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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
The most comprehensive and practical guide to understanding and applying the science of reading to improve literacy instruction.
After effectively teaching phonics in the early grades, what does the science of reading tell us should happen in literacy classes? The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Colleen Driggs, addresses the pressing challenges educators face in effectively incorporating the Science of Reading into their instruction once students already know how to decode. By offering actionable guidance grounded in seven evidence-based principles, this book helps teachers elevate their instructional practices and better prepare students to be lifelong readers and thinkers.
Grounded in proven classroom instruction, the book focuses on techniques that can allow teachers to use the science as effectively and actionably as possible. The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading is enhanced with more than 50 video clips from the classroom and covers ways to practically apply the Science of Reading. The book describes the often overlooked role of fluency in reading comprehension, even into the high school years; the profound importance of managing and socializing attention in an age of technology; the central role of background knowledge in understanding text; and the doubly important role of teaching vocabulary as a form of knowledge. It adds a discussion of how writing can make students better readers and how important it is that reading classes focus on reading actual books—great ones, ideally. And it closes with a discussion of close reading and the challenge of preparing students to rise to the challenge of complex text.
Inside the book:
- An innovative approach to building and reinforcing background knowledge in reading
- Over 50 video demonstrations of effective teaching techniques
- Sample lesson plans and materials for immediate classroom application
The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading is essential for educators, literacy coaches, and administrators who aim to foster rigorous literacy instruction in their classrooms and schools. This guide shows you how to implement techniques that ensure students find joy in reading and become better, wiser, more engaged and more motivated readers, both in their classrooms and in their lives beyond.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
How to Use This Book
Introduction: “The Science of Reading”: Shockwaves from a Podcast
WHAT'S THE LESSON?
THE END OF AN ERA (IS A COMPLICATED THING)
THE SCIENCE OF READING “BEYOND PHONICS”
WHAT'S INSIDE THIS BOOK?
THE SEVEN ARGUMENTS
Notes
Chapter 1: The Science of Reading in Seven Key Arguments
A BROAD BASE OF RESEARCH
SEVEN KEY RESEARCH-BACKED ARGUMENTS ABOUT “POST-PHONICS” READING
“THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR TEACHERS TO KNOW”
BUT WILL STUDENTS DISLIKE IT?
Notes
Chapter 2: Attending to Attention
THE BOOK IS DYING
WE WIRE HOW WE FIRE
INTENTIONAL WAYS OF READING FOR ATTENTION AND CONNECTION
HIGH TEXT, LOW TECH
BOOK-DRIVEN OBJECTIVES
PRINCIPLES OF READING IN ACTION
CHAPTER RECAP
Notes
Chapter 3: Fluency and Ways of Reading
ORTHOGRAPHIC MAPPING
BALANCING THREE WAYS OF READING
TEACHER READ ALOUD
FASE READING
ACCOUNTABLE INDEPENDENT READING (AIR)
CHAPTER RECAP
Notes
Chapter 4: The Hidden Power of Background Knowledge
RESEARCH ON KNOWLEDGE
WE KNOW KNOWLEDGE MATTERS–WHY DON'T WE ACT THAT WAY?
PERFORMANCE ON THE NEW YORK STATE ELA END-OF-YEAR STATE TEST GRADES 3–8 (2022–2023)
EMBEDDED NONFICTION
EMBELLISHMENTS AND KNOWLEDGE FEEDING
KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZERS
RETRIEVAL PRACTICE
THE FORGETTING CURVE
THE RECURSIVENESS OF KNOWLEDGE: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
CHAPTER RECAP
Notes
Chapter 5: Vocabulary Reconsidered
EXPLICIT VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION
IMPLICIT VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION
THE VOCABULARY CASE FOR READING ALOUD (AND FASE)
LESSON PREPARATION
RECURSIVENESS OF VOCABULARY
CHAPTER RECAP
Notes
Chapter 6: Using Writing to Develop Readers
“WRITE DOWN SOME IDEAS FIRST”
WRITING FOR READING: PRINCIPLES OF WRITING TO BUILD LITERACY
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
CHAPTER RECAP
Notes
Chapter 7: The Power of the Book
WHY HAVE ALL THE BOOKS GONE?
STORIES ARE COGNITIVELY PRIVILEGED
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
BOOKS PROVIDE VALUABLE CULTURAL CAPITAL
ALL BOOKS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME BOOKS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
GETTING THEM TO READ
CHAPTER RECAP
Notes
Chapter 8: Close Reading
JEN BRIMMING'S CLOSE READING OF LORD OF THE FLIES
SHORT BURSTS AND OPPORTUNITIES TO ENCODE
SELECTING COMPLEX TEXTS FOR CLOSE READING
SELECTING TEXTUAL EXCERPTS
THE CRITICAL IMPORTANCE OF ESTABLISHING MEANING
ATTENTIONALLY PRIVILEGED ENVIRONMENTS
MORE EXAMPLES OF EFFECTIVE CLOSE READING QUESTIONS
KNOWLEDGE, DISAMBIGUATION, AND CLOSE READING
CLOSE READING IN THE CONTEXT OF A LESSON
CHAPTER RECAP
Notes
Appendix A: Full Sample Lesson, Seventh Grade
Note
Appendix B: Full Sample Lesson, Ninth Grade
Appendix C: Decoding Tips
MARK THE SPOT
PUNCH THE ERROR
NAME THE SOUND OR THE RULE
SPEED THE EXCEPTIONS
CHUNK IT
USE POSITIVE FEEDBACK
Appendix D:
Reading Reconsidered
Curriculum:
The Giver
Fluency Practice: Sample Materials
Appendix E: Materials for Knowledge Building: Embedded Texts
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
How to Use This Book
Introduction: “The Science of Reading”: Shockwaves from a Podcast
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Appendix A: Full Sample Lesson, Seventh Grade
Appendix B: Full Sample Lesson, Ninth Grade
Appendix C: Decoding Tips
Appendix D: Reading Reconsidered Curriculum: The Giver Fluency Practice: Sample Materials
Appendix E: Materials for Knowledge Building: Embedded Texts
Index
End User License Agreement
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THE TEACH LIKE A CHAMPION GUIDE TO THE SCIENCE OF READING
Translating Research to Reignite Joy and Meaning in the Classroom
DOUG LEMOV
COLLEEN DRIGGS
ERICA WOOLWAY
Copyright © 2025 Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, and Erica Woolway. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
ISBNs: 9781394305995 (paperback), 9781394306008 (ePDF), 9781394306015 (ePub)
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Cover Design: WileyCover Images: © weedezign/stock.adobe.com, © Kara/stock.adobe.comAuthor Photos: © Maia Lemov, © Stephanie McCauley, © Rob Richard
About the Authors
Doug Lemov is the founder and chief knowledge officer of Teach Like a Champion. His books on teaching and learning are among the best known in the education sector. He has taught English and history at the university, high school, and middle school levels. He holds a BA from Hamilton College, an MA from Indiana University, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Colleen Driggs is a managing director of curriculum and school support of Teach Like a Champion. Colleen leads the Reading Reconsidered curriculum team and their work in content development and training and implementation support in schools. Before joining the Teach Like a Champion team, she taught middle school science in New York City; middle school science and literacy in New Haven, Connecticut; and middle school literacy in Rochester, New York. In Rochester, she served as the chair of the reading department, coaching literacy teachers and developing curriculum and assessments, at Rochester Prep Middle School. Colleen received her BA in psychology and education from Hamilton College and a master of education degree from Pace University.
Erica Woolway is the president and chief academic officer (CAO) for the Teach Like a Champion team. In this role, she works with the team to train thousands of high-performing teachers and school leaders across the country each year—reaching over one million students. Prior to becoming CAO, she served as both dean of students and director of staff development at Uncommon Schools and as an adjunct literacy instructor at Relay Graduate School of Education. Erica began her career in education as a kindergarten teacher and then worked as a school counselor. She received her BA in psychology and Spanish from Duke University, an MA and master of education degree from Teachers College in school counseling, and an MA in school leadership from National Lewis University. She is a coauthor of Practice Perfect with Doug Lemov and Katie Yezzi and Teach Like Champion Field Guide 3.0 with Doug Lemov, Hannah Solomon, and Sadie McCleary. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and their three boys.
Acknowledgments
We get up every day happy to go to work in large part because we have such an amazing group of colleagues on the Teach Like a Champion team. Truly they are the best, and much of what we have written here—the good parts!—is based on insights gleaned from daily conversations about instruction and lesson design with our colleagues on the Teach Like a Champion reading team, in particular, and they deserve special mention for their brilliance in writing many of the curriculum examples you see included in this book. They include Emily Badillo, Jaimie Brillante, Sarah Engstrom, Alonte Johnson-James, Patrick Pastore, Jen Rugani, and Beth Verrilli.
Perhaps the best single decision we made in writing this book was to enlist the support of Tracey Marin. As a developmental editor she did just about everything—revised our clunky prose, organized our ideas, helped us clarify our thinking, suggested additional lines of argument—and did all of those things exceptionally well. Without her this book would not likely have come to fruition. If it had, it would have been a lot less clear on what it was saying and why.
Once we got the book into plausible form Susan Geraghty, Pete Gaughan, and Amy Fandrei at John Wiley & Sons turned the manuscript into a book with skill and speed. Our agent, Rafe Sagalyn, provided critical guidance throughout as we sought to define and design this book.
The videos were edited and organized by John Costello and Rob Richard, mostly behind-the-scenes work that they do better than anyone.
In addition to the important work they have made available to teachers, several researchers were extremely generous with their time. David Paige, Tim Shanahan, and Daniel Willingham generously responded to our questions about their research. Emily Hanford was similarly generous in discussing her Sold a Story podcast.
Most of all we are grateful for the love and support of our families and our children in particular with whom we will always love reading.
How to Use This Book
This book is written to help teachers and leaders consider research on the science of reading and what the immediate practical applications are for literacy instruction. The two key components of this book are its videos and the aforementioned research, and we want to provide guidance on how to leverage them both.
We are immensely grateful to the teachers whose videos are captured within these pages. As with all the books that our team has had the privilege of getting to work on, without these teachers and their expert implementation of research-based practices, we would not be able to share such robust guidance.
We share these videos both to honor the teachers we have learned from and to provide critical mental models of implementation. Research tells us that a mental model—a picture in your mind that describes a cohesive picture of what the ideal solution or solutions should look like—is critical to decision-making in complex environments. A mental model is flexible, mind you. It doesn't tell you one right way and, of course, you won't do everything that you see these teachers do in their clips. You will make the techniques your own through infusing your own artistry and insights based on what you know of your students. But knowing what the end goal looks like will help you adapt and problem-solve, even if you see it slightly differently than we or the teachers in the videos do.
Please let us say one more thing about the videos:
They are a gift, given to us by the teachers we've filmed. Were they nervous when we asked to roll up with our cameras? Were they unsure? Almost certainly. They were and are overwhelmingly humble and self-deprecating practitioners. The most common response when we asked to film was, “Why do you want to tape me?”
Answer: “Because we think you are very good at what you do and because we want people to see what it looks like with real kids and real books in a real classroom with real sneezes and nosebleeds—and a hundred other emergencies and non-emergencies—interrupting the lesson.”
Will there be imperfections and flaws in videos shot under those terms? Of course! As we hope is obvious, all of the videos in this book were shot without guidance or interruption from us. There were no retakes or instructions to the students to behave differently. The videos reflect teachers doing their work as a normal day unfolds, with all its realities and challenges.
We say this because a common hobby on education social media appears to be attacking or demeaning a teacher whose video you've seen posted. Why? Because some teacher has had the temerity to demonstrate something that a viewer somewhere thinks is “obvious.” Or because the teacher in the video makes some relatively small mistake while doing fifteen other things brilliantly. Or because they are “neglecting” to do some completely different thing that is more important to one viewer than what the teacher is modeling.
So please know that if anyone is bragging, it's us and only us. We think the work of the teachers whose video we share is pretty incredible, but we mostly had to convince them of that. They didn't ask to have their work shared far and wide, and we think it's far more productive in using this book—far more useful to you as the viewer—to talk about what you can use than to pick on some flaw in their work. And so, like we ask our participants in our workshops, we ask that you honor the teachers whose classrooms we've shared by looking at what you might borrow and adapt.
Our second topic is the research. This book is intentionally recursive. Within and across chapters, we will revisit the research and how it applies to approaches and techniques we can use with our students in the hope that they will become lifelong readers.
There are several reasons for this book's intentional recursiveness and one is based on the research itself. In The Hidden Lives of Learners, education researcher Graham Nuthall describes the three exposures rule: “We discovered that a student needed to encounter on at least three different occasions, the complete set of the information … to understand the concept …. We found we could predict what students would learn—and what they would not—with an accuracy rate of 80–85%.” In each chapter you will encounter both new ideas and new research, as well as research that we have referenced in previous chapters in slightly different ways.
There is also a practical reason for this, as we know that schools will use different chapters, perhaps in isolation, to inform professional development and professional learning communities. While we of course hope that you'll read the entire book, we also know the life of busy school leaders and teachers, and we want each chapter to be able to stand on its own to inform a particular topic—whether that be about the best way to use different ways of reading in order to boost fluency or how to support students in tackling complex text.
Its recursiveness also speaks to the complexity of reading. Some of the research and principles apply to more than one idea or topic because so much of what we do as readers is inextricably intertwined. For example, you will likely see research on working memory cited multiple times across chapters—its impact on our attention and why reading actual books matters.
Our kids tell us that we tend to retell stories multiple times and we realize that we do this in our book too, though in this case it's intentional. We are so grateful that you have chosen to read this book, and we look forward to learning back from the different ways you implement the guidance from these pages.
Introduction: “The Science of Reading”: Shockwaves from a Podcast
In October 2022, education reporter Emily Hanford released a podcast called Sold a Story. Hanford's topic, the flawed science behind the nation's leading primary grade reading programs, might not at first seem the stuff of blockbuster media.
But it spent weeks on Apple's top ten list and became the second most shared podcast in the country in 2023. Time Magazine ranked it as the third best podcast in the United States that same year and by then it had more than five million downloads.
Perhaps more important than the listener statistics and accolades, it became the topic of school board and curriculum committee meetings across the country. States put the topic on the legislative docket. More than fifteen states passed laws in response, some explicitly outlawing unscientific teaching practices in early reading, others requiring districts to choose reading programs supported by science.1
Sold a Story turned out to be the most influential piece of education journalism in years.
One unfortunate reason for the podcast's success was that it was about reading failure, and the failure of a child to learn to read—well, easily, or in some cases at all—is far from a niche issue in American schools. There were tens of thousands of parents listening to the podcast not because the story was a true-crime thriller for PTA types or a cautionary tale about school-gone-wrong. It was the story of their child. They were parents who had lived with the reality that their child couldn't read or wasn't progressing. They had wondered: had they done something wrong? had they read to their children enough? had they failed to spot a learning disability?
The first episode began by introducing one of them: Corinne Adams. During the pandemic, she had sat in on her son Charlie's kindergarten, which was being held via Zoom. Watching over Charlie's shoulder as his teacher tried to get twenty-five kindergarteners to follow along, Corinne quickly recognized that if she helped Charlie manage the mute button and stay focused, she would also be helping his teacher. And so she found herself sitting daily at a window into her child's previously hidden world.
At first what she saw gave her only a vague sense of dissonance. She had expected to see a lot of sounding out of words, but Charlie wasn't taught to do that. He was encouraged to use context, the first letter, or what was shown in the pictures that often accompanied the text to guess at what a word was. Initially, this just seemed like “new math”: schools had a way of doing things now that wasn't intuitive to parents who'd grown up in a different era.
She was told she shouldn't encourage Charlie to sound out words deliberately when reading with him at home. She began to notice that he wanted to read aloud only from books she'd already read to him. He especially liked books with predictable patterns (“Good night, room; good night, moon,” etc.). But those concerns were balanced by the school's upbeat reassurances: Charlie got good grades and earned notes praising his progress in reading.
“I'd be like, ‘Oh, you're doing so great!’” Corinne recalled.
Until she was asked to give Charlie an at-home reading assessment. “I wasn't allowed to read it to him first. And I couldn't help him in any way. I could point to the words for him and that was it. He had to read it,” Corinne tells Hanford.
Corinne taped the session, and on the podcast, you can hear the recording of Charlie trying to read the sentence: “This toy moves when you push it.”
“You …. It …. You …” he guesses. He has no idea how to start. He guesses at whole words. He doesn't think to go letter-by-letter or sound-by-sound.
He has probably been taught that sounding out is a last resort, but sounding out is all but impossible if you aren't instantly familiar with the great majority of the sounds letters and letter combinations make.
Charlie is lost because he has not been taught how to read correctly.
And there's anxiety and desperation in his voice. He wants to do well and doesn't know how.
Corinne suddenly realizes: Charlie isn't “on his way” or “making progress,” he is lost—in danger already of becoming a student for whom school is frustrating and nearly hopeless. Of becoming an adult who can't read a loan application, a contract, a book, or the laws that govern him.
It's every parent's nightmare. Corinne's dreams for him are suddenly weighed down with dread.
And the normalcy of it all is doubly scary. The ship of school goes sailing on, placidly sending home reassuring notes.
Has no one even noticed??
Charlie's school is on the leafy side of the education gap, mind you, with kindness assemblies and SMART Boards in every room. And still there is the disconcerting sense that this is just the way things are. As Hanford notes, 65 percent of students—two-thirds of the nation's fourth graders—were below proficient on the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, even before the disruptions of the pandemic. No wonder no one blinked as a bright and able child became a struggling reader. It’s the majority case, you could argue.
Perhaps that's why the podcast was often gut-wrenching for the tens of thousands of teachers who also listened to it. Many had worked for years helping children learn to read, often using the programs described in the podcast—programs that eschewed systematic phonics instruction in favor of the ineffective cueing methods Charlie tried hopelessly to use. They heard how disinterest in and dismissiveness of reading science among the designers of those programs had caused teachers like themselves to give their all and still serve students poorly.
Stunningly, the flawed reading programs Hanford described in the podcast, and which Charlie's school was using, were among the most widely used in the country. Many teachers who used them were unaware of the problems; others had concerns but deferred to the experts. After all, they had been told to use them by their schools or by their professors. Besides, what to do in the face of such misgivings when you are just one teacher is far from clear.
The makers of those faulty early reading programs and their advocates were not just wrong about how to teach reading, though. They were wrong in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. Not even cutting-edge evidence: evidence that had been available for decades; evidence they were aware of. That's the kicker.
At first, their response to indications that they had the science wrong was relatively subtle. As early advocates for cognitive science made the case for the critical importance of phonics—the process of intentionally and sequentially teaching letter-sound correspondences—defenders of the dominant programs, which had been known as whole language for their belief that students could learn to read naturally without breaking words down into sounds, coined the term balanced literacy to describe their programs instead. A rebranding never hurts. After all, the programs did—or could, if a teacher chose—contain some phonics alongside their cueing methods and whole language approach,2 and the new term suggested that they were a compromise, a resolution to the increasingly vociferous arguments about how to teach reading that were sometimes dubbed the “reading wars.”
“Balanced literacy was … a way to defuse the controversy and put the criticisms of whole language aside because everyone was just going to use the best of both worlds,” University of Wisconsin cognitive psychologist and reading expert Mark Seidenberg said in a 2018 podcast.3 “It didn't solve any of the underlying issues … [because] Teachers already thought they were using the best of both worlds and so they didn't … change anything at all.”
Teachers will decide what's best: that was, and is, a critical argument of many approaches to teaching and learning, including balanced literacy. We can resolve this by deploying the wisdom of teachers to determine what works and reconcile the disputes via their learned experience in classrooms.
That's a powerful argument. In fact, teacher autonomy is something we too believe in, deeply. Teachers' capacity to solve problems and adapt ideas in the classroom is one of their most important and under-recognized skills. School doesn't work well without it.
But to be effective in technical and complex fields, autonomy requires decision-makers to have the knowledge required to solve problems effectively.
“Generations of teachers have been trained and remain stubbornly attached to ideas about how to teach reading that are unsupported by research and basic science,” the education writer Robert Pondiscio wrote in 2023,4 and this trend is exacerbated by the fact that “education tolerates and even encourages teachers' view of themselves as free agents, who … listen to the latest diktats from the district and then return to their classrooms, close the door, and do what feels right.”
If we really want to give teachers the right to decide—and we think we should—we have to empower them by ensuring their access to and understanding of critical knowledge and research. Knowing those things should be a professional expectation; learning them should be the foundation of teacher training. And the culture in the sector must value, share, and prioritize the knowledge of research-backed principles.
This is especially true of reading. Learning to read involves cognitive processes that do not reveal themselves easily. They are often technical, counterintuitive, and all but impossible to infer via mere observation.
“Most of what goes into reading is subconscious,” Seidenberg writes in his 2017 book, Language at the Speed of Sight, “We are aware of having read something—that we understood it, that we found it funny, that it conveyed a fact, idea or feeling—not the mental and neural operations that produced the outcome. People are unreliable narrators of their own cognitive lives…. Being an expert reader doesn't make you an expert about reading. That is why there is a science of reading: to understand this complex skill at levels that intuition cannot easily penetrate.”5
And while observation gleaned through experience is useful in adapting scientific principles, what we notice is largely determined by what we know. Experts observe and see underlying principles at work but observers without technical knowledge are more likely to see superficial detail or to attribute causation wrongly.
“The special role of science [is] to find out to the best of our ability what is true, letting the implications fall where they may,” Seidenberg writes. But “ensuring basic scientific literacy and familiarity with modern research” is “not a priority in educating teachers.”6 Professionalism requires technical knowledge and this is too often at odds with norms in the profession.
Doctors enjoy significant autonomy but constantly update their knowledge of the latest research and treatments. They accept that human health is complex and that what appears to be the cause of an illness or the likely route to a cure is not easily judged from mere observation. The resulting culture ensures there are mechanisms to share research and gives priority to its insights. Doctors would express immediate concern over a colleague who attempted to treat viral pneumonia with antibiotics, or who used antibiotics to treat a bacterial infection but failed to ensure patients administered the entire cycle of medication. Announcing “That's not how I do it” or “I don't really believe in giving the whole cycle” would only deepen their concerns.
So while teachers are not researchers and many will not have the time or inclination to read the science directly, being familiar with its findings, engaging in discussions of its tenets, and prioritizing its discoveries should be part of professional norms in education.
In many ways that broader issue—that the profession has been willing to allow and normalize a disconnection from research—is the “story” in Hanford's podcast. Even if far greater attention is now being paid to the science of early literacy, the larger conditions endure, the disconnect remains—at least in the United States.
We are often struck when we work with teachers in England how different these things are on the other side of the Atlantic. Knowledge of learning science is far more widespread among teachers in England and far more likely to be perceived as something all teachers have a responsibility to understand.
Schools in England almost universally teach systematic phonics, for example. In large part this is due to the fact that schools there have administered a universal phonics screening to all year 1 students since 2012. As a result, England's recent data on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, an international assessment of fourth-grade reading achievement, places them fourth among forty-three participating countries. We should all tip our caps to former Minister of State for Schools Nick Gibb, who championed the intervention. And in the United States, we should copy it.
Moreover, a much higher proportion of teachers in England are familiar with concepts like working memory, Retrieval Practice, and the role of existing background knowledge in acquiring new knowledge. In trainings there, we can reliably refer to such concepts and know that the majority of teachers will understand those references. We can simply discuss how they apply in a given situation.
Of course, there are plenty of teachers (and professors of education) in England who are exceptions. But the trend is clear: professional norms for what a teacher should know about cognitive science research are noticeably higher there than in the United States.
“You can't do a teacher training course in this country, and not come out of it without an understanding of Retrieval Practice, working memory, and the role of knowledge in reading,” a head teacher recently told us.
We doubt any school leaders would say that about US teacher preparation programs. “In America prospective teachers aren't trained to teach; they are socialized into a view of the teacher's role,” Seidenberg writes.7
A key point: This is mostly not teachers' “fault.” Teachers in the United States endeavor to serve their students in a field where the value placed on research is low, where teacher preparation programs emphasize ideological issues over technical ones, and where many of the most widely used reading curricula (and almost every state reading assessment) are organized on flawed, unscientific ideas.
This means ideas that question the assumptions we hold are far less likely to gain traction. It means that education, for all its love of the word innovative, actually resists the most useful innovations—those that align practices to how learning works.8
And sometimes education's resistance to science can be right out in the open. That's what happened in one of the most devastating sequences Hanford describes in her podcast.
In 2001, the George W. Bush administration prioritized improving early reading outcomes and proposed to ground the initiative in science. The administration convened a national reading panel to establish as clearly as possible what research supported so they could fund it and advocate for it.
The panel quickly identified that the single most important factor in primary-level reading was diligent and sequential instruction in phonics. With intentional phonics, almost every student was likely to learn to read. Without it, it was a lottery. Some kids got it and some kids—equally bright and capable, like Charlie—didn't.
But in the classroom systematic synthetic phonics required repetition, often of simple rote-seeming activities. It was important to get things just right when describing letter sounds and blends and the exact order of lesson topics really mattered, so lessons were often scripted.
That wasn't popular. Many teachers didn't like the idea of lessons someone else wrote for them. They were skeptical of direct instruction despite research indicating that it is usually the most effective way to transmit knowledge and foster learning.9
And just as important, phonics didn't jibe with many educators' intuitive sense of what made for enjoyable teaching and enriched classrooms. Teaching phonics felt faintly mechanical and prescriptive. It required repetition. Mechanical, prescriptive, and repetitive weren't words that described what most teachers imagined doing when they took the job.
There was a dissonance, in other words, between what worked and what many people enjoyed doing.10 In such an environment it was easy for curriculum designers, literacy experts, and education professors vested in existing practices to argue that what was compelling and intuition confirming yet at odds with science was preferable to what was unfamiliar, challenging, and clearly backed by research.
And then they went a step further. Advocates for the dominant reading programs didn't just try to ignore and downplay the research. Many tried to discredit it.
When the Bush administration allocated $5 billion to fund early reading programs that aligned to research through Reading First grants, advocates for whole-language and balanced literacy programs, which would not have qualified for the funding, called the research “political” and implied that the panel was an attack on teachers by ignorant and corrupt outsiders.
Sadly, the ensuing years have confirmed that the panel and the research it cited were correct, but the pushback was as successful as it was cynical. Programs using faulty methods continued to thrive. Some became more popular. And in the end, millions of children continued failing to learn to read—with all the cascading misfortunes and difficulties that implies—for two more decades.
Twenty years later, in 2022, they remained among the most popular reading programs in the country. They continued socializing teachers to coach students to guess at words rather than systematically teaching them letter-sound correspondences so they could sound them out.
WHAT'S THE LESSON?
This is not a book about phonics; it's about reading in the years after students have learned to decode. Why start by sharing the tale of Sold a Story, then?
We think it's an important first step to ask why. Why were ideas unequivocally supported by research so easily dismissed? If not, those same factors could prevent us from teaching reading better today.
We should be aware, for example, that important research was probably rejected because change is difficult and scary and requires us to start over at the bottom of the learning curve, for example. It's human nature when you have invested time and effort to master something to become more wedded to it. People don't like to change their minds and almost never do it easily.
But even very good ideas also need translation to work in the real world of the classroom. A lone teacher with misgivings can't very easily write her own curriculum. And even knowing that a concept helps determine whether pupils will learn is a long way from knowing how to embed it into a lesson for thirty students. Changing outcomes means providing tangible examples of how to use research successfully and enough tools to make it viable in teachers' already busy lives.
And, of course, there was the broader cultural problem within the education sector: the general undervaluing of science, the broad lack of familiarity with research, and the greater interest in what Seidenberg calls ideologies instead. Perhaps the response to Sold a Story will cause a realignment in the field, but there's a long way to go.
It's also important to recognize, in what today is an even more politicized era than the one in which the Reading First initiative was successfully waylaid, that we were all too ready to assign political motives to teaching ideas. It is important to ask ourselves: was critical research easy to bury because it was the Bush administration that championed it, allowing it to be tagged as “right wing” when so much of the teaching world leans left? Politics on both sides of the aisle almost assuredly continue to cloud our judgment now.
We raise these issues because we are going to share how the research as we understand it applies to the lives of developing readers after they have learned to decode. But research itself is not enough. A culture that is receptive to change is also necessary. Medicine is full of stories of cures that went unheeded well after they were understood. Ignaz Semmelweis's efforts to reduce the spread of infection in hospitals, especially in maternal wards, by requiring surgeons to wash their hands—simple, decisive, cost-effective, transformative—ended in failure. He died in an asylum, mocked for his ideas and knowing thousands of women were dying unnecessarily in childbirth every year.
The story told in Hanford's podcast was unconscionable for children and families, but horrible too for teachers.11 The podcast shares their voices—wracked with guilt at the knowledge they had worked so earnestly yet served many of the students they loved and cared about poorly. We would never want that for ourselves, and we would never want that for you.
THE END OF AN ERA (IS A COMPLICATED THING)
Things have begun changing since Sold a Story hit the airwaves. Among other things, the phrase the science of reading is practically everywhere now.12
While beneficial, the changes contain risks of their own, as Hanford and others have pointed out. There is the risk of overcorrection, for example, when a single and previously neglected factor risks becoming, in some people's minds, the only relevant factor in reading instruction. And legislation is at best a suboptimal way to shape curricular and instructional decisions in schools. It's a blunt tool, prone to perverse incentives, and often as likely to create new problems as fix old ones.
But while legislation is an unfortunate way to address pedagogy, we should also acknowledge that it reflects, at least in part, a belief among the wider public that it is necessary—that subtler methods, perhaps even better information by itself, will not be enough to cause the required changes. The neglect of phonics helped give rise to that perception. Having squandered trust, schools and educators will have to earn it back. Nothing erodes faith in institutions faster than the realization that expertise has been misused, but nothing earns trust better than institutional effectiveness, progress, and visible change—especially when it results in greater success for everybody's children.
We are at a point of transition. The long era in which teaching was shaped primarily by ideologies is ending. We must bring it swiftly to a close. In Why Don't Students Like School? Daniel Willingham reminds us that we have “learned more about how the mind works in the last 25 years than we did in the previous 2,500.”13 Our knowledge is now extensive enough that we can reliably use it to shape daily practice. A new era based on empirical research must begin.
In 2017, in Language at the Speed of Sight, Seidenberg wrote these words about our schools:
There is a profound disconnection between the science of reading and educational practice. Very little of what we've learned about reading as scientists has had any impact on what happens in schools because the cultures of science and education are so … difficult to bridge. The methods used to teach children to read are inconsistent with facts about human cognition and development…. They inadvertently place many children at risk of reading failure. They discriminate against poor children.14
Those are damning words to read. We should endeavor every day to ensure that they can never be said again of our profession. The barriers at this point are human. We should not expect the change to be easy. But there's no reason to think we can't turn the tables.
THE SCIENCE OF READING “BEYOND PHONICS”
Our book, we have noted, is not about systematic synthetic phonics, though we believe that in the primary grades (and for any student at any grade level who can't reliably decode) that's job one.
Our starting point is that phonics are a starting point—that once we have ensured that every child has mastered the code of written language, reliably and thoroughly, we are not done attending to the science. There is plenty more it can tell us—much of it overlooked and misunderstood—that is equally deserving of attention. So you might say that this book is about “the science of reading beyond phonics.”
We've tried to show what we mean by that phrase in the following figure. At the base, you can see the rough estimate of grade levels corresponding to an individual student's journey through school.
The dark gray area of the graph represents the portion of the time spent teaching and reading in each grade that should be allocated to teaching “decoding” in a scientifically supported manner. This is the primary task during the primary years.15
Our goal is to describe what literacy teaching should look like in the light gray area of the graph, which is by far the greatest portion of a student's journey through school.
There are two parts to the light gray portion of the graph. First, there is the part that typically happens in kindergarten, first, and second grade while students are learning to decode. The second occurs beyond roughly second or third grade and represents reading instruction after students are fluent decoders and have begun to build strong orthographic maps of familiar words.16 This portion is what we are mainly concerned with. The primary purpose of this book is to discuss what the science says reading teachers should do after students have mastered decoding and how they can translate those ideas into practice.
But a lot of the research we describe can also be helpful in determining what else should be happening during the primary grades while teachers are focused on helping students crack the code of letter-sound correspondence, and so a secondary purpose of this book is to help with the light gray portion of the graph above the dark area in grades K–2.
Should we be building vocabulary as well during the primary years when cracking the letter-sound code is job one? Yes! Should we be reading aloud to students to build their understanding of complex language and syntax and cause them to fall in love with stories far richer than the simple texts designed specifically for decoding? Absolutely.
In early years, those things matter, too. We should be aware that reactions to the historical neglect of phonics might lead to the most important thing becoming the only thing.
The grade level along the bottom of the graph is only an estimate, we note, because systematic synthetic phonics, represented by the dark gray area, should be the primary focus of instruction until students can reliably decode with automaticity, which happens at different points for different students. While it should ideally happen by first or second grade, it doesn't always.17
And yet the lion's share of a student's education occurs in the area after explicit phonics instruction has been successfully completed and students have “cracked the code.” That is, in grades 3–12, typically.
In this area, too, we think there is an immensely important and surprising body of research that will require us to adapt our practices in sometimes unexpected ways to ensure the success of our students. Given the size of this area on the graph, that's a big deal. If students have not mastered letter-sound correspondence in the primary years they will be sorely hampered throughout their school lives, but even if and when they have, a case could be made that we are still serving them poorly because too many teachers are not aware of the science that should shape lessons throughout the rest of their school years—the bulk of their schooling. Progress in reading scores often goes flat after the fourth grade in the United States, exactly the time that the “beyond phonics” research becomes more relevant.
As with primary level reading, some of this important research has emerged recently, but a lot of it has been known for some time—some of it hidden in plain sight. Ideas that research has demonstrated are worthy are easy to disparage when they do not jibe with what people have done in the past or think the answer should be based on other beliefs. We reiterate that this is a primary lesson of Sold a Story.
WHAT'S INSIDE THIS BOOK?
We began this journey long before we heard Sold a Story. We had our own conversion experience when we were forced to accept that much of what we had thought (and taught!) was in fact wrong. Our introduction to much of the research we will describe here began in 2014 when we were asked to rethink reading for the network of schools we then worked for. Student progress was not what it could have been. It lagged the results we saw in other disciplines. Why?
It took failure for us to begin seeking out the science, and in that sense our starting point is typical of the way change happens. The key is to acknowledge the failure.
Our previous book, Reading Reconsidered, describes our initial findings. They align to many of the ideas we discuss here, but there's a lot more we (the education community and we, the three of us) now know better. And we think it's doubly important to make the connections to and applications of the science more explicit than they were before.
In Reading Reconsidered we talked about the importance of background knowledge, for example. This was one of our first and most important discoveries from reading the research. As we discuss in Chapter One, what appeared to us in the early years of our teaching careers to be “skill” problems were in fact “knowledge” problems. We had failed to perceive this fact. It didn't help that state assessments encouraged teachers to think this way—they were literally organized on skills. But once we'd read Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School, for example, and learned about research like Recht and Leslie’s “Baseball Study,” we started to study how to use knowledge in daily lessons. We wrote a chapter about embedding nonfiction passages in the reading of books.
We have learned a lot more about creating knowledge-rich reading classrooms since—both because we have worked with teachers in scores of schools to apply it and because we have spent six years designing a curriculum that draws on the research. Chapter Four on knowledge in this book discusses a lot more than just Embedded Nonfiction. And it will show you both video examples and examples from lesson materials. If you've read Reading Reconsidered, we think you'll find this book almost entirely new even if the topics are similar.18
An important caution, though: we've visited hundreds of schools along the way to talk about and observe reading instruction. Many of them are schools that agree about the profound importance of background knowledge in reading comprehension. And yet we see, in many of those same schools, the persistence of lessons that are not especially knowledge-driven that spend forty-five minutes on the four or five or seven steps to finding the main idea, for example. In fact, we've come to coin the term skills-y to refer to lessons where the reading of the text is crowded out by meta-conversations about finding the main idea and making inferences or in which a single short passage is subjected to a litany of skill-based questions.
So we're forced to ask: if instruction in well-intentioned schools with smart teachers looks the same after people have become aware of the research, what is causing the disconnect? Why is it so hard to make change even when you believe in an idea?
One reason is that change implies so many different things—different “different things” for different people. Some teachers write their own lesson plans and curriculum. For those teachers, understanding how to design lessons plans is critical. You can't teach reading better if the curriculum isn't better. Some teachers use a curriculum written and designed by someone else. For them, making adaptations or additions to the plans will be critical, as will be knowing what to emphasize and how.
So in this book we will discuss not only lesson delivery—the pedagogy that we think can best emphasize what the science tells us—but lesson design as well: examples of how to write or adapt tasks and lessons to maximize learning.
We note that we are not scientists. We are translators. A field in which busy people are asked to apply a massive body of knowledge requires that. And, of course, research once established does not come embedded in lesson plans. It requires a separate skill to determine how to use it on Tuesday morning with a diverse group of sixth graders reading Number the Stars. Doubly so when there are multiple things the research tells us we should be doing: building background knowledge, reinforcing fluency, including writing, say. The process of turning all of that into a lesson plan is not something researchers are generally best positioned to advise on.
And so we offer ourselves, having read as much of the research as we could, having thought about and talked to hundreds of teachers about applying it, having observed what the data on their efforts to use it can tell us, and having videotaped and studied them doing so and studied the written work students produce as a result.
The changes we describe might mean adding more oral reading to build fluency or shifting the structure of vocabulary instruction to spend less time guessing at definitions and more time using words. It might mean asking students to write less but with greater intentionality to the syntax they use. It might mean adapting nonfiction articles from external sources and asking students to read them alongside a novel to help them understand more of the time and place they are reading about.
Making such changes requires two things (at least!) beyond knowledge of the research. First it requires a mental model of what the final outcome could or should look like. Nothing illustrates that better than video, of course, so this book includes videos of a wide variety of classroom teachers applying the ideas we discuss in their own classrooms. We've thanked them elsewhere and we thank them here. And we thank you, too. Because the last thing you need to make changes is a bit of bravery, honestly. We're not trying to sound patronizing when we say that. We have lived this ourselves. Changing what you do will never go perfectly and we know what it means to crash and burn in public. (Someday we'll tell you some stories!) But we know that if you take the arguments of this book to heart, there will be success and learning and a sense of accomplishment. There will also be struggle and failure, hopefully brief and transient failure on your way to glory, but failure just the same. So we wish you fearlessness and humility and wisdom. We think you're going to crush it.
THE SEVEN ARGUMENTS
This book is built on seven core arguments. Each of these is supported by research we summarize in Chapter One.
The seven arguments are as follows:
Attention is central to every learning activity, especially reading, and building attention is a necessary step in effective reading instruction.
Fluency is a prerequisite to reading comprehension at all grade levels.
Once students are fluent, background knowledge is the most important driver of understanding and comprehension.
Vocabulary is the single most important form of knowledge (but is often taught as if it were a skill).
Intentional writing development can play a critical and synergistic role in developing better readers.
Books are the optimal text format through which to build understanding and comprehension.
The ability to read complex text is the gatekeeper to long-term success.
Chapters Two through Eight take each argument in turn and expand on how it can be addressed through teaching, lesson design, and text selection.
We hope a deep study of these seven arguments will be useful to teachers but also to school leaders, curriculum designers, policymakers, and parents. We think it's important for everyone involved to be aligned: for state assessments to measure useful things so teachers have the fullest incentives to teach them, for schools to share with parents how and why they choose the programs they do. The right ideas need to be shared across the spectrum of stakeholders to best serve children.
Consider the observations of a teacher at a recent workshop we ran. The discussion was about how doing more actual reading in class was beneficial, a topic we address in Chapter Three.
“Every time I read with my class,” the teacher told us, “I live in fear that an administrator will walk in the room and ask me why we're reading when I should be teaching. My principal doesn't think reading counts as teaching.”
One person, a teacher say, in possession of knowledge but isolated in a complex system, is not yet in a position to achieve substantive change.
Notes
1
. Hanford herself had concerns about the benefits, risks, and unintended consequences of legislative responses to the issues raised in the podcast, as she discusses in episode 8 and episode 10 of
Sold a Story
.
2
. A key problem is that for phonics to work it should be systematic and synthetic—carefully sequenced and technically focused on critical letter-sound formations in order. If you're doing it sporadically, you're not really doing it.
3
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CheEVPkhdjw
.
4
.
https://www.commentary.org/articles/robert-pondiscio/teaching-reading-right/
.
5
. Mark Seidenberg,
Language at the Speed of Sight
(Basic Books, 2017), 304.
6
.
Language at the Speed of Sight
, 261.
7
.
Language at the Speed of Sight
, 250.
8
. Most innovation fails. Evolutionarily, most adaptations result in a weaker organism and die out. For this reason it is important to value successful outcomes and then allow and test innovations, rather than valorizing innovation as being inherently good.
Innovative
is at best a neutral adjective.
9
. In a nutshell, direct instruction is preferable for novices while open-ended learning processes like “discovery learning” are often better for experts. But of course very few children in the K–12 educations system are experts, no matter how much we value and respect their insights and intelligence. For more on this see Clark, Kirschner, and Sweller, “Putting Students on the Path to Learning: The Case for Fully Guided Instruction” (
https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/Clark.pdf
).
10
