{"id":245,"date":"2026-10-08T00:37:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T00:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/?p=245"},"modified":"2026-10-08T00:37:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T00:37:14","slug":"i-was-the-teacher-and-the-mom-who-had-been-trained-in-the-very-practices-that-would-later-fail-my-own-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/2026\/10\/08\/i-was-the-teacher-and-the-mom-who-had-been-trained-in-the-very-practices-that-would-later-fail-my-own-child\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI was the teacher and the mom who had been trained in the very practices that would later fail my own child\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/misspurcell.substack.com\/p\/i-met-lucy-calkins-at-the-reading?r=46qttl&#038;utm_medium=ios\">Missy Purcell:<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lucy Calkins was a huge part of my preservice teacher training at the University of Georgia. I still have my copy of&nbsp;<em>The Art of Teaching Writing<\/em>. Later, my district introduced me to Fountas and Pinnell\u2019s Guided Reading. Balanced literacy wasn\u2019t something sitting on the fringes of my professional life. It was thoroughly embedded in how I had been taught to think about literacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I believed it, and I taught it with fidelity, and then I had a child with dyslexia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anyone who has been through that knows that it changes the way you look at everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I watched a system that was supposed to teach my child to read cling to practices that didn\u2019t teach him to read. I was actually told that the balanced literacy approaches being used in his school were appropriate for children with dyslexia. I have emails from that time explaining that they weren\u2019t going to focus on sounding words out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I still get emotional thinking about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now I know what my child needed. I know what the research says. And I know how deeply entrenched this methodology has become in our schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So standing in the same physical space as Lucy Calkins at a conference devoted to advancing the science of reading was complicated for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For clarity, I don\u2019t have a problem with Lucy Calkins learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Everyone should be learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If someone discovers that what they believed, taught, promoted, or sold does not align with the evidence, I absolutely want them sitting in the room learning something different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But learning creates a responsibility to act on your new knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lucy and I had a short conversation at the conference. She talked about teachers learning all this information and then having to go back to their districts and figure out how to actually implement it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I kept thinking: Teachers have been trying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Missy Purcell: Lucy Calkins was a huge part of my preservice teacher training at the University of Georgia. I still have my copy of&nbsp;The Art of Teaching Writing. Later, my district introduced me to Fountas and Pinnell\u2019s Guided Reading. Balanced literacy wasn\u2019t&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245\/revisions\/246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedso.io\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}