Ortis Hamminggil, PBIS, and the Science of Reading

Children naturally want to learn. They want to make sense of their environment. They naturally want to create meaning with print. However, when you teach children in ways that don’t align with their natural inclination, you make learning harder. You create more frustration and failures. And when children communicate their frustration with their behavior, you use PBIS to try to make the behaviors go away. You seek to suppress and correct the behaviors for which you are largely responsible. You are addressing the effect instead of the cause – but you (Emily Hanford, Louisa Moats, and SoR ideologists) are the cause. I am not saying that bad SoR reading instruction is the cause of all bad behavior. I am not saying that PBIS should never be used. But I am saying that when students are engaged in their learning and when they are enjoying what they’re doing, and when they are successful at what they’re doing, and when learning is something they do instead of something that’s done to them … there are far, far, far fewer behavior problems and much more learning. I'm just saying.