5 Comments

Thank you for always being so thought provoking! Have you listened to this? Totally aligns with what you write about.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/education-research-reading-room/id1200068608?i=1000552429349

Expand full comment

This is a super important point out of many you make:

Teachers Need Curriculum That Incorporates Strategies

But even when the strategies recommended in Classroom Instruction are on solid ground, the authors’ summaries of studies often don’t provide enough information to enable teachers to transfer them easily to the classroom. What teachers really need is curriculum that provides rich content for students, in a coherent and logically sequenced manner, and incorporates research-backed instructional strategies in a way that’s likely to work best.

There are very interesting PD statistics about 'transfer to practice' which show that without direct coaching transfer rarely happens. In this case, if there isn't enough information in the book about transfer, that makes it even harder. I recently responded to the pushback on Sold a Story with this piece: Getting Reading Right: On Truths, Truce, and Trust.

https://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2023/01/guest-post-getting-reading-right-on.html

Here's how I addressed transfer to practice:

Trust: Knowing which reading experts to follow

For me, trust comes from gleaning where experts intersect with each other and how their recommendations in turn intersect with my classroom experience. I was fortunate to have stumbled upon the science of reading nearly two decades ago through the books by cognitive psychologist Diane McGuinness. She was right, for example, that the notion of an 'r-controlled vowel' is a phonics fabrication, as made-up as three-cueing because the vowels in 'for,' 'far,' and 'fir' are not uniformly ‘controlled’. But she was wrong about dyslexia, so I've looked to Nadine Gaab for guidance in that area. Similarly, Timothy Shanahan, Mark Seidenberg, and Daniel Willingham have helped me contextualize the oft-cited baseball study and have illuminated both the promise and limitations of promoting the background knowledge that Natalie Wexler ardently advocates.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment