July 14, 2025 • 16 mins
This year's National Assessment of Educational Progress shows only 31% of New York's fourth graders are reading at grade level. It's a dismal number mirrored in many states—and one that drops significantly for students from economically disadvantaged communities. In response, New York City’s Public Schools and other districts have increasingly embraced "The science of reading” instruction model—in part, a throwback to earlier decades of teaching. Our guest is Dr. Katie Pace Miles co-founder of CUNY Reading Corps and The NYC nonprofit The Reading Institute providing teacher training and resources.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome and thanks for listening to get connected. Focusing again
on education for the next few minutes and reading specifically.
Only thirty one percent of New York's fourth graders are
reading at grade level. That's according to the National Assessment
of Educational Progress over the last year. It is a
dismal number mirrored in many states, and one that drops
significantly for students from economically disadvantaged communities. In response, school
(00:37):
districts are increasingly embracing the science of reading, including New
York City public schools with the NYC Reads Initiative. Our
guest is doctor Katie Pay Smiles, an Associate professor and
director of the Advanced Certificate in Reading Science at Brooklyn College,
co founder of CUNY Reading Corps and the NYC nonprofit,
The Reading Institute. Doctor Katie pay Smiles, thank you for
(00:58):
being on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
You can find out more about everything we talk about
at Reading Institute NYC dot org. This literacy crisis is
not just in New York City public schools, It is everywhere.
What does it mean for these kids, both in and
out of classrooms? And who is most impacted by it?
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Absolutely, I'm glad that you're referring to it as a crisis.
It's been a crisis in our country for a long time.
In fact, the NAPE scores have been tracked since I
believe nineteen ninety two, and the proficiency rate of fourth
graders and eighth graders has not changed much. So I
believe in nineteen ninety two it was somewhere around twenty
nine percent, and it has fluctuated between twenty nine to
(01:39):
about thirty three percent of fourth and then eighth graders
reading proficiently. And when you think about the billions, trillions, whatever,
it would be amounts of dollars that have gone into education,
and all of the false promises along the way. The
laptop was going to save things, right, the iPad was
(01:59):
going to to do it, the smartboard was going to
do it. And here we are in twenty twenty four.
And I always flip those numbers to say, Okay, thirty
one percent of fourth graders are reading at a proficient level.
That means that sixty nine percent of students in the
United States are not reading proficiently. They're reading at a
(02:20):
basic or below basic level. And as you pointed out,
this overwhelmingly impacts low income students, Black and Hispanic students,
multi lingual learners, as well as students with language and
reading disabilities.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
I'd like to put it out there too, because this
practice has been going on for decades. It's worth noting
we have adults who have these major challenges. So according
to the National Literacy Institute, twenty two percent of American
adults are illiterate and fifty four percent have literacy levels
below the sixth grade level.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
It creates a cycle of the literacy these individuals, if
they have children, they are going to have very different
cult times supporting their children and the development of their literacy,
and this cycle perpetuates.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
This has come about because of the whole language instruction
model that apparently has not been effective. So can you
talk a little bit about that, and then we'll compare
it to the signs of reading, which is now going
to be the practice going forward.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
So the whole language approach was meant to be a
balanced approach, so you may also hear it referred to
as balanced literacy, and that anything that's balanced sounds good typically,
but what it did was it de emphasized explicit systematic
instruction for foundational literacy skills. Foundational skills are the skills
(03:39):
that get you up and going with your word reading
and your ability to read passages fluently or text fluently.
This balanced approach not only de emphasized explicit systematic instruction
for those skills, it also lacked evidence.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
So you're cutting out things like phonics, right, and.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
There's a lot that goes into phonic. So underneath what
undergirds phonics is letter knowledge. Letter knowledge is three pronged.
It's your ability to identify the letter shape, the letter sound,
the letter name to make the shape, identify the sound,
identify the name. Many of our letters have more than
one sound. When you group letters together, then they can
(04:20):
create additional sounds, so that's part of it. And then
your phonemic awareness, that's your ability to identify the sounds
in a word, to segment those sounds and blend those sounds.
That is going to lead to your phonics knowledge or
in your ability to leverage phonics skills to decode words.
So when people say phonics, they think of it as
(04:42):
just like Okay, A says A, and A says A.
There's a lot to it, and the goal is that
you're using that to decode. Then the goal of decoding
is that you're able to read fluently. The goal of
reading fluently is so that you have more cognitive energy
available to comprehend text. The goal of reading is comprehension.
(05:02):
But you have to back that train all the way
up in the early years too. Well, how do we
get to the ability to comprehend what we read?
Speaker 2 (05:10):
So we're backing everything up and we're going to work
on the science of reading. Let me remind everybody who
we're speaking with, and we'll talk about what that is.
Doctor Katie Pace Miles. She is the founder of the
Reading Institute. You can find out more at Reading Institute
NYC dot org. This is a new practice we're talking
about working with New York City public schools to teach reading.
You're listening to get connected on one oh six point
(05:32):
seven light FM Amina del Rio. The science of reading
is a more databased method. What does the term mean?
How does it work?
Speaker 3 (05:40):
So signs of reading. It's an interdisciplinary body of research.
It is not a curriculum. It is it has come
to us through research through academic journals. These are overwhelmingly
quantitative studies that have been conducted over the last five decades,
not only in the US, but across the world in
(06:03):
multiple languages, and together, it demonstrates a body of evidence
on how we develop the ability to read and write.
It puts forth evidence on why some people have difficulties
with reading and writing, and it also has demonstrated instructional
practices that are most effective for students. So this body
(06:25):
of research comes from cognitive developmental, educational psychology, neuroscience, education
special ed. And it's always good when there are fields
that converge on findings.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
So are we going back in a sense to what
we were learning maybe forty years ago in school, what
I might have learned in school forty years ago.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
People often ask this, Yeah, I'd like to say yes,
but it's more advanced because the research has evolved. Sure,
and so we should at this point be able to
even further support the development of bonics and the development
of literacy based on all of the evidence that we have.
We do seem to have taken a period of time
where we just let go of evidence based instructional practices.
(07:07):
That's this dip that has occurred, or this maybe we
call it a chasm in literacy instruction that veered off
into whole language balance literacy, and now we're trying to
bring it back to ensure that we're aligned with research.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
So, of course, for students to be able to make
the switch, teachers have to make the switch. They have
to know what they're teaching. So your organization, the Reading Institute,
has created a professional development tool for teachers to learn
about it.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
So we have a ten hour micro credential. That's a
fancy word of just saying it's ten hours of professional learning,
and even that term can be intimidating. So I'm going
to say it's engaging, it's efficient, and it is a
synthesis of how we learn to read and research on
(07:53):
effective instructional approaches. And the reason it's so engaging, we
have been told is that while well, I do a
bit of my academic piece as a professor, you know,
wearing a professorial hat, of saying, you know, this is
what the research says, and we show visuals that help
support what has been found in the research. We then
(08:15):
went and filmed in New York City public schools and
we have some of the most dynamic teachers showcased in
this Professional Learning Series, executing on evidence based approaches, and
you see this level of engagement with the students and
you see the progression of learning in these videos.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
So how long would it take? And I asked this
question also thinking about you know, teachers, they're overworked, they're
under resourced, all those sort of things. Right, we only
have summer ahead of us. Now, how long would it
take your teachers to get up to speed with a
program like this? And what is the cost? And that
kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Sure, So the Professional Learning Series is only ten hours,
and so you could break it up into ten one
hour segments. You could do it in chunks two hours,
and you would be done very quickly. We've had two
thousand New York City actually over two thousand New York
City public school teachers take it thus far this year.
And I recommend doing it with a colleague, and we've
(09:14):
had teams of colleagues come together to do it. And
we have a facilitation guide to keep everyone engaged and
to digest the modules. Once you're done, we have a
note catcher that guides you through the ten hours. So
if you are taking it independently at least that this
will keep you on track. We also have checks for
understanding built in to keep you engaged, as well as
(09:36):
pre and post surveys so that you can check in
on your knowledge building. Teachers can get access to the
ten hour Science of Reading course at Reading Institute NYC
dot org, and we offer it to teachers, educators, advocates, parents,
anyone who's interested in this knowledge. We offer it at
low or no cost. If you're an MIYCPS teacher, you
(09:56):
can get it for free. If you are anyone else,
you could pay twenty five dollars. But if you have
any financial hardship, you let us know and we can
give it to you for free.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
So in the past, curriculum was selected school by school
at New York City Public Schools as far as I
understand it, the plan with this change that was implemented
beginning sort of twenty twenty three was now all teachers
will work from the same playbooks. So this kind of
gets all the teachers on the same playbook. Correct, Yes,
that's right.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
So one of the things I was working with New
York City Public Schools and they came to me and said,
we have these new curriculum in place. What we need
is why did we make this change? Why does everyone
need to kind of let go of the whole language approach,
And that is where this professional learning comes into play.
We're not showcasing one of the three programs that New
(10:46):
York City Public Schools has selected. We are explaining how
we learn how to read and what teachers need to
do to support the development of reading and writing.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Part of the reason we're having this conversation is for
parents to be aware of this change or be a
little bit more involved. Why should parents want their child's
teacher to take these micro credential courses and then get
more of an understanding of the signs of reading.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Well, parents should know, and it's always disheartening to tell
parents that the majority of teachers in the United States
have not been trained in the science of reading. This
has not been a part of educator prep programs in
higher ed institutions. So there's just an astounding lack of
this content knowledge in educator prep programs and then in
(11:33):
even experienced teachers. So there's an initiative happening right now
that's going state to state. It's called pest Forward to
try and align literacy courses in educator prep programs to
the science of reading. But this is moving incrementally, and
so just to get your teacher ten hours of information
(11:53):
on this can be elucidating to teachers. And then they
start They teachers have come to us and said, you know,
you kind of blew my mind with this. I had
no idea that this is how children learn how to
read and that I should be doing using these instructional approaches.
And then they've said, and I'm going to seek out
more knowledge. And that's always the best is when you
hear that from teachers. They start their own clubs, their
(12:16):
own little science of reading clubs, they start book clubs.
I always encourage people there's an advanced certificate at Brooklyn
College that I run where there are full scholarships. If
there's a teacher in New York City public schools that's
interested in that, they can come and do that program
that's much more in depth. But to just facilitate this
initial level of understanding gets teachers in the school communicating
(12:41):
with each other in a way that they hadn't been
communicating before.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
So the NYC Reads Initiative began in New York City
Public schools and select schools. With the twenty twenty three
twenty four school year, it expanded to all districts this year.
We're still at the beginning of the transition, but what
do you know about how it's going so far?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
We know that there has been a lot of work
that has gone into this massive transition, a herculean transition
of moving teachers out of the whole language mindset and
into structured not only a structured literacy program, but a
structured literacy mindset. Structured literacy is another term that's used
interchangeably often with Science of Reading. It means that you're
(13:19):
providing explicit, systematic instruction for all students. It has been
incredible to see how teachers are coming enthusiastically to this transition,
how they are saying things when I'm in schools or
saying things like I've never taught as well as I'm
teaching now. They are making this their own, They're using
(13:43):
the materials that they have, and they're putting their own enthusiasm,
energy spice into it, and a lot of that you
can see in the ten hour Science of Reading micro
credential and professional learning that the Reading Institute offers. If
you want to see some of these an action you
can find it there.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Since you bring up parents and how unfamiliar they might
be with how reading is taught. I spoke with an
educator recently who noted that parents also tend to overestimate
how well their child is reading. And we're having this
conversation as summer break has begun, in addition to other
struggles we know about summer learning loss. How can parents
and caregivers work on their child's literacy during the summer.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
The most basic thing that parents can do over the
summer is to read to their children and to model
reading themselves. If you do nothing else, it would be that,
and it would be taking your child to the libraries
and bringing checking out as many books as you want to,
bringing them home and having them available so that there's
engaging material laying around the house. That would be the
(14:48):
first thing. If you have a child that is an
emergent reader, meaning anywhere kindergarten through second grade. The Reading
Institute offers a caregiver manual with a series of activities
based on the evidence based high impact tutoring approach program
that we have at the I'm going to say that
one one more time I'm sorry. The Reading Institute also
(15:11):
has a caregiver manual that is based on our high
impact tutoring program called Reading Ready. We give that out
for free so parents can come and get the caregiver
Reading Ready Manual. They can also get the Reading Ready
Letter Knowledge Manual. Both of those are easily accessible for
parents and they can use them at home all summer
(15:34):
long and have fun while they're teaching their children the
basics of word reading.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Our guest is doctor Katie pay Smiles, who recently wrote
an op at an AM New York calling for more
New York state funding for high impact tutoring programs. There's
much more about that in the article. You can find
out more about the training program at Reading Institute NYC
dot org. Doctor Katiepaysmiles of the Reading Institute, thank you
for being Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one O six to seven lightfm
dot com, thanks for listening,
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome and thanks for listening to get connected. Focusing again
on education for the next few minutes and reading specifically.
Only thirty one percent of New York's fourth graders are
reading at grade level. That's according to the National Assessment
of Educational Progress over the last year. It is a
dismal number mirrored in many states, and one that drops
significantly for students from economically disadvantaged communities. In response, school
(00:37):
districts are increasingly embracing the science of reading, including New
York City public schools with the NYC Reads Initiative. Our
guest is doctor Katie Pay Smiles, an Associate professor and
director of the Advanced Certificate in Reading Science at Brooklyn College,
co founder of CUNY Reading Corps and the NYC nonprofit,
The Reading Institute. Doctor Katie pay Smiles, thank you for
(00:58):
being on the show.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
You can find out more about everything we talk about
at Reading Institute NYC dot org. This literacy crisis is
not just in New York City public schools, It is everywhere.
What does it mean for these kids, both in and
out of classrooms? And who is most impacted by it?
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Absolutely, I'm glad that you're referring to it as a crisis.
It's been a crisis in our country for a long time.
In fact, the NAPE scores have been tracked since I
believe nineteen ninety two, and the proficiency rate of fourth
graders and eighth graders has not changed much. So I
believe in nineteen ninety two it was somewhere around twenty
nine percent, and it has fluctuated between twenty nine to
(01:39):
about thirty three percent of fourth and then eighth graders
reading proficiently. And when you think about the billions, trillions, whatever,
it would be amounts of dollars that have gone into education,
and all of the false promises along the way. The
laptop was going to save things, right, the iPad was
(01:59):
going to to do it, the smartboard was going to
do it. And here we are in twenty twenty four.
And I always flip those numbers to say, Okay, thirty
one percent of fourth graders are reading at a proficient level.
That means that sixty nine percent of students in the
United States are not reading proficiently. They're reading at a
(02:20):
basic or below basic level. And as you pointed out,
this overwhelmingly impacts low income students, Black and Hispanic students,
multi lingual learners, as well as students with language and
reading disabilities.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
I'd like to put it out there too, because this
practice has been going on for decades. It's worth noting
we have adults who have these major challenges. So according
to the National Literacy Institute, twenty two percent of American
adults are illiterate and fifty four percent have literacy levels
below the sixth grade level.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
It creates a cycle of the literacy these individuals, if
they have children, they are going to have very different
cult times supporting their children and the development of their literacy,
and this cycle perpetuates.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
This has come about because of the whole language instruction
model that apparently has not been effective. So can you
talk a little bit about that, and then we'll compare
it to the signs of reading, which is now going
to be the practice going forward.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
So the whole language approach was meant to be a
balanced approach, so you may also hear it referred to
as balanced literacy, and that anything that's balanced sounds good typically,
but what it did was it de emphasized explicit systematic
instruction for foundational literacy skills. Foundational skills are the skills
(03:39):
that get you up and going with your word reading
and your ability to read passages fluently or text fluently.
This balanced approach not only de emphasized explicit systematic instruction
for those skills, it also lacked evidence.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
So you're cutting out things like phonics, right, and.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
There's a lot that goes into phonic. So underneath what
undergirds phonics is letter knowledge. Letter knowledge is three pronged.
It's your ability to identify the letter shape, the letter sound,
the letter name to make the shape, identify the sound,
identify the name. Many of our letters have more than
one sound. When you group letters together, then they can
(04:20):
create additional sounds, so that's part of it. And then
your phonemic awareness, that's your ability to identify the sounds
in a word, to segment those sounds and blend those sounds.
That is going to lead to your phonics knowledge or
in your ability to leverage phonics skills to decode words.
So when people say phonics, they think of it as
(04:42):
just like Okay, A says A, and A says A.
There's a lot to it, and the goal is that
you're using that to decode. Then the goal of decoding
is that you're able to read fluently. The goal of
reading fluently is so that you have more cognitive energy
available to comprehend text. The goal of reading is comprehension.
(05:02):
But you have to back that train all the way
up in the early years too. Well, how do we
get to the ability to comprehend what we read?
Speaker 2 (05:10):
So we're backing everything up and we're going to work
on the science of reading. Let me remind everybody who
we're speaking with, and we'll talk about what that is.
Doctor Katie Pace Miles. She is the founder of the
Reading Institute. You can find out more at Reading Institute
NYC dot org. This is a new practice we're talking
about working with New York City public schools to teach reading.
You're listening to get connected on one oh six point
(05:32):
seven light FM Amina del Rio. The science of reading
is a more databased method. What does the term mean?
How does it work?
Speaker 3 (05:40):
So signs of reading. It's an interdisciplinary body of research.
It is not a curriculum. It is it has come
to us through research through academic journals. These are overwhelmingly
quantitative studies that have been conducted over the last five decades,
not only in the US, but across the world in
(06:03):
multiple languages, and together, it demonstrates a body of evidence
on how we develop the ability to read and write.
It puts forth evidence on why some people have difficulties
with reading and writing, and it also has demonstrated instructional
practices that are most effective for students. So this body
(06:25):
of research comes from cognitive developmental, educational psychology, neuroscience, education
special ed. And it's always good when there are fields
that converge on findings.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
So are we going back in a sense to what
we were learning maybe forty years ago in school, what
I might have learned in school forty years ago.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
People often ask this, Yeah, I'd like to say yes,
but it's more advanced because the research has evolved. Sure,
and so we should at this point be able to
even further support the development of bonics and the development
of literacy based on all of the evidence that we have.
We do seem to have taken a period of time
where we just let go of evidence based instructional practices.
(07:07):
That's this dip that has occurred, or this maybe we
call it a chasm in literacy instruction that veered off
into whole language balance literacy, and now we're trying to
bring it back to ensure that we're aligned with research.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
So, of course, for students to be able to make
the switch, teachers have to make the switch. They have
to know what they're teaching. So your organization, the Reading Institute,
has created a professional development tool for teachers to learn
about it.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
So we have a ten hour micro credential. That's a
fancy word of just saying it's ten hours of professional learning,
and even that term can be intimidating. So I'm going
to say it's engaging, it's efficient, and it is a
synthesis of how we learn to read and research on
(07:53):
effective instructional approaches. And the reason it's so engaging, we
have been told is that while well, I do a
bit of my academic piece as a professor, you know,
wearing a professorial hat, of saying, you know, this is
what the research says, and we show visuals that help
support what has been found in the research. We then
(08:15):
went and filmed in New York City public schools and
we have some of the most dynamic teachers showcased in
this Professional Learning Series, executing on evidence based approaches, and
you see this level of engagement with the students and
you see the progression of learning in these videos.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
So how long would it take? And I asked this
question also thinking about you know, teachers, they're overworked, they're
under resourced, all those sort of things. Right, we only
have summer ahead of us. Now, how long would it
take your teachers to get up to speed with a
program like this? And what is the cost? And that
kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Sure, So the Professional Learning Series is only ten hours,
and so you could break it up into ten one
hour segments. You could do it in chunks two hours,
and you would be done very quickly. We've had two
thousand New York City actually over two thousand New York
City public school teachers take it thus far this year.
And I recommend doing it with a colleague, and we've
(09:14):
had teams of colleagues come together to do it. And
we have a facilitation guide to keep everyone engaged and
to digest the modules. Once you're done, we have a
note catcher that guides you through the ten hours. So
if you are taking it independently at least that this
will keep you on track. We also have checks for
understanding built in to keep you engaged, as well as
(09:36):
pre and post surveys so that you can check in
on your knowledge building. Teachers can get access to the
ten hour Science of Reading course at Reading Institute NYC
dot org, and we offer it to teachers, educators, advocates, parents,
anyone who's interested in this knowledge. We offer it at
low or no cost. If you're an MIYCPS teacher, you
(09:56):
can get it for free. If you are anyone else,
you could pay twenty five dollars. But if you have
any financial hardship, you let us know and we can
give it to you for free.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
So in the past, curriculum was selected school by school
at New York City Public Schools as far as I
understand it, the plan with this change that was implemented
beginning sort of twenty twenty three was now all teachers
will work from the same playbooks. So this kind of
gets all the teachers on the same playbook. Correct, Yes,
that's right.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
So one of the things I was working with New
York City Public Schools and they came to me and said,
we have these new curriculum in place. What we need
is why did we make this change? Why does everyone
need to kind of let go of the whole language approach,
And that is where this professional learning comes into play.
We're not showcasing one of the three programs that New
(10:46):
York City Public Schools has selected. We are explaining how
we learn how to read and what teachers need to
do to support the development of reading and writing.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Part of the reason we're having this conversation is for
parents to be aware of this change or be a
little bit more involved. Why should parents want their child's
teacher to take these micro credential courses and then get
more of an understanding of the signs of reading.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Well, parents should know, and it's always disheartening to tell
parents that the majority of teachers in the United States
have not been trained in the science of reading. This
has not been a part of educator prep programs in
higher ed institutions. So there's just an astounding lack of
this content knowledge in educator prep programs and then in
(11:33):
even experienced teachers. So there's an initiative happening right now
that's going state to state. It's called pest Forward to
try and align literacy courses in educator prep programs to
the science of reading. But this is moving incrementally, and
so just to get your teacher ten hours of information
(11:53):
on this can be elucidating to teachers. And then they
start They teachers have come to us and said, you know,
you kind of blew my mind with this. I had
no idea that this is how children learn how to
read and that I should be doing using these instructional approaches.
And then they've said, and I'm going to seek out
more knowledge. And that's always the best is when you
hear that from teachers. They start their own clubs, their
(12:16):
own little science of reading clubs, they start book clubs.
I always encourage people there's an advanced certificate at Brooklyn
College that I run where there are full scholarships. If
there's a teacher in New York City public schools that's
interested in that, they can come and do that program
that's much more in depth. But to just facilitate this
initial level of understanding gets teachers in the school communicating
(12:41):
with each other in a way that they hadn't been
communicating before.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
So the NYC Reads Initiative began in New York City
Public schools and select schools. With the twenty twenty three
twenty four school year, it expanded to all districts this year.
We're still at the beginning of the transition, but what
do you know about how it's going so far?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
We know that there has been a lot of work
that has gone into this massive transition, a herculean transition
of moving teachers out of the whole language mindset and
into structured not only a structured literacy program, but a
structured literacy mindset. Structured literacy is another term that's used
interchangeably often with Science of Reading. It means that you're
(13:19):
providing explicit, systematic instruction for all students. It has been
incredible to see how teachers are coming enthusiastically to this transition,
how they are saying things when I'm in schools or
saying things like I've never taught as well as I'm
teaching now. They are making this their own, They're using
(13:43):
the materials that they have, and they're putting their own enthusiasm,
energy spice into it, and a lot of that you
can see in the ten hour Science of Reading micro
credential and professional learning that the Reading Institute offers. If
you want to see some of these an action you
can find it there.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Since you bring up parents and how unfamiliar they might
be with how reading is taught. I spoke with an
educator recently who noted that parents also tend to overestimate
how well their child is reading. And we're having this
conversation as summer break has begun, in addition to other
struggles we know about summer learning loss. How can parents
and caregivers work on their child's literacy during the summer.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
The most basic thing that parents can do over the
summer is to read to their children and to model
reading themselves. If you do nothing else, it would be that,
and it would be taking your child to the libraries
and bringing checking out as many books as you want to,
bringing them home and having them available so that there's
engaging material laying around the house. That would be the
(14:48):
first thing. If you have a child that is an
emergent reader, meaning anywhere kindergarten through second grade. The Reading
Institute offers a caregiver manual with a series of activities
based on the evidence based high impact tutoring approach program
that we have at the I'm going to say that
one one more time I'm sorry. The Reading Institute also
(15:11):
has a caregiver manual that is based on our high
impact tutoring program called Reading Ready. We give that out
for free so parents can come and get the caregiver
Reading Ready Manual. They can also get the Reading Ready
Letter Knowledge Manual. Both of those are easily accessible for
parents and they can use them at home all summer
(15:34):
long and have fun while they're teaching their children the
basics of word reading.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Our guest is doctor Katie pay Smiles, who recently wrote
an op at an AM New York calling for more
New York state funding for high impact tutoring programs. There's
much more about that in the article. You can find
out more about the training program at Reading Institute NYC
dot org. Doctor Katiepaysmiles of the Reading Institute, thank you
for being Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one O six to seven lightfm
dot com, thanks for listening,
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