January 14, 2025 • 51 mins
Dr. Donna Scanlon talks to us about considering reading skills and strategy instruction from the perspective of the learner. Donna is known for her work in support of children who experience substantial difficulty in learning to read and on how to prevent and remediate reading difficulties. In particular, she and her colleagues developed an approach to early literacy instruction and intervention known as the Interactive Strategies Approach, which has been found to be effective in helping teachers to reduce the incidence of reading difficulties in the early primary grades, and is used in Response to Intervention contexts. She authored a freely available literacy research booklet titled, Helping Your Child Become a Reader, and a report titled An Examination of Dyslexia Research and Instruction, with Policy Implications, co authored with Classroom Caffeine guest Peter Johnston. Both resources are linked below. Her most recent book titled Early Literacy Instruction and Intervention was published by Guilford Press in 2024. Dr. Scanlon was a member of the International Reading Association's RtI Task Force. She is a 2017 inductee into the Reading Hall of Fame. Dr. Scanlon is Professor Emeritus at University at Albany State University of New York’s Department of Literacy Teaching and Learning and was affiliated with the University’s Child Research and Study Center for more than forty years.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Scanlon, D., Anderson, K.L., Barnes, E.M., Morse, M., & Yurkewecz-Stellato, T. (2024). Helping Your Child Become a Reader. ISA Professional Development. https://literacyresearchcommons.org/resources/
- Johnston, P., & Scanlon, D. (2021). An Examination of Dyslexia Research and Instruction With Policy Implications. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 70(1), 107-128. https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377211024625
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2025, Jan. 14). Another conversation with Donna Scanlon (Season 5, No. 6) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/2653-2E1C-A3DB-0EB7-F157-Q
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Education research has a problem the work of
brilliant education researchersoften doesn't reach the practice
of brilliant teachers.
Classroom Caffeine is here tohelp.
In each episode, I talk with atop education researcher or an
expert educator about what theyhave learned from years of
(00:32):
research and experiences.
In this episode, dr DonnaScanlon talks to us about
considering reading skills andstrategy instruction from the
perspective of the learnerconsidering reading skills and
strategy instruction from theperspective of the learner.
Donna is known for her work insupport of children who
(00:52):
experience substantialdifficulty in learning to read
and on how to prevent andremediate reading difficulties.
In particular, she and hercolleagues developed an approach
to early literacy instructionand intervention, known as the
Interactive Strategies Approach,which has been found to be
effective in helping teachers toreduce the incidence of reading
difficulties in the earlyprimary grades and is used in
(01:13):
response to intervention or RTIcontexts.
She authored a freely availableliteracy research booklet
entitled Helping your ChildBecome a Reader and a report
entitled An Examination ofDyslexia Research and
Instruction with PolicyImplications, co-authored with
Classroom Caffeine past guest,peter Johnston.
(01:35):
Both resources are linked inthe show notes.
Her most recent book is titledEarly Literacy Instruction and
Intervention and was recentlypublished by Guilford Press.
Dr Scanlon was a member of theInternational Reading
Association's RTI Task Force.
She is a 2017 inductee into theReading Hall of Fame.
(01:57):
Dr Scanlon is ProfessorEmeritus at University of
Albany's Department of Literacy,teaching and Learning and was
affiliated with the university'sChild Research and Study Center
for more than 40 years.
For more information about ourguest, stay tuned to the end of
this episode.
So pour a cup of your favoritedrink and join me, your host
(02:21):
Lindsay Persaud, for ClassroomCaffeine Research to Energize
your Teaching Practice.
Donna, thank you for joining me.
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Happy to be here.
Thank you for hosting it.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
So, from your own experiences in education, will
you share with us one or twomoments that inform your
thinking now?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
That's a really interesting question.
Sort of sends me down memorylane.
Probably the earliest memorythat I have about reading and
reading difficulties goes wayback to the early 1960s, when I
was in second grade.
There was a teacher who wascalled in to help a little boy
identify the word strong, whichhe could not read.
(03:03):
His last name, by the way, wasstrong and he could read strong
when he had to find his name.
So this teacher and this is aCatholic school decades ago, as
I said, where screaming was notan unusual characteristic of
interacting with kids who haddifficulty, so the teacher was
(03:23):
screaming at this little guy andsaid screamed over and over.
You know that word?
You?
Speaker 1 (03:29):
know that word you know that word.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Apparently she was thinking that because he could
read and spell his last name, heknew the word strong.
But when I reflected on thatand it's stuck with me to this
day I realized that that littleboy who couldn't connect the
letters in Strong to a word thathad meaning beyond his name,
but that the teacher's actionswere not going to help him.
(03:54):
And in retrospect, when I'mthinking about how teachers'
knowledge and actions impactreading development, that moment
has motivated me to think ofinstructional interactions from
the perspective of the child whois having difficulty.
And that's such a huge, hugeaspect of literacy learning and
(04:18):
the motivational aspects and allof that.
So I've thought about that somany times over the years.
Fast forwarding a couple ofdecades when colleagues and I
were preparing for our firstintervention study, there was a
little boy brought to our clinicfor evaluation.
We had a center that had bothevaluation services and research
(04:39):
projects.
This little guy's school hadidentified him as dyslexic so
this is in the 80s, late 80sprobably and he clearly met the
criteria for that definition orthat category at the time.
He had a significantdiscrepancy between his measured
intelligence and his readingability.
(05:10):
At the time we were gettingready as a research enterprise
to do one of our firstintervention studies to try to
look at kids who had readingdifficulties so because he
happened to live close to whereI live, I decided to try to
accelerate his reading growththrough one-to-one tutoring,
which I went to his house beforeschool and it was slow going at
first.
You know he definitely haddifficulties.
Second grade he was, you knowhe was not at all capable of
(05:30):
doing what you would expect asecond grader to be doing
relative to reading, but with alot of engagement and
non-stressful I didn't yell athim non-stressful interactions
around reading and engaging himin writing stories that he was
interested in, he did showaccelerated progress and no
longer qualified as dyslexic.
(05:52):
And years later I happened torun into his mother and learned
that he graduated high schooland honors English and was fine.
Reading was never after thatperiod, never a problem for him.
But I've often thought whatwould have happened to this
little boy without this earlyintervention which basically in
(06:13):
the years since has been a majorfocus of what I do as a
professional, both in terms ofmy work as a psychologist and
mostly in my work as aresearcher and a teacher
professional developmentprovider.
So as another example and youreally did send me down memory
(06:38):
lane with this question In ourvery first intervention study
when we were attempting to gainparental permission to enroll
first grade children.
In our intervention there wasone child whose teacher was
desperate to get him into thestudy because she understood
what we were trying to do but wecouldn't get a consent form
(06:58):
from him.
The teacher kept reporting thatyou know.
No consent form came back.
So when I asked the principalif he had any insight into how
we might convince his parentsthat this might be a good idea,
he said he never sent theconsent form to the parents.
And when I asked why he wantedour study to work so he didn't
(07:20):
think this little boy was goingto accelerate his reading
progress with the interventionwe were offering.
So he was trying to support apositive outcome for the study.
Anyway, when I explained to himthat one of our goals was to
compare the characteristics ofkids who demonstrated
accelerated growth withintervention and those who
(07:42):
didn't, I got him to agree tosend the consent form and he
sort of had me thinking this wasa little guy who wasn't going
to accelerate, right, becausethis very nice principal was
very confident At any rate.
So at the outset of theintervention, which was in.
January of first grade.
For the kid he scored at thefourth percentile on a measure
(08:06):
of reading skill and at the endof the school year, with a
semester length, one-to-oneintervention, he scored at the
80th percentile.
So obviously he had anexcellent tutor and without
participation in the study, whoknows what his future would have
looked like.
But that convinced me even more.
(08:27):
So this is the very first yearof our first intervention study.
This is really something thatmatters for these little guys
and we need to continue to workon this line of research.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
To me, donna, the thread that really binds these
stories is, of course it's alsoreading difficulties, but it is
the expectations from the adultsin this children's lives, and I
think that's a point that oftenis getting lost in today's
conversations.
I don't know that there'sanyone saying that, you know,
(09:01):
early phonics-basedinterventions don't matter, but
it's everything else that comesalong with it.
Right, it's the expectation,it's the environment and, to
your point, what is the child'sperspective of what they're
being offered?
Or, I think, in some cases,what's sort of being forced upon
them?
Or, often, what's theiropportunity cost?
Right?
Are they being taken out ofrecess to do tutoring?
(09:22):
Probably not ideal, right?
Because then it feels more likea punishment than an
opportunity.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah, that's actually a big part of what we, when we
work with teachers, what we talkabout is the whole motivation
piece of the equation.
Right, like, get your work doneand then you can something more
attractive, which is acommunication that we certainly
(09:49):
don't mean to convey.
But when I say that whenworking with a group of teachers
, they all go oh yeah, right, wedo that all the time and
parents do that all the time.
Right, Get your homework doneand then you can go outside and
play or watch TV or play video.
Then you can go outside andplay or watch TV or play video,
whatever it is.
(10:12):
So I really try, in both my workwith teachers and also when I
talk to parents, to get them tothink about the value system
that they create relative tothings that we really want
children to love rather thandislike Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
I think it just reminds me wholeheartedly how
much our words matter and howmuch the messages within our
words really matter, which also,of course, leads me to thinking
about how much conversationwith young people matters and
just understanding theirperspective and their point of
view, because I think that thatis such an important lever when
it comes to supporting them intheir academic growth.
(10:46):
Right Is really understandingwhat is their motivation, what
do they want to be engaged in,how do they see themselves, how
do they perceive the environmentthey're working in?
Yeah, I just think that that'ssuch an important point that I
feel like has gotten a littlebit lost in translation,
particularly in the last coupleof years.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Yeah, when you think of all these little people who
are, you know, being engaged inendless phonics activities and
far too little engagement inreading meaningful texts, which
is the reason we're teachingthem phonics actually read
interesting and learn frominteresting things.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
So yeah, so on that note, what do you want listeners
to know about your work?
That's another very, very bigquestion to ask of someone.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
It is a very big question to ask, but I'm going
to start by saying that in mywork, I've been privileged to be
working with many phenomenalcolleagues, including both
university professors andresearchers, but also many
elementary classroom and readingteachers who would these days
be called interventionists.
So when I talk about my work,I'm actually talking about our
(11:56):
work.
None of what I've done was doneon my own, there were many, many
people involved in all of thiswork, and there were many, many
people involved in all of thiswork.
So what I try to these daysconvey when talking with people
who are educators is anunderstanding that reading and
writing are complex processesthat are mutually reinforcing.
(12:18):
Engaging in one promotesdevelopment of the other.
Writing is these days in myobservations, informal
observations is much lessemphasized than I think it needs
to be.
I don't think many peoplerealize that they are parts of
the same process and they'reboth complex processes.
(12:41):
So, because we don't have muchtime going forward, I'll just
focus on reading, because that'sreally where my focus has been
to a great extent.
So in our early work in the 70sand 80s that's how old I am we
focused on comparisons ofchildren who experienced
literacy learning difficultieswith those who learned to read
(13:03):
with relative ease, literacylearning difficulties with those
who learn to read with relativeease.
Prior to the 70s, it wascommonly believed that severe
reading difficulty, or dyslexiaas it's sometimes called, was
due to visual processingproblems, that kids somehow saw
things differently, saw thingsbackwards, and that was
completely disproven.
(13:24):
And there aren't a whole lot ofthings we can say in education
with such confidence that wasdisproven decades ago, very
clever studies, but today stillyou encounter people who still
believe that dyslexia, orparticularly dyslexia, is a
(13:52):
problem with seeing thingsdifferently, with somehow the
communication between the eyesand the brain doesn't work.
So that's important to statehere, I think, because, as I
said, there are still people whohold that belief In the work
that we were doing.
In the 70s and 80s we conductedseveral studies that compared
(14:13):
kids who had difficulty learningto read with those who didn't.
No intervention, just lookingat kids who either had or didn't
have difficulties, had ordidn't have difficulties, and,
consistent with earlier findings, those studies found no
differences between the twogroups on visual processing
skills.
So you know, vision is not theissue.
In tapping phonological skills,however, and assessing
(14:37):
phonological skills, there wereclear group differences in our
assessments, including theability to analyze the sounds in
spoken words, phonemicawareness and in the ability to
the developing understandingthat difficulties with
phonological skills are anlimited reading growth, lead to
(14:59):
limitations in phonologicalskills, so that obviously the
(15:21):
causality could go both ways.
And of course, both limitationsin phonological skills and in
reading skills could be theresult of inadequacies in the
kids' instructional experiences.
Right, and that was suggestedby Mari Clay in a paper entitled
Learning to be LearningDisabled.
You know, were we helping thekids to have difficulties?
(15:44):
Is sort of the message there.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
So questions about the direction of causality led
my colleagues and me to embarkupon a series of intervention
studies, which really was mostof what my professional career
was focused on.
So we were interested early onin whether long-term reading
difficulties could be preventedthrough instructional
(16:08):
intervention, and the answer wasyes for many, but not for all
children.
Our next question for us waswhether beginning intervention
in kindergarten versus firstgrade would make a difference,
and the answer there was yes.
Beginning intervention inkindergarten versus first grade
(16:28):
reduced the number of childrenwho experienced long-term
difficulties.
So we want to get to the kidsearly on so that they never have
that sense of themselves askids who are having difficulty,
if we can manage that.
And so, to go back to the wholemotivational thing, the kids
never identify themselves askids who are having problems and
(16:49):
so they engage with a morepositive view.
A next wave of studies focusedon whether an intervention
approach that emphasizedphonological skills would be
more or less effective reducinglong-term reading difficulties
than an intervention approachthat emphasized reading
(17:11):
meaningful text with teacherguidance.
And that's sort of at the cruxof some of what's going on in
the science of readingdiscussions these days.
So the answer there was morecomplicated.
The answer was it depends.
What we found was for childrenwith very limited phonological
(17:32):
skills, and by that I mean bothphonemic analysis skills sort of
spoken language skills anddecoding skills.
We found that an early emphasison phonological skills, coupled
with the opportunity to applythose skills when reading
meaningful text, resulted inmore children making progress.
(17:54):
Children who had strongerphonological skills at the
outset, however, showed strongergrowth when they spent more
time reading.
You know, and looking back atthat, well, that's not a
surprise, but at the time it wasa real question, it was a
genuine question.
So there's no doubt that, to agreat extent, children learn to
(18:16):
read by reading, but they needto have the foundations relative
to the phonology of language inorder to be effective in their
reading efforts.
So in all of our interventionstudies, an important focus was
on word identification skills,because to comprehend a text,
readers need to be able toaccurately identify the printed
(18:40):
words, and more or lessautomatically.
So when I work with teachers,one of the things I sometimes
ask them to do is guesstimatehow many printed words a
proficient reader can identifyeffortlessly.
And it's always an interestingbrief conversation where the
(19:03):
estimates vary from 1,000, 2,000, 3,000.
And ultimately no one ever getsclose to what the actual number
is, which is in excess of40,000 unique words.
That is a huge number of wordsthat a proficient reader can
read automatically.
And when you can read all thosewords automatically, you can
(19:26):
focus all of your cognitiveresources on meaning
construction right.
But if kids, when kids don'thave that huge body of words
that they can identifyeffortlessly, they're going to
have to spend a lot of theirthinking skills on the word
identification process andtherefore will have less
(19:46):
opportunity to understand andenjoy the things they're reading
.
So the ability to build thathuge sight vocabulary is really
an important focus.
Some kids build sightvocabulary pretty effortlessly.
Mark Seidenberg, for example,talks about statistical learning
the more you read, the moreexposure you have to spelling
(20:10):
patterns and whatnot, and themore quickly you build that huge
body of words that you canidentify.
Kids who have difficulty withthat word solving process don't
build that huge body of words aseffortlessly and therefore they
continue to have to focus onword identification and have
(20:33):
less cognitive energy to devoteto the meaning construction
piece.
Less cognitive energy to devoteto the meaning construction
piece.
So I think as teachers we needto think about how to help
learners build that huge sitevocabulary, because certainly we
can't teach those 40,000 words.
So our approach and this issince the very first
(20:54):
intervention study that westarted in the early 90s Our
approach was to explicitly teachphonological skills and to
couple that instruction withword-solving strategy
instruction, teaching the kidshow to use what they were
learning about the code in thecontext of reading meaningful
(21:14):
text.
So the goal was to enable thelearners to build their sight
vocabulary through reading byusing their phonic skills in
combination with contextualinformation.
And that's a point right.
In our current science ofreading debates, the role of
context in word solving isparticularly contentious.
(21:38):
But, as I said, in all of ourintervention studies we've
focused on helping kids learnboth phonic skills and how to
use contextual information toidentify and confirm unfamiliar
words that they encounteredwhile reading.
So an important goal was that,in the process of figuring out
(22:00):
unfamiliar words, learners wouldattend thoroughly enough to the
word's printed representationto enable them to basically
store that word in memory withenough detail so that they would
identify the word more readilyon subsequent encounters.
That's a process that LinneaAiry refers to as orthographic
(22:23):
mapping, and that's hugelyimportant that the kids need to
connect not only the words thespoken and written form of the
word, but the internal structureof the word, because that helps
them learn about some of thosestructures so that they can be
applied when they encounterother words with similar
structures.
So in our approach, in additionto explicit instruction and
(22:46):
practice with phonologicalskills, as I said, we taught a
set of word-solving strategieswhich we guided the kids in
using when they were attemptingto identify unfamiliar words in
meaningful text.
So certainly, while knowing therelationships between letters
and sounds is very important insolving unfamiliar words,
(23:10):
written English is notcharacterized by strict
one-to-one correspondencebetween graphemes and their
phonemes, so we felt it wasimportant for learners to have
and use multiple sources ofinformation when reading and
when they encounter a word thatthey can't immediately identify.
(23:31):
So, teachers in our researchprojects and our professional
development offerings since havebeen encouraged to explicitly
teach a combination ofcode-based strategies and
meaning-based strategies and tohelp kids learn to use the two
types of information incombination to identify and
(23:52):
confirm the identity ofunfamiliar words that they
encounter in the reading.
Using both types of strategiesis especially important in a
language like English because itlacks total consistency in
letter-sound relationships.
So in today's science ofreading climate, our approach
has sometimes been criticizedbecause they argue that we are
(24:16):
teaching children to guess atwords by relying on contextual
information.
But utilizing these sources ofinformation is critical when
readers encounter words that areambiguous, right.
Consider the word D-O-V-E, forexample.
Is it dove or is it dove Samespelling?
(24:37):
There are what are often calledrules, which really aren't rules
, that would lead you in aparticular direction for
identifying that word.
But when readers' phonicsskills are not yet
well-developed enough to allowfor a full decoding and
initially unfamiliar word, orwhen the word is ambiguous as
that word is, they've got tohave other ways of approaching
(25:00):
the word solving issue.
So, for example, context right.
If that D-O-V-E was encounteredin a book about that involved
water in some way, using thatknowledge would help them settle
on the pronunciation of thatword that would be accurate in
that context.
(25:21):
So those are things that havebeen really important to me and
my colleagues in terms ofhelping teachers understand this
really problematic view of theSOR folks, who are vehement
about not teaching kids to usecontext.
I think it's really going tohurt kids going forward.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
I think anytime we neglect context, we're missing,
right?
We're talking about missing theforest for the trees, right?
I think your example of theword D-O-V-E is really powerful
because is the context water oris the context air?
Because it's going to make avery big difference to what that
(26:03):
word actually is, even ifyou're able to decode it right,
if you know that pattern, thatword pattern.
In fact, I mean I can honestlysay, donna, everything you've
said makes so much sense to mebecause, you know, as I said
before, I don't know thatthere's anyone who's saying
phonics doesn't matter or thatit shouldn't be taught, but
whenever we strip readinginstruction down to just phonics
(26:27):
, we're not left with a wholelot, right, we're left with sort
of these foundational,fundamental kind of skills that
don't necessarily plug intochildren's lives or you know how
they may encounter words in thewild, you know whatever,
they're not sitting there withan instructor.
So the idea of also usingstrategies and teaching
(26:48):
strategies for how to use thatcode and how to use other tools
when the code isn't quiteworking for you, because
certainly in the Englishlanguage, you know, I can
remember teaching mykindergarten students 20 years
ago about, you know the soundthat a letter makes only to say
in some cases, right, so we havethe letter C.
(27:10):
But sometimes when you see theletter C it makes more like a
letter S sound, you know.
And so really helping kids todisentangle that it requires
context, right, it requires abit richer conversation about
how letters and sounds functionand just you know where they are
within the context of whatthey're reading.
But I think your other pointthat the motivation for learning
(27:30):
is also so, so critical and ifwe are learning words and
letters for the sake of wordsand letters, the learning kind
of stops there.
But if we're learning lettersand sounds for the sake of
reading something that'sinteresting and relevant and
meaningful, then we can maintainthat element of curiosity and
engagement and interest inlearning for the duration.
I wonder what is going tohappen with some of our early
(27:54):
learners now by the time theyget to high school.
You know what are they going tobe most interested in and
hopefully there will be manythings that spark an interest
and a joy and engagement inlearning.
I just I hope that's not lostsomewhere along the way.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
I completely agree that it's a reason to be
concerned.
Children these days are insettings where reading really
feels like uninteresting, work,right, and this whole
controversy over whole languageand balanced literacy and
(28:33):
whatever you want to call itthese days is problematic when
you think about it from theperspective of a child.
Right, I mean, yes, there was atime when we absolutely did not
teach kids enough about thecode as an educational community
.
I mean, I can remember one dayand sitting with a child who,
(28:54):
you know, misread the word, Ithink it was mother versus mommy
and a book that he was reading,and I and I said it was either
one or the other.
But the child said, and Icorrected me, and he looked at
me and he goes well, my teacherdoesn't care.
Well, that said, well, no,you're getting the meaning, you
understand what's going on there, but you know you actually have
(29:16):
to pay attention to the lettersand what they tell you, what
word they tell you to say, sothat when you see that word
again you'll know it.
You know and that's the part ofthat building that 40,000 word
site vocabulary, if you will,word sight vocabulary, if you
will, that you know.
If you, yes, a lot of times youcan figure out what's going on
(29:37):
in the text and you might notprecisely identify the
unfamiliar words, but payingenough attention to precisely
identify the word will help addthat word to your sight
vocabulary, which is going toserve you going forward.
And that's what I think wasmissing in the approach to
guided reading some people callit was that you know.
(29:59):
As long as the child seemed tobe understanding what was going
on in the text, that was okay.
Well, yes, that was okay ifyour goal is comprehension of
that text in that particularinstance.
But if your goal is to get thechild prepared for the many,
many texts that will beencountered going forward, they
(30:19):
need more precision in terms ofthe identification of the
initially unfamiliar words.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Right and to that point I think, even the figure
you shared with us.
You know that learners need anexcess of 40,000 words
automatically recognized inorder to be proficient readers.
I think that that sort of hitsthat point home that it can't
just be about decoding andteaching specific words.
You have to know more than thatbut also enjoy reading and
(30:46):
enjoy practicing.
Because I know in the lastcertainly in the last five years
or so, I think one thing thathas been challenging about some
of the systems and structuresthat have been put into place in
many schools, particularly inmy area and I think around the
United States, is that evenduring reading time there isn't
actually anywhere, and I thinkthat that is really detrimental,
(31:07):
because you know you're notgoing to teach 40,000 words.
Kids need to be motivated tocontinue that learning on their
own and, in addition to thatmotivation, have the tools they
need in order to decode andunderstand those words within
(31:28):
the context of what they'rereading.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
And they need to see reading as a pleasurable and
desirable activity rather thanas work that you have to
accomplish before you get to dosomething more appealing
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Absolutely.
That reminds me of dear JimTrelease and some of the work
that he did around reading aloudand those positive associations
and how reading.
In my mind.
What I took away from his workis that reading helps to make us
fully human and it helps uswith those connections and, you
know, I think that that's justso important and I think that
that can be kind of lost intranslation.
(32:03):
It really makes me sad aboutthe fact that balanced literacy
has become such a dirty word,because I think that it is
important we find some balancefor kids so that they are
learning structures, strategiesand really the content of
decoding, while also finding thebalance of that enjoyment and
that pleasure in the readingexperience.
Because, yeah, it's definitelysomething I worry about.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
It has become a bad word.
You're right, and I think partof that is because everybody had
a different interpretation ofwhat balance meant.
When I talk about the wholescheme of learning to read and
write, I try to use the termcomprehensive literacy
instruction.
You know it's.
There's a whole lot there.
(32:48):
It's oral language, it'smotivation, it's knowing you
know how to analyze the soundsin words so you can write them.
It's knowing the letter soundcourse.
It's a lot, it's a whole lot,and I do think that the notion
of statistical learning reallymakes it possible for kids,
(33:09):
learners, to acquire all of theinformation they need.
Learners to acquire all of theinformation they need.
That you know.
We learn to speak not becausesomebody specifically taught us
how to make the sound right.
We learn to speak because wehear it, we try it, we're
successful in getting people tounderstand the words that we say
and we, you know.
We then elaborate more, we putthem in context, blah, blah,
(33:31):
blah.
So it's not all explicitteaching.
But for an alphabetic writingsystem, there does need to be
some explicit teaching, but thenyou need to use it in
meaningful ways, not just to.
You know, read a set ofnonsense words.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
I mean years ago.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
I had students who would go out for job interviews
and they were asked to do ademonstration lesson on nonsense
words what?
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Of all the things, of all the things we could choose
to have someone demonstrate, andcertainly you know I see where
nonsense, word fluency, has aplace in helping us to see.
You know, if a studentunderstands that specific
decoding, do they understand therule out of context, but it's
probably not the most criticalthing that we could be teaching.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Well, I would argue that we shouldn't teach it, but
that assessing kids' ability todecode nonsense words gives us
instructional targets.
I just try to get inside thehead of a little person who's
learning to decode nonsensewords.
(34:44):
Why?
Speaker 1 (34:45):
am I doing this Absolutely, and I so love that
perspective.
It helps me to think about howwe recenter our focus on the
young people who are there withus every day, and you know, what
is their perception of whatthey're learning?
How are they seeing it asvaluable in their lives, and how
does it help to send them on apositive and productive track to
(35:06):
the type of learning they wantto do?
And I think that so often thathas also gotten lost in
translation.
(35:48):
Yes, of course kids need theskills and the strategies, but
if, without that motivation, itkind of stops after they have
mastered those skills, so, yeah,going on for decades, and I
think that, particularly in somepopular media, we've been sort
of sold this idea that it's, youknow, oh my gosh this clear,
particularly when it comes towhat does the sequencing look
like?
What exactly is it that aparticular learner needs at a
particular time?
And it takes skill and it takesthe expertise of teachers who
care, you know, to really beable to put those elements into
(36:09):
place for individual learners,for individual learners, and
that, yeah, I think that's.
Another thing that concerns meis that I think that teachers
are often overlooked in thisconversation and their expertise
isn't always valued.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Yeah, yeah, I would agree, and I think one of the
issues is that English is suchan unusual language in terms of
it.
You know, it brings togetherall kinds of meaning elements in
the spellings of words, and sosome people describe it as a
morphophonological language.
A written word carriesmorphemic information as well as
(36:44):
phonological information.
But in other languages Spanish,italian, for example there's
one-to-one correspondence forthe most part, so they're
teaching the code explicitly andyou know saying you can figure
out this word if you know thecode.
That works.
But in English we have a morecomplex orthography, so kids
(37:06):
need to learn to use multiplesources of information to puzzle
through and identify andultimately learn the unfamiliar
words that they encounter, andthey need to learn to be
flexible.
That's one of the strategiesthat we explicitly teach our
little guys and older students,who need guidance as well.
(37:28):
That you know if your firstattempt at a word isn't a real
word that makes sense.
There are things you can do.
You could try different soundsfor some of the letters, and
that which is now becoming apopular topic in the reading
literature is called having aset for variability being able
(37:49):
to adjust the pronunciation of aword or of an attempt so that
it's a real word that makessense, and that's a hugely
powerful thing that teachers canguide students to do.
I had a fourth grade teacheronce.
A reading teacher tell me shethought that was the most
powerful strategy that she hadever taught her middle
(38:11):
elementary readers and she wasjust like why did I never think
of that?
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Well, I think, for older learners, who are often
encountering a variety ofdifferent types of texts around
a variety of different types oftopics, particularly when it is
interest-driven, they have tohave those tools for flexibility
so that, if it is a new word,maybe it's a word they haven't
heard yet, which I think makesthat even trickier, you know, in
(38:38):
order to really crack that code.
So, yeah, we just we have tohave many tools in our toolbox
in order to be proficient andinterested and engaged readers.
So so, given the challenges oftoday's educational climate,
what message do you wantteachers to hear?
Speaker 2 (38:58):
We've sort of gotten there, I think, in what we've
already been talking about.
I guess I would say that theportrayal of the SOR movement
misrepresents both what isinvolved in reading and what the
scientific evidence reveals.
And what the scientificevidence reveals right.
So SOR proponents rightlyadvocate that learners need to
(39:20):
develop skill using thealphabetic writing system to
figure out and learn thepronunciation of words they
don't already know.
But, especially in light of theinconsistencies that we've just
been talking about and in termsof the graphemophoning
relationships, children need tolearn to test their attempt at a
word for goodness of fit in thecontext in which it's
(39:42):
encountered.
And if their attempt doesn'tfit, they need to learn to use
other ways to pronounce theunfamiliar word.
That could mean approaching thephonological information a bit
differently.
So try a different sound, orthey might use contextual
information, as we were talkingabout.
If you know, if theyencountered D-O-V-E and there's
water in the story, then youknow it's probably not a bird.
(40:05):
So basically, they need to havemultiple sources of information
coming into play when trying toidentify the word.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
I appreciate the way that you state that so concisely
, because I think that you knowone of the goals of this show is
to give teachers language aswell as backup from folks like
you to you know if they're beingasked to do something that they
don't feel is right for kids ifthey're being asked to take an
approach by the systems thatthey're working within, that is
(40:36):
not serving the best interestsof children.
We want to ensure that teachershave the language and the
research to back up what they'resaying whenever they feel they
need to push back.
So I really appreciate the waythat you so concisely stated
that, because I think that's avery portable phrase that
someone could use in order tobest support the learners in
(40:57):
their classroom.
So thank you for that.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I hope it carries the weight that you're hoping it
carries.
I do too.
It's very hard for teachers topush back on some of the things
that are going on.
As another example, one of thethings that is actually it's
part of the state teacher's examin many states is this whole
(41:20):
notion of syllable types.
Did you know until the last 10years what the six syllable
types were?
Speaker 1 (41:27):
No, I sure didn't Nope.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
And any highly literate adult I know who is not
part of the current discussionsaround literacy instruction say
what when I ask them about that?
Well, right now you knowteachers are being taught the
six syllable types and they'resupposed to help the kids learn
to use those syllable types intheir attempts to identify words
(41:57):
.
Turns out there's no researchto support teaching syllable
types as a vehicle for movingkids forward as literacy
learners.
Kids do need to know aboutsyllables when they're writing,
they don't need to know aboutsyllable types, but it's useful
in writing to think about howmany syllables and know that
(42:18):
every syllable has to have atleast one vowel letter.
You're going to get lots moreliterate looking spellings when
kids know that.
Right, but in terms of lookingat a word like robot compared to
the word Robin, of looking at aword like robot compared to the
word Robin, what are thesyllable types?
(42:39):
Right, the R-O-B is at thebeginning of both of those words
and they're followed by a vowel, right?
So one of them is a closedsyllable and one of them is an
open syllable.
And am I thinking aboutsyllable types or am I thinking
about what's going to make sensein the text that I'm currently
reading, right?
So Devin Kearns has a wholepiece on analysis of syllable
(42:59):
types and whether it's a usefulthing to be part of literacy
instruction, and he concludesthat it takes the kids away from
what you want them to be doing,which is thinking about the
meaning of the text.
There are, in my mind, too manythings going on right now that
are taking teachers' energy.
(43:19):
You know teachers have to, youknow, really work to learn the
syllable types if they'reunaccustomed to them, or that
one of my least favorite thingsthat's happening right now is
teaching kids.
First, teaching teachers toteach kids the multiple
movements, articulatorymovements, that are associated
(43:41):
with particular sounds in spokenlanguage is like painful and
the multiple ways that a givensound might be spelled.
You know how many ways arethere to spell the sound.
Well, there's a lot, andknowing all of those might
confuse me a whole lot, morethan having seen a word spelled
in a particular way multipletimes and so it's stored in
(44:04):
memory as that spelling.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
Well, I think to that point, you know, we aren't
preparing teachers to be speechlanguage pathologists, right,
and sometimes I feel like that'sthe aim that's really built
into some legislation, butthat's not the goal of teacher
preparation programs.
And you're right, it does seem,while it might be helpful
information on some level, itdoes seem as though it is a bit
(44:30):
tangential to what elementaryschool teachers, early literacy
teachers, might actually need toknow in order to support whole
group and small group as well asindividual instruction.
It's a really specialized fieldand so, yeah, it becomes a bit
convoluted and I think you'reabsolutely right.
Teachers are getting so manydifferent messages right now
about what's important and whatthey need to know and what they
(44:50):
need to focus on and what'ssupported by research right?
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Oh, absolutely no support for the sound walls that
have taken over in some partsof the country.
No support in terms of research.
Wow.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
Well, donna, I have so enjoyed talking with you
today and I really appreciateyour time and I appreciate you
sharing your ideas with teachers, because I think it that this
conversation could really helpsome to better navigate sort of
what is being pressed upon themright now, because I think that
teachers, many, many teachers Italk with are feeling very
(45:26):
pressed, and in so manydifferent ways, and I think that
just makes what can be a verychallenging job that much more
difficult.
I always say teachers don'tleave the field because of
children, it's because of youknow the many, many, many other
demands that they're beingpressed with, and so I thank you
so much for your time and Iappreciate your contributions to
(45:48):
the field of education andcertainly to this program as
well.
So thank you so much Well.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
I appreciate what you're doing to help teachers
access all of the informationthat is so hard to access unless
you have the luxury thatacademicians have.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Isn't that the truth?
Isn't that the truth?
Thank you, donna.
Thank you.
Dr Donna Scanlon is known forher work in support of children
who experience substantialdifficulty in learning to read.
Thank you.
Dr Donna Scanlon is known forher work in support of children
who experience substantialdifficulty in learning to read
and on how to prevent andremediate reading difficulties.
In particular, she and hercolleagues developed an approach
to early literacy instructionand intervention, known as the
(46:27):
Interactive Strategies Approach,or ISA.
The ISA has been found to beeffective in helping teachers to
reduce the incidence of readingdifficulties in the early
primary grades and has been usedin response to intervention or
RTI contexts.
The ISA RTI ProfessionalDevelopment Project uses
distance learning technologiesto offer extended job-embedded
(46:51):
professional development forteachers.
Job-embedded professionaldevelopment for teachers.
Donna and her colleagues alsoextend the use of ISA for use
with older readers.
They evaluated the utility ofproviding teacher educators with
ISA-based instructionalresources for use in their
undergraduate and graduateliteracy methods courses, with
the goal of enhancing new andin-service teachers' ability to
(47:12):
understand and address the needsof beginning and struggling
literacy learners.
Donna authored Early LiteracyInstruction and Intervention,
which was recently published byGuilford Press.
She is also the co-author ofComprehensive Reading
Intervention in Grades 3-8,fostering Word Learning,
comprehension and Motivation.
And Argument Writing asSupplemental Literacy
(47:33):
Intervention for At-Risk Youth.
Word learning, comprehensionand motivation.
And argument writing assupplemental literacy
intervention for at-risk youth.
Her work has appeared inReading Research Quarterly.
Literacy Research Theory,method and Practice Journal of
Learning Disabilities.
The Reading, teacher, readingand Writing Journal of
Educational Psychology.
Reading Today, which is nowLiteracy Today, and Contemporary
Educational Psychology.
(47:54):
Dr Scanlon recently authored afreely available book entitled
Helping your Child Become aReader and co-authored a
position paper titled AnExamination of Dyslexia Research
and Instruction with PolicyImplications.
With Classroom Caffeine GuestPeter Johnston.
Both resources are linked inthe show notes.
With Classroom Caffeine guestPeter Johnston.
(48:16):
Both resources are linked inthe show notes.
Most of Dr Scanlon's researchwas supported by grants from the
National Institute of ChildHealth and Human Development and
the United States Department ofEducation through the Institute
of Education Sciences and theFund for Improvement of
Post-Secondary Education.
Dr Scanlon was a member of theInternational Reading
Association's RTI Task Force andis a 2017 inductee into the
(48:39):
Reading Hall of Fame.
Dr Scanlon is ProfessorEmeritus at University of
Albany's Department of Literacy,teaching and Learning and was
affiliated with the university'sChild Research and Study Center
for more than 40 years servingas the Associate Director and
the Director at different pointsin time.
For the good of all students,classroom Caffeine aims to
(49:02):
energize education, research andpractice.
If this show gives you thingsto think about, help us spread
the word.
Talk to your colleagues andeducator friends about what you
hear.
You can support the show bysubscribing, liking and
reviewing this podcast throughyour podcast provider.
Visit classroomcaffeinecom,where you can subscribe to
(49:24):
receive our short monthlynewsletter, the Espresso Shot.
On our website, you can alsolearn more about each guest.
Find transcripts for ourepisodes.
You can also learn more abouteach guest.
Find transcripts for ourepisodes.
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Support our research throughour listener survey or learn
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(49:46):
Connect with us on social mediathrough Instagram, facebook and
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We would love to hear from you.
Special thanks to the ClassroomCaffeine team Leah Berger,
abaya Valuru, stephanie Bransonand Shaba Oshfath.
As always, I raise my mug toyou, teachers.
Thanks for joining me.
Education research has a problem the work of
brilliant education researchersoften doesn't reach the practice
of brilliant teachers.
Classroom Caffeine is here tohelp.
In each episode, I talk with atop education researcher or an
expert educator about what theyhave learned from years of
(00:32):
research and experiences.
In this episode, dr DonnaScanlon talks to us about
considering reading skills andstrategy instruction from the
perspective of the learnerconsidering reading skills and
strategy instruction from theperspective of the learner.
Donna is known for her work insupport of children who
(00:52):
experience substantialdifficulty in learning to read
and on how to prevent andremediate reading difficulties.
In particular, she and hercolleagues developed an approach
to early literacy instructionand intervention, known as the
Interactive Strategies Approach,which has been found to be
effective in helping teachers toreduce the incidence of reading
difficulties in the earlyprimary grades and is used in
(01:13):
response to intervention or RTIcontexts.
She authored a freely availableliteracy research booklet
entitled Helping your ChildBecome a Reader and a report
entitled An Examination ofDyslexia Research and
Instruction with PolicyImplications, co-authored with
Classroom Caffeine past guest,peter Johnston.
(01:35):
Both resources are linked inthe show notes.
Her most recent book is titledEarly Literacy Instruction and
Intervention and was recentlypublished by Guilford Press.
Dr Scanlon was a member of theInternational Reading
Association's RTI Task Force.
She is a 2017 inductee into theReading Hall of Fame.
(01:57):
Dr Scanlon is ProfessorEmeritus at University of
Albany's Department of Literacy,teaching and Learning and was
affiliated with the university'sChild Research and Study Center
for more than 40 years.
For more information about ourguest, stay tuned to the end of
this episode.
So pour a cup of your favoritedrink and join me, your host
(02:21):
Lindsay Persaud, for ClassroomCaffeine Research to Energize
your Teaching Practice.
Donna, thank you for joining me.
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Happy to be here.
Thank you for hosting it.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
So, from your own experiences in education, will
you share with us one or twomoments that inform your
thinking now?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
That's a really interesting question.
Sort of sends me down memorylane.
Probably the earliest memorythat I have about reading and
reading difficulties goes wayback to the early 1960s, when I
was in second grade.
There was a teacher who wascalled in to help a little boy
identify the word strong, whichhe could not read.
(03:03):
His last name, by the way, wasstrong and he could read strong
when he had to find his name.
So this teacher and this is aCatholic school decades ago, as
I said, where screaming was notan unusual characteristic of
interacting with kids who haddifficulty, so the teacher was
(03:23):
screaming at this little guy andsaid screamed over and over.
You know that word?
You?
Speaker 1 (03:29):
know that word you know that word.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Apparently she was thinking that because he could
read and spell his last name, heknew the word strong.
But when I reflected on thatand it's stuck with me to this
day I realized that that littleboy who couldn't connect the
letters in Strong to a word thathad meaning beyond his name,
but that the teacher's actionswere not going to help him.
(03:54):
And in retrospect, when I'mthinking about how teachers'
knowledge and actions impactreading development, that moment
has motivated me to think ofinstructional interactions from
the perspective of the child whois having difficulty.
And that's such a huge, hugeaspect of literacy learning and
(04:18):
the motivational aspects and allof that.
So I've thought about that somany times over the years.
Fast forwarding a couple ofdecades when colleagues and I
were preparing for our firstintervention study, there was a
little boy brought to our clinicfor evaluation.
We had a center that had bothevaluation services and research
(04:39):
projects.
This little guy's school hadidentified him as dyslexic so
this is in the 80s, late 80sprobably and he clearly met the
criteria for that definition orthat category at the time.
He had a significantdiscrepancy between his measured
intelligence and his readingability.
(05:10):
At the time we were gettingready as a research enterprise
to do one of our firstintervention studies to try to
look at kids who had readingdifficulties so because he
happened to live close to whereI live, I decided to try to
accelerate his reading growththrough one-to-one tutoring,
which I went to his house beforeschool and it was slow going at
first.
You know he definitely haddifficulties.
Second grade he was, you knowhe was not at all capable of
(05:30):
doing what you would expect asecond grader to be doing
relative to reading, but with alot of engagement and
non-stressful I didn't yell athim non-stressful interactions
around reading and engaging himin writing stories that he was
interested in, he did showaccelerated progress and no
longer qualified as dyslexic.
(05:52):
And years later I happened torun into his mother and learned
that he graduated high schooland honors English and was fine.
Reading was never after thatperiod, never a problem for him.
But I've often thought whatwould have happened to this
little boy without this earlyintervention which basically in
(06:13):
the years since has been a majorfocus of what I do as a
professional, both in terms ofmy work as a psychologist and
mostly in my work as aresearcher and a teacher
professional developmentprovider.
So as another example and youreally did send me down memory
(06:38):
lane with this question In ourvery first intervention study
when we were attempting to gainparental permission to enroll
first grade children.
In our intervention there wasone child whose teacher was
desperate to get him into thestudy because she understood
what we were trying to do but wecouldn't get a consent form
(06:58):
from him.
The teacher kept reporting thatyou know.
No consent form came back.
So when I asked the principalif he had any insight into how
we might convince his parentsthat this might be a good idea,
he said he never sent theconsent form to the parents.
And when I asked why he wantedour study to work so he didn't
(07:20):
think this little boy was goingto accelerate his reading
progress with the interventionwe were offering.
So he was trying to support apositive outcome for the study.
Anyway, when I explained to himthat one of our goals was to
compare the characteristics ofkids who demonstrated
accelerated growth withintervention and those who
(07:42):
didn't, I got him to agree tosend the consent form and he
sort of had me thinking this wasa little guy who wasn't going
to accelerate, right, becausethis very nice principal was
very confident At any rate.
So at the outset of theintervention, which was in.
January of first grade.
For the kid he scored at thefourth percentile on a measure
(08:06):
of reading skill and at the endof the school year, with a
semester length, one-to-oneintervention, he scored at the
80th percentile.
So obviously he had anexcellent tutor and without
participation in the study, whoknows what his future would have
looked like.
But that convinced me even more.
(08:27):
So this is the very first yearof our first intervention study.
This is really something thatmatters for these little guys
and we need to continue to workon this line of research.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
To me, donna, the thread that really binds these
stories is, of course it's alsoreading difficulties, but it is
the expectations from the adultsin this children's lives, and I
think that's a point that oftenis getting lost in today's
conversations.
I don't know that there'sanyone saying that, you know,
(09:01):
early phonics-basedinterventions don't matter, but
it's everything else that comesalong with it.
Right, it's the expectation,it's the environment and, to
your point, what is the child'sperspective of what they're
being offered?
Or, I think, in some cases,what's sort of being forced upon
them?
Or, often, what's theiropportunity cost?
Right?
Are they being taken out ofrecess to do tutoring?
(09:22):
Probably not ideal, right?
Because then it feels more likea punishment than an
opportunity.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah, that's actually a big part of what we, when we
work with teachers, what we talkabout is the whole motivation
piece of the equation.
Right, like, get your work doneand then you can something more
attractive, which is acommunication that we certainly
(09:49):
don't mean to convey.
But when I say that whenworking with a group of teachers
, they all go oh yeah, right, wedo that all the time and
parents do that all the time.
Right, Get your homework doneand then you can go outside and
play or watch TV or play video.
Then you can go outside andplay or watch TV or play video,
whatever it is.
(10:12):
So I really try, in both my workwith teachers and also when I
talk to parents, to get them tothink about the value system
that they create relative tothings that we really want
children to love rather thandislike Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
I think it just reminds me wholeheartedly how
much our words matter and howmuch the messages within our
words really matter, which also,of course, leads me to thinking
about how much conversationwith young people matters and
just understanding theirperspective and their point of
view, because I think that thatis such an important lever when
it comes to supporting them intheir academic growth.
(10:46):
Right Is really understandingwhat is their motivation, what
do they want to be engaged in,how do they see themselves, how
do they perceive the environmentthey're working in?
Yeah, I just think that that'ssuch an important point that I
feel like has gotten a littlebit lost in translation,
particularly in the last coupleof years.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Yeah, when you think of all these little people who
are, you know, being engaged inendless phonics activities and
far too little engagement inreading meaningful texts, which
is the reason we're teachingthem phonics actually read
interesting and learn frominteresting things.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
So yeah, so on that note, what do you want listeners
to know about your work?
That's another very, very bigquestion to ask of someone.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
It is a very big question to ask, but I'm going
to start by saying that in mywork, I've been privileged to be
working with many phenomenalcolleagues, including both
university professors andresearchers, but also many
elementary classroom and readingteachers who would these days
be called interventionists.
So when I talk about my work,I'm actually talking about our
(11:56):
work.
None of what I've done was doneon my own, there were many, many
people involved in all of thiswork, and there were many, many
people involved in all of thiswork.
So what I try to these daysconvey when talking with people
who are educators is anunderstanding that reading and
writing are complex processesthat are mutually reinforcing.
(12:18):
Engaging in one promotesdevelopment of the other.
Writing is these days in myobservations, informal
observations is much lessemphasized than I think it needs
to be.
I don't think many peoplerealize that they are parts of
the same process and they'reboth complex processes.
(12:41):
So, because we don't have muchtime going forward, I'll just
focus on reading, because that'sreally where my focus has been
to a great extent.
So in our early work in the 70sand 80s that's how old I am we
focused on comparisons ofchildren who experienced
literacy learning difficultieswith those who learned to read
(13:03):
with relative ease, literacylearning difficulties with those
who learn to read with relativeease.
Prior to the 70s, it wascommonly believed that severe
reading difficulty, or dyslexiaas it's sometimes called, was
due to visual processingproblems, that kids somehow saw
things differently, saw thingsbackwards, and that was
completely disproven.
(13:24):
And there aren't a whole lot ofthings we can say in education
with such confidence that wasdisproven decades ago, very
clever studies, but today stillyou encounter people who still
believe that dyslexia, orparticularly dyslexia, is a
(13:52):
problem with seeing thingsdifferently, with somehow the
communication between the eyesand the brain doesn't work.
So that's important to statehere, I think, because, as I
said, there are still people whohold that belief In the work
that we were doing.
In the 70s and 80s we conductedseveral studies that compared
(14:13):
kids who had difficulty learningto read with those who didn't.
No intervention, just lookingat kids who either had or didn't
have difficulties, had ordidn't have difficulties, and,
consistent with earlier findings, those studies found no
differences between the twogroups on visual processing
skills.
So you know, vision is not theissue.
In tapping phonological skills,however, and assessing
(14:37):
phonological skills, there wereclear group differences in our
assessments, including theability to analyze the sounds in
spoken words, phonemicawareness and in the ability to
the developing understandingthat difficulties with
phonological skills are anlimited reading growth, lead to
(14:59):
limitations in phonologicalskills, so that obviously the
(15:21):
causality could go both ways.
And of course, both limitationsin phonological skills and in
reading skills could be theresult of inadequacies in the
kids' instructional experiences.
Right, and that was suggestedby Mari Clay in a paper entitled
Learning to be LearningDisabled.
You know, were we helping thekids to have difficulties?
(15:44):
Is sort of the message there.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
So questions about the direction of causality led
my colleagues and me to embarkupon a series of intervention
studies, which really was mostof what my professional career
was focused on.
So we were interested early onin whether long-term reading
difficulties could be preventedthrough instructional
(16:08):
intervention, and the answer wasyes for many, but not for all
children.
Our next question for us waswhether beginning intervention
in kindergarten versus firstgrade would make a difference,
and the answer there was yes.
Beginning intervention inkindergarten versus first grade
(16:28):
reduced the number of childrenwho experienced long-term
difficulties.
So we want to get to the kidsearly on so that they never have
that sense of themselves askids who are having difficulty,
if we can manage that.
And so, to go back to the wholemotivational thing, the kids
never identify themselves askids who are having problems and
(16:49):
so they engage with a morepositive view.
A next wave of studies focusedon whether an intervention
approach that emphasizedphonological skills would be
more or less effective reducinglong-term reading difficulties
than an intervention approachthat emphasized reading
(17:11):
meaningful text with teacherguidance.
And that's sort of at the cruxof some of what's going on in
the science of readingdiscussions these days.
So the answer there was morecomplicated.
The answer was it depends.
What we found was for childrenwith very limited phonological
(17:32):
skills, and by that I mean bothphonemic analysis skills sort of
spoken language skills anddecoding skills.
We found that an early emphasison phonological skills, coupled
with the opportunity to applythose skills when reading
meaningful text, resulted inmore children making progress.
(17:54):
Children who had strongerphonological skills at the
outset, however, showed strongergrowth when they spent more
time reading.
You know, and looking back atthat, well, that's not a
surprise, but at the time it wasa real question, it was a
genuine question.
So there's no doubt that, to agreat extent, children learn to
(18:16):
read by reading, but they needto have the foundations relative
to the phonology of language inorder to be effective in their
reading efforts.
So in all of our interventionstudies, an important focus was
on word identification skills,because to comprehend a text,
readers need to be able toaccurately identify the printed
(18:40):
words, and more or lessautomatically.
So when I work with teachers,one of the things I sometimes
ask them to do is guesstimatehow many printed words a
proficient reader can identifyeffortlessly.
And it's always an interestingbrief conversation where the
(19:03):
estimates vary from 1,000, 2,000, 3,000.
And ultimately no one ever getsclose to what the actual number
is, which is in excess of40,000 unique words.
That is a huge number of wordsthat a proficient reader can
read automatically.
And when you can read all thosewords automatically, you can
(19:26):
focus all of your cognitiveresources on meaning
construction right.
But if kids, when kids don'thave that huge body of words
that they can identifyeffortlessly, they're going to
have to spend a lot of theirthinking skills on the word
identification process andtherefore will have less
(19:46):
opportunity to understand andenjoy the things they're reading
.
So the ability to build thathuge sight vocabulary is really
an important focus.
Some kids build sightvocabulary pretty effortlessly.
Mark Seidenberg, for example,talks about statistical learning
the more you read, the moreexposure you have to spelling
(20:10):
patterns and whatnot, and themore quickly you build that huge
body of words that you canidentify.
Kids who have difficulty withthat word solving process don't
build that huge body of words aseffortlessly and therefore they
continue to have to focus onword identification and have
(20:33):
less cognitive energy to devoteto the meaning construction
piece.
Less cognitive energy to devoteto the meaning construction
piece.
So I think as teachers we needto think about how to help
learners build that huge sitevocabulary, because certainly we
can't teach those 40,000 words.
So our approach and this issince the very first
(20:54):
intervention study that westarted in the early 90s Our
approach was to explicitly teachphonological skills and to
couple that instruction withword-solving strategy
instruction, teaching the kidshow to use what they were
learning about the code in thecontext of reading meaningful
(21:14):
text.
So the goal was to enable thelearners to build their sight
vocabulary through reading byusing their phonic skills in
combination with contextualinformation.
And that's a point right.
In our current science ofreading debates, the role of
context in word solving isparticularly contentious.
(21:38):
But, as I said, in all of ourintervention studies we've
focused on helping kids learnboth phonic skills and how to
use contextual information toidentify and confirm unfamiliar
words that they encounteredwhile reading.
So an important goal was that,in the process of figuring out
(22:00):
unfamiliar words, learners wouldattend thoroughly enough to the
word's printed representationto enable them to basically
store that word in memory withenough detail so that they would
identify the word more readilyon subsequent encounters.
That's a process that LinneaAiry refers to as orthographic
(22:23):
mapping, and that's hugelyimportant that the kids need to
connect not only the words thespoken and written form of the
word, but the internal structureof the word, because that helps
them learn about some of thosestructures so that they can be
applied when they encounterother words with similar
structures.
So in our approach, in additionto explicit instruction and
(22:46):
practice with phonologicalskills, as I said, we taught a
set of word-solving strategieswhich we guided the kids in
using when they were attemptingto identify unfamiliar words in
meaningful text.
So certainly, while knowing therelationships between letters
and sounds is very important insolving unfamiliar words,
(23:10):
written English is notcharacterized by strict
one-to-one correspondencebetween graphemes and their
phonemes, so we felt it wasimportant for learners to have
and use multiple sources ofinformation when reading and
when they encounter a word thatthey can't immediately identify.
(23:31):
So, teachers in our researchprojects and our professional
development offerings since havebeen encouraged to explicitly
teach a combination ofcode-based strategies and
meaning-based strategies and tohelp kids learn to use the two
types of information incombination to identify and
(23:52):
confirm the identity ofunfamiliar words that they
encounter in the reading.
Using both types of strategiesis especially important in a
language like English because itlacks total consistency in
letter-sound relationships.
So in today's science ofreading climate, our approach
has sometimes been criticizedbecause they argue that we are
(24:16):
teaching children to guess atwords by relying on contextual
information.
But utilizing these sources ofinformation is critical when
readers encounter words that areambiguous, right.
Consider the word D-O-V-E, forexample.
Is it dove or is it dove Samespelling?
(24:37):
There are what are often calledrules, which really aren't rules
, that would lead you in aparticular direction for
identifying that word.
But when readers' phonicsskills are not yet
well-developed enough to allowfor a full decoding and
initially unfamiliar word, orwhen the word is ambiguous as
that word is, they've got tohave other ways of approaching
(25:00):
the word solving issue.
So, for example, context right.
If that D-O-V-E was encounteredin a book about that involved
water in some way, using thatknowledge would help them settle
on the pronunciation of thatword that would be accurate in
that context.
(25:21):
So those are things that havebeen really important to me and
my colleagues in terms ofhelping teachers understand this
really problematic view of theSOR folks, who are vehement
about not teaching kids to usecontext.
I think it's really going tohurt kids going forward.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
I think anytime we neglect context, we're missing,
right?
We're talking about missing theforest for the trees, right?
I think your example of theword D-O-V-E is really powerful
because is the context water oris the context air?
Because it's going to make avery big difference to what that
(26:03):
word actually is, even ifyou're able to decode it right,
if you know that pattern, thatword pattern.
In fact, I mean I can honestlysay, donna, everything you've
said makes so much sense to mebecause, you know, as I said
before, I don't know thatthere's anyone who's saying
phonics doesn't matter or thatit shouldn't be taught, but
whenever we strip readinginstruction down to just phonics
(26:27):
, we're not left with a wholelot, right, we're left with sort
of these foundational,fundamental kind of skills that
don't necessarily plug intochildren's lives or you know how
they may encounter words in thewild, you know whatever,
they're not sitting there withan instructor.
So the idea of also usingstrategies and teaching
(26:48):
strategies for how to use thatcode and how to use other tools
when the code isn't quiteworking for you, because
certainly in the Englishlanguage, you know, I can
remember teaching mykindergarten students 20 years
ago about, you know the soundthat a letter makes only to say
in some cases, right, so we havethe letter C.
(27:10):
But sometimes when you see theletter C it makes more like a
letter S sound, you know.
And so really helping kids todisentangle that it requires
context, right, it requires abit richer conversation about
how letters and sounds functionand just you know where they are
within the context of whatthey're reading.
But I think your other pointthat the motivation for learning
(27:30):
is also so, so critical and ifwe are learning words and
letters for the sake of wordsand letters, the learning kind
of stops there.
But if we're learning lettersand sounds for the sake of
reading something that'sinteresting and relevant and
meaningful, then we can maintainthat element of curiosity and
engagement and interest inlearning for the duration.
I wonder what is going tohappen with some of our early
(27:54):
learners now by the time theyget to high school.
You know what are they going tobe most interested in and
hopefully there will be manythings that spark an interest
and a joy and engagement inlearning.
I just I hope that's not lostsomewhere along the way.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
I completely agree that it's a reason to be
concerned.
Children these days are insettings where reading really
feels like uninteresting, work,right, and this whole
controversy over whole languageand balanced literacy and
(28:33):
whatever you want to call itthese days is problematic when
you think about it from theperspective of a child.
Right, I mean, yes, there was atime when we absolutely did not
teach kids enough about thecode as an educational community
.
I mean, I can remember one dayand sitting with a child who,
(28:54):
you know, misread the word, Ithink it was mother versus mommy
and a book that he was reading,and I and I said it was either
one or the other.
But the child said, and Icorrected me, and he looked at
me and he goes well, my teacherdoesn't care.
Well, that said, well, no,you're getting the meaning, you
understand what's going on there, but you know you actually have
(29:16):
to pay attention to the lettersand what they tell you, what
word they tell you to say, sothat when you see that word
again you'll know it.
You know and that's the part ofthat building that 40,000 word
site vocabulary, if you will,word sight vocabulary, if you
will, that you know.
If you, yes, a lot of times youcan figure out what's going on
(29:37):
in the text and you might notprecisely identify the
unfamiliar words, but payingenough attention to precisely
identify the word will help addthat word to your sight
vocabulary, which is going toserve you going forward.
And that's what I think wasmissing in the approach to
guided reading some people callit was that you know.
(29:59):
As long as the child seemed tobe understanding what was going
on in the text, that was okay.
Well, yes, that was okay ifyour goal is comprehension of
that text in that particularinstance.
But if your goal is to get thechild prepared for the many,
many texts that will beencountered going forward, they
(30:19):
need more precision in terms ofthe identification of the
initially unfamiliar words.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Right and to that point I think, even the figure
you shared with us.
You know that learners need anexcess of 40,000 words
automatically recognized inorder to be proficient readers.
I think that that sort of hitsthat point home that it can't
just be about decoding andteaching specific words.
You have to know more than thatbut also enjoy reading and
(30:46):
enjoy practicing.
Because I know in the lastcertainly in the last five years
or so, I think one thing thathas been challenging about some
of the systems and structuresthat have been put into place in
many schools, particularly inmy area and I think around the
United States, is that evenduring reading time there isn't
actually anywhere, and I thinkthat that is really detrimental,
(31:07):
because you know you're notgoing to teach 40,000 words.
Kids need to be motivated tocontinue that learning on their
own and, in addition to thatmotivation, have the tools they
need in order to decode andunderstand those words within
(31:28):
the context of what they'rereading.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
And they need to see reading as a pleasurable and
desirable activity rather thanas work that you have to
accomplish before you get to dosomething more appealing
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Absolutely.
That reminds me of dear JimTrelease and some of the work
that he did around reading aloudand those positive associations
and how reading.
In my mind.
What I took away from his workis that reading helps to make us
fully human and it helps uswith those connections and, you
know, I think that that's justso important and I think that
that can be kind of lost intranslation.
(32:03):
It really makes me sad aboutthe fact that balanced literacy
has become such a dirty word,because I think that it is
important we find some balancefor kids so that they are
learning structures, strategiesand really the content of
decoding, while also finding thebalance of that enjoyment and
that pleasure in the readingexperience.
Because, yeah, it's definitelysomething I worry about.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
It has become a bad word.
You're right, and I think partof that is because everybody had
a different interpretation ofwhat balance meant.
When I talk about the wholescheme of learning to read and
write, I try to use the termcomprehensive literacy
instruction.
You know it's.
There's a whole lot there.
(32:48):
It's oral language, it'smotivation, it's knowing you
know how to analyze the soundsin words so you can write them.
It's knowing the letter soundcourse.
It's a lot, it's a whole lot,and I do think that the notion
of statistical learning reallymakes it possible for kids,
(33:09):
learners, to acquire all of theinformation they need.
Learners to acquire all of theinformation they need.
That you know.
We learn to speak not becausesomebody specifically taught us
how to make the sound right.
We learn to speak because wehear it, we try it, we're
successful in getting people tounderstand the words that we say
and we, you know.
We then elaborate more, we putthem in context, blah, blah,
(33:31):
blah.
So it's not all explicitteaching.
But for an alphabetic writingsystem, there does need to be
some explicit teaching, but thenyou need to use it in
meaningful ways, not just to.
You know, read a set ofnonsense words.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
I mean years ago.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
I had students who would go out for job interviews
and they were asked to do ademonstration lesson on nonsense
words what?
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Of all the things, of all the things we could choose
to have someone demonstrate, andcertainly you know I see where
nonsense, word fluency, has aplace in helping us to see.
You know, if a studentunderstands that specific
decoding, do they understand therule out of context, but it's
probably not the most criticalthing that we could be teaching.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Well, I would argue that we shouldn't teach it, but
that assessing kids' ability todecode nonsense words gives us
instructional targets.
I just try to get inside thehead of a little person who's
learning to decode nonsensewords.
(34:44):
Why?
Speaker 1 (34:45):
am I doing this Absolutely, and I so love that
perspective.
It helps me to think about howwe recenter our focus on the
young people who are there withus every day, and you know, what
is their perception of whatthey're learning?
How are they seeing it asvaluable in their lives, and how
does it help to send them on apositive and productive track to
(35:06):
the type of learning they wantto do?
And I think that so often thathas also gotten lost in
translation.
(35:48):
Yes, of course kids need theskills and the strategies, but
if, without that motivation, itkind of stops after they have
mastered those skills, so, yeah,going on for decades, and I
think that, particularly in somepopular media, we've been sort
of sold this idea that it's, youknow, oh my gosh this clear,
particularly when it comes towhat does the sequencing look
like?
What exactly is it that aparticular learner needs at a
particular time?
And it takes skill and it takesthe expertise of teachers who
care, you know, to really beable to put those elements into
(36:09):
place for individual learners,for individual learners, and
that, yeah, I think that's.
Another thing that concerns meis that I think that teachers
are often overlooked in thisconversation and their expertise
isn't always valued.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Yeah, yeah, I would agree, and I think one of the
issues is that English is suchan unusual language in terms of
it.
You know, it brings togetherall kinds of meaning elements in
the spellings of words, and sosome people describe it as a
morphophonological language.
A written word carriesmorphemic information as well as
(36:44):
phonological information.
But in other languages Spanish,italian, for example there's
one-to-one correspondence forthe most part, so they're
teaching the code explicitly andyou know saying you can figure
out this word if you know thecode.
That works.
But in English we have a morecomplex orthography, so kids
(37:06):
need to learn to use multiplesources of information to puzzle
through and identify andultimately learn the unfamiliar
words that they encounter, andthey need to learn to be
flexible.
That's one of the strategiesthat we explicitly teach our
little guys and older students,who need guidance as well.
(37:28):
That you know if your firstattempt at a word isn't a real
word that makes sense.
There are things you can do.
You could try different soundsfor some of the letters, and
that which is now becoming apopular topic in the reading
literature is called having aset for variability being able
(37:49):
to adjust the pronunciation of aword or of an attempt so that
it's a real word that makessense, and that's a hugely
powerful thing that teachers canguide students to do.
I had a fourth grade teacheronce.
A reading teacher tell me shethought that was the most
powerful strategy that she hadever taught her middle
(38:11):
elementary readers and she wasjust like why did I never think
of that?
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Well, I think, for older learners, who are often
encountering a variety ofdifferent types of texts around
a variety of different types oftopics, particularly when it is
interest-driven, they have tohave those tools for flexibility
so that, if it is a new word,maybe it's a word they haven't
heard yet, which I think makesthat even trickier, you know, in
(38:38):
order to really crack that code.
So, yeah, we just we have tohave many tools in our toolbox
in order to be proficient andinterested and engaged readers.
So so, given the challenges oftoday's educational climate,
what message do you wantteachers to hear?
Speaker 2 (38:58):
We've sort of gotten there, I think, in what we've
already been talking about.
I guess I would say that theportrayal of the SOR movement
misrepresents both what isinvolved in reading and what the
scientific evidence reveals.
And what the scientificevidence reveals right.
So SOR proponents rightlyadvocate that learners need to
(39:20):
develop skill using thealphabetic writing system to
figure out and learn thepronunciation of words they
don't already know.
But, especially in light of theinconsistencies that we've just
been talking about and in termsof the graphemophoning
relationships, children need tolearn to test their attempt at a
word for goodness of fit in thecontext in which it's
(39:42):
encountered.
And if their attempt doesn'tfit, they need to learn to use
other ways to pronounce theunfamiliar word.
That could mean approaching thephonological information a bit
differently.
So try a different sound, orthey might use contextual
information, as we were talkingabout.
If you know, if theyencountered D-O-V-E and there's
water in the story, then youknow it's probably not a bird.
(40:05):
So basically, they need to havemultiple sources of information
coming into play when trying toidentify the word.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
I appreciate the way that you state that so concisely
, because I think that you knowone of the goals of this show is
to give teachers language aswell as backup from folks like
you to you know if they're beingasked to do something that they
don't feel is right for kids ifthey're being asked to take an
approach by the systems thatthey're working within, that is
(40:36):
not serving the best interestsof children.
We want to ensure that teachershave the language and the
research to back up what they'resaying whenever they feel they
need to push back.
So I really appreciate the waythat you so concisely stated
that, because I think that's avery portable phrase that
someone could use in order tobest support the learners in
(40:57):
their classroom.
So thank you for that.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
I hope it carries the weight that you're hoping it
carries.
I do too.
It's very hard for teachers topush back on some of the things
that are going on.
As another example, one of thethings that is actually it's
part of the state teacher's examin many states is this whole
(41:20):
notion of syllable types.
Did you know until the last 10years what the six syllable
types were?
Speaker 1 (41:27):
No, I sure didn't Nope.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
And any highly literate adult I know who is not
part of the current discussionsaround literacy instruction say
what when I ask them about that?
Well, right now you knowteachers are being taught the
six syllable types and they'resupposed to help the kids learn
to use those syllable types intheir attempts to identify words
(41:57):
.
Turns out there's no researchto support teaching syllable
types as a vehicle for movingkids forward as literacy
learners.
Kids do need to know aboutsyllables when they're writing,
they don't need to know aboutsyllable types, but it's useful
in writing to think about howmany syllables and know that
(42:18):
every syllable has to have atleast one vowel letter.
You're going to get lots moreliterate looking spellings when
kids know that.
Right, but in terms of lookingat a word like robot compared to
the word Robin, of looking at aword like robot compared to the
word Robin, what are thesyllable types?
(42:39):
Right, the R-O-B is at thebeginning of both of those words
and they're followed by a vowel, right?
So one of them is a closedsyllable and one of them is an
open syllable.
And am I thinking aboutsyllable types or am I thinking
about what's going to make sensein the text that I'm currently
reading, right?
So Devin Kearns has a wholepiece on analysis of syllable
(42:59):
types and whether it's a usefulthing to be part of literacy
instruction, and he concludesthat it takes the kids away from
what you want them to be doing,which is thinking about the
meaning of the text.
There are, in my mind, too manythings going on right now that
are taking teachers' energy.
(43:19):
You know teachers have to, youknow, really work to learn the
syllable types if they'reunaccustomed to them, or that
one of my least favorite thingsthat's happening right now is
teaching kids.
First, teaching teachers toteach kids the multiple
movements, articulatorymovements, that are associated
(43:41):
with particular sounds in spokenlanguage is like painful and
the multiple ways that a givensound might be spelled.
You know how many ways arethere to spell the sound.
Well, there's a lot, andknowing all of those might
confuse me a whole lot, morethan having seen a word spelled
in a particular way multipletimes and so it's stored in
(44:04):
memory as that spelling.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
Well, I think to that point, you know, we aren't
preparing teachers to be speechlanguage pathologists, right,
and sometimes I feel like that'sthe aim that's really built
into some legislation, butthat's not the goal of teacher
preparation programs.
And you're right, it does seem,while it might be helpful
information on some level, itdoes seem as though it is a bit
(44:30):
tangential to what elementaryschool teachers, early literacy
teachers, might actually need toknow in order to support whole
group and small group as well asindividual instruction.
It's a really specialized fieldand so, yeah, it becomes a bit
convoluted and I think you'reabsolutely right.
Teachers are getting so manydifferent messages right now
about what's important and whatthey need to know and what they
(44:50):
need to focus on and what'ssupported by research right?
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Oh, absolutely no support for the sound walls that
have taken over in some partsof the country.
No support in terms of research.
Wow.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
Well, donna, I have so enjoyed talking with you
today and I really appreciateyour time and I appreciate you
sharing your ideas with teachers, because I think it that this
conversation could really helpsome to better navigate sort of
what is being pressed upon themright now, because I think that
teachers, many, many teachers Italk with are feeling very
(45:26):
pressed, and in so manydifferent ways, and I think that
just makes what can be a verychallenging job that much more
difficult.
I always say teachers don'tleave the field because of
children, it's because of youknow the many, many, many other
demands that they're beingpressed with, and so I thank you
so much for your time and Iappreciate your contributions to
(45:48):
the field of education andcertainly to this program as
well.
So thank you so much Well.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
I appreciate what you're doing to help teachers
access all of the informationthat is so hard to access unless
you have the luxury thatacademicians have.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Isn't that the truth?
Isn't that the truth?
Thank you, donna.
Thank you.
Dr Donna Scanlon is known forher work in support of children
who experience substantialdifficulty in learning to read.
Thank you.
Dr Donna Scanlon is known forher work in support of children
who experience substantialdifficulty in learning to read
and on how to prevent andremediate reading difficulties.
In particular, she and hercolleagues developed an approach
to early literacy instructionand intervention, known as the
(46:27):
Interactive Strategies Approach,or ISA.
The ISA has been found to beeffective in helping teachers to
reduce the incidence of readingdifficulties in the early
primary grades and has been usedin response to intervention or
RTI contexts.
The ISA RTI ProfessionalDevelopment Project uses
distance learning technologiesto offer extended job-embedded
(46:51):
professional development forteachers.
Job-embedded professionaldevelopment for teachers.
Donna and her colleagues alsoextend the use of ISA for use
with older readers.
They evaluated the utility ofproviding teacher educators with
ISA-based instructionalresources for use in their
undergraduate and graduateliteracy methods courses, with
the goal of enhancing new andin-service teachers' ability to
(47:12):
understand and address the needsof beginning and struggling
literacy learners.
Donna authored Early LiteracyInstruction and Intervention,
which was recently published byGuilford Press.
She is also the co-author ofComprehensive Reading
Intervention in Grades 3-8,fostering Word Learning,
comprehension and Motivation.
And Argument Writing asSupplemental Literacy
(47:33):
Intervention for At-Risk Youth.
Word learning, comprehensionand motivation.
And argument writing assupplemental literacy
intervention for at-risk youth.
Her work has appeared inReading Research Quarterly.
Literacy Research Theory,method and Practice Journal of
Learning Disabilities.
The Reading, teacher, readingand Writing Journal of
Educational Psychology.
Reading Today, which is nowLiteracy Today, and Contemporary
Educational Psychology.
(47:54):
Dr Scanlon recently authored afreely available book entitled
Helping your Child Become aReader and co-authored a
position paper titled AnExamination of Dyslexia Research
and Instruction with PolicyImplications.
With Classroom Caffeine GuestPeter Johnston.
Both resources are linked inthe show notes.
With Classroom Caffeine guestPeter Johnston.
(48:16):
Both resources are linked inthe show notes.
Most of Dr Scanlon's researchwas supported by grants from the
National Institute of ChildHealth and Human Development and
the United States Department ofEducation through the Institute
of Education Sciences and theFund for Improvement of
Post-Secondary Education.
Dr Scanlon was a member of theInternational Reading
Association's RTI Task Force andis a 2017 inductee into the
(48:39):
Reading Hall of Fame.
Dr Scanlon is ProfessorEmeritus at University of
Albany's Department of Literacy,teaching and Learning and was
affiliated with the university'sChild Research and Study Center
for more than 40 years servingas the Associate Director and
the Director at different pointsin time.
For the good of all students,classroom Caffeine aims to
(49:02):
energize education, research andpractice.
If this show gives you thingsto think about, help us spread
the word.
Talk to your colleagues andeducator friends about what you
hear.
You can support the show bysubscribing, liking and
reviewing this podcast throughyour podcast provider.
Visit classroomcaffeinecom,where you can subscribe to
(49:24):
receive our short monthlynewsletter, the Espresso Shot.
On our website, you can alsolearn more about each guest.
Find transcripts for ourepisodes.
You can also learn more abouteach guest.
Find transcripts for ourepisodes.
Explore topics using ourdrop-down menu of tags.
Request an episode topic orpotential guest.
Support our research throughour listener survey or learn
more about the research we'redoing on our publications page.
(49:46):
Connect with us on social mediathrough Instagram, facebook and
Twitter.
We would love to hear from you.
Special thanks to the ClassroomCaffeine team Leah Berger,
abaya Valuru, stephanie Bransonand Shaba Oshfath.
As always, I raise my mug toyou, teachers.
Thanks for joining me.
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