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According to research, some instructional methods for teaching reading are more effective than others. Find out what the National Reading Panel’s review of the research revealed about best practices in reading instruction.

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Reading 101: Self-Paced Learning Modules

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Core knowledge about reading is a key to effective literacy instruction. Our free, self-paced learning modules can help you deepen your understanding of the building blocks of reading and writing.

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Science of Reading Virtual Workshop | Really Great Reading

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We specialize in partnering with schools and districts to build custom implementation support plans. Including planning, training, and ongoing support

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Join us on Wednesday, September 13, at 6:30 p.m. CT, when Laura Stewart, Chief Academic Officer and Anella Wetter, Chief Sales Officer, will showcase a different approach to assessment and intervention instruction that eliminates the 'now what'.

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Literacy Webinars for Teachers and Educators | 95 Percent Group

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Our literacy webinars for teachers and educators can help drive change in your school or district. Dive into our recorded literacy webinars here.

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Welcome to FCRR! We are dedicated to ensuring that all children are reading and succeeding in school. Teachers, instructional coaches, clinicians, principals, and other school staff are critical to achieving that vision. Here, educators can find resources to support their knowledge and practice. FCRR invites you to use the resources below to make evidence-based and evidence-informed decisions to improve reading outcomes for all learners.

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Welcome to FCRR! We are dedicated to ensuring that all children are reading and succeeding in school. Teachers, instructional coaches, clinicians, principals, and other school staff are critical to achieving that vision. Here, educators can find resources to support their knowledge and practice.

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As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. "For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading," recalls Weaver. "And we hated it."

The teachers felt like curriculum robots-and pushed back. "This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do," says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. "So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out." It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. "Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way," he says.

Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. "In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading-that can't be maintained in the society," says Weaver, who received an early and vivid lesson in the value of literacy in 1984 after his cousin got out of prison and told him the other inmates stopped harassing him when they realized he could read their mail to them. "It has been an unmitigated disaster." In January 2021, the local branch of the NAACP filed an administrative petition with the Oakland unified school district (OUSD) to ask it to include "explicit instruction for phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension" in its curriculum.

Read More: The 100 Best Children's Books of All Time

Weaver and his co-petitioners-including civil rights, educational, and literacy groups-want schools to spend more time in the youngest grades teaching the sounds that make up words and the letters that represent those sounds. His petition is part of an enormous rethink of reading instruction that is sweeping the U.S. So far this year, five states have passed laws that require training for teachers in phonics-based reading techniques, adding to the 13 that passed such laws last year. And in May, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that elementary schools in the biggest district in the country would be required to adopt a phonics-based reading program.

The timing for such a dramatic change feels especially challenging. Elementary-school teachers are already having to recalibrate after two years of disruption; vicious fighting about public-health mandates as well as what kids should be taught about race and gender; and a widespread parental freak-out about how little their children have learned during the pandemic. Now the most fundamental skill that society asks them to pass along is also being completely shaken up.

But advocates say it cannot wait: in 2019, even before the pandemic upended instruction, only 35% of fourth-graders met the standards for reading proficiency set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an even lower number than in 2017. Only 21% of low-income students (measured by whether they qualify for free school lunch), 18% of Black students, and 23% of Hispanic students can be considered on track for reading by fourth grade. These numbers have been low for decades, but the pandemic has given the dismal results extra urgency. "There have been choices made where our children were not in the center," says Weaver. "We abandoned what worked because we didn't like how it felt to us as adults, when actually, the social-justice thing to do is to teach them explicitly how to read."

While reading is a foundational skill, it is not a natural one. Given enough time around other humans, the vast majority of youngsters will learn to walk upright and talk. For most children, however, recognizing that certain squiggles on a page or screen correspond to certain sounds requires painstaking instruction. In all, the 26 letters of the English alphabet can be combined to make about 44 sounds (depending on your accent). When those sounds are put together, they create 15,000 syllables and untold numbers of words. Ideally, children figure out what the letter string says at about the same moment a word they already know crystallizes into view. And after a couple of those aha moments, usually starting in first and second grade, when nicky reveals itself as nice or kahy-ef transforms into chief, the word seems to move into permanent memory. This is known as the simple view of reading: it's the product of a robust ability to decode letters, and a strong vocabulary.

There are many schools of thought on how best to aid this process, but the main contretemps has been about whether kids need to be taught how to sound out words explicitly or whether, if you give them enough examples and time, they'll figure out the patterns. The latter theory, sometimes known as whole language, says teaching phonics is boring and repetitive, and a large percentage of English words diverge from the rules. (Hello there, though, thought, through, trough and tough!) But if you immerse children in beautiful stories, they'll be motivated to crack the code, to recognize each word. The counterargument is that reading is as connected to hearing as it is to sight. It begins, phonics advocates say, with speech. This understanding, and the data that supports it, has become known as the science of reading.

Read More: Anti-'Critical Race Theory' Laws Are Working. Teachers Are Thinking Twice About How They Talk About Race

This debate was supposedly settled in 2000, when the National Reading Panel, a big group of literacy experts that examined hundreds of studies on what instruction kids need to read, released a report. It recommended explicit instruction in the things Weaver's petition asks for: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This was a victory for the phonics camps. But it is one thing to declare a war is over and another to parcel out territory.

Thus was born the notion of balanced literacy, which was an attempt to correct the ship's course, rather than turn it around completely. Schools would introduce more instruction in the link between sounds and letters, but that could be sprinkled in with other methods teachers thought worked, like prompting kids to use context clues (including, say, pictures) when they came to a word they didn't know.

The net result, says Timothy Shanahan, a former director of reading for Chicago schools and an early-literacy expert who was on the panel, was that balanced literacy came to mean whatever anybody wanted it to. Schools did not have to buy expensive new curriculums. Districts did not have to retrain their teachers. Teachers could add some lessons on phonics, but they didn't have to hit reset on the way they taught. A 2019 survey of more than 600 elementary-school teachers by Education Week found that more than two-thirds used a balanced-literacy philosophy, although most also said they incorporated "a lot" of phonics. "The idea was each group would get some of what they wanted," says Shanahan. "I've got to admit, I always thought that was a bad idea. It seemed to me that you should just go with the research."

Reading scores did not improve much after balanced literacy was introduced, but they didn't plummet, either. Things might have stumbled along in much the same way, except that education departments around the country had begun to earn the ire of a particularly determined group: the parents of dyslexic children. People with dyslexia take much longer to sort out the connection between sound and symbol. The immersion method of teaching was simply not going to work for them. Pressure from these parents, plus some crusading journalism, a steady stream of research, impressive results from several school districts, and heightened concern about pandemic learning loss, have finally turned the tide back toward a stronger emphasis on phonics.

Dyslexia is not linked to intelligence; it has been described as an island of weakness surrounded by a sea of strength. It has no cure but can be overcome. So when some wealthy, well-educated parents found their otherwise typical children were not learning to read, they had questions for the school. These were met in many cases with the advice to read to them more. The parents then did what educated, wealthy people do when they feel slighted: they looked at the research, paid for expensive testing, called their representatives, and contacted their friends in the press.

Read More: Innovative Teachers 2022

What they found was that the methods many teachers were using were not supported by the data. They were supported by theories, observations, hopes, and, some would argue, a few guru-like figures. Just as most children, no matter how many times they've been in a car, still need to be taught to drive, most readers benefit from being explicitly taught how sounds and letters go together. This is true not just for dyslexics (who represent about 10% of all learners) but for the majority of readers.

Some of the data these parents uncovered comes from the world of neuroscience. Cognitive scientists have found that as a child reads a word, the networks in the brain associated with vision activate first, followed by the areas of the brain associated with speech. There are also subtle but detectable changes in the brain as children learn to read, primarily a growth in the fibers that connect the areas associated with speech and vision. French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, in his 2009 book Reading in the Brain, calls this area "the letterbox." His studies suggest that the brain never really learns to read a whole word, it just gets really, really fast at decoding. He believes that any type of learning that does not emphasize the sound of words is inefficient.

About a decade after his book was released, Emily Hanford, an education reporter at American Public Media-after being contacted by dyslexia activists-did a multipart audio documentary on why the National Reading Panel's recommendations and all the research were so blithely ignored. It was she who popularized the phrase the science of reading.

State legislatures, which have been getting an earful from dyslexia activists for years, have begun to act. From 2013 to Aug. 1, 30 states have passed laws or enacted new policies related to "evidence-based" reading instruction. Mississippi was one of the first, and in 2019 it became the only state in the nation to meaningfully improve its fourth-grade reading scores. The results were touted as the "Mississippi Miracle."

As the pandemic stretched on and children missed a lot of school, parents became increasingly worried about how their kids would catch up and looked for such a miracle. Kymyona Burk, who helped implement the changes in Mississippi and is now a policy fellow at think tank ExcelinEd, says she met "a lot of parents who may have been involved but not engaged. They would show up to PTA meetings and sign progress reports but didn't really understand what went on in the school." COVID-19 may have changed that. "To be at home and to sit beside your child, or to hear your child in the other room with virtual learning?" says Burk. "Parents learned a lot."

But even with the Holy Trinity of school change-legislatures, researchers, and activist parents-on the case, getting teachers to use new techniques has been an uphill battle. "Passing the law was the first step for us, and it was the easy thing," says Burk. What others tout as a miracle, she notes, was more like a slow climb, with steadfast funding, tireless messaging, and a top-to-bottom reorganization of the way Mississippi's youngest readers were taught. "The hardest part was convincing others who had done things a certain way for such a long time that we needed to make a shift. We had to make a shift in our instructional practices; we had to make a shift in the curricula that we were purchasing; and also we had to just really come to terms with the fact that there were so many of our teachers who had come through our education-preparation programs who still were not equipped to teach children who struggle how to read."

Mississippi retrained all its teachers using LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling), an intensive training module that takes them all the way back to understanding the sounds in speech, what is known as phonemic awareness. Many states have followed suit. But retraining busy teachers takes a while and doesn't necessarily change what they do in the classroom. "There are tens of thousands of schools in the United States, and nobody really monitors what goes on in those schools," says Shanahan, who in nonpandemic times visits 40 or 50 schools a year. "A lot of times the teachers have no idea that they're not teaching things that are beneficial to the kids."

Even if the teachers are equipped to teach a new way, they need the support of their principals and superintendents. Stacy Pim, an elementary reading specialist in Virginia, began to use more of her instruction time to teach first-grade students letter-sound correspondence in the fall of 2020, after she noticed that in prior years, the skills of first-graders at her school had not improved. "By the time they got to second grade, we were having a whole classroom of children who were below grade level," she says. Moreover, because of the pandemic learning gaps, she felt her students were not able to tackle the work that the curriculum was offering. But, she says, her administrator told her she needed to stay with her school's balanced-literacy program. Feeling stuck, and with her own kids to deal with, she resigned. (Only 18 months later, in April 2022, Virginia enacted new "evidence-based" teacher-training regulations.)

Pim was not alone. The pandemic was extremely hard on teachers, typically nurturing, underpaid souls who got into the profession because they wanted to help others. Recent surveys have showed a sharp uptick in those wanting to leave the profession early. Making matters worse, the discussion about reading quickly became like so many others in education: less about children and improving techniques and more about finger-pointing and blame. It also became politicized, since it was mostly progressive states that used methods that leaned toward child-led learning and more conservative ones that embraced the traditional phonics-heavy methods.

Read More: Public Schools Are Struggling to Retain Black Teachers. These Ex-Teachers Explain Why

When Kari Yates, a former school principal and literacy manager in Minnesota who used the balanced-literacy-based Reading Recovery program to help struggling readers, heard that teachers in her district were going to have LETRS training, she thought she'd check it out. "I don't think I anticipated going into it that I was going to be as triggered as I was," says Yates. The language used seemed to belittle the work of those like her who had toiled for years to teach children to read using less phonics-forward methods.

Yates' friend and writing partner Jan Burkins had also heard about this so-called science of reading and started looking at research to debunk it. Instead, she too became increasingly convinced that Emily Hanford's reporting was right. "We began to realize, Oh, there are some things that we've been doing that actually make it harder for children to learn to read," she says. "And there are some relatively simple ways to shift some practices that make it easier." Burkins and Yates wrote a new book, Shifting the Balance, to try to build a bridge between the two camps. It is selling well, but the duo are wary of its success because it leaves them open to attacks from both sides. "People I've had great respect for in the field are being really criticized," says Yates.

The two write that they had to make a pact not to give in to defensiveness as they discussed why approaches such as the use of leveled readers (which predict what kinds of stories children should be reading) should be discarded in favor of decodable texts (which give them a lot of opportunities to practice sound-letter correspondence) as well as the problems with what's known as cueing, where teachers get children to ask a lot of questions about the word they're stuck on, rather than just sounding out. "Moving away from a model of reading that is strategic to one that is more aligned with what we know from the inside out about what the brain is doing when we're reading, it's a big, hard thing for teachers," says Burkins.

The difficulty of getting teachers fully on board is one of the reasons Shanahan is wary of saying the change is here to stay. "This [shift] happens with some regularity in this field," he says. "I've been doing this for more than 50 years, and this is about the third one I've been through." This time is a little different, he acknowledges, because more mainstream media outlets have taken an interest in something that is usually the preserve of academia. And this is the first pendulum swing in the era of social media. A Facebook group called The Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College has more than 165,000 members, most of them aggrieved parents or bewildered and angry teachers.

Hanford's reporting laid the blame for the neglect of a foundational reading practice largely at two doors: curriculum publishers, which market programs that critics say are not supported by science; and schools of education, which are slow to change the way they teach teachers to teach reading. It singled out Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell's Leveled Literacy Intervention, which is used by about 43% of K-2 teachers in the U.S. and suggests that students can get information about words from sources other than the letters, and Lucy Calkins' Units of Study for Teaching Reading, which is used by 14%, including, until recently, Oakland schools. (An OUSD spokesperson says it adopted a new curriculum in May 2021 and is also examining new phonics programs.)

Four years after Hanford's first story on the issue ran, those things too are finally changing-a little. Calkins, the founding director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University and a prominent figure in the field of early reading, added more emphasis on the explicit teaching of phonics to her most recent version of the curriculum, although her critics contend it's not enough. Fountas and Pinnell remain holdouts, saying in a recent series of blog posts that their work has been mischaracterized. None of these authors agreed to be interviewed.

It's probably too soon to accurately assess the impact of the pandemic on children's learning. A McKinsey report found that students in 2021 were about four months behind in reading compared with nonpandemic years. The Brookings Institute found a 15% increase in the gaps in reading proficiency between students at the wealthiest and most impoverished schools. A study out of the Netherlands found that even a relatively short eight-week lockdown led to a learning loss of a fifth of a year. But it's not all bad news. A lot of states are using their federal COVID-19 relief funds to buy new curriculum, retrain teachers, and hire literacy coaches. One of them, Tennessee, recently announced that its 2022 fourth-grade reading scores surpassed pre-pandemic levels, though still only about 40% met or exceeded standards.

Read More: From Teachers to Custodians, Meet the Educators Who Saved A Pandemic School Year

The stakes couldn't be higher. Fourth grade is a key moment in a child's education. Until then, as the old saying goes, children are learning to read; after that they're reading to learn. If they can't, things head south. A 2011 study from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that students who don't read proficiently by the end of third grade are four times as likely to eventually drop out of school as those who do.

Not every child needs systematic instruction in phonics. Some can figure out the patterns for themselves. And phonics instruction alone is not enough. But the past several decades seem to have proved that a more intense focus on the letter sounds hurts nobody, and the many children who need it flounder without it. There are no panaceas in education. Even the most science-steeped curriculum will not help if it is not implemented thoughtfully, with support from principals, literacy coaches, school-district officials, and the public purse. "The schools, we're just not doing a good enough job," says Shanahan. "Let's start right there."

Teachers have every reason to feel sore about the training they didn't receive and the children they therefore couldn't help. But they don't have time to look back. "Here's the lament," says Weaver, who is still in discussions with OUSD. "The lament is that when we started using new materials, the kids weren't learning how to read, and to explain that, rather than looking at our materials and what we were doing, we focused on the kids and said, 'Something's wrong with them. Something's wrong with our community. They're too traumatized or too broken. Their families aren't good enough. They're poor.' We explained the lack of learning in those terms, as opposed to saying, 'Wait a second, what are we doing? And what did we do when things were working?'"
CORRECTION AUG 13, The original version of this story misspelled the name of an elementary reading specialist in Virginia. She is Stacy Pim, not Stacey.
Contact us at letters@time.com.

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The Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read

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"A lot of times the teachers have no idea that they're not teaching things that are beneficial to the kids"

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Being a proficient reader has an impact on a student's entire education. Teaching students to read is the work of educators. While some educators are well-equipped to take on such a significant task, others wish they were better prepared and supported to make an impact that could change a child's life. IMSE makes it easy for teachers to access and understand the core principles of Structured Literacy and the Science of Reading (SoR) through their professional development trainings and programs. IMSE programs are delivered by experienced teachers, all with a master's degree, who know how to ensure that teachers feel knowledgeable and supported in their ability to teach literacy.

Notably, over the past years, the Science of Reading has compiled information that holds important implications for empowering teachers with the knowledge to help students succeed in reading. In addition, intervention research estimates that the use of evidence-based prevention and intervention approaches in literacy, such as what IMSE offers, could decrease the number of below-level readers from 30% to 5%.

The Science of Reading: What it is

The Science of Reading is a comprehensive body of research that encompasses years of scientific knowledge, spans across many languages, and shares the contributions of experts from relevant disciplines such as education, special education, literacy, psychology, neurology, and more. The Science of Reading has evolved from a wide span of research designs, experimental methods, participants, and statistical analyses. This conclusive, empirically supported research provides us with the information we need to gain a deeper understanding of how we learn to read, what skills are involved, how they work together, and which parts of the brain are responsible for reading development. From this research, we can identify an evidence-based best practice approach for teaching foundational literacy skills called Structured Literacy.

David Kilpatrick stated, "We teach reading in different ways; they [students] learn to read proficiently in only one way." The Science of Reading (SoR) has demystified any wonder of how we learn to read and offers evidence backed by science to confirm that there is one right way to teach reading. In addition to this, the SoR provides vital information to drive IMSE's approach to instruction and to reach all learners.

The Science of Reading: What we know

The SoR helps us to understand the cognitive processes that are essential for reading proficiency. It describes the development of reading skills for both typical and atypical readers.

The SoR has debunked various methods used over the years to teach reading that were not based on scientific evidence.

Most reading difficulties can be prevented in young, at-risk students. In other grades, studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of intensive phonemic awareness training, intensive phonic decoding training, and opportunities for repeated practice with reading controlled text. Intervention in these skills leads to efficient orthographic mapping and the highest degree of success.

Teaching whole word memorization is limited, and learning phonics empowers students with an exponential effect.
If a child memorizes ten words, then the child can read ten words. But, if the child can learn the sounds of ten letters, the child can read...

350 three-sound words

4,320 four-sound words

21,650 five-sound words

Reading development can be divided into three stages:

Letters and sounds: Letter-sound knowledge is essential for both phonic decoding and sight-word learning.

Phonic decoding: Early phonological awareness skills enable the development of letter-sound knowledge and should be targeted for direct instruction through first grade. Advanced phonological awareness skills should continue to be assessed and practiced through third grade to ensure that a solid orthographic lexicon is established.

Orthographic mapping: Understanding orthographic mapping allows for teachers to support students who struggle to read. Orthographic mapping is the process that occurs when unfamiliar words become automatic sight words. The research on orthographic mapping explains how students develop this vast sight word bank for accurate and automatic word retrieval and also why students with reading problems struggle to develop this skill.

Phonics and phonemic manipulation must be proficient to allow for students to build a sight word bank or orthographic lexicon. To support this, students need sufficient practice and review in decoding and encoding, knowledge and application of concept skills, and exposure to decodable text.

Comprehension is the ultimate goal for reading. It is driven by two broad skill sets that are identified in the Simple View of Reading (SVoR).

The Simple View of Reading (SVoR) is further detailed in Scarborough's Reading Rope, which highlights the essential components of reading.

Phonics is an important component in early, effective literacy-based instruction.

Learning to spell is far more complex than just memorizing words. Encoding (spelling) is a developmental process that impacts fluency, writing, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

Most teachers have received little knowledge about language structures that are used in reading, speaking, and writing. The SoR has compounded information but has yet to make it into the professional development of all teachers.

Students with reading difficulties present on a continuum of severity and require highly skilled teachers who have the knowledge and expertise to provide intervention based on the SoR.

The findings of the SoR translate into practices called Structured Literacy™. Structured Literacy is an approach to teach reading that is based on the Science of Reading.

Structured Literacy: How we teach

Through Structured Literacy (SL), teachers implement methods that are appropriate for all students and particularly necessary for students with learning differences.

Orton-Gillingham is an evidence-based SL approach that uses research from the SoR and incorporates recommended multi-sensory instructional techniques. SL supports instruction that is explicit, sequential, systematic, prescriptive, diagnostic, and cumulative.

Instruction is assessment-driven. The diagnostic aspect of SL requires continued progress monitoring to measure outcomes and guide differentiation.

Students are provided repeated opportunities with decodable text that have ample representations of the phonetic elements for code-emphasis.

Through regular dictation of words and sentences containing the phonetic concept, students become skilled in spelling words within and outside of the text.

Structured Literacy: What we teach

The SoR identifies five essential components that make up the Simple View of Reading. Structured Literacy incorporates all five:

Phonemic Awareness

Phonics

Fluency

Vocabulary

Comprehension

Students who have difficulty decoding need a focus on phoneme-grapheme and blending automaticity for both real and nonsense words. Teachers are skilled at differentiating instruction based on assessment results.

Orthography helps students to understand why words are spelled the way they are spelled. Students learn to identify the overlapping features of words including word origin, phoneme-grapheme correspondence, position constraints, and patterns and conventions. This helps them to acquire the alphabetic principle.

Phonemic awareness is emphasized as a necessary pre-reading skill and teachers recognize and target the sequence of skills to build phonological awareness from early to advanced skill levels.

Regular words are taught according to phonetic patterns and irregular words are analyzed for their irregularities. When proficient readers encounter new words, they phonemically analyze the word for the regular grapheme-phoneme patterns and are able to identify the irregular element(s) with ease. Teaching weak readers to activate this process allows them to align the letters to the phonemes in their memory.

Morphology is the study of meaningful units within words. Students are able to expand their vocabulary when they are directly exposed to the study of root words, prefixes, and suffixes.

The Science of Reading has proven that a Structured Literacy approach is a necessary foundation for reading success. As teachers, we make a commitment to continue our education to support the learning of every student. IMSE's Orton-Gillingham training and programs make it possible for teachers to integrate evidence-based and research-based reading instruction and intervention strategies into Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) to empower all students in every classroom.

Sign up for our LIVE virtual Orton-Gillingham training! We are now offering half-day, evening, and weekend options to best fit your schedule.

To learn more about the Science of Reading and Structured Literacy, check out the following great reads:

IMSE's approach allows teachers to incorporate the five components essential to an effective reading program into their daily lessons: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

The approach is based on the Orton-Gillingham methodology and focuses on explicit, direct instruction that is sequential, structured, and multi-sensory.

It is IMSE's mission that all children must have the ability to read to fully realize their potential. We are committed to providing teachers with the knowledge and tools to deliver proven literacy education to students of all ages and abilities.

About The Author

Dr. Kirstina Ordetx is a Level 4 Master Instructor with The Institute for Multi-Sensory Education (IMSE). She holds a doctorate in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in pediatric neurology. Dr. Ordetx is an educational specialist with over 25 years of clinical experience, research, and consultation. She is a certified Structured Literacy Dyslexia Interventionist through the Center for Effective Reading Instruction, a Certified Nutrition and Wellness Consultant, Executive Functions Coach, and a registered Licensed Mental Health Intern. Dr. Ordetx has published two books that compile her research and practice in Theory of Mind. She has served on accreditation committees for the Florida Council of Independent Schools, is a university adjunct professor in developmental and child psychology, and presents at various national and international conferences. Dr. Ordetx is head of school for a private academy in Lakewood Ranch, Florida specializing in the multi-sensory education of students who have language and learning-based differences. She is the Executive Director of the Pinnacle Pediatric Therapy Group, a multi-disciplinary, pediatric therapy clinic.
Please connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest to get tips and tricks from your peers and us. Read the IMSE Journal to hear success stories from other schools and districts, and be sure to read the OG Weekly email series for refreshers and tips.

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Being a proficient reader has an impact on a student's entire education. Teaching students to read is the work of educators. While some educators are well-equipped to take on such a significant task, others wish they were better prepared and supported to make an impact that could change a child's life.

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Teacher question: Our reading program has us evaluating students on several strategies and reading skills (e.g., orienting, predicting, monitoring, story elements, identifying point of view, word solving, retelling, inferring character traits, determining theme). It provides grade level rubrics so that we can tell the difference between whether students are doing 4th grade or 5th grade work. We are also encouraged to have the students themselves self-assess their progress on these elements. The idea is that we are to use these evaluations to help students see where they are. Is this kind of t...

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Literacy Education | Shanahan on Literacy

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Tim Shanahan is a premier literacy educator in reading instruction and comprehension. He is a Public Speaker and Advocate for Literacy Education. Contact us for more information!

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In each episode, host Susan Lambert, Chief Academic Officer, Elementary Humanities at Amplify Education, explores the increasing body of scie

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences - children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They'd catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong.
Sold a Story is an independent investigative journalism project from American Public Media. We rely on your donations to support this kind of rigorous reporting.
The controversial educational publishing company has sold instructional materials and professional resources in almost every state, earning at least $1.6 billion over a decade. Explore a map of school districts.

More states are now requiring districts to adopt curriculum that adheres to the science of reading. Look up the policy in your state.

At least 15 states have passed laws about how schools teach reading since the Sold a Story podcast was released in 2022, but there is pushback.

Here's a reading list put together by Emily Hanford.

This discussion guide, created by a teacher, invites educators, parents, community members and kids to have a conversation about the podcast.

Emails and voice messages poured in from people who listened to Sold a Story.

We'll let you know when we release new episodes of the podcast. Enter your address below.

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.

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I've chosen 10 things to recommend. I've read hundreds of books and articles since I started getting interested in this topic five years ago, so it was hard to narrow it down. This is by no means a comprehensive list. But it's a start. Here goes:

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Want to know more about the science of reading?

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Here's a reading list put together by Emily Hanford, host and lead producer of our podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

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New research out this week shows the vast majority of K-12 parents believe their kids are performing at grade level, when they're actually not.

A survey conducted in March of 2023 for the group Learning Heroes found 90 percent of parents think their kids are doing fine, but standardized test scores show otherwise. Among eighth graders, for example, just 29 percent were proficient in reading either at or above their grade level. In math, just 26 percent were considered proficient. This sheds light on what's being called the parent perception gap.

To help explain that gap and how to close it, I'm joined by two former secretaries of education who've been involved with this study. Arne Duncan was secretary during the Obama administration. He's now the managing partner with the Emerson Collective in Chicago. And Margaret Spellings served under President George W. Bush. She's now president and CEO of Texas 2036. That's a nonpartisan public policy think tank.

Welcome to you both. And thank you for joining us.

Margaret Spellings, the big question here is, why is that gap so big? Why do so many parents think their kids are doing so much better than they actually are?

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Study shows parents overestimate their student's academic progress

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Research shows the vast majority of K-12 parents believe their kids are performing at their grade level when they're not. To better understand the parent perception gap and how to close it, Amna Nawaz spoke with two former secretaries of education, Arne Duncan, who was secretary during the Obama administration, and Margaret Spellings who served under President George W.

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I'm a fourth-grade teacher. This year, because of the COVID shutdowns, I'm seeing more students than ever before who don't know how to decode. I don't see how I can teach them what I have in previous years, and I don't have the ability to deal with the decoding problems. Our district is making a long needed serious effort to upgrade to phonics in our K-1 classrooms, but my students won't benefit from that. What can I do? Shanahan responds:
Over the past few weeks, I've been hearing these kinds of complaints from across the country. Third and fourth grade teachers wanting to know what to do with their students who have serious gaps in decoding ability. Some tell me that it is a new problem for them, others say it has just gotten worse recently.

That may be surprising given the big emphasis these days on "science of reading" and the response of many states, districts, and schools to improve their programming for K-2 instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics.

It appears that this problem is part of the backwash from our COVID shutdown tragedy - and it is not the only ongoing disruption that pandemic has wreaked on our children's education. I'll address your question, and then want to talk about another COVID concern that I think deserves greater attention.

Primary grade kids missed out on a lot of teaching in the teeth of the pandemic. Some managed to parlay their shortened Zoom lessons and mom and dad's kitchen table efforts into adequate and appropriate decoding ability. Hooray!

But, sadly, for too many others - and this appears to vary by locale - things haven't worked so well. This school year they entered third and fourth grade at lower levels of reading ability than their teachers have witnessed previously.

Apparently, many schools started the 2022-2023 school year with the idea that things were back to normal. They were for the most part, for our young'uns entering our K-2 classrooms. Those kids may have been behind in these foundational skills, but their teachers usually have had the training, materials availability, and Tier 2 back up support needed to address those gaps.

Unfortunately, often those upper grade teachers have not received similar support. Under normal circumstance, that has been okay for most kids. But these are far from normal circumstances.

Too many kids in the upper grades missed out on the full regimen of decoding instruction usually available in the primary grades. They now find themselves in classrooms unlikely to fill those gaps. Given the ETS research on decoding thresholds and later literacy success, this is potentially a big, and perhaps, long term problem (Wang, Sabatini, O'Reilly, & Weeks, 2019).

It is up to educators to try to minimize the difficulty. Efforts should be made to evaluate the decoding status of kids in grades 3-5 and then fitting instructional responses need to be made.

If the numbers and percentages of decoding laggards are high, then explicit decoding instruction - at the appropriate levels, levels usually addressed in the earlier grade - should temporarily become a part of the upper grade Tier 1 curriculum. I know this will tick off my friends who worry about phonics taking over the world like a Dungeons and Dragons monster, but that's the reason for the assessments - so that kids who've mastered those skills already can proceed as usual.

It is also important to remember that this adjustment is for a year or two - just long enough to recover from the heartrending loss of education these youngsters have suffered.

If - fingers crossed - the numbers are a bit worse than usual, but far from universal, then it would be best to clean up the mess through a stronger Tier 2 effort. No reason to disrupt the regular upper grade curriculum for small handfuls of additional needy students.

What is clear from the teachers I've been hearing from is that in too many places these kids really are slipping through the cracks, and this should not be happening. These teachers are frustrated by what they are confronting but they are uncertain how best to respond.

Remember, these are not the teachers to whom professional development aimed at foundational skills has been provided. Nor are they the teachers who have been assigned curriculum materials aimed at basic decoding skills. But what has been appropriate in the past, doesn't appear to be sufficient for our current situation.

Someone in each school or district needs to assess the problem, determine its extent, and then provide a sound response to the fourth and fifth graders for the upcoming 2023-2024 school year.

The scary part of this is that we don't have a lot of models of high quality, successful upper grade phonics instructional efforts. However, those ETS data suggest that if kids don't reach threshold levels of decoding, then they don't improve in reading in the middle and high school years - no matter what we try. This is not just something we should let pass by; we need to get on this before these kids leave the elementary grades.
Additionally, there is another COVID education problem lurking in the shadows.

Over the past several weeks, news reports have begun to detail some of the most serious wreckage of the pandemic. Although no national statistics are available that I'm aware of, it is evident that school enrollments are seriously down. Districts across the country, large and small, are reporting markedly higher chronic absence and lower daily attendance than usual.

U.S. schools in the 2010s were providing teaching to the largest numbers and largest percentages of students in our nation's history. It took more than a century of effort, since education became compulsory in all our states, to accomplish that. There is no question that a big part of the reading achievement gains that we experienced from 1880-1970 were due to more kids spending more time at school.

Those attendance increases flattened out in the 1970s - as we digested Brown v. Board of Education - right about the time that educational achievement stopped increasing much in the U.S.

I suspect reversals in those enrollment and attendance figures will mean lower reading achievement nationwide for the foreseeable future. This is one that the schools can't handle on their own. But it is one that needs to be handled.

States should assist their local districts in securing sufficient transportation so kids can get to school.

Media could help a lot by stressing to parents the importance of school attendance for their children.

Educators should think hard about how we can best reintroduce our schools to our communities, so parents feel that it is safe for their kids to be at school and understand better the need for vigilance in getting their kids to school every day.

Politicians, media, and school boards should make efforts to minimize the controversies that swirl around their local schools rather than ramping up nut-bag complaints that in the past would have been dealt with expeditiously and quietly. No one wants to send their kids into a hotbed of antagonism and animosity.

Recently, I posted a blog that emphasized the importance of amount of instruction and curricula focused on those things that students need to learn to become successful readers (including decoding). There should be no need to retrace that ground here.

However, COVID, the greatest public health threat of our lifetime (with more than 7 million deaths worldwide and counting) has undermined the amount of teaching our kids get and has managed to prevent some kids from fully experiencing key parts of the reading curriculum. Sadly, COVID may turn out to be the biggest threat to public education of our lifetime as well. But that is up to us.
References
Wang, Z., Sabatini, J., O'Reilly, T., & Weeks, J. (2019). Decoding and reading comprehension: A test of the decoding threshold hypothesis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(3), 387-401. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000302

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If You Want Higher Reading Achievement, You're Going to Have to Deal with the COVID Aftermath

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I'm a fourth-grade teacher. This year, because of the COVID shutdowns, I'm seeing more students than ever before who don't know how to decode. I don't see how I can teach them what I have in previous years, and I don't have the ability to deal with the decoding problems. Our district is making a long needed serious effort to upgrade to phonics in our K-1 classrooms, but my students won't benefit from that.

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Lexia Learning Systems https://www.lexialearning.com/Assets/img/logo.svg 1984 978-405-6232 info@lexialearning.com 300 Baker Avenue, Suite 320 Concord MA 01742 USA

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Professional Learning for Educators Grades Pre-K-5 | Lexia

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Contributed photo by Lauren Wall Left to right: Bob Jamieson, Lauren Wall and Nolan Wall in front of the airplane "Zenith" Bob and Nolan are building.

Each person has a unique learning style that goes beyond a hands-on versus a classroom setting. Often times individuals with uncommon methods of learning are considered less intelligent, but that simply isn't the case.

"All brains are good brains, sometime it just takes a little bit of elbow grease to find out how each brain leans best," said speech-language pathologist Sarah Carlson, MA, CCC-SLP.

Dyslexia, for example, is a neurologically based learning disability that involves difficulty reading, spelling and occasionally writing. Dyslexia is also often genetic. Each classroom has approximately three dyslexic students, according to Carlson. With an estimated one in five, people, or twenty percent of the population, dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities. Of the 33 students Carlson works with, six have been diagnosed with dyslexia.

"Most individuals with dyslexia have average to above average intelligence. Every dyslexic person I have ever worked with has remarkable strengths in at least one area," Carlson said. "Having difficulty reading doesn't mean you aren't smart, it simply means your brain is wired differently."

Eleven-year-old Nolan Wall was diagnosed with dyslexia, and he seconded Carlson's assessment. "Don't tell yourself you're dumb, you are smarter in other ways. I have three or four friends who are also dyslexic and they are really smart in other ways," Wall responded when asked what advice he would give someone struggling with the disability.

Wall attended Friday Harbor Elementary School but found it increasingly difficult. This year he and his parents opted for home-schooling.

"Like all things parenting, you don't know how it's going to work. We are trying our best to teach our kids to be readers and writers, and trying different programs to see what works," Lauren Wall said. For Nolan, that means a hands-on style, and relying on phonics-based reading rather than guessing, which Balanced Literacy, the curriculum the San Juan Island School district uses, encourages.

"With [Balanced Literacy], you see the first letter and guess the rest. I learned to do that but it got confusing. It's insanely hard to learn," Nolan said.

Carlson said she uses a structured and systematic method of reading in tandem with strengthening phonological awareness skills are a few tools she uses when teaching children with dyslexia.

"Research strongly suggests that using a systematic and structured approach to reading, such as any Orton-Gillingham based approach, is the most efficient and effective way to teach reading to dyslexia individuals," Carlson explained. Teaching a "science of reading" and systematically teach the rules are most effective because it provides the student with strong word-attack strategies rather than allowing the students to default to guessing or using context to decipher text, she added.

"Reading has always been a struggle. When I'm reading I will recognize the word and memorize it instead of spelling it out," Nolan explained. Phonics works well, however, Lauren pointed out, phonics is just a small portion of the school's curriculum. The school, according to San Juan Island School District Superintendent Fred Woods, bases its reading curriculum on Balanced Literacy and supplements the program with phonics and other tools to meet individual students' needs.

"Of all subjects, reading is so critical. It sets the stage for success in all disciplines," Woods said. The importance of reading is reflected, he added, by the fact that each school develops a School Improvement Plan, and approximately 90 percent of the time improving reading skills is the primary objective. "They always put the emphasis on making an impact there," Woods said.

"In the cases where someone is found through school-based special education evaluations to have a specific learning disability in reading, having a parent provide documentation of a diagnosis of dyslexia may not necessarily alter or change the services we provide" Becky Bell, special services director said. Specific learning disabilities such as in reading and math are more common than other issues like developmental delays, and physical or intellectual impairments.

While one in five may have attention and or reading difficulties, according to Bell, the statistics are muddled because researchers have different projections on how many have dyslexia, as not every person has been tested, and having reading or attention difficulty doesn't necessarily indicate a disability such as dyslexia, or a specific learning disability for example. For the district, the numbers are even more muddled because they are not looking specifically at diagnosing dyslexia, instead, they look for indications of below-grade-level literacy development (areas that are also often associated with dyslexia) then provide interventions to fill in their learning gaps. Teachers try a variety of tools tailored in a way that ideally works for that particular student.

According to Woods, if the school sees what they think is a weakness, they work to identify and improve that area.

Lauren and Nolan Wall consider reliance on Balanced Literacy an area that the school could improve. At the Oct 26 board meeting, Lauren spoke to encourage the district to amend its reading curriculum away from Balanced Literacy.

"It is outstanding that our district is utilizing Wilson Fundations as well as a variety of programs in Title I that draw from the science of reading. I want to see that same value brought to the complete ELA Program," Lauren said.

"I am here today to ask the board to modify the school improvement plan for elementary school reading to reflect discontinuation of Lucy Calkins Units of Study, an investment in our educators by offering Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling and a move towards adopting a structured literacy program."

Lauren explained that The Reading League's definition of the science of reading is a vast, interdisciplinary body of scientifically-based research regarding reading and issues related to reading and writing.

The research, according to Lauren, has been conducted over the last five decades across the world, and it is derived from thousands of studies conducted in multiple languages. The science of reading has culminated in a preponderance of evidence to inform how proficient reading and writing develop; why some have difficulty; and ways to most effectively assess and teach and improve student outcomes through prevention of and intervention for reading difficulties.

The Balanced Literacy Program, Lucy Calkins, does not align with the science of reading, Lauren said. Lucy Calkins, herself, has stated that the leveled readers and cueing used in her curriculum, are inappropriate for children with dyslexia, and multi-language learners struggle with it as well. Since 2013, over 30 states have passed legislation or implemented new policies related to the science of reading. In 2016, Lauren pointed out, Seattle Public Schools stopped using Lucy Calkins in K-5. In 2020, Anacortes stopped using Lucy Calkins, and in 2021, Orcas implemented CKLA, a curriculum based in the science of reading. "Lucy Calkin's Units of Study was implemented in our district in 2017 due to low reading scores. Currently, and pre-covid, our scores have failed to exceed the pre-intervention levels," Lauren said. "We can no longer stand by a curriculum that is not based in science, nor has provided adequate growth in our students."

The school board voted to continue with an updated version of Balanced Literacy. Woods noted high school students' high reading levels, saying that the school's library circulation rates exceed other districts.

Woods explained curriculum adoption varies from district to district. Some have chosen Balanced Literacy, while others have gone in a different direction.

"We continually reevaluate it. It doesn't mean it doesn't have holes, or that we can't improve and supplement it," he said. "There is always a discussion about the curriculum. We don't let the curriculum be the only thing we do."

Bell reiterated that the district screens for literacy issues.

"When a student has reading or math difficulties, we provide interventions and support, and if that is not effective, we may look to see if they are eligible for special services such as special education," Bell said. "If they are eligible, we write an individual plan and provide goals special instruction. It depends on the individual needs of that child. We look at the reading needs, look at a target area."

For some, a structured reading approach, like the science of reading, may prove useful.

"There is never one solution which is why changing curriculums isn't always the best answer," Bell said. Instead, the school is constantly looking at the bigger broader picture.

"This is a constant philosophical and practical conversation. What worked, what was the data,' Woods said.

Bell added that how are students doing is something teachers and staff are constantly asking. "That means socially and emotionally too."

As students return to school after COVID, for example, they were so excited to see each other and needed face-to-face interaction. Teachers decided to also focus on social-emotional learning because the impact of social isolation needed to be taken into account.

"I want teachers to know we think they are doing a wonderful job. It's a big task teaching a child to read," Lauren said, adding that Nolan is currently working to unlearn the Balanced Literacy approach and refrain from guessing. "The science of reading and neuroscience has really evolved."

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Dyslexia and individual learning styles | The Journal of the San Juan Islands

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Each person has a unique learning style that goes beyond a hands-on versus a classroom setting. Often times individuals with uncommon methods of learning are considered less intelligent, but that simply isn't the case. "All brains are good brains, sometime it just takes a little bit of elbow grease to find out how each brain leans best," said speech-language pathologist Sarah Carlson, MA, CCC-SLP.

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As educators, we are always learning and growing in order to improve reading instruction. It can be challenging to sift through the many resources available, so we have created a list for you. The following includes a list of 30 resources for educators who wish to further their knowledge about the Science of Reading.

5 "Must See" Resources to Get Started
1. EAB Report: Narrowing the 3rd Grade Reading Gap (10 minute read)
A research brief for educators embracing the science of reading from the EAB District Leadership Forum. This is an accessible read for educators who want to learn more and implement classroom instruction that is aligned to the science of reading.

2. Of 'Hard Words' and Straw Men: Let's Understand What Reading Science is Really About by Louisa Moats (5 minute read)

An article about what the Science of Reading really entails and how important it is to really have an understanding of the components of foundational literacy instruction in order to implement them effectively into the classroom.

3. Hard Words: Why Aren't Kids Being Taught to Read? (45 minute listen)
Emily Hanford, educational journalist has researched reading instruction across the US. Her findings sparked conversations about The Science of Reading and how we can improve reading proficiency in the US. 4. Videos: Is My Kid Learning to Read? (Part 1 and Part 2; 26 minutes) How many students are being taught to read in the classroom can be eye-opening for parents. Watch this two-part video series to learn more about how students may be learning to read and how to best support them as they continue to learn to read. 5. Reading Rockets website
Okay, we kind of cheated with #5, but if you read nothing else on Reading Rockets, be sure to check out their articles on Phonological and Phonemic Awareness and Why Phonological Awareness is Important for Reading and Spelling .

Infographics

6. The Ladder of Reading by Nancy Young

7. Scarborough's Reading Rope

"The genesis of the Reading Rope dates back to Scarborough's lectures for parents on the complexities involved in learning to read. Originally, she spoke of skilled reading as resembling the 'strands' of a rope, using pipe cleaners to illustrate the interconnectedness and interdependence of all the components."

8. How Our Brains Learn to Read

Our brains are naturally set up to learn to speak, but learning to read does not happen on its own. Scientists have found that we must develop certain parts of our brains and build connections between brain areas that were not connected before. The picture (below) shows four different areas of our brains that we use when we read.

Podcasts

9. Educate by APM Reports

Stories about education, opportunity, and how people learn. Emily Hanford podcasts are recommended and two favorites are listed below:

At a Loss for Words (52 minutes; published Aug. 22, 2019)

National Assessment Shows More K-12 Students Struggling to Read (25 minutes; published Nov. 1, 2019)

10. Glean Education: Research to Practice

Dive into current research, hot topics, and success stories with our two podcast series for educators.

Why Phonological Awareness is Important to Reading? (23 minutes; published Jan. 3, 2019)

How to Make Sight Word Instruction and Reading Intervention More Effective ( 50 minutes published Oct. 1, 2020)

11. Science of Reading: The Podcast by Amplify Education

The latest insights from researchers and practitioners in early reading. Each episode takes a conversational approach and explores a timely topic related to the science of reading.

12. Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast by The Reading League

Listen to speakers who have made important contributions to the educational community as they discuss reading and writing, but connect to other "literacies" that impact children's learning .

Websites, Blogs & Webinars

13. The Reading League

The Reading League is a non-profit organization focused on the mission to advance awareness, understanding, and use of evidence-based reading instruction.

14. Right to Read Project

A group of teachers, researchers, and activists committed to the pursuit of equity through literacy.

15. Louisa Moats

A website from Literacy Expert, Louisa Moats, includes webinars, blogs, and articles for educators committed to best practices in literacy instruction.

16. The Literacy Nest

Emily Gibbons, certified dyslexia practitioner and creator of The Literacy Nest shares resources for instruction for struggling readers.

17. CORE Learn

The Consortium on Reaching Excellence is Education (CORE) provides many excellent resources and free professional learning opportunities.

18. The Learning Spark

A kindergarten teacher who shares her experience along with many resources in the areas of literacy.

19. Education Week

A website sharing in-depth information and research serving K-12 education.

Articles & Research

20. Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel (2008)

21. Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read (2000)

22. Learning to Read: Center for Early Reading (

23. Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science: What Expert Teachers of Reading Should Know and Be Able to Do, 2020 by Louisa Moats, published by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)

Teacher Resources

24. Florida Center for Reading Research: FCRR

25. University of Florida Literacy Institute: UFLI

26. The Simple View of Reading

Professional Books

27. Speech to Print by Louisa Moats (2014)

28. Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David Kilpatrick (2015)

29. Phonics from A to Z by Wiley Blevins (2017)

30. Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print by Marilyn Adams (1994)

Did we miss a resource? Please leave a comment and let us know!

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As educators, we are always learning and growing in order to improve reading instruction. It can be challenging to sift through the many resources available,...

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Dr. Andy Johnson discusses various issues around the reading wars: An interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito

In this interview, Dr. Andy Johnson talks about various issues dealing with the reading wars. He focuses on dispelling misinformation and myths, which are currently being presented by the folks supporting the social media version of the science of reading. In addition, he tells us about his newest reading book- Designing Meaning-Based Interventions for Struggling Readers. That book is a treasure trove of information and practical ideas for teachers working with those readers. Here is Dr. Johnson's biography LINK:

Here is a link to the YouTube interview:

Dr. Andy Johnson's YouTube Channel LINK.

Dr. Andy Johnson's Reading Instruction Show LINK.

Dr. Andy Johnson's Newest Reading Book LINK

Dr. Andy Johnson Twitter - @axe_andrew

Link to Dr. Johnson's next webinar LINK.

Final Thoughts About This Interview.

Dr. Johnson has long been an advocate of using research, all the research, to inform us on the best ways to teach reading. There has been a growing tide of voices like Dr. Johnson's, voices that are pushing back on the misdirection and misinformation given by the social media version of SOR. In addition to attending Dr. Johnson's webinar, also have a look at the upcoming webinar by P.D. Pearson Fact-Checking the "Science of Reading": Claims, Assumptions, and Consequences LINK. I'll also be sharing Richard Allenton's ideas around that same subject. Be on the lookout for what I say about Allenton's article published in the Tennessee Reading Journal. In sum, it's time to try something new. That something new is using ideas from all sides to create a Reading Evolution LINK.

Happy Reading and Writing.

Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the middle taking flak from all sides)
Copyright 2023 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.

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Dr. Andy Johnson discusses various issues around the reading wars: An interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito

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Dr. Andy Johnson discusses various issues around the reading wars: An interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito In this interview, Dr. Andy Johnson talks about various issues dealing with the reading wars. He focuses on dispelling misinformation and myths, which are currently being presented by the folks supporting the social media version of the science...

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Teacher question: Our school district is all abuzz about "Sold a Story," a documentary about reading instruction, and the response it is getting from some reading experts. We've been surprised that you haven't written about this. We're sure you have an opinion. Would you be willing to share it?
Shanahan's response:
I admire Emily Hanford and her work. I've been interviewed several times by her over the years. She always has treated me respectfully. She asks probing questions and relies on relevant research for the most part. In my experience, her quotes are accurate and fitting.

That doesn't mean I necessarily agree with all her views or even how she frames some of her arguments. Nevertheless, in my opinion, she usually gets things right, and I'm sympathetic with most of her conclusions since I believe they're more in tune with what research reveals about reading instruction than the positions of her supposedly expert critics.

The major thrust of her work (not just the documentaries you note, but also earlier productions) has been that readers must translate print (orthography) into pronunciation (phonology) and that explicit teaching of phonics helps kids learn to do this. She also emphasizes that many schools are not providing such instruction and that many teachers aren't prepared to teach it. Finally, she's revealed that the currently most popular commercial reading programs ignore or minimize phonics instruction, and teach approaches to word reading that science has rejected (like 3-cueing, in which students are taught to read words by looking at the pictures or guessing from context).

Those positions are sound; well supported by lots of high-quality research. My disagreements with Ms. Hanford's work are more around the edges. I think she puts too much emphasis on the motivations of those who've advanced theories that don't stand the test of evidence. Also, her reports tend to imply greater consequences of the problems identified than is prudent (something I might write about soon).

The counterarguments to Ms. Hanford's reporting strike me as more troubling. I think they do more to confuse the issues than to enlighten. They often seem to have no purpose beyond attempting to discourage the teaching phonics (a peculiar slant given that such instruction has long been required by all 50 U.S. states).

I have neither the space nor patience to reply to all of the criticism, but here are my thoughts on some of the more prominent ones.

1. Challenges to the source rather than the content

Since the early Greek philosophers, ad hominem arguments - as opposed to ad verbum ones - have been characterized as illogical, fallacious, and just bad form. Any student enrolled in Philosophy 101 learns that sound reasoning eschews attacks on the person rather than the person's claims.

Accordingly, I reject the ad hominem judgments of some of my colleagues.

The idea that reporters can't report on education unless they've taught school or possess a PhD in education strikes me as loony. It is akin to the idea that Woodward and Bernstein couldn't cover Watergate since they'd never been elected President.

The accuracy of Ms. Hanford's reports is legitimately open to challenge, but rejections of accurate reporting because the source isn't a professional educator is fallacious.

I'm flabbergasted that those who reject Ms. Hanford's reporting because she is a reporter aren't similarly up in arms about commercial reading programs created by folks with little or no expertise or knowledge of reading instruction. The latter would seem to be more problematic since the likelihood of it harming children would be so much higher.

As for myself, I try to avoid ad hominem judgments altogether, though I certainly recognize the appeal (many of those critics have little expertise in these issues - for example, many in their research and teaching are focused on high school education and aren't particularly conversant in issues of beginning reading instruction). Nevertheless, the issue shouldn't be who the sources are, but whether the reports are accurate.

2. Reading requires more than phonics

Most critics have dismissed Ms. Hanford's reporting because of its intensive focus on phonics instruction and decoding. Their criticisms are either that she doesn't provide a definition of reading (so she must not understand what reading entails) or that she is neglecting potentially valuable instruction in other skills and abilities.

I understand why one would want to ensure that children receive comprehensive reading instruction - I've argued for comprehensiveness for decades. Teaching children all the skills that research has identified as beneficial to learning seems like the most-likely-to-be-successful approach one could take.

However, journalism is different than teaching. What's requisite for a curriculum, state standards, core reading programs, teacher education, or daily classroom instruction has little to do with what one must include in a journalistic report.

The same can be said about research studies. If I conduct a study on the teaching of reading comprehension, editors don't berate me with complaints that my study failed to consider the best way to teach children to deal with the schwa sound.

Imagine that a medical reporter discovers that doctors and nurses at the local hospital are not following sound sanitary protocols. She documents the problem, interviews medical personnel and patients, examines local health records and research studies that have addressed the implications of such lapses.

Would you really be convinced that the reporter must be wrong because there is more to medicine than hand washing and instrument sterilization?

Perhaps the hospital administrator's response would be something like: "Ms. Hanford doesn't understand all the necessary components that go into sound health care. You might have noticed that she didn't define sound health care in her documentaries, nor did she even mention the importance of tasty foods in the commissary or the proper procurement practices when it comes to essential materials that must be kept on hand (an important part of health care to which I have personally devoted my career)."

We'd all laugh the dude out the room because we still want the doctors to wash their hands.

My point is simply this: reporting, unlike reading instruction, doesn't have to address everything to be sound and of value.

The reportorial identification of negligence or corruption should never be interpreted as being more than just that. If a reporter finds out that a public official is embezzling, that neither means that all public officials are crooks nor that the one so identified is the only fly in the ointment.

My sense is that neither Hanford nor the many reporters following up on her stories in their own locales are having any trouble finding schools that omit or minimize phonics, or teachers who claim they weren't prepared to teach it.

This should not be terribly surprising to anyone in the field given that Education Week surveys have revealed some commercial reading programs that minimize phonics instruction or that omit it altogether are widely used in U.S. classrooms. Likewise, academic studies have demonstrated important gaps in coverage of phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary/morphology, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension in teacher education programs.

Even if your local school district is already doing a crackerjack job with phonics, that doesn't mean that the other 67,000 U.S. schools are on point with decoding. Such reporting may increase the scrutiny your teaching is subjected to, but if you're really addressing phonics then that shouldn't be a problem.

Hanford's reports do not provide a comprehensive examination of all aspects of a reading program. I don't think we should expect them to do so, and I don't accept that her identification of this problem prevents anyone from teaching other essential aspects of reading.

"We were going to improve our reading comprehension instruction, but that damn Emily Hanford won't allow us to do that!" Yeah, that's the problem.

Comprehensiveness of coverage is a responsibility of educational standards writers, curriculum designers, professors, boards of education, school administrators, and teachers. Not journalists. They are vigilant in trying to identify our shortcomings - they are not required to find all of them.

A fascinating aside: Many critics have written things like, "of course, phonics is essential" or "everyone agrees that phonics is an important part of reading instruction." Those admissions usually precede admonitions that this reporting goes too far in advocating for phonics.

To me that raises a question: If everyone knows that phonics is so important, how could an especially popular commercial reading program omit it for nearly 20 years without any remark from these vigilant reading educators? They blame reporters for not being comprehensive in their conceptions of reading instruction, but then let themselves off the hook for being even more woefully inattentive.

3. There are many ways to teach reading

While many of the critics have been willing to concede the value of explicit decoding instruction, others seem to defend its neglect. Their claim is that this reporting is off base since there are "many ways to teach reading." In other words, in their opinion, teaching 3-cueing is as effective as teaching phonics - and either choice is equally supportable.

Those arguments may appear to deserve 4-stars for affability and reasonability. But only if you're willing to ignore the research.

Studies show that explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction consistently provide a learning advantage. There are no such studies supporting 3-cueing.

Studies show the activation of visual and phonological centers in the brain when word reading ... they don't reveal similar activation in that would suggest 3-cueing.

Readers do sometimes guess words (e.g., damaged pages, reader distraction, lack of decoding ability), but this is more evident with poor readers than good ones.

Usually, we strive to teach students to emulate proficiency. I want my kids to try to golf like Tiger Woods, not some old duffer who can't get onto the green.

Three-cueing is the only instance I can think of that asks students to parrot low success performance, rather than proficiency.

There are many ways to teach reading. It is sophistry, however, to pretend that these ways are all equal. Phonics provides a clear advantage.

To those who claim that we need different ways of teaching decoding (e.g., pictures, context) since all children are different, show me the research.

Until such research is available, I'm willing to follow this claim to its logical conclusion. Let's say that I'm willing to entertain the idea that all children learn differently. If that is the case, then why aren't these critics up in arms about programs that omit or minimize phonics given that research has found such omissions to be especially harmful to our most vulnerable children? Their position seems to be not just inconsistent, but hard hearted and downright mean.

Enough.

Emily Hanford's investigative reporting has been useful; a welcome relief from the wishful but misleading reporting that has often plagued this topic. (Patti Ghezzi, the astute former educational reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, recently provide an exceptionally candid account of why her past reporting went so wrong - included in Maureen Downey's column).

For many schools these reports have led and will lead to a serious rethinking of how best to meet young children's reading needs. Perhaps, some of these long overdue appraisals will be led by wise schoolmen and women who will wonder, "Gee, if we so missed the boat on phonics, how are we doing with other aspects of reading? Maybe we could do better."

One can hope.

Selected comments

Comment from Kate

Thank you for a thoughtful response. The argument I keep hearing most (because of the district I teach in) is that the science of reading is not appropriate or responsive to multilingual learners/emergent bilinguals. I wonder what your thoughts are on that? If we acknowledge that multilingual learners might need more oral language development initially and if we attend to transfer from L1, what else is missing?

Reply from Tim Shanahan

Kate -

Research on multilingual learners find that English learners benefit from instruction in all the same things that benefit native speakers. However, the effect sizes for such instruction tend to be somewhat lower. For instance, phonics instruction is effective with ELs but not as effective as it is with the other students. The one exception to this is vocabulary. Basically, phonics can only help a student read to the extent that the student knows the language he or she is trying to read. That's why experts on second language learning argue for daily periods of English instruction for ELs, in addition to regular lessons in PA, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and writing.

Tim

Comment from Linda

What is your opinion on using the three cue analysis (running record) for reading assessments with young readers?

Reply from Tim Shanahan

Linda -

I see little benefit in that kind of assessment. I want to know things that will affect my teaching. Since I won't be teaching 3 cueing it wouldn't matter much what those patterns are. Use assessments that tell you something about phonemic awareness, phonics, text reading fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, spelling, alphabet knowledge, writing quality.

Tim

Comment from Patrick

Thanks for the insightful commentary, Tim. I frequently think of the oft-used and entirely accurate phrase with regard to reading development/instruction: "Necessary but not sufficient." I believe that research makes absolutely clear that there are several "necessary" knowledge-skill-strategy domains involved in proficient reading AND that none of them are "sufficient" in and of themselves. That said, I do feel that effective phonics instruction leading to competent word reading is, perhaps, the "first among equals." Why? Because if students don't become proficient word readers early on in schooling, research makes clear that this often becomes an insurmountable obstacle to their long-term reading achievement (see Connie Juel's long-term studies in the '80s and Zuowei Wang's team's recent decoding threshold studies). For me, proficient word reading stands as the first great test of the quality of our reading instruction and the critical initial fork in the road for reading development. If we provide it, we give students a fighting chance moving forward. Of course, in keeping with "necessary but not sufficient," we also need to provide effective instruction in other key domains all along the way. However, If we don't provide highly effective word reading instruction in the early grades, there is little hope that many of our students will become proficient readers regardless of what else we teach (Juel, C.1988. Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of 54 children from first through fourth grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 437-447. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.80.4.437). Best of luck to all of us involved in the very challenging task of teaching all students to be competent readers!

Reply from Tim Shanahan

Patrick -

I fully agree with you on necessary but insufficient. That's why when I was director of reading in Chicago, we required substantial amounts of instruction devoted to word knowledge (phonemic awareness, alphabet, phonics, high frequency words, vocabulary, morphology), text reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing. Teachers weren't allowed to pick the ones that liked teaching and we provided substantial amounts of teacher preparation in what to teach and how to teach it. That's why, I assume, we were able to raise reading achievement significantly in grades K-12.

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Is Emily Hanford Right? | Reading Rockets

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Teacher question: Our school district is all abuzz about "Sold a Story," a documentary about reading instruction, and the response it is getting from some reading experts. We've been surprised that you haven't written about this. We're sure you have an opinion. Would you be willing to share it?

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Helping Students Read Better and Learn More

The Iowa Reading Research Center strives to improve the literacy skills of all students through research with students, professional learning for educators, and technical assistance for school districts.

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Iowa Reading Research Center | The University of Iowa

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Striving to improve the literacy skills of all students.

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The MTSS framework is comprised of four essential components: screening, progress monitoring, multi-level prevention system, and data-based decision making. This collection of infographics provide an overview of key features of each of the essential components of MTSS.

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Essential Components of MTSS Infographic Collection

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The MTSS framework is comprised of four essential components: screening, progress monitoring, multi-level prevention system, and data-based decision making. This collection of infographics provide an overview of key features of each of the essential components of MTSS.