P David Pearson
Episode 27 To the Classroom Podcast
November 20, 2023
Jennifer Serravallo:
Today's guest is none other than THE Dr. P David Pearson. Usually I approach guests with a topic in mind, but because Dr. Pearson had just written on just about every topic there is to write about in the field of literacy education, I asked him what he wanted to discuss. He said: "how to design an ideal literacy block aligned to research." I love the topic and I hope you will too. As always, I'm joined by colleagues in the second half of the episode today. It's Gina Dignon and Macie Kerbs to talk about practical takeaways for the classroom. It's a long episode, but worth every minute.
Dr. David Pearson. Welcome to the podcast.
P David Pearson:
Thanks for having me, Jen.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, when you offered to speak with me about designing a research-based reading program, I thought this is a perfect topic because I'm always being asked, how do you fit it all in? Right? The challenges that I've always had with answering the questions are, first of all, what's "it?" What are we fitting in, right? And that depends a little bit on the grade level, the needs of students and a whole host of other factors. And so I thought what we could do is to start off today by talking about the elements to consider that we should be including in a reading block, and then move into discussing how do we know how much time to devote to each element based on some different class profiles?
P David Pearson:
Sure, that's great. But let me preface that with one comment. We're in the middle of this sort of science of reading discourse that we have all over the country and really all over the world. And I want to just stake my claim here that I am a firm believer in the science of reading and that all of our pedagogical and curricular decisions ought to be based upon the best available research and science we have. But I want to be clear that my reading of the research says that we've often erred on the side of emphasizing one area of research or one specific topic over others. And I want to make sure that we do a full reading of the research as we carve out a place for instructional practices within our curriculum.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you for saying that, and I think you're the perfect person to help us to do that because you've got decades and decades of experience. You've written research handbooks, you've written how many hundreds of articles probably at this point and have a really good sense of all the different...
P David Pearson:
Well, I'm very proud of the fact that I've written articles with more people than articles. So I've got, I think the last count was something like, and it's only a matter of longevity and survival that pretty much has to happen. I think about 330 articles with about 360 people.
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's incredible. And that's a great example of trying to listen to all voices and incorporate all fields and come to consensus and work together, which is what I think we need right now for sure.
P David Pearson:
Right
Jennifer Serravallo:
So let's start off with the elements. So we've got some frameworks that guide us. We've got the simple view of reading, we've got Scarborough's Rope and we've got the new Duke and Cartwright Active View of Reading. And I'm wondering if you could just give your opinion based on your reading of the research, the broad research, which of those models feels most helpful to kind of base our decisions on how to form a literacy block?
P David Pearson:
Well, sure, I'll be clear about where I stand. I was very happy to see the Duke Cartwright piece on the Active View of Reading come out because I think it makes more salient the elements other than decoding capacity and linguistic comprehension that are there in the Scarborough's rope, which is of course an extension of Gough and Hillinger's Simple View of Reading. The Duke and Cartwright piece, I think make those things more explicit. And by the way, if it is the case that the Simple View of Reading is simple in the sense that there's two big buckets to coding and linguistic or language comprehension. But once you get inside those buckets, it isn't simple at all. And Gough and Hoover, all of whom contributed to that Simple View of Reading, say exactly that in their original treatise on the simple view of reading is a complex process.
What's simple about it is the view of reading. We got these two big buckets as convenient placeholders for all that complexity that you otherwise have to deal with. But of the three, I'll take the one by Duke and Cartwright because they add other elements such as social relations amongst folks in the classroom, and they do a much better job of dealing with issues of motivation, engagement, and executive control than do the other elements. And by the way, the people who align themselves with a simple view of reading, people like David Francis and Hugh Catz and Kim from UC Irvine, all work within the framework of the Simple View of Reading. But what they've been doing is making it much more complex in the last four or five years. So even the advocates of a simple view of reading are understanding that they have to unpack that complexity that lies just beneath the surface. So a simple view of reading I think in general isn't so simple anymore. But of the three models, I'll take the Duke and Carwright piece.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, I agree that I love that inclusion of the executive functioning skills and of these bridging processes that are the in-between the word recognition and language comprehension. And then of course there's the foundational element in the active view, which is that we need to teach kids to be active, but they need to use strategies. So I was wondering if we could hear your definition of strategy and if you agree that it fits across the literacy block, because in that model it talks about strategies for word recognition, for fluency, for comprehension, and sort of cuts across all of it. So what's a strategy?
P David Pearson:
Well, Peter Afflerbach and Scott Paris and I wrote a paper on skills and strategies in I think 2007 or 08, I can't remember the exact year for The Reading Teacher. And we've done some updates of it since. And what we try to do is to make the point that what we have is a set of reading practices, things we do while we're reading, and sometimes those practices are under strategic control. And when things are under strategic control, they're slowed down, they're deliberate, they're intentional, you're sort of talking yourself through them. And the other mode is the skill mode. That is where we practice the strategy enough so that we don't think about it much anymore, and it becomes almost automatic for us. What we're striving for in all cases with all readers is to develop this sort of skilled mode of operating where we just read when we're constantly monitoring and revising our hypotheses about what things mean, but doing so almost without any conscious effort on our part. And that's where we want to get to, but sometimes in order to get to it, we have to slow that process down and we have to be more intentional and deliberate about it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And do you agree that outside of comprehension, strategies can also be helped?
P David Pearson:
Yes, sure. Absolutely. I think that there's, do you know the work? Well, of course you do the work of Linnea Ehri who talks about ways of reading words, and she talks about that. You can read words, but with sort of a synthetic decoding where you look at the letters and blend the letters together and she talks about reading by analogy where you look at a word and you say, this word is fat. I know it rhymes with cat, so it must have the same ending. So you read by analogy to other known words. She talks about also contextual reading where we sometimes use context to figure out to sort of probably confirm our hypotheses about what a word actually says of the like. So yes, I think that figuring out what words say and mean can be every bit as strategic as understanding the intention of the author or trying to understand what the author is trying to get us to think and believe and things like that.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, while we're on word reading, let's talk about foundational skills, which is critical: being able to read the words on the page, phonological awareness, understanding of the alphabetic principle, phonics, the decoding strategies you just talked about. If we were to look to research to create a research-based effective program for those foundational skills, what are some of the key elements that we need to keep in mind?
P David Pearson:
I distinguish between phonological and phonemic in the sense that phonological refers to any sound representation. When I get down to a word like cat and I can go c-a-t, I can segment and I can then blend back together the sounds in those words. That's the phonemic part because you're doing the mapping between phoneme, and well you're breaking the words down into individual phonemes, those skills. Well, two things about 'em. First of all, they develop in young readers whether you teach it to them or not. We didn't teach phonemic awareness at all in any of our curriculum until I'm thinking the mid to late eighties, something like that. We taught auditory discrimination and we taught a lot of word reading skills and we taught visual discrimination, but we did not have many explicit programs on phonemic awareness until it became a popular entity, I think largely as a function of the words of the folks at Haskins Lab in Connecticut.
They're the ones who sort of discovered this and put it into our reading theories and the like. But once we started teaching it, we know that explicit attention to it, a) promotes better understanding of phonemic awareness, and there is evidence that it has a residual impact on our decoding ability. So it's a real phenomenon and I'm in favor of its development no matter how you develop it. I believe the evidence from the National Reading Panel that phonemic awareness is best taught in conjunction with letter sounds instruction and limited to a pretty short period of time in the curriculum.
I can't remember the exact recommendation from the National Reading Panel, but it's very modest in terms of its overall impact on the amount of time it takes in the curriculum. And secondly, mapping letters onto sounds is promoting the alphabetic principle and teaching kids different strategies for doing that is great. I think that if I were responsible for a first grade program now we'd have some units on mapping individual letters onto sounds and with the synthetic phonics, so I think instruction, explicit instruction, and that is important. I would never stop there. I would also do a lot on Word families as a way of giving kids a strategy for looking at more than a single letter at a time.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think one of the things that a lot of teachers wonder and I think is an important thing to point out this time when there's a lot of new programs taking up a lot of time in the classroom right now is how much phonics do kids actually need? There's a program I like a lot that has design where it's interleaved practice, so the same skills keep coming up again and again over the course of several years and they're recommending 30 minutes a day and every skill they say is exposed or repeated 30 times across the program. Do most kids need 30 exposures to a sound spelling correspondence to get it? Is there research on this?
P David Pearson:
First of all, I don't think there's, I know of no research that tells us the amount of time to spend on individual letter sound correspondences. I think what we have is a lot of experience and a lot of, I guess armchair advice coming from people like myself and many others who on the basis of their interactions with teachers and their reading of the research develop plausible hypotheses about what makes sense. A colleague of mine who's since retired, who was a very strong phonics advocate, her name was Connie Jewel, I don't know if you remember Connie's work, but she did a lot of work on early reading instruction, kind of a contemporary of Marilyn Adams in the seventies and eighties, and one of the things that she told me that I've never forgotten is that when we teach phonics to kids, we do it as if they never learned anything about, they never acquired any knowledge about how letter sound correspondences work, so that when you get to the 15th letter sound lesson on the sound of the letter Q maybe or something like that, we teach it just like the first lesson that was maybe on the sound of T or the sound of S.
And we forget that many, indeed most, kids develop a schema for what a letter sound is like a letter sound correspondence is like, and so when they get to the 15th lesson, they say, oh, this is just like what we learned for S only is with the sound of F. It's just like learning the sounds of the letter S only is they're different, but the logic is the same. Let's give kids some credit for developing a schema for what a letter sound correspondence looks like and assume that later on we can probably achieve the same level of mastery with less intentional effort and time on our part. We can be more efficient in teaching those. Probably no one that I know, at least in my time, did more to promote the judicious and sensible use of phonics than Steve Stahl who died in about 2004 or five, I believe when Steve left us.
But he was a student of Jean Chall's and always I think carried the torch for Challs' emphasis on early code instruction, but in a way that recognized that there were a million other things to it. I remember once, I'm guessing it was in the late nineties or early two thousands, he came out with his model of what a first grade curriculum should look like and what the distributions of time should look like. And this is from a guy who believes that phonics is one of the core things you have to learn. In first grade, I think it was 15 minutes a day should be devoted to code instruction. Now here's a person who's a champion of phonics and saying it should take less than 10% of the entire first grade curriculum.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, I think that's an important point because if we are, nobody denies how important phonics is, but if we're taking a ton of time, then that's time kids aren't getting to practice other things, like you said, fluency or having read alouds or getting to play with each other or all the many other things that they need to develop oral language and literacy skills and things like that.
P David Pearson:
Sure. This one is a little bit of an analogy. It's less research based than it is for me, an object lesson in curriculum development. Pretend that you ran a summer basketball camp for eight year olds who came when universities do this all over the country. If you said to them when they got to the camp, "Well, welcome to basketball camp. For the first week we're going to work on dribbling and we're going to work on defense and we're going to work. Then if you get good at that, we'll work on a layup. And if you get good at that, we'll do free throws. And when you've all achieved 85% mastery on those basics, then maybe we'll have a scrimmage. And if we're lucky, we'll get to the scrimmage by the end of the second week."
If you did that, those kids would all go home on day two. Why? Because they never got to play the game. And kids want to play the game at whatever level of mastery of the component skills they have. And we forget that that's part of the magic of learning to read is not just learning the letter sound correspondences, it's putting them to work in making sense out of text and accessing the magic that lays waiting for you to unearth. And if all we ever did was practice those skills until you reach a certain level of mastery and never let you play the game of reading, you'd go home. And I think that's what happens to a lot of kids.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, you've got kids sitting in front of you. You've got to keep engaged and focused, right?
P David Pearson:
Yeah, you've got to play the game. And that's why most reading programs, you only learn one or two skills per lesson and then you read some text and you talk about it because that's the point of reading and the job of the phonics you're learning isn't done until you've made sense out of that text.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Absolutely.
P David Pearson:
And we forget that phonics skills and fluency, I would argue that a lot of the stuff we teach in a curriculum, all they are is enabling skills. They're a means to an end. They're not an invent to themselves programs that are too skills oriented, fall victim to that conspiracy of good intentions and forget that that kids have to stay engaged and they have to experience that a meaningful and coherent curriculum that makes sense to them. And a reading curriculum isn't going to make sense until you get to making meaning.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So let's talk about that. Let's talk about the reading of continuous text and practicing fluency, really getting in there and playing the game. And then we'll talk about comprehension. What do you think the fluency instruction should look like?
P David Pearson:
Well, I've always been impressed with, first of all, the essential character of fluency because if you can't learn to put the words on the page into phrasing that approximates everyday oral discourse, the way we talk to one another, the way that you and I are talking to one another right now, or the ways that six-year-olds talk to one another is real easy to lose the threat of meaning. And so some practice in influence is I think called for, I'm impressed with the work that Steve Stahl and Melanie Kuhn started in the late, I guess mid to late 90's and have carried on and after Steve's death, of course, Melanie and others have carried that on. And I believe that approach to meaningful fluency practice where you really over rehearse certain stories and the like. I believe the research that my colleague when I was at the University of Minnesota, Jay Samuels did on repeated readings actually was helpful. And I think that our colleague, Tim Rasinski has done a marvelous job of trying to put all this together in a sensible and research-based framework that teachers can actually implement. So my advice would be find out what people like Melanie Kuhn and Tim Rasinski have to say these days and listen to it carefully.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, they were both guests on the podcast, so...Go back and listen to those episodes!
P David Pearson:
That's right, go listen to those.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Go listen,
P David Pearson:
They know what they're talking about.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, let's talk about comprehension. I know this is a major area of focus for your whole life's work, and right now there seems to be this debate going on between whether to teach content or to teach strategies for comprehension. And I know you've long said, "No, it's both." So can you tell us what the research tells us and how that should apply to how we're designing our literacy block?
P David Pearson:
I started working on this issue, and I'm guessing when I was at grad school in the late sixties, I was impressed by the fact that most of my colleagues were studying word identification and phonics and beginning reading, and I got to worrying about how kids ever make sense of what they read. And I started reading in this emerging field of cognitive science, and I discovered things like schema theory and Construction Integration Models of Kinch and the like, and they were focusing on how we incorporate new ideas into our existing knowledge structures. And the mantra was that we understand what's new in terms of what we already know, and if an idea comes into our head, we look for a place where there are other things like it, and we look for hooks to hang our hats on, if you will. And if we find those hooks and we can say, "Ah, this is just like X," or "Here's another example of a dog or whatever it is," and once you've found those homes, then that idea can remain in your memory because it's got a place where it belongs.
And when kids get an idea that's so foreign to them that they have no idea what it's about, those ideas literally go in one eye and out the other. There's no place for them to find that home. So that really appealed to me. And then I started doing small scale experiments where we looked at comprehension in the face of greater or lesser knowledge about the topics, and sure enough, the more about it, the easier it is to learn and remember the idea is in a new text and the like. So that was one insight. Then as my career changed, I got to looking at a slightly different aspect of this and I said, well, what about the information that goes in and stays? It's there now. It literally becomes today's new knowledge. The stuff that we acquired today is tomorrow's prior knowledge
So that while we understand what's new in terms of we already know what already know changes every day, not only does it change every day, it changes from the beginning of the text, from the beginning of a story to the end of it. You're not the same reader at the end of the story that you were at the beginning by virtue of what? All of the ideas that you've encountered and understood. So it becomes knowledge begets comprehension, begets knowledge, begets comprehension, and it's what I like to call the virtuous cycle. So I'm all for people who are promoting knowledge development, and I spend about 12 years of my life working on a project called Seeds of Science, roots of Reading. And what we did is we tried to embed comprehension instruction into the acquisition of knowledge and inquiry skill in science with little kids from kindergarten through well bigger kids to through eighth grade ultimately.
And that was our whole notion is that to the degree that we could take advantage of what kids knew about science and use that to promote comprehension--and here's what the people in the Knowledge Matters thing, I think miss the boat--is that we forget that it's not just a matter of teaching them the knowledge and then having them read about it. It's the reading of it that actually changes the knowledge structure. And until you get that reciprocity between knowledge and comprehension and knowledge, it's really knowledge, knowledge promotes comprehension, promotes learning. I'm all for doing whatever we can to make sure that we have kids read about things that are interesting and worthwhile and that promote their knowledge. I'm all for doing firsthand investigations in science and social studies and literature that don't involve reading that are through the oral channels. And I just think that the folks who made a fetish out of pitting knowledge against strategies are barking up the wrong tree.
Just because you teach strategies doesn't mean you don't think knowledge is important, and just because you teach knowledge doesn't mean that you think that there isn't a place where strategies, as a matter of fact for me, strategies, comprehension strategies like searching, trying to draw inferences about characters, motives or things like that. Strategies are the tools we use when knowledge won't do the job on its own. When you get to the what my friend Tom Anderson at the Center for the Study of Reading in the seventies and early eighties used to call the clunks of comprehension. That's when strategies should kick in and strategies, the tools we use to work our way out of these little cul-de-sacs we get into. So for me, there should not be any tension between strategy instruction and emphasis on knowledge. Do 'em both do them both and do 'em well and give kids things worth reading about.
I like to think of a matrix in which you have reading, writing and language across the top, and these are processes that we use, and then you have science, social studies, literature, maybe humanities like art and stuff like that. Down the side, a curriculum is comprised of applying peace learning tools, reading, writing and language discourse, talking and thinking about things to those curricular elements. And if we could build a curriculum like that, I think we'd be doing kids service. But as long as we continue to think of science and social studies as completely independent of reading, which are curriculum practices in schools seem to promote, I think we'll continue to have separate silos for those things and I'd love to do more and more to unsilo them.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, I agree with you there. And I also think that sometimes the implication of the very science, social studies, knowledge rich curriculum is that we lose literature, so we're losing stories. We're losing the kind of knowledge that kids build about the world and people through reading stories. I don't know if that's intentional.
P David Pearson:
Well, no, you, you've hit on something really important and that is that, and the best person, if you want to know about the role of narrative in understanding, you need to read the work of Jerome Brenner because he was the one who I really think helped us understand that narrative is the way that we experience life, and it's sort of the intuitive way of organizing our experience. We tell people about our day and we do it in a narrative fashion. So narrative is the medium of everyday understanding and as it should be because when we tell stories about things, they not only carry the thread of the ideas, they also carry the underbelly of the lived experience, the emotional reaction, the affective reaction, and what surprised us, delighted us, angered us about those things. Those things come with that, but that's one way of organizing the world. The other way of organizing the world is categorically like these are all things about mammals. These are all things about birds, these are all things about unhappiness. We can organize the world that way too. And then there's no reason the one should outweigh the other.
And if you think about how we deal with ideas in the world, we're constantly going back and forth between them. They're both important ways of looking at the world. And by the way, there's an affective side to expository texts and there's a knowledge side to stories. We gain a lot of information from stories. Stories are filled not only with the stuff of stories is the stuff of human experience, love, friendship, loyalty, betrayal, all those things that make us human beings. And so our literature and our narrative literature has a content to it, but it's also the case that's just a lot of ideas, a lot of stuff
In stories. And so we learn from stories too. And so that's why I constantly object to these forced choices that my colleagues seem to want to voice upon us when my response is, well, I can see both sides of that. Maybe both of those things need to be a part of our curriculum, and we need to find a way of, if you don't want to use the word balance anymore, which no one seems to want to do, we could talk about being comprehensive or having a sharing of important ideas. Use whatever metaphor or word you want, but make sure you do it all.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. I think another false choice is this idea of we want to build knowledge, and so the teacher must always determine the texts that the kids read and they have to be aligned to the curriculum. What's the place then for any kind of choice reading or independent reading or kids making their own selections of texts that they read? Do you think that belongs in the classroom?
P David Pearson:
Choice is so important. The work of my colleague John Guthrie on engagement. One of the things that people don't look at enough in that research on engagement is the degree to which choice is an important feature of an engaged experience. And that is when you have decided to do it yourself, you're much more committed to it. And what you'll be is not only more engaged, you'll be more attentive, and when you're more attentive, you'll learn more and the like. So a steady diet of rich experiences that convey a lot of new information but don't engage, you aren't going very far because if you aren't engaged, you won't remember it and it'll be like one of those other things that goes in one eye and out the other. The work on engagement is really interesting. If you look at all the factors that affect engagement when you're reading, there's a whole set of them. And one of course is interest that goes with almost without saying, but another one is coherence. To the degree that there's a cognitive clarity in the curriculum and you can see how ideas relate to one another that makes you more engaged. When things are confusing, people tend to want to back off and ignore those things. Just get out of that situation and the like. So clarity and if you will, presentation and ideas is important to engagement and choices too.
We know that over and over again. By the way, choice is important in a lot of things. I'm a big believer in choice in what you read. I don't mind us having common readings. I don't think common readings should be viewed as imposing something on students. I think they should be viewed as an opportunity for a collective experience. But I also think that choice is a part of what you read is important. Choice is also we know important in what you write because when you write about things that you care more about, you're more likely to be attentive to and knowledgeable about the ideas that you're going to write about anywhere else where choice is important, and we forget this too, choice is important in assessment because what choice means in assessment is it means that I get a chance to present myself to you as a reader and a writer in a way that matters to me.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I want to ask you about vocabulary. It's part of knowledge building of course, but I'm wondering your thoughts about the role of explicitly teaching words to kids. So pulling words out of texts that you're choosing or pulling words out of science or social studies curriculum and teaching them explicitly, and then also balancing that with strategies to help kids to figure words out the meaning of words out from context when they encounter them on their own. What's in your ideal reading program? What does it look like?
P David Pearson:
Well, sure. Well, first of all, my fundamental conviction about vocabulary is that the best way to think about words is that words are the things we use to name our knowledge and that we shouldn't think of knowledge acquisition as independent of vocabulary. When you're engaging kids in the acquisition of knowledge in whatever activity, I don't care whether it's in reading or science or social studies or a math curriculum, you have an obligation when you're engaging them in the acquisition of that knowledge to acquire the words that make it easy for them to engage in that discourse. And if you're not teaching them those key words that are unique to each of those areas of interest, those topics, then you're not doing them a service in terms of allowing their knowledge to grow in those areas. So yeah, I'm all for linking as tightly as we can, vocabulary acquisition with knowledge acquisition, that's number one.
And I'm also keenly aware of the work on--what do they call these--academic word lists, words that travel across domains and things like that. I think that to the acquisition of academic vocabulary that travel across domains is also important. I'm not sure that I would teach those words in isolation. What I would do is to make sure that if we have a curriculum that we take opportunities to point out the similarities and differences in which a word like process is used in science versus in civics government, so that kids see those similarities and differences. And that requires some thought, some thoughtfulness across content areas, which I think is what the work that Catherine Snow and Josh Lawrence and White and a whole bunch of people at Harvard did on word generation. They had this thing called the word generation curriculum. I think they were onto something in terms of trying to build these cross disciplinary units where we see how these academic words get used in different areas.
A guy named Arthur Gates in the thirties did a study in which he took all the words that were introduced in a basal reader program, the new words that were taught before the kids read the story, and he just gave it to the kids as a test without ever reading the stories or anything like that. And he found that somewhere around 60% of the words that were supposed to be new weren't the kids already knew the meaning of them. And a group of grad students and I at Illinois in the late eighties replicated that study. And one of the things we found is that not only did they know most of the words that in the grade level program, they also knew most of the words in the grade level above them.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Oh, wow.
P David Pearson:
And like, yeah, and I think the title of our article was "Are New Words Really New?" I do think that post-reading discussions of words, and particularly going back and seeing how authors use words and stories and what their motive might be for using this word as opposed to any other, why did the author choose pirouette rather than dance? Why did the author choose prance rather than walk? Things like that. And looking at the nuance of meaning is an important reading skill that can begin when kids are young. And the other thing I'll mention, you didn't ask this, but I'm going to mention it anyway, is that I'm impressed with the new work that I've seen on morphology and the degree to which words form these families of meaning, like all the words in which scribe (S-C-R-I-B) is used. And I think that morphological lessons that emphasize the acquisition of these word families are really important. As a matter of fact, there's another way of organizing words is like a thesaurus where you have all the words that convey dancing or all the words that convey talking or all the words that convey happiness and the like. And I think that activities in which you help kids learn how to organize vocabulary words, and by the way, and experiences semantically, these are all on the topic X or Y or Z are great. But I think organizing them in terms of, oh, they all have the same morphological element. What does it mean for these words to have those in common? What's the commons read here? And that's the key in vocabulary, whether it's semantic or morphological, is what's the commons read.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Is there any element that I haven't asked you about? We talked about everything from foundational skills to fluency to comprehension, vocabulary, the role of knowledge. Is there anything else I should be considering for a curriculum that I haven't asked you about yet?
P David Pearson:
Well, last year, a colleague of hers, Christina Mata and I, we did I think our seventh edition of a book that Leslie Morrow and other people have edited over the years called something like Best Practices for Literacy Instruction. The title is pretty grandiose, but that's what the book is really about. And we wrote a chapter on--God forbid--balance for the seventh edition, and one of the points we wanted to make there is a point that we've actually slithered around the edges of, and that is these false choices and false debates we have about what's good and what's not good. And our fundamental mantra there is you got to do it all.
There isn't any choice. You leave out one component of this curriculum and you're asking for trouble in terms of short-changing some kids. And so in our book, we pointed to research that looked at the internal models of reading, like the Simple View of Reading versus the Scarboroughs Rope versus the Active View of Reading. And we said, we've got to have those models that explain what goes in inside the head. But one of the things we haven't looked at as much as external models of the acquisition of reading, and here I'm referring to sociocultural models and particularly to the science of learning and development and all of the things that we've learned about how context and how the people where we do things with whom we do them and in what cultural tradition we do them, how those shape our understanding. And so if you have a science of reading that only looks at the inside view of reading the cognitive and linguistic stuff and doesn't take into account the context in which reading occurs, then you'll end up with a limited model that will leave some things out.
And one of the things that it'll probably leave out is all the things we've learned about culturally responsive and culturally sustaining pedagogies over the last 20 years. And to leave those out, we're asking for trouble in the sense that we're going to end up privileging some groups of kids over others. And that would be not only, only ineffective, it would be an unconscionable and unethical thing to do. And so you've got to look at that facet too. And you also have to look at all of the stuff, and I never have a good term for this, the combination of motivation, affect, emotional response to things. If you fail to take that into account, then you'll be missing what's the driving force of a lot of learning. And without that, your models of learning will be deficient. When you're building a curriculum, you need to make sure that all of these elements are there.
Our view is, yeah, let's do a research-based model, but let's make sure we're reading all the research, not just the bits and pieces that we like are that support our pet project or the like. And I think one of the reasons we have the wars that we have is that everyone is so concerned that their pet piece of the curriculum received the proper attention it deserves that they oversell it, and we should probably be more modest in our claims about what it is that we have to offer. And we should probably be more open to looking for opportunities to learn from others. I very much want to see these reading wars in, but I don't think they'll end until we're willing to do a few things, one of which is to listen to what one another have to say,
Quit engaging in these false debates where we set up straw people and we knock down those straw people that represent someone else's point of view in order to make sure that our point of view sustains its position within the curriculum and the current discourse and the like. So I want to see that. And my metaphor for this is that when you invite research to the table, you end up inviting the whole family, not just the bits and pieces you like, you invite everyone there. And so even the cousins who belch in the middle of dinner and the like have to be there, and we stay there and we come to the table and we stay at the table until all possible avenues of research-based consensus have been explored, maybe even exhausted. We have to figure out what we agree on, what we don't agree on, and then maybe what we have to do is to figure out what a research agenda is for the future so we can answer some of these questions that still prevent us from reaching the kind of consensus that we'd like. The unfortunate thing about all this is that I think people in schools and classroom teachers get mixed authoritative messages about what's important to emphasize.
The, that's the unfortunate thing about it. And so folks are just not sure what to do. And I think that the cost of these false debates is that lack of clarity, and that is what those of us who are professionals should strive to eliminate. I think that the cost of the false debates too is that people get so enamored at particular points of view that they approach some of these movements with a level of political zeal that is just not merited by the evidence that we have.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I have a theory too that some of the debate continues because people have their own individual experiences with particular children who needed a particular approach, and then they assume that approach is what everybody needs. And one of the things
P David Pearson:
Yeah
Jennifer Serravallo:
Trying to do on this podcast is interview experts who work with autistic children, who work with multilingual learners, who work with deaf and hard of hearing students, and what you do to approach and support each one of those children can look a little bit different and should look a little bit different because of their unique needs.
P David Pearson:
Yeah, there's a great, the study on the studies on individualization are, there aren't that many of them, first of all, but the work that I like the most is that the work of Carol Connor, the late Carol Connor,
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah
P David Pearson:
I knew when she was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, but she went on to Florida State and then Arizona and Irvine and did great research on looking at the different ways of approaching particular individual kids. And she found that some kids needed a lot of external structure from a teacher or a tutor or something like that to kind of shape their curricular experiences. But other kids needed kind of a looser reign, just started letting them pursue their own interests and initiatives and that they benefited from less structure on the part of teachers or the curriculum and the like. And I think that the idea that we have these interactions between different approaches and individuals with different characteristics is another line of research that we need much more work on to see if we can identify these patterns that would allow us to be more effective with students who come to the table with different experiences, different strengths, different needs, and the like.
Yes, I know we always say that we need to do individualization, but it's really true. We really do need to think about not only the general characteristics but the characteristics of particular individuals. We need a set for, if you will, variability in the strengths and needs that kids come to the table with. And by the way, we also need a set for variability in terms of the set of tools that we provide kids. One tool, one way of solving words isn't going to stretch across all the words you ever encounter. Some words are going to lend themselves to a kind of sequential decoding approach. Other words are going to lend themselves to a word family approach. Still other words are going to require you to have to use context to settle on a pronunciation. And certainly on a meaning,
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think sometimes people assume that when there's a research finding that's statistically significant, it means that particular approach is good for everybody. But that's not really what that means, right? It means it's good for a statistically significant percentage of the population, but that there's still individual variability. Am I understanding correctly?
P David Pearson:
No, you're absolutely right. Here's the way I like to think about it: when you go to a doctor and if the doctor doesn't know anything about you and you have a particular symptom, then what you want the doctor to use is the other things being equal best practice associated with that symptom. So other things being equal. If all I know is that you've got symptom X, then apply the treatment that on average works best for the most people, but the minute that doctor knows something about you, in addition to having symptom X, you've got also symptoms, Y, Z, and A. Then that doctor is ethically and morally obligated to use that information to make a differential decision. And maybe in this case, we don't use the default treatment. We use some other treatment that has been shown in other research to be more effective for people with this more complicated set of symptoms.
And I think we want the same thing in education. We want people--other things being equal--go with the most general research findings. And I think that's what Carol Connor's research that we alluded to earlier was all about is doing our best to know those characteristics that will allow us to adapt to the variability that exists in the real world that of kids that we encounter. So I guess another way of saying this is that you can't always look at the mean that sometimes you have to look at the standard deviation and you have to look at the variability that confronts you, not just what's true on average. Yeah, yeah. There's statistical anomalies that present themselves that we don't get into in these kinds of conversations usually, but I think we always want to use the best available scholarship we have and we want to adapt it to the particular circumstances. And medical practice isn't always just about taking the default approach. And nor should I think educational practice be about that either. So: know as much as you can about what the research says and be prepared to encounter variability that will prompt you to deviate from the default practices when the situation requires it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's a great way to end. Those are great final last words. I could talk to you all day. I might have to invite you back on for a part two conversation. Thank you so much.
P David Pearson:
Yeah, I'm sorry that it got, so we went off in a lot of different directions.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I loved every direction. Thank you so much.
P David Pearson:
Yeah, it was fun. It's always fun to talk to you too, Jen. Thank you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome my colleagues, Gina Dignon and Macie Kerbs for a conversation about practical takeaways. I'd love to talk at first about the idea of what it means when something is proven in research to work. A finding in research isn't a guarantee that something's going to work for everybody all the time. And if we take that knowledge into our classroom and we think about how, of course we want to be research informed, of course we want to see what does research say is most likely to work, but that we still need to have flexibility. What's on the top of your mind around how that practically looks in the classroom? What are you thinking?
Gina Dignon:
Well, first of all, you kept asking him about, well, how much time should be allotted to different components? And I feel like that's one thing that should be left up to teachers based on the research, but also based on what they're seeing in their classroom. And I think that at one point you kind of pushed him to say, how much time should we be spending on word study or phonics? And he kind of deferred to other people who've done work in that area, and he said about 15, 20 minutes. But even that, some kids might need a little more, some kids might need a little less. And I think that teacher autonomy should be front and center for that, because teachers are the ones who are getting to know their kids.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, I think that's so important, Gina, because I see this a lot in the districts and schools we visit, is that there are requirements around how many minutes you spend on each of the different components, and they came from somewhere. And it may be the case that they're recommendations based on what most kids need, but if we are always expecting variability, we're always expecting there will be outliers who need more or less. Macie, what are you thinking about?
Macie Kerbs:
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, that it comes down to trusting teachers to make decisions for their students with that data in mind. And so often, especially right now, we're handed these programs that might be very structured or very scripted, and it doesn't allow for teachers to adapt for variability. We have got to keep trusting teachers to make decisions and all the professional learning that we have can be grounded in using what our students are doing so that we can make those decisions in ways that are intentional and targeted and meaningful, and tracking the growth over time instead of blindly feeling like we're chained to a curricular resource without that ability to be adapting.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I love that he brought back Carol Connor's research. The finding was that individual teachers made a difference more than the programs, so they need that flexibility. Absolutely.
Gina Dignon:
You were just making me think about the whole idea of schema theory that he brought up because it has to do with that. It's why would we present the 15th lesson the same way that we presented the first lesson. If kids have the routines down, they have built schema. And I could say that it's also true for teachers themselves. You build a schema over the course of your year with your kids and you know them.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Let's shift gears and start talking about some of the different types of goals that we're supporting in our classrooms. And let's think about practical recommendations for lesson types or strategies that we might teach.
Macie Kerbs:
I kind of like the way he broke down strategy work in general. We talk a lot about what it means to develop a strategy on our own and kind of the background of your books and how it helps us chunk the process for students to slow it down, to help them be strategic. And he gave the analogy of riding a bike or driving a car, which we often refer to in our work with teachers. And it made me think about how I have little children right now. So they're not only learning how to read, but they're also learning all these other things in the world. And so riding a bike is one of those. And last weekend, one of my sons learned how to ride a bike for the first time without training wheel.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Oh, congratulations!
Macie Kerbs:
I know it's a great moment. It's a big moment. It's a great moment. And he's my fearful child. So he didn't do it until he knew he was confident. But when I think back to that process of what we did, we had scaffolds in place, whether we were holding the seat or putting training wheels on, there's scaffolds in place, but without the ability to wobble a bit, he would never have felt confident. He had to feel the shakiness, he had to get control of it. He had to be able to ride on different surfaces, even how the sidewalk's not always really flat. All of these skills that we did led him to this place where now he can ride without training wheels. And I think so much of that is true for our readers is we have to give him opportunities where we're practicing some of this work in isolation.
We're breaking the process down, we're giving them the scaffolds and the tools like magnetic letters to manipulate or decodable text to apply it in opportunities to encode in an interactive writing lesson. All of these tools help them become more automatic. And so that eventually we pull those scaffolds away and they're applying it to more increasingly complex texts, and they're writing more independently applying these skills into their writing, but without those scaffolds, they never feel that confidence of, let me go ahead and take those training wheels off and get this book and do it by myself.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I'm just reminded of the research around set for variability and David Share's self-teaching hypothesis and how we have to have, because of the variabilities within the English language, we've got to have opportunities for kids to encounter things that are not as controlled. We've got to have opportunities for them to encounter a word. Maybe it has a spelling pattern that they haven't explicitly learned in phonics, but because they've developed, like you were talking about earlier, Gina, right? This schema, I know that letters and sounds, there's some logic to how they connect. So I'm going to keep trying different sounds until I get to a word that matches what I know from my vocabulary. They're never going to have that opportunity if everything they read is controlled. So what that means is I think it could be during a phonics lesson that they have not just the decodable text, but they have another text that gives them an opportunity to keep applying the flexing of different vowels or the emphasizing different syllables in a word or whatever it is, to help them to develop that set for variability. And that new study from Freddie Hiebert that looked at whether kids decoding was best, if they had only decodables only pattern books or combinations of the two, and she found it was actually a combination of the two. So we've got to give kids a balance of different texts and different materials on which to practice.
Gina Dignon:
I've had such rich conversations around the progression of skills for accuracy in your book, Jen, The Reading Strategies book 2.0, because when you look at it, it really does offer different pathways into word reading and applying what kids are learning in other parts of their day to the different types of texts that you're talking about. So we've had conversations around, well, how can you use 3.12 to 3.19? Because that's all about applying phonic skills. Like, well, how are they able to do that without you at some point? And so it's just really sparked some conversations around, well, if you're using some program at one part of the day, what are the tools the kids are using and can they use it during reading and can they use it during writing? Because not every learner needs just one way. But again, that goes back to knowing your learners, their profile and what's going to work for them.
Macie Kerbs:
Gina, I love that you just captured this "both/and" framework that it's not one or the other. It's really both. And the piece that you really highlighted is this idea of choice and giving students' interest a place in the classroom and allowing for choice. Because I think without the ability to feel safe taking risks, a lot of our students don't feel comfortable activating that schema because they're coming to a book thinking that there's a right way or a right answer, but with words that break the pattern, we have to be able to take that little bit of risk to try something that might not always follow the pattern. And so how do we create those safe spaces in our classrooms so that students do feel willing to come in? I think that's where a writing workshop time, a dedicated time where students can write about topics of choice and take risks in what their encoding is, is really important, but not outside of also having time where we're strategically asking them to encode words that we're practicing from our phonics lesson so that they're applying the skills that they're learning. So I think that idea of it's both. It's both things where we have to do this work with a skill focus, and we also have to provide a context where students feel safe taking risks and making a little bit of a mistake so that they learn through that messy process.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Such an important point.
Gina Dignon:
And I think that speaks to just keeping engagement and motivation at the forefront of what we're doing. Because he used that analogy of the basketball camp, which I thought was perfect, because if you're only doing these skills and you don't actually get to play, what's the point? What you were just saying makes me, made me think about that because we have to, as teachers, orchestrate all the different ways that kids can play the game in our classroom, whether they're reading on grade level, above grade level, below grade level, what structures are we using to make sure that everybody is playing the game, they're being able to participate and be motivated and engaged in what we're doing. But I don't know if I had that analogy right. That's how I interpret it, but I don't know.
Macie Kerbs:
I was thinking of Gholdy's work. That's what it made me think of is when you interviewed Gholdy Muhammad and she talked about the same thing as we're teaching skills, we're grounding it in these cultural experiences of them, and we're infusing joy in our classroom all the time. And I think that element of joy sometimes, it's not just fun, right? It's kids coming to school because they see themselves represented on the walls of their classroom. They feel a part of this community. They see themselves represented in texts that we're reading to them. They get insight into people that are unlike themselves through the, that we're reading and the conversations we're having with each other. I just found myself when he said, it's the inside and the outside process of reading how the inside is that cognitive and the outside is where the sociocultural and the context in which we're serving. And to do one without the other is unjust for students. We have to have both of those pieces.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I love that he talked about cultural responsiveness and the strong research base behind that. Absolutely. Had echoes of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's work as well. What are the other practical applications of how teachers do that?
Gina Dignon:
Well, one of the things I was thinking about is how can teachers get talk up and running in their classroom in the conversation to around, it could be around text, it could be around any other topic that might be being studied. Because I was trying to find the quote, but he said something about vocabulary is the way what we use to name our knowledge or something like that. And I thought, well, kids need to be apprenticed into using different vocabulary. And I feel like that happens during conversation where teachers can structure that for them or teach them strategies to do that work. And I do think that that could be happening during a morning meeting. I think it can happen then. I think it could happen around a shared experience around a text because some people are using programs where there's a lot of shared what the programs call "shared reading" around a text and maybe picking and choosing ones that match their class makeup, whether it's in their program or not.
Macie Kerbs:
I'm also thinking about the way to involve the community that we live in to help just make literacy be beyond that one block. And so a school I was in last week, the farmers delivered apples to the campus. I guess I'm not from New York, but I assume it's apple season.
Jennifer Serravallo:
It's apple season!
Macie Kerbs:
The farmers were trying to not only support this community who has great needs, but also just show them what is right in their backyard. So the whole school got all these apples and I had the privilege of walking through the classes as they were all just crunching on those apples and enjoying it and savoring it. And it turned into a shared writing experience. It turned into some read aloud experiences where we pulled some books that are on that topic. So I think the more that we can lean into our community that's surrounding our school to bring that into the place where our students are, the more that they'll see that literacy, reading and writing is not just what we're doing in school. It's helping us become these productive citizens in our community that we are going to be grownups in eventually.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I love that, Macie.
Gina Dignon:
I was just going back to the part of the interview around strategies versus knowledge building and how he said strategies or the tools we use when knowledge doesn't do the job on its own. I thought that that was just something like, it's a key thing I took away from this conversation because I feel like he kept saying there's this false debate between knowledge building and strategy instruction, and I was just still thinking about the vocabulary, how you use vocabulary to name your knowledge, but then you can help kids with strategies to acquire vocabulary. And I think he used a word family example, and you have strategies in your book around trying to just generate different words for common things like inserting a synonym, but then you also have that strategy like get to the base, look for the word part, clues, roots and bases.
Macie Kerbs:
You made me think of the strategy 11.18, "Read up the Ladder." That's what you're making me think of is how tech sets around things that we're using to build our knowledge, whether it's connected to our science topic or our social studies or our math. I think most of the time it's great to pull in the content areas in that, but reading a lot of text that are different. So some might have a lot of visual features, some might be multimodal, some might be just used to build our background knowledge on a topic. Some might be to help us think about it as more of an action stance. But all of these texts can work together to increase our vocabulary so that our knowledge is also building. So that strategy, 11.18 "Read Up the Ladder" is the one that I lean into so much because of the level of engagement from students, but also the ability to grow both vocabulary and knowledge.
Jennifer Serravallo:
It's a strategy for teachers to create their own text sets and then for kids to go off and create their text sets as well if they're in a book club or something like that. And yeah, I love that balance, Gina, of, we're in a read aloud lesson. There's a word that has some contextual support. We take time in the moment of the read aloud to model for kids how we're thinking through what that word probably means using context or Oh yeah, that word has the same part as this other word we know. So this word probably means something like we're doing that on the spot, modeling those strategies and also both. And also maybe doing a 10 minute lesson later in the day, pulling that word back in and saying, let's generate all the words we know that have the same base. And then explore affixes that you can add to the beginning and end of base to create new words
And suddenly kids have this awareness of how words work and they take that with them. It reminds me of my conversations with Dr. Margaret McKeown and also Dr. Freddie Hiebert who advocate for that approach as well. So it's both during the reading of text and it's the strategy instruction during the reading of text and it's the explicit teaching of morphology or explicit teaching of vocabulary and concept webs and how these different terms that we're reading across our text set connect and fit together. And I think that's of all the stuff that I talked about with Dr. Pearson, I feel like that is the biggest takeaway is this idea of rejecting binary thinking, understanding that things need to be in balance, that it's "both/and" and research supports the "both/and" viewpoint that we're trying to do all of these things. And I'm not sure we got to the question that teachers always ask me, which is how do I fit it all in? And I think it's because that answer, what am I fitting in depends on the kids in front of me and I don't know that there's ever going to be one clear answer that everybody can follow. Do you feel the same way?
Gina Dignon:
The thing that he started off his interview with was to say that he's collaborated with more people on articles than articles he's actually written.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I loved that.
Gina Dignon:
And I was like, you know what? I think school leaders should be jotting that down because even this individual who's contributed to the field of educational research in such a massive way is not doing it by himself. That message of collaboration and not saying "it's one way or the other" and trusting your colleagues and leading from a collaborative standpoint is I think what we should be promoting. And I think that people who think that they have all the answers, I would be skeptical of anybody who says that I'm going to take that with me to any leader in any district that I work with, because a) they shouldn't have to feel like they need to know all, everything. And b) they need to talk to their teachers in a productive way and find out from them what's happening in their classrooms.
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's a mark of a real scientist to me, is humility. Adam Grant talks about this in his book Think Again. That is one of the key markers of a true scientist, is that you remain humble in the face of new information. And I think that that willingness, and I would even say excitement over collaborating and trying to outgrow your best thinking by collaborating with others, it's just such a valuable message and takeaway.
Macie Kerbs:
I'm just going to echo that I was thinking about Adam Grant's book too, which is exactly what I was going to say, is just as a teacher, when we find ourselves in a box where we're unable to think about new information in fresh ways or we feel really fixed on the routines, I think that's a really good sign. It's time for collaboration and to surround ourselves with people that are innovative and willing to learn. Because through those experiences as a teacher, through experiences of collaboration and innovation and productive struggle through new topics, that is when we reach more students, it is when we are too comfortable that sometimes we find ourselves unable to see growth like we would like to see. And so I hope as a leader, one of the takeaways was lean into the expertise on your campus, but also be okay knowing that there's always new things coming and there's always new things we can try. So how do we ground those decisions so that we don't do too much, but do enough so that we're constantly trying, and learning. and growing.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think that's a great last statement for us to all leave thinking about. Thank you, Macie and Gina so much for your time today.
Macie Kerbs:
Yeah, thank you Jen.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you. And thank you for listening. Please support to the classroom by sharing, subscribing, or leaving a review on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts. Find out more about me and my work at my website, jennifeserravallo.com