Published: March 19, 2007 01:36 am            

Q&A: Literacy volunteer returns to LHS

A distinguished Lockport High School graduate came home last week to inspire his alma mater with a pep talk.

Dr. Wayne Secord, a senior research scientist in the Department of Speech and Hearing at Ohio State University, spent this past Friday with Lockport teachers and administrators delving into literacy instruction. The nationally recognized expert on communication, language and early literacy worked for the district free of charge, bringing along two other top-level experts to talk with staff about best teaching practices.

A member of the LHS class of 1963, Secord still makes the trip home to Lockport fairly often, since he has a large family here. After a bite at his favorite diner, Chet’s, on Thursday, he stopped by the US&J to chat about the subject that brought him home in the middle of the NCAA tournament.

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QUESTION: What are you doing professionally for Lockport schools?

ANSWER: Lockport wants to become a model school district and the only way they can do that is to get kids to be fluent readers by third grade. If everybody is a fluent reader by the time they hit third grade, it means they won’t get left behind in school.

Lockport has been good to me. I learned a great deal here and this isn’t trying to pay Lockport back; it’s trying to pay it forward. We’re trying to help build better literacy teams, help (school staff) understand and integrate theory into practice better and help them individually become more inspired and better at their own job.

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Q: What makes a model school district?

A: What’s really critical, in the kindergarten, first- and second-grade years, is to help teachers become instructional leaders and build literacy teams, so that every single child gets the kinds of early literacy and language experiences they need to “cross over the bridge” in third grade.

Crossing over the bridge means that by the time the children get to third grade, they are able to construct, interact and interpret meaning in gradually increasing levels of abstraction across the school curriculum. When they hit third grade, they have to be able to read, write, think, get meaning, do it more abstractly and be ready to deal with content at higher levels of abstraction. That’s what grades three, four and five start doing.

If you want to ensure no child is left behind, you make sure that he has the early language and communication experiences that they get through good preschools and lots of early book experiences. If they cross over the bridge in third grade, we won’t have to worry about them too much more.

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Q: Is teaching reading more complicated than it used to be?

A: It’s not harder, kids just come to school prepared so differently. We’re not like we used to be; there have been huge changes in our society. Our kids went to school ready to learn because we read to them, we interacted with them, we talked to them. Today a lot of children don’t get the early communication and language experiences that they got when they had parents at home all the time.

When kids are talked to and read to, they learn a lot about the language, the reading process. Just sitting down with a book in their hand and being read to and talked to, they learn how stories are organized, how words (are organized). They listen and they talk about it, so they learn their vocabulary words.

All of those early interactive language experiences that occur around books and text are so critical. The extent to which a child is read to in the early preschool years is probably the single most predictive variable for reading success in school.

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Q: What’s driving the literacy push?

A: One of the problems facing the United States is the loss of intellectual capital. At Ohio State, one-third of our pHds are from foreign countries. The old way of doing things continues to be wrong.

How effective kids are as language users is absolutely critical to their success. Thinking is the engine and language is the fuel. How good people are with listening, speaking, reading and writing will dictate the quality of jobs they get in the future. People who (aren’t literate) will work at lower paying, unskilled jobs because there are so many more of them, and they will not be able to pay the kinds of taxes that in this country pays for their own life cycle costs. The more poor we have, the more the larger part of the population will have to pay for them — and the more we will distance ourselves competitively from the rest of the nations.

We can counteract that by building the best public school systems we can. It starts right here in the Lockport public schools by making sure every single kid is a good reader.

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Q: How did you get involved in your field?

A: Well, that’s easy. I wanted to be a major league baseball player and that didn’t work. I wanted to be Walter Cronkite; I don’t know why that didn’t work. In college, I ran into a bunch of people who stuttered severely, and I found out that to help (them) you had to become a speech language pathologist. I graduated from Ohio State and became a speech language pathologist; I worked in public schools for about seven years, with all kinds of kids.

While I was getting my master’s degree I knew a professor who was an expert in child language and I realized that’s my area, because if you really want to help somebody, become an expert in child language.

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Q: What’s your ‘read’ on Lockport school performance?

A: I was impressed when we got the (data). Many of their schools are doing quite well, so it gives me a great deal of pride, having grown up here, to see how well the district is doing.

The test scores coming out at grades three through eight are getting better, and that means the teachers in K through three are doing their job. Because it isn’t just the teaching in three through eight that does it, it’s giving those three through eight teachers the children who can read, write listen and speak effectively.

If we ensure that kids in K through two succeed highly in their early literacy training, and ensure those kids can cross over that bridge in grade three, Lockport will be a model school district. I guarantee it.

        

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