our education: the Early Childhood day remains focused on physical and emotional development through free play and work in our beautiful indoor and outdoor Early Childhood classrooms.
We have incorporated two small changes in our mixed-age kindergartens. The first is that all indoor classrooms include a small library of high-quality picture books and a literacy center with paper, crayons, tape, and other office supplies where children who choose to can “write” and share books. Another change is that all Early Childhood circles, in addition to the traditional songs, rhymes, finger plays, and movement, include a few minutes a day of phonemic awareness work. We find that this oral language play blends easily with other circle activities.
Our program for rising first graders includes more formal instruction in literacy. While this approach is a departure from the traditional Waldorf approach, we find this model strikes a good balance between the play-based, language-rich traditional Early Childhood Waldorf experience, and the needs of today’s six-year-olds.
We brought this change in large part because we find that most six-year-olds are developmentally ready to learn to read. They are full of anticipation for this milestone, and still largely in the imitative stage of development, making them ready to take in and able to repeat sounds exactly as the teacher produces them. Further, early literacy work requires a lot of repetition that can feel tedious at a later stage of childhood, but is exciting and filled with wonder for the six-year-old. Children in the last year of kindergarten are also generally highly motivated to please the adults they love; that relationship provides a strong foundation for beginning the hard—but oh-so-rewarding—work of literacy.
In our Early Childhood, after a typical morning in the mixed-age kindergarten, the rising first graders gather together in the afternoon with an teacher who is trained in Extra Lesson and early literacy. In this program, following lunch and and a quiet story time, the children receive more explicit instruction in separating and blending oral sounds; draw letters in sand, on chalk boards that guide letter formation, and on paper; play with letter cards and wooden letters; work on pencil grip using crayons, and practice writing their name. They delight in this work and approach it each day with joy–they are so excited to be learning to read and write.
It’s important to say what isn’t happening in this classroom: there are no desks, no worksheets, and no stressed children. There are not even main lesson books. The children work at the same tables at which they need dough and paint earlier in the day. Their equipment is sandboxes, mini-chalkboards, crayons and paper. Their lessons are short—20 minutes at a time or so—and always start with movement, since writing begins as movement captured on paper.
These literacy activities are interspersed with engaging activities from the Extra Lesson curriculum, including integrative floor exercises, gross motor movements, balance and core work, as well as auditory and visual games. The day ends with a half hour or more of free play in the forests and around the school.
All of these elements together – a gentle introduction to literacy and the attention to physical development that characterize Waldorf Early Childhood – are building a foundation of success for the whole child.
In addition to meeting the children where they are in the last year of kindergarten, we’ve seen another benefit to a slightly earlier start to literacy instruction. It allows us the time to move unhurriedly through all the elements of sequenced literacy instruction, and still have children master literacy fundamentals by the end of third grade.
Teaching the whole sequence of structured literacy means moving through many skills, including
• Developing phonemic awareness (the ability to play with sounds; being able to distinguish and manipulate the units of sound within words)
• Grasping sound-symbol correspondence (e.g., associating the letter A with the first sound in apple)
• Blending letters to sound out syllables and short consonant-vowel-consonant words
• Learning the rules for combining syllables to decode multisyllabic words
• Connecting decoding (the rules of reading) to encoding (the rules of spelling); using knowledge of phonics to correctly spell words
• Understanding conventional English syntax and grammar
• Understanding morphology: using meaningful parts of words to spell and figure out meaning of new words (prefixes, suffixes, base, and root words)
• Building vocabulary through reading and other experiences with words
• Learning reading comprehension strategies for different types of text
These skills need to be practiced, or “over-rehearsed,” to become automatic, so that children can focus their mental energy on the meaning of what they’re reading, rather than on the work of decoding.
The whole sequence, taught in large- and small-group settings, with ample time for practice, usually takes about four years, allocating 60-90 minutes over the course of the day (this time includes storytelling, language play, orally based phonological work in the early years, and independent reading in the older grades). Some children will understand it much faster than others, and a certain number will need one-on-one or targeted small group instruction to master reading. But the great majority will benefit from sequenced and systematic instruction over a period of several years, and with that kind of instruction, most will become fluent readers able to tackle and make meaning out of a variety of rich middle grades texts. Students with this kind of foundation are also well positioned to keeping growing as readers through their lives, because they’ve learned a lot about how to learn about words. This metacognition serves them well in middle school and beyond.
The traditional Waldorf timeline of waiting until first grade to begin any formal literacy work means that we are teaching foundational reading skills through fourth grade. That requires fourth graders, after the nine-year-old change, to be practicing rote skills. Ten-year-olds are not ideally suited to such work; they want to read and talk about books for information and for stories, not push through decodable readers to learn how to read accurately and fluently. By introducing the letters in the last year of kindergarten, we aim to complete foundational literacy instruction by the end of third grade, and be working in a different way with the ten-to-eleven-year-old. Offering a developmental education means that we attend to the needs of the child across the whole spectrum of childhood; this change in our curriculum allows us to serve our students better in the middle and upper grades, as well as meet them where they are in kindergarten.
In the past, when we didn’t know about the science of reading, teachers might have moved to full-length connected text (chapter books) in third grade regardless of where the students were in their phonetic understanding. Now, with more data, we know that to skip through the recommended sequence of instruction will leave many learners struggling later. It’s not that they can’t learn to read without the full sequence, just as children who never crawl will still learn to walk. But Waldorf teachers understand that skipping any stage in a neurologically-based sequence of development comes at a cost, and often makes things more challenging later.
An important layer to this learning is that human beings are not born “prewired” to process written language; writing is a relatively modern technology, and a skill that has to be mapped onto our innate oral language development. Nonetheless, it follows a clear sequence based on our brain development and function, and when our literacy instruction follows that science, it is more efficient and “clicks” for more children. Some children will develop the interconnected neurological systems needed to read and write easily. For others, it will be challenging. Students with dyslexia work twice as hard to develop an accurate reading circuitry system in the brain.6 Allowing more time to develop these neurological connections before the nine-year-change supports all students, but it is a special gift to those whose brains process written symbols differently. Starting our instruction in kindergarten gives us time to identify those who will need extra support and provide it before a window closes around the end of third grade.
One of the strongest pieces of data provided by the reading research is that children who aren’t reading by the end of third grade are at much higher risk for never reading fluently.7 Again, it’s not that kids can’t learn to read after third grade; it’s just that the developmental changes that come between nine and ten make it considerably more difficult, and often involve greater emotional cost, as children, newly self-aware, are hindered in their reading by feelings of difference, embarrassment, and self-consciousness.
Ideally, we want to provide the full scope of instruction to all children, so that as many as possible can access reading. We want our students to have both the beauty and wonder of stories, and the skills required to decode them for themselves.
At the Lake Champlain Waldorf School we believe that Waldorf schools, which have so much right about learning to read, have a few adjustments to make so that the traditional Waldorf curriculum can meet children as they are today. The heart of Waldorf education has always been to meet the children in front of us, giving them what they need for the time in which they live.
With that in mind, our school has embraced a structured literacy approach, training all of our teachers in the science of reading, and adding our Waldorf methods to structured literacy methods in order to provide a joyful, enlivened, child-centered literacy instruction starting in the last year of kindergarten. We teach the foundations of literacy through third grade, infusing them with imagination and the arts as we know so well how to do. This frees us to move into next-level work with our fourth and fifth graders, who learn how to ask harder questions, research answers through first-hand interviews and books, and read and write in a variety of genres. Our middle school students build on those skills, conducting internet research, reading complex fiction and nonfiction, and writing essays, lab reports, poetry, short stories, and more. Our students are well-equipped to access and produce all of these complex texts because they know the way written language works. They don’t have to guess; they are empowered to discover.
In the past, Waldorf education made choices about our instruction that were based in what we now see as a false binary. It seemed like we had to choose between providing children with a strong physical foundation and ensouled education in early childhood and the early grades, or we could teach them to read before they were nine years old, when they are developmentally most open to this task. That no longer seems like a choice we have to make. Using all we know about relationship-based, arts-integrated education, and drawing from the science of reading, we believe we are providing the best of both worlds.
Resources
1 Jennifer S. Ray, “Structured Literacy Supports All Learners,” Texas Association for Literacy Education Yearbook, 2020.
2 “Scarborough’s Reading Rope: A Groundbreaking Infographic,” International Dyslexia Association, April 2018.
3 Erica Green and Dana Goldstein, “Reading Scores on National Exams Decline in Half the States,” New York Times, October 30, 2019.
4 Sarah Mervosh and Ashley Wu, “Math Scores Fell in Every State, and Reading Dipped on National Exam,” New York Times, October 24, 2022.
5 LynNell Hancock, “Why Are Finland’s Schools So Successful?” Smithsonian Magazine, September 2011.
6 Jennifer Ray, p. 37.
7 Anne E. Casey, “Early Warning! Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters,” Special Report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2010.