Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Conversation with Robert J. Tierney and P. David Pearson
Drs. Robert J. Tierney and P. David Pearson talk to us about their latest collaborative work, an open-access monograph entitled Fact-Checking the Science of Reading. In this free volume (linked in the show notes, on their guest page, and available at literacyresearchcommons.org), Rob and David take a journalistic approach to identifying the current global conversation around the Science of Reading, while offering contextualizing histories and the nuance often missing from that conversation. They share ways in which we might move forward from the current moment of heavy-handed and restrictive policy moves to a view of teaching reading that honors who learners are as individuals, rooted in the sciences of reading. Rob and David are both past guests on the show.
You can find Rob and David's free monograph Fact-Checking the Science of Reading and other resources at literacyresearchcommons.org.
You can listen to Rob's previous Classroom Caffeine episode at: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1338925/9910333
You can listen to David's previous Classroom Caffeine episode at:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1338925/9008110
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2024, August 13). A conversation with Robert J. Tierney and P. David Pearson (Season 5, No. 1) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/1A29-D7AD-44C6-8249-6117-F
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Education research has a problem the work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom Caffeine is here to help. In each episode, I talk with a top education researcher or an expert educator about what they have learned from years of research and experiences. In this episode, drs Rob Tierney and P David Pearson talk to us about their latest collaborative work, an open access monograph entitled Fact Checking and the Science of Reading. In this free volume, linked in the show notes on their guest page and available at LiteracyResearchCommonsorg, rob and David takea journalistic approach to identifying the current global conversation around the science of reading, while offering contextualizing histories and the nuance often missing from that conversation. They share ways in which we might move forward from the current moment of heavy-handed, specific and restrictive policy moves to a view of teaching reading that honors who learners are as individuals rooted in the sciences of reading. Rob and David are both past guests on the show, so you may notice that this lively conversation moves on its own momentum without the need for my usual three questions.
Speaker 1:Rob is known for his work in the areas of reading and the reading-writing, connection theories of literacy, instruction and research, teaching, learning and researching with digital literacies and global developments in literacies. He has worked in the United States, canada, australia, africa and China. Rob has published numerous books and scholarly articles focused on literacy education, teacher development, cross-national educational research, and educational assessment and equity. Rob is a recent past president of the Board of the International Literacy Association. Rob is Professor Emeritus and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia.
Speaker 1:David is known for his work in the areas of literacy history, literacy policy and literacy practice. He has authored more than 300 books, articles and chapters with nearly 300 co-authors. Notably, he has written and co-edited the Handbook of Reading Research, now in its fourth edition. In addition to holding numerous leadership and editorial positions in the field of literacy and reading, david is the namesake for the Literacy Research Association's P David Pearson Scholarly Influence Award. David is Professor Emeritus Faculty at the University of California, berkeley. In 2021, rob and David co-authored A History of Literacy Education Waves of Research and Practice, an influential volume tracing shifts in theory, research and practice related to reading, education and literacy, attending to meaning-making as the central goal of literacy. For more information about our esteemed guests, stay tuned to the end of this episode and check out their previous Classroom Caffeine episodes. So pour a cup of your favorite drink and join me, your host, lindsay Persaud, for Classroom Caffeine research to energize your teaching practice. Rob and David, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show or, maybe more appropriately, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2:That's right. It's good to be with you again, lindsay. I recall our initial conversation went about three years ago, two and a half three years ago.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And I'm glad to see that your classroom caffeine is just going great guns.
Speaker 1:Thank you, you all will actually kick off season five for us.
Speaker 3:So that's year five.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Wow, congratulations.
Speaker 1:Thank you, so we'll go ahead and get started From your own experiences and education. Will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now? And of course, this conversation is really geared towards your recent monograph that you've published, and I'm hoping that you all will share a bit about what brought you to writing that monograph and particularly the way that you've released it as an open source publication. Go ahead, rob, kick it off.
Speaker 3:Well, david and I had been working on a book on the history of literacy where we had used the metaphor of waves, and then, all of a sudden, we saw this tsunami arrive under the umbrella of and I put in quotes the science of reading, and we were quite dismayed by the extent to which it seemed to be sweeping aside a fuller consideration of a lot of what we know about beginning reading or learning to read.
Speaker 3:And the manner of doing that seemed to be quite concerning, because sometimes we thought, as if they were slanted in their interpretation of some of the reports, that they were putting aside a certain amount of what we know has been the research on reading, and they were acting as if the field wasn't informed by waves, even though they claimed that they were being informed by cognitive science, linguistics and whatnot. They seemed to want to push aside the conversation that we've been involved in for decades that involve an array of things, all of which operate in a fashion which is sort of quite synergistic in informing us. So, as a result of being dismayed like that, we've got our foot in the door and entered into this room of contested ideas around learning to read.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, rob. I think what really set me off was the fact that, unlike earlier iterations of the debate about code emphasis versus meaning emphasis, which has been going on as long as you and I have been in the field and even before, is that this time the movement seemed to have a lot more teeth, in the sense that it was not just about sending alternative ideas out into the professional ether and let them competing on the marketplace of ideas. It was all about translating these into legislative mandates or, at least you know, update policies and the like. In the United States and also in England there were national policies on it mandating particular approaches to beginning, rating and the like. So it seems somehow categorically different from earlier iterations of this debate.
Speaker 3:Yeah, part of our concern was tied to what Dave was saying. It was categorically different, and it was approached in a fashion whereby it was almost like they were declaring binaries. This is how reading used to be taught and this is how it needed to be taught. And in doing that, they sometimes enlisted what we thought were sometimes ad hominem attacks which mischaracterize the contribution of a range of our colleagues that we think have made very significant contributions to the field of reading people like Marie Clay and Ken Goodman and, more recently, gaye Supernell and Irene Fountas and Lucy Corkins and so we were taken aback with what we consider to be a fairly ahistorical consideration of the field that seemed to be wanting to marginalize or push aside what we thought were important works and contributions of previous scholars.
Speaker 2:And another thing that I was just taken aback by was that if you look at the sort of the waves of literacy that Rob and I talked about in our book and if you look at the field and you look at what's changed over the last 50 years, what you see is an evolving notion of what counts as context.
Speaker 2:When I started grad school in 1966, context meant looking at a word in a sentence rather than looking at it in isolation. And if you look at what happened in the cognitive revolution, what we got was knowledge as a context. And then sometime in the 80s we began the social turn and we began looking at phenomena like reading in terms of where it occurred and in what cultural context it occurred, and we didn't see any of that sociocultural perspective in the same world that we've been living in, because we found that the push toward social, cultural concerns about equity and inclusion and phenomena like culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogy has sort of swept the field of not only literacy but also education and curriculum and teaching more broadly concerned. We didn't see much of that. We're how folks have been looking.
Speaker 3:So when we got into this, we spent a fair bit of time delving into where these folks were coming from. These folks were, to some extent, our colleagues of years past and we were sort of asking ourselves, well, where are they coming from? What are the assumptions which basically support the positioning they do? And that was really key because as we delved into it, we uncovered some key assumptions that helped explain where they were coming from, and those were assumptions that we thought as David sort of discussed this as your cultural thing really limited what they viewed as reading and reading development and, in a sense, was being used as fuel for the type of advocacies that they were wanting to make.
Speaker 2:In particular, I think one of the things that we discovered was that people were operating with very different definitions of reading.
Speaker 2:By the time we had reached the year 2020, I think that I at least and I know Rob had been working under the assumption that reading was regarded as an aspect of a broader sort of notion of literacy and that reading was always sort of situated within language and related to writing and related to cultural assets and things like that.
Speaker 2:And what we found was that an underlying definition of reading that a lot of the folks who aligned themselves with the science of reading took was that reading was basically recognizing and understanding words that are within one's oral language repertoire, and what that meant is that reading was done when you figured out what the words said and meant, and it didn't require the consideration of who was doing the reading, who had done the writing and what sort of assumptions about meaning went into the understanding process, and that just was curious to us. And so that difference in assumptions about what is involved in reading whether it's getting words off the printed page and turning them into oral language, turning them into oral language or whether it's, you know, constructing meaning in the context of learning was a huge sort of gap between two ways of thinking about reading.
Speaker 1:Well, I think I'm always a little cautious when we talk in such binaries that it's reading is either this or it's that. And, to your point, the way that some scholars have more or less been villainized in this conversation around the science of reading and how so many years of the work that's been done in the field to really develop a rich understanding of what reading is and how it helps us as humans to function in the world, to me is also very alarming. Because what I see, and particularly in the state that I live in, where we do have that legislation that has gone as far as to remove any materials that talk about meaning, structure and visual cues If there's a mention of MSV in curriculum, then it is not supposed to be used. You know, it really does sort of make you go. What are we really getting at here?
Speaker 1:And to think that reading is only decoding, which is largely where the conversation is pointing right now.
Speaker 1:It is very alarming because I'm seeing my students as pre-service teachers. They're walking into classrooms where phonics reigns supreme and really to the exclusion of authentic children's literature, real texts, enjoyment of reading, and I think that there's so much danger in that. And if we want to talk about how we help young learners to become lifelong readers, they're going to need a lot more than decoding. I don't think anyone's denying that readers need to know how to decode, but there's so much more to the conversation, and I'm grateful to you all for bringing this monograph into the world and making it freely available and accessible, because I think it does offer really what I sort of see as the rest of the conversation that has largely been left out of at least popular media, as well as a lot of the conversations that I hear happening in the field which was important for us to in a sense glean was their definition of what counts as reading and that it didn't match what we thought counts as reading.
Speaker 3:But it served to their convenience because it in a sense narrowed the approach to beginning reading especially.
Speaker 3:But coupled with that, we were really concerned with the exclusion of certain research the research on the queuing systems by people like Donna Scanlon and that support the use of multiple queuing system, the extent to which that they were wanting to draw from neuroscience in a way which might be encouraging but really isn't as confirming as they would like to argue, and other elements, in a sense to conspire towards sort of suggesting the science was settled and was firmly in support of things which really need ongoing and further research.
Speaker 3:Even if you accept their approach to reading, which you know as both, as all of us agree, we don't define reading that narrowly, and particularly in this age. You know, dave is in a state where 60% of the children, or around 60% of them, are non-English speakers coming to school, and so the whole issue of multiculturalism, and you know how you actually build upon a child's background or experience. Now, interestingly, as you try to keep your finger on the pulse in the field. You get the sense that even the advocates of the science of reading, in a sense the ones who sort of pioneered this stuff, are now sort of suggesting no, we really need to look more closely at comprehension and other features, which we don't think we've done adequately, if in fact we're to develop what they're now saying is a need for not just what they would deem foundational skills but a comprehensive approach to literacy. So I think if the teachers, they need to realize that even among the pioneering advocates there's a sort of a shift in orientation that's occurring.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the way I like to think about it is this and, if you don't mind, I want to actually read a definition of reading that comes right out of the science of reading perspective, and this is one that was put forward in 2001, about the time that the National Reading Panel Report came out and talked about the five pillars for teaching reading. Here's the definition of reading in a paper by Keith Rayner, barbara Farman, chuck Profetti, david Posetsky and Mark Seidenberg all really great sort of basic researchers in reading. In focusing on reading's distinguishing features, we define learning to read as the acquisition of knowledge that results in the child being able to identify and understand printed words that he or she knows on the basis of spoken language. You see, that's that narrow definition that Rob was talking about and that I introduced earlier, and contrast that with one that Pat Alexander, in 2020, put forward and you remember, lindsay, that issue of RRQ that was entirely devoted to articles on the science of reading.
Speaker 2:Pat Alexander said the reality is that reading does not begin and end with phonics or whole word instruction. It's far broader and more complex. Reading, broadly conceived, is any interaction between a person, be it a child, adolescent or adult, and written language. That interaction can involve written language at many levels, from words to sentences to paragraphs or volumes, and it can also be performed for many reasons, from purely personal to largely academic and in many contexts, both in and out of school, as well as online or in print.
Speaker 2:Well, the contrast there between those two views of reading is, I think, just stark, and that, I think, is behind a lot of the miscommunication we have between. If you will competing camps about what we should do in teaching and reading, if you accept a narrow definition, then what you want to do pedagogically is teach kids to get words off the page. If you accept the broader definition, like the one that Pat Alexander put forward, then reading involves making as many connections as you can possibly make with all kinds of experiences, with everyone in your class, so that everyone has a chance to construct meaning. So I think that's, just for starters, why it is that we seem to be talking past one another in this current debate about teaching reading.
Speaker 3:And interwoven with this. We were really concerned with how what was identified as science was being used to do it in an analogical sort of fashion. Analogical sort of fashion. I wouldn't want the science of reading folk to be my doctor in a medical sense, because I think the use of science is sometimes pretty sketchy. I didn't particularly like the way they were trying to extrapolate from national assessment results to ascribing to a whole language and balanced literacy all sorts of problems.
Speaker 3:Lucy Corkins caught them recently in Ohio ascribing the downturn in Ohio results, which might be questionable anyway, to her program, when her program is only in 6% of the schools in Ohio. And likewise they were touting the Tennessee miracle. And, as a person in California recently noted, I'm not sure there are lessons to learn from Tennessee for California. For example, in Tennessee, I believe, 2% of the population is non-English speaking, in California you've got 60%. And so we really questioned the extent to which science was being used in a fashion which was overgeneralized and wasn't being considered in the context of being situation-specific, which needs to be interpreted and applied fairly discerningly by teachers whose judgment is respected, based upon a teacher's consideration of the characteristics and needs of the students that she's working with.
Speaker 2:Can I pick up on that science thing for just a minute, rob? Because it seems to me that the notion of science that is talked about when people begin with the statement that science is settled, is really surprising, because science, if it's anything, is a self-improving enterprise. If you talk to people who are bench scientists chemists and physicists and biologists and the like, they'll tell you that the notion of settled science is kind of an oxymoron, that it's not static, that our findings and their implications are only as good as the last set of experimental results you got or the last theoretical insight that you got. And nowhere is, I think, this better illustrated than in the early days of COVID. You remember when Anthony Fauci would come on TV and said well, you know, we found out that we need to do this or that. And the science was in flux and a lot of people got angry because the scientists kept changing their mind about exactly how the virus spread and things like that. Well, of course they were doing that because they were getting more evidence and they had to change their theories about how the disease is transmitted and the like. So science is always provisional and it's a self-improving enterprise.
Speaker 2:And, furthermore, science is an inherently skeptical thing. The notion of show me your data, I think, embodies that kind of skepticism. So replication and synthesis across studies is the way to go. And here we were having people really sort of overconfident and overgeneralizing on the basis of limited evidence. And the other thing is is that science isn't pushing, you know, like qualitative work against quantitative work. Real science is complementary rather than additive. When we look at ways that the different ways of examining data inform one another and what Rob said also, I want to emphasize the fact that you know generalizing from studies of how adult readers whatever I mean, you know whether it's eye movement studies or whether it's you know what parts of the brain light up when you read different kinds of words and the like. It's always very, very risky. It seems to me that the issues of what counts as good pedagogy and good curriculum, those are issues to be settled in the crucible of the classroom rather than in any kind of consideration of basic science for competent adult readers.
Speaker 3:I think, a key thing, which is part of what the ruminations were occurring with David and I. When we first were looking at this, at least, my reaction was oh my God, where are these people coming from and why are they being so adamant and how come they're having so much influence on legislators who seem to be falling in place and prescribing practices? That was very concerning to us, but related to that, we were concerned with, in a sense, the whole demeanor in the field, which was one of, on the positive side, well, what can we do to help kids who struggle? But also our concern was well, let's make sure we're dealing with this in a diverse sort of fashion, but let's do it in a fashion which isn't competitive but, as David suggested in the word, which is much more complementary. And David was really keen, as we got into this endeavor, not to speak, as he suggested I might occasionally do with a certain bravado but to open up the conversation with these people so that they're engaging with these ideas rather than dismissing the ideas.
Speaker 3:And if you look at, what we've tried to do in the book is we try to represent as best we can the evidence that's being used to support different claims that are being made.
Speaker 3:We try to add to that evidence that we think should be enlisted to look at the claims, en route to suggesting what we think would be a better interpretation, which is, in a sense, we win and you lose, but in a fashion which basically opens us up to a fuller, better informed consideration of the evidence, leading to practices which are more warranted than what we see as being proposed.
Speaker 3:And we often drew upon the medical field as an example of what we think is the sort of disposition we would like to see teachers and educators take. If you've been around any doctors and you've got an ailment, you'll find that the typical response. When you sort of say, well, what can I do to remedy the situation, that medical doctor will say to you well, every case will vary. They will use whatever evidence they can bring to bear on it, together with observations of the needs and characteristics of the individual. So we're drawing upon medicine a lot relative to this sort of more case-based approach to interpreting research, finding or drawing principles from research and then considering how best practice should be something more continuous than prescribed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the way I think about that is sort of like this and that is, if you're in a profession like medicine or like law or like education, then we want everyone who's a practitioner to possess the very best and most relevant knowledge they can about these matters. But possession of that knowledge doesn't mean that you treat every client, every student, exactly the same. The minute you know something particular about that child, something that sets that individual apart from others, you're morally and ethically obligated to use that information. In medical practice, we know that you take a particular kind of issue, like, maybe, high cholesterol. There are many treatments for it, some of which are dietary, some of which are, you know, involve medicine and some of which involve things like exercise and the like. And not everyone will get exactly the same prescription from their doctor, because the doctor will take into account the things that set you apart from other people with similar symptoms.
Speaker 2:And I think another way of thinking about that is in education.
Speaker 2:We want our teachers to have a full toolbox of tools, be able to teach kids how to recognize words, and not only one way, but three or four ways Sequential decoding you know, ba ata word, families like jam, sam ram and the like and using context and then reading whole words.
Speaker 2:And we want teachers to have that repertoire of different approaches so that they can tailor their pedagogy to the particular strengths and needs of individuals. You know, kids differ from one another and those individual differences are very real, as we know, and a sort of a highly generalized, one-size-fits-all approach is never going to make it. It doesn't make it in medicine either. There's actually a new field of medical practice called situated medicine, and what it does is it takes into account not only the findings from the research but also the cultural context in which a medicine is actually administered and the like. And I think we want something similar to that for our educational situation. And, by the way, rob was referring earlier to teachers in California, especially those dealing with English learners and emergent bilinguals, and that's really what the teachers in California are telling stuff that teachers need to be respected and we need to be able to apply our craft exercise prerogative inside classrooms in order to meet the range of needs and interests that come our way.
Speaker 3:In a sense, our feeling was a lot of concern about the exclusion of certain areas and interpretation of certain areas and almost a need to sort of say hey, you guys need to open up to a fuller consideration of what literacy is, and that in a sense and this goes almost back to the National Panel Report there's probably not enough discussion of how readers orchestrate the use of strategies and skills.
Speaker 3:There's a very limited discussion of what we know about comprehension development. There's next to no discussion of early reading development by children from birth. That needs to be sort of brought into this sort of discussion. There's very, very limited and I think to some extent unfortunately, it's sort of tied to the fact that they don't want to give Lucy Corkins any credit. There's very little discussion of how writing could integrate with reading development and I'm sure there are other areas, certainly in the age of digital literacy. There's no effort to sort of move beyond the sort of form of print literacy to consider how other literacies might complement and expand and, in a sense, reform what we're doing in terms of beginning reading, and so we almost felt as if we could have written another book, sort of saying well, how about a science of reading that also focuses upon these issues. We wouldn't be the only person.
Speaker 2:Can I just add a couple to that, because I think this is a really key point and you know, in the two issues of Reading Research Quarterly that came out in 2020 and 2021 or two, I can't remember when the second one came out I think that a lot of the people who wrote in those issues really brought up these other areas. You mentioned the role of writing and the like. There's also the role of knowledge and meaningful vocabulary. That is in danger of getting short shrift Now. I will grant you that most of the people who we identify as being on the quote science of reading within that movement. They're quick to say that phonics isn't the be-all and end-all.
Speaker 2:But if you look at what gets talked about in the policy considerations at the state level in the United States and I really don't know so much about Australia, but I do know that this was a matter of great concern in England in the implementation of the phonics mandate about 15 years ago At any rate these other things are always in danger of being second amongst equals. There's the old notion of first amongst equals. We say that all of these are important but let's do this first and I think that's the danger here. So, knowledge and meaning vocabulary. The role of language, not only academic language and talking like a book, but the role of first language and making sure that first language gets the kind of nurturance it needs to fuel the development of second language.
Speaker 2:How about the role of talk? You know, if you really look at what goes on in classrooms, the single most important thing that teachers do is to guide conversations amongst them, with kids, and talk about text, about words, about solving problems is so important and yet there's little about that in the science of reading. How about all the stuff that deals with motivation and engagement, interest, self-efficacy, agency, identity, all that stuff that makes you feel better about who you are as a learner, asset-based and culturally sustaining pedagogies? You know the role of text and different kinds of text. And all of these things run the risk of not getting their day in court when foundational skills dominate the conversation. And if you really want a curriculum, you've got to do all those things. You cannot just do a few basic things and think that everything else is going to take care of itself.
Speaker 3:I guess I just want to pick up quickly on what David said. I attended a webinar that Gina Cervetti and Freddie Ebert gave a couple of days ago and it was very much on building background knowledge and they stressed the importance of everybody's experiences coming to bear. And what I find as I work in Australia in remote areas bear, and what I find as I work in Australia in remote areas, that sometimes our Aboriginal populations are provided with libraries of books but few of those libraries include the children's own writing about their experiences. Now there are art teachers and music teachers who are bringing the culture into the classroom, music teachers who are bringing the culture into the classroom. But as we sort of expand upon a sort of a sociocultural perspective on literacy, as Dave was sort of emphasizing, you're not only bringing in oral language but you're also bringing in a bridge to their experiences so that in actuality they're treating students as knowledgeable rather than other as they come into the classroom.
Speaker 1:There are so many critical points in what you both have said so far and there are a couple of things that I just want to pick back up on. I think one thing to me that was so important about the way that you have structured your book is that you really recount what is the claim and those 10 claims around the science of reading and then work to really kind of resituate those and bring in that additional context of what does it mean to other elements of reading, what does it mean to learners as individuals, what does it mean to different cultural groups? And then I think, when you present then a revised version of that claim that's so impactful and may really serve to help practitioners, educational leaders, hopefully policymakers, we'll see to better understand what it is that we're really doing with some of this legislation and how. You know, I think, about what this might mean to learners. You know our kindergarten students. What is it going to mean to them whenever they are college age. You know how is this going to impact their view of themselves and what they bring to bear on their education and how does that help them to become lifelong learners, lifelong readers or not?
Speaker 1:And I think that of course, that remains to be seen, but it also reminds me of the waves of education, as you all have talked about, and just how those conversations loop back on each other, and I think we've in some ways seen this play out a bit and to say that there's one silver bullet, I know we've been looking for that for a long time and it just doesn't really exist. And so I think that recontextualizing so many of those really staunch claims that have been made in the science of reading, recontextualizing them, bringing in the other evidence in order to resituate them, maybe in a way that isn't so staunch, I think, is just it's so critical right now because, as we've said, this is impacting the daily practice of teachers and, of course, that means the daily lives of students.
Speaker 3:Yeah, one of our concerns is the extent to which we're seeing reform that isn't as well informed as it should be relative to school change. In the webinar I recently attended that was done by Ed Sauce in California, you certainly heard teachers sort of say hey, don't approach us in an oppressive, top-down fashion. We need support, we need help making decisions. Stop the top-down management sorts of approaches. Likewise, you sort of see that there's an attempt to sort of blame. You know whether it be the attempt to sort of blame. You know whether it be the attempt to sort of align past approaches with alleged declines in test scores, but also to blame teacher education. And if you look closely at the evidence they're using to basically sort of assess whether a teacher education is failing, it's very, very limited. And then if you look to see what they're proposing as the reforms that need to occur, they really aren't well informed by the cadre of scholars who have been involved in teacher education and what we know about what teachers need and how they develop over time. And so both of us are concerned with this sort of rush to reform based upon, we think, evidence and arguments for which there's a lack of warrant to major reformation of, for example, teacher education or school systems and so on.
Speaker 3:That is really, we think, is really sort of problematic. We wouldn't stand for it in the area of medicine. Yet we sort of see it occurring in education, where the consequences are as dangerous as what would be the case with an erroneous application of a prescription to deal with a remedy and the prescription is based upon limited research or findings for which there isn't sufficient data to have faith in. As I said, I just attended this webinar and I was so impressed with the California Teachers Association and how they were represented in this panel and the voice that they were demanding in support of teachers and also the California Association for bilingual education and the extent to which they were basically arguing about what they know are the needs of the child, for whom English is not their first language. And again, the science of reading really hasn't brought into play that sort of knowledge of transliteracies by literacies, enlisting some of the key scholars who have been doing wonderful work in that area.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of my big concerns in all this is that, in emphasizing a narrow band of research to bring to the policy arena, that we run the risk of overemphasizing some areas and leaving others to chance. And in mandating the foundational skills, I think what happens is that it sets up policies as more restrictive than they need to be. If we took the research that we have available seriously, we have to ask questions like where are the policy levers to ensure that students have all the tools they need to understand and evaluate the trustworthiness of information available across public and social media? Boy, you know, if there's something I worry about in the school curriculum, it's with the, the trustworthiness of information available across public and social media. Boy, you know, if there's something I worry about in the school curriculum, it's with the explosion of information I didn't use the word knowledge, but information out there on the web and the lack of control of the quality and trustworthiness of the information. We've created this need for students and citizens to know about that, yet we haven't gotten a push on the mandates to make sure that people have those tools. Where's the push to ensure that all students receive curricular opportunities to see their own and use their own cultural assets in learning from the school curriculum and those things are just not getting the same kind of press as the other issues on foundational skills.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, like in teaching phonics, there's nothing in the research that says that you have to teach phonics in a particular way, like sequential decoding or word family phonics. It just says that phonics needs to be systematic. Within the notion of systematic there are a lot of options. Yet we have mandates where people mandate a particular approach to teaching phonics, like synthetic phonics, and that's just not true. The research doesn't support that specific mandate.
Speaker 2:And Rob mentioned the thing about the multiple cueing systems In the research that Donna Scanlon and her colleagues have done. It's really interesting because what they provide kids with is a full toolkit of some orthographic, some phonological, some semantic and some syntactic cues. And what they find over time is if you give kids that full toolbox, over time kids, when faced with uncertainty about a word's pronunciation or meaning, over time they'll develop natural strategies and maybe even lean more towards the orthographic and phonological cues over the meaning cues, because in some ways they're easier to use. But that only happens if you give kids the full gamut of cues to select from. So you know, what we've got is selective application of our research-based knowledge. Not all of the equally important findings from research get translated into policy, and that seems to me to be a real problem in terms of the kinds of focus on particular aspects of the curriculum that we have in this country and in other countries as well.
Speaker 3:I think there are at least three things that I want to emphasize from research. One is I think you could predict for a number of kids that an approach to beginning reading which isn't also meaning-centered will probably contribute to advances in their ability to decode, but not necessarily to comprehend, particularly in the first couple of grades. And so if you're in a school district and you're sort of seeing a lag in comprehension scores, it could be because of that, and notice I'm using the word could be because you know. The other key finding from research that's over and over again is there's typically a treatment by what we call aptitude or inability interaction, which basically sort of says hey, don't expect any sort of treatment or instructional approach to operate in a similar fashion or the same fashion of effectiveness with all kids. And it brings to bear what you sort of see in medicine Doctors don't prescribe things and let you go out and do anything and everything just based on the prescription.
Speaker 3:Doctors are constantly calling you back into their office or their hospital to check up on you to see if in fact they need to make adjustments, and what I see happening in education is not that sort of careful monitoring and adjustments to education over time based upon those sorts of observations.
Speaker 3:It's like we have a tendency to want to sort of lock into this orientation to education which is a little bit overly scripted and rigid.
Speaker 3:Is a little bit overly scripted and rigid and I think we have to adjust to thinking about education in the hands of educators who are encouraged to use their professional judgments, discernments, to make adjustments over time, using a full toolbox of understandings of what is literacy and literacy development and strategies they might use to support different students in different sorts of ways. So I think there are sort of some key things about research which we really need to think about, particularly as we sort of move forward with these legislative mandates that to me seem to be antithetical to what we really need to do. If, in fact, we're sort of adopting a model which is sort of case-based, specific to different individual needs over time and is informed to some extent by the fact that we could sort of almost predict what a narrow approach that overemphasizes one aspect of reading over another will lead to, it will lead to some limitations in the results that teachers are likely to get.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and I think that the omissions from the conversation to me are again what's so important about the work that you all have done is to really bring some of that back into the context. Is there anything else that you really want listeners to know about this work?
Speaker 2:I don't know if this is entirely new, but one of the problems we have is that, like our society at large, our conversations about the issue of teaching reading have become very ideological, in the sense that, you know, we push our point of view and we barely talk to other people who think differently from the way that we think. And I think we almost need a complete reset on how it is that we manage differences, controversy and deeply held beliefs in our quest for common ground. You know, I think one of the problems we have is that we come to the table with our sort of pet notion of what really matters. Is that we come to the table with our sort of pet notion of what really matters and some people think that, well, if we would just teach phonics first and fast, you know, everything would take care of itself. When somebody comes along and says no, the answer is comprehension strategies, and a third person comes along and says it's all about motivation, and a fourth person says it's all about cultural relevance. And I think what happens to us is that we feel so strongly about our particular first principle that we push for it at the exclusion of other principles, and I think that we really wesense on how to manage these differences, and I do think we need to first of all, replace false debates with real debates.
Speaker 2:And that is one of the things that we do in this not only in education, but also in politics and broader social issues is that we don't let people speak for themselves. We assert what we think the other people believe and then we critique our version of what it is we're saying that they believe, and I think we've got to let people speak for themselves, and we do have to come to the table and deal with our differences and try to reach consensus where we can. And when we can't reach consensus, at least try to understand why we don't agree with one another and to see what kind of research that we actually have to do in order to settle some of these unsettled questions. So I think that until and unless we do that, we're just going to be mired in these debates and some name-calling and impugning other people's motives and the like. So I think we need to show more respect for one another and at least talk to people who don't think exactly the way that we think.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'll pick up a little bit on what David said. I think one of the reactions to our book that we've seen is some people want to sort of say what we're wrong, not right, and that's not what we hope will be discerned from our book. We hope our book raises issues that people need to take into consideration, as david sort of says, in conversation and debate, and not give us a score, not to sort of in a sense grade us as right or wrong, but actually are raising issues that need to be considered, and we've raised some issues but not others. I I think one of the things that strikes me and we've talked about this frequently and that is teachers need to be given a voice and they need to be. I mean, they're the first line of defense. Their practical knowledge needs to be respected and research can contribute to people's thinking, but teachers are going to have knowledge of situation of individual kids and based upon their observations and engagements. That shouldn't be minimized. It needs to be highlighted and teachers encouraged to sort of raise sort of issues and not feel as if they have to sort of hide out in their classrooms doing the things that they think will work, but engaging with their coaches and others in meaningful consideration of the merits of this stuff.
Speaker 3:I think over time some of the most outstanding educators that I have encountered are teachers who might not have the research background but they have practical knowledge and when you look at their practical knowledge and unpack it it goes beyond any theory that we have to explain the type of thinking they're doing and the types of considerations.
Speaker 3:One person in the drama world that I was struck with who had that practical knowledge was a woman by the name of Dorothy Heathcote. I find, for example, in New Zealand, the history of reading recovery and this was not just Marie Clay's invention but the educators and the sort of thinking they brought to bear on developing a program such as reading recovery or the Foundations of Literacy by people like Don Holdaway, was extraordinary. You know, people like Reggie Routman, people like some of the folks that came out of the National Writing Project, particularly the Bay Area Writing Project, were approaches to teachers that really veiled and respected teachers and engaged them in conversations with each other, rather than sort of this approach to education which has this sort of somewhat of analogy to sort of Moses descending from the mountain with his Ten Commandments. And you know, again I guess I'd like to sort of stress what I heard the California educators say hey, we need to figure out how to support them from the ground up and not from the top down.
Speaker 2:My way of sort of saying it is that as a profession, we are given prerogative, and the prerogative is to take our research-based knowledge to the last mile and to implement it in the classroom.
Speaker 2:And it's not going to look exactly the same in seven different contexts in which you implement that same research context in which you implement that same research. And that's because when knowledge gets situated, you have to take into account the particulars of that situation in order to make the research-based knowledge work. If it's just applied uniformly, without taking into account those particularities of the situation, it's kind of like inert knowledge. But it's a relationship you know. In exchange for the prerogative that teachers are given, they have to know as much as they can know, and sometimes that knowledge comes directly from experience, it's kind of implicit, and sometimes it comes from study and reading about the research and the like, and I want people to know what the latest findings are from the research. But I think in exchange for possessing that knowledge, we need to as the California teachers that Rob was referring to talked about we need to respect the fact that teachers are the ones who take the theory and the research the last mile and make it happen for the good of the individuals who are in their chair.
Speaker 3:A book was not meant to discount the science of reading, but to contextualize it better than we think it was being by some people and to basically open up the conversation to those perspectives which need to move beyond what's actually emerged at this point.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I want to thank you both so very much for spending this time with me and for really helping to explain what you lay out so beautifully in the book. That I think is helpful to practitioners and, as I said, hopefully eventually to policymakers when it comes to how we contextualize reading and literacy in the real lives of real students and the teachers that support them. So thank you both so much for the work that you do.
Speaker 3:Lindsay, thank you so much for including us in this. Thank you both.
Speaker 1:Dr Robert Tierney is known for his work in the areas of reading and the reading-writing, connection theories of literacy, instruction and research, teaching, learning and researching with digital literacies and global developments in literacy.
Speaker 1:Rob has published numerous books and scholarly articles focused on literacy, education, teacher development, cross-national educational research, educational assessment and equity. Rob is a recent past president of the Board of the International Literacy Association. He currently serves as the lead editor for the International Encyclopedia of Education and has served as editor of Reading Research Quarterly and an editorial board member of the American Educational Research Journal, educational Researcher, the British Educational Research Journal, journal of Literacy Research and Reading Research Quarterly. Rob has worked in the United States, canada, australia, africa and China. He has received research funding from various US government and Canadian agencies. Rob has been engaged in projects for UNESCO in Africa, children's Television Workshop, apple Computer, the World Bank and various foundations and university consortium groups across America and the Asian Pacific region. In Canada, rob served as the president of the Association of Canadian Deans of Education, where he guided the formulation of the General Accord, a national accord on teacher education and a national accord on education research. In Australia, he has been actively involved in national state and local teacher education, educational research and indigenous efforts, including the Association of Australia Councils of Deans of Education and Affiliates. During his time in the US, he was president of the Literacy Research Association and chair of the National Assembly of Research for the National Council of Teachers of English. He has been the recipient of a number of international and national awards, including the WS Gray Citation of Merit Award for Contributions to Literacy Education, american Council of Teacher Education Award for Contributions to Teacher Education and Beijing Normal University Award for Contributions to International Research Collaborations. In 2000, he was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame. In Canada, he received an award and lifetime membership in the Association of Canadian Deans of Education for his work. He was a professor and former dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, an honorary professor and immediate past dean of the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney, a visiting distinguished scholar at Beijing Normal University and a conjoint professor for the Walutuka Center for the University of Newcastle. Rob is Professor Emeritus and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. You could reach Rob at robtierney at ubcca. That's r-o-b dot t-i-e-r-n-e-y at ubcca and learn more at literacyresearchcommonsorg. That's l-i-t-e-r-a-c-y-r-e-s-e-a-r-c-h-c-o-m-m-o-n-sorg. M-o-n-s dot, o-r-g, dr P David Pearson is known for his work in the areas of literacy history, literacy policy and literacy practice.
Speaker 1:He has authored more than 300 books, articles and chapters with almost 300 co-authors. Notably, he has written and co-edited the Handbook of Reading Research, now in its fourth edition. He has served on the boards for Reading Research, quarterly Science, journal of Literacy Research, journal of Educational Psychology, cognition and Instruction, research in Teaching English and Review of Educational Research. He has served multiple terms as editor of three major research publications Reading Research Quarterly, national Reading Conference Yearbook and Review of Research and Education. David has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the 1989 Oscar Causey Award from the National Reading Conference, now the Literacy Research Association, for outstanding contributions to reading research and in 1990, the William S Gray Citation of Merit from the International Reading Association, now the International Literacy Association, for his contributions to theory, research and practice. In 1990, he was also inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame.
Speaker 1:He became a member of the National Academy of Education in 2003, and in 2004, he received the Alan Purvis Award from the National Council of Teachers of English for the Research in Teaching English article Most Likely to Influence Practice. In 2005, he received the Albert J Harris Award from the International Reading Association for Scholarship on Reading Difficulties. In 2006, the University of Minnesota honored him with the Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award, the highest non-academic award given at the university, for his contributions to educational research and practice. In 2009, he was elected to membership as a fellow of the American Educational Research Association. In 2010, he received the American Educational Research Association Distinguished Contributions to Research and Education Award. In 2012, the Literacy Research Association created the P David Pearson Scholarly Influence Award to honor scholarship that impacts literacy practice. He has served as an advisor to the National Academy of Science, the Children's Television Workshop now the Sesame Workshop many school districts and state agencies, as well as public and private educational enterprises. He has been a reading program author for multiple publishers. David has enjoyed a long career in positions as faculty member, a dean and center director at four universities University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, university of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, michigan State and University of California-Berkeley. Dr David Pearson is now Michigan State and University of California Berkeley. Dr David Pearson is now emeritus faculty at the University of California Berkeley. You can connect with David at ppearson at berkeleyedu that's p-p-e-a-r-s-o-n. At b-e-r-k-e-l-E-Y dot edu and on Facebook.
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