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Better Reading Instruction with Dr. Jan Richardson

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Better Reading Instruction with Dr. Jan Richardson

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Lots of tips and information

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Jan Richardson, Ph.D., is a best-selling author and an education consultant, reading specialist, former Reading Recovery ® Teacher Leader, and a classroom teacher (K-college). Her highly acclaimed collection of professional books includes , , (co-authored with Ellen Lewis), and The Next Step Forward in Guided Guided Reading Teacher's Companion Next Step Guided Reading in Action video Reading, series Next Step Guided Reading Assessment kits (coauthored with Maria Walther), Next Step Forward in Word Study and Phonics Next Step Forward in Reading Intervention (co-authored with Michele Dufresne).

Jan is the lead author for several reading kits. She recommends the Literacy Footprints Classroom Kits (co-authored with Michele Dufresne) for classroom instruction, and the RISE program (co-authored with Ellen Lewis) for a powerful, short-term, small group reading intervention. Additionally, Jan recommends the Stepping Together kit for whole class lessons. It includes explicit reading, phonics, phonemic awareness, and writing instruction for K-2. Jan personally wrote all the lesson plans for these kits.

Dr. Richardson and her expert team of literacy consultants provide schools and school districts with customized professional development and demonstration lessons designed to equip teachers with practical and effective techniques for strengthening effective, small group reading instruction. The goal is for every student to become a better reader who just can't wait to read another book!

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Jan Richardson, Ph.D., is a best-selling author and an education consultant, reading specialist, former Reading Recovery ® Teacher Leader, and a classroom teacher (K-college).

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Next Step Forward Guided Reading Framework and the "Science of Reading"

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Next Step Forward Guided Reading Framework and the "Science of Reading"

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Next Steps and the Science of Reading.2_2023

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The name of his blog- Raadical Scolarship- says it all. He blogs on many topics so you will have to sort through to find pertinent postings. The search engine on hios blog is pretty good.

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After 18 years teaching high school English, I transitioned to higher education in 2002. For well over a decade, I have been teaching first-year writing to incoming college students, who in many ways struggle with the contrast between what it means to be a high-achieving high school student and a successful college students. [1]

One of the first discussions I have with those first-year students is about student behaviors, ways in which students are expected to behave that are unlike behaviors outside of the classroom.

We often discuss hand raising, asking permission to go to the restroom (or being denied access to the restroom), bell systems for being late and class dismissal, and taking tests (and the focus on not cheating).

The discussion is designed in part for students to interrogate the norms of being a student and schooling, but also to begin to consider how college norms are different.

I start here advocating for students to stop behaving as students since many of those behaviors center the authority of the teacher/professor and erase the humanity and autonomy of those students.

My university has recently committed to an expanded advising program that guides students purposefully through their first two years. Since I enjoy working with first-year students, I just volunteered for the program and attended training last week.

One of the sessions addressed the community norms that the program seeks to foster in students, norms of classroom behaviors that should be applied across all of their courses.

Although we didn't spend much time on this, what stood out to me was the tension between "community" and "norms"-terms that are too me positive, the former, and negative, the latter [2].

Additionally, I am certain that our current political climate around education-anti-CRT legislation, curriculum bans, and book censorship-that suggests teachers and schools (especially higher education) are indoctrinating and grooming children and young people would result in some people finding these norms "woke indoctrination."

Ironically, these goals are designed to encourage a more free and considerate exploration of ideas; in short, this is about the importance and power of community:

But teachers like McLaughlin and a growing group of parents are starting to realize that for our children to be healthy, happy and successful, we need to teach them a more profound lesson: interdependence - that is, how to rely on others and how to be a person whom others can rely on, too.

What McLaughlin knows and what research suggests is that lasting self-worth cannot come from approval based solely on external rewards, such as trophies, college acceptance letters and fancy job offers. Rather, an understanding of one's inherent value comes from knowing one's place in a community - from the sense that others value you and that you add value to others. Researchers call this feeling "mattering": Only by building interdependence can kids gain social proof that they do indeed matter.
Forget independence. Teach your kids this instead.

I have two vivid and humbling experiences from college. The first in Mr, Pruitt's class as a first-year student and the second in Dr. Predmore's class, likely when I was a junior.

As an eager students who had a great deal of success engaging in classroom discussions in high school English (Mr. Harrill's classes), I found myself excitedly speaking up in Mr. Pruitt's class until I suddenly realized I was embarrassing myself.

That day I recognized I had much left to learn and not speaking up, listening with new ears, was often a better option.

Just a couple years later, after I had declared as a secondary English education major, I had grown some as a student, but I entered class one day for Dr. Predmore's Southern literature course and once again found myself embarrassed at my lack of knowledge (but I had learned not to speak up too quickly by then).

I was then evolving in my quest for academic/intellectual humility.

Much of my grounding as a teacher for forty years has rested on those experiences and how to foster high engagement, intellectual humility, and intellectual curiosity in students. I also recognize that a great deal of the norms of schooling are counter to human dignity and deeply engaging with knowledge in critical ways.

There is also another layer to the paradox of community norms in the classroom; along with the tension between education and indoctrination is how teachers/professors and students can navigate academic freedom in a space that has a diversity of beliefs and experiences.

Academic freedom is incredibly important in an education system dedicated to fostering democracy and individual freedom; however, "freedom" is not license, and neither teachers/professors nor students are "free" to simply say anything.

Further, learning is often uncomfortable (student discomfort having been politicized, even weaponized, by conservative recently), but while intellectual discomfort may be expected or even necessary, no one should feel emotionally or physically threatened or unsafe.

Few people have a genuinely good grip, though, on where that line is, and often, the teacher/professor is left to determine that threashhold.

Currently, issues around safe spaces, trigger warnings, and other mechanisms designed to encourage respectful and open discussions are also under attack (and some of the debate around this is certainly warranted).

In the real world, students and teachers/professors will make mistakes, but I remain convinced that formal education must seek to balance academic freedom, free speech, and seeking ways not to further marginalize or dehumanize anyone-recognizing fully that some topics and comments are necessarily inappropriate for class discussions.

Free speech and academic freedom, however, fall back under the problem of norms.

If you spend just a few minutes on social media, you soon learn that billionaires, politicians, and the so-called average citizen all have very weak or even distorted understanding about free speech and academic freedom.

Simply put, what we can say and should be allowed to say on Twitter/X simply is not the same as a classroom, and technically, free speech is grounded in the role of government to monitor or control speech (made even more complicated by the recent over-reach by states such as Florida).

The paradox of community norms in the classroom then becomes that a classroom setting is the ideal place to identify norms and then interrogate that if those norms are ultimately fair and healthy.

Community matters, but share values are not without problems-unless we are willing to continually revisit and revise those shared values in the context of avoiding either/or thinking in which we reduce "value" to either supporting the individual or the community.

As John Dewey and other progressives have argued, we simply do not have to choose one or the other since in a democracy, community and the individual are sacred.

So I return to the problem I have with "community norms."

Often "norms" are fixed and work in ways to control or police human behavior; community is. a thing in progress, an evolution that is made stronger by its constant state of possible flux.

Norms, you see, are the seeds of indoctrination, and while I fully reject the current conservative histrionics around indoctrination, I am a critical educators who also fully rejects indoctrination.

The best classroom, one where human dignity and humanity are honored in the pursuit of democracy and individual freedom, is a community, and the best community is a thing in progress, stable enough to support us and malleable enough to serve us better as we grow together.

[1] What Do College Professors Want from Incoming High School Graduates?

[2] See:

On Normal, ADHD, and Dyslexia: Neither Pathologizing, Nor Rendering Invisible

Normality in Sayaka Murata

A Vision of Being Human: "Am I normal?"

My father wasn't a reader or very well educated, but he loved telling stories. Mostly about his growing up and then his courtship and marriage of my mother.

Born and raised in rural South Carolina with one set of grandparents in rural North Carolina, I was repeatedly warned as a child not to "tell stories."

My father's storytelling and those warnings never confused me as a child because I knew this about "telling stories":

That I became an avid (even voracious) reader and writer is easily traced back to my father's oral storytelling. But as I evolved from a writer of fiction and poetry into being mostly an academic writer (although still a poet), I remained grounded in narrative.

While it has been a struggle, as my status as a scholar has grown, I became more assertive when editors asked me to cut narrative openings from my academic submissions. I stood by print it as is or don't print it at all, and mostly, that has worked.

Over 40 years of teaching students to write, I have also remained committed to fostering students as effective and compelling writers. Specifically I urge that openings be narrative even as I caution students that academia shuns anecdotes and narrative writing.

The academic rejection of anecdote and the narrative mode is simplistic, I think. Writers should not avoid anecdotes and narrative mode (both of which are very compelling), but must use them ethically, making sure the anecdote and narrative reflect valid claims supported by empirical evidence.

For example, scholars and students as writers should never start with the anecdote or narrative since they can (and often are) outliers that do not support making valid and generalizable claims.

Instead, I teach students to do their research first, and once they have a credible literature review, to seek out anecdotes and narratives that fairly represent that data set.

Scholarly claims can often be abstract or complex, but giving readers what those claims look like in reality-real people doing real things-provides a concrete basis for reader understanding.

As a concrete example, if a student, journalist, or scholar were writing a piece on police in the US shooting and killing citizens, there are options for writing compelling openings.

A retelling of George Floyd's death would be a valid opening for a piece making the claim that police shoot and kill Black people at about a 2.5 times greater rate than white people.

This narrative opening is both compelling and valid because the data supports that this narrative is representative of a supportable generalization.

However, opening with a narrative about police shooting and killing a white person to make the claim that police shootings of citizens is not racist is a not a valid opening because white people are underrepresented in police killings by rate.

This is a brief but specific example of why anecdotes or narrative mode is not the problem. The problem-one that is persistent in mainstream journalism-is that relying on compelling narratives that are not representative of valid generalizations is an ethical failure of writers.

Over the years I have interacted with many journalists, and their pursuit of stories is vivid. In recent years, the media obsession with reading has been hyper-focused on stories, grounded in a podcast titled Sold a Story.

The problem with the "science of reading" (SOR) movement is ironically grounded in telling stories.

The stories of parents and students trapped in situations where children are not progressing as readers are very compelling and likely credible individual stories. Some documentaries include equally compelling stories of adults who struggled in life due to low literacy.

Again, individual stories are deeply moving and are themselves mostly credible anecdotes.

But the SOR movement's reliance on stories has two essential problems: First, those stories are paired with false definitions and misleading claims without taking any scientific effort to match the stories in causal ways to the claims; and second, the SOR movement (notably in the media) is calling for a narrow application of "scientific" in reading instruction while relying on non-scientific claims based on stories.

In short, journalists are telling stories that are also breaking the rule I warned about as a child-telling stories.

Yes, anecdotes and narrative mode are compelling ways to communicate, and I strongly endorse those approaches.

However, what is too often missing in mainstream media is a rich and nuanced understanding of education and literacy that must inform what stories are told and what claims those stories can offer valid evidence for.

Mainstream media fails the ethical standard of using narrative because of a nearly all-consuming pursuit of stories that will grab readers, listeners, and viewers.

Yet, as my grandparents and parents warned me, we shouldn't be telling stories, especially at other people's expense.

Recommended

The NY Times Again Goes After Public Schools, Susan Ohanian

Telling the Truth in a Story-Haunted South

International Literacy Educators Coalition
ILEC Vision: To promote literacy learning practices that enable all children and youth to realize their full potential as literate, thinking human beings.
Download a PDF of the response.
ILEC Response: Mainstream media coverage of reading proficiency, teachers of reading, NAEP scores, and teacher preparation
Mainstream media such as Education Week, the New York Times[1], APM, and Forbes persist in recycling a compelling but misleading story about reading proficiency, teachers of reading, NAEP scores, and teacher preparation that is not supported by the full body of evidence. As Aukerman explains:

From how much of the media tells it, a war rages in the field of early literacy instruction. The story is frequently some version of a conflict narrative relying on the following problematic suppositions:

a) science has proved that there is just one way of teaching reading effectively to all kids - using a systematic, highly structured approach to teaching phonics;

b) most teachers rely instead on an approach called balanced literacy, spurred on by shoddy teacher education programs;

c) therefore, teachers incorporate very little phonics and encourage kids to guess at words;

d) balanced literacy and teacher education are thus at fault for large numbers of children not learning to read well.[2]

The Science of Reading and the Media: Is Reporting Biased?, Maren Aukerman

In fact, Reinking, Hruby, and Risko concluded, "there is no indisputable evidence of a national crisis in reading, and even if there were a crisis, there is no evidence that the amount of phonics in classrooms is necessarily the cause or the solution."
ILEC Concerns:

1. Hoffman, Hikida, and Sailors note that "the SOR community do[es] not employ the same standards for scientific research that they claimed as the basis for their critiques." While individual stories of parents and students are compelling, anecdotes are not scientific and do not provide valid evidence for generalizations about reading proficiency or reading instruction.

2. Longitudinal and recent NAEP scores on reading are misrepresented by mainstream media. "Proficiency" on NAEP is well above grade level, and "basic" is a closer measure of grade level (Loveless, 2023; Loveless, 2016).

3. Any claim of "crisis" or "miracle" in education is misleading. Specifically, the Mississippi "miracle" does not have scientific evidence to show NAEP increases are caused by instructional reform, but appear linked (as with Florida) to punitive uses of grade retention that disproportionately impact minoritized students.[3]

4. Mainstream media misrepresents teacher education, reading programs, reading instructional practices, brain research, and the complex body of reading research to promote a compelling story that is melodramatic and anecdotal.

5. Citing NCTQ, NRP, and surveys fails to meet the level of "scientific" that SOR advocacy requires of teachers.

[1] The NY Times Again Goes After Public Schools, Susan Ohanian

[2] See The Science of Reading and the Media: Is Reporting Biased?, Maren Aukerman; The Science of Reading and the Media: Does the Media Draw on High-Quality Reading Research?, Maren Aukerman; The Science of Reading and the Media: How Do Current Reporting Patterns Cause Damage?, Maren Aukerman

[3] A Critical Examination of Grade Retention as Reading Policy (OEA)

Having watched Shiny Happy People a second time, I cannot emphasize enough that the documentary is far more than an expose on the Duggar family, Bill Gothard, or the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP).

This is a warning for people living in a free society, a warning about the essential threat that authoritarian movements pose for a democracy grounded in the rights of individuals.

And it is a horrifying portrayal of the ways in which children are indoctrinated and groomed by organized religion and parents, the ways women are reduced to serving the purposes of men (primarily by reproduction).

For fundamentalists, there is a fixed Truth and it is their sacred duty to impose that fixed Truth not only on those within their belief community but everyone.

I grew up in the fundamentalist South, and repeatedly was taught that to be Christian you must witness. That sacred duty to witness, in part because media has helped promote fundamentalists as shiny happy people, has exploded into an aggressive political machine poised for national indoctrination.

As the documentary explains, IBLP built a political movement as part of its mission, a mission that is inherent across the US in all sorts of fundamentalist denominations.

Several so-called mainstream Republicans have started openly saying that the separation of church and state isn't really a founding principle in the US; the same group that treats the Second Amendment as sacred, by the way.

Imposing dogma is the goal of fundamentalism, the only goal, by any means necessary.

Nothing represents that ends-justify-the-means mentality more than the idolatry around Trump among fundamentalists. Trump the person is irrelevant as long as he remains an effective mechanism for imposing their dogma.

Two realities face Americans.

First, the separation of church and state, religious freedom, asserts that everyone has the right to embrace or reject whatever religious dogma they choose, but no one has the right to impose that dogma on others, notably not through the mechanism of government.
Therefore, the separation of church and state is a threat to the essential mandates of fundamentalism, witnessing and converting everyone to a singular way of thinking and living.
Second, fundamentalism is at the core of all organized religion at varying degrees of intensity; fundamentalism also by its nature is authoritarian.

And as the documentary on the Duggars dramatizes, authoritarianism is a mechanism of centering male authority-women and children must be subservient. (See also Sister Wives.)
Authoritarianism is a threat to democracy and individual freedom-especially in the form of religious fundamentalism that asserts dogma as the word and will of God.
These tensions now represent the primary core of politics in the US. We are no longer faced with choosing the best candidate (if we ever were), we are no longer faced with choosing between Democrats or Republicans, but we are faced with choosing between democracy and authoritarianism.

The parental rights movement built on charges of indoctrination and grooming has its roots in fundamentalism, but that political movement is not about actual indoctrination or grooming of children in the public sphere (specifically K-16 education).

The parental rights movement is projection because fundamentalists are indoctrinating and grooming; any alternative to a fundamentalist way of thinking and living, again, is a threat to fundamentalist goals for everyone conforming to that singular world view.

Like "Shiny Happy People," "Losing My Religion" is associated with the alternative rock group R.E.M., who introduced the Southern saying to the world.

"Losing my religion" isn't about religion, but a metaphorical statement of exasperation. "Son, you're about to make me lose my religion" is a warning that someone is about to lose patience, to act in ways counter to how they believe they should act.

So let me be clear here: I am calling for a literal use of "losing our religion."

Despite their numerous flaws, the so-called Founding Fathers were mostly secular men who valued human reason; many of them ascribed to a non-dogmatic view of "god" and belief that allowed for a free people to govern themselves.

In many ways, this is idealistic but a wonderful thing, I think. The problem is that granting fundamentalists religious free is a paradox since fundamentalists will not (cannot) honor the freedom for the rest of us to believe or not as we choose.

No child or woman in a fundamentalist church or home is given that freedom, and fundamentalists believe that their soul depends on them demanding compliance from the rest of us.

Between democracy and authoritarianism, only democracy allows everyone life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Everyone should watch Shiny Happy People.

Everyone should step back and recognize this documentary is not a narrow snapshot of an outlier family or some rare religious cult.

Authoritarianism is coming for us. All of us.

If fundamentalists get their way, there is no choice.

This is our future.

See Also

Reading Wars and Censorship Have a Long and Shared History

Christian Nationalists Can't Wait for This School in Oklahoma to Open

For Boebert and Greene, faith - and Christian nationalism - sells

Education, education reform, Educational Research, miracle schools, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, race, racism, Social Context Reform, Teaching, Testing

As a teacher for forty years and a teacher educator for more than half of that career, I have always struggled with the tendency to oversell teacher quality and instructional practice.

Does teacher quality matter? Of course.

Does instructional practice matter? Again, of course.

But both teacher quality and instruction (pedagogy) are dwarfed by teaching and learning conditions within schools and more significantly by the conditions of any child's life.

As I have noted recently, the peak era of focusing on teacher quality, the value-added movement (VAM) occurring mostly under the Obama administration, instead of identifying high-quality teachers as a driver for improving student achievement found out something much different than intended:

VAMs should be viewed within the context of quality improvement, which distinguishes aspects of quality that can be attributed to the system from those that can be attributed to individual teachers, teacher preparation programs, or schools. Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.
ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment (2014)

Teacher quality necessarily includes two types of knowledge by a teacher-content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge.

Yet the VAM experiment revealed something we have known for decades-standardized tests of student learning mostly reflect the student's relative privilege or inequity outside of school.

Despite the refrain of Secretary Duncan under Obama, schools have never in fact been "game changers."

While neoliberal/conservative education reforms leveraged the "soft bigotry of low expectations" and unsubstantiated claims that the Left uses poverty as an excuse, people all along the ideological spectrum are over-focused on instructional practices. And that overemphasis is used to keep everyone looking at teachers, students, and instruction instead of those more impactful out-of-school (OOS) influences on student learning.

A companion to the cult of pedagogy in education reform is the "miracle" school claim, but "miracle" schools rarely (almost never) exist once the claim is interrogated, and even if a "miracle" school exists, it is by definition an outlier and essentially offers no guidance for scaling outward or upward.

The paradox of the cult of pedagogy in education reform is that until will directly address OOS factor we will never have the context for better teasing out the importance of teacher quality and instructional practices.

The current education reform trapped in the cult of pedagogy is the "science of reading" (SOR) movement which oversells the blame for student reading achievement as well as oversells the solutions in the form of different reading programs, reading instructional practice, and teacher preparation and professional development.

The "miracle" of the day in the SOR propaganda is Mississippi, which is very likely a mirage based on manipulating the age of students being tested at grade level and not on teacher quality and instructional practices.

Not a single education reform promise since the 1980s has succeeded, and the US remains in a constant cycle of crisis and reform promises.

Yet, the evidence is overwhelming that many OOS factors impact negatively student learning and that social reform would pay huge dividends in educational outcomes if we simply would move beyond the cult of pedagogy in education reform.

For example, see the following:

My entire career has existed within the neoliberal accountability era of education reform that oversells education as a "game changer" and oversells teacher quality and instructional practices.

Like time-share frauds, we are being duped, and teachers and students need us to move beyond the cult of pedagogy in education reform and focus on the much larger influences on students being able to learn and teachers being able to show that their quality and instruction can matter.

One of the many ways that Florida has been dismantling education in their state and influencing similar actions across the country is whitewashing Black history.

Below is a reader addressing this assault on history, Black people, and efforts to create a more equitable democracy:

See Also

"Every white person in this country...knows one thing," James Baldwin (1979)
Listening to Langston Hughes about "Make America Great Again"

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educator, public scholar, poet&writer - academic freedom isn't free

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I don't always agree with Shanahan but he does make me think!

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Shanahan on Literacy has a variety of literacy blogs in one place. Find out here the information that can use by teachers and parents in teaching and assessing reading, writing, and literacy. Read more here!

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P. David Pearson talks about various literacy issues, including Reading as a Meaning-Making Process and the educational implications of that view, PART TWO. An Interview by Dr. Sam Bommarito
Because of the length of the interview, it is being posted in two parts- this is the second part of that interview. When P.D. Pearson agreed to this interview, it was a career moment for me. Pearson is credited with the creation of the gradual release of teaching model What now follows is Pearson taking an in-depth, research-based look at the remaining issues surrounding the question of how to best teach literacy in the 21st century. BIOGRAPHY LINK. Here are the timed stamped talking points for the interview (so, you can go to the sections that interest you the most first) That model transformed the world of teaching. In addition, his ideas around the concept of "The Radical Middle" LINK RESOURCES AND LINKS PROVIDED BY PD Pearson. shaped my thinking around the whole topic of what it means to be a centrist. In the first part of the interview, Pearson talked about social-cultural models of reading, the gradual release model, Durkin's research around teaching comprehension, and the importance of reading definitions in establishing reading practices. He pointed out the shortcomings of definitions used by some SOR advocates and the need for a definition of reading that clearly includes the concept of reading as a meaning-making process. In case you missed it, here is a link to the blog about the first half of the interview LINK.

OTHER RESOURCES RELATED TO PEARSON'S IDEAS

The Science of Reading Comprehension- Reading Teacher, 2021, Duke, Ward & Pearson Mary Howard once again provided some excellent detailed notes on this interview. THANKS MARY. Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/mary.c.howard.79/posts/pfbid02d6anZsUkCayh3Nb427GubvMBUQdTtMhh9JBvdNebeFvB4HVED9y1zVCDGsGgNAUEl Final Thoughts about this interview LINK
Here is a link to the U-Tube Interview:

David Pearson and Rob Tierney's presentation on The Science of Reading: What it Means for Classroom Practices

A chapter by David Pearson, Christina Madda, and Taffy Raphael dealing with t he question of balance in the days of the Science of Reading.

P. David Pearson & Rob Tierney Webinar LINK

--------------------------------

I want to remind readers of what Pearson said in part one of this interview:

"So, what have they done? They have defined all this other stuff out of reading that's part of literacy, that's part of learning, but it's not part of reading. And what that does is it makes the reading curriculum a much narrower swab that I think most of us think is involved in reading."

We must take care when making policy at the district, state, and national level that those policies are based on a definition of reading that makes it crystal clear that reading is first and foremost, a meaning-making process. If you are not reading for meaning, then you are not reading at all. In a 2021 Reading Teacher article entitled The Science of Reading Comprehension, Duke, Ward and Pearson make this statement- "However, research has supported a simultaneous, rather than sequential, model of reading instruction." p 665, LINK. The same article points out the need for graphophonological semantic cognitive flexibility, and the fact that reading comprehension is not automatic even when fluency is strong.
Copyright 2023 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author's views and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.
Right now, a model for reading instruction that is based on a limited definition of reading and questionable practices around comprehension is sweeping the country. Phonics first (phonics only?) has been tried before with disastrous results. Read the review of the Reading First initiative LINK. Millions of dollars were spent with very little in the way of improved reading/reading comprehension to show for it. I fear that, once again, we are on a path that will result in yet another very expensive pendulum swing.

Let's take Pearson's advice and think about taking positions instead of taking sides. How about starting with the thought that teachers and students need to learn to apply the phonics instruction that is best for each child?

I would propose that we start with synthetic phonics but have other forms of phonics waiting in the wings for those students for whom synthetic phonics fails to work. Pearson explained some of those other forms of phonics during the interview, 22:05.

Encourage teaching practices that result in a set for variability in both word recognition and comprehension.

Let's look at all the research. That includes qualitative research. Let's stop using strawmen to misrepresent what the other side says, 24:14.

Let's listen carefully to folks like Pearson and Howett LINK, who actively use common sense to find some common ground. We owe it to the kids to stop the arguments and start the discussions. Dare to dream!

So, until next week:

Happy Reading and Writing.

Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the center taking flak from all sides)
In the upcoming year, I will present at LitCon in Ohio, the Wisconsin ILA Conference, the Hudson River ILA Conference and the Write to Learn Conference in Missouri. Should you be interested in having me as a speaker or presenter at a conference, please e-mail me at bommaritosam@yahoo.com. Include the word "speaker" in your subject line.
PS If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following it to ensure you won't miss future posts. Use the "follow" entry on the sidebar of the blog.

COMING EVENT

Join us on November 9 at 4 pm EST for a free webinar! Register today for Transformative Teaching Strategies, moderated by Dr. Sam Bommarito with panelists Tim Rasinski, Kathy Roe, and Penny Slater.

In this special session, Dr. Sam Bommarito will bring together an exciting panel of literacy experts to discuss strategies for improving student reading comprehension, fluency, accuracy, and reading stamina. Bestselling author and fluency scholar Tim Rasinski will share some important research on fluency. Penny Slater and Kathy Roe will show how they have used Tim's research to develop a Reading Fluency Project in the UK that has led to struggling readers achieving more than 1.5 years of growth in comprehension/fluency in just eight weeks of small-group instruction.

Register: pioneervalleybooks.com/webinars\

Nora Chahbazi, the founder of EBLI: An evidenced-based reading program, talks about her program and upcoming webinar. Interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito

In the past few years, I have tried to talk to folks from various perspectives on reading, especially beginning reading. I've interviewed many literacy leaders, including Tim Rasinski, LINK Narelle Lynch LINK, Rachael Gabriel LINK, George Hruby LINK, Marnie Ginsberg LINK and Yvonna Graham LINK, just to name a few. I recently talked to Bruce Howett LINK and Jan Wasowicz LINK about their ideas around ending the reading wars. Also, in what was a career moment for me last week, I was able to interview P.D. Pearson LINK, whose idea of the Radical Middle LINK has served as the core foundation for my centrist position LINK. That was a two-part interview. I've delayed publishing the second part of that interview until next week because an old friend and colleague asked me to give her a chance to talk about a webinar she is holding next week. I thought that her request fit right into the Pearson segment because, in that segment, Pearson pointed out that there is more than one way to teach phonics. I think that Nora has found one of those ways. So, before closing out the Pearson thread next week, I thought I would share Nora's project with you and tell you about her upcoming webinar.

I first met Nora 5 years ago. She invited Tim Rasinski and me to visit her site. Nora is the parent of a dyslexic child. The process of helping her daughter learn to read caused her to do a deep dive into the research. That, in turn, led to the creation of EBLI ( Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction). EBLI teaches a form of decoding based on the work of Diane McGuinness. McGuinness advocates a speech-to-print rather than a print-to-speech way of teaching decoding. In this interview, Nora tells the whole story about the creation of EBLI. EBLI has grown a great deal since I first talked to Nora five years ago. It now serves thousands of teachers and students. It has many resources for parents and teachers. Links to that are provided later in the blog. EBLI is sponsoring a webinar next week.

Here is Nora's biography taken from an earlier version of the EBLI website:

Nora is a believer in the Science of Reading. She and I don't agree on everything. But since I first visited her, she has always been willing to talk and share ideas. I often allude to the fact that of all the SOR sites I've looked at, hers is one of the very few that can demonstrate that their methods improve BOTH decoding and comprehension. She measures her results with tests of the full reading process rather than tests that measure mainly decoding. In this interview, Nora discusses ongoing efforts to document research around EBLI's impact.

Nora gets decoding taught very quickly and very efficiently. To do that, she takes a road less traveled. She uses linguistic phonics instead of focusing on more traditional approaches, e.g., OG. There is a link about linguistic phonics later in this blog. Nora also talks about EBLI's upcoming webinar. It will use a panel discussion format. The panel will consist of 3 teachers who share their evolution from other methods to EBLI. They will talk about their transition, successes, and challenges along the way. I'll be attending for sure; I hope you will too. LINK:
Here is Nora's interview:

NOTE: In the interview, Nora said the webinar is on the 25th. It is on the 26th, and a link is provided below.

Here is a link to EBLI's overall website. The website is worth exploring. I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the wide range of resources she provides for educators, parents, and students. EBLI website

Here are other links that go along with the topics covered in the interview:
Dr. Sam's thoughts about this interview & a peek at future topics. As I mentioned, I have been talking to or writing about ideas from all across the reading spectrum for the past five years. I am a centrist. I am making the case that we should listen to ideas and findings from all sides of the reading issue. The way Nora carries out and promotes her program at EBLI represents one way of proceeding with Science of Reading that holds hope for eventually finding common sense and common ground. She demonstrates that there are ways to teach phonics effectively that don't fit the mold some are trying to force on us all. Nora is not trying to force her views on anyone. Everyone would benefit from learning more about the "flagship of her fleet," linguistic phonics.

Next week, I will post the other half of the Pearson interview. I'll reflect on the best ways to end the reading wars. People like Nora give me hope that someday, all of us will follow P.D. Pearson's advice to stop taking sides and start taking positions. Nora has taken the position that linguistic phonics is one path students can follow to help them quickly overcome difficulties with decoding. Please consider that. People like Nora give me hope that the day will come when we stop taking sides and start using the best research-based practices from all positions to guide us. Dare to dream!

Until next time- this is Dr. Sam signing off.

Happy Reading and Writing.

Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the center taking flak from all sides)
Copyright 2023 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author's views and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.
PS If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following it to ensure you won't miss future posts. Use the "follow" entry on the sidebar of the blog.

ANOTHER UPCOMING EVENT

Join us on November 9 at 4 pm EST for a free webinar! Register today for Transformative Teaching Strategies, moderated by Dr. Sam Bommarito with panelists Tim Rasinski, Kathy Roe, and Penny Slater.

In this special session, Dr. Sam Bommarito will bring together an exciting panel of literacy experts to discuss strategies for improving student reading comprehension, fluency, accuracy, and reading stamina. Bestselling author and fluency scholar Tim Rasinski will share some important research on fluency. Penny Slater and Kathy Roe will show how they have used Tim's research to develop a Reading Fluency Project in the UK that has led to struggling readers achieving more than 1.5 years of growth in comprehension/fluency in just eight weeks of small-group instruction.

Register: pioneervalleybooks.com/webinars\

P. David Pearson talks about various literacy issues, including Reading as a Meaning-Making Process and the educational implications of that view- An Interview by Dr. Sam Bommarito
Because of the length of the interview, it is being posted in two parts- the first part today and the second part a week from today.
When P.D. Pearson agreed to this interview, it was a career moment for me. Pearson is credited with the creation of the gradual release of teaching model LINK. That model transformed the world of teaching. In addition, his ideas around the concept of "The Radical Middle" LINK, shaped my thinking around the whole topic of what it means to be a centrist. What follows is Pearson taking an in-depth, research-based look at the issues surrounding the question of how to best teach literacy in the 21 st century.
BIOGRAPHY

Here are the timed stamped talking points for the interview (so, you can go to the sections that interest you the most first) RESOURCES AND LINKS PROVIDED BY PD Pearson.
Here is a link to the U-Tube Interview:

David Pearson and Rob Tierney's presentation on The Science of Reading: What it Means for Classroom Practices

A chapter by David Pearson, Christina Madda, and Taffy Raphael dealing with t he question of balance in the days of the Science of Reading.

P. David Pearson & Rob Tierney Webinar LINK
OTHER RESOURCES RELATED TO PEARSON'S IDEAS My three-blog series about the presentation at the 2019 ILA convention entitled What Research Really Says About Teaching Reading- and Why That Still Matters
--------------------------------

P.D. Pearson, Nell K. Duke, Sonia Cabell, and Gwendolyn Thompson McMillon made that presentation.
"It's as though because we think content knowledge building is so important, we're just going to ignore three decades of research on comprehensive strategy instruction," said Duke. "This isn't a zero-sum game saying, 'if you can't attend to content, then you can't teach comprehension strategies' or 'if you teach comprehension strategies, you must not be paying enough attention to vocabulary or morphology." I believe what was reported in this session supports a position that calls for the direct, explicit, systematic teaching of comprehension strategies, using a gradual release model.

The first blog was entirely about what P.D. Pearson has to say about the topic and included screen captures of slides from his presentation.LINK.

The second blog includes a link to the summary of the presentation done by ILA LINK. It includes my reflections on what was said about early literacy. A discussion of a project being carried out in St. Louis (where I live) and Molly Ness's ILA position paper on Read Alouds included. Here is the link to the blog: LINK.

The third blog talks about what was said during the session about comprehension. LINK This quote about what the ILA summary reported Nell Duke said during the session is of special interest:

--------------------------------
Final Thoughts & a preview of next week's blog

Here's what Pearson said in the interview about SOR and their definition of reading:

"So, what have they done? They have defined all this other stuff out of reading that's part of literacy, that's part of learning, but it's not part of reading. And what that does is it makes the reading curriculum a much narrower swab that I think most of us think is involved in reading. It means, if you look at the teaching of reading today, it includes a lot of this other stuff, and it certainly includes a focus on comprehension, motivation, purpose for reading and the like. "

" So, I just think that what the folks in the science of reading are doing is they're just picking off one little piece of reading, and they're saying that THAT'S what matters most, and THAT'S what we should pay attention to. We'll get to the other stuff, but we don't have to get to it in the reading curriculum. You can do that in social studies or science or this sort of broad nothing of literacy for everyday life - but it's not part of reading. So, I think the definition matters a whole lot."

39:39 to 40:44 on the interview video

Bolding is mine

As my colleague Mary Howard pointed out to me when discussing her notes from previewing the video of this interview, By the way, Mary has created a very complete set of notes about the first half of this interview and made them available online LINK. Thanks, Mary!

Pearson's explanation of the impact of how one defines reading helps to explain the origins of many of the current battles around SOR and Balanced Literacy. The definition chosen by the SOR folks oversimplifies things in a way that divorces the decoding aspects of reading from the meaning-making aspects. I think it is a major source of criticisms made about some SOR advocates' views. Those advocates are often seen as taking a decode first, comprehend later view of reading. This narrow definition of the reading process also helps to explain why many SOR advocates prefer using tests like the Dibels to measure reading progress. When I talk to administrators about the issue of Dibels vs. the content of reading tests used in most states, I give a buyer beware warning. I asked administrators to compare the items on the two tests. The items are not the same.

Duke describes the typical content of state reading tests in this chart from page 7 of her article entitled Reading by Third Grade: How Policymakers Can Foster Early Literacy. LINK.

One quickly finds that the Dibels test does not directly measure many of the things measured by state reading tests. Many critics have written extensively about the "miracle gains" reported by some SOR folks and said those gains are illusionary or overstated LINK, LINK, LINK.

Another concern about what some SOR folks say about comprehension instruction is that many call for much less direct instruction in comprehension strategies. They base this on the work of Daniel Willingham. They count on background knowledge to provide most of what students need in order to comprehend, minimizing the need for instruction in comprehension strategies. In addition to Pearson, two other prominent researchers differ from them on that point. The first is Dr. Tim Shanahan. He wrote a blog entitled The Spirit is Willingham, but the Flesh is Weak. Shanahan concludes that blog by saying, "There definitely can be too much strategy teaching, but in most places, any dosage, not overdosage, is the problem." Clearly, he thinks Willingham has underestimated the need for strategy instruction. I already mentioned Nell Duke's take on this issue earlier in the blog. She expressed the fear that some folks were ignoring three decades of research on comprehensive strategy instruction and are overemphasizing the importance of background knowledge. I would add that research has indicated that teaching comprehension strategies using the gradual release model has been shown to raise test scores significantly.

So, does that mean we must fall to the use of dichotomies (BL vs. SOR) once again? I've often said that dichotomies have consistently led to pendulum swings, not progress. We need something else. Next week, I will talk about that "something else." It is my belief that taking a centrist approach, an approach that draws the best research from both sides (all sides), is a possible way to cut through the Gordian knot of the reading wars. P.D. Pearson's ideas are at the heart of that centrist approach LINK. I'll pick up on this idea next week as we examine the interview's second half. Stay tuned!

So, until next week:

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

PS If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following it to ensure you won't miss future posts. Use the "follow" entry on the sidebar of the blog.

COMING EVENT

Join us on November 9 at 4 pm EST for a free webinar! Register today for Transformative Teaching Strategies, moderated by Dr. Sam Bommarito with panelists Tim Rasinski, Kathy Roe, and Penny Slater.

In this special session, Dr. Sam Bommarito will bring together an exciting panel of literacy experts to discuss strategies for improving student reading comprehension, fluency, accuracy, and reading stamina. Bestselling author and fluency scholar Tim Rasinski will share some important research on fluency. Penny Slater and Kathy Roe will show how they have used Tim's research to develop a Reading Fluency Project in the UK that has led to struggling readers achieving more than 1.5 years of growth in comprehension/fluency in just eight weeks of small-group instruction.

Register: pioneervalleybooks.com/webinars\

Dr. Jan Wasowicz talks about the SPELLtalk discussion group, the Language Literacy Network &issues around the teaching of beginning reading: An Interview by Dr. Sam Bommarito

"Informed, empowered teachers are the best solution to our current literacy problems." Dr. Jan Wasowicz (quote from her Oct. 2nd e-mail)

My regular readers know that I have been on a quest trying to find common ground in the often-contentious world of literacy. My doctorate was completed in the last iteration of the so-called reading wars. In my dissertation, I found that the two sides of that era had more practices in common than those on which they differed. At that time, I joined P.D. Pearson in what he called The Radical Middle LINK. His ideas became the core of my centrist approach - i.e., using the research-based ideas of all sides and steadfastly working toward the day when we finally recognize there really are no sides.

Recently, some developments have given me some hope for finding that common ground. Amanda Goodwin, the Reading Research Quarterly Co-Editor, had much to say about this topic in a recent interview in the KAPPAN- LINK. She described how, in the process of peer review, researchers who at first viewed themselves in different camps found themselves shifting more to the center:
"Some researchers probably started out thinking they were in different camps, but during the editing process, that changed. You know, in an academic journal like RRQ, we ask experts to review each article and give the authors anonymous feedback. A lot of them pushed the authors to say more about the gap between research and practice and to consider differing perspectives. And when they revised their articles, those researchers who started out in separate camps seemed to move more to the center and acknowledge and welcome other views. So, overall, I'd say that the experts agreed that it's valuable to conduct various kinds of scientific research that aims to better understand and meet children's complex and varied needs - not to insist that there's a single, "one best" way to teach reading." I wrote an entire blog around Amanda's article LINK.
A few months after reading Amanda's article, I met Bruce Howlett on social media. He told me about his plan for ending the reading wars. I had a chance to interview him about his model to achieve that end, I wrote a blog about that LINK. If you haven't seen Bill's model yet, please do take a look. He has some very interesting insights into things like LTRS and Reading Recovery. Bruce told me Dr. Jan Wasowicz had invited him to post his work on SPELLtalk. That has happened. He thought it would be a good idea for me to talk to Jan and perhaps interview her.
BIOGRAPHY
That brings us up to the present. I did talk to Jan. As part of that conversation, I posited to her the idea of the importance of informed, empowered teachers. One of the results of the conversation around that is the quote from the beginning of this blog. The solution to the reading wars (a term many folks think should be abandoned) and our reading problems lies in fostering the creation of informed, empowered teachers. We've known since the First Grade Studies were published more than 50 years ago that in terms of improving reading scores, teachers make more difference than programs LINK, LINK,,
Here are the timed stamped talking points for the interview (so, you can go to the sections that interest you the most first) RESOURCES FROM JAN- Listed in the order they are mentioned in the interview:
In the current interview, Jan talks about her background, the Language Literacy Network and her extensive work in the reading field, work which spans several decades. Although I may not agree with every single thing she says, I do see an enormous amount of common ground in our literacy views. What now follows is her biography, the details of the interview and a list of resources Jan has shared. Let's take a look at all that now.

Here is a link to the U-Tube Interview:

Connect with researchers and practitioners via SPELLTalk™, the FREE online multi-disciplinary professional discussion group dedicated to improving literacy through discussion of research and evidence-based best practices. Be Informed. Be Empowered. Make a Difference. (Dr. Sam note- please consider commenting to this group about Bruce's model to end the reading wars)

Join SPELLTalk -FREE!.

(the publisher requires that readers download directly from their website.)

A speech-to-print approach to teaching reading. Wasowicz (2021) in the LDA Bulletin.

OPEN ACCESS. Download publication.

Download 17 FREE activities for speech-to-print reading and writing instruction at www.spell-links.com

(Teachers must download this directly from the home page of our website.)

Final Thoughts & a peek at upcoming blogs:

At the start of this blog entry, I said that discussing how to teach reading can be contentious. This is especially true today. Today, there are some advocates of SOR who fail to tell the whole story and who push what I view as a narrow and limited view of the reading process. They claim it's all settled science and attack anything that doesn't fit their narrow views exactly. I have pushed back many times on such views LINK LINK, LINK. These particular advocates of the SOR, whom I have dubbed the social media version of SOR, often use public relations tactics like misinformation and misdirection to push their agenda. The result has been some questionable legislation around reading, legislation that in some states has resulted in some publishers getting a state-enforced monopoly on the sale of reading materials LINK. Just this week, I dealt with one such advocate who was condescending, used brutal sarcasm and ignored several calls to end the conversation with an agreed to disagree statement. He took what I characterize as a my way or the highway stance. By the way, there are also advocates from the opposite end of the spectrum who are prone to use strawman versions of SOR in order to counter such arguments. I wrote an article around this phenomenon of folks with extreme views arguing about reading instruction, with each side using strawman versions of the other. In the article I talk about how to handle that kind of situation. It appeared in Literacy Today, in 2020 LINK. The name of the article was Talk More Argue Less. In it, I called for all sides to stop using strawman versions of each other, start recognizing that every side has limits and limitations and, most importantly, that we talk more about common ground.

I'll be explicitly clear in saying that both Jan and Bruce have sincere views about SOR and are willing to consider all the information and research. Jan's story is one of seeking better understanding through research, and her story isn't finished. Her reaction to new ideas about how to teach reading was the reaction of a scientist (see the video 29:27). In his own teaching, Bruce reported he does use ideas from all sides. Asking folks to use research-based ideas from all sides has become my mantra. We are at a crossroads in discussing the best ways to teach reading. We can choose to let the folks at the extremes remain in control of the discussion. Historically, when that has happened, the result has been another swing of the pendulum. Or we can choose to refrain from using strawmen, to admit all sides have limits and limitations, and most importantly, to admit there is common ground in what we all believe. I sincerely hope we choose that path.
Copyright 2023 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author's views and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.
I'm meeting tomorrow with P.D. Pearson. Dr. Pearson is a well-published reading researcher best known for creating the gradual release model. I'm sure there will be a lot to unpack from that interview. I'll also be doing a blog about my upcoming webinar. Pioneer Valley Books sponsors it. The name of it is Transformative Reading Strategies. Details can be found at the end of this blog. So, as we get started in this new school year, there's lots going on. Until next week, this is Dr. Sam signing off.

Happy Reading and Writing.

Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the center taking flak from all sides)

PS If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following it to ensure you won't miss future posts. Use the "follow" entry on the sidebar of the blog.

COMING EVENT

Join us on November 9 at 4 pm EST for a free webinar! Register today for Transformative Teaching Strategies, moderated by Dr. Sam Bommarito with panelists Tim Rasinski, Kathy Roe, and Penny Slater.

In this special session, Dr. Sam Bommarito will bring together an exciting panel of literacy experts to discuss strategies for improving student reading comprehension, fluency, accuracy, and reading stamina. Bestselling author and fluency scholar Tim Rasinski will share some important research on fluency. Penny Slater and Kathy Roe will show how they have used Tim's research to develop a Reading Fluency Project in the UK that has led to struggling readers achieving more than 1.5 years of growth in comprehension/fluency in just eight weeks of small-group instruction.

Register: pioneervalleybooks.com/webinars

Kenn Nesbitt talks about his website, Poetry4Kids.com and its many different resources for teachers: An Interview by Dr. Sam Bommarito

My readers know that I am very interested in finding ways to help all readers improve both fluency and comprehension. Singing and repeated readings LINK, fluency training LINK and use of short texts like poetry LINK are surefire ways to help your kids become better readers. Poems are often thought-provoking and entertaining. They are also meaning rich. So, if you are looking for short, meaning-rich texts for your lessons, look no further than poems. As you will discover in his biography below, Kenn Nesbett is a well-known, well-published poetry writer. He writes for kids. In 2013, the Poetry Foundation selected him as the Children's Poet Laureate LINK,. He held that position from 2013 until 2015. Tim Rasinski and others often use and refer to his poems. His website provides a treasure trove of resources that not only includes poetry for children of all ages but also has resources and lesson plans that can help teachers to meet their students' needs in a variety of ways. Let's take a brief look at Kenn's biography.

The links in the screen capture above will be active if you go to the webpage. Here is a link to the bio on the webpage LINK
Here are the timed stamped talking points for the interview (so, you can go to the sections that interest you the most first)

Here is a link to the U-Tube Interview:

Here is the link to Kenn's website: www.poetry4kids.com

Here are links to some of the web pages Kenn mentioned in the interview. I'm sure you'll find them useful as a source for poems, writing lessons and writing your own rhyming poems.
Poems: https://poetry4kids.com/poems/
Lessons: https://poetry4kids.com/lessons/poetry-writing-lessons/

Rhyming Dictionary: https://poetry4kids.com/rhymes/
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kennnesbitt/membership
If you would like to help Kenn with what he is doing, you can have an ad-free experience on the website, get free goodies, and have access to the members-only pages of his website. You can join here :

School visit from Kenn:
Link to The Missouri Reader Poetry issue LINK
You can also use the link above to join using the "super member" option. That option is $25 a month and gives you a free online school visit from Kenn. Those visits usually cost $325.

Final Thoughts & a peek at upcoming blogs:

As I said in the introduction, poetry can be used to help children of all ages. Kenn has used his programming expertise to create these incredible resources for students and teachers. I use his site in my current teaching. I joined his site as a supporting member in order to gain access to the members-only pages. Those pages make a good thing even better. Be sure to spend some time this week visiting his site and exploring it. You won't be sorry that you did.

I have several important blogs in the works. Next week, I will be interviewing Dr. Jan Wasowicz. She'll be telling us about SPELLtalk and her model for teaching reading. I'm also meeting next week with P.D. Pearson to set up what we will discuss in his upcoming interview. I'll also be doing a blog about my upcoming webinar. Pioneer Valley Books sponsors it. The name of it is Transformative Reading Strategies. I will be talking to a panel of experts that includes Tim Rasinski, Penny Slater and Kathy Roe. A link will be forthcoming. In the meantime, please have a look at what Penny & Kathy had to say about their innovative adaptations of Tim's fluency work LINK. So, as we get started in this new school year, there's lots going on. Until next week, this is Dr. Sam signing off.

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

PS If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following it to ensure you won't miss future posts. Use the "follow" entry on the sidebar of the blog.

New book by Robb, Rasinski and Harrison- Ready to use Differentiated Lessons for Grades 3-6. An Interview by Dr. Sam Bommarito

Before I became a reading teacher/professor, I was a social studies teacher for five years. So, I've had an ongoing interest in how to best teach our older students. Imagine my delight when I found out that three well-credentialed reading experts have gotten together to create a book designed to help readers in grades 3-6. I can't tell you how many times at a conference I have been asked how we can help readers at this age, and this book certainly provides a go-to resource to that end. David Harrison has custom-written short, high-interest passages for the lessons. Tim Rasinski has made word ladders to go with the lessons. How good is that? Add to that the fact that Laura Robb has done a masterful job of organizing the book so that teachers can easily access the lessons they want at the difficulty levels they want. Some lessons can be used for struggling readers but also for both on- and above-level readers. I believe the lessons can be adapted for readers outside the 3-6 grade range. I know this book will become one of my go-to resources. Let's now learn a little about each of the authors:

Here are the timed stamped talking points for the Interview (that way so you can go to the sections that interest you the most first)

Here is a link to the U-Tube Interview:

Laura Robb- Here are the links to three of Laura's books:

Increase Reading Volume: Practical Strategies That Boost Students' Achievement and Passion for Reading, NCTE: https://store.ncte.org/book/increase-reading-volume-practical-strategies-boost-students-achievement-and-passion-reading

Guided Practice For Reading Growth: Texts and Lessons to Improve Fluency, Comprehension, and Vocabulary, Corwin Literacy: https://us.corwin.com/books/guided-practice-for-reading-270980

V ocabulary Is Comprehension: Getting to the Root of Text Complexity, Corwin Literacy: https://us.corwin.com/books/vocabulary-is-comprehension-24247H9
Here is a link to the Robb Review podcast- LINK
H ere is a link to the Robb Review - LINK

Here is a link to Tim's website LINK:

Here is a link to David's blog/website LINK.

Final Thoughts & a peek at upcoming blogs:

As I said in the introduction, I predict this book will become teachers' go-to resource. The custom-made supporting materials include both the high-interest passages and the word ladders. These lay the foundation for easy-to-use lessons that teachers can use for many different purposes.

I have several several interesting blogs in the works. Next week, I will be posting my interview with Ken Nesbitt. He will give us a tour of his amazing poetry site, Poetry4Kids. That site provides a treasure trove of resources. He will give us a cook's tour of those resources and explain how they can be used. I also will be talking to Mary Howard about her recent post about guided reading. That post appeared in the Robb Review. I'm also arranging an interview with Jan Wasowicz, PhD, CCC-SLP, BCS-CL, about SPELLtalk and her thoughts about Bruce Hewett's recent post on that site. In that post, Bruce proposed a way to end the reading wars LINK. So, many interesting things are coming up as we get started in this new school year. Until next week, this is Dr. Sam signing off.
Copyright 2023 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author's views and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.
Happy Reading and Writing.

Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the center taking flak from all sides)

PS If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following it to ensure you won't miss future posts. Use the "follow" entry on the sidebar of the blog.

Dr. Sam is upgrading the blog site this week- The regular blog returns next week

This week, I'm getting the blog site ready so that I can add a new feature. The working title for that feature is Dr. Sam's Common-Sense/Common Ground Minutes. These will be short hot-topic videos discussing key literacy issues. The regular blog will continue as always, but there will be a special page on the blog to house these short videos. I'm hoping to have the first one ready by next week.

On the topic of the regular blog continuing, I have two important interviews coming up. One is with Laura Robb, Tim Rasinski and David Harrison. It is about their new book, Promote Reading Gains with Differentiated Instruction. The interview is already complete. It will be posted as soon as the book is ready for sale.

The other upcoming interview will be with Ken Nesbitt. It will be about his wonderful children's poetry site and the many resources available at the site. So- lots of good things coming up.

By the way, Bruce Hewitt's proposal for ending the reading wars is generating a lot of interest on SPELLtalk. If you missed my interview with him last week, here is the LINK. Part of the reason for creating the videos around using common sense to find common ground is aimed at achieving the day when there are no sides.

Until next week, this is Dr. Sam signing off.

Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the center taking flak from all sides)
Copyright 2023 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author's views and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.
PS If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following it to ensure you won't miss future posts. Use the "follow" entry on the sidebar of the blog.

Dr. Sam Bommarito interviews Bruce Howlett, author of Sparking the Reading Shift, about a plan to end the reading wars.

In the spirit of bringing in voices and ideas from all sides, I recently conducted this interview with Bruce Howlett from Sparking the Reading Shift. Bruce and his co-author, Dr. Caitlin Howlett, have drawn up a rather complete and ambitious plan to end the reading wars. I find this plan intriguing because it proposes using ideas from all sides and focuses on successful strategies rather than a single one-size-fits-all plan. While I may not agree with every point, I do find that their proposal is one that should give us all hope for finding common ground in what has so far been the endless reading wars. The Howlett's work has attracted the attention of Jan Wasowicz, founder and CEO of Learning by Design. Their plan appeared in this week's posts on Spell-Talk. Please see a screen capture of Jan's letter below:

Here is a link to his article: https://learningbydesign.com/professional-development/spell-links-blogue/

Here is Bruce's Biography. It is taken from his website LINK.

These are the highlights of the interview. The interview was conducted in advance of the publication of the article. I timed the interview posting to come immediately after the article's publication. In case you want to jump to a particular topic in the interview, the highlights are time-stamped.

HERE IS THE LINK TO THE INTERVIEW:
Chris' website for Sparking the Reading Shift program is Twitter - @ReadingShift Here is a link to a sharefolder containing Bruce's slides from this interview: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gglDNUVRZA73JB0ex_k21nuZQiLqDK8t?usp=sharing Dr. Sam's reflections & some upcoming events and posts readingshift.com
As I mentioned last week, I've interviewed several different literacy leaders from several different perspectives. This includes last week's interview with Marnie Ginsberg, Ph.D. the Founder and CEO of Reading Simplified LINK, and an interview of Nora Chahbazi and her speech first instructional system LINK. Other interviews included Denise Ritchie and her work at the THRASS institute LINK, Jan Richardson, and her work with Guided Reading LINK, LINK and Penny Slater & Kathy Roe and their work at HFL Education which adapts the work of Tim Rasinski in teaching prosody LINK. That is only a partial list of literacy leaders I have talked to. What all these leaders have in common is that they have created research-based ways to help children learn the decoding skills they need and do that in a way that also promotes comprehension. What I like most about Chris's ideas from this current interview is his statement to "exclude nothing" (16:13 on the video). Because Chris came from a background of working in a building that included both OG and RR, he had direct experience in working with ideas from all sides. Using ideas from all sides to implement reading programs has been a constant theme in my own writing on this topic. In that sense, Bruce and I are kindred spirits. I truly believe the path to ending the reading wars lies not in one side or the other declaring victory, but rather it lies in all sides showing a willingness to use the best of all worlds, regardless of whose particular world the research-based practices come from.

I have been championing the idea of avoiding the dichotomies often associated with discussions about the teaching of reading and replacing that dichotomous thinking with a search for common ground LINK, LINK, LINK. I think if you look carefully at the work of the folks I talk about in the paragraph above, there really is a great deal of common ground in what they propose. There are many things that teachers can adapt and start to use in their own teaching. I've long advocated having more talk and less arguing. That means that all sides must avoid using straw man versions of the other sides. I wrote an article for Literacy Today on that very point, LINK. Perhaps Bruce's post can become the spark that marks the beginning of the end of the reading wars.
"Some researchers probably started out thinking they were in different camps, but during the editing process, that changed. You know, in an academic journal like RRQ, we ask experts to review each article and give the authors anonymous feedback. A lot of them pushed the authors to say more about the gap between research and practice and to consider differing perspectives. And when they revised their articles, those researchers who started out in separate camps seemed to move more to the center and acknowledge and welcome other views. So, overall, I'd say that the experts agreed that it's valuable to conduct various kinds of scientific research that aims to better understand and meet children's complex and varied needs - not to insist that there's a single, "one best" way to teach reading." I'll end with that thought from Amanda. Copyright 2023 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author's views and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization. "... experts agreed that it's valuable to conduct various kinds of scientific research that aims to better understand and meet children's complex and varied needs - not to insist that there's a single, 'one best' way to teach reading." Perhaps models like Bruce s, will help us operationalize how we can all use common sense to find the common ground in the reading wars. The kids deserve that!
In one of my earlier blogs, I wrote about Amanda Goodwin and the insights she developed when working on the two special issues of the Reading Research Quarterly. I hope we can follow the example set by her in that article LINK. Those two special issues included several peer-reviewed research articles and ideas from several different perspectives LINK. In her article, Amanda described how, in the process of peer review, researchers who at first viewed themselves in different camps found themselves shifting more to the center:

Happy Reading and Writing.

Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the middle taking flak from all sides)

PS If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following it to ensure you won't miss future posts. Use the "follow" entry on the sidebar of the blog.

Dr. Sam Bommarito interviews Marnie Ginsberg, Ph.D. the Founder and CEO of Reading Simplified
I've spent the summer looking at various ideas about how to best teach reading. This was done in the spirit of trying to find some common ground and common practices in what some have called The Reading Wars. One of my regular followers suggested I investigate the ideas and work of Dr. Marnie Ginsberg. I'm very glad he did. This interview will give my readers a treasure trove of ideas, including many that are "ready to use for next Monday's class". Let's start by learning a little about Dr. Ginsberg and what she is doing.

Marnie Ginsberg, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of Reading Simplified.

In 1999, Marnie searched high and low for answers to the question, "How do you teach reading quickly?". She found lots of conflicting advice and theories. Overwhelming! She finally ran across ideas that made sense. Before and after school, she tutored two boys in her class who originally were below the 1st-grade level, and their achievement jumped ahead to the middle of 3rd grade!. Armed with this early success between 2013 and 2015, Marnie developed K-5 sets of student materials and training videos for a national, non-profit mentoring organization. Then she began Reading Simplified, which has had over 150,000 email readers enjoy their free trainings and resources, as well as the training and curriculum inside the paid Reading Simplified Academy, which has served over 14,000 teachers and parents. So, as you can tell, many children have been reached over the years with instruction that yields much more rapid achievement gains than mainstream approaches.

This biography is based on highlights from the "Our Story So Far" post on her website. For more details about Marnie and her program, use this LINK.

These are highlights of the interview. In case you want to jump to a particular topic, the highlights are time-stamped.
HERE IS A LINK TO THE YOUTUBE VIDEO:

Link to the Reading Simplified Website LINK.
Targeted Reading Intervention articles: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259708793_The_Effectiveness_of_a_Technologically_Facilitated_Classroom-Based_Early_Reading_Intervention Targeted Reading Instruction's ongoing work

What Works Clearinghouse: What Works Clearinghouse review of 1 Targeted Reading Intervention study

Switch It game: Integrate-don't-isolate-A child learning 13 letter sounds and advancing in PA in 5 days with just eight min. of Switch It per day: LINK

Access to a sample Streamlined Pathway: LINK

Access to Marnie's Timeline of Research: Follow the directions at this LINK to download the full timeline pictured below. Each item on the timeline links to the research described. BTW- in addition to these well-chosen pieces, I would suggest readers also examine the work of Duke and Scanlon.

Marnie's podcast and the blog on Set for Variability LINK.

Dr. Sam's reflections & some upcoming events and posts

Dr. Ginsberg 's work can be added to several projects I've done interviews about, including Nora Chahbazi and her speech first instructional system LINK, Denise Ritchie and her work at the THRASS institute LINK, Jan Richardson, and her work with Guided Reading LINK, LINK and Penny Slater & Kathy Roe and their work at HFL Education which adapts the work of Tim Rasinski in teaching prosody. LINK. What all these folks have in common is that they have created research-based ways to help children learn the decoding skills they need and do that in a way that also promotes comprehension. Next week, I'll be posting my interview with Bruce Hewitt LINK about his upcoming piece which is scheduled to appear in Spell Talk. The name of that post is "Our Choice: Rapidly Translate, Evaluate and Adopt Innovative Literacy Methods or Prolong the Reading Wars." That upcoming post outlines his proposal to effectively end the reading wars by using ideas and practices from all sides in order to create and implement effective practices for the teaching of reading. I think you will find the interview about his ideas quite interesting.

I have been championing the idea of avoiding the dichotomies often associated with discussions about the teaching of reading and replacing that dichotomous thinking with a search for common ground LINK, LINK, LINK. I think if you look carefully at the work of the folks I talk about in the paragraph above, there really is a great deal of common ground in what they propose to do. There are many things teachers can adapt and start to use in their own teaching. By the way, Dr. Ginsberg 's ideas add many new things for teachers to consider, and I want to thank her for sharing those resources. So, until next week, this is Dr. Sam, signing off.

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

P.S. If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following it to ensure you won't miss future posts. Use the "follow" entry on the sidebar of the blog.

BREAKING NEWS: Today Lucy Calkins launched her new website; please look at her ideas on how to rebalance literacy. LINK

Pushing back on the SOR Legislation Currently Sweeping the Nation: Looking at Things from a Centrist Perspective by Dr. Sam Bommarito
* If you overdo phonics (code emphasis) & underdo comprehension (meaning emphasis), you will get word callers * If you overdo comprehension (meaning emphasis) & underdo phonics (code emphasis), you will get word guessers. * If you balance your phonics and comprehension instruction, you will get readers.
The above heading summarizes the heart of what I have come to call the centrist position around literacy LINK, LINK. For decades, the issue of how to teach reading has turned into a swinging pendulum. We've gone through eras of meaning emphasis vs. code emphasis and even brief periods of phonics vs. no phonics. The net result has been what Frank Smith once called the endless debate in reading. There have been many attempts to settle things once and for all. Often, those attempts have resulted in major shifts that end up helping some children but not others. Many of those shifts have resulted in spending millions of dollars with very little in the way of improvement in reading. Take the case of the Reading First program, a program that is clearly a code-emphasis approach. The following is taken from the Executive Summary of Reading First LINK:

"The findings presented in this report are generally consistent with findings presented in the study's Interim Report, which found statistically significant impacts on instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) in grades one and two, and which found no statistically significant impact on reading comprehension as measured by the SAT 10." (The bolding is mine)

My conclusion: Code emphasis approaches tend to show gains in decoding abilities but not comprehension.

Meaning emphasis approaches also have had problems. They tend to show gains in comprehension and critical thinking, But the charge is often made that some students using them are not learning their decoding skills. LINK. The proposed solution to this problem is to teach the students phonics, specifically synthetic phonics LINK. Despite claims that this solution uses all five of the pillars of instruction, as you will see in the upcoming analysis, code emphasis approaches like those being mandated under some of the new state laws have had problems demonstrating real gains in comprehension. In addition, the proposed solutions fail to deal with the fact phonics needs to be taught in the context of a total reading/language arts program LINK. Another issue is that there is more than one kind of phonics LINK. Limiting teacher training to only learning about one kind, synthetic phonics, is a key weakness of this approach.

My conclusion: Both extremes, code emphasis and meaning emphasis, don't do very well in scaffolding children into becoming readers, i.e., students who can decode and make meaning out of what they decode. Why do the two extremes fail? There is a simple reason:

What works with one child doesn't always work with another. Different children need different kinds of instruction. Taking one-size-fits-all approaches guarantees that there will always be some children who won't be helped.

The problem with scaffolding children in decoding is that we sometimes fail to match the child with the kind of phonics instruction they need. That happened to Dyslexic children when the programs of the day using meaning emphasis failed to give them access to the synthetic phonics methods they needed. Mismatches in the kind of instruction needed are still happening now to many children who can decode but can't remember or make meaning of what they decoded. Word Callers are the neglected children of the current debate about reading methods LINK. For anyone thinking that is not a significant problem, please look at this screen capture for P.D. Pearson's video on the topic, where he cites a study by Koon Foorman and Galloway showing that 1/3 of the students who did not pass the third-grade state test could decode. LINK:

Proposed Legislation Exploring Some Myths and Realities:
Today, we are in danger of taking part in yet another swing of the pendulum. Some folks have claimed they finally have the one and only answer that will fit all children. They are again championing a point of view that fits the definition of a code-emphasis approach. They claim to have found methods that work with every child. The claims extend to the point that their point of view about teaching reading has risen to the level of "settled science." The problem is that this is not the first time such claims have been made. Please listen to this short video from Dr. George Hruby for an entertaining yet informative post that makes this point emphatically. The name of the video is What the Phonics is the Science of Reading. You'll see that much of what is being offered up today is, in reality, old wine in new bottles. We've been down this path already, and that path leads to a very expensive dead end.

Let's examine some myths and realities around the claims made by Science of Reading proponents of the current round of SOR legislation.

MYTH - Training teachers in LTRS (or similar programs) will solve a significant number of the reading problems of our children.

REALITY - The research around such programs shows otherwise:

Training teachers in letter-sound relations improve teacher's letter-sound knowledge and use of structured teaching. IT DOES NOT IMPROVE STUDENT TEST SCORES. So, says LTRS's own research (and we can expect similar results from other programs as well; none of them have demonstrated improved student test scores in comprehension). Consider what Racheal Gabrial had to say on this subject.

Link to the LTRS research: LINK. The results of the research cited by Gabriel align completely with the findings of other research studies showing that LTRS training does not improve student reading scores and that other more promising ways of teacher sound-symbol relations have emerged LINK.
LINK

Myth: Proponents of SOR legislation claim that the failure of balanced literacy caused a reading crisis. They also claim the methods they champion greatly improve reading scores, alluding to things like the "Mississippi Miracle" to show they have found a much better way.

The Realities: There are definite problems in the reading world. Reading scores have remained relatively flat over an extended period of time. Read my interview with Tom Loveless for the details LINK. Here are the points he makes in that interview.

Loveless points out the alarmist language used by SOR proponents. Their claims that 2/3 of the students in the nation are not proficient readers might lead some to believe that 2/3 of the students are reading below grade level. In fact, when using NAEP basic scores (which more closely reflect the idea of reading at or near grade level), the number changes to approximately 1/3 of the students reading below basic. On the one hand, that is far from acceptable. On the other hand, it is half what is usually reported, hence my charge that the social media reporting is purposefully exaggerating the problem. I would add that researchers like Dr. Paul Thomas have published papers indicating that the claims about the Mississippi Miracle do not hold up under close scrutiny LINK.
There are many other problems with the SOR legislation:
I don't want anything I've said to be interpreted as saying that improving teacher knowledge in sound-symbol relations isn't an important goal. It is. Rather, I am saying that mandating ineffective programs to benefit one set of publishers over all others is not the best way to improve teacher knowledge of the application of phonics. There are less expensive, more effective alternatives to training teachers in sound-symbol relations in a way that helps them teach students about those relations and helps students actually apply that sound-symbol knowledge when they are reading. Consider the work of Tim Rasinski LINK, Heidi Mesmer LINK , or Nora Chahbazi LINK. All these folks are working on alternatives to the programs being mandated by many states. Mandating particular programs is effectively giving some publishers a monopoly. States should not be in the business of providing monopolies. State laws granting these monopolies should be changed immediately. Providing select publishers with monopolies is an ill-advised way to proceed.

SOR legislation does not adequately address comprehension problems. Many SOR advocates say comprehension comes automatically after decoding. IT DOES NOT. So says the NRP and all of Nell Duke's work in comprehension. Comprehension strategies must be taught explicitly and learned using gradual release. Duke and others have several decades of research indicating that this is the case LINK. Even Shanahan has criticized what I've come to call the "background only" approach to teaching comprehension in this cleverly named blog post: The Spirit is Willingham, but the Flesh is Weak.

SOR legislation does not address the fact that research shows that teaching phonics to older children does not improve comprehension. Older children need other things. One promising intervention is including Rasinski's use of fluency instruction. That improves both fluency and comprehension. See the results that teachers in England are getting using Rasinski's idea LINK.

SOR legislation does not address the issue of Word Callers. Some SOR advocates claim that Word Callers do not exist or do not exist in large enough numbers to be a concern. P.D. Pearson and others have reported otherwise, as demonstrated earlier in this blog, citing the work of Coon, Foorman and Gallaway (2020) LINK.

SOR advocates discount the results that call into question the long-term benefits of programs emphasizing synthetic phonics over all else. Consider the work of Jeffery Bowers LINK. Is this discounting really justified when all the data is considered, or is this just a case of applying the "discount and discredit" tactic used by many SOR folks to call into question research that challenges their basic assumptions and findings? Careful consideration should be given to that question before making decisions around literacy issues.

The so-called SOR movement (what I call the social media version of SOR) is being promoted by social media pundits who have a vested interest in keeping the movement alive. They make their living in public relations campaigns promoting this version of SOR. The term structured literacy was created as a public relations marketing term LINK. These public relations folks are often called upon to testify before state legislators. That testimony should be treated the same way as any testimony from experts provided by lobbyists. It should not be a substitute for expert testimony from researchers in the literacy field.

I'm not saying there aren't problems that need fixing. For instance, the years that many balance literacy advocates spent stressing analytic phonics over synthetic phonics worked for some children but not all. Too many universities included analytic phonics-based practices in their teacher education programs and downplayed or completely left out synthetic phonics. This has led to a situation where many educators today are not even aware that there are various ways to teach phonics. There is more than one way, as documented by this ILA position statement LINK. However, each of those ways can help some children. Teachers need to be versed in teaching all the forms of phonics. Training in phonics needs to be done in a way that allows teachers to scaffold children into actually using phonics as they read. District curriculum should be arranged so that every child gets the kind of phonics instruction they need. That especially means we must include synthetic phonics for children who need that form of instruction. However, that should be done in a manner that does not preclude children who thrive using other forms of phonics to have access to those forms. Care should be taken not to solve the problems of one set of children at the expense of another. The use of RTI LINK at the district level would be crucial to ensure that all children get what they need.

Mandating synthetic phonics over all else and ignoring many key pieces of research around comprehension will simply cause yet another pendulum swing. I made that point in my very first blog about this topic, a blog in which I called for a reading evolution (as opposed to a reading revolution). LINK.

As of this writing, the state Massachusetts Legislature is considering a bill inspired by the current spate of SOR legislation from around the country. As those legislators consider this bill, I hope they keep in mind that Massachusetts already has some of the best reading scores in the nation. Take care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, tweak the current system to ensure teachers learn about ALL the different ways to teach phonics. Since some dyslexic students need synthetic phonics over all other kinds, set up ways to ensure that that happens for them. But don't do it in a way that strips students who flourish using other ways of teaching phonics of their access to those alternate ways. Take a long, hard look at England and what has happened when the emphasis on synthetic phonics is so large that comprehension concerns get pushed into the background LINK. Avoid the pitfalls present when student retention is used to raise reading scores LINK. Don't let the social media pundits have control of these very important issues. Please let the "reading wars" play out fully in the research world. Let's not move things from the research world into the everyday classroom without fully vetting them first. Above all, ensure the instruments used to test literacy fully and directly measure comprehension. Weak sister substitutes for comprehension tests should be avoided. Refer to the chart from Nell Duke's article on advice to policymakers LINK to ensure the test being used measures everything it needs to measure.

In sum, let's try using a centrist approach, using the best research from all sides.

Let's try something that has never been tried in reading history. Let us try stopping the pendulum in the middle for a time, just as P.D. Pearson suggested we should LINK. Let's follow the example set by Amanda Goodwin and the researchers involved in putting together the two special issues of the Reading Research Quarterly. These special issues provide one of the most complete collections of research on the question of how to teach reading. It includes relevant research from all sides LINK. I highly recommend that anyone who wants a good starter set of well-done research about how to teach reading begin by reviewing the collection from these two special issues.

Here is what the co-editor of RRQ, Amanda Goodwin, reported about what happened as the authors put together that collection LINK:

I'll close with that thought. There is not one single "one best" way to teach reading. Legislation should reflect that. Legislation should allow districts to pick the research-based approaches that best serve their local population. After all, individual districts know their kids the best. State or national mandates of one-size-fits-all solutions cannot possibly fit the diverse needs of all districts. It's time to move to the center and give districts the discretion they need to meet the needs of all their children.

Happy Reading and Writing.
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. Some additional thoughts/resources:
Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the middle taking flak from all sides)

When teaching about phonics, I've found this piece by Nell Duke and Heidie Mesmer particularly useful: LINK

Provided with permission of Crossland Literacy
Screen captures of the two documents are found below. To have working links, download them from the sharefolder.

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Seeking Ways to Grow Proficient, Motivated, Lifelong Readers & Writers

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Reading Research Quarterly - 2022 - Hall - Forty Years of Reading Intervention Research for Elementary Students with or at

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PROOF POINTS: Leading dyslexia treatment isn’t a magic bullet, studies find, while other options show promise

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PROOF POINTS: Leading dyslexia treatment isn’t a magic bullet, studies find, while other options show promise

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In 2019, a grassroots campaign led by parents succeeded in passing a wave of dyslexia legislation. Many states mandated hallmarks of the Orton-Gillingham method, specifically calling for "multisensory" instruction, to help students with dyslexia read and write better.* In New York, where I live, the city spends upwards of $300 million a year in taxpayer funds on private school tuition for children with disabilities. Much of it goes to pay for private schools that specialize in Orton-Gillingham instruction and similar approaches, which families insist are necessary to teach their children with dyslexia to read.

But two recent academic papers, synthesizing dozens of reading studies, are raising questions about the effectiveness of these expensive education policies. A review of 24 studies on the Orton-Gillingham method, published in the July 2021 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Exceptional Children, found no statistically significant benefit for children with dyslexia. Instead, suggesting a way forward, a review of 53 reading studies, led by University of Virginia researcher Colby Hall and published online September 2022 in Reading Research Quarterly, found that much cheaper reading interventions for children with a variety of reading difficulties were also quite effective for children with dyslexia.

There's no litmus test for dyslexia and education experts say the diagnosis covers a range of reading problems. Orton-Gillingham is one of the oldest approaches to help struggling readers, dating back to the 1930s, and it explicitly teaches letters and sounds, and breaks words down into letter patterns. It also emphasizes multisensory instruction. For example, students might learn the letter "p" by seeing it, saying its name, and sounding it out while tracing it in shaving cream.

"We have this approach that's so deeply rooted in legislation and in policy and practice, but we don't have the evidence base to support it," said Elizabeth Stevens, an assistant professor at Georgia State University, and the lead author of the 2021 Orton-Gillingham study. "The thinking is that OG [Orton-Gillingham] is the magic bullet, the thing that these students need. But Colby [Hall]'s paper says, 'No, these other reading interventions that explicitly teach these foundational skills significantly improve their reading outcomes.' These students can benefit from these other interventions."

The implication is that maybe children diagnosed with dyslexia don't need something that is substantially different from children with other reading struggles. This theory still needs to be tested. No well-designed research study has compared a dyslexia-specific remedy, such as Orton-Gillingham, head-to-head with more general interventions for children who struggle in reading.

More than 2 million children, nearly 3 out of 10 who receive special education services in the United States, have been diagnosed with dyslexia or a closely related reading disability. Getting the solution right is important, not only to help these children read and write, but to spend taxpayer funds on helping them efficiently.

Monica McHale-Small, director of education at the Learning Disabilities Association of America, and previously with the International Dyslexia Association, said there's a "growing consensus" that Orton-Gillingham approaches aren't necessarily what all children with dyslexia need. "The research is there," she said. "You can't deny the findings of multiple studies."

Many dyslexia advocates remain loyal to Orton-Gillingham, McHale-Small said, because so many parents have kids whom they believe were helped by Orton-Gillingham tutors. Meanwhile, it remains out of reach for many low-income families. Orton-Gillingham involves very expensive teacher training, she said, which many schools cannot afford. McHale-Small experienced the costs first hand when she was superintendent of the Saucon Valley school district in Pennsylvania and participated in a pilot study of Orton-Gillingham in 2016-17.** The American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research group, found no statistical benefits for these multisensory interventions in a 2018 report.

"Science evolves. Science has to be taken seriously," said Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice at UCLA and author of Proust and the Squid, a book about how the brain learns to read. "We don't need emphasis on 'multisensory'; we need emphasis on being explicit, systematic and after all of the components of language in our interventions."

The researchers in both the 2021 and 2022 studies all cautioned that the jury is still out on Orton-Gillingham. Better quality studies may still prove the method to be effective with children with dyslexia. Stevens had to throw out more than 100 of the studies she found; many were poorly designed, didn't compare children who didn't receive the treatment and didn't measure outcomes well. In the end, she reviewed only 24 of the better Orton-Gillingham studies and just 16 had enough numbers to include in her calculations. Several of these were rather small, as few as 10 or 12 participants. That's such a small number of children that it makes it hard to derive any meaningful conclusion from them.

"The corpus of studies included in our meta-analysis were not very high quality," said Stevens. "We need to do more high-quality research to fully understand the effects of that approach on the reading outcomes for students with dyslexia."

The larger 2022 analysis of 53 reading interventions had a higher bar for study quality and only one Orton-Gillingham study made the cut. Several of the reading interventions that marketed themselves as "multisensory" also made the cut, but the researchers didn't detect any extra benefits from them.

"They weren't more effective than the ones that didn't market themselves as multisensory," said Hall.

The good news is that most of the 53 reading interventions were effective and they had more similarities than differences. They were administered to children as either one-to-one tutoring sessions or in small groups. And they tended to provide direct, explicit step-by-step reading and writing instruction which includes not just traditional phonics but practice with clusters of letters, tricky vowel patterns and sounds. This is in sharp contrast with a teaching approach based on the belief that children can learn to read naturally if they are surrounded by books at their reading level and get lots of independent reading and writing time.

"Systematic instruction works for kids," said Emily Solari, a prominent reading expert and a professor at the University of Virginia, who was part of the 12-member research team on the 2022 study. "That is what we need to do for kids with dyslexia and for word reading difficulties."

Researchers noticed good outcomes for several commercial interventions, such as Lexia Core5, Sound Partners, and Rave-O. Many non-commercial interventions were effective too, including Sharon Vaughn's Proactive Reading intervention and Jessica Toste's Multisyllabic Word Reading Intervention + Motivational Belief Training. Toste's method isn't sold commercially, but the University of Texas associate professor gives it away free to teachers upon request.

In the meta-analysis, there were hints that spelling instruction may be especially beneficial to students with dyslexia. Frequency appeared to matter too.

"There's been decades of research to show that we actually need to do really intensive intervention with these kids, not just two days a week for 20 minutes," said Solari. "They need evidence-based core instruction, and then they need more. And often it's a lot more."

The researchers could not ascertain a minimum threshold or dosage for effectiveness. That still needs to be studied.

One of the trickiest things about studying dyslexia is defining it and determining who has it. Experts disagree. Some insist it is a genetic condition, but there is no genetic test. Others say a child's environment can cause it. Others believe it is neurobiological, but it is difficult to determine whether a reading difficulty is neurological in origin. The belief that children with dyslexia see letters backwards is a debunked myth of the past, but there is little agreement on what it is exactly.

When I interviewed the researchers behind the 2022 meta-analysis on reading interventions, they explained to me that dyslexia, or word reading difficulty, falls along a continuum. "People think of dyslexia like a broken leg, you either have it or you don't," said Hall. "But dyslexia and word reading difficulties are more like high blood pressure. It still needs to be addressed, but it's a different way of thinking about it."

In the 2021 and 2022 studies, researchers defined dyslexia as having "word-level reading difficulties." Some children were formally diagnosed with dyslexia and others hadn't been diagnosed, but they scored in the bottom 25 percent in basic word recognition, reading fluency and spelling. Dyslexia is generally distinguished from comprehension difficulties, but there is often overlap. Some children with word reading difficulties also have comprehension problems but some have excellent comprehension.

Both McHale-Small at the Learning Disabilities Association and Wolf at UCLA believe that there are various types of dyslexia and each may need different interventions. Not every child diagnosed with dyslexia struggles to sound out words, for example. "The minute you see reading fluency problems, that is beyond phonics," said Wolf. "Over time, some of those kids just don't need that decoding emphasis."

"We need more research," said McHale-Small. "We know a lot about dyslexia but we need to know a lot more."

Millions of children and their parents are waiting for an answer.
*Correction: Because of a mischaracterization of her research by Elizabeth Stevens, an earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that at least seven states require teachers to be trained in the Orton-Gillingham teaching approach and to use it to help students with dyslexia read and write better. ** Clarification: Saucon Valley school district was not part of the pilot study, but McHale-Small served on the study's advisory committee and decided to implement an Orton-Gillingham intervention in her district.
This story about children with dyslexia was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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PROOF POINTS: Leading dyslexia treatment isn't a magic bullet, studies find, while other options show promise

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Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox In 2019, a grassroots campaign led by parents succeeded in passing a wave of dyslexia legislation.

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The 3 Cueing Systems and the Science of Reading

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The 3 Cueing Systems and the Science of Reading

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Dr. Andy Johnson makes the case for the 3 Cueing Systems. It's also worth following the article links at the end of this presentation.

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In one of my latest books, some of the limitations of brain-imaging research and "reading science" are reviewed. Designing meaning-based interventions for reading. (2021) Guildford Press. Here, I describe effective, research-based reading instruction and interventions. Research supporting a meaning-based approach is cited here.

However, on various discussion sites, I've noticed some common misunderstandings. I wish to clarify eight of these:

1. The 3-cueing system is not an approach to reading instruction. It simply recognizes that the brain uses three interconnected systems to recognize words during the act of reading: semantic, syntactic, and grapho-phonetic. The research supporting this is pretty overwhelming (some of it is cited in my book), and taken from a variety of fields (linguistics, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, cognitive science, eye movement and miscue analysis, and reading instruction).

2. Understanding how the brain creates meaning with print (versus simply sounding out words) is essential in designing effective reading instruction and interventions. Direct instruction in phonics must be used along with activities and instruction to develop the semantic and syntactic cueing systems. Limiting instruction to just phonics impedes rather than enhances students' ability to create meaning with print.

3. Word recognition must be separated from word identification.

4. Reading is creating meaning with print, not simply sounding out words. Understanding this difference is essential in evaluating and accurately interpreting educational research.

5. I create a lot of short instructional YouTube videos and podcasts. Here, I try to provide a basic understanding of how the brain creates meaning along with print along with a few useful tips. I don't cite my sources here. My books are used for deeper explanations and my sources are cited here.

6. The idea that one should abandon direct instruction has not been put forth in any of my books, podcasts, or YouTube videos. It's not the "what" of direct phonics instruction that is the question; rather, it is the "how", the "how much" and the "in what context" of phonics instruction in which there are differences between code-first and meaning-first approaches to reading instruction. You can find research to support both perspectives; however, research to support a meaning-first approach seems to be far more convincing.

7. Reading volume (the best research-based strategy) is commonly described as one important component of effective reading instruction. This is something that teachers can easily include with daily reading instruction and parents can easily promote at home. This does not mean that reading instruction should be abandoned.

8. Finally, I am always happy to review any studies that show something is or isn't effective. Send them my way ( Andrew.johnson@mnsu.edu). When somebody says "research says" this or that, I always try to examine at least one supporting study. What you find when you begin to review a lot of educational research is that there is no single study that proves anything. Instead, various studies become part of a theoretical perspective. You need to look at a lot of research from a wide variety of perspectives to get an accurate picture of reality. From my perspective, a neurocognitive model of reading has far more supporting research from a much greater variety of sources than does the phonological processing model.

I appreciate hearing a variety of views and perspectives, especially from those who may not agree with me. It always helps me clarify my own perspective and sometimes, if solid, convincing evidence is provided, I do modify my views on things.
www.teaching-reading.com
Andy Johnson

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The 3 Cueing Systems and the "Science"​ of Reading

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In one of my latest books, some of the limitations of brain-imaging research and "reading science" are reviewed. Designing meaning-based interventions for reading.

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They have offered several webinars about the Science of Reading as well as some great resources provided as hand-outs
In 2023, check out Finding Common Ground to Establish Best Practices in Literacy Instruction, featuring Dr. Sam Bommarito, Michèle Dufresne, and Karen Cangemi
In the 2022 webinars check out
Getting the Facts Straight on Guided Reading, featuring Jan Richardson and Michèle Dufresne
Unpacking Reading Science to Inform a Different Path to Literacy, featuring Paul Thomas, Ed.D.

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This webinar gives a good overview of some of the things we know and other things that we don't know.

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Presented by Dr. Nathan Clemens, Associate Professor, Department of Special Education, The University of Texas at Austin

Sponsored by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Watch the Recording Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.
Reading research has identified instructional practices and target skills that are critical for reading success. At the same time, research is less clear on some aspects of reading instruction and several questions remain unanswered. In this edWebinar, Dr. Nathan Clemens discusses how reading science can be applied in practice, and how to navigate situations in which evidence is unclear.

Viewers leave with insights on bringing the latest evidence-based practices and skills to their classrooms and districts.

This recorded edWebinar is of interest to teachers and school and district leaders of the kindergarten through elementary grades.
About the Presenter Learn more about viewing the live presentation and the recording, earning your CE certificate, and using our new accessibility features.
Dr. Nathan Clemens is an associate professor in the Department of Special Education at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Clemens studies reading difficulties in children and youth, particularly, word-level difficulties for students in early grades and reading comprehension difficulties for students in later grades. His work is aimed at improving reading instruction and interventions, helping teachers make better use of assessment data to guide their instruction, and aligning evidence-based interventions with students' unique learning needs. He has over 50 publications and is leading several federal research grants that are studying the effects of interventions for struggling readers. He received his Ph.D. in school psychology from Lehigh University in 2009.

Join the Teaching Reading and Writing community to network with educators, participate in online discussions, receive invitations to upcoming edWebinars, and view recordings of previous programs to earn CE certificates.

Grounded in evidence-based research and guided by learning sciences, HMH makes it easy to align your early literacy instruction to how students learn best. Best-in-class core instruction, personalized supplemental practice and intervention, meaningful professional learning, and reliable assessments are uniquely integrated to empower teaching and learning all on one platform.

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The Science of Reading: Applying What We Know and Navigating What We Don't - edWeb

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Discover instructional practices, and guiding principles that have been established across the past four decades of reading research.