Peabody elementary school has proudly served its community since its opening in 1928. When it became a charter school in 1992, claiming the 21st charter in the State of California (of now more than 1,300), it maintained its attendance boundary, keeping it the home school for the nearly 800 students that live within the enrollment area. As the largest elementary school in Santa Barbara, Peabody takes seriously its role in making a difference in the lives of the diverse student population that is highly reflective of the Santa Barbara community at large. One current effort to make just such a difference is the focus on and deep investment in literacy instruction that is grounded in a body of research called the science of reading.
Reading instruction is one of the most studied areas in education. In the past 50 years, that research has expanded to include findings from related fields such as psychology and neuroscience. Modern technology allows researchers to literally watch the brain work as it performs the act of reading, a skill that humans aren’t necessarily born to acquire like the way we are born to learn oral speech. Based on this rigorous research, Peabody teachers have committed to learning and training in the science of reading in order to better instruct all of their students.
This is important because prior to this work, many teachers were trained by their credential programs in a program called balanced literacy. Balanced literacy is an approach that has been widely used for a long time both locally and statewide. Balanced literacy often leaves out the explicit instruction of letter-sound correspondence and how those letters come together to make words. Due to the complexity of the English language, without this explicit instruction, students are at best left with compensatory strategies such as guessing the meaning of words based on pictures or other cues, or at worst left with gaps in their reading knowledge that they never overcome on their journey to be strong readers.