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BustED Pencils; Fully Leaded Education Talk is a powerful radio show/podcast dedicated to public education. BustED Pencils is known for its commitment to the hard facts with a humorous twist. Hosts Dr. Tim Slekar and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci cover the "real" issues in education.

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I'm joined by my colleague Allison Herrick. We invite you to a discussion we've been having for several months - a hot button topic in the world of education - The Science of Reading VS The Science of Reading Movement. Our goal in this discussion is to disrupt, perhaps agitate a bit...or simply - to invite curiosity, ask questions, and to think critically.
What happens if we don't activate our critical thinking skills in the fast moving pace of information on a day to day basis? What happens if we read with only one perspective in mind? What happens when policy is made, decisions are made with one source of information?
Together, we invite you to join the conversation, and build your critical thinking toolkit not only for the current trends and discussions, but also in our everyday lives. Here are a few (friendly) reminders to help you practice critical thinking and critical reading:
Find out before you flip out. "Say more about what you mean by..." Who conducted the research you're referring to? Who funded the research you're referring to? Get curious before furious. As a team, we actively seek information and research on many things, The Science of Reading movement included. We've compiled a few that we'd like to share with you linked here.

Until next time, let's continue to read, write, and (critically) think together!

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episode 17: the power of critical thinking and 'the science of reading' movement with allison herrick

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read write think (and listen) with renee podcast

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‎Read Write Think (and Listen) with Renee Podcast: Episode 17: The Power of Critical Thinking and 'The Science of Reading' Movement with Allison Herrick on Apple Podcasts

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I'm joined by my colleague Allison Herrick. We invite you to a discussion we've been having for several months - a hot button topic in the world of education - The Science of Reading VS The Science of Reading Movement. Our goal in this discussion is to disrupt, perhaps agitate a bit...or simply - t...

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Children are growing up in a vastly different world than the one we grew up in. (Pro Tip: If you ever want to sound a million years old, say sentences like that one!)

It feels like we are more polarized than ever (#checkyoursocialmedia) with little space for seeing the world through someone else's eyes. It's easier than ever to become siloed off into echo chambers where we are surrounded by opinions and viewpoints that are similar to our own, which makes it increasingly more difficult to have civil dialogue about opposing viewpoints (#checkyoursocialmedia...again).

To further complicate the polarization of opinions and viewpoints, we throw in unprecedented access to information. An endless amount of information is milliseconds away on a smartphone. Then, things get more complex when we add in the fact that the information found on the internet does not actually have to be factual. Anyone can post anything in any corner of the web and we are all just one Google search away from it. It's amazing and terrifying.

This is why we have to teach students to think critically about the information they encounter.

Let's acknowledge a few things:

1. Students are inundated with written, digital, visual, and auditory information all day, every day.

2. Information they receive online is often determined by an algorithm that adjusts to their search history and interests.

3. We (the adults in the scenario) adjust and address how we critically think about the information we are presented, too.

4. We (again, the adults here) weren't taught how to teach students to critically consume these various forms of information, so the way WE interact with and think about information is outdated, and must shift.

But, why?

Because we want to raise up a generation of critical humans. Humans who look at their everyday lives and at the world in a broader scope than their own personal bubble. A generation that understands that people are more complex than they can imagine. We want to raise a future generation of humans who will look out for one another, will advocate for themselves AND their neighbors, who value cultural pluralism, and will do all of that because they understand their perspective is just one of many.

The antidote to this polarization is raising a generation of humans who are flexible in their thinking and can shift between perspectives. Understanding someone else's point of view doesn't mean that you have to change yours, but it does help to understand and humanize others.

This all sounds really abstract, right? Maybe even a bit idealistic. Sure. Let's change the world. <insert eye roll> But, what if I tell you it starts with a simple concept that our youngest learners can grasp?

It starts with reading.

Teaching humans how to read is incredibly complex, so for the sake of this blog, let's think of it as two main skill sets: reading the words in a text accurately and comprehending the meaning of the text.
Let's keep digging. There are two main text types we read - fiction and nonfiction. Again, for the sake of this blog that's all about critically consuming information, we're only looking at nonfiction. For the nonfiction text type, there are two (main) facets readers use to comprehend nonfiction texts - synthesizing information together in order to identify the central message, or main idea, and understanding perspectives.

Now, here's where critical thinking comes into play.

When reading a nonfiction text it's really important to understand and examine (in other words, think about) perspectives in order to have an understanding of the text. That understanding of the text includes both the perspective of the author and the reader's personal perspective on the topic.

Understanding perspectives help critical thinkers to**:

Connect and empathize with others

Be open to new ideas

Develop our social imaginations

Realize how our experiences shape our views of reality

**Goldberg & Houser, 2017

Our perspectives, or points of view, on any given topic come from lived experiences, tightly held beliefs, and how we behold the world around us. When we teach readers to understand perspectives we help them understand that the world is composed of many, many different points of view and theirs is just one (Goldberg & Houser, 2017). In other words, the more someone acknowledges these different perspectives in the world, the more likely they are to empathize and connect with others.

Can you see where we are going here? By teaching students to understand different perspectives within nonfiction texts, we are teaching them to understand that the creators of information (including Tik Tok, podcasts, YouTube, books, etc) have a perspective on the topic that may be similar or different from theirs and that we have to be aware that multiple, valid perspectives exist.

Deep breath! This is a BIG topic!

In part 2 of this blog series, we are going to look closely at how to teach students to understand perspectives. To do that, we'll give you two lessons to teach in any classroom.

But before we wrap this one up, we want to invite you to do some thinking:

Think about yourself as a reader - or consumer of information. We are going to ask you to spy on yourself a little bit, and if you're willing, have this discussion with a colleague.

We'd like you to choose an article, nonfiction book, or podcast and ask yourself a few questions.

When you are reading, or listening to, information what do you do as a critical thinker to determine the perspective of the author/creator?

What is your process for understanding information from a perspective that is different from your own?

What do you do with that information? Does it add to your understanding of the topic at large, or is it thrown out?

Because, after all, our goal is to help students become proficient readers and you are one of their proficient-reader mentors. How you interact with and understand nonfiction texts will inform how you teach students to do the same.

Click here for part 2 of this series.

*To read more about understanding perspectives and for many, many more lessons, check out What Do I Teach Readers Tomorrow? Nonfiction by Gravity Goldberg and Renee Houser. Click to purchase.

Children are growing up in a vastly different world than the one we grew up in. (Pro Tip: If you ever want to sound a million years old, say sentences like that one!)

It feels like we are more polarized than ever (#checkyoursocialmedia) with little space for seeing the world through someone else's eyes. It's easier than ever to become siloed off into echo chambers where we are surrounded by opinions and viewpoints that are similar to our own, which makes it increasingly more difficult to have civil dialogue about opposing viewpoints (#checkyoursocialmedia...again).

To further complicate the polarization of opinions and viewpoints, we throw in unprecedented access to information. An endless amount of information is milliseconds away on a smartphone. Then, things get more complex when we add in the fact that the information found on the internet does not actually have to be factual. Anyone can post anything in any corner of the web and we are all just one Google search away from it. It's amazing and terrifying.

This is why we have to teach students to think critically about the information they encounter.

Let's acknowledge a few things:

1. Students are inundated with written, digital, visual, and auditory information all day, every day.

2. Information they receive online is often determined by an algorithm that adjusts to their search history and interests.

3. We (the adults in the scenario) adjust and address how we critically think about the information we are presented, too.

4. We (again, the adults here) weren't taught how to teach students to critically consume these various forms of information, so the way WE interact with and think about information is outdated, and must shift.

But, why?

Because we want to raise up a generation of critical humans. Humans who look at their everyday lives and at the world in a broader scope than their own personal bubble. A generation that understands that people are more complex than they can imagine. We want to raise a future generation of humans who will look out for one another, will advocate for themselves AND their neighbors, who value cultural pluralism, and will do all of that because they understand their perspective is just one of many.

The antidote to this polarization is raising a generation of humans who are flexible in their thinking and can shift between perspectives. Understanding someone else's point of view doesn't mean that you have to change yours, but it does help to understand and humanize others.

This all sounds really abstract, right? Maybe even a bit idealistic. Sure. Let's change the world. <insert eye roll> But, what if I tell you it starts with a simple concept that our youngest learners can grasp?

It starts with reading.

Teaching humans how to read is incredibly complex, so for the sake of this blog, let's think of it as two main skill sets: reading the words in a text accurately and comprehending the meaning of the text.
Let's keep digging. There are two main text types we read - fiction and nonfiction. Again, for the sake of this blog that's all about critically consuming information, we're only looking at nonfiction. For the nonfiction text type, there are two (main) facets readers use to comprehend nonfiction texts - synthesizing information together in order to identify the central message, or main idea, and understanding perspectives.

Now, here's where critical thinking comes into play.

When reading a nonfiction text it's really important to understand and examine (in other words, think about) perspectives in order to have an understanding of the text. That understanding of the text includes both the perspective of the author and the reader's personal perspective on the topic.

Understanding perspectives help critical thinkers to**:

Connect and empathize with others

Be open to new ideas

Develop our social imaginations

Realize how our experiences shape our views of reality

**Goldberg & Houser, 2017

Our perspectives, or points of view, on any given topic come from lived experiences, tightly held beliefs, and how we behold the world around us. When we teach readers to understand perspectives we help them understand that the world is composed of many, many different points of view and theirs is just one (Goldberg & Houser, 2017). In other words, the more someone acknowledges these different perspectives in the world, the more likely they are to empathize and connect with others.

Can you see where we are going here? By teaching students to understand different perspectives within nonfiction texts, we are teaching them to understand that the creators of information (including Tik Tok, podcasts, YouTube, books, etc) have a perspective on the topic that may be similar or different from theirs and that we have to be aware that multiple, valid perspectives exist.

Deep breath! This is a BIG topic!

In part 2 of this blog series, we are going to look closely at how to teach students to understand perspectives. To do that, we'll give you two lessons to teach in any classroom.

But before we wrap this one up, we want to invite you to do some thinking:

Think about yourself as a reader - or consumer of information. We are going to ask you to spy on yourself a little bit, and if you're willing, have this discussion with a colleague.

We'd like you to choose an article, nonfiction book, or podcast and ask yourself a few questions.

When you are reading, or listening to, information what do you do as a critical thinker to determine the perspective of the author/creator?

What is your process for understanding information from a perspective that is different from your own?

What do you do with that information? Does it add to your understanding of the topic at large, or is it thrown out?

Because, after all, our goal is to help students become proficient readers and you are one of their proficient-reader mentors. How you interact with and understand nonfiction texts will inform how you teach students to do the same.

Click here for part 2 of this series.

*To read more about understanding perspectives and for many, many more lessons, check out What Do I Teach Readers Tomorrow? Nonfiction by Gravity Goldberg and Renee Houser. Click to purchase.

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A World-Saving Teaching Perspective - Read Write Think with Renee

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We want to raise up a generation of critical humans who look at their everyday lives and at the world in a broader scope than their own personal bubble.

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Captives of the Script: Killing Us Softly with Phonics

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Captives of the Script: Killing Us Softly with Phonics

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By Richard J. Meyer

-photo: skjold

Karen's primary classroom was a joyous place for her to teach because her district trusted her decision making about teaching and learning. Daily readers' and writers' workshops provided evidence of what children know, and Karen's use of assessments such as miscue analysis helped her decide what to teach next. Each piece of writing - and there are many in journals, stories, and other genres - suggested what children are coming to understand and what might be strengthened with the strategy lessons that Karen tailored to their needs. Grand conversations about texts and discussions about grammar, vocabulary, and phonics arose in response to Karen's questions, such as, "What do you notice about this story, poem, word, song?" Karen explains that she taught phonics "all day! We always talk. about letters, sounds, rhymes, and more."

AND THEN

Then Karen's district shifted its stance on reading curriculum. The local newspaper reported second-grade test scores, and the drop in scores led to an outcry in many forums. The district responded swiftly by adopting and mandating the use of a systematic, direct-intense phonics instruction program. The texts used in reading instruction shifted from predictable books to phonetically regular texts that were referred to by the publisher as "predictable" and "decodable," but that actually consisted of phonetically regular words organized into sentences that strain young readers' sense-making. Teachers were told to follow verbatim the scripted lessons of the phonics program. Karen describes the change:

"I was told by [a district reading administrator] that for too long teachers in this district have thought that their job was to create curriculum. I was told that is not our job. Our job is to 'deliver' [she makes quote signs in the air with her fingers] curriculum."

Life in the classroom changed in response to the phonics mandate because the lessons consumed time. Karen says, "My students need to hear stories. They need to be involved with real literature . although [now] I always feel like I'm battling the clock." She explains that the mandated program is so oriented to precision that her students are less willing to take risks as readers and writers. That, in combination with less time for writing, makes Karen wonder about all the lost possibilities: for teaching, for learning, and for young readers and writers to express themselves, their ideas, their hopes, their dreams, and their imaginations.

WHAT ABOUT LIFE IN THE CLASSROOM?

Karen and her students live within the tense zone generated by disagreements about the teaching of reading. Government-sponsored groups, researchers, church groups, think tanks, and legislators have placed increasingly harsh and often ambiguous demands on reading pedagogy. The many voices in this never-ending debate contribute to constructing an air of hysteria and urgency about reading and readers. Alongside the cries about poor readers and ineffective instruction are articulate responses describing the intensity of the debate as a manufactured crisis. In the midst of the swirling mass of doubt and rebuttal about teacher efficacy and student performance, we see newscasts of crying children preparing for reading tests, and anxious teachers and parents awaiting test results that affect funding, salaries, and student promotion. The voice of the government via the "No Child Left Behind" act gives the message that systematic, direct-intense phonics instruction will solve many of our educational problems and lead to student success in life beyond school.

But there is one view that's consistently absent in the perpetual noise about the teaching and learning of reading. The missing view - the one taken in this article - is the view from a classroom of children and their teacher.

The first section of this article contains a thick description of a lesson that Karen and her students experienced one day in school. It is a typical lesson, and as Karen explains, "If you've seen one of these lessons, you've seen them all." The second section consists of my interpretations of the lesson from multiple points of view.

TIME FOR PHONICS

With the date and other beginning-of-the- day activities completed, Karen tells her students it is time for phonics. Karen's use of words is significant and intentional: "I will not call that reading," she told me earlier. "It's not reading." It is a little before 10:00 a.m. The time is important to get a sense of how long it takes to complete a phonics lesson.

STARTING THE LESSON

The children sit on the carpeted floor facing Karen. Following the demands of the district and her principal, Karen adheres to the script for the entire lesson. She tells the children that they will do a "you blend them story," and she reads the crow and the fox fable. A fox wants the cheese that a vain crow has in her beak. The fox tells the crow that she can't sing well; when the crow sings to convince the fox, she drops the cheese, and the fox eats it.

I describe her lesson using letters in // to indicate the sounds for which those letters stand. When the letters are in < >, it means the name of the letter. When I refer to words that Karen writes on the board, they are italicized.

Karen begins to read, "Once there was a /k/-/r/-/o [she is making the sounds which, blended together, say the word crow]."

Some children call out "Crow!" Others follow suit, saying, "crow" as well, just a beat after the first bunch. The second group is taking its cues from the children who understand the task. Karen continues, stopping at every fifth word or so and slowly saying the phonemes that make up the word. She haltingly says: /f/-/o/-/x/, /l/-/u/-/n/-/ch/, /sh/-/i/-/n/ [shine], /v/-/oi/-/s/ [voice], /b/-/e/-/k/ [beak], and /n/-/u/-/n/ [none]. After the story, there is a brief discussion.

Karen later confirms my suspicion that the stronger readers are the ones who typically follow the storyline during this type of activity.

SUBSTITUTING FINAL SOUNDS

At 10:05, Karen turns towards the marker board and writes superma n. Two children call out "Superman!" right away. They are precocious readers and volunteer many of the words Karen writes. The transition has been wordless as the children watch their teacher shift from reading the scripted story to writing a word on the board. They are used to the routine; it's almost October, and they've been at this for weeks.

Karen erases the in superman and puts a at the end to make the nonword supermad. Some of the students in Karen's class believe it is a word, and one child suggests that if you are very mad at someone, you "are supermad at them." Next Karen puts an back in place of the but then places a after the to make superman d. The children slowly work to say the nonword. One calls it out, and a few others echo. They look at their teacher; "What is supermand?" asks one.

Karen says, "It is not a word."

Karen erases supermand and writes baboon,which is read by one of the same two precocious readers. Karen changes it to baboo t. Some of the children say it; others echo it. Some are silent.

Next Karen writes alphabet; the same two children read it. Others echo it. Karen changes it to alphabe d. Some children chuckle as they say it; others echo and wait for the next word. Some are silent.

When Karen writes schoolbus, again some say the word, and others echo it or are silent. Someone suggests, "Like The Magic School Bus [books]" (Cole, 1986), as Karen turns it into schoolbun by erasing the and replacing it with an . One child frowns and calls out, "What is a schoolbun?"

Another responds before Karen can answer, "Like, when you're at school, if they have hot dogs for lunch, they give it to you on a schoolbun." Karen smiles.

The last word for this portion of the lesson is reces s. Karen erases and writes . Some pronounce reced (like "re-said"), some echo, and some are silent.

SNIGGLE AND FINAL SOUNDS

It's now 10:08. Karen announces, "Let's get out Sniggle." Sniggle is the hand puppet that the students have named. "Figure out what Sniggle is doing today," Karen reads from the script.

Karen holds Sniggle facing her; she says, "Maze." Then she moves her hand so that the puppet faces the children, she moves the puppet's lips, and she changes her voice as she says /zzzz/. She says "man" following the same routine with Sniggle facing her when she says the word and making Sniggle face the children when the puppet says the isolated final sound of the word. She says "fish," and the puppet says /shhhh/. A child suggests that the puppet is saying the ending sound; Karen confirms this, and the children are asked to say the ending sounds of these words, along with Sniggle: "sleep," "touch," "leak," "meet," "truck," "treat," "place," "eat," "please," and "teach." Some comply, some echo, and some are silent. Karen says "Thank you for helping us" to Sniggle and places him back in his box near her desk.

INTRODUCING AND /D/

At 10:12 Karen holds up a white card that measures about 12 by 18 inches, with an uppercase and lowercaseprinted on it. She says, "The uppercase is a straight line down from the sky and a big fat tummy. The lower case is a circle and then a straight line down." She reads this twice, drawing the letters in the air with her index finger. Some of the children draw and in the air with her while others either move their fingers randomly in the air or do nothing.

Above the marker board at the front of the room, where one might see the alphabet in a primary classroom, there is a row of white cards like the one Karen is holding. Six of them have an upper- and lowercase letter (e.g., and an illustration. One of those cards is ; the other five are consonants. The rest of the cards are blank.

Karen turns over the card to reveal the letter and again; this side of the card also has a picture of a dinosaur. Some of the children seem excited and talk to Karen and each other about dinosaurs.

SCANNING THE SCENE

It's 10:14. Some of the children are watching Karen; others are not. One child has carefully rolled up one leg of his jeans and works at unraveling his sock. He is making a ball with the string of elastic. Since he unweaves only the threads that are parallel to the sole of his foot, he leaves a skeleton of his sock that slips further down his leg as he unwraps further. A few of the children rock back and forth, not paying particular attention to Karen (although it is conjecture to suggest they are not paying attention merely because they are not looking at her). One child quietly makes the sounds of bombs dropping as he moves his hand above the rug and drops it slowly down. One child picks his nose; another plays with her ears; one rubs her hands up and down her braids (later she'll undo and redo them).

A STORY WITH LOTS OF S

The overhead projector is turned on to reveal an eight-line story about dinosaurs. Karen reads it. The story has a lot of words with in them. At the end of every few lines are two s written side by side (). The children are to say the sound /d/ twice when they come to those parts of the story. The sound is supposed to represent the sound of dinosaurs walking.

The experience with the story is short, taking only two minutes to read. There is no discussion of the storyline. Later, Karen explains that the push to complete the lesson makes discussion impossible, and it is not called for in the script.

As the children look to Karen for what they are to do next, my eyes focus again on the letters above the marker board. I notice that the letter is on a card that has a picture of a dog. I whisper to the child next to me, "What is that picture on the card with and a dog?"

She smiles and says, "That's a /h/ /h/ /h/ hound dog."

I smile back. She has breathed big puffs of air with each /h/, and we both think she's quite clever.

LISTENING FOR /D/

Karen reads from the scripted teachers guide, "Say these words back to me if they start with /d/." Then she reads "dog," "daisy," "dance," "foot," "dark," "wagon," "doorman," "paper;" the list goes on for about 12 words. She pauses after each word and waits for children to repeat words if they begin with . The pattern of children responding at this point is consistent with what occurred earlier in the lesson. A small number of children respond almost in unison. Some of the children wait to echo the first group. Still others are silent for the entire activity. Some say every word, regardless of the initial sound.

A DIVERSION

At 10:19, Karen says, "You all seem very restless because of all this phonics." I expect she will tell them that they'll go outside for recess. But Karen's response to the restlessness is one I do not expect. She says, "I've got a real book about dinosaurs here." She holds up a library book that has a big dinosaur on the cover. The scripted lesson placed aside, Karen reads and shows them the pictures. The behaviors that I noted abate. The sock un-weaver, one of the precocious readers, moves closer to Karen and looks at the book as she reads. Other children also move closer to the book. The nose picker stops. The rocking that some of the children were engaged in also subsides. The child who played with her ears and the kids who chatted with their friends instead of watching Sniggle or echoing nonwords now focus. As she reads, Karen is emotional and active and changes her voice for different characters. The children interrupt the reading at times for brief comments and thoughts connected to the story.

It's 10:33. For the next few minutes, the children make connections to other texts they've read and talk about what they know and wonder about dinosaurs. The talk about the book winds down, and Karen excuses the children to write in their journals for 15 minutes. She tells them that phonics is not done, and that they'll have to return to finish today's lesson, but she wants them to "enjoy writing for a while." The children chat as they return to their desks, find their journals, and write.

During journal writing, children read and reread what they write. They read their writing to others near them and ask for advice. They read to Karen and to me. They move around the room to find words they want to spell or to write near a friend. They question others about their writing. A few who do not seem interested in journal writing listen for a while, watch their colleagues, and then - as an idea strikes - begin writing, too. The one child who appears to be staring at the ceiling interests me. When I ask him about journal writing, he explains that some days he just day-dreams. He also shows me his journal, which contains stories, illustrations, and more.

BACK TO THE SCRIPT

Twenty minutes after they were excused, Karen calls the children back to the carpeted area. "Let's finish phonics," she says.

It's almost 10:55.

The children sit on the rug again. They are asked to say words as Karen writes them on the marker board. She writes dad and changes it to had and to mad; she writes an and changes it to and and to han d; she writes other words and changes them slightly. Once again, I scan the group. A child pulls at the rug and gathers a pile of pile; the sock child, once again, tears apart his clothing; one child talks to a friend; one sits and rocks and twists his ears. When asked to say the words on the board, some children answer, some echo, and others do not respond. Their behavior is qualitatively different when compared to the engaged behaviors during the book reading and journal writing.

LETTERS ON CARDS

At 11:10, following the script, Karen has the children pick up letter cards with , , , , and . These are some of the same letters that are displayed above the marker board. The is printed in red; the rest are black. On one side, the cards look like a conventional deck of playing cards; one letter is on the other side of each card. The children form a large circle in the rug area. Karen has not asked that the circle be formed, but they know this routine. Some begin to arrange the cards to make words and call out what they've made. Being in a circle allows them to see each other's cards.

A child makes "mad" and says it aloud; Karen asks them all to make the word and say the sounds of each letter in "mad." Some look at their colleagues who have formed the word successfully by putting the cards with , , and together and find those letters to make the word themselves. Others finger the cards and move them around, not paying particular attention to the word Karen asks them all to make. One child calls out "dam" and is accused of making a bad word, but Karen clarifies that this is a thing that holds water back, not the bad word. Most of the children put the letters together to make "dam" and approximate the sounds of the phonemes in "dam." I say approximate because saying the /d/ in isolation is not easy, and most add the sound of the 's in "book."

A child suggests that he could make "candy" if he had a . Karen says, "That is harder than we're supposed to make." This is the only time during the lesson that she looks over the children at me. Her eyes water. Later, when I ask Karen about her feelings as she responded to that child, she explains that the program underestimates some children and confuses others. "It's just not for every child," she sighs. It takes just a few minutes for the children to make words suggested by their colleagues or the publishers (via Karen) before the cards are collected.

A BOOK, OF SORTS

The closing part of the lesson, beginning at almost 11:20, involves the distribution of a "book" made from a black-line master. The book fits onto one piece of photocopy paper, with each page being one-half of the piece of paper. When the book is folded, it will have four pages. The book is illustrated with simple line drawings. It is about a cat that naps on a mat, on a (mouse) pad, in a pan, and in a cap. The cat's owner is illustrated as being annoyed at the cat's choices of places to nap. The only words in the book are: "the," "cat," "had," "nap," "on," "a," "mat," "pad," "in," "pan," and "cap." Some of the words are used in one sentence on each page. The children read the text in a mass oral reading; more accurately, some read, some echo, some ignore. This is followed by a flurry of rereading to a few neighbors. They briefly discuss the naughty cat in the book. Karen says they may color it later on.

Each day, Karen is required to do one lesson of this systematic direct-intense phonics program. When the children are dismissed for lunch, Karen tells me that when she told district reading administrators that phonics took up to 90 minutes on some days, she was told that she has a "personal problem." She makes little quote signs in the air when she says "personal problem." "What does that mean?" she asks, looking at me.

"I don't know," I tell her, because I have no idea.

The total time spent on phonics on this day, subtracting the minutes that the children heard a real book and wrote in journals, was 60 minutes.

INTERPRETING THE LESSON

Karen's students learn what reading is by the way it is operationally enacted day to day, in and out of school. Although Karen refers to it as "phonics," the children are learning (from the script that constantly says "read") that reading is making sounds. They are learning that reading is the production of something oral so that we can move on. Say "reced" or "schoolbun" and move on. Although we heard the children's quest to find meaning in some of these words, the intention of the program is to have children string together sounds. The final-consonant substitution activity teaches children to expect nonmeaning as an accepted reality of reading. Say "baboot" and move on. Remember, Karen tells a child, "It's not a word," when that child asked about "supermand." Being told to read a word (by the script) and that what they read is not a word (by their teacher) is confusing at best and may, in a larger sense, be teaching children that their reading is not supposed to make sense. That's a seriously negative lesson to teach for a full hour each day.

Perhaps the targeted students, beginning readers with a limited understanding of reading, are learning the most unintended lesson; they're learning that reading is a mess of sounds that they say but that they can't rely upon to be meaningful. This stands in sharp contrast to the lessons Karen teaches throughout the rest of the day, when her goal is that the children appropriate important questions readers ask themselves, such as "Does it make sense?" or "What does it mean?"

TEACHER KNOWLEDGE

The teacher using this program cannot decide who needs intense work with sound, how much, and for how long each day. The district demands that all teachers do it every day. Karen explained that when a teacher asked at an in-service about the usefulness of the program for her entire class, the company representative said, "Trust me. This program is good for every child in your class." Karen does not have that kind of trust because she is a smart teacher. The district has appropriated her decision making.

And the district's policy is enforced. Administrators and district office representatives visit Karen's school to make sure that she follows the scripts. "It's the phonics police . the curriculum cops," she says. "We are not allowed to think for ourselves."

Because of the intense pressure from her administrators, Karen taught phonics by the script for the first year of the mandate.

CHILDREN'S POINT OF VIEW

Karen is smart about child development, teaching, and learning. But the scripted program usurps her power to respond to what her children's behaviors tell her. Karen confirmed by observation that her students consistently fall into three categories during phonics lessons.

One group is with the lesson, following Karen and making efforts to respond. These tend to be the children who already read, some who might benefit from such an intense structure, and some polite children. The second group is the echo group. They repeat what others say but do not necessarily understand the content or purpose of the lesson. The third group includes silent students and the ones who call out anything.

The children's behaviors indicate their responses to the content of the lesson. Finding phonics cognitively and affectively barren, many initiate and communicate (by their actions) a search for stimulation, contact, and meaning. They find it in their noses, along their ears, and in their clothing. They find it as they suck a bracelet or touch a friend. Their behaviors communicate the mismatches between learners, curriculum, and the interactions children expect in a social learning setting. The phonics lesson forces kids to have tunnel vision about reading as they focus on sounds, rather than meaning. In contrast, large-group lessons, such as the book reading, allow all to participate because children explore a broad spectrum of strategies as they learn about the reading process.

Karen accepts some of the children's aberrant behaviors during the phonics lessons because she cannot in good conscience ask them to focus on something that is meaningless to them.

CULTURAL RELEVANCE

Culturally relevant pedagogy means that teaching and curriculum are constructed with, from, and for students. This section is a discussion of cultural relevance in the phonics program.

There is none.

The phonics program does not take into consideration the differences among and between learners' languages and cultures. It does not take into consideration the needs of English language learners who, in past years in Karen's classroom, benefited from learning through culturally responsive thematic units and inquiry. The program ignores or dismisses the complexities of teaching in a diverse society.

Some might argue that for one hour a day children benefit from focusing on the sound system of the English language. As Karen explained, she taught that all day before the mandate. She taught phonics in contexts that were meaningful to her students and respectful of their linguistic (including dialect) and cultural diversity. She taught it specific to their needs, which she assessed daily. For an hour each day, Karen feels forced to ignore the individuality of her students and the specificity of instruction she could provide. Her students read less, write less, and find their identities less integrated into their classroom. The effects remain to be seen.

HOPE

During the second year of the adoption of the phonics program, Karen made changes. She did lessons quickly by skipping large sections or doing fewer parts within each lesson. She told her principal that she was getting better at delivery. This was one way of undermining the attack that the program made upon her students' learning and her teaching. At no time during the year did Karen sigh that heavy sigh of burned-out teachers and ask, "What's the use?" She got angry, sad, and eventually responsive, like many other teachers. But the focus of this article is not those wonderful and strong bastions of hope and action. Here, I have described and analyzed the lesson and the program. I hope that such an analysis will prove useful to teachers and others in favor of informed and reflective teaching as we make the case against being held hostage by programs that appease powerful special-interest groups and make publishers rich at the expense of authentic learning.

Richard J. Meyer ( meyer@unm.edu) is an associate professor at the University of New Mexico and a 22-year veteran teacher of young children. Reprinted with permission from the July 2002 issue of Language Arts, published by the National Council of Teachers of English.

Summer 2003

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Captives of the Script: Killing Us Softly with Phonics

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By Richard J. Meyer Karen's primary classroom was a joyous place for her to teach because her district trusted her decision making about teaching and learning. Daily readers' and writers' workshops provided evidence of what children know, and Karen's use of assessments such as miscue analysis helped her decide what to teach next.

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Has the Science of Reading become a rampant thought-terminated cliche?

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Has the Science of Reading become a rampant thought-terminated cliche?

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I was running a workshop last week when I was asked, "Is The Writing Revolution SoR?" Now, all this educator wanted from me was a yes or no response which is worrying in itself, but they were talking about a about techniques, and there is no such thing as an "SoR" curriculum, resource or set of instructional techniques. The question was a symptom of how terribly thing have gone wrong in systems and schools, thanks to the indefatigable and apparently irreproachable Science of Reading (SoR) tsunami, which based on what I see in hundreds of schools across any given year, is currently leaving a lot more debris than delight in its wake. I write all of this as an evidence-based practitioner and proponent, and as someone who once hoped the Science of Reading (SoR) was a term with utility. I even used the term for a while, up until around 2020, but over the last few years I have purposefully distanced myself from it, after seeing firsthand, over and over, why it's not really fit for purpose, and why we probably need to move on.

The Science of Learning (SoL) is the same. You will often hear people asking, "Is this SoL?" or "Are you an SoL school?", or schools will say, "We use an SoL approach". What does that mean? In concrete terms, what exactly would you observe in these schools with respect to documentation, assessment, or teaching and learning practices that would mean they were an "SoL" school, and who decides? Structured literacy is another meaningless term. Again, in concrete terms, what exactly would you observe in "structured literacy" schools with respect to documentation, assessment, or teaching and learning practices that would mean they were such a school, and who decides? The way it is being "done" in schools varies wildly, often in ways that are not supported by research. My view is experts and academics who now use this term should hold themselves to a higher standard because we cannot just make things up. We cannot just create a term to counter other terms or movements or approaches we do not like or agree with.

I was running a workshop last week when I was asked, "Is The Writing Revolution SoR?" Now, all this educator wanted from me was a yes or no response which is worrying in itself, but they were talking about a about techniques, and there is no such thing as an "SoR" curriculum, resource or set of instructional techniques. The question was a symptom of how terribly thing have gone wrong in systems and schools, thanks to the indefatigable and apparently irreproachable Science of Reading (SoR) tsunami, which based on what I see in hundreds of schools across any given year, is currently leaving a lot more debris than delight in its wake. I write all of this as an evidence-based practitioner and proponent, and as someone who once hoped the Science of Reading (SoR) was a term with utility. I even used the term for a while, up until around 2020, but over the last few years I have purposefully distanced myself from it, after seeing firsthand, over and over, why it's not really fit for purpose, and why we probably need to move on.

The Science of Learning (SoL) is the same. You will often hear people asking, "Is this SoL?" or "Are you an SoL school?", or schools will say, "We use an SoL approach". What does that mean? In concrete terms, what exactly would you observe in these schools with respect to documentation, assessment, or teaching and learning practices that would mean they were an "SoL" school, and who decides? Structured literacy is another meaningless term. Again, in concrete terms, what exactly would you observe in "structured literacy" schools with respect to documentation, assessment, or teaching and learning practices that would mean they were such a school, and who decides? The way it is being "done" in schools varies wildly, often in ways that are not supported by research. My view is experts and academics who now use this term should hold themselves to a higher standard because we cannot just make things up. We cannot just create a term to counter other terms or movements or approaches we do not like or agree with.

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Has the Science of Reading become a rampant thought-terminating cliché?

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I was running a workshop last week when I was asked, "Is The Writing Revolution SoR?" Now, all this educator wanted from me was a yes or no response which is worrying in itself, but they were talking about a book about writing techniques, and there is no such thing as an "SoR" curriculum, resource or set of instructional techniques.

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More Researchers Push Back on the "Science of Reading" Claims

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More Researchers Push Back on the "Science of Reading" Claims

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More Well-Known Researchers Push Back on the “Science of Reading” Claims- A blog post by Dr. Sam Bommarito

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More Well-Known Researchers Push Back on the “Science of Reading” Claims- A blog post by Dr. Sam Bommarito Let’s start with an announcement concerning last week’s post about Tierney and Pearson’s w…

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Maren Aukerman, The University of Calgary

At least two questions are critical for assessing journalistic quality. First, does the writing exhibit bias that distorts the truth? And, second, does the writer understand the topic deeply enough to report on it accurately? In the field of reading education, these issues have come to the fore with a recent explosion of journalism about the "science of reading." Teachers, policymakers, and parents hunger for information about good reading instruction, yet journalism on the topic can be grossly oversimplified. In a three-part Critical Conversations series, I examine how well-intentioned journalism about the "science of reading" is frequently biased and inadequately research-based, ultimately making the case that such reporting has damaging consequences for the teaching of early reading. In this article, the first of the series, I highlight media bias.

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.

Unfortunately, these suppositions turn out to be highly misleading. The problem is not with recognizing that teaching phonics can play a facilitative role in having children learn to read; that insight is, indeed, important, if not particularly new . The problem is that this narrative distorts the picture to the point that readers are easily left with a highly inaccurate understanding of the so-called "science of reading."

Here, I present four types of bias errors in "science of reading" journalism. To discuss these, I examine an article from the New York Times (NYT) by Dana Goldstein in 2022. It focuses on Lucy Calkins, a professor who authored a popular literacy curriculum called Units of Study . The article is intensely critical of Calkins's work and zeroes in on her recent decision to add more explicit phonics to her curriculum as a "major retreat" tantamount to admitting serious flaws in the previous version.

I note for the record that I do not know Calkins, have never used her curriculum, and agree that her program (like any) can benefit from critique. My concern is with the nature of the reporting by Dana Goldstein, an NYT national correspondent. I chose this article because it appears in an otherwise reputable newspaper, but the errors that render it profoundly flawed are widespread in education journalism.

I present these bias errors partly as a call to action for reporters; they have the responsibility and opportunity to decrease divisive rhetoric that has increasingly come to dominate discourse about early literacy instruction . I also hope that, by offering recommendations on how to identify errors, this article might help readers assess journalistic bias.

Bias Error 1: Lack of Balance in Reporting

The "guru" reference in the title of the NYT article is dismissive, and the article continues in the same tone. It quotes five individuals sharply critical of Calkins, while including no positive or even nuanced views. Three are sources that Goldstein already drew upon in an earlier article, raising questions about how well she represents a spectrum of perspectives. Calkins herself was interviewed, but her quotes were arguably selected in ways that contribute to a lack of balance (the longest begins with "All of us are imperfect"). A curriculum as popular as Calkins's program does not get that way without strengths that stakeholders find meaningful; that needs acknowledgment.

Recommendation: Be wary of "science of reading" news that fails to include and fairly represent a range of perspectives.

Bias Error 2: Sensationalistic "Straw Man" Arguments

The NYT article states: "Some children seem to turn magically into readers.... That has helped fuel a mistaken belief that reading is as natural as speaking" . This "mistaken belief" is attributed to no named human beings, and no evidence is presented that Calkins holds this belief.

Whether or not Goldstein knows it, the source of this idea is likely a 1976 essay by Ken and Yetta Goodman. (Even back then, there was nuance in the premise: the Goodmans noted that "teaching children to read is not putting them into a garden of print and leaving them unmolested;" see p. 459.) But to the present point: nowadays, few reading researchers or teachers embrace anything like the "reading is as natural as speaking" premise.

In reality, there is considerable common ground among literacy educators that reading should be deliberately taught, and specifically that most students benefit from explicit instruction in decoding. Where perspectives vary, they are not characterized by absolutes such as "let students figure out reading by themselves," or "phonics is a waste." Goodwin, editor of the flagship research journal Reading Research Quarterly, which recently ran two full special issues about the science of reading , put it this way:

The version of the science of reading that has been presented in the media is very narrow, focusing mainly on alphabetics, phonics, and word reading. It's also pretty directive, telling teachers that if they want to help kids learn to read, then they should do this, not that. But when we invited researchers to propose and submit articles on the science of reading, that's not how they defined it.... I just don't see anybody talking about a battle between science and non-science.

Yet, media rhetoric continues to hype the supposed dichotomy . In doing so, articles like Goldstein's conjure a protagonist ("the science of reading") and an enemy ("balanced literacy") characterized as anti-phonics and anti-science. It is important, then, to distinguish between the "science of reading" often presented in the press ("popular SOR"), and actual research-based science of reading ("research-based SOR").

To be sure, a few academics (often folks who do not do classroom-based research) have fed the "popular SOR" narrative. For example, cognitive scientist Seidenberg has blogged the incendiary claim that most teachers are never exposed to "facts about the bases of reading skill" due to bad teacher education. More recently, his blog highlighted his own contribution to the Reading Research Quarterly special issue on the science of reading - while completely ignoring other research contributions to that issue, including ones counter to his views .

But outright dismissals of balanced literacy come perhaps most of all from members of the public (see, for example, Letter to the Lindbergh Board, 2019), including parents and teachers, whose perspectives appear to have been shaped by polarizing media accounts and literacy websites with a questionable research basis . The dichotomous worldview of "popular SOR" in public discourse is arguably in part thanks to media reporting.

Recommendation: Be wary of "science of reading" news that demonizes an approach (e.g., balanced literacy) and/or creates dichotomies of good and bad.

Bias Error 3: A Myopic Lens Fetishizing Phonics Instruction

Myopia- that is, shortsighted vision that misses the larger picture - abounds in popular SOR. The NYT article (Goldstein, 2022) does briefly state (without citation) that "research points to a broad set of skills necessary to become a literate person - including phonics, vocabulary, and knowledge of current events, history, art, sports, and nature." Yet the alluded-to "broad set of skills" is not broad; it represents nowhere near the range of domains that the reading research community emphasizes . For example, students should develop dexterity in decoding, comprehension, using texts for real-life purposes, and critical reading; and they should develop literate dispositions such as reading motivation. Research-based SOR examines all these areas, and robust bodies of research address equally vital literacy domains, like writing development, oral language development, the development of English as an additional language, and identity-related aspects of literacy development given that children bring who they are (including varied identities and racial/socioeconomic backgrounds) to bear on their reading.

But, in popular SOR, everything but phonics gets short shrift. There are 86 mentions of phonics instruction in Hanford's (2019) media report claiming to explain why reading instruction in the United States is inadequate, and only a single reference to any other aspect of literacy. The NYT article (Goldstein, 2022) follows a similar pattern: aside from scattered mentions of having children read complex text, only phonics is given attention. Reporting with such a laser focus on phonics, often circulated widely , crowds from view many core aspects of literacy. Developing children's ability to understand, to imagine, and to think critically about text? Ignored. Developing their capacity to discuss and make reasoned text-based arguments? Ignored. Developing their reading motivation, which is associated with better comprehension? Ignored. In crowding out so much else that is vital, such reporting works counter to the goal of moving the fuller body of reading research into classroom practice.

Recommendation: Be wary of "science of reading" news that zeroes in on phonics (or any highly limited slice of reading instruction) rather than building a well-rounded picture of literacy learning.

Bias Error 4: Logical Fallacies

The NYT article (Goldstein, 2022) contains this troubling statement:

Goldberg, a Bay Area literacy coach and leader in the science of reading movement, said Professor Calkins's [recent curricular] changes cannot repair the harm done to generations of students. Even before the pandemic widened educational inequality, only one-third of American fourth and eighth graders were reading on grade level.

One journalistic problem here is that exactly zero evidence was requested of the person interviewed to support that accusation of harm. Moreover, none was provided by Goldstein to support the implication that Calkins's curriculum was at fault for students reading below grade level. The two ideas are juxtaposed so as to suggest a relationship, but the journalist fails to empirically establish any causal link. In point of fact, reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress were actually 12 points higher in 2020 than they were in 1971 (before Calkins's program even existed). If test results indicate a crisis, it long preceded Calkins and cannot fairly be attributed to her.

I could find no evidence for this claim of harm anywhere else, either. The reality is that in classrooms without much systematic phonics, most children also learn to read , and proficient readers from such classrooms show no word reading or comprehension disadvantages over those in classrooms with more systematic phonics instruction. In fact, they can read more fluently than proficient readers from classrooms where the phonics was more systematic, presumably because of more practice reading real texts. Even Shanahan, a reading researcher skeptical of the kind of decoding instruction that Calkins' materials previously included, concedes that there is no evidence that such instruction causes harm.

Recommendation: Be wary of "science of reading" news that contains wild leaps of logic unsupported by actual evidence presented.

These four errors (lack of balance, straw man arguments, myopic lenses, and logical fallacies) might seem puzzling, particularly in well-known publications: how could conscientious journalists fall prey to them? The reality is that some journalists reporting on education may have an insufficiently robust understanding of the field of reading research themselves, which can make it harder to engage in rigorous reporting. Look for additional posts forthcoming on Critical Conversations for more in-depth discussion of this problem.

Maren Aukerman is a Werklund Research Professor at the University of Calgary who focuses on literacy education and democratic citizenship. She studies educational ethics, how youth engage with information in the media, and the preparation of students for responsible citizenship and democratic dialogue, particularly in the context of literacy education. Aukerman previously was on the faculty at Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania and is the recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship as well as the 2009 Albert J. Harris Award and the 2018 Dina Feitelson Research Award from the International Literacy Research Association. In her current work, she is studying how young people make sense of COVID-19 information that they encounter, with a special emphasis on what they do and do not find trustworthy as information sources.

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The Science of Reading and the Media: Is Reporting Biased? - Literacy Research Association

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The Science of Reading and the Media: Is Reporting Biased? Maren Aukerman, The University of Calgary At least two questions are critical for assessing journalistic quality. First, does the writing exhibit bias that distorts the truth? And, second, does the writer understand the topic deeply enough to report on it accurately?

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John Walker and Jan Wasowicz
Today's episode is a double - I have two guests to teach us about a speech to print approach to spelling and phonics instruction. John Walker is the UK-based creator of Sounds-Write. Jan Wasowicz is the US-based creator of Spell Links. We'll talk about the differences-and benefits-of using a speech to print approach. Later, I'm joined by colleagues Macie Kerbs and Rosie Maurantonio, as well as the author of We Do Writing, Leah Mermelstein, for a conversation about practical takeaways for the classroom.

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Read a full transcript of this episode and learn more about the show at: https://www.jenniferserravallo.com/podcast
Cognitive Load Theory
Miller's Studies on Memory
Speech to Print Approach
Sounds Write UK

SPELL-Links
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More about Dr. John Walker:
John is the founder and CEO of Sounds-Write and one of the co-authors of the programme.
John has been a qualified teacher, university lecturer and teacher trainer for over thirty years, teaching English language and literature in many different countries and settings.
He trains practitioners in Sounds-Write and promotes the Sounds-Write programme in schools and other educational institutions across the world.
John is an enthusiastic edu-blogger, who posts regularly on all aspects of literacy teaching at his site theliteracyblog.com.

More about Dr. Jan Wasowicz:
Dr. Jan Wasowicz has over 40 years of experience working with academically struggling students, and she specializes in assessment and intervention for K-12 students with language-based reading, writing, and spelling problems including dyslexia, dysgraphia, and other language-based learning disabilities. In addition to providing direct assessment and remediation services, she participates in school meetings to counsel parents and to advocate for the student to receive appropriate public-school services, including modification of the classroom language arts curriculum to meet the learning needs of the student. Dr. Wasowicz is frequently invited to speak on best practices for literacy assessment and instruction and has conducted countless professional development workshops for schools. She has held faculty positions at leading universities and clinical training programs including Northwestern University and Elmhurst College. Dr. Wasowicz is a certified speech-language pathologist and a Board Certified Specialist in Child Language licensed to practice in the states of Illinois and Florida and is a licensed professional educator with elementary and secondary endorsements from the IL State Teacher Certification. She is a SPELL-Links Certified Provider.

Special thanks to Alex Van Rose for audio editing this episode.

Support this show
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21. john walker and dr. jan wascowicz -- speech to print approach to phonics and spelling instruction

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to the classroom: conversations with researchers & educators

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‎To the Classroom: Conversations with Researchers & Educators: 21. John Walker and Dr. Jan Wascowicz -- Speech to Print Approach to Phonics and Spelling Instruction on Apple Podcasts

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John Walker and Jan Wasowicz Today's episode is a double - I have two guests to teach us about a speech to print approach to spelling and phonics instruction. John Walker is the UK-based creator of Sounds-Write. Jan Wasowicz is the US-based creator of Spell Links. We'll talk about the differences-an...

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The talk I gave at the Yale Child Study Center on 12/4/23 was not recorded. I recorded a version with a voiceover on 12/23. It is the same talk, with some additional information. The updated slides are here. The video of the talk itself is here. The links work on the blog post.

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Podcast: What does it mean to teach like yourself?

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Podcast: What does it mean to teach like yourself?

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"Making a conscious and intentional effort to tap into your own personal power and being courageous" is the way Dr. Gravity Goldberg defines "teaching like yourself."

You may remember her from a 2019 interview I did, which ended up being one of the most downloaded Truth for Teachers episodes ever. It's Episode 171, called "Teach like yourself: Why YOU are the person your students need most."

Gravity has over 20 years of teaching experience, including positions as a science teacher, reading specialist, third-grade teacher, special educator, literacy coach, staff developer, assistant professor, educational consultant, and yoga teacher. Gravity holds a B.A. and M.Ed. from Boston College and a doctorate from Teachers College. As the founding director of Gravity Goldberg, LLC, she leads a team that offers side-by-side coaching and workshops that focus on teachers as decision-makers and student-led instruction.

Since our last conversation, Gravity - who has authored nine books on teaching - has released a new title called Active Learning: 40 Teaching Methods to Engage Students in Every Class and Every Subject, which she co-wrote with the late Barry Gilmore.

We touched a bit on that book and what Gravity's working on now, but I thought of this conversation as a "Teach Like Yourself, Revisited". I wanted to know how her thinking has changed around this topic and the role authentic teaching plays now. Listen in as we discuss:

How "teaching like yourself" (making a conscious and intentional effort to tap into your personal power and being courageous) is more important now than ever

What Gravity has learned about authentic teaching and learning since publishing her book on that topic Has she changed her mind on anything? What would she add?

How teachers can integrate engagement strategies in a way that feels authentic and meaningful, rather than just tossing something into their instructional day because they think (or are told) they should

The impact of authenticity on students, and specific, practical ways we can make sure students can be their true, authentic selves in the classroom

Listen to the audio below,
or subscribe in your podcast app
ANGELA: So, Gravity, the last time I had you on the show was fall 2019, which was obviously pre-pandemic. It feels like a million years ago, a totally different lifetime. So I want to revisit our discussion about the importance of teaching like yourself, of making a conscious and intentional effort to tap into your own personal power and being courageous. I feel like these practices are more important now than ever, and I want to know how you think they fit into the current landscape and teaching.
GRAVITY: I think even just choosing to walk in the door of a school building feels courageous to me. I want to sort of start by just acknowledging that with the emotional and physical traumas that people are bringing with them, with the fear around us, with the noise (for lack of having a better word for it) - it's just a whole lot. And I was thinking about this in terms of the political and everyday polarization happening that schools seem to be in the center of. There's the sort of push for uniformity and transparency, which I think was there a few years ago, but just feels so heightened, as if there's this massive belief that people are carrying that teachers are trying to pull something over on parents and community members, which I think could be further from that.

And then I think there's just the policies that are happening, that with just my area of literacy that I spend a lot of time in that we never used to have - policies that banned things and mandated things from a curricular approach. So this deprofessionalization is going on too where things that were very local - whether it was local at the state or a town or school or classroom level - are no longer in the hands of teachers. So I just want to acknowledge that it's one thing to say, be yourself, show up authentically. But it's even harder when most of the time that's not the message being sent by people whose voices are really amplified.

I want to counter that with, I just spent a girls' weekend with some friends who all have children in schools from kindergarten through college. And that's not the message I hear from the parents. I've sat with people one-on-one, and just yesterday, I had a conversation where they were saying, "M y kid loves every one of their teachers." And then talked with really beautiful nuance about how each one of them brought their gifts into the classroom and then allowed space for their children to do that.

So I think sometimes we need to separate and remind ourselves that the news and the policymakers have a voice. I have yet to meet a parent one-on-one who said, "I don't want my child's teacher to show up as they are." I've yet to meet an administrator who's like, "I want those teachers to hide their gifts and talents and just be a computer like everybody else." So I want to acknowledge this real tension, but also remind us that in human interactions, not everybody actually feels that way.
Yeah, I think that's true. And I've seen studies that said the average American is concerned about public schools, in general, and they don't necessarily approve of what's happening in schools, but their kids' schools, their local schools, the approval rating tends to be around like 80 some percent, which is pretty high if you think about how hard it is to get people to agree on anything. Most people like their kids' teachers, they actually like their local principal. And so there's this disconnect between the narratives that they're hearing about who teachers are, what they represent, and what they're doing with kids and the actual human beings in the classroom. And that's where I feel like what you're touching on here about these one-on-one relationships and conversations and the disconnect feels so important in terms of authenticity because when you know who the person is, it seems to be easier to build those bridges.
Absolutely. And I think that bringing it to the research is helpful to remember this isn't just a conversation I had, although that happens, that there's the research to support that. And I think part of that is we are living in a time of great contradiction everywhere. But I think one of the other contradictions is people are in some ways saying we need more uniformity. We need teachers to all be the same. We need transparency.

But they're also saying, we need connection, we need relationships, we need compassion - we center and value that. And so I think what I would say humbly in a way that I want to recognize how hard it is, is that trying to remember that every decision is local. It's like this person's brain and body with this person's. I and this teacher today really just need to focus on these students in this classroom. And when we make it hyperlocal that way, I think the data you're saying supports that the connection and relationship supports that. And it allows me to feel a sense of safety in a world that doesn't always feel safe because in this moment, right now in this classroom, most likely I am safe. I can show up as myself. If I listen to all the noise, I might not feel that way.

And so I think there's just a sort of bringing myself to the present moment, to the present place, keeping things really hyperlocal in the teaching moments. I don't think we should block everything out when we're not teaching. We need to be informed. But that seems to give me a sense of that personal power that you talked about in that question too, when I remember where I actually am in this moment, not what the news says or what the latest policy is or what was said at the faculty meeting or what could go wrong or what we're fearful for all possibly happening staying in that moment.

Racial identity and teaching authenticity
I'd love to hear how your thinking has evolved over the last couple of years about the topics in your book that's called Teach Yourself: How Authentic Teaching Transforms Our Students and Ourselves. So as an author myself, I know how challenging it is to put your ideas into print because it feels so final. And I think of things that I would like to add to my books on almost a daily basis because I'm always learning and discovering more. So I wonder, have you changed your mind on anything that you wrote about in that book? Is there anything that you would add to what you originally wrote?
So one of those, I think, is just I've done much more self-work on my own racial identity as a white woman and what that means to be a white educator and the idea of authenticity and teaching like yourself, I still strongly believe in and see the day-to-day evidence for, and yet my identity doesn't necessarily match the student's identity. It never one hundred percent does.

And so I think part of it is not normalizing my experience and my identity as universal. And so in different sections in that book, I think I absolutely could go back and think about what are the practices that I've learned along the way - that especially other educators of color have taught me - around how do I actually do the excavation of my own identity and bring that forward and own that this is a part of my identity, but not assume that this is a part of everybody else's. And I think part of authenticity is claiming part of my racial identity that I think, to be honest, I took a little bit for granted as that was more universal than it really is. So I think that's one huge part. And I think somewhat related to that is I've also just really learned a lot more about looking at things through the lens of impact as opposed to intent.

And so I think part of the authenticity lens was very much to get clear on your intention of who you want to be as a teacher, and I still think that matters, but I think maybe more importantly is this - what is the impact of how you show up as yourselves and what is the impact of creating spaces for students to do that? So I think those are two areas where I just honestly had not done enough work myself when I wrote that book that now I would absolutely include. And when I present and lead workshops, I definitely include more of that work.
I appreciate your transparency and sort of giving that lens in. That's something that I always try to do when I'm talking to teachers because unless you have published a book yourself - until I published - I assumed that when a book was out that was sort of like the final word on something. And I missed the fact that hopefully the author is continually learning and growing and they're changing. The world is changing. They're having new experiences and something that you wrote 10 years ago, hopefully, you've learned some new things along the way that have shifted your perspective. And I'd just like to illuminate that because I think it sort of gives us a little bit more grace when we're reading people's work and recognizing that there's, there's always more to come. And if we wait until we know it all, we wait until we're perfect, then we're never going to say anything. And it takes a lot of courage, I think, to put your work out into the world. And I know that book has really touched a lot of teachers. I've heard from a lot of folks how much that book and just your work in general has really helped them even in its imperfect state. And that's how I really want to show up too, because my work is certainly imperfect. There's certainly things that I would like to change and just embracing that as part of the process instead of trying to show up perfect and trying to know it all.
And I think as you're saying that, it's also just striking me that that's what teaching is. It's writing, but it's also teaching.
Yes, that's right. You're not going to know it all at first and you're going to look back on your practice and think about things that you wish you had known earlier on.
Absolutely. There's definitely teaching practices I did early on that I would never do now. That's the fact that revision is life work. It's not just something we do as writers.

Engaging students authentically
Well, your most recent book talks about teaching strategies that you really like and that are really research-based. It's a book that you co-authored with Barry Gilmore, and it's called Active Learning: 40 Teaching Methods to Engage Students in Every Class and Every Subject. And in this book, you have curated high-impact teaching strategies that help students be more actively engaged in learning. And I would like to talk about that through this lens of authentic teaching. How can teachers figure out how to integrate engagement strategies in a way that feels authentic and meaningful rather than just tossing something into their instructional day because they think they should or they're told they should.
I've definitely done that. So it's interesting because when I came onto this book project, Barry Gilmore, my co-author, was in pretty late stages of cancer and actually dying. And so I came on as a co-author of this book to help him finish it. It was one of his last wishes. And one of the things that I brought to it was this lens that you're talking about. So I appreciate you asking that question. This idea of we had a lot of these strategies. We had to, of course, do revision and things came in and out and were changed.

But one of the things that I wanted to bring to this was the idea that the reason we choose an instructional strategy, the reason we choose a teaching method, can't just be because we read about it or we did it in a PD or it looks interesting and might get kids up and moving, that there has to be a way in which it's going to engage them and get them thinking because there's just so much that I see where students are actively going through experiences without actively thinking.

So the book is grounded in the idea of this ultimate goal - we want students to develop independence of mind. We want them to be thinkers. And so while of course we could think about lots of different types of thinking, there were four main types of thinking that I think really grounded this book in. And so that becomes, to me, a compass for how to decide on which strategies and which methods to use.

And those types of thinking are independent thinking where they can think for themselves, how might this strategy actually set students up to form their own opinions and ideas. A second is creative thinking. So how do I create context where the experience has allowed students to create something that literally never existed before, whether it's combining things in new ways or taking something out or adding something in or bringing a fresh idea to the table. A third is empathetic thinking, the idea of how might this instructional practice help my students develop empathy, the ability to recognize another perspective, the ability to say, I might not have this worldview, but I can take time to understand somebody. I think that's where the impact piece can come in.

And then that fourth kind is problem-solving, thinking, How am I setting students up to solve real relevant problems in any subject area? And then to bring their thinking into that process. So it's not like we ever work on one at a time, and it's not a checklist by any means, but to me it just, like I said, becomes almost a compass for what's the direction I want to go in and does this strategy or this method set students up in a context to develop those types of thinking? And so to me, that is a set of questions that any teacher could ask. I can ask that if I'm an art teacher, or a PE teacher, or a science teacher, or social, those four types of thinking are not subject area specific.
The goal of the active learning strategies in the book is one of the lines from the book that I really appreciated and says it's to help students become intellectually curious, physically active, and emotionally involved in collaborative work that builds their capacity for empathy. And in that line, I really sense a crossover with Teach Like Yourself because authentic teaching transforms students as well as their instructors. Can you talk a little bit about authenticity's impact on the kids in our classrooms?
I think the first thing that comes to mind around that is there's a lot that might push them in a direction of showing up as the best, glossiest version of themselves, especially in teenager's day.

What are we posting on social media? What are we curating? How are we choosing to present ourselves in ways that seem somewhat more permanent in photos, videos, and comments? And I think there's a real repercussion to that because most of the time that's not the reality. Most of the time we're struggling with something, we're pondering something, we're feeling something that doesn't always engage us in a smile. And so if we're going to get real learning - learning is frustrating and messy and hard and joyful and silly - how do we create these learning spaces where they can tap into all parts of their humanity, which means we engage in all those things.

And so I think the real benefit to having authentic spaces is a reclaiming of our humanity. And I know that sounds so bold or maybe grandiose, but so much of people's days is about putting our humanity in a box and leaving pieces out. What would it look like to have a space where that happens? And I see it all the time. I'm lucky enough to have a job where I get to go into classrooms and see it all the time. And sometimes it's crying, sometimes it's laughter, sometimes it's frustration, sometimes it's arguing, sometimes it's collaboration.

So I think one of the avenues into that is setting up our classrooms around a framework of contribution. This idea that if each of you students were not in this room, if any one of you weren't here, we wouldn't get the same beautiful results - that each of you matter. And so when you bring your gifts and talents and quirks and personalities and all parts of you and your identities into the classroom, we all benefit from that.

And this maybe even goes back to the idea of what did you leave out of the book? One of the things I do now is make sure we start the beginning of the year, a course, or the beginning of a unit by asking how are we each going to contribute. What are we going to bring forth that's going to make all of our community a little better? And sometimes they have very academic answers, the students, and sometimes they say things like, "I'm going to crack a joke, make us laugh, or I'm going to remind us when we need to drink water." But that matters too.

And so I just think this idea that community is about every person feeling like they matter and their contributions matter is so essential for learning. And I don't think any of today's problems can be solved by individuals. It's all going to be collaborative. So if we're not supporting that in schools, we're not setting up a planet and a community and a country and a world that's going to survive.

Practical approaches to authentic teaching
What are some specific and practical ways that we can do this so we can make sure students are able to be their true authentic selves in the classroom?
Yeah, it's hard. I want to acknowledge that. I'm going to offer some actual methods and tools, but the biggest practical tool is when we do it ourselves. There's just no way we can show up in authentic ways and ask to do as I say and not as I do.

It's making sure we are modeling this, that we are living this ourselves. So I think one is making sure we have feedback processes that are reciprocal, meaning we have space and we teach people how to give and receive feedback. Because we're not going to know if people are showing up authentically, or if they feel safe too, if we don't have really honest feedback loops where both are happening. So that might look like things people already do.

It's just making sure we do it regularly, like having conferences with students, making sure that we have some sort of anonymous and non-anonymous ways, whether that's a Google form or an exit ticket to check in with people. It's sometimes having real talk like, Let's pause here, something is off. Can we talk about what's going on? What do you need more of? What do you need less of? So I think making sure our feedback processes are reciprocal is huge.

Another one of those is making sure choice is embedded into as many aspects of our classroom experiences as possible, whether that's choice of what we read, how we take notes, the topics we study, who we get to work with, how we want feedback, how we want to share our learning. I think there was this beautiful time during lockdown, where there were lots of not-beautiful times, but where there was a lot more choice given to students, how are you going to be able to show up?

And I don't think we should stop asking that question just because we're in person again. I think there are lots of different ways for students to demonstrate their competency and are we making use of all those options? And then maybe a couple of others. One is if we really want authentic spaces for students and teachers, we need to be talking a lot more about boundaries and allowing students to set them, too. What are students allowed to say no to? if we create learning spaces where they're expected for the default is yes to everything in the learning space, how could that possibly be authentic?

I know students don't always because of school-based rules or policies get to say no to everything, but they have to be able to have places to say honest no's or to set a boundary for themselves. And so I'm just going to give some examples of what practically that might look like. In one of the schools where I was working, students were expected to read every night a certain amount of pages, and students had some real talk with the teacher inside. "We have lives outside of school. We cannot read X amount of pages every night. There are real obligations we have." And so they set a boundary to say, "We have to say no. If you want us to do that, we're going to end up faking it."

And so they worked to asking, "Could we have things that are not daily? What would it look like if by the end of this week we've read?" And well, not every student loved that idea. Many more of them were able to say, "Oh, yeah, I have flexibility, then I can choose when I'm going to read more and on some nights, I'm not going to read at all." And so I just think one shift like that is honoring that students can set some boundaries and say no sometimes to things because we are not their only class and their only obligation.

I could go on and on. I think those are some of the big practical ideas that I have for right now.

Addressing student apathy and hopelessness
Yeah, that's kind of blowing my mind thinking about students setting boundaries, but it's so obvious when you say it like that because you're right. If they are not able to be free to speak up for themselves, then they are going to fake it. And I think that's a big problem that's happening right now a lot in classrooms, particularly at the secondary level, is there's a lot of going through the motions. There's a lot of, "Just tell me what to do, I'm going to do it, or maybe not, but I'm not going to think for myself. I'm not going to question it. I'm not going to go above the bare minimum. I'm going to just do whatever I have to do just to get out of this class, basically to either graduate or to just check this off my list so I'm done and I don't have to think about it anymore, and not really having goals for myself past that." That's something that I've been hearing a lot from secondary teachers lately is the goal. If there is a goal, it's just to graduate. They don't necessarily have goals for themselves outside of that. And I'm wondering how in all of your expertise and research and all of the work that you've done, how are you thinking right now about student apathy and disengagement? The hopelessness of Gen Z - that's certainly not all of them that are feeling or experiencing this - but that seems to be presenting in bigger numbers where students are sort of uncertain of the future and not sure if it's really worth putting in the hard work because it may not pay off for them. There may not be a healthy planet for them to live on. They may not ever be able to afford a home. What are you seeing in your work and how do you think that these practices kind of address these deeper needs of students to be able to really show up truly as themselves and to sort of work through these issues?
I mean, I wish I had the answer to that for many reasons, but my insights, maybe I could contribute this - I don't know a single person, let alone educator, right now who's not really overwhelmed. I mean, as we're recording this, it's also October - the longest month in the teaching world. But people are overwhelmed, people are overtired, people are connection-deprived and obligation-overwhelmed.

I don't think that's any different for students. The amount of space and time they have to daydream, to play, to rehearse is largely gone. And so if we think about any of us - adults or children or teenagers - we need space to dream if we're going to imagine what we're going to do next. Otherwise, everything is just a checklist. And for many of them, everything is a checklist. So while I think part of the issue is just the large problems that they're inheriting to some degree (we've always had that) but each generation seems to be more full, like no free time to daydream and play.

And so I think part of that is what would it look like to have more space for that in classrooms? Because we can lament that like, Oh, outside, they're too overscheduled, too plugged into their devices. You have no control over that. In our classrooms, are there places where we rehearse for things? Are there places where we think about what could be? Or are we teaching students to claim their gifts and their contributions and to say, what might it look like on a bigger scale or an out-of-school scale?

I think part of that is it means taking enough time to know ourselves well enough to know what those next steps and goals would be. But if school is not about knowing ourselves, it's about knowing content, then there isn't the same opportunity to then use our self-knowledge to plan for our futures. So I think part of this is making these macro problems smaller, creating a lot more time for feedback and self-reflection and creating some more playful dreaming time. And I know that sounds so woo-woo, but I think it's just essential for any sort of vision for the future. That's not what already exists,
Right? Because if we can't imagine it, then how can we ever work to create it?
Yes. Some of my mentors often have talked about this idea that what we're really lacking is imagination. And I believe Martin Luther King wrote deeply about that too, which is why creative and empathetic thinking are essential. We can't actually imagine something unless we're in that creative energy and mindset, and we can't create something beautiful if we don't have the skill of empathy. And it is a skill.
Yes. What's something that you wish every teacher listening to this understood about what we've talked about today?
So I don't know if others can relate to this, but I feel like often what I teach is what I need to learn myself. And so lately, what I've found myself teaching about is listening. I think maybe people who are reading this right now and thinking, Okay, so what am I going to do? And I would say the first thing to do is to listen. None of us are in this alone. And most of the time the answer is right there if we're listening.

So if you feel like students are not showing up authentically, don't go do anything. Listen a whole lot more. If you feel like your grade level team or your department meetings, people are not showing up authentically. You don't need to bust in with, we need to fix this, like listen more. And so I've done a deep dive in some of the research on listening and trying to really myself work on my own listening practices more. And one of the findings that came out of Itzchakov's and Kluger's research, is that one of the benefits of being a good listener is it creates open-mindedness and what they call attitude complexity, which is the ability to see multiple sides of any issue.

And I just feel like if there's one thing we need in the world right now, it is that ability. And so my suggestion to people is to put a device down, put an agenda down, put even your pen down, and take time listening with an open heart and mind. And it's not like a one-time thing. We need to listen a whole lot more. And I think from that, the next step will be a whole lot clearer.

Oftentimes when I'm struggling, I'll listen to students and they are literally telling me it doesn't come out in standard speak, and it's not necessarily teacher jargon, but they are telling me what they need. If I'm just present enough to hear it and then maybe listen to ourselves - who can you go talk to? That's going to really create a space for you to talk so that you can actually hear what's going on for yourself. I just think listening would be helpful to all of us right now.

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How to be an authentic teacher and "teach like yourself" in 2024

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"Making a conscious and intentional effort to tap into your own personal power and being courageous" is the way Dr. Gravity Goldberg defines "teaching like yourself." You may remember her from a 2019 interview I did, which ended up being one of the most downloaded Truth for Teachers episodes ever.

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My Curriculum not the reason kids can't read...

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My Curriculum not the reason kids can't read...

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Your Feb. 29 cover story, "When Kids Can't Read," references Springfield public schools and my curriculum, Units of Study.

I applaud Springfield for attending to the individual differences among children as readers. It is fundamentally important to recognize that children are all different. Assessments from reading specialists and individualized support for those who need it are foundational parts of a successful education strategy. Some children will need help segmenting and blending sounds as they read, while others need more opportunities to read nonfiction texts and to develop world knowledge and vocabulary.

Springfield's programs such as Real Men Read and Compass for Kids similarly show that the district is making sound, research-based decisions that will move readers forward. The Real Men Read program provides valuable mentorship, allowing children to grow up seeing themselves as readers and thinking, "Reading is something cool people do." And Springfield's decision to supplement classroom learning with after-school and summer programs to support readers is wise. Kids need time to practice reading. These efforts make a real difference. These programs matter.

But I am sorry that, while Springfield is doing so many things right, the cover story contains inaccuracies about "balanced literacy" and about my curriculum, Units of Study, that may indeed ultimately hurt students.

Balanced literacy works.

My curriculum, Units of Study in Reading, Writing and Phonics, is a curriculum that has been continually developed and refined for 40 years, informed by classroom-based research, by rich assessments of students and by scholarship. The approach would never have been adopted in approximately 25% of the nation's schools if it didn't yield results. It is the curriculum in a huge number of Blue Ribbon and Beat the Odds schools. The data overwhelmingly indicate that schools partnering with us demonstrate meaningful improvements in student performance and that improvements only deepen over time.

Although there were inaccuracies in the story, the article was not wrong in saying that some whole language educators used to teach phonics through immersion, hoping children would learn their ABCs through immersion, just as they learn oral language. It is true that studies have shown that most children benefit from explicit, structured instruction in phonics.

The errors in the article come from the author confusing balanced literacy with whole language, and more specifically, from confusing Units of Study (and me) with a belief that children grow best from laissez-faire, natural instruction. I have always been a strong proponent of explicit phonics instruction, and in general, of direct, explicit instruction. Anyone who knows my work knows I have written literally thousands of minilessons in which kids are taught through the teacher naming, then demonstrating, then guiding kids to practice a skill or strategy.

I never bypassed phonics instruction in my approach to teaching reading. My very first book on teaching reading, which predates this latest "science of reading" debate by nearly 20 years, devoted three chapters to early reading and one of those three was to phonics. I have written 22 books on phonics, well over 2,800 pages. And I have written hundreds of decodable books, including the series Jump Rope Readers, which are regarded by many as best-in-class.

False claims of a dramatic new reading crisis have whipped the public into a frenzy, leading whole states to mandate totally untested statewide reforms in reading. Let's instead pause, check the facts (yes, reading scores dipped during COVID, but over the 20 years prior, they have been slowly, steadily improving) and look with more care at exactly what has and has not worked for America's young readers.

I know that podcasts, blogs and social media posts have made me a scapegoat for the imperfections of early literacy education, and so I understand why your newspaper echoed those claims. But that narrative is filled with untruths and brims with blaming and shaming, a toxic brew that will not help our country, nor serve Springfield's children.

Promises of a magic bullet are tempting. Some states are mandating a short list of required programs, each costing millions of dollars, and knowledgeable educators in those states are howling with protest. This is playing out in Connecticut right now - districts like Wilton, Cheshire and Greenwich are prime examples. Rushing to purchase a whole-district basal that channels all students to read the same snippets of books despite wide differences in students' reading levels is not apt to be a panacea. Many of those programs have been evaluated as culturally harmful, and none of them have been implemented in a district like Springfield with strong results. Some come labeled 'Science of Reading,' but the science of reading is neither a curriculum nor a method for teaching children. And in any case, it alone will not take a K-12 system to rich, cross-disciplinary standards-based work. In a too hasty effort to translate ideology to curriculum, children suffer.

It is clear there are some wise, informed educators at the helm of Springfield. Those educators need the opportunity to do a school-by-school audit to determine what the needs are in Springfield. It may be that the district needs to adopt a more tightly controlled phonics program, or to offer teachers more professional development in phonics. But as Elfrieda Hiebert's analysis of kids who do not do well on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows, it is just as likely that Springfield's upper-grade students need more access to engaging, accessible nonfiction.

Reform in literacy will require additional funding. District 186 is underfunded. It sounds as if Springfield may be ready to invest in early literacy, and that is heartening. When spent thoughtfully, funds could make a huge difference in classrooms across Springfield.

Lucy Calkins is the founding director of both Mossflower Reading and Writing Project (formerly the Reading and Writing Project) and of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project.

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My curriculum not the reason kids can't read

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Your Feb. 29 cover story, "When Kids Can't Read," references Springfield public schools and my curriculum, Units of Study. I applaud Springfield for attending to...

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Opinion: Should California schools stick to phonics-based reading ‘science’? It’s not so simple

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Legislation to require a ‘science of reading’ curriculum oversimplifies the process of learning to read. It would be particularly bad for English learners.

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In the wake of the "science of reading" tsunami, most states have passed new or revised reading legislation over the past decade. Research on the outcomes of those flawed decisions are now being published and exposing a common theme-"unintended consequences."

While I think for some these consequences are intended, the research is showing that once again, following a similar pattern of accountability reform since the 1980s, the SOR legislative reform movement is simply not fulfilling promised outcomes and is often causing more or different harm.

Here are some current examples of that research:

I.

The Unintended Consequences of Test-Based Remediation, David N. Figlio and Umut Özek

NBER Working Paper No. 30831

January 2023

Abstract

School systems around the world use achievement tests to assign students to schools, classes, and instructional resources, including remediation. Using a regression discontinuity design, we study a Florida policy that places middle school students who score below a proficiency cutoff into remedial classes. Students scoring below the cutoff receive more educational resources, but they are also placed in classes that are more segregated by race, socio-economic status, and prior achievement. Increased tracking occurs not only in the remedial subject, but also in other core subjects. These tracking effects are significantly larger and more likely to persist beyond the year of remediation for Black students.

II.

Elena Aydarova; "Whatever You Want to Call It": Science of Reading Mythologies in the Education Reform Movement. Harvard Educational Review 1 December 2023; 93 (4): 556-581. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.556

In recent years, a wave of science of reading (SOR) reforms have swept across the nation. Although advocates argue that these are based on science-based research, SOR remains a contested and ambiguous notion. In this essay, Elena Aydarova uses an anthropology of policy approach to analyze advocacy efforts that promoted SOR reforms and legislative deliberations in Tennessee. Drawing on Barthes's theory of mythology, this analysis sheds light on the semiotic chains that link SOR with tradition, knowledge-build ingcurricula, and the scaling down of social safety nets. This deciphering of SOR mythologies under scores how the focus on "science" distorts the intentions of these myths to naturalize socioeconomic inequality and depoliticize social conditions of precarity. This study problematizes the claims made by SOR advocates and sheds light on the ways these reforms are likely to reproduce, rather than disrupt, inequities and injustices.

III. (Math research relevant to reading)

Clements, Douglas H., Renee Lizcano, and Julie Sarama. 2023. "Research and Pedagogies for Early Math" Education Sciences 13, no. 8: 839. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13080839

Abstract

The increasing interest in early childhood mathematics education for decades has increased the need for empirically supported pedagogical strategies. However, there is little agreement on how early math might best be taught. We draw from the empirical literature to paint a picture of research-based and research-validated pedagogical approaches and strategies for teaching early math. Most approaches share core characteristics, including concern for children's interests and engagement and for working on content matched to children's level of thinking. Learning trajectories are an especially useful organizing structure because they combine and integrate educational goals, development of children's thinking, and empirically supported pedagogical strategies. Therefore, they help teachers interpret what the child is doing, thinking, and constructing, and offer instructional activities that extend children's mathematical thinking. Simultaneously, teachers can see instructional strategies from the child's perspective, offering meaningful and joyful opportunities to engage in learning.

IV.

Legislating Phonics: Settled Science or Political Polemics? David Reinking, George G. Hruby, and Victoria J. Risko

Abstract

In this commentary, we identify a phonics-first ideology and its polemical distortions of research and science to promote legislation that constrains and diminishes the teaching of reading. We affirm our own, and a majority of reading professionals', commitment to teaching phonics. However, we argue that phonics instruction is more effective when embedded in a more comprehensive program of literacy instruction that accommodates students' individual needs and multiple approaches to teaching phonics-a view supported by substantial research. After summarizing the politicization of phonics in the United States, we critique a legislated training course for teachers in Tennessee as representative of how a phonics-first ideology is expressed polemically for political purposes. We contrast it with a more collaboratively developed, balanced, nonlegislative approach in the previous governor's administration. Specifically, the training course (a) makes an unfounded claim that there is a national reading crisis that can be traced to insufficient or inappropriate phonics instruction; (b) distorts, misrepresents, or omits relevant research findings and recommendations, most prominently from the report of the National Reading Panel; (c) inaccurately suggests that "balanced literacy instruction" is "whole language" instruction in disguise; and (d) wrongly claims that its views of phonics are based on a settled science of reading.

V.

Compton-Lilly, C., Spence, L.K., Thomas, P.L. and Decker, S.L. (2023), Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading. Read Teach, 77: 392-400. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2258

Abstract

The recent dissemination of selective research findings related to reading privileges a narrow body of reading scholarship and a singular, unproven solution-teaching phonics. We offer a research-based correction by presenting two compelling bodies of research to argue that reading instruction must be responsive to individual children. While this confluence of complexity does not deny the importance of phonics, it highlights the significant findings related to: (1) the brain and reading, and (2) the systematic observation of young readers. We argue that reductive and singular models of reading fail to honor the cultures, experiences, and diversity of children. This confluence of research findings reveals an unequivocal need for caution as states, universities, schools, and teachers adopt assumedly universal and narrow approaches to teaching reading.

VI. (Relevant from 2002)

What I've Learned about Effective Reading Instruction: From a Decade of Studying Exemplary Elementary Classroom Teachers, Richard L. Allington, Volume 83, Issue 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170208301007

VII. (TBP 2024)

The Balancing Act: An Evidence-Based Approach to Teaching Phonics, Reading and Writing, Dominic Wyse, Charlotte Hacking

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In the wake of the "science of reading" tsunami, most states have passed new or revised reading legislation over the past decade. Research on the outcomes of those flawed decisions are now being published and exposing a common theme-"unintended consequences." While I think for some these consequences are intended, the research is showing that once...

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Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading

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Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading

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Are we supposed to teach reading strategies or not? I keep coming across contradictory information. Some writers say the research supports strategy teaching and some say that we should teach background information instead. I respect your opinion. What do you think? Shanahan response:
Many studies - hundreds actually - have shown that teaching comprehension strategies can improve reading comprehension (Filderman, Austin, Boucher, O'Donnell, & Swanson, 2022; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). That's a pretty strong argument for teaching strategies.

That's why I've taught them to students myself.

That's why I sometimes use them when I'm reading.

The first question to ask ourselves, it seems to me, is why do strategies help? How do they make someone a better reader?

I remember Dick Venezky telling me that one of the big benefits of phonics instruction was that it got kids to look at the words, to look at all the letters in the words. At the time, I thought that was glib. But over time, I've come to appreciate the wisdom in that explanation.

My answer for why and how strategies work is as glib as that.

Strategies do two things for readers.

First, they require readers to think about a text more than they would if they just read it.

If readers think more about the ideas in a text, they are more likely to remember them later. Strategies slow you down. It takes more time to read a text and implement a strategy than to only read the text.

Too many readers are satisfied with comprehending a text. They may understand it as they read, but they don't retain the information. We use the term "reading comprehension" too generally. When we use it, we usually intend more than just understanding.

No, it often includes the idea that readers should remember what they read so that they can successfully answer questions, participate in discussions, or use the information in some other way.

Strategies arm readers with purposeful actions they can take before, during, and after reading. Basically, they get readers to think about the ideas more than once. They facilitate learning from text. (That's why Ron Carver used to argue that the term comprehension strategies was a misnomer; he thought a more apt label was study skills, skills one would use to study a text or learn from it.)

The idea of strategies is to provide readers with the tools that will allow them to accomplish purposeful learning - and the tools work by slowing us down and getting us to think more than once about the ideas in the text. A rather blunt tool admittedly, but, according to the empirical studies, an effective one.

As such, strategies play a very different role in the reading process than knowledge.

It should not be a choice between the two.

Second, strategies may also play a useful role in guiding student attention to key information in a text. (I tend to think of most strategies as "paying attention strategies.")

When I'm reading something that is very hard for me, I write down the most important idea from each paragraph or section. That ensures that I pay attention to all the key ideas, without the details distracting me.

Other strategies encourage readers to depend on the author's organizational scheme. Doing so focuses attention on certain key information that they may neglect without that strategy.

Further distinguishing knowledge and strategies in reading are those strategies that emphasize making connections between the text and the knowledge that we bring to the text.

Prediction, for instance, is a strategy that leads readers to anticipate what the author will reveal. Predictions require that readers combine information from the text with the knowledge they bring to the text. Predicting is a tool readers can apply in certain reading situations, but it can only work if there is relevant knowledge available.

Inferencing is another such strategy. Readers can be sensitized to the concept that texts won't provide explicitly all the needed information so readers must draw inferences to fill in the blanks and make connections. But the inferencing strategy only works to the extent that there is background knowledge available from which to generate those inferences.

A third strategy that depends on knowledge and encourages readers to connect knowledge to text is comprehension monitoring. With this one, students are taught to pay attention to whether they are understanding a text or if it is making sense. Determining whether something makes sense means that you can compare it with some standard and that standard for this is the knowledge that you bring to the text.

In all these examples, the strategy gives the reader some insights about text (e.g., it has a structure, the text should make sense, text sometimes implies rather than states information) and some action steps that if taken will improve understanding and memory for what is read.

But none of these strategies pays off unless the reader possesses sufficient topical knowledge to make them work.

As such strategies are useful and knowledge is essential.

That sounds like reading lessons would be better off emphasizing the learning of content, rather than developing insights about text and reading and developing actions students can use in a purposeful way to think more about the text.

But that is not necessarily the case. Our emphasis on knowledge should not be the central goal of reading instruction. It should be the central goal of schooling. Yes, kids should read texts worth knowing in their reading lessons and they should be held accountable for the content learning that can be gained from such texts. But learning also needs to come from social studies, science, and the arts, as well as from all the other sources of information that children confront in the media, in their play activities and social interactions, and so on.

Reading strategies are something students are likely to learn only in a reading lesson. As such, they deserve special attention in those lessons.

I don't accept the premise of what you are hearing - that reading lessons should either teach strategies or knowledge. They need to accomplish the former and contribute to the latter.

Although I didn't cite many specific studies in this blog entry, it heavily benefited from the brilliant contributions of the late Ernst Z. Rothkopf, whose pioneering work on "mathemagenic activities" presaged all the strategy research in reading.
References
Filderman, M. J., Austin, C. R., Boucher, A. N., O'Donnell, K., & Swanson, E. A. (2022). A meta-analysis of the effects of reading comprehension interventions on the reading comprehension outcomes of struggling readers in third through 12 th grades. Exceptional Children, 88( 2), 163-184. doi.org/10.1177/00144029211050860

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, DHHS. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: Reports of the Subgroups (00-4754). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Rothkopf, E. Z. (1970). The concept of mathemagenic activities. Review of Educational Research, 40(3), 325-336.

Rothkopf, E. Z. (2008). Reflections on the field: Aspirations of learning science and the practical logic of instructional enterprises. Educational Psychology Review, 20(3), 351-368. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-008-9076-5

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Knowledge or Comprehension Strategies -- What Should We Teach? | Shanahan on Literacy

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This blog explains what it is that comprehension strategies provide to readers.

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Whenever we hear an educator begin a statement with the words "Research says...," we must attend with caution. This is because what is said is an interpretation or a translation of research. The interpretation may or may not accurately reflect the findings of specific research studies. In this article, I express concerns about what is lost in translation in the interpretation of what the science of reading (SoR) research says about particular approaches to and strategies for reading and writing instruction from my positionality as a bilingual teacher educator and researcher in dual language education. In the February 2023 edition of Language Magazine, Kari Kurto, SoR project director for the Reading League, defined the science of reading as "a vast interdisciplinary body of scientifically based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing." This expansive definition of SoR includes interdisciplinary studies from the multiple fields that comprise the knowledge base for educating multilingual learners. Research on multilingual students is conducted in the academic disciplines of applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, second-language acquisition, second-language reading, cross-linguistic transfer, and the sociocultural contexts of literacy learning. Additionally, international research on literacy in the languages of instruction of target and partner languages in dual language programs informs multilingual literacy instruction. Studies of how monolingual speakers of a language such as English or Spanish give educators a knowledge base for effective approaches to teaching bilingual learners to read and write in both their first and second languages (Mora, 2016).

A theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world that is formulated from a body of evidence that has been repeatedly tested and corroborated using scientific methods and protocols of observation, measurements, and evaluation. In his book titled Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners, Professor Jim Cummins (2021) proposes three criteria for evaluating the legitimacy and credibility of theoretical constructs and claims that are advanced using the analytical processes common to all scientific inquiry (p. 141):

* Empirical adequacy-to what extent is the claim consistent with all the relevant empirical evidence?

* Logical coherence-to what extent is the claim internally consistent and noncontradictory?

* Consequential validity-to what extent is the claim useful in promoting effective pedagogy and policies?

Cummins's criteria enable educators to distinguish between evidence-free ideological claims and evidence-based, logically coherent, and pedagogically useful claims that support effective instructional practices for multilingual learners. Education researchers observe patterns of findings that suggest some stable underlying principle at work across various contexts with different student populations in search of refined hypotheses with broader explanatory and predictive power. Theories and constructs in research are the products of systematic observations and rigorous empirical evaluation through peer review before they gain legitimacy as contributions to a scientific knowledge base. A research theory is very different from what may be called "just a theory" in the common vernacular.

The two criteria of empirical adequacy and logical coherence apply to all theoretical constructs, while the criterion of consequential validity is context specific. Isolated research findings become relevant for education policy and practice only when they are integrated into coherent theoretical frameworks. The three criteria are also applicable for analyzing claims from journalists and the media about the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of certain methods, approaches, and strategies for reading instruction. As an example, let us examine the claim that a strategy popularly known as three-cueing is ineffective and possibly harmful to emergent readers.

Empirical Adequacy
According to Hanford (2019) in her podcast titled Sold a Story, "The cueing theory provided justification for not teaching children how to sound out words." Hanford attributes this theory to Marie Clay, a New Zealand literacy educator, and also to "an influential academic in the United States." Hanford claims that Clay's theory is a "debunked idea about how children learn to read." Subsequently, three-cueing is alleged to be a practice that "runs counter to how the brain processes print and language" (Kurto, 2023). Again, this claim is made without citing any studies or SoR research base. In actuality, cueing is not "Marie Clay's theory." It is a construct that is the subject of investigation in multiple academic disciplines by many respected academic researchers. Researchers who find these claims to be problematic are unable to identify any empirical data to examine to either affirm or challenge such assertions. Journalists and other critics of three-cueing fail to articulate a theoretical framework or to reference specific research studies to support their condemnation of its effectiveness as a practice in reading instruction. Consequently, such claims lack empirical adequacy to support the argument that teachers should reject cueing as a tool in their toolkit of instructional strategies.

A clear definition of a construct that is identifiable as associated with a theoretical framework or theoretical model and empirical data base is required before a theory or practice can be declared to be scientifically based. The notion of cueing systems comes from linguistics, where subsystems of language are distinguished according to their roles in meaning making from oral language and written text. Three language subsystems are identified in multiple bodies of research as sources of cues to comprehension of words, phrases, and sentences in reading: graphophonics (letter-sound associations; spelling), semantics (meanings of words and phrases), and syntax (word order and grammar). Clearly, graphophonics cues are the basis for orthographic mapping, the technical term for decoding. But what happens when there is no meaning for the word in the reader's mental lexicon? Or what does the teacher do when the reader does not understand the word because spelling alone does not provide a cue to its meaning within the sentence? A significant percentage of English words have the same spelling but multiple meanings. Does the teacher simply let the reader wander into a linguistic cul-de-sac without providing any guidance for figuring out the meaning of an unfamiliar word?

The case of the critique of cueing as a "debunked practice" in reading instruction (Hanford, 2019) is particularly problematic from the vantage point of curriculum and instruction for multilingual learners. The theoretical framework for miscue analysis and eye-movement research utilizes these terms to articulate the construct of the sources of knowledge from a text and from background knowledge that enable readers to construct meaning from written language. There are decades of second language acquisition research into the theoretical construct of lexical inferencing. The construct is the product of observations of how readers utilize linguistic sources to derive the semantics of words in the process of meaning making in reading (Wesche and Paribakht, 2009). Lexical inferencing is a cognitive and linguistic process that supports vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension while enhancing bilingual learners' understanding of syntax and grammar in their first and second languages. Advocates for the science of reading who now criticize teachers for using what is popularly termed the three-cueing system do so without referencing the corpus of multidisciplinary empirical data from which the construct emerged. This omission of reference to a widely utilized theoretical perspective on language and literacy learning processes poses a risk of a loss of credibility of the science of reading for the multilingual learner education research community.

Logical Coherence
The second criterion for assessing the legitimacy of claims based on scientific research requires that the claim must demonstrate that it is internally consistent and noncontradictory. To examine the criticisms of three-cueing ostensibly based in theories about literacy learning and neuroscientific studies, we must look at established theoretical frameworks. One is the simple view of reading (SVR) (Hoover and Gough, 1990). Kurto (2023) cites this study in a Reading League article, calling the SVR theory "the research that the framework used to describe the reading process is built upon" (p. 34). The SVR proposes that reading is the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. A combination of skills in both processes is needed to comprehend text. Furthermore, instruction that advances skills in either process advances overall achievement in reading comprehension. Decoding instruction and comprehension instruction are not in competition with each other. The empirical data that support the SVR suggest a reciprocity between decoding and comprehension skills development. Consequently, to discourage teachers from using a set of strategies based on the false notion that their use detracts from students' learning of decoding skills is not supported by scientific reading research. Therefore, claims against the use of three-cueing systems for meaning are internally inconsistent and contradictory to established theory.

There is also neuroscience research to support the assertion that instruction in language-subsystem cueing is an effective practice. The data base from research on reading in the brain is especially informative when combined with related data bases of observations of reading behaviors. A large data base has been generated using eye-movement studies overlayed onto miscue analysis of oral reading performance (Strauss, 2013).

This triangulated data provides detailed descriptions of eye fixations and their relationship to reading miscues to explain readers' perceptual and informational processing of text. The corpus of eye movement/miscue analysis (EMMA) data confirms that meaning construction relies on psycholinguistic strategies far more efficient and effective than letter-sound conversion instruction. This scientific technology challenges the claim that a meaning-making theorical model of reading is disconfirmed by neurobiological research into brain-region activation in phonological processing.

Through brain imaging (fMRI) technology, a dual route to the mental lexicon, one relying on grapheme-phoneme correspondences and the other on direct lexical access from the visual word form, is supported by neuroimaging data (Strauss, 2013; Strauss et al., 2009). It is misleading to infer that neuroscience has discredited the theoretical framework of meaning centered, psycholinguistic models of reading. On the contrary, neuroscientists argue that emerging concepts from the neuroscientific study of brain function both support and are supported by psycholinguistic research on the reading process.

Consequential Validity
It is inconceivable that teachers could be told that it is not aligned with the science of reading to teach vocabulary or grammar during interactive oral reading with their multilingual students. It is unimaginable that teachers would be advised against scaffolding texts to support their English language learners' comprehension of challenging academic texts because it detracts from their decoding skills acquisition. It is difficult to imagine that the SoR does not promote students' use of metacognitive strategies to enhance self-monitoring and problem solving during oral and silent reading to comprehend text. Yet this is the inevitable consequence of journalists' inexpert and uninformed claims, made without clearly identifying the theoretical framework and research foundations for the approach that they condemn. The censure of a common instructional practice popularly known as three-cueing is not valid. In fact, readers' use of language subsystems as cues in meaning making in reading is essential for comprehension. Alternative theoretical perspectives cannot invalidate the findings from empirical research data bases without establishing a causal relationship between a construct and intervention program outcomes. MacPhee et al. (2021) make this observation about media portrayals of the science of reading: "The media have asserted a direct connection between basic research and instructional practice that, without sufficient translational research that attends to a variety of instructional contexts and student populations, may perpetuate inequities" (p. S145).

It is counterproductive for advocates of SoR to allow the media to create practitioner lore condemning practices associated with theoretical frameworks that are not favored by a certain group of reading scientists. If science of reading advocates seek to maintain legitimacy with the multilingual learner education research community, we must set a very high bar for judging any theoretical framework to be "disproven," "debunked," or "wrong." Educators must not make judgments about the utility of approaches and strategies based on a caricature of typical practice. The full corpus of scientific research on literacy learning must inform instruction, without privileging a narrow range of methodologies or discrediting empirical data bases because of ideological rather than scientific criteria. Professor Cummins (2021, p. 131) warns that theoretical constructs cannot be made the scapegoat for problematic instructional practices or misguided broader policy initiatives.

We academic researchers cannot be held responsible for misinterpretations, misrepresentations, and misapplications of the findings of our studies. Instead, we encourage dialogue with our practitioner colleagues to improve the translation of research findings into effective instruction to ensure that reading and writing programs are accessible to all students.

References
Cummins, J. (2021). Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners: A Critical Analysis of Theoretical Concepts. Multilingual Matters.

Hanford, E. (2022). " Sold a Story: How teaching kids to read went so wrong." APM Reports. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/?fbclid=IwAR2NWgzZSOemLf7Ctg4fW3bBiGuvKF9DdljD14swHpFbPQkjNBTz7-QXRlk

Hoover, W. A., and Gough, P. B. (1990). "The Simple View of Reading." Reading and Writing, 2(2), 127-160.

Kurto, K. (2023). "Clarifying the Science of Reading." Language Magazine, 32-35.

Mora, J. K. (2016). Spanish Language Pedagogy for Biliteracy Programs. Montezuma Publishing.

Strauss, S. L. (2013). "We Need a Paradigm Shift in Research on Reading and Dyslexia: Fundamental problems with fMRI studies of written language processing." Journal of the Neurological Sciences, 333, e579-e628.

Strauss, S. L., Goodman, K. S., and Paulson, E. J. (2009). "Brain Research and Reading: How emerging concepts in neuroscience support a meaning construction view of the reading process." Educational Research and Review, 4(2), 21-33.

MacPhee, D., Handsfield, L. J., and Paugh, P. (2021). "Conflict or Conversation? Media portrayals of the science of reading." Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S145- S155.

Wesche, M. B., and Paribakht, T. S. (Eds.). (2009). Lexical Inferencing in a First and Second Language: Cross-Linguistic Dimensions. Multilingual Matters.

Jill Kerper Mora, EdD, is associate professor emerita at San Diego State University. Dr. Mora disseminates her international research and expertise in Spanish language and literacy instruction for dual language educators through her MoraModules website at moramodules.com. Dr. Mora is a member of the California Committee for Effective Literacy.

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To Cue or Not to Cue: Is That the Question? - Language Magazine

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Whenever we hear an educator begin a statement with the words "Research says...," we must attend with caution. This is because what is said is an interpretation or a translation of research. The interpretation may or may not accurately reflect the findings of specific research studies.

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Independent reading leads to an increased volume of reading. The more one reads, the better one reads. The more one reads, the more knowledge of words and language one acquires. The more one reads, the more fluent one becomes as a reader. The more one reads, the easier it becomes to sustain the mental effort necessary to comprehend complex texts. The more one reads, the more one learns about the people and happenings of our world.

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Taking Stock of the science of reading: A conversation with Amanda Goodwin

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Taking Stock of the science of reading: A conversation with Amanda Goodwin

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Past debates about reading instruction have been heated, but there's a lot of consensus among researchers today, especially around the idea that the science of reading is a broad body of research.
Amanda P. Goodwin is co-editor of the academic journal Reading Research Quarterly and an associate professor of literacy at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education, Nashville, TN. She has taught in public and private schools at the elementary, middle, and collegiate levels, and she frequently works with states and school districts to strengthen their literacy plans and instruction.

Phi Delta Kappan: Currently, you and your Vanderbilt colleague Robert Jiménez serve as co-editors of Reading Research Quarterly (RRQ), which is one of most highly respected academic journals in K-12 education, featuring articles on reading and reading instruction, writing, oral language, and other aspects of children's literacy development. Ordinarily, the editors of RRQ have their hands full publishing four issues a year, but you decided to publish a pair of extra issues, in 2020 and 2021, focusing specifically on the science of reading.

The science of reading has become a very hot topic in recent years, not only among researchers but also among journalists, school reformers, and policy makers, some of whom have argued that it is a specific, evidence-based way to teach children to read, that it's the only effective way to do so, and that educators need to get with the program and stop using approaches that aren't backed by solid research. As you've written, this argument is "reminiscent" of past "reading wars" (such as the struggle between phonics- and whole language-based approaches to instruction), which have often divided elementary education into opposing camps. Is that why you decided to devote a couple of special issues of RRQ to this topic? Were you hoping to show that there's no need for another reading war?

Amanda Goodwin: Actually, our main goal was to bring more clarity to the debate. As a researcher, I spend a lot of time at academic meetings and conferences, and a number of years ago, I started hearing a lot of talk about the science of reading in those settings. I also spend a lot of time in classrooms working with teachers, and they were talking about it a lot, too. And as a parent, I was also hearing the term come up at parents' groups. Basically, I was hearing about the science of reading everywhere I went, but, depending on the setting, people seemed to mean very different things by it. So, our main goal for these issues of RRQ was to encourage researchers to define the term in clear and consistent ways and provide updated research so that we can have a more coherent debate about what the existing evidence actually tells us about reading, reading instruction, and related topics. Basically, we wanted to provide the latest research studies to inform the debate and to figure out how to best teach reading and writing!

Given how heated the past debates in this field have been, I was expecting researchers to send us articles that take very different views on the topic. But I was surprised - and also excited - to see that there's actually a lot of consensus, especially around the idea that the science of reading is a broad body of research. You know, the version of the science of reading that has been presented in the media is very narrow, focusing mainly on alphabetics, phonics, and word reading. It's also pretty directive, telling teachers that if they want to help kids learn to read, then they should do this, not that. But when we invited researchers to propose and submit articles on the science of reading, that's not how they defined it. In all, we received about 90 article submissions and published 50 of them, many written by leading experts in reading and literacy, and we did not hear calls for the sort of narrow, directive approach to reading instruction that journalists and policy advocates often promote.

When you ask the experts what they mean by the science of reading, they describe a diverse set of research studies, including many lines of research into a wide range of topics.

Actually, the researchers chose to define the science of reading in much broader terms. For instance, one well-known scholar, Steve Graham, wrote (and I quote), "The science of reading involves studying how reading operates, develops, is taught, shapes academic and cognitive growth, affects motivation and emotion, interacts with context, and impacts context in turn. It includes genetic, biological, environmental, contextual, social, political, historical, and cultural factors that influence the acquisition and use of reading." Another, Patricia Alexander, says, "As someone who has been conducting empirical studies of reading for 40 years, I see the science of reading as contributing to a vast interdisciplinary store of critical information about reading-related skills, processes, antecedents, and outcomes, representing linguistic, cognitive, social, cultural, neurological, and psychological dimensions."

I know, those are pretty thick, wordy definitions. But the long and the short of it is that when you ask the experts what they mean by the science of reading, they describe a diverse set of research studies, including many lines of research into a wide range of topics - not just phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension but also language development, motivation, dyslexia, the reading of digital texts, multilingual literacy, the literacies of Black students and other historically minoritized student groups, and on and on. I just don't see anybody talking about a battle between science and non-science.

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.

Of course, this isn't the first time researchers have tried to take stock of what the science says about reading and reading instruction. More than two decades ago, the U.S. Congress funded a massive effort, directed by a blue-ribbon National Reading Panel (NRP), to review and synthesize the existing research in this area, leading to the publication, in 2000, of the NRP's report, Teaching Children to Read. It's hard to overstate just how much influence that report has had, since then, on education policy, teacher education, instruction, student assessment, curriculum, classroom resources, and on and on. But two decades is a long time in education research, and it sounds like a lot has changed since 2000. How does the current science of reading expand on or differ from what was described in the NRP report?

Goodwin: The NRP report was really wonderful in a lot of ways. Given the evidence base at the time, though, the panel chose to sort the research on reading instruction into pretty broad categories: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension . . . Since then, and as you can see in the RRQ articles, we've learned a lot more about each of those buckets and what does or doesn't go into them. And we've added some more buckets, too.

For example, the NRP report didn't really focus on language comprehension, except to say that vocabulary knowledge is important to reading comprehension. But since then, researchers have looked much more deeply into how children learn to understand written language and use it to communicate about complex ideas.

For instance, newer research shows just how important it is to support young children's understanding of morphology (how things like root words and suffixes work) and syntax (how words can be arranged in different ways and into different kinds of sentences). These kinds of language skills matter a lot when you start to read books that include long words and paragraphs, full of complex information and ideas. By the time you get to the 3rd or 4th grade, you might be able to decode text really well. You might even be familiar with the topic you're reading about, and you might know a lot of the vocabulary. But if you don't know how to make sense of the ways in which words are modified by prefixes, or how ideas are communicated via word order and sentence structure, then you'll run into some problems. Plus, you need to understand not just what individual words mean but also their nuances. For example, you have to be able to understand whether a word has a positive or a negative connotation, depending on who's using it and in what context. You have to be able to tell the difference between formal and informal language, or when the author's being serious and when they're being ironic, or when they're giving a personal opinion and when they're stating facts.

Our schools tend to be pretty good at teaching kids to decode written language. Most kids are successful in the early years of reading instruction, when the focus is on reading simple texts. But if we want them to be successful in the middle and upper grades, then we also need to teach them more complex language skills, even while they're learning to decode. Basically, the NRP was right in many ways: We do need to teach phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. But today's science of reading says so much more about how to do this - and about what else to do.

Kappan: Can you give some other examples of ways in which the current science of reading differs from what the NRP report found 22 years ago?

Goodwin: Since the NRP report, we've learned a lot about how diverse content knowledge (in science, social studies, art, and other areas) matters to reading comprehension. We've learned a lot about digital literacy, play and its role in literacy development, writing instruction (and its relationship to reading), and what's involved in teaching reading to English learners and multilingual students. We've become much more aware of the many strengths that students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds bring to the classroom, such as differing ways of using language, telling stories, and interpreting texts. And, just as important, we've become more aware of how complex and uncertain the work of reading instruction really is.

After the NRP report came out, a lot of people seemed to think that it gave researchers license to tell teachers exactly what they should do in the classroom: Here's how you should teach letter recognition, here's the most effective way to support reading fluency, and so on. But actually, the more researchers learn about reading, the more obvious it becomes that the relationship between research and practice doesn't work that way. Teachers make hundreds, if not thousands, of instructional decisions each and every day. We can give them research-based principles and resources and suggestions about specific practices and approaches that tend to be effective. But when it comes down to it, teachers have to do what makes sense in the moment, given the specific context in which they work, the specific students they work with, and the constant stream of judgment calls they have to make.

I don't want to be critical of the National Reading Panel, though. Like I said, they did great work. And if you look across the articles we just published in RRQ, you'll see that the current science of reading confirms a lot of what the NRP found 22 years ago, including how important it is to provide systematic instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. That's still Reading 101. But since then, researchers have filled in a lot of the gaps in those areas, explored other areas, and learned a lot more about the ways in which effective reading instruction depends on teachers' expertise and judgment.

Kappan: As you said, though, the NRP findings have had - and continue to have - an enormous influence on education policy, curriculum, classroom practice, and so on. Researchers may have moved past Reading 101. They may understand that there's no simple, all-purpose formula for effective reading instruction. But are state policy makers and school and district leaders getting the message?

Goodwin: Policy makers don't necessarily want to hear that the science is more complex and less certain than we thought. It's much easier to get public support for a handful of "proven" practices. For example, in Tennessee (where I live), there's been a lot of concern about young kids missing out on literacy instruction during the pandemic. So, the legislature recently passed a bill that focuses on teaching foundational reading skills. And that's great; our schools need more resources for early reading instruction. But the bill makes a point of defining "foundational reading skills" as the familiar buckets from the NRP report, especially phonemic awareness and phonics. But I have to ask: Isn't everybody already required to teach those things? After all, they've been written into our curriculum for a long time. What about the lessons we've learned since then about how to teach these foundational skills more effectively? What about the many other skills that researchers now know to be important? For instance, what are we going to do to promote higher-level literacy skills? How will we differentiate reading instruction to meet students' diverse needs? What can we do to better serve students who come from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds?

Policy makers don't necessarily want to hear that the science is more complex and less certain than we thought. It's much easier to get public support for a handful of "proven" practices.

Plus, even in an area that's as well-researched as phonics, there's still a lot we don't know, and researchers continue to raise questions about what we thought we knew for sure. For instance, advocates often claim that "the science of reading" proves that it's ineffective to use pictures and other contextual cues to help students figure out the words they're trying to decode. Even some state literacy boards have become adamant that this is bad practice: No pictures! Teachers need to make students sound out the letters!

But their RRQ article, Donna Scanlon and Kimberly Anderson review 25 years of rigorous experimental studies in which kids were given systematic phonics instruction and also taught to use context cues to help them when they struggle to sound out words. And what they found was that kids tend to become more successful readers when they get both kinds of instruction, compared to those who get phonics alone. In short, they found that more resources are better. It's self-defeating to insist on an either-or choice between phonics and context cueing, as though these practices were at war with each other. It's much more helpful to treat them as complementary.

The other day, for instance, my daughter was reading a book about soccer, and when she came across the word "kick," she read it as "dribble," because she was relying on the meaning she was building and the picture she saw. Well, I'm fine with that. In that particular moment, she was enjoying the book and getting meaning out of it, so why should I make her stop? Sometimes the priority is to continue the story, right? It doesn't mean she doesn't know the word "kick" or that she isn't learning to use the important skill of sounding out as her primary tool to support her reading. It just means she is using multiple tools.

Kappan: In other words, instead of doing what the recipe says to do (stop her and get her to sound out the letters), you exercised some discretion.

Goodwin: Exactly. And my fear is that when people insist that the science of reading is definitive, they seem to be suggesting that if we can force teachers to do what the research says and follow the script all the time, then our kids will all become successful readers. But real life is messy and complicated, and sometimes the worst thing we can do is to make everybody stick to the script. Teachers need to know what the science says about phonics instruction, but they also need some room for discretion and creativity and joy.

Recently, I was talking with one of the RRQ authors about a randomized control study she was conducting - you know, super-rigorous, quantitative research into the effectiveness of a specific teaching practice. And she said that in the middle of the study, she was observing a classroom, and she could see right away that this one teacher was just amazing. It was clear that this teacher loved what she was teaching, she was bringing a lot of joy and passion to the work, and she had her students totally engaged in reading. But whatever she was doing, it wasn't the instructional strategy the research study set out to analyze. Maybe it had to do with how she motivated kids, or her choice of reading materials, or how she related to the particular group of students, or something else - I don't know. Not everything lends itself to a randomized control study, and a lot of teachers have talents and gifts that are hard to measure. The problem is that if policy makers and school and district leaders demand that teachers stick to a narrow set of "proven" practices, then they can end up undermining great teachers like this one, forcing her to stop what she's doing because it's not in the script.

Teachers need to know what the science says about phonics instruction, but they also need some room for discretion and creativity and joy.

One of the RRQ articles makes an important distinction between the science of reading and the science of teaching reading. How wide is the gap that separates reading research from what we know about classroom practice?

Goodwin: It's pretty wide. There's an urgent need to improve how we translate between research and practice, especially to do so in a way that empowers teachers, rather than treating them as worker bees. Teachers don't need to be told how to teach reading. Rather, they need to be kept informed about what researchers have learned, so they can teach reading more successfully. The better they understand what the science says, and the more confident they are in their own knowledge and expertise, the more they can use it to inform their practice.

Also, the more they know about the research, the better they can advocate for curricula, textbooks, and teaching models that fit their local context, rather than being told to follow a specific recipe that was found to be effective in some other setting, So, when I say we need to get better at "translating" the research, I'm not talking about converting research findings into scripted teaching practices. Rather, I'm talking about explaining the research more clearly, so that teachers can use it to inform their professional decisions.

When you visit classrooms, you see all these curriculum materials that are labeled as "research-based." Well, I'm a researcher, so when I see things like that, I want to know what's their evidence? What are their citations? What studies did they conduct? Why should the school purchase these materials? What makes the publisher think this intervention is appropriate for these particular students?

It's really important to ask these kinds of questions, rather than just accepting what the publishers tell you or what the researchers say you should do. And my argument is that teachers should be empowered to ask these questions, too. But that doesn't mean teachers should be expected to read RRQ and attend academic conferences. It means that reading researchers need to get better at translating and disseminating findings in ways that make sense to practitioners. The burden should fall on us researchers. We need to get better at communicating with teachers, respecting their expertise, and treating them as partners.

Ultimately, the term science of reading can be interpreted in divisive ways or in informative ways. We know a lot about reading and how to teach reading (and writing!), and we should use that. Classrooms should be full of these effective, research-based practices. But there is no single way that is a magic solution. I have learned that the science of reading is most effective when it is broad, bridges perspectives, and has the goal of sharing accurate, evidence-based, and meaningful understandings that can move us forward.

This article appears in the May 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 8, pp. 32-36.

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Taking stock of the science of reading: A conversation with Amanda Goodwin - kappanonline.org

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Past debates about reading instruction have been heated, but there's a lot of consensus among researchers today, especially around the idea that the science of reading is a broad body of research. Amanda P. Goodwin is co-editor of the academic journal Reading Research Quarterly and an associate professor of literacy at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education, Nashville, TN.

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Please pronounce “sove.” Does it rhyme with “dove” (bird)? Or “dove” (past tense of “dive”)? Or “move”? Increasingly, this is how student…

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The Future of Science of Reading by Rachael Gabriel

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The Future of Science of Reading by Rachael Gabriel

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Unpacking the Science of Reading - Paul Thomas

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Unpacking the Science of Reading - Paul Thomas

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How can we attune our instruction to support the reading development of multilingual students? This complex question has become even more tricky given the current thrust of media messages about the "best way" about how reading should be taught. The Science of Reading (SOR) movement has been highly successful in messaging teachers, administrators, and the public about the need for specific components of foundational reading and corresponding instructional moves to support early readers. But do all students, including multilingual students, need the same reading instructional techniques to become successful readers? If not, what kind of adjustments to foundational reading instruction need to be considered for multilingual students?

Let's start by clarifying what I refer to reading in this short piece. I refer to reading as the complex orchestration of reading words, understanding their meanings, and understanding the meaning of words in relation to larger pieces of texts. This is a departure from how reading is commonly currently conveyed by SOR advocates. In the current discourse word reading or decoding is commonly the only portion of the entire reading puzzle being referenced. Decoding is the ability to use knowledge about letters and their sounds to read a word and is, undoubtedly, a foundational aspect of reading. However, for multilingual students decoding a word does not necessarily mean that they "read it." In other words, while multilingual students may have the knowledge of sound-letter relationships to sound out a word, decoding does not mean that multilingual students can understand the word on its own or in relation to the words around it. Clarity about what educators mean when we refer to reading is always essential because it impacts what instructional practices educators design and how much time we dedicate to the instructional practices we choose to employ.

For multilingual students learning to read, phonemic awareness exercises can have an extra layer of complexity. Phonemic awareness is the ability to play with sounds of a word and to manipulate them. It is considered one of the cornerstones of early reading abilities. Ideally young readers should engage in short, intentional, and powerful instruction to support students' acquisition of phonemic awareness. For young children who are asked, "if I say seat, change the s to a ch," and who have ample experience with English, the exercise can target their phonemic awareness. But for multilingual students, it's not that simple. Did the teacher say, "ch" or "sh?" And what do these words mean?

These layers of complexity are consistently present throughout a range of different foundational reading experiences for multilingual students. Take for instance the following anecdote: in a first grade classroom, teachers are working with multilingual students through foundational skills curriculum. Students are instructed to pick out the word that is different from the others. They are given the following three words: "pepper, letter, and perfect." While for many students, it is clear that the word, "letter" is different from the others because it starts with the letter, "l," for many multilingual students there are a range of confounding factors that may make this simple exercise much more than identifying an initial letter sound. For example, when the teacher says to identify something different about one word, what kind of difference is he/she referring to? Students may be confused if they should identify a difference in letters at the beginning or the end? They may think, should I look for which word means something different? Exercises like this are meant to be fast paced, yet, multilingual learners may still be processing what is exactly required of them, thus not actually engaged in the targeted skill that these exercises intend for students to practice.

In another instance, the teacher sends students to a table to work in a small group reading nonsense words like, "puk, jaf, kuf." Before starting the activity, one of the students, a Latinx boy, asks the teacher, "can we use sounds in Spanish?" This example demonstrates that for many multilingual students, they may have knowledge of letter sounds across the languages that they use daily. In the case of nonsense words, it's important for students to know if the teachers want them to employ all of their knowledge of sounds, even if it goes beyond English, or do they need to keep within the confines of English sounds?

As these types of foundational exercises have become increasingly popular and even mandated by law for students, it is important for educators who work with multilingual students to be reminded that their professional expertise is fundamental to "skillful implementation" (professional communication, Melissa Lambert, 2/1/23) of these foundational instructional techniques for multilingual readers. These proceeding anecdotes demonstrate that multilingual learners approach tasks that are meant to target foundational reading skills in a way that differs from monolingual students. Assuming that the same instructional tasks will activate the same type of learning for all students including multilingual students is reflective of the monolingual bias in activities such as these (Ascenzi-Moreno, unpublished manuscript).

The vast research on bilingualism and reading indicates that there are differences between monolingual and multilingual students as they develop to be readers (Reyes, 2012). It is critical that research on biliteracy sits alongside and on equal ground with research promoted by SOR advocates. While SOR advocates argue for universality or of the claim that all readers need the same instructional techniques regardless of their profiles, it is clear that multilingual students need something different in developing to be successful readers.

What exactly do we know about how multilingual students and monolingual students differ in how they learn to read? While there are many ways that multilingual students' reading development differ from monolingual students, in this short piece, two ways in which they differ will be highlighted. First, language and literacy are intertwined (Razfar & Rumenapp, 2014). For multilingual students this means that while we may try to isolate reading skills from language, this only works for students who already are quite adept in knowing the meaning of words. For multilingual students, the danger when we engage in these types of practices is that we are missing an opportunity for language development. Secondly, multilingual students operate across named languages or use their translanguaging abilities - meaning that they have knowledge about different components of reading in two or more named languages. Therefore, they may know a variety of sounds associated with a given letter in more than one named language. They may also have knowledge of words and texts in languages in addition to English. Therefore, the need for students to understand their resources cross-linguistically becomes critically important (Cárdenas-Hagan, 2020). For example, multilingual students may benefit from discussing and practicing similarities and differences between sounds in the named languages that they use.

So what does a multilingual approach to teaching early reading looks like? Because language and reading are intertwined for multilingual students there are a couple of shifts that can take place for multilingual students to account for their rich linguistic and cultural resources. Reading is both cumulative and componential (Lesaux, 2015). For multilingual students, this means that not only do multiple experiences need to add up to continually develop a thoughtful and skillful reader, but also that the skills need to relate to each other. One of the first things that teachers can consider is how foundational exercises are related to meaning? For multilingual students when meaning is not integrated into learning, there is a lost opportunity for language development. When reading skills are compartmentalized, then multilingual students' overall comprehension may be impacted in the long run, because the relationship between word reading and language is not made over time.

For example, before asking students if they know the sound the word starts with, it's important that students know what the word means. This can be accomplished by asking students what the word means in the languages that they use or even by showing visuals, if applicable. A second way to support multilingual students' acquisition of foundational skills is to integrate a space within foundational reading skills to explore the ways in which their named language works - the similarities and the differences - between the languages that they use. This means that students have the opportunity to hear how the "th" sounds in English and compare it, let's say for a Spanish speaker, to how the medial "d" sounds, "media" (or sock), which has similarities. The vast body of biliteracy research emphasizes the importance of metalinguistic awareness in the development of biliteracy for multilingual students (Reyes, 2012).

Calls for universality in the teaching of foundational skills makes a complex instructional landscape for multilingual students invisible. When the actual learning of multilingual students is not perceived, then their needs cannot be attended to adequately, and in the end multilingual students will lose out on crucial reading instruction that is attuned to their profiles. An overemphasis on word work unconnected to meaning, in the long run may cumulatively lead to weaknesses in meaning-based reading abilities. Of course, multilingual students need foundational skills - all students do - however, the ways that word reading and meaning come together for multilingual students during foundational skills development deserves both dedicated attention and a different approach that matches the research base on multilingual students. Educators will need to advocate for multilingual students by exercising their professional expertise to adapt foundational skills based on what research says about how multilingual students learn.
References
Ascenzi-Moreno, L. (Unpublished Manuscript). Bilinguifying reading instruction through a translanguaging perspective on reading and readers.

Cárdenas-Hagan, E. (2020). Literacy foundations for English learners: A comprehensive guide to evidence-based instruction. Brookes.

Lesaux, N. (2015). Cultivating knowledge, building language: Literacy instruction for English learners in elementary school. Heinneman.

Razar, A. & Rumenapp, J. (2014). Applying linguistics in the classroom: A Sociocultural approach. Routledge.

Reyes, I. (2012). Biliteracy among children and youths. Reading Research Quarterly, 47( 3), 307-327.
Dr. Laura Ascenzi-Moreno is a professor of bilingual education and bilingual program coordinator at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Brooklyn, NY, USA

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How can we attune our instruction to support the reading development of multilingual students? This complex question has become even more tricky given the current thrust of media messages about the "best way" about how reading should be taught.

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While the pandemic has challenged literacy development and outcomes for many students, that doesn't mean America is currently in a literacy crisis. Professor Catherine Snow, a pioneer with decades of research in language and literacy development, says she's puzzled by the public discourse about a literacy crisis.

"I am ... struck by the degree to which people are willing to invoke a literacy crisis, when the data do not support anything like a literacy crisis," Snow says. "NAEP scores, over the last 10, 15 years have grown - slowly, but they have gotten better in literacy."

There are many districts that weathered the storm of COVID. Snow cautions that it's important to remember the negative impacts on children's reading test scores is not evenly distributed, and in time we will have a better understanding of its impact on literacy development. In the meantime, Snow reminds educators to remain steadfast with balanced literacy instruction.

"What worries me about the post-pandemic instruction is that people are particularly under the influence of these worries about phonics are retreating to a stance of, 'Oh my gosh. They've missed the phonics instruction. We've got to do that more and more and better and better,'" she says. "And the fact of the matter is that yes, they need phonics instruction. But they don't need an hour and a half a day of phonics instruction. Fifteen minutes a day, in the context of opportunities to read and practice and play with language, is probably more effective than overloading literacy instruction with phonics in order to repair the ravages of the pandemic."

In this episode of the EdCast, Snow discusses the current state of American literacy, and how despite knowing what works, we continue to misinterpret modes of instruction and the science of reading.

TRANSCRIPT

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

Harvard Professor Catherine Snow doesn't believe the lag in children's reading scores means there's a literacy crisis. She spent decades as a Harvard researcher, understanding how children acquire oral language skills and how that relates to literacy outcomes.

Debates have long plagued the field of literacy development. To this day, educators grapple with the idea of phonics instruction, what the science of reading actually means, and what's the best way to invest instructional time. Snow says children need strong, balanced, literacy instruction that incorporates many components, even some that have yet to really catch on in schools.

First, I asked her to tell me how she thinks the pandemic impacted literacy development.

CATHERINE SNOW: From my perspective, and from the data, the pandemic has negatively impacted literacy development. But I think it's important to realize that negative impact is not evenly distributed. Students in certain grades in school are particularly vulnerable to not receiving steady, systematic, and enough instruction.

In other grades, if they've already learned how to read, and in particular if they're avid readers, or if they're at least willing readers, then a lot of the development of literacy skills can occur just because they continue to read, if they have books, if they have someone to talk to about those books. They don't necessarily require literacy instruction after third grade or fourth grade.

But they do require, of course, access to texts that will help them continue to expand vocabulary and expand background knowledge, and keep the skills current, keep the skills growing and becoming more automated.

I think the most vulnerable children are those in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, where instruction is directly relevant to how well they're going to grow. And we haven't really seen the NAEP outcomes for those children in fourth grade yet.

In other countries which do more regular assessments, it seems as if kids did lose about a year of schooling, of growth in literacy, over the course of the interrupted and somewhat scrappier instruction of the pandemic. So I think we have to anticipate that might appear in our fourth grade readers when NAEP is next applied.

JILL ANDERSON: Try to help put this in a little perspective for me. Because sometimes, it feels like, are we overreacting? Is there really a reason to be worried?

CATHERINE SNOW: I am, like you, struck by the degree to which people are willing to invoke a literacy crisis, when the data do not support anything like a literacy crisis. NAEP scores, aside from the pandemic then-- but NAEP scores, over the last 10, 15 years have grown-- slowly, but they have gotten better in literacy.

And it's deeply puzzling to me why we have all of this public discourse about a literacy crisis. If I were deeply cynical, I would say it's probably a useful technique for companies that are trying to sell their programs to get people to buy those programs, if parents and some school districts are very agitated about the so-called literacy crisis.

Now that isn't to say that all American children are doing wonderfully in literacy. Obviously, they aren't. But it is to say that there's not a new or a sudden decline in literacy performance, other than that associated with the dip that had to do with the pandemic.

JILL ANDERSON: Right. I got very confused when I started to look at what was said about a year ago, which sounded incredibly dire. And of course, everyone was pointing their fingers, it seemed, to the pandemic. But then I looked at something new. And it said that things weren't as bad as we thought it would be.

CATHERINE SNOW: Right. And there are school districts, I should say, that have done a very good job of weathering even the COVID challenges. I've been working, together with my collaborator, Suzanne Donovan, with the DC public schools. And their test scores did not drop at all in K, 1, or 2 over the COVID period. They do regular assessments, and they've gotten better.

So it is not necessary that there were losses. I mean, it was not unlikely. But some districts managed to recruit resources that enabled teachers and families to weather that period without severe loss of literacy skills, even for very young children who were still in the process of acquiring literacy.

JILL ANDERSON: You've done a lot of work about the importance and value of literacy development beyond elementary years. We don't hear a lot about what's going on for kids in the middle, early adolescent years. How has the pandemic impacted their development?

CATHERINE SNOW: I think we have less information about that. And I find it a little harder to speculate about what the impacts have been. I think, it's clear that the negative impacts for somewhat older students. The negative impacts of COVID were motivation, social contact, mental health, the emotional capacities that surround and potentiate good school learning.

So rather than there being direct impacts on literacy development, I think there are probably indirect impacts. I see later literacy development, starting in fourth or fifth grade, as generally quite a neglected domain in the schools, as if they learned how to read up to third grade. And now we just give them stuff to read and assume they can do it.

And that's, of course, a mistake. There are many new challenges after third or fourth grade. There's new kinds of texts. There's much more complex language in those texts that older children read. There are new topics. There are new genres. There are new disciplinary challenges, learning to follow arguments in history or in science, in a way that first through third graders don't need to.

So there is a lot left to teach. But in general, that's conceptualized as let me just teach my content, and not worry too much about how students read that content. And of course, you can give lectures and convey the information. The challenge then is that students are not given the skills to read and learn on their own.

So I wish there were much more attention to literacy in the content areas after grade four. But given that that's not universally available in US schools, I think the negative consequences of the pandemic of this break in schooling on students will have been mediated primarily through these motivational and social mechanisms, and of course, lost opportunities to learn content.

And content ultimately does contribute to reading. It's easier to read about things you know about. And you read much more successfully. If you're reading about familiar topics.

JILL ANDERSON: Why has it been so difficult for that focus in the middle years to catch on with literacy development?

CATHERINE SNOW: I think many teachers don't have the tools to support them in making that change. The mechanisms that we've found in our research are very helpful in making that change include opportunities to enter the texts, to read texts with an understanding of how they are relevant to really important and big questions, and to discuss those important and big questions, and then use the texts as resources in thinking more deeply about those questions.

And that's an approach to teaching that is a little bit hampered by many of the emphases in US schools. It's an approach to teaching that suggests slowing down and spending more time on a topic, rather than getting through the topic as quickly as possible so that the material is all covered.

It's not consistent, or is not seen as consistent with the demands of preparing students for the end of year tests, which require coverage of the material. It's an approach to teaching that requires much more discussion and open consideration of alternatives in the classroom. It's hard to do that when you're on a pacing guide or when you are afraid to let the students talk too much.

So I think there are a lot of ways in which we have set up the assessment system, the accountability system, the teacher accountability, as well as the student accountability system, to counter the opportunities for deeper learning.

JILL ANDERSON: Literacy development seems like it's always been an area of debate, way before the pandemic. Why has it been so challenging to come to any consensus on what works?

CATHERINE SNOW: That is a great question. Because in fact, we've come to a consensus on what works a dozen times over the history of American. We know what works. The problem is not to achieve a consensus about what works, but rather to ensure that consensus is implemented in such a way that the integration of attention to the different skills required is maintained.

So people become very distressed when they think that some piece of the set of components that students have to be taught about is being neglected. And then the response is to go in and push that component. So you might think that, as many people do right now, that phonics is being neglected, and mount a campaign to emphasize the teaching of phonics.

And that's a useful campaign. Students do need to learn phonics. But of course, they don't need to learn phonics all the time. They need to learn phonics in the context of many other skills that are also crucial to literacy. But other people would say, well, you're overemphasizing phonics. We need to have more discussion of literature. We need to have more engagement in reading aloud.

And that's, of course, also a crucial component of literacy instruction. But it can't be emphasized to the exclusion of teaching students how to deal with the code. I mean, I think everybody agrees about the basic principles. But they don't agree on how you prioritize those instructional components, those instructional tasks.

And there is, I'm afraid, in the literacy field, a little bit of a holier than thou, accusatory style of discourse, which leads to problems for students and parents and backward progress on good instruction.

JILL ANDERSON: What do you hear from educators, especially right now, those who are working with kids, about their challenges?

CATHERINE SNOW: Well, I hear from educators, deep commitment to adhering to the, quote science of reading, unquote. And I but I put it in quotes. Because the science of reading has become something more like a religious commitment than anything that you would call a science.

I mean, there is, of course, a science of reading. But it is not guiding instruction, particularly. It's a very broad set of scientific findings and accumulation of scientific knowledge. And yet it's being wielded as a cudgel in many educational discussions, partly because people don't really know what it means.

If you ask 10 people what is the science of reading, they will define it somewhat differently. I mean, one of the assumed principles of the science of reading is, of course, that children learning to read in English, a complex and abstract orthography, need explicit instruction in the code, in the alphabetic principle, in how letters represent sounds.

And that is, as I say, part of the science of reading. But the science of reading would equally dictate that in an orthography like English, because it's so deep, you also have to teach a lot of sight words, words that don't adhere to the decodable principles that guide many reading activities.

And you have to teach morphology. You have to teach how frequent morphological markers don't adhere to those phonics principles. And you have to ensure that students have wide vocabulary and a wide background knowledge basis in order to help them decode and comprehend what they're reading. So those aspects of the science of reading, which are just as well demonstrated as the importance of phonics, are often left out of the discussion, unfortunately.

The other thing I would say about the science of reading is that we know a lot about the process of reading development. We don't know very much about the teaching of reading. There are wild claims made about how American teachers don't know how to teach phonics, or there is no phonics instruction going on in American classrooms. And we don't really know. Nobody's done a large scale survey or a large scale set of observations of American classrooms that would enable us to say what percentage of teachers are completely neglecting phonics, what percentage are overemphasizing phonics.
It would be nice to know that. But we just don't.

JILL ANDERSON: That's amazing, that study hasn't been done yet.

CATHERINE SNOW: It would be a big study.

JILL ANDERSON: It sounds like there is no one focus and emphasis that educators should be using, that it's a bunch of different things and methods that should be done in order to teach reading.

CATHERINE SNOW: That's exactly right. Students need several domains of competence to be good readers. And of course, those different components of reading skill are acquired in somewhat different orders in somewhat different facility by different students. So it's a very complex task to figure out what this child needs versus that child.

But they all need rich language exposure and opportunities to interact about interesting topics, using vocabulary and syntax that's appropriate to the complexity of those topics. They all need opportunities to practice reading, to become automatic more skilled in doing the task of reading. And almost all of them need explicit phonics instruction.

The question is how to integrate and sequence and connect up all those different domains of instruction.

JILL ANDERSON: Do you think that because of the pandemic, we might need to rethink how we do this work?

CATHERINE SNOW: Well, I guess I would say the pandemic has certainly opened up evidence about domains, areas where kids are failing, more, obviously, than might have happened without the pandemic. I don't think that post-pandemic students need a different form of literacy instruction. They might need a more intensive and more efficacious form of literacy instruction.

And in other words, not just kind of let it happen, the way we had been letting it happen, but trying to ensure efficiency and targeting of needs for students who are falling behind more effectively. But what worries me about the post-pandemic instruction is that people are particularly under the influence of these worries about phonics are retreating to a stance of oh my gosh. They've missed the phonics instruction. We've got to do that more and more and better and better.

And the fact of the matter is that yes, they need phonics instruction. But they don't need an hour and a half a day of phonics instruction. 15 minutes a day, in the context of opportunities to read and practice and play with language, is probably more effective than overloading literacy instruction with phonics in order to repair the ravages of the pandemic.

I've seen a lot of classrooms in which they're supposed to be two hours for the literacy instruction block. But it always starts with the small skills, letter sounds, sound segmentation, spelling, regular words. And the time that is scheduled for language enrichment, for practicing reading comes at the end and gets squeezed out.

And that's a terrible mistake. Because those components are just as important and need to be given their full attention as well.

JILL ANDERSON: My understanding is, we're not always talking about apples to apples. There is a lot of inequality across the board in kids learning to read.

CATHERINE SNOW: There is huge inequality in the array of skills that kids bring to kindergarten or first grade, when reading instruction starts. That inequality is unfortunately often compounded by inequality in access to good instruction. I trust that when the data finally end up getting fully analyzed about the effects of COVID, I'm sure that we will see that for reading performance, as for health, for other consequences of the pandemic, that children in low income households, that children whose parents have low education levels, will have suffered more, will be showing greater slowdown in their learning.
And so that's also worth thinking about in a post-COVID recovery, targeting resources to those schools, those districts where the kids most need the support, and where the teachers most need the support. Because their students are at greatest risk.

JILL ANDERSON: How do you often advise educators to spend their time, energy, and money when it comes to literacy development?

CATHERINE SNOW: Often, the classroom educators unfortunately don't have a lot of autonomy in that regard. But at the school or district level, I think the focus has to be supporting teachers not just with knowledge about literacy. I mean, that seems like it's the right way to go, that they should become more sophisticated in the science of reading.

But I think when all of us get into the classroom, we tend to rely to fall back on curricula and techniques that we have available. So I would hope that we're supporting teachers by facilitating their use of curricular materials that give students what they need or that are a basis for giving students what they need, and organizational strategies that help them respond in a more individualized way to students' profiles.

JILL ANDERSON: Are there any literacy innovations coming down the pipeline or anything new that's coming up that you're excited about?

CATHERINE SNOW: Well, I'm excited about the tendency in some corners of the world, of the literacy world, to recognize that just teaching literacy skills is an inadequate approach. Literacy skills are tools for children.

They want to do something. They don't-- it's not that they want to learn the alphabet. They want to learn about the world. They want to have an impact on the world.

Now the alphabet, knowing the alphabet, knowing how to read, knowing how to write, is a remarkably powerful mechanism for learning about the world and for having an impact on the world. But we put learning the skills ahead of those other tasks So. That kids never kind of struggle through first, second, and third grade to get the skills to a high enough level before they're allowed to use those skills in productive ways.

And I think that's just backwards. I think it's backwards for language, for second language speakers, for example, to teach them several words before you let them talk about something they're interested in. And it's backwards for first graders, who could be learning to read by being exposed to and being given guidance in accessing texts about what they're interested in, by writing texts that express their own interests and perspectives.

So I'd like to see a rebalancing of the end of literacy-- namely, learning and communication, with the beginning of literacy namely the skills that make that possible.

JILL ANDERSON: Catherine Snow is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.

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Harvard EdCast: To Weather the "Literacy Crisis," Do What Works

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While the pandemic has challenged literacy development and outcomes for many students, that doesn't mean America is currently in a literacy crisis. Professor Catherine Snow, a pioneer with decades of research in language and literacy development, says she's puzzled by the public discourse about a literacy crisis. "I am ...

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Author, scholar, educator, and international speaker

Supporting educators, districts, and organizations in using research to improve reading for all children through professional development, professional books, coaching, and consulting.

Reading Above the Fray

Reliable, Research - Based Routines for Developing Decoding Skills

"Reading Above the Fray is a wonderful resource, a book I read from cover to cover. The scholarship is impeccable, citing the central and most impactful studies surrounding foundational skills and their importance to reading acquisition. Authored by a passionate educator, the book is rich in stories, lessons, activities, and ideas. It is a joy to read and will become a well-worn guide for teachers and students of reading!"

- ANNE E. CUNNINGHAM, Professor, Learning Sciences and Human Development, University of California, Berkeley; author of Book Smart: How toDevelop and Support Successful, Motivated Readers

About Dr. Julia Lindsey, Ph. D.

Julia B. Lindsey, Ph.D., is a foundational literacy expert, consultant, and proud former elementary school teacher. Her work aims to help educators implement research findings in reading instruction.

She is the author of the newly released book, Reading Above the Fray: Research-based Routines for Developing Decoding Skills. Julia is also the creator of a framework for research-tested, content-rich decodable texts used by districts, curriculum developers, and tens of thousands of teachers across the globe.

More from Dr. Lindsey

Research-backed decodables that support meaning-making

"Whether you're at the beginning stages of making instructional shifts or in the midst of it, Dr. Lindsey is a resource you can count on. She takes the research and provides teachers with practical ideas to assist them in the process of growing strong readers and writers. Her essential instructional swaps are, as she calls them, effective and efficient, but they're also realistic and engaging for both teachers and students. Dr. Lindsey values the voice of teachers and connects them with research that will impact their students."

​

Kristy Thomas, Principal of Rock Rest Elementary School, Monroe, NC

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Research-Based Foundational Literacy | Dr. Julia B. Lindsey, Ph.D.

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Julia B. Lindsey, Ph.D., is a literacy expert who helps teachers implement research-based foundational literacy instruction. She is the author Reading Above the Fray: Research-based Routines for Developing Decoding Skills and over one hundred content-rich decodable texts.

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This is the third in a series of four articles on how educators can support literacy by bringing knowledge-building into their classrooms (read the , , and posts). Our group of 14 scholars has distilled a rich body of research into 10 practical recommendations for educators. In this article, we discuss recommendations 4- 6, how quality texts can be accessed to build knowledge.

Complex, knowledge-rich texts that feature unfamiliar vocabulary and new ideas are a powerful gateway for building knowledge. How can students access such texts? Simply putting a complex book in a child's hands isn't enough-they must be taught to read texts fluently and must be able to comprehend what they are reading. There are core sense-making skills that capable readers deploy to understand and learn from the texts they are reading. The recommendations below focus on instructional strategies that build students' reading comprehension and expand their access to knowledge-building.

4. Give Read-Alouds a Central Role

Read-alouds are a powerful tool for teachers to foster literacy development . Read-alouds expose students to vocabulary, syntax, and content that is more sophisticated than what they can read on their own. Even books written for preschoolers expose children to vocabulary that is rarer, and more varied, than the vocabulary found in everyday conversation , and can be more syntactically complex as well . Read-alouds also turn the typically solitary act of reading into a group activity, with students listening, talking, and learning together. When students dialog about a text during a reading, they are developing their ability to engage in conversations about a text. Furthermore, read-alouds can be joyful and motivational for young children and older students alike.

The polar bear lives in the Arctic, the area that surrounds the North Pole. Part of the Arctic is frozen, treeless land called tundra. Most of the Arctic is ocean. Ice covers the water most of the year. (Holiday House, 2002)

Read-alouds like this can build knowledge of things most children are unlikely to experience firsthand, such as the Arctic, and can similarly help to address inequities in children's opportunities to build knowledge due to lack of prior exposure.

Engaging in discussion about a text before, during, and after reading, can help build students' knowledge and support critical thinking skills. Examples of questions a teacher might ask include:

Read-alouds also provide opportunities for teachers to explicitly explain and to what goes on in a reader's mind as they read, which is part of effective comprehension instruction. The power of interactive read-alouds doesn't stop at the end of elementary school. Interactive read-alouds can contribute to knowledge-building well into adolescence and beyond.

5. Foster Foundational Skills

We've all heard the adage that children first learn to read, and then they read to learn. Yet decades of research show that this is a false dichotomy. As described in previous articles in this series and in the preceding section, from the very beginning, children can build knowledge of the natural and social world through read-alouds and visual and experiential learning. They can also build knowledge through texts that they are learning to read themselves. As children are developing literacy foundational skills-concepts of print, phonological awareness, phonics, spelling, and fluency-they can be simultaneously building vocabulary and conceptual knowledge. As children develop as readers, they are able to read increasingly complex texts themselves and build more and more knowledge through that process.

Teachers do not need to choose between instruction that builds knowledge and that which teaches literacy foundational skills. They can occur in tandem and complement each other across a rich literacy curriculum.

It is obvious that developing literacy foundational skills is essential to children being able to read texts that build knowledge. However, the reverse is also true. Building content knowledge can contribute to word-reading development.

Content knowledge, in particular knowledge of concepts and the words that label them, supports . Orthographic mapping involves connecting and storing three types of information about a word: the word's phonology, or pronunciation; its orthography, or the way the word is written; and its semantics, or the meaning of the word. Orthographic mapping cannot occur without children developing vocabulary knowledge, which comes in significant part from building content knowledge. When children understand that a kit is a baby fox, they can more readily remember the sound, spelling, and meaning of the word "kit" and put that information to use when encountering new texts.

Content knowledge also helps children recognize when they've misread a word. For example, consider the sentence: "Most fish hatch from eggs." An early reader who does not yet know the tch trigraph might read this aloud as: "Most fish hath from eggs." or "Most fish hatkh from eggs." Content knowledge (or knowing that many animals hatch from eggs) leads the reader to recognize that those readings don't make sense, which signals them to go back and try decoding the word again.

Cross-checking to ensure that the word as they have decoded it is especially crucial in the busy world of a classroom. It may not be possible for teachers to alert each one of their students every time they misread a word. But increasing children's world knowledge will improve the likelihood that they will recognize a misread word on their own. For multilingual learners, building language and knowledge in the language(s) they are reading is crucial to support cross-checking their decoding while also supporting their language development . By ensuring students are building knowledge, engaging with knowledge-rich texts, and monitoring their comprehension of those texts, teachers can provide students with important tools to recognize misread words and try again to read them on their own.

6. Apply Strategies for Sense-Making

Building knowledge from texts requires being able to read the words in the text and comprehend them. Proficient comprehenders are quite active as they read, engaging in mental moves to support their comprehension, particularly when they're finding the text to be difficult. These sense-making strategies can be taught within instruction that is focused on knowledge-building. Teaching students how to use these tools to access text and building knowledge are not in conflict. For example, research has demonstrated that elementary-school instruction that teaches text structures and builds knowledge improves reading outcomes compared to instruction that focuses on knowledge-building alone, without any detrimental effect on knowledge development.

Sense-making strategies are especially helpful for developing readers who struggle with comprehension. Research has long-identified a significant subgroup of children who have grade-level word-reading skills yet struggle to comprehend text. There also are many children who need considerable support with both word reading and comprehension development.

One valuable tool for readers to better understand, and therefore build knowledge from what they read, is by attending to the way the author has organized the text, for example presenting a problem and then potential solutions, or conveyed similarities and differences between two entities. Explicitly teaching children to pay attention to how texts are structured and common organizational patterns that authors use has been shown in many studies to support informational text comprehension .

Before Reading

It helps students access texts when teachers provide them with explicit instruction on strategies they can use as they are preparing to read. Teachers can instruct students to set goals for reading by considering their purposes for reading (e.g., what they want to learn or gain from the text). Students also benefit from learning how to preview a text. This includes assessing what they already know and don't know about the content, articulating what they might learn by reading and attending to the text's structure, and introducing key vocabulary and concepts. Deeper preview, aided by, for example, read-alouds or videos, is helpful toward preparing students' interest and understanding of texts with topics that might otherwise be too unfamiliar or difficult for students to grasp on their own.

During Reading

Students benefit from explicit instruction in comprehension monitoring, in which they monitor their success in understanding and learning from text while they read. For example, students can be taught to ask questions and pay attention to whether they can answer them.

Students can be taught to stop and rereadportions of the text so that they can make connections, put the pieces together, and understand the text from various angles. Also effective is instruction in getting the gist -teaching students to ascertain the key points an author intends to convey by paraphrasing, clarifying, explaining, or summarizing small portions of the text. Strategies designed to support comprehension should be invoked in service of understanding the text at hand; there is a lack of evidence for isolated comprehension strategies instruction that does not ask students to reflect on the content of the text.

After Reading

Asking students to ask and answer questionsposed before or during reading is shown to increase both memory and comprehension of what they've read. Similarly, students benefit from summarizing their texts and from pulling together key points that the author has aimed to communicate across larger portions of the text. While discussion is invaluable, the impact of having children write about what they've read is tremendous. When students are regularly engaged in writing about their reading, it is shown to boost not only the quality of their writing but also their and overall . This finding applies to English learners as well as to students already proficient in English. Finally, instruction that includes a "balance" of reading and writing produces better outcomes in both.

Important practices for helping students access and therefore build knowledge with texts include reading aloud material too difficult for students to access on their own; developing foundational skills that enable students to fluently read increasingly complex texts; and explicitly teaching text structures and comprehension. Included in the next article will be a discussion of the nature and diversity of those texts.

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Helping Students Access Complex, Knowledge-Rich Texts

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This is the third in a series of four articles on how educators can support literacy by bringing knowledge-building into their classrooms (read the , , and posts). Our group of 14 scholars has distilled a rich body of research into 10 practical recommendations for educators.

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The Sciences of Reading Instruction - Rachael Gabriel

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The Sciences of Reading Instruction - Rachael Gabriel

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Every January, my social media feeds fill with ads, free trials, and coupons from the diet and wellness industry, promising to help me with my (presumed) resolutions to be better, faster, leaner, and healthier. Every diet program claims some type of relationship to science.

The same is true with reading instruction. Most programs or approaches claim to be based on "science." But consider the many possible meanings of this claim. Some approaches to reading instruction are developed as part of rigorous, peer-reviewed research and are continuously evaluated and refined. Others are designed by practitioners who draw on experience, and whose insights are validated by inquiry after development. Many are based on well-known principles from research or assumptions about learning in general, but haven't themselves been tested. Some "research-based" instructional tools and practices have been shared, explained, interpreted, misinterpreted, and re-shared so many times that they bear little resemblance to the research on which they were based (Gabriel, 2020). Others rack up positive evidence no matter how many times they're studied. Then there are practices that have no evidence behind them but are thought to be scientific-because they've always been assumed to be true.

"Polarizing Pitches"

When it comes to diet and wellness, advertisers work to make complicated choices about food and exercise appear simple and easy. And once phrases like "clinically proven" began to appear on almost every dieting option out there, many products-to stand out-changed their messaging to the now-familiar polarizing pitch, which typically involves one or more of these claims:

This type of promotion is challenging because approaches that seem to conflict with each other both make claims about their own effectiveness and the ineffectiveness of others.

Similar polarizing pitches can now be seen in approaches to early reading instruction. Multiple approaches-often different and even resistant to each other-claim to be scientific and "evidence-based." But too few programs have been examined with gold-standard studies to make comparisons meaningful. And every new evidence-rating system has slightly different recommendations (Gabriel, 2020). The "evidence-based" label seems to have lost its distinctive meaning. Rather than solely asking whether an approach is "evidence-based," most educators now want to know what the individual components of high-quality instruction truly are.

What We Do and Don't Agree On

The challenge, really, is to discern which reading-instruction approach is right for your school community, in what ways, at which times. Understanding what your school or classroom needs for current students is made more difficult by the lack of shared language for common concepts in the field, and the "all-or-nothing" mentality that suggests you must go all one way or another. Moreover, instructional decisions in this area matter tremendously. Just like unbalanced nutrition, the wrong program or combination of approaches can do more than waste time; it can discourage, limit, and minimize students' opportunities to learn. Perhaps this is why discussions about various programs evoke passionate responses from different factions in the "reading wars."

Within every approach to literacy instruction lies a unique logic or way of making sense of the central challenge of literacy development and of the best strategies for dealing with that challenge. Still, there's little disagreement on the non-negotiables of effective reading instruction, even if polarized perspectives use different terminology to describe them. I state these non-negotiables as: Students need developmentally appropriate, precise (explicit) instruction about every strand of literacy (letter patterns, vocabulary, usage, comprehension), instruction that includes clear modeling, plenty of practice, and specific feedback on that practice. There's also little disagreement on these general principles for effective reading instruction:

Reading and writing more is better than reading and writing less.

Clearer specific teaching and feedback is better than vague teaching and feedback.

Code-focused instruction (in which students learn about letter sounds, patterns and word structures) is important, and meaning-focused instruction (where students learn about vocabulary, text structure, discourse, genre and communication patterns) is important. But their successful integration is most important.

This last point is the crux of media representations of the "reading wars" and the conversations and, in some cases, legislation, that has followed. Code-focused instruction, or phonics instruction, has been presented as largely absent in reading instruction, and its absence is viewed as wholly responsible for persistently low achievement in reading (MacPhee, Handsfield, & Paugh 2021).

But the tension between code- and meaning-focused reading instruction has led to pendulum swings toward trends in curriculum and instruction that favor one and then the other for nearly a century. This in itself is problematic, leading to narrow conceptions of what students need.

The principles behind code-focused and meaning-focused reading instruction have been anchored in different fields of study and are best understood by researchers or practitioners in those different fields, so varied terms, philosophies, and approaches will always be at play. For this reason, the term "science of reading" really ought to be plural. Understanding reading development among diverse students requires an understanding of multiple fields of science (bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing), not just one. A myopic focus on just one field leads to deficiencies in one area or another-for teachers and students. And there's mounting agreement that to interrupt the status quo of unequal reading achievement in the United States, research in the science of reading needs to use more diverse tools and perspectives (Milner, 2020).

Soil Scientists and Botanists

In my graduate classes, I refer to people who are heavily invested in code-focused instruction as "soil scientists" because they focus on the foundation in which literacy (considered here as a tree) grows. They're often interested in the granular details of early literacy skills, like phonological and phonemic awareness, that are hidden below the surface for a competent reader. Evidence for instruction here is often drawn from linguistics, speech-language pathology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Foundational skills provide readers with access to written words by "cracking the (alphabetic) code" and allowing students to look at letters and link those letters with sounds that combine into words. Using my tree metaphor, building basic skills is like focusing on the right nutrients and balance within the soil to support the proliferation of skills (roots) that can fuel initial growth-and are vital for the life of the tree. A strong foundation of skill mastery can be the first step to healthy growth in literacy.

I think of educators more heavily invested in meaning- and comprehension-focused instruction as botanists. They are interested in nurturing the tree as it grows: ensuring it has sunlight (language exposure) and water (compelling reasons for reading and exposure to a wide range of text types). Evidence for instruction in this area often drawn from sociology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, and communications.

As a tree grows, it sprouts branches that reach out toward its best sources of nutrients. Similarly, students with an interest in and knowledge about a certain topic or genre will extend (read) in that area and grow a stronger, leafier "branch" in that subject. With trees, as more leaves emerge, they provide increased surface area for capturing nutrients from the environment, until the leaves become the main source of nutrients for the tree and its roots. If each leaf represents a student's experience with a text, this metaphor illustrates how reading more can reinforce the brain's understandings of letter- and text-patterns (the roots). Reading more helps a student build content knowledge, linguistic knowledge, and textual knowledge through increased exposure to language and ideas.

What Does This Mean for Teaching Reading?

No tree is the same. Some are well-matched to their current soil environment; others are not, and require more attention to thrive. Similarly, no two students are the same. So, in teaching reading, depending on the needs of the student, there's a time for a focus on the "soil" and a time to focus on nutrients in the environment (texts, talk, and teaching that's explicitly about meaning-making).

A scientific approach to teaching reading would acknowledge that, like a sapling, every student has within them the natural ability to develop literacy. It would acknowledge that each unique student will require different kinds and degrees of support for component skills and the many processes of literacy.

A scientific approach would also acknowledge that any teacher will bring expertise to some, but not all, of the many strands of literacies and pedagogies for teaching those strands. No good botanist can work without knowing something about soil science; no soil scientist succeeds without knowing the parts of trees. But people usually specialize based on their interest and experiences. So, a school leader has to gauge how well a particular teacher's strengths and focus areas align with the school's literacy curriculum and goals-and how much additional training she may need to adapt to her students' needs.

Many argue that basic skills have been neglected and need a renewed focus. However, historically, it's not the presence, absence, or balance of phonics vs. comprehension instruction that always leads to poor outcomes (Bond & Dykstra, 1967); it's the lack of responsive integration of phonics and other instruction (Connor & Morrison, 2016).

It's worth adding that there is an implicit history of inequality behind the reading wars that's rarely discussed in conversations focused on reading science. Historically, code-focused, direct instruction was part of a no-frills, no-nonsense version of literacy teaching (Eppley & Dudley-Marling, 2018; Haberman, 1991). Such instruction was seen to require little teacher expertise to deliver because it's largely scripted or routinized (though delivering it well actually requires significant skill). Under-resourced schools have long seen a revolving door of inexperienced teachers and persistently low test scores which make this approach seem all the more logical.

On the other hand, child-centered, unscripted approaches that depend on teachers' use of data and in-the-moment analysis of student needs have often been the domain of better-resourced schools with experienced teachers who were trusted to make their own instructional decisions. (For information on balancing literacy instruction, see sidebar "How to Know If You're Providing Enough Phonics Instruction.")

Today, some teachers have the tools, training, and ongoing support to provide systematic code-focused instruction (phonics) in a way that is engaging, cohesive, and differentiated. But many do not. This is clear from surveys and interviews with teachers, who say they lacked preparation for the complexity of teaching reading, especially phonics, to diverse learners, despite passing scores on the tests of reading knowledge required for initial certification in many U.S. states (NCTQ, 2020).

Likewise, some teachers have the tools, training, and ongoing support to provide explicit comprehension instruction in a way that's purposeful and integrated with all aspects of written language, from phonics to spelling to grammar. Many do not. This is clear from looking at the questions on standardized tests that students most struggle with and the underlying mental processes, as reflected by recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP, 2019) findings. According to the 2019 NAEP, 66 percent of 4th graders tested could do the tasks required to score as "basic," which require little more than accurate word recognition and literal comprehension. However, scoring "proficient" requires inference, judgement, and the ability to construct an argument about ideas drawn from a text. Only 35 percent of U.S. 4th graders scored proficient or advanced.

This pattern suggests that meaning-focused comprehension instruction is neither absent nor adequate. So I would argue that one more pendulum swing towards phonics (to be followed in 15 years by a swing away) would do little to equip educators with the ongoing support they need for cohesive, integrated instruction. Explicit comprehension instruction must engage all levels of language, using culturally sustaining texts, in the context of purposeful activities if students are to develop higher levels of comprehension.

A lack of adequate phonics instruction is surely a social justice issue. A national debt is owed to students whose school experiences haven't included full access to rigorous skill development for reading and writing. Yet teaching students to recognize words without also teaching them to integrate, interpret, apply, judge, critique, and construct arguments about or with them is an example of systematic oppression. If literacy is to liberate, its components must fully integrate.

Needed: An Integrated Approach

Let's return to our comparison of reading programs and diet programs. We seem to have an understanding as a culture that there are multiple evidence-based ways to go about getting in shape, even if some basic principles apply to all of us. We don't seem to have this sort of flexibility about approaches when it comes to beginning reading instruction. But we desperately need it. Significant evidence has accumulated about the different profiles of learners, the varying reasons for students' difficulties with reading, and the need for different forms of instruction to ensure equitable opportunities to develop literacy. Some students need teachers who can build up their foundation for literacy with explicit, teacher-directed instruction. Others need an opportunity for increased independence as their literacies self-extend through engagement with texts they can and want to read.

If science is both a body of knowledge generated through systematic inquiry and a process for generating such knowledge, then embracing the sciences of reading should include embracing the process of inquiry as we implement various reading instruction approaches, as well as embracing research findings to help choose an effective program. Testing out a certain approach and finding it sound doesn't mean a wholesale rejection of all others. Science is tentative, not tyrannical.

Leaders and policymakers should remember that the individual differences that make each of us unique matter for reading instruction. Reading and writing require the orchestration of multiple complex cognitive, social, affective, and linguistic tasks. How well a student performs these tasks is influenced by many factors, only one of which is the type of instruction her teacher uses. Students' individual language histories, cultural knowledge, interests, skills, health, text exposures, and reasons for reading affect their responses to instruction and intervention.

Treating evidence-based programs or approaches as solutions to be applied rather than possibilities to be tried out is problematic. Figuring out who needs what means asking the right questions about our students, instructional routines, and contexts, and having the wisdom, flexibility, and resources to adjust. It means positioning each teacher as the principal investigator of their classroom, someone who consistently inquires about the optimal balance of instructional practices for their current students-and positioning leaders to investigate how teachers are implementing reading instruction.

If anything, science shows us that the diversity of students' responses to instruction-even the same instruction-requires instructors to be flexible in their selection of content and pedagogy to provide equal opportunities for each learner's development.

How to Know If You're Providing Enough Phonics Instruction

So how can school leaders know if they're providing the right balance between a basic-skills-centered and a meaning-centered approach? As described by the IRIS Center at the Peabody College of Education (2021), you'll know whether your approach is delivering sufficient phonics if 80 percent of all students, including those in special education, can read simple texts independently at the end of 1st grade and more complex texts with understanding by the end of 3rd, and if those who require additional support show progress as a result of a short-term (about 3-4 months) intervention.

On the other hand, you'll know your current emphasis (or lack thereof) on phonics has missed the mark if interventions for most students take longer than a few months, and/or if more than 20 percent of students seem to need them. These percentages are based on federal guidelines for RTI models.

Critical Questions on Literacy Instruction

Science is about asking good questions and using those questions to find evidence or explanations that help improve an endeavor. Unfortunately, as H. Richard Milner notes, most research highlighted in current discussions of the science of reading has been conducted on white, monolingual students and may have limited implications for the education of diverse learners, whose pathways to literacy may vary (Milner, 2020). Ethical action in determining effective literacy instruction in the current climate means asking the right questions and responding quickly to the answers. Three questions are a solid start:

1. Is there a pattern based on language, culture, or skill level of students who are well-served by your current curricular approach? How would a rebalancing or reintegration of instruction help you better serve students not in this group?

2. Are all students engaged in meaningful practice in reading? If so, are there ways you might make such practice even more engaging, meaningful, and inclusive? If, on the other hand, students are practicing isolated skills without opportunities for integration, or reading without building skills for more complex engagement, what missing instruction or opportunities for integration could you provide?

3. Is this approach bearing fruit? This is the key question when weighing whether the literacy instruction approach you consider scientific-and have been trying out-is right for your students and teachers. Even if individual measures or skills show growth, ask whether all students are increasingly independent, engaged, and flexible as readers and writers-and if not, why not.

Reflect & Discuss

➛ What are your greatest concerns about current trends and programs in early-reading instruction? Why?

➛ Consider examples of effective reading instruction you've observed or participated in. What are the key components or characteristics of such instruction?

➛ Do you agree with Gabriel that schools need "flexibility" in their approaches to reading instruction? What does flexibility mean to you in this context?

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When it comes to reading instruction, an "all or nothing" approach is actually unscientific.

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Paul Thomas mentions much of this research in his webinar hosted by Pioneer Valley Books

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Below is the current and on-going (and thus updated as new research is published) body of research related to the "science of reading" movement and reading policy adopted in states across the U.S.

The research compiled here has been (except for new publications under "UPDATE" where relevant) included in The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction, a double-blind peer-reviewed policy brief.

As many scholars have noted (see references under Media Portrayals of Reading Science below), the messaging around the "science of reading" has been misleading and oversimplified, contributing to policy and practices that are counter to good practice and the existing research base.

For one political example, consider this:

"This is a huge wake-up call for America. We answered it in Virginia last year," [Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R - VA)] said. "We passed the Virginia Literacy Act to bring the science of reading, otherwise known as phonics [emphasis added], back into our school system for K-3. We invested a record amount in education. We, in fact, have been working with higher education and K-12 to raise standards and expectations."
WATCH: Youngkin says education will drive midterm elections amid poor student performance

And as Hoffman, Hikida, and Sailors (2020) detail: "the SOR community do not employ the same standards for scientific research that they claimed as the basis for their critiques"; therefore, I provide here the evidence, recommending that any challenges to claims about reading science focus on that evidence and not attacking people or (often misused) terms and labels.

Historical Overview of Reading Debates
1940s
Betts, E., Dolch, E., Gates, A., Gray, W., Horn, E., LaBrant, L., . . . Witty, P. (1942). What shall we do about reading today?: A symposium. The Elementary English Review, 19(7), 225-256. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from www.jstor.org/stable/41382636
1950s, 1960s
Flesch, R. (1986). Why Johnny can't read: And what you can do about it. William Morrow Paperbacks.

Bowers, J.S. (2020).Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 32(2020), 681-705. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10648-019-09515-y

Education: Why Johnny can't read. (1955, March 14). Time. Retrieved April 27, 2022, from https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,807107,00.html

Williams, B.T. (2007, October). Why Johnny can never, ever read: The perpetual literacy crisis and student identity. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 51(2), 178-182.

Semingson, P. & Kerns, W. (2021). Where is the evidence? Looking back to Jeanne Chall and enduring debates about the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S157-S169. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.405
1960s, 1970s
Semingson, P., & Kerns, W. (2021). Where is the evidence? Looking back to Jeanne Chall and enduring debates about the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S157-S169. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.405

Krashen, S. (2017). Does phonics deserve the credit for improvement in PIRLS? Retrieved July 26, 2022, from http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/2017_does_phonics_deserve_the_credit_for_improvement_in_pirls.pdf

Chall, J. (1967). Learning to read: The great debate. McGraw-Hill.
1980s, 1990s
Krashen, S. (2002b). Whole language and the great plummet of 1987-92. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(10), 748-753.

McQuillan, J. (1998). The literary crisis: False claims, real solutions. Heinemann.

Darling-Hammond, L. (1997, November). Doing what matters most: Investing in quality teaching. Kutstown, PA: The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.
2000s
Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read. (2000, April). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved May 18, 2022, from https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/smallbook

Reports of the subgroups. (2000, April). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/report

Wilde, J. (2004, January). Definitions for the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001: Scientifically-based research. National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs. Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://ncela.ed.gov/files/rcd/BE021264/Definitions_of_the_NCLB_Act.pdf

Yatvin, J. (2002). Babes in the woods: The wanderings of the National Reading Panel. The Phi Delta Kappan, 83(5), 364-369

Yatvin, J. (2003). I told you so! The misinterpretation and misuse of The National Reading Panel Report. Education Week, 22(33), 44-45, 56. Retrieved May 18, 2022, from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.html

Yatvin, J. (2000). Minority view. Retrieved June 8, 2022, from https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/minorityView.pdf

Stephens, D. (2008). The federal government wants me to teach what? A teacher's guide to the National Reading Panel report. National Council of Teachers of English. Retrieved May 19, 2022, from https://cdn.ncte.org/nctefiles/resources/newsletter/magazine/nrp_report.pdf

Chapter 3 in Thomas, P.L. (2020). How to end the reading war and serve the literacy needs of all students: A primer for parents, policy makers, and people who care. Information Age Publishing.

Goodman, K. (2008, June 16). The Reading First debacle. Retrieved June 9, 2022, from http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kgoodman/readingdeb.pdf

Shanahan, T. (2005). The National Reading Panel report: Practical advice for teachers. Learning Point Associates. Retrieved June 7, 2022, from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED489535.pdf

Shanahan, T. (2003, April). Research-based reading instruction: Myths about the National Reading Panel report. The Reading Teacher, 56(7), 646-655.

Review of the Literature on Reading
Reading Policy
Cummings, A. (2021). Making early literacy policy work in Kentucky: Three considerations for policymakers on the "Read to Succeed" act. Boulder, CO: National Education PolicyCenter. Retrieved May 18, 2022, from https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/literacy

Cummings, A., Strunk, K.O., & De Voto, C. (2021). "A lot of states were doing it": The development of Michigan's Read by Grade Three law. Journal of Educational Change. Retrieved April 28, 2022, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10833-021-09438-y

Collet, V.S., Penaflorida, J., French, S., Allred, J., Greiner, A., & Chen, J. (2021). Red flags, red herrings, and common ground: An expert study in response to state reading policy. Educational Considerations, 47(1). Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.4148/0146-9282.2241

Yelland, N. (2020, August 19). Phoney phonics: How decoding came to rule reading lost meaning. Teachers College Record. Retrieved July 23, 2022, from https://foundationforlearningandliteracy.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Phoney-Phonics.pdf

Brooks, G. (2022, July 18). Current debates over the teaching of phonics. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Retrieved July 23, 2022, from https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-1543
Reading and Teacher Education/Professional Development
Tortorelli, L.S., Lupoo, S.M., & Wheatley, B.C. (2021). Examining teacher preparation for code-related reading instruction: An integrated literature review. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S317-S337. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.396

Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255-S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353

Seidenberg, M.S., Cooper Borkenhagen, M., & Kearns, D.M. (2020). Lost in translation? Challenges in connecting reading science and educational practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S119-S130. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.341

Woulfin, S.L. & Gabriel, R.E. (2020). Building infrastructure for improving reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S109-S117. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.339
Theories of Reading and Reading Instruction
Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348

Paige, D.D., Young, C., Rasinski, T.V., Rupley, W.H., Nichols, W.D., & Valerio, M. (2021). Teaching reading is more than a science: It's also an art. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S339-S350. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.388
Whole Language
Krashen, S. (2002). Defending whole language: The limits of phonics instruction and the efficacy of whole language instruction. Reading Improvement, 39(1), 32-42. Retrieved May 17, 2022, from http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/2002_defending_whole_language.pdf

Krashen, S. (2002). Whole language and the great plummet of 1987-92. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(10), 748-753.

McQuillan, J. (1998). The literary crisis: False claims, real solutions. Heinemann.

Semingson, P. & Kerns, W. (2021). Where is the evidence? Looking back to Jeanne Chall and enduring debates about the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S157-S169. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.405.

Ordetx, K. (2020, December 30). Embracing the science of reading: Making the transition from the three cueing system. IMSA Journal. Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://journal.imse.com/embracing-the-science-of-reading-making-the-transition-from-the-three-cueing-system/

Schwartz, S. (2020, December 16). Is this the end of "three cueing"? Education Week. Retrieved July 23, 2022, from https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/is-this-the-end-of-three-cueing/2020/12
Balanced Literacy Simple View of Reading
Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S18-S195. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348

Duke, N.K. & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411

Cervetti, G.N., Pearson, P.D., Palincsar, A.S., Afflerbach, P., Kendeou, P., Biancarosa, G., Higgs, J., Fitzgerald, M.S., & Berman, A.I. (2020). How the reading for understanding initiative's research complicates the simple view of reading invoked in the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S161-S172. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.343
Active View of Reading
Duke, N.K. & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411
Structured Literacy
Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348

Seidenberg, M. (2018). Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can't, and what can be done about it. Basic Books.

Willingham, D.T. (2017). The reading mind: A cognitive approach to understanding how the mind reads. Jossey-Bass.
National Reading Panel
Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read. (2000, April). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved May 18, 2022, from https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/smallbook

Reports of the subgroups. (2000, April). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/report

Phonemic awareness. (n.d.). Big ideas in beginning reading. Center on Teaching and Learning. Oregon University. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/pa/pa_what.php

Stephens, D. (2008). The federal government wants me to teach what? A teacher's guide to the National Reading Panel report. National Council of Teachers of English. Retrieved May 18, 2022, from https://cdn.ncte.org/nctefiles/resources/newsletter/magazine/nrp_report.pdf

Shanahan, T. (2005). The National Reading Panel report: Practical advice for teachers. Learning Point Associates. Retrieved June 7, 2022, from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED489535.pdf

Shanahan, T. (2003, April). Research-based reading instruction: Myths about the National Reading Panel report. The Reading Teacher, 56(7), 646-655.

Bowers, J.S. (2020).Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 32(2020), 681-705. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10648-019-09515-y

Collet, V.S., Penaflorida, J., French, S., Allred, J., Greiner, A., & Chen, J. (2021). Red flags, red herrings, and common ground: An expert study in response to state reading policy. Educational Considerations, 47(1). Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.4148/0146-9282.2241

Seidenberg, M.S., Cooper Borkenhagen, M., & Kearns, D.M. (2020). Lost in translation? Challenges in connecting reading science and educational practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S119-S130. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.341

Yatvin, J. (2002). Babes in the woods: The wanderings of the National Reading Panel. The Phi Delta Kappan, 83(5), 364-369

Yatvin, J. (2003). I told you so! The misinterpretation and misuse of The National Reading Panel Report. Education Week, 22(33), 44-45, 56. Retrieved May 18, 2022, from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.html

Yatvin, J. (2000). Minority view. Retrieved June 8, 2022, from https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/minorityView.pdf
Systematic Phonics and Comprehension
Yelland, N. (2020, August 19). Phoney phonics: How decoding came to rule reading lost meaning. Teachers College Record. Retrieved May 17, 2022, from https://foundationforlearningandliteracy.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Phoney-Phonics.pdf

Bowers, J.S. (2020).Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 32(2020), 681-705. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10648-019-09515-y

Brooks, G. (2022, July 18). Current debates over the teaching of phonics. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Retrieved July 23, 2022, from https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264093-e-1543

Davis, A. (2013, December 13). To read or not to read: Decoding synthetic phonics. IMPACT No. 20. Philosophical Perspectives on Education Policy. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1111/2048-416X.2013.12000.x

Pearson, P.D. (2019, October 12). What research really says about teaching reading-and why that still matters [Video]. International Literacy Association 2019 Conference. Retrieved May 18, 2022, from https://ila.digitellinc.com/ila/sessions/123/view

Allington, R.L., & McGill-Franzen, A.M. (2021). Reading volume and reading achievement: A review of recent research. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S231-S238. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.404
[UPDATE]
Testing the impact of a systematic and rigorous phonics programme on early readers and also those that have fallen behind at the end of Key Stage 2. (2022, October). Education Endowment Foundation. Retrieved October 17, 2022, from https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/read-write-inc-and-fresh-start

Recent Developments
The Science of Reading Movement
Cummings, A. (2021). Making early literacy policy work in Kentucky: Three considerations for policy makers on the "Read to Succeed" act. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved May 19, 2022, from https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/literacy

Schwartz, S. (2022, July 20). Which states have passed "science of reading" laws? What's in them? Education Week. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/which-states-have-passed-science-of-reading-laws-whats-in-them/2022/07

Bailey, N. (2022, May 23). The science of reading corporate connection: Replacing teachers with tech [Web log]. Retrieved July 24, 2022, from https://nancyebailey.com/2022/05/23/the-science-of-reading-corporate-connection-replacing-teachers-with-tech/

Aukerman, M., & Chambers Schuldt, L. (2021). What matters most? Toward a robust and socially just science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S86 Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.406

Petscher, Y., Cabell, S.Q., Catts, H.W., Compton, D.L., Foorman, B.R., Hart, S.A., Lonigan, C.J., Phillips, B.M., Schatschneider, C., Steacy, L.M., Terry, N.P., & Wagner, R.K. (2020). How the science of reading informs 21st-century education. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S267-S282. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.352

Shanahan, T. (2020). What constitutes a science of reading instruction? Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S235-S247. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.349

Seidenberg, M.S., Cooper Borkenhagen, M., & Kearns, D.M. (2020). Lost in translation? Challenges in connecting reading science and educational practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S119-S130. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.341
Media Portrayals of Reading Science
Hanford, E. (2018, September 10). Hard words: Why aren't kids being taught to read? APM Reports. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read

Moates, L. (2019, March 20). Hard words: A webinar to discuss what teachers need to know about teaching reading . . . and how to acquire that knowledge. Edview 360. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.voyagersopris.com/blog/edview360/2019/03/20/hard-words-a-webinar-to-discuss-what-teachers-need-to-know-about-teaching-reading

Moates, L. (2019, October 16). Of 'Hard Words' and straw men: Let's understand what reading science is really about. Edview 360. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.voyagersopris.com/blog/edview360/2019/10/16/lets-understand-what-reading-science-is-really-about

Coles, G. (2019, Summer). Cryonic phonics: Inequality's little helper. New Politics, 18(3). Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://newpol.org/issue_post/cryonics-phonics-inequalitys-little-helper/

Hanford, E. (2019, December 5). There is a right way to teach reading, and Mississippi knows it. The New York Times. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/mississippi-schools-naep.html

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (2021, November 3). A response to EdReports' assessment of units of study for teaching reading, writing and phonics. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://readingandwritingproject.org/blog/a-response-to-edreports-assessment-of-units-of-study-for-teaching-reading

Just to Clarify (blog series). Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://fpblog.fountasandpinnell.com/tag/just-to-clarify-series

Wexler, N. (2021, December 21). The 10 posts I wrote in 2021that got the most views. Forbes. Retrieved April 27, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2021/12/21/the-10-most-viewed-posts-of-2021/

Seidenberg, M. (2018). Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can't, and what can be done about it. Basic Books.

Willingham, D.T. (2017). The reading mind: A cognitive approach to understanding how the mind reads. Jossey-Bass.

Afflerbach, P. (2022). Teaching readers (not reading): Moving beyond skills and strategies to reader-focused instruction. The Guilford Press.

Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255-S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353

MacPhee, D., Handsfield, L.J., & Paugh, P. (2021). Conflict or conversation? Media portrayals of the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S145-S155. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.384

Thomas, P.L. (2022, February 15). Mississippi miracle, mirage, or political lie?: 2019 NAEP reading scores prompt questions, not answers [Web log]. Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://radicalscholarship.com/2019/12/06/mississippi-miracle-or-mirage-2019-naep-reading-scores-prompt-questions-not-answers/
New and Revised Reading Policy
Schwartz, S. (2022, July 20). Which states have passed "science of reading" laws? What's in them? Education Week. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/which-states-have-passed-science-of-reading-laws-whats-in-them/2022/07

Cummings, A. (2021). Making early literacy policy work in Kentucky: Three considerations for policymakers on the "Read to Succeed" act. Boulder, CO: National Education PolicyCenter. Retrieved May 19, 2022, from https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/literacy

Cummings, A., Strunk, K.O., & De Voto, C. (2021). "A lot of states were doing it": The development of Michigan's Read by Grade Three law. Journal of Educational Change. Retrieved April 28, 2022, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10833-021-09438-y

Briggs, D. (2006). Review of "Getting farther ahead by staying behind: A second-year evaluation of Florida's policy to end social promotion." Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved April 28, 2022, from http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-getting-farther-ahead-staying-behind-a-second-year-evaluation-floridas-policy-end-s

Huddleston, A.P. (2014). Achievement at whose expense? A literature review of test-based grade retention policies in U.S. school. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22(18). Retrieved July 26, 2022, from http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v22n18.2014

Hughes, J.N., West, S.G., Kim, H., & Bauer, S.S. (2018). Effect of early grade retention on school completion: A prospective study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(7), 974-991. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000243

Jasper, K., Carter, C., Triscari, R., & Valesky, T. (2017, January 9). The effects of the mandated third grade retention on standard diploma acquisition and student outcome over time: A policy analysis of Florida's A+ Plan. Policy Analysis. Retrieved July 24, 2022, from https://theoptoutfloridanetwork.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/e782a-executivesummary.pdf

National Council of Teachers of English. (2015). Resolution on mandatory grade retention and high-stakes testing. Retrieved May 19, 2022, from https://ncte.org/statement/grade-retention/

Robinson-Cimpian, J.P. (2015, December). Review of The effects of test-based retention on student outcomes over time: Regression discontinuity evidence from Florida. National Education Policy Center. Retrieved July 24, 2022, from https://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-NBER-retention

International Literacy Association. (2016). Research advisory: Dyslexia. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/ila-dyslexia-research-advisory.pdf

Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S25-S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353

Discussion and Analysis
Dyslexia
Allington, R.L. (2019, Fall). The hidden push for phonics legislation. Tennessee Literacy Journal, 1(1), 7-20.

Decoding Dyslexia. (2022). Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.decodingdyslexia.net/

International Literacy Association. (2016). Research advisory: Dyslexia. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/ila-dyslexia-research-advisory.pdf
[UPDATE]
Hall, C., et al. (2022, September 13). Forty years of reading intervention research for elementary students with or at risk for dyslexia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly. Retrieved October 17, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.477
Neuroscience and Brain Research
Aukerman, M. & Chambers Schuldt, L. (2021). What matters most? Toward a robust and socially just science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S85-S103. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.406

Gabriel, R. (2021, May 1). The science of reading instruction. ASCD. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/the-sciences-of-reading-instruction

Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255-S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353

Yaden, D.B., Reinking, D., & Smagorinsky, P. (2021). The trouble with binaries: A perspective on the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S119-S129. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.402

Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348

Seidenberg, M. (2018). Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can't, and what can be done about it. Basic Books.

Seidenberg, M.S., Cooper Borkenhagen, M., & Kearns, D.M. (2020). Lost in translation? Challenges in connecting reading science and educational practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S119-S130. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.341

Willingham, D.T. (2017). The reading mind: A cognitive approach to understanding how the mind reads. Jossey-Bass.

Wormeli, R. (n.d.). The problem with, "Show me the research thinking." AMLE. Retrieved April 29, 2022, from https://www.amle.org/the-problem-with-show-me-the-research-thinking/
Criticism of Balanced Literacy and Reading Programs
Hanford, E. (2020, October 16). Influential literacy expect Lucy Calkins is changing her views. APM Reports. Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://www.apmreports.org/story/2020/10/16/influential-literacy-expert-lucy-calkins-is-changing-her-views

Goldstein, D. (2022, May 22). In the fight over how to teach reading, this guru makes a major retreat. New York Times. Retrieved May 22, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/reading-teaching-curriculum-phonics.html

Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255-S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (2021, November 3). A response to EdReports' assessment of units of study for teaching reading, writing and phonics. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://readingandwritingproject.org/blog/a-response-to-edreports-assessment-of-units-of-study-for-teaching-reading

Just to Clarify (blog series). Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://fpblog.fountasandpinnell.com/tag/just-to-clarify-series

Seidenberg, M.S., Cooper Borkenhagen, M., & Kearns, D.M. (2020). Lost in translation? Challenges in connecting reading science and educational practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S119-S130. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.341

Semingson, P. & Kerns, W. (2021). Where is the evidence? Looking back to Jeanne Chall and enduring debates about the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S157-S169. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.405.

Routman, R. (1996). Literacy at the crossroads: Crucial talk about reading, writing, and other teaching dilemmas. Heinemann.

Ordetx, K. (2020, December 30). Embracing the science of reading: Making the transition from the three cueing system. IMSA Journal. Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://journal.imse.com/embracing-the-science-of-reading-making-the-transition-from-the-three-cueing-system/

Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348

Aukerman, M., & Chambers Schuldt, L. (2021). What matters most? Toward a robust and socially just science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S85-S103. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.406

International Literacy Association. (2016). Research advisory: Dyslexia. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/ila-dyslexia-research-advisory.pdf

Cervetti, G.N., Pearson, P.D., Palincsar, A.S., Afflerbach, P., Kendeou, P., Biancarosa, G., Higgs, J., Fitzgerald, M.S., & Berman, A.I. (2020). How the reading for understanding initiative's research complicates the simple view of reading invoked in the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S161-S172. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.343

Duke, N.K. & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411

Hanford, E. (2019, December 5). There is a right way to teach reading, and Mississippi knows it. The New York Times. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/mississippi-schools-naep.html
Teacher Education/Professional Development, Phonics, and Grade Retention
Schwartz, S. (2022, July 20). Which states have passed "science of reading" laws? What's in them? Education Week. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/which-states-have-passed-science-of-reading-laws-whats-in-them/2022/07

Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255-S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353

Stillman, J., & Schultz, K. (2021). NEPC Review: "2020 Teacher Prep Review: Clinical practice and classroom management." Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/teacher-prep

Briggs, D. (2006). Review of "Getting farther ahead by staying behind: A second-year evaluation of Florida's policy to end social promotion." Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved May 18, 2022, from http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-getting-farther-ahead-staying-behind-a-second-year-evaluation-floridas-policy-end-s

Huddleston, A.P. (2014). Achievement at whose expense? A literature review of test-based grade retention policies in U.S. school. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22(18). Retrieved July 26, 2022, from http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v22n18.2014

Jasper, K., Carter, C., Triscari, R., & Valesky, T. (2017, January 9). The effects of the mandated third grade retention on standard diploma acquisition and student outcome over time: A policy analysis of Florida's A+ Plan. Policy Analysis. Retrieved July 24, 2022, from https://theoptoutfloridanetwork.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/e782a-executivesummary.pdf

Hanford, E. (2019, December 5). There is a right way to teach reading, and Mississippi knows it. The New York Times. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/mississippi-schools-naep.html

Collins, T. (2019, December 4). Mississippi rising? A partial explanation for its NAEP improvement is that it holds students back. Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Retrieved April 28, 2022, from https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/mississippi-rising-partial-explanation-its-naep-improvement-it-holds-students

Hughes, J.N., West, S.G., Kim, H., & Bauer, S.S. (2018). Effect of early grade retention on school completion: A prospective study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(7), 974-991. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000243

National Council of Teachers of English. (2015). Resolution on mandatory grade retention and high-stakes testing. Retrieved May 19, 2022, from https://ncte.org/statement/grade-retention/

Access grade retention data from the USDOE/Office of Civil Rights here https://ocrdata.ed.gov/estimations/2017-2018

Perrault, P. & Winters, M.A. (2020, July 28). Test-based promotion and student performance in Florida and Arizona. Manhattan Institute. Retrieved July 24, 2022, from https://www.manhattan-institute.org/student-retention-policies-impact-student-success

Robinson-Cimpian, J.P. (2015, December). Review of The effects of test-based retention on student outcomes over time: Regression discontinuity evidence from Florida. National Education Policy Center. Retrieved July 24, 2022, from https://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-NBER-retention

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Reading Science: Current and On-Going Research

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Below is the current and on-going (and thus updated as new research is published) body of research related to the "science of reading" movement and reading policy adopted in states across the U.S. The research compiled here has been (except for new publications under "UPDATE" where relevant) included in The Science of Reading movement: The...

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By Thomas Ultican 12/28/2022

The Orwellian labeled science of reading (SoR) is not based on sound science. It more accurately should be called "How to Use Anecdotes to Sell Reading Products." In 1997, congress passed legislation calling for a reading study. From Jump Street, the establishment of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a doomed effort. The panel was given limited time for the study (18 months) which was a massive undertaking conducted by twenty-one unpaid volunteers. The NRP fundamentally did a meta-analysis in five reading domains while ignoring 10 other important reading domains. In other words, they did not review everything and there was no new research. They simply searched for reading studies and averaged the results to give us "the science of reading."

It has been said that "analysis is to meta-analysis as physics is to meta-physics."

Nancy Bailey is an expert in special education and early reading instruction. In a recent posting she shared,
"A troubling feature of the Science of Reading (SoR) is the connection between those who believe in the power of phonemes (and more) and those who want to privatize public schools. The old "For example, former gov Jeb Bush has been crusading for the Science of Reading, praising Emily Hanford for her advocacy for the SoR, implying teachers haven't understood how to teach reading." "Those of us in literacy, specifically the field of reading, have been highlighting since 2018 that APM Reports (specifically the work of Emily Hanford) has been misrepresenting both the problems around reading achievement and how to teach reading. "Hanford and APM Reports are ground zero for the deeply flawed "science of reading" (SoR) movement that now pervades mainstream media." NCLB crowd has been rejuvenated and seems onboard with digital instruction replacing public schools and teachers.
Also in the post by Bailey are links to about 30 companies who sponsored Bush's reading summit. They are all looking to cash in on the SoR.
"As I have pointed out numerous times, there is a singular message to Hanford's work; she has never covered research that contradicts that singular message. "For example, "And not a peep about schools having success with one of Hanford's favorite reading programs to demonize." "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. "The problem is not with recognizing that teaching phonics can play a facilitative role in having children learn to read; that insight is, indeed, important, if not particularly new. The problem is that this narrative distorts the picture to the point that readers are easily left with a highly inaccurate understanding of the so-called 'science of reading."' not a peep about the major study out of England that found the country's systematic phonics-first policy to be flawed, suggesting a balanced approach instead.
Professor Paul Thomas has a deep background in teaching and education research. He spent 20 years in high school English classrooms and another 20 years at Furman University teaching teachers. Thomas recently wrote,

Hanford's status as a reporter at American Public Media (APM) makes her work very damaging. APM is a sister organization to the Public Broad Casting system which has a well earned reputation for being unbiased and accurate.
"... IMSLEC started as an IDA committee, and ALTA certifies dyslexia specialists in the multisensory language approach, which in turn is consistent with IDA's standards for educator preparation in reading (Knowledge and Practice Standards, n.d.). The IDA began certifying teachers in 2016, in addition to accrediting dyslexia teacher training programs."
Hanford is not an expert in education or reading. In 1994 she earned a BA in English from Amherst College and in 1996 she took a job as a reporter at Chicago's public media station WBEZ. She has been in the public broadcasting system ever since.

Professor Thomas points out that Hanford's reporting is biased toward SoR claims that she agrees with and ignores all other evidence. He states,
"I have dyslexia. Reading and math are really hard for me. I've had too many teachers that don't understand how to teach me. Finally, this year I went to Lindamood Bell training and reading is getting easier."
Hanford is a glaring symptom of the journalism plague that is infecting public education but hardly the only one. Dana Goldstein continues to write problematic articles for the New York Times. Her writing is also biased towards the privatization agenda as salve for reading education. Her degree from Brown University in European intellectual and cultural history does not make her an expert in education, none-the-less, she regularly gets many inches in the Times to pontificate about it.

Maren Aukerman is an education expert. Professor Aukerman is currently a Werklund Research Professor at the University of Calgary who focuses on literacy education and democratic citizenship. She previously served on the faculty at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. Her recently published paper in the Literary Research Association focuses on the work of Goldstein, Hanford and others promoting the SoR movement. Aukerman outlined the fundamental message they're selling,

Aukerman points to four fundamental flaws in their journalism: (1) Lack of Balance in Reporting , (2) Sensationalistic "Straw Man" Arguments, (3) A Myopic Lens Fetishizing Phonics Instruction and (4) Logical Fallacies. She gives examples for each of these claims. For example, a Logical Fallacy is not reporting research that shows students taught to read without systematic phonics "read more fluently."

In January 2021, California State Senator Anthony Portantino a New Jersey transplant to the San Fernando Valley introduced SB237 which stipulates dyslexia testing for all students, kindergarten through third grade. The legislation also calls on local school districts to use "structured literacy instruction." Although the bill was not adopted the concepts are still being actively pursued in Sacramento.

Today, forty states mandate dyslexia screening even though there is no consensus on how to define dyslexia. Some researchers even question its existence. Ball State University and University of Texas researchers have joined the chorus of scientists stating, "There are no universally employed measures or procedures for identifying dyslexia." Commercially available tests misidentify both those that have a disability and those that don't. Screening expert Dr. Amanda M. Vanderheyden reported that tools like The Shaywitz Dyslexia Screen have error rates of more than 50%. Vanderheyden also stated, "Readers may be surprised to learn that there is not a direct positive relationship between screening assessments and improved reading outcomes."

Professor Rachael Gabriel makes this important observation about the screening tool Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), "Just like a 20-minute consult with a doctor is always better than health advice from an online calculator, a one-on-one conference with a teacher or reading specialist will always be better than DIBELS at diagnosing and understanding reading difficulty, ability and progress."

Politicians in a growing number of states are mandating "structured literacy." It is a systematic phonics approach to reading instruction based on the 1930s theories of Anna Gillingham and Samuel Orton. The advantage of this approach is that it can be easily packaged into commercial products. Both the Department of Education's clearing house and the International Literacy Association state that this approach is not supported by research.

In their studies, the research teams from Ball State University and the University of Texas noticed that an intricately linked closed circle of organizations are driving dyslexia discourse. The International Dyslexia Association (IDA), the Academic Language Therapy Association (ALTA), the International Multisensory Language Education Council (IMSLEC) and Decoding Dyslexia (DD) are the major players. The study states,

DD has parent chapters in every state in the union and they all employ the same language from IMSLEC and IDA in their lobbying materials and mission statements. DD's parent chapters are able to drive many people out to legislative hearings to testify on behalf of structured literacy programs and commercial dyslexia testing.

Associate Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Connecticut Rachael Gabriel has been studying parent engagement with reading issues. In her report, she shares several extracts from the oral and written testimonies given at various legislative sessions on special education. The testimonies are often emotionally delivered anecdotes that support the privatization agenda. In this typical statement, a student claims,

In her paper, Professor Gabriel also noted how parents are told that the public school teachers do not know how to teach reading especially to students with dyslexia. They are informed that dyslexia is often associated with other giftedness, a claim with no evidence other than anecdotal undocumented claims about Einstein and other famous people who are said to have been dyslexic. Those testifying regularly call for the five point DD agenda:

1. "A universal definition and understanding of 'dyslexia' in the state education code.

2. Mandatory teacher training on dyslexia, its warning signs and appropriate intervention strategies.

3. Mandatory early screening tests for dyslexia.

4. Mandatory dyslexia remediation programs, which can be accessed by both general and special education populations.

5. Access to appropriate 'assistive technologies' in the public school setting for students with dyslexia."

Some of what DD is calling for has been standard practice addressed in teacher education programs for decades. Some of it looks like a call to sell technology which often is worse than useless. Unfortunately, the screening tests will misidentify and harm many students. The call for a universal definition of dyslexia by political edict in education code is anti-science and bizarre.

The SoR movement is another example of oligarch spending diminishing professionalism in education. The combination of arrogance and too much money in a few hands is a disaster. The people who were on the NRP were dedicated professionals and the last thing they wanted was to harm reading education yet their report is being used for just that purpose.

It is probably true that many students with issues learning to read are not being well served, but turning to products from private companies to save the day is a mistake. School districts in most of the nation are starved for cash and administrators look for any way to cut spending. This is the root of the poor service for struggling students.

The answer is to drive more money into early education and insure that teachers are provided with extensive training in reading education. It should be the purview of these trained professionals to screen their students one-on-one for learning problems. Once those evaluations are made, the school staff should be charged with deciding on the appropriate response.

Stop the incessant neoliberal agenda of monetizing everything.

Tags: Dana Goldstein, Decoding Dyslexia, Emily Hanford, International Dyslexia Association, Jeb Bush, National Reading Panel, Science of Reading

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By Thomas Ultican 12/28/2022 The Orwellian labeled science of reading (SoR) is not based on sound science. It more accurately should be called "How to Use Anecdotes to Sell Reading Products." In 1997, congress passed legislation calling for a reading study. From Jump Street, the establishment of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a doomed...

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The Jump Rope Readers series gradually and systematically introduces beginning readers to new letter-sound correspondences and high-frequency words. Along the way, the books also introduce memorable characters, exciting adventures, and the foundational elements of literary fiction.

The Jump Rope Readers Classroom Bundle, Set A consists of 6 sets of 30 decodable readers that are just right for kids who are learning how to read. The titles in this series gradually and systematically introduce beginning readers to new letter-sound correspondences and high-frequency words. Along the way, the books also introduce memorable characters, exciting adventures, and the foundational elements of literary fiction. Jump Rope Readers are engaging and meaningful books that help beginning readers develop their foundational word recognition skills.

In addition to the print decodable books, this bundle includes digital access to the decodable readers, 6 read-aloud books, and a brief Getting Started Guide.
For more information about the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, visit UnitsofStudy.com/K-2Reading.

(click any section below to continue reading)

Ordering Guidance

These decodable series books support the work of the new Units of Study in Reading, Grade K.

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For questions related to content and purchasing options, contact your local Heinemann Sales Rep:

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Jump Rope Readers Classroom Set A, Fiction

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The Jump Rope Readers series gradually and systematically introduces beginning readers to new letter-sound correspondences and high-frequency words. Along the way, the books also introduce memorable characters, exciting adventures, and the foundational elements of literary fiction. The Jump Rope Readers Classroom Bundle, Set A consists of 6 sets of 30 decodable readers that are just right for kids who are learning how to read.

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Methods of research and study are important to note in our reading, discussions, decisions.

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Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading, according to new research investigating how the brain responds to different types of reading instruction.

In other words, to develop reading skills, teaching students to sound out "C-A-T" sparks more optimal brain circuitry than instructing them to memorize the word "cat." And, the study found, these teaching-induced differences show up even on future encounters with the word.

The study, co-authored by Stanford Professor Bruce McCandliss of the Graduate School of Education and the Stanford Neuroscience Institute, provides some of the first evidence that a specific teaching strategy for reading has direct neural impact. The research could eventually lead to better designed interventions to help struggling readers.

"This research is exciting because it takes cognitive neuroscience and connects it to questions that have deep meaning and history in educational research," said McCandliss, who wrote the study with Yuliya Yoncheva at New York University and Jessica Wise at the University of Texas at Austin. "We can learn a lot about the brain circuitry that supports skilled reading, how it is developing in children and how it is shaped by decisions and approaches that educators take in their teaching practice."
Instructional methods
Theories on reading development have long supported the importance of a phonics foundation, especially for early learners and struggling readers, yet investigating the way in which brain mechanisms are influenced by the choices a teacher makes is a fairly recent endeavor.

As the field of educational neuroscience grows, however, both brain researchers and educational researchers can improve their understanding of how instructional strategies can best be harnessed to support the brain changes that underlie the development of learning, McCandliss said.

In this study, released this month in the journal Brain and Language, the researchers devised a new written language and contrasted whether words were taught using a letter-to-sound instruction method or a whole-word association method. After learning multiple words under both approaches, the newly learned words were presented in a reading test while brainwaves were monitored. McCandliss's team used a brain mapping technique that allowed them to capture brain responses to the newly learned words that are literally faster than the blink of an eye.

Remarkably, the researchers said, these very rapid brain responses to the newly learned words were influenced by how they were learned.

Words learned through the letter-sound instruction elicited neural activity biased toward the left side of the brain, which encompasses visual and language regions. In contrast, words learned via whole-word association showed activity biased toward right hemisphere processing. McCandliss noted that this strong left hemisphere engagement during early word recognition is a hallmark of skilled readers, and is characteristically lacking in children and adults who are struggling with reading.

In addition, the study's participants were subsequently able to read new words they had never seen before, as long as they followed the same letter-sound patterns they were taught to focus on. Within a split second, the process of deciphering a new word triggered the left hemisphere processes.

"Ideally, that is the brain circuitry we are hoping to activate in beginner readers," McCandliss said.

By comparison, when the same participants memorized whole word associations, the study found that they learned sufficiently to recognize those particular words on the reading test, but the underlying brain circuitry differed, eliciting electrophysiological responses that were biased toward right hemisphere processes.

"These contrasting teaching approaches are likely having such different impact on early brain responses because they encourage the learner to focus their attention in different ways," McCandliss said. "It's like shifting the gears of the mind - when you focus your attention on different information associated with a word, you amplify different brain circuits."

While many teachers are now using phonics to teach reading, some may be doing it more effectively than others, McCandliss said.

"If children are struggling, even if they're receiving phonics instruction, perhaps it's because of the way they are being asked to focus their attention on the sounds within spoken words and links between those sounds and the letters within visual words," he said. "We can direct attention to a larger grain size or a smaller grain size, and it can have a big impact on how well you learn."
Monitoring brain waves
The study involved 16 literate adult participants, yet gained its statistical power by teaching all participants in two different ways, much like what a typical student may experience when learning from different teachers or trying to master irregular words that don't conform to letter-to-sound mapping, such as yacht.

The new written language was based on line features that formed symbols representing different letters of a new alphabet. The symbols were joined to represent a distinct visual word.

Each participant was trained to read two sets of three-letter words under identical conditions that provided practice viewing words and listening to corresponding spoken words. The only difference between the two training conditions was a set of instructions at the beginning that encouraged the readers to approach learning the words in one of two ways. One instruction asked learners to approach the task of learning each word by picking out each of the three letter symbols and matching each to the corresponding sound in the spoken word. The other focused on teaching the association between whole printed and spoken words.

After training was completed, participants were hooked up to an electroencephalograph, or EEG, that monitored brain waves while they took a reading test on word-figures they had already learned. Following the letter-sound style of training, participants were also tested on their ability to read new words composed of the same letters.

The EEG mapping results offered a window into how the brain works under different tasks as the electrode sensors took 1,000 pictures per second to map fluctuations in the brain's energy across time.

"When we looked under the hood, we found that the participants could learn to read under both forms of instruction, but the brain activation showed that learning happened in very different ways," McCandliss said. "These results underscore the idea that the way a learner focuses their attention during learning has a profound impact on what is learned, and what is retained, and more generally highlights the importance of skilled teachers in helping children to focus their attention on precisely the most useful information."

McCandliss hopes such research will provide a stronger common ground between educators who are seeking to design better teaching interventions for children struggling with reading and cognitive neuroscientists who are working to understand how learning experiences lead to changes in brain circuitry.

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May Wong is a freelance journalist who frequently writes for Stanford Graduate School of Education publications.

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Brain wave study shows how different teaching methods affect reading development

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Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading, according to new research investigating how the brain responds to different types of reading instruction.

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TwERL® Phonics for tweens (middle school phonics) has been developed specifically for emerging readers in grades 4-8 who are developing their decoding skills. The series is also useful for newcomers with no prior English language skills. Written at emergent and beginning reader levels, the books have been carefully controlled to showcase phonics skills, beginning with CVC words and progressing through long vowels, consonant digraphs, vowel diphthongs, and multisyllabic words. Accompanied by dynamic full-color photos, the engaging storylines are tween-centric and represent a wide variety of genres.

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TwERL® Phonics for tweens (middle school phonics) has been developed specifically for emerging readers in grades 4-8 who are developing their decoding skills. The series is also useful for newcomers with no prior English language skills.

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Shedding Light on Reading Skills and Strategies - Shanahan on Literacy

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Shedding Light on Reading Skills and Strategies - Shanahan on Literacy

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I want to clarify the definitions of reading skills vs reading strategies. I know you have written about this, but I'm still confused. I've read your blogs, the National Reading Panel Report, Zimmerman's Mosaic of Thought book, Oakhill et al.'s language skills, Chris Such's book, Scarborough's reading rope, etc. I tried to summarize what those sources had to say about each of more than a dozen strategies and I found several contradictions and lots of general confusion. Some of them label background knowledge as a strategy, while others say it is a language comprehension skill. Comprehension monitoring shows a similar pattern of disagreement, though the various authors might change sides about how to classify that one (and some treatments ignore it altogether). Scarborough shows language - which most classify as a skill - to become increasingly strategic with development. I could go on, but who is right here? Shanahan response: RELATED: What's the Role of Amount of Reading Instruction?
That's an easy questiom. I'm right!

Aren't I always? I'm surprised that you didn't know that. I thought you said you've read my blogs before.

Okay, maybe we've all been a tad sloppy with the old language, carefully delineating these concepts when addressing their distinctions explicitly, but not so much when we are just referring to skills and strategies in other treatments. Unfortunately, our carelessness is needlessly confusing and, perhaps, it is even a barrier to supporting the highest quality comprehension instruction.

Let's see if I can cast light on this problem.

And, that, in fact, is a very good place to start.... with light.

Physicists during the 19 th century and early part of the 20 th, were all in a tizzy over the nature of light. Did light travel in waves or particles?

They argued back and forth over that. Scientists would conduct an experiment proving that light must be moving in waves. Which was convincing right up until some contradictory experiment showed that it must be transmitted as a series of discrete packets, particles, or photons.

That argument raged for quite a while before Erwin Schrödinger let the wind out of all their balloons with his equation that described the dual nature of light. He showed that light possesses both qualities under various conditions and put an end to the argument so they could get on with business. (Schrödinger was good at that kind of thing. You might remember he was the guy with the cat that was both dead and alive. I'm sure glad you didn't ask me to explain that one!)

Much like Herr Schrödinger, I think this dead cat is amazingly lively.

That is, it's possible for something to be both skill and strategy.

Sometimes we teach something as a strategy initially, and with development it gains skill status. The reverse can happen as well (à la, Hollis Scarborough's rope, with language becoming increasingly strategic with development).

Background knowledge, for instance, plays a fundamental role in reading comprehension. This role, however, is often not intentional. Our minds seem to be designed to make connections. We almost can't stop ourselves from making comparisons ("Mom liked you best"), recognizing similarities, and seeing contrasts.

That's why Jimmy Kim's latest work (Kim, Burkhauser, Relyea, Gilbert, Scherer, Fitzgerlad, Mosher, & McIntyre, 2023) is gaining so much attention these days. It seems to be showing that building children's knowledge about a topic can generalize - automatically, without prompting - to other related or analogous topics. That would make background knowledge a skill.

That's exciting because most of the people promoting background knowledge as the golden road to high reading comprehension have been viewing it as a skill - as something that can be used productively in reading without conscious intentions of the reader. If students know a lot of science and social studies, this would mean that they'll often connect that body of information to whatever they read and as a result comprehension will rise.

However, other researchers have demonstrated that we can successfully teach people to use their background knowledge intentionally - that is, more strategically - to improve their understanding of what they read (Hattan & Alexander, 2021; Hattan, Alexander, & Lupo, 2023; Lupo, Tortorelli, Invernizzi, Ryoo, & Strong, 2019).

Intentional?

Well, for example, what if, prior to reading, I look over the material and see if any of it is familiar and ponder how I think it may connect up with what I already know? Maybe I'll decide to pay more attention to some sections than to others.

Or, what if I identify the major topic and then brainstorm for a few minutes before reading that text - bringing what I already know to conscious attention? That seems to improve comprehension, too.

Or, what if, as I read, I intentionally stop whenever I see something familiar and try to connect that information explicitly with what I already know - maybe even trying to identify what's new and where it may fit with what I already know? Again, a winning strategy.

Those kinds of intentional steps are strategic and that makes the use of background knowledge a strategy. Whereas just building up knowledge and hoping it will have relevance to what you read someday is betting on knowledge as a skill that can improve reading comprehension.

The studies seem to say that knowledge can operate as both skill and strategy - it just depends how we try to apply it.

Vocabulary knowledge (knowing the meanings of lots of words) is certainly a skill. When I read, for the most part, recognizing the words triggers the meanings without much conscious attention. For example,

if I read the word, "green," I think of that color automatically, I don't usually make decisions about it because I have that word firmly in my lexicon. I can't say I don't "think about it", because my mind must be thinking about (as I know the term to mean). And, yet, the process seems to keep conscious Tim out of the equation altogether. I do it, but I'm not aware that I'm doing it.

On the other hand, had the author used, prasine, smaragdine, greeny, viridescent, or verdant, that choice might change everything. I'd have various strategic decisions to make with those words. I kind of know what "verdant" means and the shade of green that may imply. I likely would do nothing with that one. The same would be true for "greeny." I might be able to gain purchase on "viridescent" through a moment of morphological analysis (yeah, it does have something to do with iridescent). But "prasine" and "smaragdine" are not in my vocabulary. For those, I'd have to decide how much I cared. Whether it would be worth trying to ken those from context or by looking them up in the dictionary (my most likely strategy for solving those) would depend on my desire to fully comprehend the message.

Those schemes that we have for dealing with unfamiliar words - context, morphology, reference guides, ignoring - tend to be strategic, intentional choices the reader deploys to address a potential problem.

Lessons in which children memorize the definitions of vocabulary words are skills lessons.

Lessons in which children must identify unknown words in passages and figure out their meanings are strategies lessons.

That means vocabulary can be skill or strategy, just as light can be waves and packets. It just depends.

I think you should worry less about classifying them and more about how you think students need to apply them. Is the goal to teach students to respond automatically, without conscious direction, without intention, without being triggered by some conditional event? If so, automaticity is going to be important and you are going to want to work hard at memorization and repetition, to ensure that your students master these skills.

Or, are you preparing students to respond flexibly when confronted with a particular challenge or problem, that they are going to have to make decisions about?

Then, you want to teach it as a strategy. Here you teach them what it is, why it has value, when to use it, and you give them guided practice in applying it in various situations.

We tend to think of those kinds of situations as belonging to the comprehension realm. How would you read a short story differently from a science text? That passage made no sense - now what are you going to do?

However, as much as we consider decoding to be a skill, there are situations when students must make choices and at least some of those will require conscious decisions. at least for a while...

"I know CVCe words tend to have long vowels, but that pattern doesn't seem to be working when I try to read the word done." The best strategy in that situation is to consider other possible pronunciations of the vowel.

That kind of word reading problem is interesting and complicated. Early on, I want students to see that CVCe pattern as a skill to be learned to the point of automaticity because of its high likelihood of working. But I also want them to know how to respond to it strategically because of the important exceptions that exist. Over time, as students gain familiarity with the exceptions (e.g., done, have, one, live, come) the need for a strategic response will become unnecessary as reading these kinds of words will move into the house of skills.

How we use it and how we learn it are what determines whether something is strategy or skill. I suspect those apparent contradictions that you are seeing may be more due to differences in what those experts were focused on rather than to real differences in our understanding of skills or strategies.

It also can help to think about whether what you are teaching can really be a skill or a strategy. For years, we've tried to teach the various question types as comprehension skills. Kids are supposed to to learn the approrpriate way to answer main idea, supporting details, inference, and drawing conclusions questions. The problem with that is that there isn't any systematic way to answer those kinds of questions.

There are question types that could be learned. For example, teaching kids the various words that signal cause-and-effect relations can be helpful in guiding them to respond appropriately to many cause and effect questions. Likewise, how to connect cohesive links across a passage (such as connecting pronouns with the subjects they refer to) is teachable and should allow students to respond to a whole category of inferential questions (it isn't too clear how to teach other kinds of inferencing). However, in both of those cases, the instruction would focus on how to read the text and think about it, rather than how to answer particular questions. That's just not a skill or strategy that good readers use and it doesn't prepare students to excel with future test performance (despite the certainty of many school administrators).
References
Teaching kids to be strategic in teasing out the author's point of view in a social studies text, or the characters' conflicting goals in literature, or to connect up the causes and effects in science all could be strategies that students could learn to wield in various kinds of texts. Over time, with lots of practice, they may take those actions on as habits of mind that they engage in without much conscious decision making. In other words, those strategies may become more skill like with acquistion.

READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

Hattan, C., & Alexander, P. A. (2021). The effects of knowledge activation training on rural middle-school students' expository text comprehension: A mixed-methods study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(5), 879-897. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000623

Hattan, C., Alexander, P. A., & Lupo, S. M. (2023). Leveraging what students know to make sense of texts: What the research says about prior knowledge activation. Review of Educational Research, doi.org/10.3102/00346543221148478

Kim, J. S., Burkhauser, M. A., Relyea, J. E., Gilbert, J. B., Scherer, E., Fitzgerald, J. Mosher, D., & McIntyre, J. (2023). A longitudinal randomized trial of a sustained content literacy intervention from first to second grade: Transfer effects on students' reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology. doi.org/ 10.1037/edu0000751

Lupo, S. M., Tortorelli, L., Invernizzi, M., Ryoo, J. H., & Strong, J. Z. (2019). An exploration of text difficulty and knowledge support on adolescents' comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 54(4), 457-479. doi.org/10.1002/rrq.247

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shedding light on reading skills and strategies

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Reading Skills and Strategies | Shanahan on Literacy

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Shedding Light on Reading Skills and Strategies: A Blog Exploring the Distinctions and Teaching Techniques for Better Reading Comprehension. Read here more!