Latest / Wellness, Actually with Emily Oster & Perry Wilson, MD / Why Kids Can't Read: How we missed the mark on literacy education

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Why Kids Can't Read: How we missed the mark on literacy education · Wellness, Actually with Emily Oster & Perry Wilson, MD

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: This is parent data. I'm Emily Oster, Butterfly.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: In the sky. I can go twice.
• 0:15
  Speaker 3: Take a look.
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: It's in a book, a reading rain.
• 0:21
  Speaker 4: A book is in the world for a kid. It's
• 0:24
  Speaker 4: fun expensive Haras. Reading is fundamental, brings these boys and
• 0:28
  Speaker 4: girls all kinds of books. Learn to read with hooked
• 0:31
  Speaker 4: on phonics, the musical reading programs.
• 0:35
  Speaker 3: You A let me call one eight hundred A D
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: C D E f G.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: It's one thing to say that reading is fundamental, and.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: I remember hearing this.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: But where I really learned how important reading is is
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: from television, specifically from the show Punky Brewster.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Maybe the World is Fine.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Or just a little, and the episode of Punky Brewster
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: where she and her friend are babysitting and the kids
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: swallows something from underneath the sink, and we realize that
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Punky Brewster's friend does not know how to read and
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: is unable to read the poison control instructions.
• 1:18
  Speaker 4: Nine one one emergency.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Hello, my brother, just strength from a bottle stuff under
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: the sink in the kitchen. I don't know what to do.
• 1:25
  Speaker 4: Calm down your address registered when you called. I'm sending
• 1:28
  Speaker 4: somebody right now. But what do I do?
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: He looks real sick.
• 1:31
  Speaker 4: Do you have the bottle your brother drank out?
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Yes, I've done, and it's right here.
• 1:35
  Speaker 4: Okay, Now there's a label on it that tells you
• 1:37
  Speaker 4: what to do in case someone swallows it. Read it
• 1:40
  Speaker 4: to me, read it. Yes, I can't read it is
• 1:43
  Speaker 4: the label worn off?
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: No, I can't read.
• 1:47
  Speaker 4: You can't read at all? A little you gotta try.
• 1:50
  Speaker 4: It's very important.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: Reading is really fundamental, and not just for poison control
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: instructions while you're babysitting, although that's important, but also for
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: all of the things that we want our kids to
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: learn in school. They need to learn to read so
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: they can read. They also need to learn to read
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: so they can do math, and do social studies and
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: do science.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: Reading comes up all the time.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: And yet in the US only about a third of
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  Speaker 1: fourth and eighth graders are testing at grade level in reading.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: That means two thirds of kids in those grades are
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: not reading at the grade level we expect. And in
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: the US fourteen percent of adults cannot read.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: Why is this? And can we fix it?
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  Speaker 1: If you've been following some of the recent media and
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: political rhetoric on reading, you might have heard the phrase
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: science of reading phonics or phonics versus balance literacy, or
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: phonics versus a whole language approach. These are all referring
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: to different ways that we might think about teaching kids
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: how to read. Phonics is probably the simplest to understand,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: and we talk about phonics, we're talking about understanding the
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: link between letters and sounds. So when we teach kids
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: to read with a primarily phonics based approach, we teach
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: them that sounds correspond to letters, and that you can
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: put those letters together by putting their sounds together and read.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: So you teach a kid that s says an, A
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: says at A T sys T, and then you teach
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: them and you can say sat, and then they're reading SAT,
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: and pretty soon they're reading hat, and then they're reading MAT.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: And we go on from there.
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  Speaker 1: That has been the predominant method of teaching people to
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  Speaker 1: read for an extremely long time, but in the US,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: beginning in the nineteen sixties, there was a movement towards
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: what some people call a whole language approach, which was
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: the idea that maybe instead of using this phonics system,
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: which while simple, is quite boring, we could instead teach
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: kids to read by exposing them to more interesting books
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: and by having.
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  Speaker 2: Them absorb the words.
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  Speaker 1: It turns out that that whole language approach to learning
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  Speaker 1: to read is actually not very effective for most people.
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  Speaker 1: That for most people, phonics is a much better way
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: to approach reading instruction, and particularly for kids who are
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: struggling to read, phonics is really required to make progress
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: going forward. My guest today on the podcast is Emily Hanford.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Emily is a journalist who has worked on these issues,
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  Speaker 1: the issues around children being behind in reading and issues
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  Speaker 1: around how we teach kids to read for many years,
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  Speaker 1: and in twenty twenty two she released an incredibly successful
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: podcast called Sold the Story, which has sparked a raft
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: of discussion about these issues and ultimately pushed legislation and
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  Speaker 1: changes in how kids are actually taught in schools. At
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  Speaker 1: the core, her podcast is about not only how we
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: should teach kids to read, but how we ended up
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  Speaker 1: with a reading instruction system in many places in the
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  Speaker 1: US which actually isn't based on the best data. Her
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  Speaker 1: podcast is a long story about economics, politics, It's about
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  Speaker 1: resistance to change. Today on this podcast, Emily and I'll
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  Speaker 1: talk a little bit about her journey on Sould the Story,
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: but we'll also talk much more about the data on
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: the science of reading and practically about how parents can
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: know if their kids' schools are teaching reading well. As
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: a parent, how do you know how it's going, what
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: would make you concerned, and what would be some.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: Methods that you could use to step in.
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  Speaker 1: We also discuss a bit how we got to this
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  Speaker 1: place and whether the wave of state legislation about the
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  Speaker 1: science of reading is actually going to rescue us. After
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: the break Emily Hanford Emily Hanford, I am absolutely delighted
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: to have you on the podcast.
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  Speaker 3: Well, I'm very happy to be here, thanks for asking me.
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  Speaker 1: So I'd love to start by having you introduce yourself.
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  Speaker 3: Sure, my name is Emily Hanford. I am a senior
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  Speaker 3: correspondent and producer at APM Reports, where the documentary and
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: investigative reporting team at American Public Media. We are public
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: radio Public Media. I've been working at since two thousand
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: and eight, covering education, making long form radio documentaries and
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: now podcasts about education, and I'm the host of a
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: podcast called Sold a Story, which first came out in
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: the fall of twenty twenty two and has continued since.
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: We have several new episodes, including a couple of new
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: episodes that came out in the spring of twenty twenty four.
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  Speaker 2: And the podcast is what We're here to talk.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: It's a really amazing podcast, so we're not going to
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: rehash all of it, although I will tell people if
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: you haven't listened to that podcast, as soon as you're
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: finished with this episode, please go listen to the entire thing.
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  Speaker 1: And I did want to take this opportunity to publicly
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: say thank you because my daughter, my twelve year old
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: at the time eleven year old, listened to the podcast
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: and she loved it and it was great, and then
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: she wrote to you to say how much she loved it,
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: and you wrote back to her, which was so nice
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: and totally made her, like, made her week.
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  Speaker 2: So thank you.
• 7:33
  Speaker 3: I'm so glad to hear that. You know. I just
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: got a message just yesterday of the youngest listener I've
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: known of so far. Someone wrote to me and said
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: that his four year old son has been listening four
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: years old, that his parents have been playing it and
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: he's been saying no, no, play a little bit more.
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  Speaker 2: That's amazing. He's going to learn and he's going to
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  Speaker 2: learn to read.
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  Speaker 1: So the podcast is about how kids learn to read
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  Speaker 1: and about the crisis and how we teach kids to read.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: And I thought, without you know, rehashing everything you talk
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: about there, I think it'd be useful for people to
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  Speaker 1: understand a little bit the stakes of what we're talking
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  Speaker 1: about and even what the words mean. So now, in
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  Speaker 1: part because of your podcast, this idea of phonics and
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  Speaker 1: science of reading, those words are out in the world,
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  Speaker 1: but I'm not sure it's always visible to people, like
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  Speaker 1: what does that mean? So do you want to give
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: us a little bit of an overview about what are
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: the what does phonics mean when we say teach phonics?
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  Speaker 1: How is that different from what might be happening Otherwise?
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  Speaker 3: You've asked very complicated questions. I know, have a very long.
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  Speaker 1: Have so many podcasts episodes summarize it in two and
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  Speaker 1: a half minutes.
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  Speaker 3: Okay, Well, one of the things that I actually like
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  Speaker 3: to start up by saying is that the podcast and
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  Speaker 3: I would say, the science of reading and I'll get
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  Speaker 3: back to that in a minute, are about a lot
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  Speaker 3: more than phonics. Phonics is an important component of learning
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  Speaker 3: how to read, and there has been a huge amount
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: of research over the past forty or fifty years that
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: has revealed a whole lot that wasn't known before about
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  Speaker 3: how reading works in the brain, Like how do we
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  Speaker 3: even do that? How do we read? How do we
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  Speaker 3: learn to read? And it turns out that having a
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  Speaker 3: good understanding of how the sounds in words are represented
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  Speaker 3: by letters is absolutely critical when it comes to becoming
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  Speaker 3: a good reader. That might sound kind of obvious to people,
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  Speaker 3: but the fact is we've been having debates, really crazy,
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  Speaker 3: very passionate debates for hundreds of years about how to
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  Speaker 3: teach kids to read, whether you should start with letters
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  Speaker 3: and the sounds, or you should start with sort of
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  Speaker 3: the meaning of the text, whole words, whole sentences, you know,
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  Speaker 3: sort of. I think everyone who's been involved in these
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  Speaker 3: debates shares the same goal of helping kids learn how
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  Speaker 3: to read, but the question has been sort of how
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  Speaker 3: does a kid get to that goal? How do you
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  Speaker 3: go from being a four or five six year old
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  Speaker 3: child who knows how to speak a language but doesn't
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  Speaker 3: know how to read it yet? What does it take
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  Speaker 3: to become a reader of a language? And what's happened
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  Speaker 3: is that cognitive scientists and many other researchers have been
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  Speaker 3: engaged in really interesting research that has sort of taken
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  Speaker 3: place kind of outside the world of traditional education, school
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  Speaker 3: sort of oriented research. It's sort of been the cognitive
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  Speaker 3: scientists kind of on the other side of the quad,
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  Speaker 3: and they have discovered all these really fascinating things about reading.
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  Speaker 3: And the most important thing to understand is that you
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  Speaker 3: cannot be a good reader without having a good understanding.
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  Speaker 3: It doesn't have to be a conscious You can explain
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  Speaker 3: all the rules of the language understanding, but you have
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  Speaker 3: a really good ability of understanding the relation relationship between
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: letters and sounds. And it turns out that a lot
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  Speaker 3: of other research has shown that the most effective way
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  Speaker 3: to make sure people have that knowledge, which is critical
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  Speaker 3: to ultimately becoming a good reader. It's not the end goal,
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  Speaker 3: it's not all you need, but it is a critical
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  Speaker 3: foundation that the most efficient, most effective way to do
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  Speaker 3: that is to teach that to kids right out of
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  Speaker 3: the box, right away. They can learn it, They need
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  Speaker 3: to learn it. It's teachable, and if you teach kids
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  Speaker 3: that at the very beginning of school, you increase their
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  Speaker 3: chances of becoming good readers. And we have fought about
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  Speaker 3: phonics for so long that it's gotten caught up in
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  Speaker 3: a lot of stuff about reading, and it's turned out
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  Speaker 3: that there are many schools in the country that maybe
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: teach a little bit of phonics, but they've also been
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  Speaker 3: teaching all these other sort of strategies and ways to
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  Speaker 3: get the words that don't necessarily include looking at the
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  Speaker 3: word carefully sounding it out, connecting the pronunciation of the
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  Speaker 3: word with the spelling and the meaning. And that's what
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  Speaker 3: your brain has got to do for you to learn
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  Speaker 3: how to read those words quickly and efficiently. So I've
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  Speaker 3: had a lot of approaches to reading that haven't included
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  Speaker 3: a really good foundational focus on that, nor a good
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  Speaker 3: understanding among teachers about why that's so important.
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  Speaker 1: I want to pause on the data piece because I
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: think I think that that piece is incredibly interesting, and of.
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  Speaker 3: Course you do.
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  Speaker 2: Of course I knew, of course I would think that.
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  Speaker 1: But where I think it's a little hard for people
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  Speaker 1: to sometimes understand that is, you know, I, as a
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  Speaker 1: fluent reader, when I read, I have no perception that
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  Speaker 1: I am.
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  Speaker 2: Sounding anything out right.
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  Speaker 1: I don't when I look I'm looking over here at
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  Speaker 1: something it's as ballad and closed, and I just look
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  Speaker 1: at that, and those words they appear.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: In my in my head. I should probably vote on
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: whatever that is.
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  Speaker 1: But they just appear in my head and I'm not
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  Speaker 1: perceiving that I'm sounding them out. Yeah, And some of
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  Speaker 1: for me, some of the most interesting data on this
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  Speaker 1: comes from what the sort of putting people in an fMRI.
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  Speaker 2: And seeing what their brain is doing when they're looking at.
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  Speaker 1: Particularly longer words and recognizing that in fact, whether I
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: perceive it or not, I am in fact chunking that
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: word and sounding it out, of course instantaneously, not in
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: a long form at like my kids learned, but that
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: that skill remains as a central way that we are
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: reading even when we don't perceive it. And I think
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: that that connection for me has been very important in
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: thinking about why that set of skills was so is
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: so crucial, because it remains so crucial. It's not something
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: you use and then forget and then never use again.
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  Speaker 1: It's the whole thing.
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  Speaker 3: Well, and just to complicate it a little bit more's
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: what it turns out that you can actually there is
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: sort of a direct route for you at this point
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: in your life between words that you've seen a lot
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: that you know really well, which probably imcrude, ballot enclosed.
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: There's sort of a direct route for you to be
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: able to look at that word and know what it
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: is without really any sounding out. Now, the reason you
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: can get this direct root from the reading that word
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: to knowing it is because at some point you laboriously
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: sounded out the word ballot and you connected b a
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: lllot ballot and the meaning and all those three things
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: get tightly connected into sort of a word form, and
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: your brain can just get them instantly. Longer words that
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: you don't see as often you may spend actually just
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: a little bit more time on because you are doing
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: a little bit more work to possibly like chunk it,
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: because your brain isn't immediately like I got that word it.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: This stuff is completely fascinating. There's a really great book
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: written by a French neuroscientist named Stanislas Duan and it's
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: called Reading in the Brain.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Yes, that book is highly recommend it.
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: Who wants to understand this? But the larger point you're
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: making is critical, which is what it seems like we're
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: doing when we're reading is not what we're really doing.
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: And this is why this sort of whole word approach
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: became very popular because it seems like, oh, look at
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: what skilled readers do they know these whole words in
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: an instant, right, And we do know these whole words,
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: tens of thousands of them in an instant, But the
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: question is how do we do that, and how did
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: we get there? How did we first learn how to
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: do that? That's critical. You have to first learn how
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: to do it and then how you're doing it now.
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: Turns out there might be a little bit of a
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: difference between how you first did it and how you
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: do it now, but you need to go through that
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: process of doing it initially, and this very you know,
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: I think this is one of the bigger tensions in
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: the sort of debates about reading. I mentioned earlier that
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: some of this really eye opening research was taking place
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: in like psychology departments, among cognitive scientists that weren't in
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: the education school. And I think a lot of the
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: research that has been taking place in schools of education
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: has a lot of value. But much of it has
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: been observational research. Other kinds of research too, But that's
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: a very strong tenet within education research is to sort
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: of observe what learners observe, what children observe, what kids
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: and classrooms are doing, and to do sort of descriptional
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: kinds of studies that are based on what you can observe.
• 16:36
  Speaker 3: What's so fascinating when you get inside people's brains is
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: what you can observe is not what's actually going on
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: behind the eyes. And that's what makes cognitive science so fascinating.
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: Some of this stuff is kind of counterintuitive in a way.
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: It doesn't seem like that's what's happening, but that's what is.
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: And that's why I think it's really important for teachers
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: to have some understanding that I don't have to become
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: cognitive scientists, but I think it's really profound for many
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: teachers to gain a little bit of knowledge about what
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: some of the cognitive science has shown us about learning
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: to read and learning in general over the past fifty
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: years or so, because it changes their notion. It helps
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: you understand something about how people are actually learning, which
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: has implications for teaching.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: And I think the other you know, piece of this
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: to sort of get into what we see with kids
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: and why this can be hard is actually, for very
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: young kids, they can learn some words with a sort
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: of the kind of pattern recognition that almost the visual recognition,
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: the same way they know the McDonald sign.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: You know, they can see the McDonald sign.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: They can see, they can recognize that that's a form
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: of it's a form of it looks like it's a phase.
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: It's a phase and stage of learning to read. It
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: isn't actually reading, although actually what you identified there are
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: two sort of different things. So it is true that
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: you can sort of memorize a certain number of words
• 18:05
  Speaker 3: by the way they look. And actually, when you interview
• 18:08
  Speaker 3: older readers who struggle with reading, this is one of
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: their main strategies. They sort of memorize the look of words.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: They sort of store them like little pictures in your mind.
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: But it turns out that when you're a skilled reader,
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: that's not how you're storing words. You're not storing them
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: as pictures in your mind. You're storing them through the
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: sort of linkage between the sound, the spelling, and the meaning.
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: So that's one thing, and that's actually one reason why
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: a lot of kids can look like they're pretty good
• 18:31
  Speaker 3: readers for the first couple of years kindergarten, first grade,
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: maybe even second grade. They're kind of chugging along, and
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: things sort of fall apart by third grade because suddenly many,
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: you know, the early reading books only have so many
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: words in them. And some kids are really good memorizers,
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: and they can sort of memorize all those words, but
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: when they start taking in to war words they've never
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: seen before, longer multi syllavic words, they don't know how
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: to attack those words. They don't know what to do,
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: and they're really lost. So one thing is word memorization.
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: The other thing that you talked about, though, is definitely
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: a phase in learning how to read, which is that
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: sort of learning by cues, like so, you know the
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: McDonald's sign, you know Coca cola, and kids are sort
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: of seeing that as a picture and the logo or
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: whatever the picture is that goes with the word is
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: key to them understanding. And there's actually fascinating research that
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: shows that kids can know a McDonald's sign. But if
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: you take away the big M and just give them
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: word McDonald's, they can't read that word, which means they
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: weren't reading the word, they were reading the combination of
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: the word and the symbol. So young parents will be like,
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: oh my gosh, my kid is reading. Well, they're not. Really,
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: they're understanding how to understand these various symbols in their environment,
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: and they have yet to get to the alphabetic stage,
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: which is really understanding that those letters themselves represent sounds
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: and meaning in words.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: So I want to ask about the We sort of
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: talked about the cognitive science piece of the research, and
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: then I wanted to ask about the research in classroom.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: So if we said, you know, some.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Of these approaches to teaching kids to read work better,
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: some of them seem like they'd work better based on
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: the brain, how do we know what works in the classroom.
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a really important question. So to go back
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: to one of the things we were talking about earlier,
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: the science of reading. So I just want to pause
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: for a moment on that phrase because I do think
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: it's being used a lot these days, and it's being
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: used inaccurately pretty frequently. So the science of reading is
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: not like a thing you do, or a way to teach,
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: or a program you buy. It's basically just a term
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: that refers to this big body of evidence that I
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: sort of referred to before, this cognitive science. But it's
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: more than just that. So it's important for people to
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: recognize that this science of reading, loosely defined, is not
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: just this brain research, neuroscience, cognitive science research. But when
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: people are referring to that, they're usually also referring to
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: a lot of studies that have been done in real
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: classrooms with real kids, some of it with small groups
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: of kids. But I think it's widely misunderstood that a
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: lot of this research was with entire classrooms of children
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: and in entire schools. But it's also really important to
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: recognize that the science of reading, the cognitive science that
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: getting inside the brain understanding what goes on doesn't give you,
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: it's not sort of directly translatable into a way to teach,
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: right the scientific research has implications. Understanding something about how
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: people learn can then inform how you teach, what you teach,
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: when you teach, at the order you teach it. In
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: all very profound, very important things. But translating that stuff
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: into practice is one of the things that's going on
• 21:45
  Speaker 3: right now. But there is a large body of research
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: going back decades of looking at particular approaches in classrooms,
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: going back long before we had all this cognitive science research,
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: long before we could peek inside people's brains to see
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: what was going on on, people were testing out various
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: approaches to things like teaching little kids how to read.
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: And we have a pretty robust. There was a really
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: important book written about this in nineteen sixty seven looking
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: at a whole bunch of research that have been done
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: through the first part of the twentieth century, and that
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: research has always found consistency consistently, that sort of starting
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: with the letters and sounds and focusing on phonics and
• 22:24
  Speaker 3: early reading instruction is a more efficient, more effective approach
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: for more kids. You tend to give more kids a
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: better chance at being good readers. And now all this
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: brain science and cognitive science has in some ways helped
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: us understand why it's all us understand why that worked,
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: and that research is ongoing. So not only was there
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: a huge amount of research done in the middle early
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: part of the century, partly because people have been fighting
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: about phonics for so long. People started studying it a
• 22:55
  Speaker 3: long time ago, let's try to figure out what really
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: works best. But there's been continuing research through the eighties
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: and nineties. Huge amounts of money of our taxpayer dollars
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: have gone to these long term studies that have looked
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: at different approaches to instruction over a long period of time.
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: And the consistent finding is that phonics instruction is critical.
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: It's not the only thing you need. It takes a
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: lot more to be a good reader, but you can't
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: be a good reader without understanding the sounds and letters
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: and words, and that if you want kids to know something,
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: the best thing to do is to teach it to them.
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: So there is another line of research just about instruction
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: itself in all areas, sort of whether you want instruction
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: to be sort of direct and explicit, especially at the
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: early stages of learning anything direct and explicit instruction of
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: helping kids or the learner whoever it is, sort of
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: understand the concept that you're trying to teach them. How
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: you break that down and teach it to them, and
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: then later when they have a lot of foundational skills.
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: We all know this from our own development. You can
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: do so much more of the sort of exploration and
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: the discovery of new knowledge on your own, but having
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: the skills as necessary. So I think all of this
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: debate about reading instruction is actually more a debate about
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: sort of direct and explicit instruction versus more sort of
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: discovery oriented learning. And you know, all of this is
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: always some shades of gray. There's obviously room for both,
• 24:30
  Speaker 3: but it's really important to recognize that with something like
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: reading in particular at the very beginning. If you want
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: to make sure that kids know it, then teach it
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: to them. Don't expect them to discover it on their own.
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: Don't make that a sort of core or even sort
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: of tangential kind of element of the instruction. And I
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: would say it's sort of a core tangential element of
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: the reading instruction has been this idea that we're going
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: to kind of let kids discover it for themselves.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: So I think the reason for that is a fallacy
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: associated with what is true of kids who are good
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: readers at the beginning. So one of the one of
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: the reactions I had most strongly to a lot of
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: the discussion in the podcast and just this general discussion
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: is there are a lot of kids who are going
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: to learn to read no matter what.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: Now, maybe they could learn it faster, they could learn
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: it better.
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: But my mother and I talked about this when your
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: podcast had first come out, and or maybe when I
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: was writing about it, and she said, you know, for her,
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: she would have learned to read no matter what. You know,
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: she basically knew how to read when she got into kindergarten.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: But for her brother, that was not true, and that
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: her mother basically had to come into the school and say,
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: you know, you're not actually teaching him, like I have
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: to teach him how how to read. But I think
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: there is this sense of for kids who are just
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: naturally people vary, there's heterogenating, and for kids who are
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: naturally better at reading, they're going to show up pretty
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: much anything you do, they're going to learn, and then
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: they're going to enjoy it, and you're going to feel like, oh,
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: wouldn't be great if everyone was like little Lucy there
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: who just sits in the corner and reads her book
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: and is you know, is doing so great. Let's try
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: to generate environment where everyone is experiencing it like Lucy is,
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: and we miss that that's a maybe that's the unusual
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: thing or yeah, and that if we don't scaffold more
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: explicit teaching for everybody, we're not going to get them
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: to sitting in the corner and reading Harry Potter.
• 26:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And then what ends up happening and not I
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: think because anyone's sort of intending it to be this way,
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: is that the child or the child's parents of the
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: kids who aren't learning to read like little Lucy, who
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: learned easily kind of get blamed, yeah, because the question
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: is so like, you're not trying hard enough. You didn't
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: do enough before this kid got to school. You're not
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: doing enough at home to read to him. And I
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: think you're very right to identify that as a sort
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: of major fallacy at play here. I would you know
• 27:07
  Speaker 3: one of a couple of key sort of findings here
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: that there are a number of people who struggle to
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: learn how to read. And you might be a very
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: smart person, Like it doesn't have to do with intelligence, right, Like,
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: there are very smart people who learn who struggle to
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: learn how to read. But I but they and they
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: just they need to be taught how to do it.
• 27:27
  Speaker 3: They may stumble along and come to reading eventually sort
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: of kind of, but there's a lot of stuff they
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: miss out on. But there's a lot of stuff around
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: spelling in particular, right So there, so there are a
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: lot of kids, I think who are sort of limping
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: along because they're not getting the instruction they need. And
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: then there's a subset that is not a small number
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: who are not not limping along at all. They're like
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: really struggling. They are really can't figure this thing out.
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: And they're starting to really kind of get lost the
• 28:00
  Speaker 3: shuffle early on in school, and they're sort of getting
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: disengaged or having behavior problems because this reading thing isn't
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: making sense.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: And because it comes up in them every class and everywhere.
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: I bet you know by the time you get to
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: third or fourth grade, you need to be able to
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: read pretty well to do math, and to do science,
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: to do social studies, and to do everything else, because
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: reading actually is fundamental, as they as they say, to everything.
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: And I'll say this one other thing that you're identifying
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: about the fallacy. I talk about this often in talks
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: I give. So I think I was one of those
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: kids who learned to read pretty easily. And I have
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: two boys who are now in their young twenties, and
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: they learned to read pretty easily too. I've been an
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: education reporter for a long time before this ever really
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: occurred to me, and I think part of that is
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: because I was living in that bubble of, oh, what
• 28:46
  Speaker 3: does it take to learn how to read? Lots of
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: reading to your kids, lots of talking to your kids.
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: You know, it'll all come together in time. And when
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: I started to realize how many people struggle with learning
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: how to read and how so many kids are not
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: getting the instruction they need in school. That was a
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: real shock to me. I mean that's how I started
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: on this reporting years ago, long before sold a story.
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: Sold a story was sort of the result of reporting
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: that I had been doing for years. I really wanted
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: and sold a story to try to answer some questions
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: about how it happened, Like why is it how is
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: it that a lot of teachers don't know about a
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: lot of this research, don't know how to teach kids
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: to read? And I know that because they've told me.
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: I was a first grade teacher for fifteen years, and
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: I didn't I think I thought, I guess I thought
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: I was teaching kids to read. But you know what
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: is so devastating.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: This is not.
• 29:43
  Speaker 3: Uncommon that a teacher realizes that she, and very often
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: in elementary school education in particular, it's women, they don't
• 29:51
  Speaker 3: know how to teach kid to read when they have
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: their own child who really struggles and they realize I
• 29:56
  Speaker 3: don't know how to teach her. I don't know how
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: to teach my own child how to read.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: More parent data including where we go from here for
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: American schools and Emily Hanford's favorite children's book, After the Break.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: So for parents listening, I want to give them a
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: little bit of a sense of you. If I was
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: in my kids classroom and I was or I was
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: hearing in the classroom, but I was hearing about the
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: reading curriculum approach, how would I how would I know
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: to be concerned? Is the simplest way I can ask it.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: So what does it look like? We've said phonics is good,
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: We've said some find like, what does it look like
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: if things.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: Are not going the way that they should be?
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: Well, let me say the first scenario would be a kid,
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: it would be a parent, because you know, it's kind
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: of rare actually for parents to sit in on classroom instruction,
• 31:19
  Speaker 3: although I do think that's a good thing to ask
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: to do, go in and volunteer. But the very first
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: thing a parent is probably going to notice is their
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: own child. So the first thing I would say is
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: that if you're noticing that your own child is sort
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: of struggling with reading, resisting reading, having a lot of
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: temper tantrums around reading, that don't ignore that red flag
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: warning like that is that is something that you need
• 31:41
  Speaker 3: to think about. You need to go talk to the
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: school about it. That might be a frustrating experience. You
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: should find other teachers, other parents in your community who
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: are talking about this. You can find a lot of
• 31:51
  Speaker 3: those people online. You should really try to deal with
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: that problem. If you do get a chance to go
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: into your childild's class, you probably will see some phonics instruction.
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: And for a long time I think people thought, well,
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: I'm seeing them. They're introducing letters, they're sounding out pH
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: or whatever, so they're doing phonics, and so people checked
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: the box like, oh, phonics. But I think it's really
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: important to recognize that. You want to make sure that
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: kids are not also being taught other strategies to learn
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: to read. So they're not being handed books that have
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: all kinds of words in them that they haven't yet
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: been taught how to read in their phonics lessons. So
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: you want to see some matching up between kids have
• 32:31
  Speaker 3: been taught. You want to see some sort of sequence,
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: like kids are being taught sort of the most frequent
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: letter patterns first, and it's building up to complexity, and
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: they're being given books that have letters with that have
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: words with the letter combinations that they have been taught,
• 32:45
  Speaker 3: so they don't have to guess or memorize the words.
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: They can actually sound out most of the words in
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: the book. So you want to see some connection between
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: the word reading instruction and the words they're actually reading
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: the book.
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: So can I give one like explicit just for people?
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: Like explicit example? And I think, what how you're what.
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: You're talking about?
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: So so think about the contrast between uh, like the
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: Bob books. So the first Bob book, which is a
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: series of books, has four letters in an M A Matt,
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: Matt's m A T S and you learn the sounds,
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: and then the book is Matt Matt Sat Sam Sam Sat.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: It's it's only the letter sounds that you know. That's
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: kind of one quite letter sound phonics based book. You
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: then have a set of books that would say, you know,
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: like the cat. You know Pam is an orange cat,
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: and there's a picture of an orange cat. And although
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: orange is absolutely not a word you have learned, we
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: might say, well, what what do you think that could say?
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: Because of the color and asking the kid to effectively
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: guess about the word orange. That would be an example
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: of something that was not a phonics based approach to
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: learning that word.
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: Is that do I have that.
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: Right, excellent. Yeah, that was excellent example. Yeap. And I
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: think that's actually one of the primary primary things that
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: teachers can that parents can look for, and you don't
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: have to go into the classroom to see that. You
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: can look at what's being brought home in your look
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: in your kids backpack.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think the thing that came
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: out a lot in you talked about was this idea
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: of strategy of.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: Guessing, as in not like guessing.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: Words is not an approach, not a not a typically
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: a great approach to learn to read, because it is
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: not a way we it's not how we do it,
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: So how do you do it as an adult?
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: Right? And it's important to recognize that I think people
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: who have taught that approach to kids have a good
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: thing in mind, which is like, okay, so here are
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: these books. You know. One of the issues with the
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: English language is that some of our simplest words are
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: the most difficult to pronounce and figure out, or the
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: kinds of words you would see frequently in a kid's book,
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: like circus or something like that.
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: Right, or knife?
• 34:55
  Speaker 3: Why is the case very good?
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: Knife?
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: That's I remember my daughter asking like, what do you
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: mean that's what I was like, I don't know.
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: It's like the kay silent. It makes the I say
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: a different thing.
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: Right, And eventually, as you start to get sort of
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: good with these letters and sounds, your brain can also
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: deal with these little exceptions. It's not like kids need
• 35:13
  Speaker 3: to be taught every rule in the English language and
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: they you know, that's not actually the goal here. So
• 35:19
  Speaker 3: that's actually a red flag that I would have for
• 35:22
  Speaker 3: parents to look for when there is a lot of
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: phonics instruction. I think there can be there can be
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: phonics instruction that's not very good, that's sort of almost
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: overkill or sort of teaching kids every rule rather than
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: what you really want to see is like that sequence
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: from simple to complex, because eventually what's happening in your
• 35:39
  Speaker 3: brain is you're starting to understand how these letters and
• 35:43
  Speaker 3: sounds work. Is that you are actually starting to do
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: it's called statistical learning or basically like implicit learning. You
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: are starting to sort of teach yourself this stuff on
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: it on your own, so it's it, but it is
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: really weedy and difficult to understand this. So it's very
• 36:01
  Speaker 3: important I think for parents to open a dialogue with
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: the schools. Many schools are talking about this issue these days,
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: and so I think you can be actually more successful
• 36:11
  Speaker 3: in having a productive conversation with the schools today than
• 36:14
  Speaker 3: maybe you would have four or five years ago. I
• 36:16
  Speaker 3: think things are really changing. But also really encourage parents
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: to talk to their friends and other parents and other
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: parents in the community of kids who are struggling with reading,
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: because those parents have often educated themselves quite deeply about
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: what the school is doing, what they have been doing,
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: what they're trying to change, the kinds of struggles that
• 36:37
  Speaker 3: kids are having, where you can go for help outside
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: of the school system, like other parents are really going
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: to be some of your key assets here in you
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: figuring out what you can do for your child, because
• 36:49
  Speaker 3: you really do also and I don't mean to put
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: a sense of panic into anyone here, but it's important
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: to deal with this quickly because the time the clock
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: is ticking and you really want a kid to not
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: fall behind early in reading. That is a really difficult
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: thing to recover from. You really want to sort of
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: nip this problem in the bud right at the beginning
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: and get get your child the help here she needs
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: right away.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: I want to ask the question about how how we
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: got here, at least very briefly, and this is a
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: big focus of the podcast, so I don't want to
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: spend a huge amount of time on that, but just
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: very generally, this makes so much sense, like when you
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: explain it, and you're right that the research, not the
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: fMRI research, but a lot of this research goes back
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: incredibly long time. So it isn't like we thought something
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden there was one large
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: randomized trial and we thought, oh my god, we got
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: it wrong. This is really it should not have been
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: much of a surprise, and yet a huge share of
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: schools are using strategies which really are not in line
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: with what should be happening.
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: I mean, what, how did that happen?
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well again we did have There's five and a
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: half hours too that tries to explain.
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: That the market.
• 38:10
  Speaker 3: Well, actually, I'll take you back to I think a
• 38:13
  Speaker 3: thought that I started a moment ago, and I don't
• 38:15
  Speaker 3: think I fully completed, which is I think there were
• 38:19
  Speaker 3: good intentions here. So part of the goal is to
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: figure out, well, how can we want kids to be
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: able to read books. We want kids to be able
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: to read, We want them to be able to read books.
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: We want them to be able to enjoy it, enjoy
• 38:30
  Speaker 3: them because the English language actually has quite a few
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: difficult words, which are the kind of words that might
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: be in the kinds of stories that kids would want
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: to read. What can we do it It's too much
• 38:41
  Speaker 3: to maybe teach them all the phonics they would need
• 38:44
  Speaker 3: to read those words. So let's try some other strategies.
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: Let's try to get them into books early by showing
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: them they can do things like look at the picture
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: and think of a word that makes sense, and look
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: at the first letter, look at the last letter letter.
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: Use your oral language ability, like you know the meanings
• 39:01
  Speaker 3: of lots of words, use what you know about spoken
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: language to sort of like use some clues from the
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: text to figure out these words. This will get kids
• 39:11
  Speaker 3: into books early. We'll get them going and they will
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: be like Lucy off in the corner reading, and that
• 39:16
  Speaker 3: does happen for some kids. So I think it was
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: sort of hard even in my reporting about this topic,
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: because I think once people understand some of the scientific research,
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: once I understand some stuff about what phonics is, that
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: you have to sound out words in order to know them,
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: it seems kind of obvious to people. You know, you're like, oh, wait, well,
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: why would anyone think that there was another way to
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: do it? Well, I think there's a good reason why
• 39:39
  Speaker 3: people found that there was another good way to do it,
• 39:41
  Speaker 3: which is the English language is hard. It actually can
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: take a couple of years to take people through the
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: sort of the way the English language works to teach
• 39:49
  Speaker 3: them a good phonics program. And we want to get
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: kids reading, we want to get them the enjoyment. We
• 39:54
  Speaker 3: want to get them to the good stuff. And it
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: works for some kids if you can figure out a
• 39:59
  Speaker 3: way to get them to the end goal. They sort
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: of do all the work, a lot of the work
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: in between. They get from the beginning to the end,
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: and they don't need a huge amount of direct instruction
• 40:14
  Speaker 3: for anyone to get there. But half of kids are
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: more really do need significantly more direct instruction in getting
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: there than they've been getting in many, many classrooms, not
• 40:24
  Speaker 3: just in the United States, but in other parts of
• 40:26
  Speaker 3: the world. This is really a reckoning that's going on
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: in many English speaking countries and in non English speaking
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: countries too. But I think this is particularly significant in
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: the English speaking world because even for a typically developing
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: reader who's developing pretty rapidly. They probably need a few
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: years in school and a lot of good exposure and
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: some guidance and instruction on written language to get how
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: English works. In a language like Spanish, where there's much
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: more relationship, it's literally just phonetic and you can sort
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: of teach kids the code of Spanish in a year
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: and most kids will be able to decode Spanish. Now,
• 41:07
  Speaker 3: does that mean they can read Spanish? Not necessarily, because
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: there are a lot of kids who are still developing
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: their Spanish vocabulary. We know kids come into school with
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: very different levels of oral language spoken language ability, which
• 41:22
  Speaker 3: is how this gets kind of pernicious in terms of
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: the way that it all sort of falls out, because
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: kids often from more educated, more affluent homes come into
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: school with more oral language ability, and that is an assist,
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: a very big assist in learning how to read. If
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: you can teach someone how to decode the language, oh well,
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: they're really often running in terms of the rest of
• 41:48
  Speaker 3: what they need to know to comprehend what they read.
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: And oh, by the way, knowing a lot of words
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: means that you're going to be able to decode them
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: more easily. You're going to be sounding them out and
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: then you say the word, and oh, you know that word,
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: whereas another kid who doesn't speak English was a first
• 42:03
  Speaker 3: language in an American school, for example, or doesn't have
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: as much vocabulary, is not going to have as much
• 42:08
  Speaker 3: of an assistance in learning how to read. So I
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: think we've kind of this whole debate is end up
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: is just very very intertwined with class and race in
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: this country, because kids who come into school with this
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: sort of oral language advantage often have an advantage when
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: it comes to learning how to read, especially if they're
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: not being directly taught. But they don't always. And I
• 42:33
  Speaker 3: would say one of the reasons. One of the ways
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: that I saw this whole problem most profoundly myself being
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: an upper middle class white woman who learned how to
• 42:43
  Speaker 3: read easily and had children who learned how to read easily.
• 42:46
  Speaker 3: It really was profound to me when I started meeting
• 42:50
  Speaker 3: a lot of people like me who did sort of
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: everything right. I'm doing that in air quotes before their
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: kids got to school, lots of reading to them, lots
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: of talking to them, and then their kids still couldn't read.
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: Often what you have in that case is a kid
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: with a true reading disability. Right, this is a child
• 43:06
  Speaker 3: who really really needs a lot of extra help learning
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: how to read. But if you think of that one
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: little pure example, now think of all the kids out
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: there who are somewhere on that spectrum. They're somewhere that
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: word reading ability is somewhere from really easy to really
• 43:22
  Speaker 3: really hard, and most kids are in between. And that
• 43:25
  Speaker 3: oral language ability is somewhere from really high to really low,
• 43:29
  Speaker 3: and most people are somewhere in between. And that combination
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: of things or what you really are going to be
• 43:35
  Speaker 3: sort of the foundation that takes you to sort of
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: being a good reader or not. And the decoding part,
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: the teaching kids how to read the words, that is
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: very teachable. It can be done by skilled and nolable
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: teachers in a few years in school. The rest of it,
• 43:55
  Speaker 3: all of that knowledge and language comprehension you need to
• 43:58
  Speaker 3: be a good reader. That is harder for schools to
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: control because so much of that happens outside of school.
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: And it's also what all of education is beyond learning
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: how to read. Right, So, I think one of the
• 44:11
  Speaker 3: things that's happening now in schools is as they're starting
• 44:14
  Speaker 3: to understand that there's something they have to do better
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: differently with the early reading instruction. Once you get kids
• 44:22
  Speaker 3: to be good little word readers, then it opens up
• 44:25
  Speaker 3: the whole box and a whole set of very very
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: important questions about what else are kids learning in school? Yeah,
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: are we teaching them that what they need to know?
• 44:35
  Speaker 4: What?
• 44:35
  Speaker 3: You know? Are are they getting a good education in
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: American public schools?
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: That is probably for a different podcast, But before I
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: let you go, I did want to ask about policy changes,
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: because I think this is a place where we have
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: seen a lot of states make statements pass laws that say,
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: you know, reading curricula have to conform to some kind
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: of science of reading. As you've said, is not entirely
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: clear what that really even means, but that's the language
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: a lot of them are using.
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: Do you are you encouraged by that?
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: You know, it's a it's a tricky one to answer,
• 45:13
  Speaker 3: and if you listen to the most recent four episodes,
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: I sort of touch on this question in all of them.
• 45:21
  Speaker 3: I think, obviously policy is really important, Lever, and one
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: of the things that I've heard from teachers, especially over
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: the last few years, is they've started to understand all
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: of this stuff about what has been off and missing
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: in their own reading instruction, and they're kind of looking
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: up to their principles, their superintendents, their school boards, and
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: then ultimately off and there's state departments of education and
• 45:43
  Speaker 3: their legislators to say, help me, you know, like we
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: need better materials, we need better training, we need things
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: that policy can help provide. So I think it's a
• 45:54
  Speaker 3: very important moment for the policy makers to be looking
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: down and listening to the teachers and parents and others
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: who are saying we need policy changes here. At the
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: same time, there's some delicate balance when it comes to
• 46:08
  Speaker 3: good policies turning into good change or instigating good change,
• 46:12
  Speaker 3: where you have some balance of sort of bottom up
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: and top down right bottom up needs the top top
• 46:18
  Speaker 3: down can become too much. Right policies have all kinds
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: of unattended consequences. The policy itself is never the solution,
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: you know. It's sort of like how the policy is implemented,
• 46:31
  Speaker 3: how the policy gets changed to meet what's maybe wasn't
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: right about the policy in the first place, or additional
• 46:38
  Speaker 3: things that need to be added. So it's kind of
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: a mess out there right now, and I think this
• 46:43
  Speaker 3: is very much a work in progress. I think there
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: are many people who are very glad to see state
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: legislators finally responding, and I think many of those same
• 46:52
  Speaker 3: people are sometimes taking a little pause when they're seeing
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: what the legislators are actually doing or how that's actually
• 47:01
  Speaker 3: getting translated. There's a lot of now lists or people
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: saying you can't use this curriculum and you have to
• 47:07
  Speaker 3: use that curriculum. And I think there's a couple of
• 47:10
  Speaker 3: really important questions there. One curriculum is clearly an important
• 47:14
  Speaker 3: part of this, but definitely not the only part, and
• 47:17
  Speaker 3: in fact, may not even be the most important part.
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: I actually think teacher knowledge and training and educator knowledge
• 47:23
  Speaker 3: in general is really important. And you know, how are
• 47:26
  Speaker 3: these different curriculum getting on these lists? What's the evidence
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: that this is good, that this is better, that this
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: is going to work?
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: All right?
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: My last question, what's your favorite children's book?
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: I heard your sigh right before that. Okay, that is
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: so hard to decide your kids are older.
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: But I bet, I know, I bet you.
• 47:48
  Speaker 3: Okay, I have two books that I've just been thinking
• 47:50
  Speaker 3: about in the last few days. Okay, so when my
• 47:52
  Speaker 3: kids are old enough that one of their babysitters is
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: about to have a baby, so we had to buy
• 47:59
  Speaker 3: baby presents. So one of my favorite books for little
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: kids is Hippos Go Berserk.
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: I think I think I could recite in the Holy
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: One Hippo all alone calls two hippos on the phone.
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: I think I could do the whole thing, but that's
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: not for this podcast.
• 48:11
  Speaker 3: Oh my god, I love it. And then I'm actually
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: about to go to Australia. And so I was talking
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: to the people that I'm planning with, and I don't
• 48:19
  Speaker 3: know if you remember Alexander and The Terrible, horrible, no good,
• 48:22
  Speaker 3: very Bad Day by Judith Fiorst, and what he says
• 48:25
  Speaker 3: all the time is like things are going so badly
• 48:27
  Speaker 3: he just wants to move to Australia, and Australia keeps
• 48:30
  Speaker 3: coming up, and at the end of the book, he's
• 48:33
  Speaker 3: his horrible day is coming to an end, and his
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: mother says to him, some days are like that, even
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: in Australia. And I feel like my mother used to
• 48:44
  Speaker 3: say that to me all the time, which is the
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: way of being like, you know, just get some sleep, honey,
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: it'll be better tomorrow. We all have bad days. So
• 48:51
  Speaker 3: I'm about to go to Australia. So I've bought a
• 48:53
  Speaker 3: couple of copies of those books to the people who
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: are hosting me because they have grandchildren and they've never
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: heard of it before. And I was like, oh, over
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: here in America we say some days are like that,
• 49:00
  Speaker 3: even in Australia.
• 49:03
  Speaker 2: That's amazing. Those are great suggestions.
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: I'm going to come in here with the Book with
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: No Pictures, which may post date.
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: Your I don't know what you're talking about.
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: The Book with No Pictures is a book with no pictures,
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: but a lot of were funny words that adults have
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: to say, Like it's difficult to describe, but if you
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: are a parent of a child who is slightly younger
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: than yours, your child will love it.
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: Okay, I'm going to write it down. I'm keeping a
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: future grandmother list.
• 49:36
  Speaker 2: Over here, important to have. Emily, thank you so much
• 49:39
  Speaker 2: for joining me with such a pleasure.
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you. I loved it.
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: Parent Data is produced by Tamar Avishai with support from
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: the Parent Data team and pix. If you have thoughts
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: on this episode, please join the conversation on my Instagram
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: at prof Emily Ostar, and if you want to support
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: the show, become a subscriber to the parent Data newsletter
• 50:10
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• 50:13
  Speaker 1: everything to do with parents and data to help you
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: make better, more informed parenting decisions. For example, a few
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: years ago, I interviewed another Emily on the topic of
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: kids learning to read. Professor Emily Solari about inequality and
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: reading skills across socioeconomic groups, and the role COVID played,
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: how to make phonics fun, and more. Check that out
• 50:34
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• 50:37
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• 50:39
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• 50:43
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• 50:46
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• 50:49
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• 50:52
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• 50:52
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• 50:56
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• 51:01
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