# data[].attributes.headline
See pages 48-69 for schwa lesson plan slides

# data[].attributes.subject
See pages 48-69 for schwa lesson plan slides

# data[].attributes.headline
Tap It..Map It (32-34)P/G Mapping (36)Additive Blending (45)Heart Word (46-47)

# data[].attributes.subject
Tap It..Map It (32-34)P/G Mapping (36)Additive Blending (45)Heart Word (46-47)

# data[].attributes.body
It may be helpful to each pick an activity to model

# data[].attributes.headline
See pages 41-59 for -tch lesson plan slides

# data[].attributes.subject
See pages 41-59 for -tch lesson plan slides

# data[].attributes.headline
See Pages 40-66 For Consonant Chart Introduction

# data[].attributes.subject
See Pages 40-66 For Consonant Chart Introduction

# data[].attributes.headline
A New Model for teaching High Frequency Words

# data[].attributes.subject
A New Model for teaching High Frequency Words

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reading League Event - January 2019 - Deciphering DECODABLE TEXT - Alicia Sparks, Presenter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dr. Keith Rayner - What Eye Movements Tell Us About the Processing Involved In Reading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dr. Rayner’s study of eye movements during reading is an important cornerstone of today’s reading science.

# data[].attributes.body
Hourglass Demonstration Part 1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Introduction to the Tolman Hourglass Figure

# data[].attributes.headline
See Day 1 Activity Sheet for Specific Directions

# data[].attributes.subject
See Day 1 Activity Sheet for Specific Directions

# data[].attributes.body
1. Review Gerardo Case Study information & documents

2. Download and complete the Gerardo Case Study Homework Day 3 document

3. Review WHAT doc

4. Grows & Glows posted on the Padlet

# data[].attributes.headline
What’s the point of this exercise? What is your take-away? Add your comments here.

# data[].attributes.subject
What’s the point of this exercise? What is your take-away? Add your comments here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join the web's most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD and 4K with no ads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join the web's most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD and 4K with no ads.

# data[].attributes.headline
See Pages 15-19 For Vowel Chart Introduction

# data[].attributes.subject
See Pages 15-19 For Vowel Chart Introduction

# data[].attributes.body
Follow this link to see Dr. Tolman discussing allophonic variants

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join the web's most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD and 4K with no ads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Heart Word Magic - Read and Spell High Frequency Words | Really Great Reading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Heart Word Magic - Help Students Learn to Read and Spell High-Frequency and Sight WordsHeart Word Magic is a complimentary teaching tool designed to help students learn to read and spell high-frequency words and sight words, particularly those that aren’t very decodable. Show your students the animations, then try these fun, hands-on free Student Practice

# data[].attributes.headline
Should We Teach Students t their Reading Levels

# data[].attributes.subject
Should We Teach Students t their Reading Levels

# data[].attributes.headline
Link to Google Drive with Slide Deck PDF

# data[].attributes.subject
Link to Google Drive with Slide Deck PDF

# data[].attributes.body
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1h7XtM_owVuM5xupZcwoYhHxaE50j-OiK

# data[].attributes.body
Hourglass Demonstration Part 2

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Top Part of Tolman's Hourglass Figure: Phonological Awareness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join the web’s most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD and 4K with no ads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join the web's most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD and 4K with no ads.

# data[].attributes.body
Follow this link to see Dr. Tolman talking about affrication

# data[].attributes.body
By Dr. Katie Pace Miles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Types of High Frequency Words: Implications for Instruction

# data[].attributes.headline
Who’s Right about Text Complexity, You or the Institute of Education Sciences?

# data[].attributes.subject
Who’s Right about Text Complexity, You or the Institute of Education Sciences?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This blog entry explores how the IES Practice Guide on Foundational Reading Skills differs from Tim Shanahan’s explanation of teaching with text complexity.

# data[].attributes.body
Books:
1.  Proust and the Squid:  The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
2.  Reader, Come Home:  The Reading Brain in a Digital World
3.  Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, a teacher, and an advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the Director of the newly created Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Previously she was the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007, HarperCollins), Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain (Edited; York, 2001), Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (2016, Oxford University Press), and Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (August, 2018, HarperCollins).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, a teacher, and an advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is focused on the impact of digital media on the reading brain.

# data[].attributes.headline
Consonant Chart Review Homework - You do not need to post this review to the padlet. We will debrief the answers during morning check-in.

# data[].attributes.subject
Consonant Chart Review Homework - You do not need to post this review to the padlet. We will debrief the answers during morning check-in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join the web's most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD and 4K with no ads.

# data[].attributes.body
This is housed on the Reading League site - https://www.thereadingleague.org/knowledge-base/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join the web’s most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD and 4K with no ads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join the web's most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD and 4K with no ads.

# data[].attributes.headline
Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read

# data[].attributes.subject
Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Fifty years ago, when I was becoming a teacher, reading instruction consisted of a ubiquitous classroom practice: placing students in instructional groups according to their reading level. These groups were sometimes known by various colors or animals. I distinctly remember the redbirds, the bluebirds, and the buzzards among the most popular appellations. Today, although groups are now labeled with letters (Level G, Level L, etc.) and ornithological monikers are out of fashion, assigning students to instructional groups according to their reading levels is still a common practice in classrooms across the country.

A recent survey aimed at identifying the most popular current programs used to teach reading ¹ found that one common feature of all the top sellers was that they organize their teaching around leveled books. Other recent surveys show that teaching reading with leveled books is on the increase and that teachers believe it is endorsed or supported by their state educational standards, ² though, in most cases, it is not.

But how effective is such teaching? Does it work?

On the surface, those are easy questions. Leveled readers obviously work. Most American students are learning to read, at least at basic levels, ³ and since most are being taught with leveled books, there must be some potency in the approach.

But the real question isn't whether children can learn from leveled books, but whether such leveling confers any learning advantages. Might students do even better if taught with books they can't already read so well? That's the real question. In this article, I examine the research on leveled reading approaches and offer more effective ways that classroom teachers can ensure their students acquire the skills and knowledge they need to not only read a text but also comprehend it. First, I provide a brief history lesson in how we got here.

Teaching with Gradually More Difficult Texts

The idea of testing students to place them in different levels of text for instruction was first recommended more than 100 years ago, ⁴ and an early survey indicated that 58 percent of primary-grade reading instruction was already being delivered in small ability-based groups and that 42 percent of the teachers were adjusting text levels to facilitate learning. ⁵ They may not have referred to these texts as "leveled readers," and no company that published basal readers had yet coined the term "guided reading," but the practices of that time were markedly similar to those of today.

During the 20th century, research identified text features that correlate with reading comprehension, ⁶ and publishers started to control these features to a degree previously unimagined. One reading program I remember from my childhood bragged that it never introduced more than one new word per page, and any word that was introduced was repeated 15 times over the following pages. That's why those texts could be so mind-numbingly repetitive: "Oh. Oh. Oh. Look, Jane, look." If learning to read meant learning words-and at least since the time of Horace Mann that's been an idea held by many-then the accumulation of words gradually from selection to selection was how someone would best advance in learning to read.

But such tight readability controls made beginning reading texts so artificial that they eventually elicited an adverse reaction. The most remarkable of these reactions was the adoption of "whole language" policies by California in the 1980s. ⁷ These reforms required that the texts used to teach reading not be designed for reading instruction, and severely limited the text revisions that could be made for pedagogical purposes. What this meant was that for a brief period of time, even the beginning reading materials got much harder, ⁸ perhaps so hard for beginning readers that they represented a significant impediment to learning. ⁹ If the old basal readers were easier than necessary, these new books were decidedly too hard for the beginners, and they provided teachers with little or no guidance on how to teach with texts that the older students couldn't read successfully on their own. Exacerbating the effects of these harder books was that California's policies simultaneously discouraged phonics and spelling-instruction that could have helped students to better read the challenging materials, and the term "whole language" often came to mean "whole class" instruction in many schools. ¹⁰ Perhaps the thinking was, why group for instruction if nobody could read the books anyway?

It was in this environment that Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell published their landmark book in 1996, Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children. There was nothing terribly original in their presentation, but they rediscovered and championed a set of teaching procedures that in the not-too-distant past had been widely used to facilitate reading instruction. They recognized that texts varied in difficulty and that one could guide student progress successfully across a gradually harder progression of books. To do this successfully, they asserted that teachers would need to group children, matching different books to students based on their varied levels of reading. Their approach offered immediate relief for those beginning reading classes where easier books made sense, but even in the grades beyond, the shift was welcome because of the lack of any pedagogical support for teaching challenging books. Fountas and Pinnell's approach, although reminiscent of earlier popular instructional practices, differed from them in one important regard: because of the burgeoning availability of high-quality children's trade books, they could propose doing this without textbooks.

In the Fountas and Pinnell version of guided reading, teachers assess students to determine their reading levels and then assign them books that they can read with a high degree of accuracy and comprehension. Over time, if retesting shows improvement, the students are switched to more demanding books. When it doesn't work so well, students may languish for long periods at their current levels. Such languishment has been enough of a problem that in the second edition of their book, they recommend moving students up sometimes even when the testing shows no evident improvement. (This seems to me like a judicious amendment to the original plan, but it raises the question about why these students can be expected to learn from the harder books when it is assumed that no one else would be able to.) Currently, this approach to reading, in which leveled books are matched to student reading levels for reading instruction, predominates in U.S. classrooms.

Determining Text Levels

There are basically two ways to determine how difficult texts may be and to set their levels: quantitative readability measures and qualitative judgments about texts. Although they approach the task differently, the purpose of both is to array texts on a continuum of difficulty.

The quantitative study of readability identifies text features that may affect comprehension and then tries to array these features in an algorithm that will allow accurate predictions of text difficulty. It turns out that accurate predictions can be obtained with only two text variables: vocabulary and sentence complexity. Such formulas are imperfect, but reasonably accurate. They aren't able to make fine distinctions, and until recently, haven't been able to measure beginning text levels very well. Nevertheless, quantitative readability algorithms are able to provide a largely reliable and accurate scientifically derived text gradient.

Still, it is important to remember that readability was not developed to match books to students in a way that would facilitate learning. Readability measures predict comprehension, not reading progress. The idea of using these kinds of measures to establish which books would best promote learning to read came later.

With the advent of computer technology, readability measurement has improved. ¹¹ The newer readability measures that have emerged are now widely used by researchers and publishers and were employed by the Common Core State Standards to specify text level aspirations for the various grade levels. Despite all this, when teachers speak of "leveling" books, they are most likely referring to Fountas and Pinnell levels.

Researchers provide a useful history of the development of this qualitative leveling system. ¹² Basically, an early version of the approach was developed for use with Reading Recovery, ¹³ a short-term reading intervention for first-graders who have difficulty learning to read, and Fountas and Pinnell refined and expanded this system to apply to texts from beginning readers through eighth-grade texts. Texts are evaluated by judges who place them on a multipoint continuum (from A to Z) based on 10 criteria: genre/forms, text structure, content, themes and ideas, language and literary features, sentence complexity, vocabulary, words, illustrations, and book and print features. ¹⁴

No studies have evaluated the reliability of these judgments, but a couple of small studies suggest that the Fountas and Pinnell gradient correlates reasonably well with the better-validated quantitative readability measurements. ¹⁵ Publishers have now leveled tens of thousands of books using this scheme. But given its complexity-the simultaneous qualitative evaluations of 10 factors with no explicit prioritization rules-it is unclear how accurate these levels may be (a point Fountas and Pinnell themselves make ¹⁶). Clearly, this approach lacks the scientific rigor of the quantitative approaches and may result in varied book placements depending on who makes the judgments. But until more evidence is available, let's at least for the sake of argument accept that these levels are sufficiently accurate to consider their use.

To sum up, there are two approaches to setting text levels-one based on a great deal of scientific evidence and one less well understood. Nevertheless, existing data suggest that both can place texts on a reasonable comprehensibility continuum, from easy to difficult. The problem is that research does not support the idea that either approach can identify from which texts students will learn best. The point of leveling is both to establish a text gradient and to place students in the appropriate text along that gradient. The latter is the issue to which we now turn.

Book Levels That Promote Learning

More than 70 years ago, Emmett Betts published an influential textbook on the teaching of reading. ¹⁷ Betts claimed all readers have three reading levels: independent, instructional, and frustration. According to Betts, the independent level refers to texts that readers can handle on their own without assistance. Instructional-level texts are a bit harder, but not so hard that students can't improve their reading from working with them under the guidance of a good teacher. And, frustration level? These books would be so difficult that learning would be unlikely even with supportive teaching.

Betts wrote that the way to determine these levels was to have students read from the books aloud and answer comprehension questions. Instructional-level texts, according to Betts, were those that could be read with 95-98 percent accuracy (in terms of word reading) and understood with 75-89 percent comprehension-the criteria that continue to be used today. Instructional-level texts generate small numbers of mistakes and misunderstandings, which can then presumably be addressed successfully through instruction and practice. Betts claimed that research supported the idea of matching books to students in this way to optimize learning. This instructional-level scheme is what is used today in most popular reading programs.

It's easy to understand why someone might propose (or adopt) such an approach. It is incredibly frustrating when students can't read a text very well. At a time when teachers were limited to one grade-level text for reading, there would be plenty of students who wouldn't be able to read it proficiently. Under those circumstances, teachers would gladly embrace the idea of working only with books that children could already read well. But as gratifying as the idea of teaching students at their instructional levels may have been, there are legitimate questions about the degree of effectiveness of this approach. When there is so little to learn from a particular text, it is possible that progress will be needlessly slow moving.

Despite Betts' original claims and the current popularity of leveling, research evidence has not been especially supportive of the approach. The study Betts referred to as the source of the instructional-level criteria was a doctoral dissertation of one of his students, ¹⁸ and that study neither matched books to students for instruction nor evaluated learning. Betts' doctoral student simply checked to see how many oral reading errors fourth-graders could make and still maintain 75-89 percent reading comprehension; that was the source of the 95-98 percent accuracy criterion. Years later, the researchers were questioned about the source of comprehension numbers, and they couldn't remember from whence those had come. ¹⁹ Not a very substantial basis for such a widely recommended instructional practice.

In the 1960s and 1970s, William Powell challenged Betts' criteria, though he fully accepted the kind of evidence Betts had used to set them. ²⁰ Powell thought Betts got the numbers wrong. To that end, he conducted studies in which children from grades 1-8 were evaluated in much the same way as in Betts' doctoral student's study. Powell found a couple of interesting things. He reported different instructional levels for different grades; that is, some children could tolerate more disfluency and still comprehend what they were reading. He also reported that some students could tolerate quite a bit of disfluency, suggesting Betts was placing students in books that were too easy.

Later, another study tested how well second-graders could read the books they were taught with, and then measured how much they learned. The researcher found that texts that could be read with about 85 percent accuracy and less than 50 percent comprehension led to the biggest learning gains. In other words, students learned more from books that were at their "frustration levels."

Over the past few decades, there have been several direct tests of the instructional level, and these have all ended with one of two outcomes. Instructional-level texts either have provided no learning advantages or have done harm. One example of the latter is another study with second-graders. ²¹ This study was the first randomized control trial of this practice. Students were tested and, using Betts' criteria, randomly assigned to one of three treatments. One group worked with texts at their instructional levels, one worked with texts two grades above this, and the third worked with books four grades above. Students read in pairs, practicing reading fluency with a partner. At the end of the school year, the students placed in books above their instructional level had made significantly bigger learning gains than those placed in the books supposed to facilitate their learning. This study was later replicated with third-graders. ²² Other studies again found big learning advantages from working with books at the children's grade levels rather than reading levels. ²³ Even students with learning disabilities have been found to obtain no benefit from these text placements. ²⁴

Betts saw a problem-students being taught from books that many couldn't read-and he proposed a solution, moving students to books that they could. Another solution, one he apparently didn't entertain, was that teachers could adjust their instruction in particular ways to facilitate students' interactions with these hard-to-read books. As a recent study found-this one with high school students-most students who were asked to read grade-level materials were able to learn more than those placed in the easier books. ²⁵

Basically, what this research reveals is that limiting students to texts they can already read well reduces their opportunity to learn-by limiting their exposure to sophisticated vocabulary, rich content, and complex language. With knowledge of the research on effective reading instruction, skilled teachers can facilitate students' productive interactions with harder text.

But what has happened since states started requiring that students be taught to read more challenging text?

In 2010, the majority of states adopted the Common Core State Standards. These standards, for the first time ever, set text levels that students were supposed to be able to read by the time they reached particular grade levels. The levels were set high to enable students to reach levels of proficiency that would ensure later life success.

States may have thought they had accomplished something pretty big by adopting those standards, and likewise district administrators may have thought they had dealt successfully with the complex text requirements when they purchased new textbooks matched to these new requirements. However, according to national surveys, ²⁶ all that has happened is that teachers, seeing that more of their students are now struggling with these newer texts, have increasingly relied on the idea of instructional-level teaching, and more and more are placing students in below-grade texts for reading instruction.

A More Effective Approach

As a teacher, I always taught with leveled books and worked hard to match texts to students in the ways described here. However, as I've learned of the research, I've gone a very different way-except with beginning readers. I know of no studies with kindergartners or first-graders showing that they should be trying to read particularly demanding texts (in contrast, there is a benefit to teachers reading aloud demanding texts to build young children's knowledge and vocabulary).

I've come to think of reading as the ability to make sense of the ideas presented in text, by taking advantage of the affordances and overcoming the barriers included in the text. Learning to read means becoming aware of these text features-and learning how to deal with them. Instructional-level texts are usually too easy to provide students with the opportunities to confront text features that they cannot already manage.

Affordances or barriers-and these are basically the same things-are features that authors build into their texts to facilitate communication. A particular text feature serves as an affordance if it does that, and-for some readers-it may serve as a barrier to understanding. For example, an author might aim for clarity and accuracy through apt diction, and for readers who know the meanings of the words so chosen, this can be a powerful text affordance. But for readers with more limited vocabularies? That potential affordance may become an unfortunate barrier for them.

It's not, however, as simple an equation as instructional-level theory makes out. It is not that some students have better vocabularies, so we should let them work with the relatively difficult books (the ones with the rich content and complex language), and that the other students-those who know fewer words-should be segregated into easier and more limited texts. That approach can have some unfortunate implications for students who are minorities and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds. ²⁷

What if, instead of segregating them into what some students call the "stupid books," we placed them in books with demanding vocabulary and taught dictionary skills, use of context, and morphology? What if we taught them when it was essential to figure out an unknown word meaning and when they might be able to soldier on successfully without doing that?

And, of course, vocabulary is just one of many such text features. Studies have long shown that teaching students how to disentangle the grammar of some sentences, ²⁸ how to take advantage of the cohesive links across a passage, ²⁹ and how to identify and use a text's organizational structure ³⁰ all can improve reading comprehension. Teaching students to negotiate these features of a text only makes sense if students are to be confronted by challenging texts, and none of them have value for students reading, what for them, are easy books.

If we are serious about raising reading achievement, we must think hard about whether it makes sense to continue teaching students to read books they can already understand so well. These easier books make learning unnecessary and, without adequate challenge, may even drain the fun out of learning. That doesn't mean that every selection used for reading instruction must significantly challenge students, only that grade-level texts should be part of the instructional mix.

Instead of a steady diet of instructional-level texts, students should be reading a range of texts in their classrooms. Some proponents of leveled reading claim they too support this idea, but they propose that instructional-level texts should be the focus of small-group teaching. I recommend just the opposite, having students reading really demanding texts when the teacher is close by and ready to help, and less demanding ones when on their own or when a teacher just isn't going to be available.

But this is not just an avenue to higher achievement (though research suggests that it could be), it is also an issue of equity. If fourth-graders are taught from a second-grade book, when will they have the opportunity to confront the language and ideas of fourth-grade books? This is a cruel math problem that tells students they are best served by books that don't match their interests, their curiosity, or their social aspirations. Leveled reading emphasizes students' current limitations, rather than increasing their possibilities, especially for the least advantaged of our students. We can do better.
Timothy Shanahan is a distinguished professor emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the founding director of its Center for Literacy. Previously, he was the director of reading for Chicago Public Schools. A past president of the International Literacy Association, he was the chair of the National Early Literacy Panel and a member of both the National Reading Panel and the English Language Arts Work Team for the Common Core State Standards Initiative. He writes about education at www.shanahanonliteracy.com.
Endnotes

1. S. Schwartz, "The Most Popular Reading Programs Aren't Backed by Science," Education Week, December 3, 2019.
2. D. Griffith and A. Duffet, Reading and Writing Instruction in America's Schools (Washington, DC: Thomas Fordham Foundation, 2018); and J. Kaufman et al., Changes in What Teachers Know and Can Do in the Common Core Era (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).
3. National Assessment of Educational Progress, Results from the 2019 Mathematics and Reading Assessments (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, 2019).
4. L. Zirbes, "Diagnostic Measurement as a Basis for Procedure," Elementary School Journal 18, no. 7 (1918): 505-522.
5. W. Theisen, "Provisions for Individual Differences in the Teaching of Reading," Journal of Educational Research 2, no. 2 (1920): 560-571.
6. G. Klare, The Measurement of Readability (Ames, IA: Iowa State UP, 1963).
7. California State Board of Education, English-Language Arts Framework for California Public Schools, Kindergarten through Grade 12 (Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education, 1987).
8. E. Hiebert, "Changing Readers, Changing Texts: Beginning Reading Texts from 1960 to 2019," Journal of Education 195, no. 3 (2015): 1-13.
9. E. H. Hiebert and C. W. Fisher, "The Critical Word Factor in Texts for Beginning Readers," Journal of Educational Research 101, no. 1 (2007): 3-11.
10. P. Pearson, "The Reading Wars," Educational Policy 18, no. 1 (2004): 216-252.
11. A. Stenner et al., "How Accurate Are Lexile Text Measures?," Journal of Applied Measurement 7, no. 3 (2006): 307-322.
12. P. Pearson and E. Hiebert, "The State of the Field: Qualitative Analyses of Text Complexity," Elementary School Journal 115, no. 2 (1991): 161-183.
13. B. Peterson, "Selecting Books for Beginning Readers: Children's Literature Suitable for Young Readers," in Bridges to Literacy: Learning from Reading Recovery, ed. D. DeFord, C. Lyons, and G. Pinnel (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991), 119-147.
14. I. Fountas and G. Pinnell, "Guided Reading: The Romance and the Reality," Reading Teacher 66, no. 4 (2012): 268-284.
15. J. Hoffman et al., "Text Leveling and Little Books in First-Grade Reading," Journal of Literacy Research 33 (2001): 507-528; and P. Hatcher, "Predictors of Reading Recovery Book Levels," Journal of Research in Reading 23 (2000): 67-77.
16. Fountas and Pinnell, "Guided Reading."
17. E. Betts, Foundations of Reading Instruction (New York: American Book, 1946).
18. P. Killgallon, "A Study of Relationships among Certain Pupil Adjustments in Language Situations" (unpublished PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1942).
19. H. Beldin, "Informal Reading Testing: Historical Review and Review of the Research," in Reading Difficulties: Diagnosis, Corrections, and Remediation, ed. W. Durr (Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 1970), 67-84.
20. W. Powell, "Reappraising the Criteria for Interpreting Informal Reading inventories," paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Reading Association, Boston, MA, 1968.
21. A. Morgan, B. Wilcox, and J. Eldredge, "Effect of Difficulty Levels on Second-Grade Delayed Readers Using Dyad Reading," Journal of Educational Research 94, no. 2 (2000): 113-119.
22. L. Brown et al., "The Effects of Dyad Reading and Text Difficulty on Third-Graders' Reading Achievement," Journal of Educational Research 111, no. 5 (2017): 541-553.
23. M. Kuhn et al., "Teaching Children to Become Fluent and Automatic Readers," Journal of Literacy Research 38, no. 4 (2006): 357-387.
24. R. O'Connor, H. Swanson, and C. Geraghty, "Improvement in Reading Rate Under Independent and Difficult Text Levels: Influences on Word and Comprehension Skills," Journal of Educational Psychology 102 (2010): 1-19.
25. S. Lupo et al., "An Exploration of Text Difficulty and Knowledge Support on Adolescents' Comprehension," Reading Research Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2019): 457-479.
26. D. Griffith and A. Duffett, Reading and Writing Instruction in America's Schools (Washington, DC: Thomas Fordham Foundation, 2018); and V. Opfer, J. Kaufman, and L. Thompson, Implementation of K-12 State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts and Literacy: Findings from the American Teacher Panel (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016).
27. A. Sørenson and M. Hallinan, "Effects of Ability Grouping on Growth in Academic Achievement," American Educational Research Journal 23, no. 4 (1986): 519-542.
28. V. Mih and C. Mih, "Reducing Children's Reading Comprehension Difficulties through a Training for Enhancing Sentence Organization Skills," Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal 16, no. 3 (2012): 387-401.
29. J. Irwin, "Linguistic Cohesion and the Developing Reader/Writer," Topics in Language Disorders 8, no. 3 (1988): 14-23.
30. K. Wijekumar, B. Meyer, and P. Lei, "Web-Based Text Structure Strategy Instruction Improves Seventh Graders' Content Area Reading Comprehension," Journal of Educational Psychology 109, no. 6 (2017): 741-760.

[Illustrations by Angela Hsieh]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fifty years ago, when I was becoming a teacher, reading instruction consisted of a ubiquitous classroom practice: placing students in instructional groups according to their reading level. These groups were sometimes known by various colors or animals. I distinctly remember the redbirds, the bluebirds, and the buzzards among the most popular appellations.

# data[].attributes.body
Books:
1.  Reading in the Brain:  The New Science of How We Read
2.  How We Learn:  Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine...for Now

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Enseigner la recherche en train de se faire

# data[].attributes.body
J. S. I really love the connection between all the models we've been studying. Seeing how the hourglass connects directly to both Ehri's phases and the 4 part processor continues to solidify that information for me.

# data[].attributes.headline
Florida Center For Reading Research- Alphabet Arc Activities

# data[].attributes.subject
Florida Center For Reading Research- Alphabet Arc Activities

# data[].attributes.body
https://fcrr.org/student-center-activities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently. Students can complete the activities in small groups, pairs, or individually.

Accompanying these Student Center Activities is a Teacher Resource Guide that offers important insights on differentiated instruction and how to use the Student Center materials.

Component

Name of the reading component: Phonological Awareness (PA), Phonics (P), Fluency (F), Vocabulary (V), or Comprehension (C). Each component is color coded: PA is purple, P is orange, F is red, V is green, C is blue.

Subcomponent

Name of the reading subcomponent, which is a subskill of the component.

Activity Name

Activity Number

The letters correspond with the reading component (PA, P, F, V, or C). The numbers are listed in ascending order within each component. The activities are sequenced from simple to more complex within each component and subcomponent.

Student Icon

The suggested number of students for the activity. One student icon indicates that students may work independently or with a small group. Two student icons indicate that the activity requires students to work in pairs. Two student icons with a plus sign indicate that the activity requires two or more students.

Objective

States the goal of the activity, which is aligned with the subcomponent.

Materials

Materials are located on the pages that follow the Activity Plan. Most materials are non-consumable to be prepared and used repeatedly (e.g., word cards can be laminated). Some materials are consumable and will need to be duplicated for each student doing the activity. Other materials, such as counters, are commonly found in most classrooms.

Activity Statement

One sentence explanation of the purpose of the activity and what students do to complete the activity.

Activity Steps

The first step describes how to setup the center. The second step begins with: The student, Students, Working in pairs, or Taking turns depending on the number of students needed to complete the activity. The second step also starts the series of steps to complete the activity. The next steps explain what the student does to complete the activity. The last step lists one of three accountability methods: Self-check, Peer evaluation, or Teacher evaluation.

Example

A visual of the activity and key materials.

Extensions and Adaptations

Suggestions that extend or provide an adaptation for additional practice on the skill addressed in the activity. Materials for the extensions and adaptations are included after the pages that align to the Activity Plan.

Users may use the FCRR Student Center Activities resources as long as modifications are not made, the resources will only be used for non-profit educational purposes, and the copyright belong jointly to the Florida Department of Education and the Florida Center for Reading Research. These resources may not be used for any commercial purposes. These resources on our site may be linked to but not reposted, reproduced, modified, or copied to other sites. For questions about the use of these resources, please contact The Florida Center for Reading Research at fcrr@fcrr.org.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently.

# data[].attributes.body
Type in a word to find its history!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Etymonline - Online Etymology Dictionary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The online etymology dictionary (etymonline) is the internet’s go-to source for quick and reliable accounts of the origin and history of English words, phrases, and idioms. It is professional enough to satisfy academic standards, but accessible enough to be used by anyone.

# data[].attributes.body
Follow this link to hear Dr. Tolman talk about nasalization

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join the web's most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD and 4K with no ads.

# data[].attributes.body
Books:
1.  The Reading Mind:  A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads
2.  When Can You Trust the Experts:  How to Tell Good Science From Bad in Education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Web page for Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia

# data[].attributes.body
The Hourglass Figure helps me to better understand the progression of learning for readers connecting letters and sounds . This progression helps to grow students as readers by beginning with the smallest units of sounds (early) to the advanced level in which students are able to read and spell proficiently.

# data[].attributes.headline
Fluency Norms Chart (2017 Update) By: Jan Hasbrouck, Gerald Tindal found in Reading Rockets

# data[].attributes.subject
Fluency Norms Chart (2017 Update) By: Jan Hasbrouck, Gerald Tindal found in Reading Rockets

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.readingrockets.org/article/fluency-norms-chart-2017-update

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tiffany P. Hogan , ​ PhD, CCC-SLP Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders Director, SAiL Literacy Lab

# data[].attributes.body
Books:
1.  Language at the Speed of Sight:  How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It

# data[].attributes.body
Th e hourglass came from the phonology and Orthographic processes turned on on their side.

# data[].attributes.body
Keynote Speech at The Reading League Conference 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Louisa Moats - Keynote Address at 2018 Reading League Conference

# data[].attributes.body
This demonstration helps to understand how Ehri's Phase of Word Reading connect.

# data[].attributes.body
PAST

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
© 2023 Equipped for Reading Success - WordPress Theme by Kadence WP

# data[].attributes.body
By Anita Archer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Effective and Efficient Teaching

By Anita L. Archer and Charles A. Hughes

Explicit instruction is systematic, direct, engaging, and success oriented-and has been shown to promote achievement for all students. This highly practical and accessible resource gives special and general education teachers the tools to implement explicit instruction in any grade level or content area. The authors are leading experts who provide clear guidelines for identifying key concepts, strategies, skills, and routines to teach; designing and delivering effective lessons; and giving students opportunities to practice and master new material. Sample lesson plans, lively examples, and reproducible checklists and teacher worksheets enhance the utility of the volume.

This title is part of the What Works for Special-Needs Learners Series, edited by Karen R. Harris and Steve Graham.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Explicit Instructions | Effective and Efficient Teaching

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Anita L. Archer and Charles A. Hughes Explicit instruction is systematic, direct, engaging, and success oriented-and has been shown to promote achievement for all students. This highly practical and accessible resource gives special and general education teachers the tools to implement explicit instruction in any grade level or content area.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
1. Consciously unskilled - we know that we don't have this skill.

2. Consciously skilled- we know that we have this skill.

3. Unconsciously skilled - we don't know that we have this skill, but we don't focus on it because it's so easy.

This "ladder of learning" is shown in figure 1, below.

Figure 1 - The Conscious Competence Ladder

Some people prefer to think of the learning process as a matrix, with incompetence/competence on the horizontal axis and unconscious/conscious on the vertical axis (see figure 2, below). Use the representation that works best for you.

Figure 2 - The Conscious Competence Matrix

Why Is the Conscious Competence Ladder Useful?

The Conscious Competence Ladder is useful in several ways.

For example, during the consciously unskilled phase, you can reassure yourself that, although learning this skill is difficult and frustrating right now, things will improve in the future. And, when you're unconsciously skilled, the model reminds you to value the skills that you've gained, and not to be too impatient with people who have yet to gain them.

It's also useful in coaching and training situations, because it allows you to be in touch with what your people are thinking and feeling. You can then help them to understand their emotions as they learn new skills, and encourage them when they're feeling disillusioned.

How to Use the Conscious Competence Ladder

The following sections look at each level in more detail, and highlight strategies that you can use to move yourself through each stage successfully, as you learn a new skill. They also cover strategies that you can use when you're guiding other people through the learning process.

Level 1 - Unconsciously Unskilled (You Don't Know That You Need This Skill)

To move out of level 1, use tools like Personal SWOT Analysis and a Training Needs Assessment to identify your strengths and weaknesses, and to understand which skills you need to learn. As part of this, ask other people for their input, so that you can uncover weaknesses and skill needs that you might otherwise miss.

If you're coaching other people, be aware that at the beginning of the process, they may not know how unskilled they are. You'll need to make them understand how much they need to learn. You'll also need to explain why they need to learn these skills.

Level 2 - Consciously Unskilled (You Know That You Need This Skill)

By this stage, you've discovered that you need to learn new skills. You realize that others are much more competent than you are, and that they can easily do things that you are struggling with.

Use tools like affirmations and Treasure Maps to combat negative thinking and to refocus your energy on days when you feel down. Remember, learning might be uncomfortable in the short term, but these skills will help you to reach your goals and build a better life.

Level 3 - Consciously Skilled (You Know That You Have This Skill)

At this level, you know that you have acquired the skills and knowledge you need. You put your learning into practice regularly, and you gain even more confidence as you use your new skills.

You still need to concentrate when you perform these activities, but, as you get more practice and experience, these activities become increasingly automatic.

If you're coaching team members, keep them focused on the skills that they need to learn, and give them plenty of opportunities to practice these skills.

For example, you could assign them projects that use their new skills, or set them relevant training exercises.

Level 4 - Unconsciously Skilled (This Skill Is Now Effortless)

Once you master one set of skills, it's important to learn more if you want to continue to grow.

A good way to do this is to teach these new skills to others in your organization. This will keep information fresh in your mind, deepen your understanding of the material, and give you a rewarding way to pass this knowledge on to others.

Also, bear in mind that you may go back down the ladder if you don't use your new skills regularly.

If you're coaching, make sure that people avoid complacency, and that they stay up-to-date with their skills.

You may also need to remind people how difficult it was to reach this level, so that they offer empathy and support to people who are at an earlier stage in the process.

Even when your team members are unconsciously skilled, encourage them to use checklists and formal procedures so that they still need to think about what they're doing at important points.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Conscious Competence Ladder - Developing Awareness of Your Skill Levels

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn how to manage difficult emotions when learning new skills. This article on the Conscious Competence Ladder is endorsed by its originator, Noel Burch.

# data[].attributes.headline
Syllable Types: A Strategy for Reading Multisyllabic Words by Knight-McKenna, Mary

# data[].attributes.subject
Syllable Types: A Strategy for Reading Multisyllabic Words by Knight-McKenna, Mary

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/28799762_Syllable_Types_A_Strategy_for_Reading_Multisyllabic_Words/download

# data[].attributes.body
Emily Hanford

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented program. But she couldn't read very well.

"There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me," she said. "When a teacher would dictate a word and say, 'Tell me how you think you can spell it,' I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, 'How do they even know where to begin?' I was totally lost."

Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.

Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory."

Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?

Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.

Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. But getting through text took forever. "I hated reading because it was taxing," she said. "I'd get through a chapter and my brain hurt by the end of it. I wasn't excited to learn."

No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. Her reading strategies were her "dirty little secrets."

Woodworth, who now works in accounting, 1 says she's still not a very good reader and tears up when she talks about it. Reading "influences every aspect of your life," she said. She's determined to make sure her own kids get off to a better start than she did.

That's why she was so alarmed to see how her oldest child, Claire, was being taught to read in school.

As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.

A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use.

The teacher said, "If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here," Woodworth recalled. "There was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. It's a "b." Is it fox or bear?'"

Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets."

She went to the teacher and expressed her concerns. The teacher told her she was teaching reading the way the curriculum told her to.

Woodworth had stumbled on to American education's own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers - and educators may not even know it.

For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by - memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know - are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process. 2

A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well. A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.
Percentage of U.S. fourth-graders below basic level in reading
When kids struggle to learn how to read, it can lead to a downward spiral in which behavior, vocabulary, knowledge and other cognitive skills are eventually affected by slow reading development. 3 A disproportionate number of poor readers become high school dropouts and end up in the criminal justice system. 4

The fact that a disproven theory about how reading works is still driving the way many children are taught to read is part of the problem. School districts spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on curriculum materials that include this theory. Teachers are taught the theory in their teacher preparation programs and on the job. As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.
Percentage of U.S. 12th-graders proficient in reading
The origins

The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information - or "cues" - to identify words as they are reading.

The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City.

In the paper, 5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:

graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)

syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)

semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)

Goodman concluded that:

Skill in reading involves not greater precision, but more accurate first guesses based on better sampling techniques, greater control over language structure, broadened experiences and increased conceptual development. As the child develops reading skill and speed, he uses increasingly fewer graphic cues.

Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.

Previously, the question of how to teach reading had focused on one of two basic ideas.

One idea is that reading is a visual memory process. The teaching method associated with this idea is known as "whole word." The whole word approach was perhaps best embodied in the "Dick and Jane" books that first appeared in the 1930s. The books rely on word repetition, and pictures to support the meaning of the text. The idea is that if you see words enough, you eventually store them in your memory as visual images.

The other idea is that reading requires knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters. Children learn to read by sounding out words. This approach is known as phonics. It goes way back, popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey readers.

These two ideas - whole word and phonics - had been taking turns as the favored way to teach reading until Goodman came along with what came to be known among educators as the "three-cueing system."

In the cueing theory of how reading works, when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, the teacher encourages her to think of a word that makes sense and asks: Does it look right? Does it sound right? If a word checks out on the basis of those questions, the child is getting it. She's on the path to skilled reading.

Teachers may not know the term "three cueing," but they're probably familiar with "MSV." M stands for using meaning to figure out what a word is, S for using sentence structure and V for using visual information (i.e., the letters in the words). MSV is a cueing idea that can be traced back to the late Marie Clay, a developmental psychologist from New Zealand who first laid out her theories about reading in a dissertation in the 1960s. 6

Clay developed her cueing theory independently of Goodman, but they met several times and had similar ideas about the reading process. Their theories were based on observational research. They would listen to children read, note the kinds of errors they made, and use that information to identify a child's reading difficulties. For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence.

Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words. "In efficient word perception the reader relies mostly on the sentence and its meaning and some selected features of the forms of words," Clay wrote. 7 For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text. 8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough.

These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools. Goodman's three-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an approach known as "whole language" that by the late 1980s had taken hold throughout America. 9 Clay built her cueing ideas into a reading intervention program for struggling first-graders called Reading Recovery. It was implemented across New Zealand in the 1980s and went on to become one of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs. 10

But while cueing was taking hold in schools, scientists were busy studying the cognitive processes involved in reading words. And they came to different conclusions about how people read. 11

Scientists take on three cueing

It was the early 1970s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. He thought the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an interest in learning and cognition due in part to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education teacher.

Stanovich wanted to understand how people read words. 12 He knew about Goodman's work and thought he was probably right that as people become better readers, they relied more on their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure to read words and didn't need to pay as much attention to the letters.

So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.

They couldn't have been more wrong.

"To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition." 13

The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research. 14

Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory: 15

Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example.

Experiments that force people to use context to predict words show that even skilled readers can correctly guess only a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers.

Weak word recognition skills are the most common and debilitating source of reading problems. 16

The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works.

But cueing is still alive and well in schools.

Picture Power!

It's not hard to find examples of the cueing system. A quick search on Google, Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers turns up plenty of lesson plans, teaching guides and classroom posters. One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children they have lots of strategies to use when they're stuck on a word, including looking at the picture (Eagle Eye), getting their lips ready to try the first sound (Lips the Fish), or just skipping the word altogether (Skippy Frog).

There are videos online where you can see cueing in action. In one video posted on The Teaching Channel, 17 a kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, instructs her students to use "picture power" to identify the words on the page. The goal of the lesson, according to the teacher, is for the students to "use the picture and a first sound to determine an unknown word in their book."

The class reads a book together called "In the Garden." On each page, there's a picture of something you might find in a garden. It's what's known as a predictable book; the sentences are all the same except for the last word.

The children have been taught to memorize the words "look," "at," and "the." The challenge is getting the last word in the sentence. The lesson plan tells the teacher to cover up the word with a sticky note.

In the video, the wiggly kindergarteners sitting cross-legged on the floor come to a page with a picture of a butterfly. The teacher tells the kids that she's guessing the word is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word to check on the accuracy of her guess.

"Look at that," she tells the children, pointing to the first letter of the word. "It starts with the /b/ /b/ /b/." The class reads the sentence together as the teacher points to the words. "Look at the butterfly!" they yell out excitedly.

This lesson comes from "Units of Study for Teaching Reading," more commonly known as "reader's workshop." 18 According to the lesson plan, this lesson teaches children to "know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words." 19

But the children were not taught to decode words in this lesson. They were taught to guess words using pictures and patterns - hallmarks of the three-cueing system.

The author of Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Lucy Calkins, often refers to cueing in her published work. 20 She uses the term MSV - the meaning, structure and visual idea that originally came from Clay in New Zealand.

Then there is Fountas and Pinnell Literacy, started by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, teachers who learned the MSV concept from Clay in the 1980s. 21

Fountas and Pinnell have written several books about teaching reading, including a best-seller about a widely used instructional approach called "Guided Reading." They also created a reading assessment system that uses what are called "leveled books." 22 Children start with predictable books like "In the Garden" and move up levels as they're able to "read" the words. But many of the words in those books - butterfly, caterpillar - are words that beginning readers haven't been taught to decode yet. One purpose of the books is to teach children that when they get to a word they don't know, they can use context to figure it out.

When put into practice in the classroom, these approaches can cause problems for children when they are learning to read.

'That is not reading'

Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.

The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me."

But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."

Rodney breezed right through it, unaware that he hadn't read the sentence on the page.

Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"

"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."

Goldberg had been hired by the Oakland schools in 2015 to help struggling readers by teaching a Fountas and Pinnell program called "Leveled Literacy Intervention" that uses leveled books and the cueing approach. 23

Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The program is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS. 24 It's a phonics program that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Most words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.

Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "but in the way they approached their reading."

Goldberg and a colleague recorded first-graders talking about what makes them good readers.

One video shows Mia, on the left, who was in the phonics program. Mia says she's a good reader because she looks at the words and sounds them out. JaBrea, on the right, was taught the cueing system. JaBrea says: "I look at the pictures and I read it."

Courtesy of Margaret Goldberg, Oakland Unified School District

It was clear to Goldberg after just a few months of teaching both approaches that the students learning phonics were doing better. "One of the things that I still struggle with is a lot of guilt," she said.

She thinks the students who learned three cueing were actually harmed by the approach. "I did lasting damage to these kids. It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that you predict what you read before you read it."

Goldberg soon discovered the decades of scientific evidence against cueing. 25 She was shocked. She had never come across any of this science in her teacher preparation or on the job.

And she started to wonder why not.

Balanced Literacy

People have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. The fight has mostly focused on whether to teach phonics.

The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument. 26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because - according to the three-cueing theory - readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say. 27

Marilyn Adams came across this belief in the early 1990s. She's a cognitive and developmental psychologist who had just written a book summarizing the research on how children learn to read. 28 One big takeaway from the book is that becoming a skilled reader of English requires knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences. 29 Another big takeaway is that many kids were not being taught this in school.

Soon after the book was published, Adams was describing her findings to a group of teachers and state education officials in Sacramento, California. She was sensing discomfort and confusion in the room. "And I just stopped and said, 'What is it that I'm missing?'" she recalled. "'What is it that we need to talk about? Help me.'"

A woman raised her hand and asked: "What does this have to do with the three-cueing system?" Marilyn didn't know what the three-cueing system was. "I think I blew all of their fuses that I did not [know what it was] since this was so fundamental to being an elementary reading teacher," she said. "How could I present myself to them as an expert on reading and not know about this?"

The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. It looked something like this:

Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading.

But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.

"The most important thing was for the children to understand and enjoy the text," Adams said. "And from that understanding and joy of reading, the words on the page would just pop out at them."

She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly teaching children about the relationships between sounds and letters is essential to ensure all kids get off to a good start in reading. But she got tons of pushback from teachers. "They didn't want to teach phonics!" she recalled in frustration.

In 1998, Adams wrote a book chapter about how the three-cueing system conflicts with what researchers have figured out about reading. She hoped it would help put three cueing to rest. 30

By this time, the scientific research on reading was gaining traction. In 2000, a national panel convened by Congress to review the evidence on how to teach reading came out with a report. 31 It identified several essential components of reading instruction, including vocabulary, comprehension and phonics. The evidence that phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning how to read was clear and compelling. National reports on reading a few years later in the United Kingdom and Australia came to the same conclusion. 32

"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it."-Stacey Cherny

Eventually, many whole language supporters accepted the weight of the scientific evidence about the importance of phonics instruction. They started adding phonics to their books and materials and renamed their approach "balanced literacy."

But they didn't get rid of the three-cueing system.

Balanced literacy proponents will tell you their approach is a mix of phonics instruction with plenty of time for kids to read and enjoy books. But look carefully at the materials and you'll see that's not really what balanced literacy is mixing. Instead, it's mixing a bunch of different ideas about how kids learn to read. It's a little bit of whole word instruction with long lists of words for kids to memorize. It's a little bit of phonics. And fundamentally, it's the idea that children should be taught to read using the three-cueing system.

And it turns out cueing may actually prevent kids from focusing on words in the way they need to become skilled readers.

Mapping the words

To understand why cueing can get in the way of children's reading development, it's essential to understand how our brains process the words we see.

Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words. 33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair. 34 You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?

It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping." 35 This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters. 36 A child knows the meaning and pronunciation of "pony." The word gets mapped to his memory when he links the sounds /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ to the written word "pony."

That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters. 37 In other words, you need phonics skills.

Here's what happens when a reader who has good phonics skills comes to a word she doesn't recognize in print. She stops at the word and sounds it out. If it's a word she knows the meaning of, she has now linked the spelling of the word with its pronunciation. If she doesn't know the meaning of the word, she can use context to try to figure it out.

By about second grade, a typically developing reader needs just a few exposures to a word through understanding both the pronunciation and the spelling for that word to be stored in her memory. 38 She doesn't know that word because she memorized it as a visual image. She knows that word because at some point she successfully sounded it out.

The more words she stores in her memory this way, the more she can focus on the meaning of what she's reading; she'll eventually be using less brain power to identify words and will be able to devote more brain power to comprehending what she's reading. 39

But when children don't have good phonics skills, the process is different.

"They sample from the letters because they're not good at sounding them out," said David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties. 40 "And they use context."

In other words, when people don't have good phonics skills, they use the cueing system.

"The three-cueing system is the way poor readers read," said Kilpatrick.

And if teachers use the cueing system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not just teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process. 41

"The minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you're drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to read the word [and] remember the word," Kilpatrick said. In this way, he said, three cueing can actually prevent the critical learning that's necessary for a child to become a skilled reader.

In many balanced literacy classrooms, children are taught phonics and the cueing system. Some kids who are taught both approaches realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier time understanding the ways that sounds and letters relate. They'll drop the cueing strategies and begin building that big bank of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading.

But some children will skip the sounding out if they're taught they have other options. Phonics is challenging for many kids. The cueing strategies seem quicker and easier at first. And by using context and memorizing a bunch of words, many children can look like good readers - until they get to about third grade, when their books begin to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures. Then they're stuck. They haven't developed their sounding-out skills. Their bank of known words is limited. Reading is slow and laborious and they don't like it, so they don't do it if they don't have to. While their peers who mastered decoding early are reading and teaching themselves new words every day, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and further behind. 42

These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, can follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing approach never become good readers. Not because they're incapable of learning to read well but because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers.

'So what if they use the picture?'

Once Margaret Goldberg discovered the cognitive science evidence against cueing, she wanted her colleagues in the Oakland school district to know about it too.

Over the past two years, Goldberg and a fellow literacy coach named Lani Mednick have been leading a grant-funded pilot project to improve reading achievement in the Oakland schools. 43

They have their work cut out for them. Nearly half the district's third-graders are below grade level in reading. Goldberg and Mednick want to raise questions about how kids in Oakland are being taught to read.

They meet every couple weeks with literacy coaches from the 10 elementary schools in the pilot program. They read and discuss articles about the scientific research on reading. At a meeting in March, the coaches watched the video of the "picture power" lesson.

"This teacher meant well," Mednick said to the coaches after they watched the lesson. "It seemed like she believed this lesson would ensure her students would be on the road toward reading."

Mednick wanted the coaches to consider the beliefs about reading that would lead to the creation of a lesson like "picture power." The Oakland schools purchased the Units of Study for Teaching Reading series, which includes the "picture power" lesson, as part of a balanced literacy initiative the district began about 10 years ago. The district also bought the Fountas and Pinnell assessment system.

The coaches saw right away that "picture power" was designed to teach kids the cueing system. But they said many teachers don't see any problem with cueing. After all, one of the cues is to look at the letters in the word. What's wrong with teaching kids lots of different strategies to figure out unknown words? 44

"I remember before we started looking at the science and everything, I thought to myself, 'Reading is so hard for kids, so what if they use the picture?'" said Soraya Sajous-Brooks, the early literacy coach at Prescott Elementary School in West Oakland. "Like, use everything you've got."

But she's come to understand that cueing sends the message to kids that they don't need to sound out words. Her students would get phonics instruction in one part of the day. Then they'd go reader's workshop and be taught that when they come to a word they don't know, they have lots of strategies. They can sound it out. They can also check the first letter, look at the picture, think of a word that makes sense.

Teaching cueing and phonics doesn't work, Sajous-Brooks said. "One negates the other."

Goldberg and Mednick want to show the district there's a better way to teach reading. Schools in the pilot project used grant money to buy new materials that steer clear of the three-cueing idea. Two charter school networks in Oakland are working on similar projects to move their schools away from cueing.

To see what it looks like, I visited a first-grade classroom at a charter school in Oakland called Achieve Academy. 45

One part of the day was explicit phonics instruction. 46 The students were divided into small groups based on their skill level. They met with their teacher, Andrea Ruiz, at a kidney-shaped table in a corner of the classroom. The lowest-level group worked on identifying the speech sounds in words like "skin" and "skip." The highest-level group learned how verbs like "spy" and "cry" are spelled as "spied' and 'cried" in the past tense.

There were also vocabulary lessons. 47 The entire class gathered on a rug at the front of the classroom to talk about a book Ms. Ruiz read out loud to them. One of the words in the book was "prey."

"What animals are a chameleon's prey?" Ms. Ruiz asked the children. "Or we can also ask, what animals do chameleons hunt for food?"

The kids turned and talked to each other. "A chameleon's prey are bugs and insects and other chameleons and mice and birds," a little boy explained to his classmate. "That's it."

Other vocabulary words these first-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean.

This comes straight from the scientific research, which shows that reading comprehension is the product of two things. 48 First, a child needs to be able to sound out a word. Second, the child needs to know the meaning of the word she just sounded out. So, in a first-grade classroom that's following the research, you will see explicit phonics instruction and also lessons that build oral vocabulary and background knowledge. And you will see kids practicing what they've been taught.

After their vocabulary lesson, the kids did "buddy reading." They retreated to various spots around the classroom to read books to each other. I found Belinda sitting on an adult chair at the back of the classroom, her little legs swinging. Across from her was her buddy Steven, decked out in a yellow and blue plaid shirt tucked neatly into his jeans. He held the book and pointed to the words while Belinda read.

"Ellen /m/," Belinda paused, sounding out the word "meets." She was reading a decodable book about some kids who visit a farm. Almost all of the words in the book contain spelling patterns she'd been taught in her phonics lessons.

"I am a farm here," Belinda read.

Steven did a double-take. "A farmer here," he said gently. Steven's job as Belinda's reading buddy was to help her if she missed a word or got stuck. But that didn't happen much because Belinda had been taught how to read the words. She didn't need any help from the pictures, either. She barely glanced at them as she read.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with pictures. They're great to look at and talk about, and they can help a child comprehend the meaning of a story. Context - including a picture if there is one - helps us understand what we're reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to use context to identify words, she's being taught to read like a poor reader.

Many educators don't know this because the cognitive science research has not made its way into many schools and schools of education. 49

Ruiz didn't know about this research until the Oakland pilot project. "I didn't really know anything about how kids learn to read when I started teaching," she said. It was a relief when she came to Oakland and the curriculum spelled out that kids use meaning, structure and visual cues to figure out words. "Because I came from not having anything, I was like, 'Oh, there's a way we should teach this,'" she said.

I heard this from other educators. Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do.

"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it," said Stacey Cherny, a former teacher who's now principal of an elementary school in Pennsylvania. She says many teachers aren't taught what they need to know about the structure of the English language to be able to teach phonics well. She says phonics can be intimidating; three cueing isn't.

Another reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids - perhaps about 40 percent - who will learn to read no matter how they're taught. 50 According to Kilpatrick, children who learn to read with cueing are succeeding in spite of the instruction, not because of it.

Goldberg hopes the pilot project in Oakland will convince the district to drop all instructional materials that include cueing.

When asked about this, the Oakland superintendent's office responded with a written statement that there isn't enough evidence from the pilot project to make curriculum changes for the entire district and that the Oakland schools remain committed to balanced literacy.

Oakland's situation is no different from many other districts across the country that have invested millions of dollars in materials that include cueing.

"It feels like everyone's trusting somebody else to have done their due diligence," Goldberg said. "Classroom teachers are trusting that the materials they're being handed will work. The people who purchase the materials are trusting if they were on the market, that they will work. We're all trusting, and it's a system that is broken."

'My science is different'

If cueing was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, why is the idea still in materials that are being sold to schools?

One answer to that question is that school districts still buy the materials. Heinemann, the company that publishes the Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins' products that the Oakland schools use, earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million in 2018, according to earnings reports. 51

I wanted to know what the authors of those materials make of the cognitive science research. And I wanted to give them a chance to explain the ideas behind their work. I wrote to Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell and asked for interviews. They all declined. Heinemann sent a statement that said every product the company sells is informed by extensive research.

I also asked Ken Goodman for an interview. It's been more than 50 years since he first laid out the three-cueing theory in that 1967 paper. I wanted to know what he thinks of the cognitive science research. Of the major proponents of three cueing I reached out to, he was the only one who agreed to an interview.

I visited Goodman at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He's 91. He uses a scooter to get around, but he's still working. He just finished a new edition of one of his books.

When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.

"Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."

He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?

He dismissed my question.

"The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."

Cognitive scientists don't dispute that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text. But the question is: How can you understand what you are reading if you can't accurately read the words? And if quick and accurate word recognition is the hallmark of being a skilled reader, how does a little kid get there?

Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist - despite lots of evidence that it does. 52 And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

"My science is different," Goodman said.

This idea that there are different kinds of evidence that lead to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read. It's important for educators to understand that three cueing is based on theory and observational research and that there's decades of scientific evidence from labs all over the world that converges on a very different idea about skilled reading.

The cognitive science does not provide all the answers about how to teach children to read, but on the question of how skilled readers read words, scientists have amassed a huge body of evidence.

Goldberg thinks it's time for educators across the country to take a close look at all the materials they use to teach reading.

"We should look through the materials and search for evidence of cueing," she said. "And if it's there, don't touch it. Don't let it get near our kids, don't let it get near our classrooms, our teachers."

Share and discuss on Facebook
Support for this program comes from the Spencer Foundation and Lumina Foundation.
Sign up for email notifications
We're interested in hearing what impact APM Reports programs have on you. Has one of our documentaries or podcasts changed how you think about an issue? Has it led you to do something, like start a conversation or try to do something new in your community? Share your impact story.

Enter your address below and we'll let you know when we publish new stories.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.

# data[].attributes.body
the 2nd video shows how PA is at the top and is broken down into early, basic and advanced...then moves into (PA) 1: (Orthography) 1 to put these sounds with print.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We provide a wide variety of instructional materials for your classroom such as Kid Lips and Phoneme/Graphem Cards.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
of assessment and instruction in today's classrooms. supplies K-12 educators with in-depth knowledge of the structure and function of language-fundamentals they need to deliver successful structured literacy instruction. Renowned literacy expert Louisa Cook Moats gives current and future teachers comprehensive, accurate, and accessible information on the underpinnings of language instruction, including: their students should be taught. Ideal for use in preservice courses and in-service professional development sessions, this essential textbook will give educators the strong foundation they need to teach language and reading skills to students with and without disabilities. Support your instruction with a complete package of online companion materials, including chapter quizzes, a sample syllabus/course outline, PowerPoints to accompany each chapter, PDF handouts for selected concepts, and a video demonstrating production of all the sounds in the English language. Learn more about the new edition! Speech to Print has been a bestselling, widely adopted textbook on explicit, high-quality literacy instruction. Now the anticipated third edition is here, fully updated with ten years of new research, a complete package of supporting materials, and expanded guidance on the how Speech to Print

Filling a critical gap in teacher preparation courses,

the history of the English language and its effect on spelling

English phonology, including speech sounds and their distinctive features

how print represents speech in English

the morphological aspects of words

syntax and its instruction

how meaning is conveyed with language

how
Through case studies, activities, recommended teaching principles, and close analysis of real-world student work samples, teachers will also receive invaluable insight into WHAT'S NEW:

New and expanded practical content on the how of language and reading instruction

New and updated chapter exercises

New faculty support materials

More on key topics like program and curricula selection, frameworks for instructional planning, and problem solving when students are slow to respond to intervention

More accessible, undergraduate-friendly tone and structure

Additional graphics to illustrate key concepts

NEW FACULTY SUPPORT MATERIALS!

Watch the webinar recording

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amazon - Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers: Moats Ed.D., Louisa Cook, Brady Ph.D., Dr. Susan: 9781681253305: Books

# data[].attributes.headline
Orton Gillingham Manual with word lists included

# data[].attributes.subject
Orton Gillingham Manual with word lists included

# data[].attributes.body
https://or.dyslexiaida.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2020/06/OG-Training-Manual-2019.pdf

# data[].attributes.body
Emily Hanford

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
READ THIS STORY IN SPANISH

Lea esta historia en español.

It was 2015 and Jack Silva, the chief academic officer for the public schools in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had a problem: Only 56 percent of third-graders in his district had scored proficient on the state reading test.

Reading scores had been low for a while, but for most of the five years that Silva had been chief academic officer, he and other school leaders had been consumed with a severe budget crisis. By 2015, the district had turned the corner financially, and Silva was wondering why the reading scores were so terrible. "It was really looking yourself in the mirror and saying, 'Which four in 10 students don't deserve to learn to read?'" he said.

The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don't learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they're likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we've come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it's been that way since testing began in the 1990s.
Percentage of U.S. students proficient in reading
SOURCE: The National Assessment of Educational Progress ( Grade 4 | Grade 8). *In 1992 and 1994, testing accommodations were not permitted.

One of the excuses educators have long offered to explain America's poor reading performance is poverty. There is plenty of poverty in Bethlehem, a small city in eastern Pennsylvania that was once a booming steel town. But there are fancy homes here, too, and when Silva examined the reading scores he saw that many kids at the wealthier schools weren't reading very well either. This was not just poverty. In fact, by some estimates, one-third of America's struggling readers are from college-educated families.

Silva didn't know anything about how children learn to read or how they should be taught, so he started searching online. As he soon discovered, virtually all kids can learn to read - if they are taught the right way. The problem is that many American elementary schools aren't doing that.

"We never looked at brain research. We had never, ever looked at it. Never."
- Jodi Frankelli

The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters - phonics.

"There are thousands of studies," said Louisa Moats, an education consultant and researcher who has been teaching and studying reading since the 1970s. "This is the most studied aspect of human learning."

But this research hasn't made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don't know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.

Most teachers nationwide are not being taught reading science in their teacher preparation programs because many deans and faculty in colleges of education either don't know the science or dismiss it. As a result of their intransigence, millions of kids have been set up to fail.

The problem in Bethlehem

Even though Silva had known little about how children learn to read or how reading should be taught, he'd long been aware that some older students were struggling too. He'd been a middle school and high school teacher for years, and he had students who came across words they'd never seen before and had no idea how to sound them out.

Kim Harper, the district's supervisor of literacy, noticed the same thing. She'd been a high school English teacher in Bethlehem and said that a disturbing number of her students, even students in honors classes, weren't very good readers. "They didn't like to read," she said. "They avoided reading. They would tell me it was too hard."

She didn't know what to do about it either, so she more or less shrugged it off. "I think it became easy to say, 'Well that's just the way it is. You know, we're always going to have X percent of kids who it's just going to be a struggle for,'" she said.

Even the school board president, Mike Faccinetto, said it was pretty much accepted that a lot of kids in the district would never be very good readers. "It was always, 'Well, that's not a reflection of Bethlehem,'" he said, referring to the reading scores. The kids who weren't doing well, "'Ah, well, you know those kids, their parents aren't around, or maybe they don't have two parents. And that's the best they're going to do.'"

Silva wanted to figure out what was going on. So in 2015, he assigned Harper to visit all of Bethlehem's elementary schools and find out how children were being taught to read.

Harper went to a professional development day at one of the district's lowest-performing elementary schools. The teachers were talking about how kids should attack words in a story. When a child came to a word he didn't know, the teacher would tell him to look at the picture and guess. The most important thing was for the child to understand the meaning of the story, not the exact words on the page. So, if a kid came to the word "horse" and said "house," the teacher would say it's wrong. But, Harper said, "if the kid said 'pony,' it'd be right because pony and horse mean the same thing."

Harper was shocked. First of all, pony and horse don't mean the same thing. Second, the idea that you look at pictures and guess when you don't know a word seemed odd to her. "I wouldn't have been able to use that strategy at the secondary level," she said. There were no pictures in the books her high school students read.

The teachers described their approach to reading instruction as "balanced literacy." Harper didn't quite know what that meant, but her colleague Jodi Frankelli had heard lots about balanced literacy. Frankelli was the district's new supervisor of early learning. Though her teaching experience and training were in the upper grades, too, she'd been a principal at one of Bethlehem's elementary schools. She said it hadn't been completely clear to her what balanced literacy was. The main idea seemed to be: Give kids lots of good books, and with some guidance and enough practice, they become readers. "We never looked at brain research," she said. "We had never, ever looked at it. Never."

We are not born wired to read

The scientific research on reading goes back decades, from work psychologists were doing in the 1960s to more recent discoveries by neuroscientists using brain imaging technology.

Researchers have been doing their work in labs that were sometimes right across the quad from schools of education, but reading researchers and education researchers kind of live in separate universes; they go to different conferences, publish in different journals. The big takeaway from all the scientific research on reading is that learning to read is not a natural process. We are not born wired to read.

"Balanced literacy was a way to defuse the wars over reading. It succeeded in keeping the science at bay and it allowed things to continue as before."
- Mark Seidenberg

We are born wired to talk. Kids learn to talk by being talked to, by being surrounded with spoken language. That's all it takes. No one has to teach them to talk.

But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don't know how to do it. That's because human beings didn't invent written language until relatively recently in human history, just a few thousand years ago. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.

Another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that, while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound. What a child must do to become a reader is to figure out how the words she hears and knows how to say connect to letters on the page. Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds. Kids have to crack that code to become readers.

Children don't crack the code naturally. They need to be taught how letters represent speech sounds. But by the time scientists had done all the studies to conclude this for sure, a different set of beliefs about reading was already deeply entrenched in many American schools and colleges of education.

Balanced literacy

Debates about reading go back centuries. In the 1800s, Horace Mann, the father of the public-school movement in the United States, railed against the idea of teaching children that letters represent sounds. He referred to letters of the alphabet as "bloodless, ghastly apparitions" and argued that children would be distracted from comprehending the meaning of what they were reading if they focused too much on letters. He believed children should be taught to read whole words.

On the other side of the debate were people who believed in phonics. That means teaching children that words are made up of parts and showing them how different letters and combinations of letters connect to the speech sounds in words.

No one really knew how children actually learned to read, or how they should be taught. "It was more debates among people who had philosophies," Moats said. By the 1980s, the debate was so intense that people began referring to it as "the reading war." It was phonics versus what had come to be known as "whole language."

Whole language was a movement of people who believed that children and teachers needed to be freed from the tedium of phonics instruction. Phonics lessons were seen as rote, old-fashioned, and kind of conservative. The essential idea in whole language was that children construct their own knowledge and meaning from experience. Teaching them phonics wasn't necessary because learning to read was a natural process that would occur if they were immersed in a print-rich environment. Whole language proponents thought phonics lessons might actually be bad for kids, might inhibit children from developing a love of reading by making them focus on tedious skills like breaking words into parts.

By the early 1990s, the idea that kids didn't need phonics had taken hold in many schools and teacher preparation programs, and was even a guiding principle behind reading instruction across the entire state of California. But the phonics folks kept pushing back.

The battle between whole language and phonics got so heated that the U.S. Congress eventually got involved, convening a National Reading Panel to review all the research on reading. In 2000, the panel released a report. The sum of the research showed that explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters improved reading achievement. The panel concluded that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. There is no evidence to say the same about whole language.

After the National Reading Panel report, whole language proponents could no longer deny the importance of phonics. But they didn't give up their core belief that learning to read is a natural process, and they didn't give up the reading programs they were selling, either. Instead they advocated for doing both, a balance. So, whole language didn't disappear; it just got repackaged as balanced literacy. And in balanced literacy, phonics is treated a bit like salt on a meal: a little here and there, but not too much, because it could be bad for you.

"Balanced literacy was a way to defuse the wars over reading," said Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of the book "Language at the Speed of Sight." "It succeeded in keeping the science at bay, and it allowed things to continue as before."

He says the reading wars are over, and science lost.

Seidenberg knows of a child who was struggling so much with reading that her mother paid for a private tutor. "The tutor taught her some of the basic skills that the child wasn't getting in her whole language classroom," he said. "At the end of the school year the teacher was proud that the child had made so much progress, and the parent said, 'Well, why didn't you teach phonics and other basic skills related to print in class?' And the teacher said 'Oh, I did. Your child was absent that day.'"

For scientists like Seidenberg, the problem with teaching just a little bit of phonics is that according to all the research, phonics is crucial when it comes to learning how to read. Surrounding kids with good books is a great idea, but it's not the same as teaching children to read.

Experts say that in a whole-language classroom, some kids will learn to read despite the lack of effective instruction. But without explicit and systematic phonics instruction, many children won't ever learn to read very well.

'When we know better, we do better'

By the end of 2015, Silva and other district leaders in Bethlehem had figured out that balanced literacy didn't line up with the science.

Now they had to figure out what to do about it. They decided the first step would be a series of training sessions over the course of a school year for all the principals at the district's 16 elementary schools. The district leaders reasoned that the principals needed to be convinced of the science if they were going to convince their teachers to change the way they taught reading.

If there was one principal who was sure to resist, it was Kathy Bast, the principal of Calypso Elementary School. She was known as the district's No. 1 balanced literacy champion. "Decoding was never part of anything I ever did," Bast said. She happened to be out on medical leave when the training began, but her colleagues warned her she wouldn't like it. "They said to me, 'Kathy, we know you. You're not going to take well to this training.'"

Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence.

But Bast had a secret. Before becoming a principal, she'd been a reading specialist. It was her job to help struggling readers. In her training to become a reading specialist, she learned a lot about how to identify children with reading problems, but she learned nothing about how to help those children learn to read. "I didn't know what to do, except just give them more books," she said. "And it wasn't working."

With time on her hands while she was on medical leave, Bast began poking around online and discovered the vast scientific literature on reading. It wasn't being published in a lot of the journals and newsletters she got as a school principal, but as her boss, Silva, had discovered, all it takes is a Google search to find it. When Bast returned to work from medical leave and joined her fellow principals in the training on reading science, she was ready to hear what the trainer had to say. And it kind of blew her mind. "Wow!" she thought. "OK, let's go get at this."

The training used a curriculum written by Moats called "Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling" or LETRS. The principals went through the training in the 2015-16 school year, the kindergarten teachers went through it the next year, and then first- and second-grade teachers did it, too.

For many teachers, the science of reading training was overwhelming at first. "I remember sitting there and my head was throbbing 'cause it was like, 'How can I take all this in?'" said Adrienne Ibarra, a reading specialist at Bethlehem's Lincoln Elementary School. She hadn't learned much about phonics when she was in college studying to be a teacher. Neither had Michelle Bosak, an English as a second language teacher at Lincoln. "It was very broad classes, vague classes and like a children's literature class," Bosak said. "But not actually teaching phonics."

Candy Maldonado, a first-grade teacher at Lincoln, described the district's old approach to reading instruction this way: "We did like a letter a week. So, if the letter was 'A,' we read books about 'A,' we ate things with 'A,' we found things with 'A,'" she said. "All we did was learn 'A' said 'ah.' And then there's apples, and we tasted apples."

The teachers had no idea how kids actually learned to read. "It was just that they do," Ibarra said.

"Almost like it's automatic," Maldonado added.

After learning about the reading science, these teachers were full of regret. "I feel horrible guilt," said Ibarra, who's been a teacher for 15 years.

"I thought, 'All these years, all these students,'" said Bosak, who's been teaching for 26 years.

To help assuage that guilt, the Bethlehem school district has adopted a motto: "When we know better, we do better." And soon, they were doing much better.

'My kids are successful, and happy, and believe in themselves'

The Bethlehem schools now use a curriculum in the early elementary grades that mixes teacher-directed whole-class phonics lessons with small-group activities to meet the needs of children at different points in the process of learning to read. At first, some of the teachers recoiled a bit at the scripted nature of the lessons; the curriculum is explicit and systematic, with every teacher on the same page each day. If the curriculum says today's the day for kindergarteners to learn words that begin with the sounds "wuh" and "guh," you can walk into any kindergarten classroom in the district and see the teacher doing that lesson.

Lynn Venable, a kindergarten teacher at Calypso who has been teaching elementary school for 21 years, said she used to think reading would just kind of "fall together" for kids if they were exposed to enough print. Now, because of the science of reading training, she knows better. She said her current class of kindergartners had progressed more quickly in reading than any class she'd ever had. "My kids are successful, and happy, and believe in themselves," she said. "I don't have a single child in my room that has that look on their face like, 'I can't do this.'"

At the end of each school year, the Bethlehem school district gives kindergartners a test to assess early reading skills. In 2015, before the science of reading training began, more than half of the kindergartners in the district tested below the benchmark score, meaning most of them were heading into first grade at risk of reading failure. At the end of the 2018 school year, after the principals and kindergarten teachers were trained in the reading science, 84 percent of kindergarteners met or exceeded the benchmark score. At three schools, it was 100 percent.
Kindergarten reading performance before and after the science of reading training
SOURCE: Bethlehem Area School District. *Low-income is defined as the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, 2017-18.

Silva is thrilled with the results, but cautious. He's eager to see how the kindergartners do when they get to the state reading test in third grade. "We may have hit a home run in the first inning," he said. "But there's a lot of game left here."

It's impossible to know if the science of reading training is what led to the test score gains. Some of the schools in the district moved from half-day to full-day kindergarten the same year the training began, so that could have been a factor. But Bast, the principal at Calypso, thinks if her teachers had continued with the old approach to reading instruction, she'd still have a lot of struggling readers in her school. "We're actually teaching," she said. "We're doing our jobs."

The teacher prep problem

You can find schools and school districts across the United States that are trying to change reading instruction the way Bethlehem has, but according to Moats, ill-informed, ineffective reading instruction is the norm. "The gap between science-based ideas and practices and those most often used in our classrooms remains very wide and persistent," she wrote in a recent article.

A big part of the problem is at the university level, in schools of education, according to the authors of a 2016 article in the Journal of Childhood & Developmental Disorders. "Faculty have ignored the scientific knowledge that informs reading acquisition," the authors wrote. "As a result, the pre-service teachers who are being educated at these institutions fail to receive the necessary training."

In 2016, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, reviewed the syllabi of teacher preparation programs across the country and found that only 39 percent of them appeared to be teaching the components of effective reading instruction.

Seidenberg says the scientific research has had relatively little impact on what happens in classrooms because the science isn't very highly valued in schools of education. "Prospective teachers aren't exposed to it or they're led to believe that it's only one of several perspectives," he said. "In a class on reading, prospective teachers will be exposed to a menu in which they have 10 or 12 different approaches to reading, and they're encouraged to pick the one that will fit their personal teaching style best."

Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence, Seidenberg said. "We have to change the culture of education from one based on beliefs to one based on facts."

Kelly Butler has been trying to do just that for nearly two decades in Mississippi.

'Is this your science or my science?'

Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

Butler works for the Barksdale Reading Institute, an organization founded with a $100-million gift from the former CEO of Netscape to help Mississippi children improve their reading skills. Back in the early 2000s, after the panel convened by Congress released its report, Butler and her colleagues wanted to know: Were teacher preparation programs in Mississippi instructing teachers to teach reading in ways backed up by the science?

So they did a study of the teacher preparation programs at the state's eight publicly funded universities. The institute reviewed syllabi and textbooks, surveyed the students in the classes, observed some of the classes, and interviewed the deans and faculty. The study found that teacher candidates in Mississippi were getting an average of 20 minutes of instruction in phonics over their entire two-year teacher preparation program. Kelly Butler was alarmed. She and her colleagues went to state education officials and pleaded with them to take action.

In 2003, in a rather extraordinary move, the state Department of Education mandated that every teacher preparation program in Mississippi require two courses in early literacy to cover what was in the National Reading Panel report. It was extraordinary because even though states have the authority to regulate teacher preparation programs, only a handful of states have specific requirements about what prospective teachers learn about reading. Colleges and universities generally don't like state officials telling them what to do. "Professors pretty much have academic freedom to construct learning in the way they think best," Butler said.

Angela Rutherford, who works with Butler and is a professor in the school of education at the University of Mississippi, put it more bluntly. "Faculty members close the door and do whatever the heck they want to," she said.

Rutherford wasn't sure the state mandate would make a big difference because many of her colleagues in teacher preparation didn't know the science themselves or didn't believe in it. She said many of them have long believed in whole language. "I had a colleague challenge me back in the fall," she said. "And her question was, 'What do you believe?' I said, 'I believe what I see in research.'"

Butler says the resistance to the science among college faculty and administrators baffles her, but it runs deep. Once, when she was talking to an education school dean about the reading science, the dean said to her, "Is this your science or my science?"

It was not clear how much impact the state mandate to teach reading science was having. Then in 2015, the Mississippi legislature passed a law called the "Literacy-Based Promotion Act." The law says that kids who aren't reading on grade level by the end of third grade cannot be promoted to fourth grade. The legislature appropriated millions of dollars to pay for training in the science of reading for all of the state's elementary school teachers.

However, if new teachers coming out of teacher prep programs didn't know reading science, the state would be spending money perpetually retraining teachers. At this point, no one really knew what prospective teachers were learning in those early literacy classes required by the state.

"I think we all agree that this is right. And maybe we're here because of that. And the whole language ones are not here because I think they would really resist, a lot."

So in 2015, Butler and her colleagues decided to repeat the study they'd done in 2003. This time they looked at private colleges in Mississippi, too. They examined the early literacy courses at 15 teacher prep programs. They found, with one exception, that all the state's teacher prep programs appeared to be teaching the components of reading identified by the National Reading Panel report. But when Butler interviewed deans and faculty, most of them admitted they'd never actually read the report. And when she asked them basic questions about the science of reading, most of them didn't know the answers. The schools of education were complying with the letter of the law, but many faculty members didn't really understand the science themselves.

The professors needed training.

Changing the way teachers are taught

Teachers in the K-12 education system are used to professional development. College professors are not.

A Mississippi governor's task force decided the professors would benefit from the same training that the state's elementary school teachers were getting. The teacher training used LETRS, the curriculum the teachers in Bethlehem went through. No one was going to require college instructors to do the training, but state legislators had passed a measure to encourage it. Since 2016, teacher candidates in Mississippi have been required to pass a test on reading science. If you don't pass what's known as the Foundations of Reading test, you don't get licensed to teach elementary school in Mississippi. It's now in the best interest of faculty to teach the science, because if they don't, their students won't get jobs.

In a session of LETRS training for faculty in Jackson, Mississippi, in March 2018, the trainer, Antonio Fierro, passed out a quiz. The first question was: "True or false? Speaking is natural, reading and writing are not." The answer is "true," but the question was being asked because it's not a given that the 37 people in this training, a mix of mostly tenured faculty and adjuncts, would know that.

Roshunda Harris-Allen, a professor in the teacher preparation program at Tougaloo College, said she wasn't taught reading science in college or as part of her doctorate. And she didn't learn phonics as a kid. "We were just taught - here are your sight words, you need to memorize them," she said. She said that she struggled with reading when she was a child.

Trashonda Dixon, a literacy instructor at Tougaloo, says she did get phonics instruction when she was young, but she never learned how to teach phonics. "I think we did have issues with a lack of knowledge initially," Dixon said, referring to herself and her fellow faculty members in LETRS training. "But I think we're making great strides here to correct that."

The Mississippi faculty came together for training several times over the course of a year, and some even received mentoring as they were teaching reading science to their college students. Moats said she once did some LETRS workshops for college faculty in Colorado many years ago and one of her colleagues did abbreviated training for faculty in Maryland, but Mississippi is the only place she knows of where college faculty are going through an extended course.

"I feel blessed to be part of this change," said Barbara Bowen, an instructor at the University of Southern Mississippi who went through the training. "I think we all agree that this is right. And maybe we're here because of that. And the whole language ones are not here because I think they would really resist, a lot."

The whole language hold-outs

The faculty who most resist reading science weren't in the LETRS training. Two professors at the University of Southern Mississippi agreed to be interviewed about why they didn't want to attend.

"I am philosophically opposed to jumping on the bandwagon of the next great thing that's going to teach every child how to learn to read," said Stacy Reeves, an associate professor of literacy. "Phonics for me is not that answer."

Reeves said she knows this from her own experience. In the early 1990s, before she started her Ph.D., she was an elementary school teacher. Her students did phonics worksheets and then got little books called decodable readers that contained words with the letter patterns they'd been practicing. She said the books were boring and repetitive. "But as soon as I sat down with my first-graders and read a book, like 'Frog and Toad Are Friends,' they were instantly engaged in the story," she said.

She ditched the phonics workbooks and the decodable readers. "And once I started teaching in a more whole way, a more encompassing way of the whole child - What does this child need? What does that child need? Let's read more real books," she explained, "my teaching improved, the students learned more. I feel they came out the other side much better." She admitted she had no evidence her students were learning more, but she said they seemed more engaged.

One of the central tenets of whole language is that teachers are best able to judge whether their students are learning, not standardized tests. Another key idea is that all children learn to read differently and need to be taught in different ways. But research has shown that's not true.

Our brains are much more similar than they are different, and all children need to learn basically the same things to change their nonreading brains into reading brains. "Cultural, economic, and educational circumstances obviously affect children's progress," Seidenberg wrote in his book. "But what they need to learn does not change." One of the most consistent findings in all of education research is that children become better readers when they get explicit and systematic phonics instruction.

The students who suffer most when schools don't give their students insight into the code are kids with dyslexia. They have an especially hard time understanding the relationship between sounds and letters.

Mary Ariail, former chair of the Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Special Education at the University of Southern Mississippi, remains opposed to explicit phonics instruction. She thinks it can be helpful to do some phonics with kids as they're reading books, maybe prompt a child to sound something out or to notice a letter pattern in a word. But she believes kids will be distracted from understanding the meaning of what they're reading if teachers focus too much on how words are made up of letters. "One of the ideas behind whole language is that when [reading] is meaningful, it's easy," she said. "And when it's broken down into little parts, it makes it harder."

Despite research to the contrary, Ariail and Reeves said they believe learning to read is a natural process.

"I believe children learn to read as soon as they start learning to hear," Reeves said. "Being surrounded by books, being read to often."

"It's like learning to talk," Ariail said. "A lot of children come to school already reading because they have been immersed in print-rich environments from the time they were born."

It's not clear how much they had read about reading science, but they said they do not agree with it. "One of the bones of contention is that the phonics-based approach is the scientific approach," Ariail said. "It's their science."

Ariail left her job and returned to her home state of Georgia at the end of the 2018 academic year, in part because of her frustration with the effort to change reading instruction in Mississippi. She sees it as an example of lawmakers telling educators what to do, and she doesn't like it.

Phonics isn't enough

When you talk to whole language proponents, it's clear pretty quickly that the distrust of phonics instruction is motivated by a fear that reading will be reduced to rote and boring phonics drills. One of the reasons whole language flourished in the 1970s and '80s is that it rejected the idea that children should sit quietly in rows listening to a teacher direct a lesson. "In whole language, the battle was seen as, 'Are you in favor of literacy or are you in favor of skills?'" Seidenberg said.

He said no one is advocating for rote and boring lessons. But the science shows clearly that when reading instruction is organized around a defined progression of concepts about how speech is represented by print, kids become better readers. There is also widespread support in the research for the effectiveness of teacher-directed lessons as opposed to letting children discover key concepts about reading on their own.

What's also clear in the research is that phonics isn't enough. Children can learn to decode words without knowing what the words mean. To comprehend what they're reading, kids need a good vocabulary, too. That's why reading to kids and surrounding them with quality books is a good idea. The whole language proponents are right about that.

There are proven ways to help people with dyslexia learn to read, but some public schools are denying children proper treatment and failing to identify them with dyslexia in the first place. Read more and listen.

But, according to the research, kids who can't decode will never be good readers. Some children learn decoding quickly with minimal instruction. Others need a lot more help. But good phonics instruction is beneficial for all kids, even those who learn to decode easily; research shows they become better spellers.

The belief that learning to read is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by books is a problem not just because there's no science to back it up. It's a problem because it assumes the primary responsibility for teaching children to read lies with families, not schools. If you're not fortunate enough to grow up in a household where there are lots of books and adults who read to you, you may be out of luck.

There is no debate at this point among scientists that reading is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught by showing children the ways that sounds and letters correspond.

"It's so accepted in the scientific world that if you just write another paper about these fundamental facts and submit it to a journal they won't accept it because it's considered settled science," Moats said.

According to all the research, what you should see in every school is a heavy emphasis on explicit phonics instruction in the early grades. There is no evidence this turns kids off to reading or makes reading harder. In fact, it's the opposite. If you do a good job teaching phonics in the early grades, kids get off to a quicker start. "And they accelerate their progress faster and read more and like it better and so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle," Moats said. "Whereas the converse is true. When you don't give kids insight into the code and don't arm them with insight into language, both spoken and written, what happens is, 'This is a mystery. I'm not sure I'm getting what these words really say. Therefore, I'm uncomfortable. And therefore, I don't really like it.'"

The students who suffer most when schools don't give their students insight into the code are kids with dyslexia. They have an especially hard time understanding the relationship between sounds and letters. If you're a child with dyslexia from an upper-income family, someone is probably going to notice that you're struggling and pay for you to get the help you need. But kids from poor families often get left behind, and there's evidence that a disproportionate number of them eventually end up in the criminal justice system. American prisons are full of people who grew up in poor families, and according to a study of the Texas prison population, nearly half of all inmates have dyslexia. They struggled to read as kids and probably never got the help they needed.

For Butler, the main problem at this point is ignorance. Too many teachers, school administrators and college professors don't know the science. She's betting that teaching them the science is the answer. "Part of my optimism about this is it's not like we're setting out to try to figure out how to teach reading so we can then teach everybody how to do it," she said. "We know how to do it."

Seidenberg is less optimistic. He makes a comparison to climate change research. "One thing that we've learned from climate change and the other issues over which we have polarization in this country is that facts aren't the thing that change people's beliefs," he said. "In fact, confronted with data that contradict deeply held beliefs, instead of bringing people closer together, it can have the paradoxical effects of entrenching them further."

SHARE AND DISCUSS ON FACEBOOK

CORRESPONDENT
Emily Hanford

Support for this program comes from Lumina Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.

Resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don't know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.

# data[].attributes.headline
Sandi-The first video was great! It showed her thinking about how shetook the 4 part processing model and created the hourglass. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Sandi-The first video was great! It showed her thinking about how shetook the 4 part processing model and created the hourglass. 

# data[].attributes.body
by Dr. Mary Dahlgreen

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you were teaching second-grade what would your schedule look like? Shanahan's response:
This question - in various forms - came up a lot this week in response to last week's posting. Here is my thinking on this.

I start from the premise that I want kids to get between 120-180 minutes per day of reading/writing instruction. The more challenged the kids are, or the greater the learning gains we are seeking, the more time I will devote to literacy.

Given the ambitious learning goals that we are striving for, I see no way of accomplishing them with fewer than two hours per day (or 360 hours per year). And, no matter how great the needs, I can think of no situation where I would devote more than three hours per day to these goals because of the importance of math, science, social studies, the arts, etc.

If you look at the various surveys and observational studies reported since the early 1960s, it appears that English language arts (which has long been dominated by reading) usually has received about 90 minutes of attention per day on average. This has worked out to something like two hours per day in the primary grades and one in upper elementary - with 90 minutes as the average.

Most schools that I visit these days are proud of their 90-minute reading block. In other words, they've institutionalized an average effort. I insist on two to three hours with the idea of ensuring that the average amount of literacy learning increases.

Another basic idea is that students will need instruction in multiple areas: word knowledge, oral reading fluency, writing, and reading comprehension. In some situations, I might be persuaded to add explicit oral language instruction to the mix (and then divide the total into five), but that would not be universal, so let's not do that here. I would give roughly equal amounts of teaching in each of these four aspects of literacy which means that kids each year would receive about 90 hours of teaching about words, comprehension, fluency, and writing.

A final basic. I'm purposefully proposing a schedule that is not a "block." I'm not a big fan of the reading block because it can make it very difficult to schedule the complexity of an elementary school day. There is no learning benefit to having reading organized in a block - and often I see kids getting less than the scheduled time because of questionable assumptions about the sanctity of the block.

If your school day begins at 8:00 a.m., and your literacy block goes from 8:00-9:30 ... what are the chances kids will receive 90 minutes of instruction? My bet (and past observations) would say that the first 10 or 15 minutes of the day (and sometimes even more) are not devoted to teaching. Pledge of allegiance, morning announcements, lunch money collection, attendance, pencil sharpening, circle time, and so on are not reading instruction.

Okay with those basics out of the way, let's start with a fairly simple scheme.

8:10-9:00 Reading comprehension instruction

9:00-9:15 Oral reading fluency

9:15-10:15 Math

10:15-10:45 Word knowledge

10:45-11:15 Writing

11:15-12:15 Lunch/recess

12:15-12:30 Oral reading fluency

12:30-3:30 [Social studies, science, music, art, physical education, library/computer center]

Let's take it line by line.

Reading comprehension instruction

Although I said I'd provide equal amounts of instruction for each of the four literacy components, but here I've provided almost double the time for comprehension. The reason for this is because the classroom that I've imagined is pretty diverse and, while all the children can read, there are big level differences. I thought it best to divide them into two groups today. The extra time will be needed to provide both of the these groups with 30 minutes of instruction.

Some days this might not be necessary. Some days I might schedule it differently. This particular plan would allow me to have the two comprehension groups engaged in some kind of guided reading activity (e.g., Directed Reading Activity, Directed-Reading Thinking Activity, Close Reading, strategy lesson) simultaneously, with me rotating myself across the groups. I might be able to do that in less than double the time, but I certainly can't do it in 30 minutes.

Approximately half this reading comprehension time would engage the students in text reading-rather than just discussion or explicit instruction from me. Over time, that means kids will be reading a lot under my guidance.

Oral reading fluency

I've set aside 30 minutes for fluency teaching, and my thoughts here would be to engage kids in supervised paired-reading practice. There are lots of other choices, but that's my usual go-to for fluency. That means the whole class would be divided into pairs, they'd be taking turns reading pages to each other and giving feedback to each other, and I'd be moving from pair to pair to help with the feedback, to collect data on student performance, and to keep kids on task.

The tricky move here was dividing this time in two. The reason why you might want to do that is to keep it from getting boring or to engage kids in interval training-practice, take a break, practice some more-which can enhance this kind of skills learning. It also illustrates how flexible my schedule could be.

Math

Are you kidding, math in the middle of the reading block? Remember, blocks aren't necessary - research doesn't find that structure to be any more (or less) effective than this. In this schedule I'm able to address math in the morning. I've written before that morning instruction is no more effective than afternoon instruction, so I'm putting my money where my mouth is here. Our math consultant hasn't read that research and he's sure that morning teaching is more effective, so I'm willing to keep him happy by providing that math teaching early on, even if it means some of the literacy teaching might have to be provided in the PM.

Word knowledge

This part of the curriculum emphasizes both decoding (e.g., phonics, phonemic awareness, sight words, spelling) and word meaning (including morphology). Although my hunch is that my varied class will be diverse here, too, I think I can provide the needed instruction in 30 minutes (give or take 5-10 minutes).

I could deliver a single phonics lesson - aimed especially at my less advanced readers (which will provide a review for the more advanced ones), or I could deliver two different lessons, one on phonics and one on vocabulary possibly. In either event, the kids will be spending at least half the time decoding words or encoding words, not just listening to me.

Writing

This time would be devoted to teaching writing and includes everything from prewriting, composition, revision, editing, printing/cursive or keyboarding work, and so on. On this day, I'm imagining that all the kids have been working on their compositions and we'd spend the half hour sharing the compositions, receiving revision feedback from peers and me, and perhaps even beginning some light revision. That's why I put the time here. After the intensity of the phonics work in the previous lesson, I thought the sharing and interaction here would allow more movement and would add some needed variation in activity at this point.

On other days, if the kids were starting to compose, I might have interspersed this with the reading comprehension time - with one group writing and one working with me on comprehension and then reversing. I didn't think that would work so well with the revision activity so added the extra comprehension time to facilitate my choice.

Flexibility

There are other ways this could be done, as well. Perhaps on Tuesdays my kids have physical education at 10:30, so I might make some different choices and could push more reading into the afternoon. Or, I might do what many upper grade teachers do which is to teach reading comprehension every other day (alternated with writing), which provides me with a full hour of teaching of writing or comprehension. I don't like that as much with 7-year-olds, but with the older kids it can prevent the need for splitting up a chapter or story across two days, and the more extended writing time is welcome, too.

Another variant of this can provide a bit more time elasticity. What if today's reading comprehension lesson was to be taught to the whole class? That would buy me back 20 minutes. What if that lesson were being taught not with the core reading program, but with the social studies or science book? That also would reduce the amount of time needed to cover the ground of an ambitious elementary curriculum.

The schedule itself can't show the possibilities of interconnections among these parts either. Perhaps the kids are writing about the text they read for reading comprehension work. The vocabulary that they studied might be connected to that text too, as could the fluency work. Or, maybe the class is working on some kind of project or report and the texts being used for reading comprehension are part of topical text sets. The schedule might look largely the same, but the degree of integration could still be quite high.

This, of course, was a two-hours of instruction schedule; a three-hour schedule would eat up more of the day. What might that look like? Lots of choices there.

One choice might be to simply increase the time devoted to each of these subjects by another 15 minutes (45 minutes per day, instead of 30 for each). That makes it harder to address all the other subjects, but in fact, in most cases it is still very doable.

Another popular approach is to supplement the two-hours of teaching with up to an hour of additional intervention time, which creates reteaching opportunities for some kids.

At least one school district that I know committed to this two-hour teaching commitment but added an additional 30 minutes a day to try to teach love of reading (e.g., reading to the kids, independent reading, computer games, book club). I'm not a big fan of that because it is not likely to be as effective as teaching, but I'd not oppose it as long as it isn't stealing the children's reading instruction. It did give the teachers some additional scheduling flexibility and that's a plus.

Key points

Like any example, this one is limited, but it does highlight a number of key points:

Amount of instruction needs to be maximized and varied on the basis of student need - down time or activities with low learning payoffs (though sometimes necessary) should be minimized

Actual amount of instruction is more important than the numbers of minutes scheduled.

Schedules should be based on the outcomes one is seeking more than on the activities one might want to use for teaching.

There are many different activities that can be used to accomplish particular learning goals (that is, there is more than one way to teach something). Effectiveness is what matters.

Literacy instruction should include a lot of oral and silent reading, writing, decoding, spelling. Kids need explicit instruction and guided practice in which they are engaged in trying to do these things.

Schedules need to be dynamic and flexible - allowing teachers to better meet the needs of students rather than honoring traditional, but unsubstantiated claims, like kids learn more in the morning or small groups are always better than whole class.

Integration across the language arts and content areas can have a multiplier effect.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Would You Schedule the Reading Instruction? | Reading Rockets

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you were teaching second-grade what would your schedule look like? Shanahan's response: This question - in various forms - came up a lot this week in response to last week's posting. Here is my thinking on this. I start from the premise that I want kids to get between 120-180 minutes per day of reading/writing instruction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Everything You Want To Know & Exactly Where To Find It - William Van Cleave

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
William Van Cleave's text book combines three useful features. The word lists developed for each skill have been tested over time with a variety of students working at different levels. They are accompanied by invaluable hints for teachers, based on years of experience.

# data[].attributes.body
In video 2, Dr. Tolman explains her model in depth. She breaks down the phonological awareness into applicable practices.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching How the Written Word Works By Peter Bowers - William Van Cleave

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
takes teachers through how English spelling uses morphology to represent the meaning of words

# data[].attributes.body
Using cognitive research to help students remember what is taught

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In this chapter, the authors encourage readers to "Embrace Difficulties" during learning. One example is the myth of errorless learning. Contrary to popular belief, making errors during retrieval is a good thing for learning. In one experiment, students made errors while studying, which improved their learning, yet they didn't recognize this benefit.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning - Retrieval Practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the book Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, cognitive scientists present key findings and learning strategies drawn from rigorous lab and classroom research.

# data[].attributes.headline
Sandi-The second video was helpful in seeing how children come with long strings of speech. Instruction moves it to the small individual sounds. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Sandi-The second video was helpful in seeing how children come with long strings of speech. Instruction moves it to the small individual sounds. 

# data[].attributes.body
See page 90 in Volume 1 of your LETRS Manual!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Spectrogram of the spoken words "nineteenth century". Frequencies are shown increasing up the vertical axis, and time on the horizontal axis. The legend to the right shows that the color intensity increases with the density.

A 3D spectrogram: The RF spectrum of a battery charger is shown over time

A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time. When applied to an audio signal, spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams. When the data are represented in a 3D plot they may be called waterfall displays.

Spectrograms are used extensively in the fields of music, linguistics, sonar, radar, speech processing, seismology, and others. Spectrograms of audio can be used to identify spoken words phonetically, and to analyse the various calls of animals.

A spectrogram can be generated by an optical spectrometer, a bank of band-pass filters, by Fourier transform or by a wavelet transform (in which case it is also known as a scaleogram or scalogram).

Scaleograms from the DWT and CWT for an audio sample

A spectrogram is usually depicted as a heat map, i.e., as an image with the intensity shown by varying the colour or brightness.

A common format is a graph with two geometric dimensions: one axis represents time, and the other axis represents frequency; a third dimension indicating the amplitude of a particular frequency at a particular time is represented by the intensity or color of each point in the image.

There are many variations of format: sometimes the vertical and horizontal axes are switched, so time runs up and down; sometimes as a waterfall plot where the amplitude is represented by height of a 3D surface instead of color or intensity. The frequency and amplitude axes can be either linear or logarithmic, depending on what the graph is being used for. Audio would usually be represented with a logarithmic amplitude axis (probably in decibels, or dB), and frequency would be linear to emphasize harmonic relationships, or logarithmic to emphasize musical, tonal relationships.

Sound spectrography of infrasound recording 30301

Spectrograms of light may be created directly using an optical spectrometer over time.

Spectrograms may be created from a time-domain signal in one of two ways: approximated as a filterbank that results from a series of band-pass filters (this was the only way before the advent of modern digital signal processing), or calculated from the time signal using the Fourier transform. These two methods actually form two different time-frequency representations, but are equivalent under some conditions.

The bandpass filters method usually uses analog processing to divide the input signal into frequency bands; the magnitude of each filter's output controls a transducer that records the spectrogram as an image on paper.

Creating a spectrogram using the FFT is a digital process. Digitally sampled data, in the time domain, is broken up into chunks, which usually overlap, and Fourier transformed to calculate the magnitude of the frequency spectrum for each chunk. Each chunk then corresponds to a vertical line in the image; a measurement of magnitude versus frequency for a specific moment in time (the midpoint of the chunk). These spectrums or time plots are then "laid side by side" to form the image or a three-dimensional surface,[4] or slightly overlapped in various ways, i.e. windowing. This process essentially corresponds to computing the squared magnitude of the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) of the signal - that is, for a window width , .[5]

From the formula above, it appears that a spectrogram contains no information about the exact, or even approximate, phase of the signal that it represents. For this reason, it is not possible to reverse the process and generate a copy of the original signal from a spectrogram, though in situations where the exact initial phase is unimportant it may be possible to generate a useful approximation of the original signal. The Analysis & Resynthesis Sound Spectrograph is an example of a computer program that attempts to do this. The Pattern Playback was an early speech synthesizer, designed at Haskins Laboratories in the late 1940s, that converted pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech (spectrograms) back into sound.

In fact, there is some phase information in the spectrogram, but it appears in another form, as time delay (or group delay) which is the dual of the instantaneous frequency.

The size and shape of the analysis window can be varied. A smaller (shorter) window will produce more accurate results in timing, at the expense of precision of frequency representation. A larger (longer) window will provide a more precise frequency representation, at the expense of precision in timing representation. This is an instance of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that the product of the precision in two conjugate variables is greater than or equal to a constant (B*T>=1 in the usual notation).

Early analog spectrograms were applied to a wide range of areas including the study of bird calls (such as that of the great tit), with current research continuing using modern digital equipment and applied to all animal sounds. Contemporary use of the digital spectrogram is especially useful for studying frequency modulation (FM) in animal calls. Specifically, the distinguishing characteristics of FM chirps, broadband clicks, and social harmonizing are most easily visualized with the spectrogram.

Spectrograms are useful in assisting in overcoming speech deficits and in speech training for the portion of the population that is profoundly deaf

The studies of phonetics and speech synthesis are often facilitated through the use of spectrograms.

In deep learning-keyed speech synthesis, spectrogram (or spectrogram in mel scale) is first predicted by a seq2seq model, then the spectrogram is fed to a neural vocoder to derive the synthesized raw waveform.

By reversing the process of producing a spectrogram, it is possible to create a signal whose spectrogram is an arbitrary image. This technique can be used to hide a picture in a piece of audio and has been employed by several electronic music artists. See also steganography.

Some modern music is created using spectrograms as an intermediate medium; changing the intensity of different frequencies over time, or even creating new ones, by drawing them and then inverse transforming. See Audio timescale-pitch modification and Phase vocoder.

Spectrograms can be used to analyze the results of passing a test signal through a signal processor such as a filter in order to check its performance.

High definition spectrograms are used in the development of RF and microwave systems

Spectrograms are now used to display scattering parameters measured with vector network analyzers

The US Geological Survey and the IRIS Consortium provide near real-time spectrogram displays for monitoring seismic stations

Spectrograms can be used with recurrent neural networks for speech recognition.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time. When applied to an audio signal, spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams. When the data are represented in a 3D plot they may be called waterfall displays .