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science of reading

Connecting the Dots: Who Can Help Our Kids Learn to Read? Parents!

As a parent of a child with a reading issue like dyslexia, I came to this world of reading wars, phonics, balanced literacy, leveled readers, and other instructional methods that we argue about, as an innocent. I merely wanted to know why our daughter was struggling so much, and why nobody could help her learn to read. When she didn’t progress at school, I thought that I could teach her to read. As an English major, a publishing professional, and a past writing tutor, I was a natural candidate, but my methods and attempts didn’t work. I couldn’t teach her, and the school couldn’t seem to teach her, so then I thought that there must be a print-based or computerized program that could teach her to read. If there wasn’t, I was sure that my colleagues and I in educational publishing and technology could invent a program that would magically work. We had solved educational challenges before; surely we could figure this out. (Perhaps now we could create something, but we didn’t have the background back then.) As I slowly entered the world of the science of reading; direct, explicit instruction; multisensory instruction; and eventually Orton-Gillingham, I still couldn’t help our daughter learn to read. I couldn’t hear the sounds myself! While I could probably teach a course on the… | Read More »Connecting the Dots: Who Can Help Our Kids Learn to Read? Parents!

Why Educational Publishers are Part of the Solution to the Reading Challenge

“The greatest enemy of progress is the illusion of knowledge.” John Young, Astronaut Several years ago, I was working as a contractor in the educational publishing industry. The scope of one of our contracts was to build curricula for a few disciplines so the publisher could assess whether to pursue publishing in those particular academic areas and, if so, determine their strategy. We listed the required and elective courses for the discipline, specific areas of study, course objectives, and major textbooks and course materials used for each class. We commented accordingly on enrollments, trends, and areas for improvement. One of the disciplines we worked on was education. While we were putting together courses and books for the certification and degree programs in special education, reading, and literacy, it never occurred to me to hunt for the few textbooks that include a science-based approach to reading, or to recommend that graduates need at least a basic understanding of the foundations of reading. I didn’t know then about the five pillars of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. How would I have known? We Can’t Change What We Don’t Know Is Broken That phrase is repeated regularly in connection with teacher training in the science of reading, and it applies to publishers as well. Publishers can’t change what they don’t… | Read More »Why Educational Publishers are Part of the Solution to the Reading Challenge