Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Conversation with Donna Scanlon
Dr. Donna Scanlon talks to us about considering reading skills and strategy instruction from the perspective of the learner. Donna is known for her work in support of children who experience substantial difficulty in learning to read and on how to prevent and remediate reading difficulties. In particular, she and her colleagues developed an approach to early literacy instruction and intervention known as the Interactive Strategies Approach, which has been found to be effective in helping teachers to reduce the incidence of reading difficulties in the early primary grades, and is used in Response to Intervention contexts. She authored a freely available literacy research booklet titled, Helping Your Child Become a Reader, and a report titled An Examination of Dyslexia Research and Instruction, with Policy Implications, co authored with Classroom Caffeine guest Peter Johnston. Both resources are linked below. Her most recent book titled Early Literacy Instruction and Intervention was published by Guilford Press in 2024. Dr. Scanlon was a member of the International Reading Association's RtI Task Force. She is a 2017 inductee into the Reading Hall of Fame. Dr. Scanlon is Professor Emeritus at University at Albany State University of New York’s Department of Literacy Teaching and Learning and was affiliated with the University’s Child Research and Study Center for more than forty years.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Scanlon, D., Anderson, K.L., Barnes, E.M., Morse, M., & Yurkewecz-Stellato, T. (2024). Helping Your Child Become a Reader. ISA Professional Development. https://literacyresearchcommons.org/resources/
- Johnston, P., & Scanlon, D. (2021). An Examination of Dyslexia Research and Instruction With Policy Implications. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 70(1), 107-128. https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377211024625
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2025, Jan. 14). Another conversation with Donna Scanlon (Season 5, No. 6) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/2653-2E1C-A3DB-0EB7-F157-Q
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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, dr Donna Scanlon talks to us about considering reading skills and strategy instruction from the perspective of the learner considering reading skills and strategy instruction from the perspective of the learner. Donna is known for her work in support of children who experience substantial difficulty in learning to read and on how to prevent and remediate reading difficulties. In particular, she and her colleagues developed an approach to early literacy instruction and intervention, known as the Interactive Strategies Approach, which has been found to be effective in helping teachers to reduce the incidence of reading difficulties in the early primary grades and is used in response to intervention or RTI contexts. She authored a freely available literacy research booklet entitled Helping your Child Become a Reader and a report entitled An Examination of Dyslexia Research and Instruction with Policy Implications, co-authored with Classroom Caffeine past guest, peter Johnston. Both resources are linked in the show notes. Her most recent book is titled Early Literacy Instruction and Intervention and was recently published by Guilford Press. Dr Scanlon was a member of the International Reading Association's RTI Task Force. She is a 2017 inductee into the Reading Hall of Fame. Dr Scanlon is Professor Emeritus at University of Albany's Department of Literacy, teaching and Learning and was affiliated with the university's Child Research and Study Center for more than 40 years.
Speaker 1:For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite drink and join me, your host Lindsay Persaud, for Classroom Caffeine Research to Energize your Teaching Practice. Donna, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Happy to be here. Thank you for hosting it.
Speaker 1:So, from your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Speaker 2:That's a really interesting question. Sort of sends me down memory lane. Probably the earliest memory that I have about reading and reading difficulties goes way back to the early 1960s, when I was in second grade. There was a teacher who was called in to help a little boy identify the word strong, which he could not read. His last name, by the way, was strong and he could read strong when he had to find his name. So this teacher and this is a Catholic school decades ago, as I said, where screaming was not an unusual characteristic of interacting with kids who had difficulty, so the teacher was screaming at this little guy and said screamed over and over. You know that word? You?
Speaker 1:know that word you know that word.
Speaker 2:Apparently she was thinking that because he could read and spell his last name, he knew the word strong. But when I reflected on that and it's stuck with me to this day I realized that that little boy who couldn't connect the letters in Strong to a word that had meaning beyond his name, but that the teacher's actions were not going to help him. And in retrospect, when I'm thinking about how teachers' knowledge and actions impact reading development, that moment has motivated me to think of instructional interactions from the perspective of the child who is having difficulty. And that's such a huge, huge aspect of literacy learning and the motivational aspects and all of that. So I've thought about that so many times over the years.
Speaker 2:Fast forwarding a couple of decades when colleagues and I were preparing for our first intervention study, there was a little boy brought to our clinic for evaluation. We had a center that had both evaluation services and research projects. This little guy's school had identified him as dyslexic so this is in the 80s, late 80s probably and he clearly met the criteria for that definition or that category at the time. He had a significant discrepancy between his measured intelligence and his reading ability.
Speaker 2:At the time we were getting ready as a research enterprise to do one of our first intervention studies to try to look at kids who had reading difficulties so because he happened to live close to where I live, I decided to try to accelerate his reading growth through one-to-one tutoring, which I went to his house before school and it was slow going at first. You know he definitely had difficulties. Second grade he was, you know he was not at all capable of doing what you would expect a second grader to be doing relative to reading, but with a lot of engagement and non-stressful I didn't yell at him non-stressful interactions around reading and engaging him in writing stories that he was interested in, he did show accelerated progress and no longer qualified as dyslexic. And years later I happened to run into his mother and learned that he graduated high school and honors English and was fine. Reading was never after that period, never a problem for him. But I've often thought what would have happened to this little boy without this early intervention which basically in the years since has been a major focus of what I do as a professional, both in terms of my work as a psychologist and mostly in my work as a researcher and a teacher professional development provider. So as another example and you really did send me down memory lane with this question In our very first intervention study when we were attempting to gain parental permission to enroll first grade children.
Speaker 2:In our intervention there was one child whose teacher was desperate to get him into the study because she understood what we were trying to do but we couldn't get a consent form from him.
Speaker 2:The teacher kept reporting that you know. No consent form came back. So when I asked the principal if he had any insight into how we might convince his parents that this might be a good idea, he said he never sent the consent form to the parents. And when I asked why he wanted our study to work so he didn't think this little boy was going to accelerate his reading progress with the intervention we were offering. So he was trying to support a positive outcome for the study. Anyway, when I explained to him that one of our goals was to compare the characteristics of kids who demonstrated accelerated growth with intervention and those who didn't, I got him to agree to send the consent form and he sort of had me thinking this was a little guy who wasn't going to accelerate, right, because this very nice principal was very confident At any rate. So at the outset of the intervention, which was in.
Speaker 2:January of first grade. For the kid he scored at the fourth percentile on a measure of reading skill and at the end of the school year, with a semester length, one-to-one intervention, he scored at the 80th percentile. So obviously he had an excellent tutor and without participation in the study, who knows what his future would have looked like. But that convinced me even more. So this is the very first year of our first intervention study. This is really something that matters for these little guys and we need to continue to work on this line of research.
Speaker 1:To me, donna, the thread that really binds these stories is, of course it's also reading difficulties, but it is the expectations from the adults in this children's lives, and I think that's a point that often is getting lost in today's conversations. I don't know that there's anyone saying that, you know, early phonics-based interventions don't matter, but it's everything else that comes along with it. Right, it's the expectation, it's the environment and, to your point, what is the child's perspective of what they're being offered? Or, I think, in some cases, what's sort of being forced upon them? Or, often, what's their opportunity cost? Right? Are they being taken out of recess to do tutoring? Probably not ideal, right? Because then it feels more like a punishment than an opportunity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's actually a big part of what we, when we work with teachers, what we talk about is the whole motivation piece of the equation. Right, like, get your work done and then you can something more attractive, which is a communication that we certainly don't mean to convey. But when I say that when working with a group of teachers, they all go oh yeah, right, we do that all the time and parents do that all the time. Right, Get your homework done and then you can go outside and play or watch TV or play video. Then you can go outside and play or watch TV or play video, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:So I really try, in both my work with teachers and also when I talk to parents, to get them to think about the value system that they create relative to things that we really want children to love rather than dislike Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I think it just reminds me wholeheartedly how much our words matter and how much the messages within our words really matter, which also, of course, leads me to thinking about how much conversation with young people matters and just understanding their perspective and their point of view, because I think that that is such an important lever when it comes to supporting them in their academic growth. Right Is really understanding what is their motivation, what do they want to be engaged in, how do they see themselves, how do they perceive the environment they're working in? Yeah, I just think that that's such an important point that I feel like has gotten a little bit lost in translation, particularly in the last couple of years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you think of all these little people who are, you know, being engaged in endless phonics activities and far too little engagement in reading meaningful texts, which is the reason we're teaching them phonics actually read interesting and learn from interesting things.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so on that note, what do you want listeners to know about your work? That's another very, very big question to ask of someone.
Speaker 2:It is a very big question to ask, but I'm going to start by saying that in my work, I've been privileged to be working with many phenomenal colleagues, including both university professors and researchers, but also many elementary classroom and reading teachers who would these days be called interventionists. So when I talk about my work, I'm actually talking about our work.
Speaker 2:None of what I've done was done on my own, there were many, many people involved in all of this work, and there were many, many people involved in all of this work. So what I try to these days convey when talking with people who are educators is an understanding that reading and writing are complex processes that are mutually reinforcing. Engaging in one promotes development of the other. Writing is these days in my observations, informal observations is much less emphasized than I think it needs to be. I don't think many people realize that they are parts of the same process and they're both complex processes. So, because we don't have much time going forward, I'll just focus on reading, because that's really where my focus has been to a great extent. So in our early work in the 70s and 80s that's how old I am we focused on comparisons of children who experienced literacy learning difficulties with those who learned to read with relative ease, literacy learning difficulties with those who learn to read with relative ease. Prior to the 70s, it was commonly believed that severe reading difficulty, or dyslexia as it's sometimes called, was due to visual processing problems, that kids somehow saw things differently, saw things backwards, and that was completely disproven. And there aren't a whole lot of things we can say in education with such confidence that was disproven decades ago, very clever studies, but today still you encounter people who still believe that dyslexia, or particularly dyslexia, is a problem with seeing things differently, with somehow the communication between the eyes and the brain doesn't work. So that's important to state here, I think, because, as I said, there are still people who hold that belief In the work that we were doing.
Speaker 2:In the 70s and 80s we conducted several studies that compared kids who had difficulty learning to read with those who didn't. No intervention, just looking at kids who either had or didn't have difficulties, had or didn't have difficulties, and, consistent with earlier findings, those studies found no differences between the two groups on visual processing skills. So you know, vision is not the issue. In tapping phonological skills, however, and assessing phonological skills, there were clear group differences in our assessments, including the ability to analyze the sounds in spoken words, phonemic awareness and in the ability to the developing understanding that difficulties with phonological skills are an limited reading growth, lead to limitations in phonological skills, so that obviously the causality could go both ways. And of course, both limitations in phonological skills and in reading skills could be the result of inadequacies in the kids' instructional experiences. Right, and that was suggested by Mari Clay in a paper entitled Learning to be Learning Disabled. You know, were we helping the kids to have difficulties? Is sort of the message there.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So questions about the direction of causality led my colleagues and me to embark upon a series of intervention studies, which really was most of what my professional career was focused on. So we were interested early on in whether long-term reading difficulties could be prevented through instructional intervention, and the answer was yes for many, but not for all children. Our next question for us was whether beginning intervention in kindergarten versus first grade would make a difference, and the answer there was yes. Beginning intervention in kindergarten versus first grade reduced the number of children who experienced long-term difficulties.
Speaker 2:So we want to get to the kids early on so that they never have that sense of themselves as kids who are having difficulty, if we can manage that. And so, to go back to the whole motivational thing, the kids never identify themselves as kids who are having problems and so they engage with a more positive view. A next wave of studies focused on whether an intervention approach that emphasized phonological skills would be more or less effective reducing long-term reading difficulties than an intervention approach that emphasized reading meaningful text with teacher guidance. And that's sort of at the crux of some of what's going on in the science of reading discussions these days. So the answer there was more complicated. The answer was it depends.
Speaker 2:What we found was for children with very limited phonological skills, and by that I mean both phonemic analysis skills sort of spoken language skills and decoding skills. We found that an early emphasis on phonological skills, coupled with the opportunity to apply those skills when reading meaningful text, resulted in more children making progress. Children who had stronger phonological skills at the outset, however, showed stronger growth when they spent more time reading. You know, and looking back at that, well, that's not a surprise, but at the time it was a real question, it was a genuine question. So there's no doubt that, to a great extent, children learn to read by reading, but they need to have the foundations relative to the phonology of language in order to be effective in their reading efforts.
Speaker 2:So in all of our intervention studies, an important focus was on word identification skills, because to comprehend a text, readers need to be able to accurately identify the printed words, and more or less automatically. So when I work with teachers, one of the things I sometimes ask them to do is guesstimate how many printed words a proficient reader can identify effortlessly. And it's always an interesting brief conversation where the estimates vary from 1,000, 2,000, 3,000. And ultimately no one ever gets close to what the actual number is, which is in excess of 40,000 unique words. That is a huge number of words that a proficient reader can read automatically. And when you can read all those words automatically, you can focus all of your cognitive resources on meaning construction right.
Speaker 2:But if kids, when kids don't have that huge body of words that they can identify effortlessly, they're going to have to spend a lot of their thinking skills on the word identification process and therefore will have less opportunity to understand and enjoy the things they're reading. So the ability to build that huge sight vocabulary is really an important focus. Some kids build sight vocabulary pretty effortlessly. Mark Seidenberg, for example, talks about statistical learning the more you read, the more exposure you have to spelling patterns and whatnot, and the more quickly you build that huge body of words that you can identify. Kids who have difficulty with that word solving process don't build that huge body of words as effortlessly and therefore they continue to have to focus on word identification and have less cognitive energy to devote to the meaning construction piece. Less cognitive energy to devote to the meaning construction piece.
Speaker 2:So I think as teachers we need to think about how to help learners build that huge site vocabulary, because certainly we can't teach those 40,000 words. So our approach and this is since the very first intervention study that we started in the early 90s Our approach was to explicitly teach phonological skills and to couple that instruction with word-solving strategy instruction, teaching the kids how to use what they were learning about the code in the context of reading meaningful text.
Speaker 2:So the goal was to enable the learners to build their sight vocabulary through reading by using their phonic skills in combination with contextual information. And that's a point right. In our current science of reading debates, the role of context in word solving is particularly contentious.
Speaker 2:But, as I said, in all of our intervention studies we've focused on helping kids learn both phonic skills and how to use contextual information to identify and confirm unfamiliar words that they encountered while reading.
Speaker 2:So an important goal was that, in the process of figuring out unfamiliar words, learners would attend thoroughly enough to the word's printed representation to enable them to basically store that word in memory with enough detail so that they would identify the word more readily on subsequent encounters.
Speaker 2:That's a process that Linnea Airy refers to as orthographic mapping, and that's hugely important that the kids need to connect not only the words the spoken and written form of the word, but the internal structure of the word, because that helps them learn about some of those structures so that they can be applied when they encounter other words with similar structures. So in our approach, in addition to explicit instruction and practice with phonological skills, as I said, we taught a set of word-solving strategies which we guided the kids in using when they were attempting to identify unfamiliar words in meaningful text. So certainly, while knowing the relationships between letters and sounds is very important in solving unfamiliar words, written English is not characterized by strict one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and their phonemes, so we felt it was important for learners to have and use multiple sources of information when reading and when they encounter a word that they can't immediately identify.
Speaker 2:So, teachers in our research projects and our professional development offerings since have been encouraged to explicitly teach a combination of code-based strategies and meaning-based strategies and to help kids learn to use the two types of information in combination to identify and confirm the identity of unfamiliar words that they encounter in the reading. Using both types of strategies is especially important in a language like English because it lacks total consistency in letter-sound relationships. So in today's science of reading climate, our approach has sometimes been criticized because they argue that we are teaching children to guess at words by relying on contextual information. But utilizing these sources of information is critical when readers encounter words that are ambiguous, right. Consider the word D-O-V-E, for example. Is it dove or is it dove Same spelling?
Speaker 2:There are what are often called rules, which really aren't rules, that would lead you in a particular direction for identifying that word. But when readers' phonics skills are not yet well-developed enough to allow for a full decoding and initially unfamiliar word, or when the word is ambiguous as that word is, they've got to have other ways of approaching the word solving issue. So, for example, context right. If that D-O-V-E was encountered in a book about that involved water in some way, using that knowledge would help them settle on the pronunciation of that word that would be accurate in that context. So those are things that have been really important to me and my colleagues in terms of helping teachers understand this really problematic view of the SOR folks, who are vehement about not teaching kids to use context. I think it's really going to hurt kids going forward.
Speaker 1:I think anytime we neglect context, we're missing, right? We're talking about missing the forest for the trees, right? I think your example of the word D-O-V-E is really powerful because is the context water or is the context air? Because it's going to make a very big difference to what that word actually is, even if you're able to decode it right, if you know that pattern, that word pattern.
Speaker 1:In fact, I mean I can honestly say, donna, everything you've said makes so much sense to me because, you know, as I said before, I don't know that there's anyone who's saying phonics doesn't matter or that it shouldn't be taught, but whenever we strip reading instruction down to just phonics, we're not left with a whole lot, right, we're left with sort of these foundational, fundamental kind of skills that don't necessarily plug into children's lives or you know how they may encounter words in the wild, you know whatever, they're not sitting there with an instructor. So the idea of also using strategies and teaching strategies for how to use that code and how to use other tools when the code isn't quite working for you, because certainly in the English language, you know, I can remember teaching my kindergarten students 20 years ago about, you know the sound that a letter makes only to say in some cases, right, so we have the letter C. But sometimes when you see the letter C it makes more like a letter S sound, you know. And so really helping kids to disentangle that it requires context, right, it requires a bit richer conversation about how letters and sounds function and just you know where they are within the context of what they're reading.
Speaker 1:But I think your other point that the motivation for learning is also so, so critical and if we are learning words and letters for the sake of words and letters, the learning kind of stops there. But if we're learning letters and sounds for the sake of reading something that's interesting and relevant and meaningful, then we can maintain that element of curiosity and engagement and interest in learning for the duration. I wonder what is going to happen with some of our early learners now by the time they get to high school. You know what are they going to be most interested in and hopefully there will be many things that spark an interest and a joy and engagement in learning. I just I hope that's not lost somewhere along the way.
Speaker 2:I completely agree that it's a reason to be concerned. Children these days are in settings where reading really feels like uninteresting, work, right, and this whole controversy over whole language and balanced literacy and whatever you want to call it these days is problematic when you think about it from the perspective of a child. Right, I mean, yes, there was a time when we absolutely did not teach kids enough about the code as an educational community. I mean, I can remember one day and sitting with a child who, you know, misread the word, I think it was mother versus mommy and a book that he was reading, and I and I said it was either one or the other. But the child said, and I corrected me, and he looked at me and he goes well, my teacher doesn't care.
Speaker 2:Well, that said, well, no, you're getting the meaning, you understand what's going on there, but you know you actually have to pay attention to the letters and what they tell you, what word they tell you to say, so that when you see that word again you'll know it.
Speaker 2:You know and that's the part of that building that 40,000 word site vocabulary, if you will, word sight vocabulary, if you will, that you know. If you, yes, a lot of times you can figure out what's going on in the text and you might not precisely identify the unfamiliar words, but paying enough attention to precisely identify the word will help add that word to your sight vocabulary, which is going to serve you going forward. And that's what I think was missing in the approach to guided reading some people call it was that you know. As long as the child seemed to be understanding what was going on in the text, that was okay. Well, yes, that was okay if your goal is comprehension of that text in that particular instance. But if your goal is to get the child prepared for the many, many texts that will be encountered going forward, they need more precision in terms of the identification of the initially unfamiliar words.
Speaker 1:Right and to that point I think, even the figure you shared with us. You know that learners need an excess of 40,000 words automatically recognized in order to be proficient readers. I think that that sort of hits that point home that it can't just be about decoding and teaching specific words. You have to know more than that but also enjoy reading and enjoy practicing. Because I know in the last certainly in the last five years or so, I think one thing that has been challenging about some of the systems and structures that have been put into place in many schools, particularly in my area and I think around the United States, is that even during reading time there isn't actually anywhere, and I think that that is really detrimental, because you know you're not going to teach 40,000 words. Kids need to be motivated to continue that learning on their own and, in addition to that motivation, have the tools they need in order to decode and understand those words within the context of what they're reading.
Speaker 2:And they need to see reading as a pleasurable and desirable activity rather than as work that you have to accomplish before you get to do something more appealing Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. That reminds me of dear Jim Trelease and some of the work that he did around reading aloud and those positive associations and how reading. In my mind. What I took away from his work is that reading helps to make us fully human and it helps us with those connections and, you know, I think that that's just so important and I think that that can be kind of lost in translation. It really makes me sad about the fact that balanced literacy has become such a dirty word, because I think that it is important we find some balance for kids so that they are learning structures, strategies and really the content of decoding, while also finding the balance of that enjoyment and that pleasure in the reading experience. Because, yeah, it's definitely something I worry about.
Speaker 2:It has become a bad word. You're right, and I think part of that is because everybody had a different interpretation of what balance meant. When I talk about the whole scheme of learning to read and write, I try to use the term comprehensive literacy instruction. You know it's. There's a whole lot there. It's oral language, it's motivation, it's knowing you know how to analyze the sounds in words so you can write them. It's knowing the letter sound course. It's a lot, it's a whole lot, and I do think that the notion of statistical learning really makes it possible for kids, learners, to acquire all of the information they need. Learners to acquire all of the information they need. That you know.
Speaker 2:We learn to speak not because somebody specifically taught us how to make the sound right. We learn to speak because we hear it, we try it, we're successful in getting people to understand the words that we say and we, you know. We then elaborate more, we put them in context, blah, blah, blah. So it's not all explicit teaching. But for an alphabetic writing system, there does need to be some explicit teaching, but then you need to use it in meaningful ways, not just to. You know, read a set of nonsense words.
Speaker 1:I mean years ago.
Speaker 2:I had students who would go out for job interviews and they were asked to do a demonstration lesson on nonsense words what?
Speaker 1:Of all the things, of all the things we could choose to have someone demonstrate, and certainly you know I see where nonsense, word fluency, has a place in helping us to see. You know, if a student understands that specific decoding, do they understand the rule out of context, but it's probably not the most critical thing that we could be teaching.
Speaker 2:Well, I would argue that we shouldn't teach it, but that assessing kids' ability to decode nonsense words gives us instructional targets. I just try to get inside the head of a little person who's learning to decode nonsense words. Why?
Speaker 1:am I doing this Absolutely, and I so love that perspective. It helps me to think about how we recenter our focus on the young people who are there with us every day, and you know, what is their perception of what they're learning? How are they seeing it as valuable in their lives, and how does it help to send them on a positive and productive track to the type of learning they want to do? And I think that so often that has also gotten lost in translation.
Speaker 1:Yes, of course kids need the skills and the strategies, but if, without that motivation, it kind of stops after they have mastered those skills, so, yeah, going on for decades, and I think that, particularly in some popular media, we've been sort of sold this idea that it's, you know, oh my gosh this clear, particularly when it comes to what does the sequencing look like? What exactly is it that a particular learner needs at a particular time? And it takes skill and it takes the expertise of teachers who care, you know, to really be able to put those elements into place for individual learners, for individual learners, and that, yeah, I think that's. Another thing that concerns me is that I think that teachers are often overlooked in this conversation and their expertise isn't always valued.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I would agree, and I think one of the issues is that English is such an unusual language in terms of it. You know, it brings together all kinds of meaning elements in the spellings of words, and so some people describe it as a morphophonological language. A written word carries morphemic information as well as phonological information. But in other languages Spanish, italian, for example there's one-to-one correspondence for the most part, so they're teaching the code explicitly and you know saying you can figure out this word if you know the code. That works. But in English we have a more complex orthography, so kids need to learn to use multiple sources of information to puzzle through and identify and ultimately learn the unfamiliar words that they encounter, and they need to learn to be flexible.
Speaker 2:That's one of the strategies that we explicitly teach our little guys and older students, who need guidance as well.
Speaker 2:That you know if your first attempt at a word isn't a real word that makes sense. There are things you can do. You could try different sounds for some of the letters, and that which is now becoming a popular topic in the reading literature is called having a set for variability being able to adjust the pronunciation of a word or of an attempt so that it's a real word that makes sense, and that's a hugely powerful thing that teachers can guide students to do. I had a fourth grade teacher once. A reading teacher tell me she thought that was the most powerful strategy that she had ever taught her middle elementary readers and she was just like why did I never think of that?
Speaker 1:Well, I think, for older learners, who are often encountering a variety of different types of texts around a variety of different types of topics, particularly when it is interest-driven, they have to have those tools for flexibility so that, if it is a new word, maybe it's a word they haven't heard yet, which I think makes that even trickier, you know, in order to really crack that code. So, yeah, we just we have to have many tools in our toolbox in order to be proficient and interested and engaged readers. So so, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Speaker 2:We've sort of gotten there, I think, in what we've already been talking about.
Speaker 2:I guess I would say that the portrayal of the SOR movement misrepresents both what is involved in reading and what the scientific evidence reveals. And what the scientific evidence reveals right. So SOR proponents rightly advocate that learners need to develop skill using the alphabetic writing system to figure out and learn the pronunciation of words they don't already know. But, especially in light of the inconsistencies that we've just been talking about and in terms of the graphemophoning relationships, children need to learn to test their attempt at a word for goodness of fit in the context in which it's encountered. And if their attempt doesn't fit, they need to learn to use other ways to pronounce the unfamiliar word. That could mean approaching the phonological information a bit differently. So try a different sound, or they might use contextual information, as we were talking about. If you know, if they encountered D-O-V-E and there's water in the story, then you know it's probably not a bird. So basically, they need to have multiple sources of information coming into play when trying to identify the word.
Speaker 1:I appreciate the way that you state that so concisely, because I think that you know one of the goals of this show is to give teachers language as well as backup from folks like you to you know if they're being asked to do something that they don't feel is right for kids if they're being asked to take an approach by the systems that they're working within, that is not serving the best interests of children.
Speaker 1:We want to ensure that teachers have the language and the research to back up what they're saying whenever they feel they need to push back. So I really appreciate the way that you so concisely stated that, because I think that's a very portable phrase that someone could use in order to best support the learners in their classroom. So thank you for that.
Speaker 2:I hope it carries the weight that you're hoping it carries. I do too. It's very hard for teachers to push back on some of the things that are going on. As another example, one of the things that is actually it's part of the state teacher's exam in many states is this whole notion of syllable types. Did you know until the last 10 years what the six syllable types were?
Speaker 1:No, I sure didn't Nope.
Speaker 2:And any highly literate adult I know who is not part of the current discussions around literacy instruction say what when I ask them about that? Well, right now you know teachers are being taught the six syllable types and they're supposed to help the kids learn to use those syllable types in their attempts to identify words. Turns out there's no research to support teaching syllable types as a vehicle for moving kids forward as literacy learners.
Speaker 2:Kids do need to know about syllables when they're writing, they don't need to know about syllable types, but it's useful in writing to think about how many syllables and know that every syllable has to have at least one vowel letter. You're going to get lots more literate looking spellings when kids know that. Right, but in terms of looking at a word like robot compared to the word Robin, of looking at a word like robot compared to the word Robin, what are the syllable types? Right, the R-O-B is at the beginning of both of those words and they're followed by a vowel, right? So one of them is a closed syllable and one of them is an open syllable. And am I thinking about syllable types or am I thinking about what's going to make sense in the text that I'm currently reading, right? So Devin Kearns has a whole piece on analysis of syllable types and whether it's a useful thing to be part of literacy instruction, and he concludes that it takes the kids away from what you want them to be doing, which is thinking about the meaning of the text.
Speaker 2:There are, in my mind, too many things going on right now that are taking teachers' energy. You know teachers have to, you know, really work to learn the syllable types if they're unaccustomed to them, or that one of my least favorite things that's happening right now is teaching kids. First, teaching teachers to teach kids the multiple movements, articulatory movements, that are associated with particular sounds in spoken language is like painful and the multiple ways that a given sound might be spelled. You know how many ways are there to spell the sound. Well, there's a lot, and knowing all of those might confuse me a whole lot, more than having seen a word spelled in a particular way multiple times and so it's stored in memory as that spelling.
Speaker 1:Well, I think to that point, you know, we aren't preparing teachers to be speech language pathologists, right, and sometimes I feel like that's the aim that's really built into some legislation, but that's not the goal of teacher preparation programs. And you're right, it does seem, while it might be helpful information on some level, it does seem as though it is a bit tangential to what elementary school teachers, early literacy teachers, might actually need to know in order to support whole group and small group as well as individual instruction. It's a really specialized field and so, yeah, it becomes a bit convoluted and I think you're absolutely right. Teachers are getting so many different messages right now about what's important and what they need to know and what they need to focus on and what's supported by research right?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely no support for the sound walls that have taken over in some parts of the country. No support in terms of research. Wow.
Speaker 1:Well, donna, I have so enjoyed talking with you today and I really appreciate your time and I appreciate you sharing your ideas with teachers, because I think it that this conversation could really help some to better navigate sort of what is being pressed upon them right now, because I think that teachers, many, many teachers I talk with are feeling very pressed, and in so many different ways, and I think that just makes what can be a very challenging job that much more difficult. I always say teachers don't leave the field because of children, it's because of you know the many, many, many other demands that they're being pressed with, and so I thank you so much for your time and I appreciate your contributions to the field of education and certainly to this program as well. So thank you so much Well.
Speaker 2:I appreciate what you're doing to help teachers access all of the information that is so hard to access unless you have the luxury that academicians have.
Speaker 1:Isn't that the truth? Isn't that the truth? Thank you, donna. Thank you. Dr Donna Scanlon is known for her work in support of children who experience substantial difficulty in learning to read. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Dr Donna Scanlon is known for her work in support of children who experience substantial difficulty in learning to read and on how to prevent and remediate reading difficulties. In particular, she and her colleagues developed an approach to early literacy instruction and intervention, known as the Interactive Strategies Approach, or ISA. The ISA has been found to be effective in helping teachers to reduce the incidence of reading difficulties in the early primary grades and has been used in response to intervention or RTI contexts. The ISA RTI Professional Development Project uses distance learning technologies to offer extended job-embedded professional development for teachers. Job-embedded professional development for teachers. Donna and her colleagues also extend the use of ISA for use with older readers. They evaluated the utility of providing teacher educators with ISA-based instructional resources for use in their undergraduate and graduate literacy methods courses, with the goal of enhancing new and in-service teachers' ability to understand and address the needs of beginning and struggling literacy learners.
Speaker 1:Donna authored Early Literacy Instruction and Intervention, which was recently published by Guilford Press. She is also the co-author of Comprehensive Reading Intervention in Grades 3-8, fostering Word Learning, comprehension and Motivation. And Argument Writing as Supplemental Literacy Intervention for At-Risk Youth. Word learning, comprehension and motivation. And argument writing as supplemental literacy intervention for at-risk youth. Her work has appeared in Reading Research Quarterly. Literacy Research Theory, method and Practice Journal of Learning Disabilities. The Reading, teacher, reading and Writing Journal of Educational Psychology. Reading Today, which is now Literacy Today, and Contemporary Educational Psychology. Dr Scanlon recently authored a freely available book entitled Helping your Child Become a Reader and co-authored a position paper titled An Examination of Dyslexia Research and Instruction with Policy Implications. With Classroom Caffeine Guest Peter Johnston. Both resources are linked in the show notes. With Classroom Caffeine guest Peter Johnston. Both resources are linked in the show notes. Most of Dr Scanlon's research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the United States Department of Education through the Institute of Education Sciences and the Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. Dr Scanlon was a member of the International Reading Association's RTI Task Force and is a 2017 inductee into the Reading Hall of Fame. Dr Scanlon is Professor Emeritus at University of Albany's Department of Literacy, teaching and Learning and was affiliated with the university's Child Research and Study Center for more than 40 years serving as the Associate Director and the Director at different points in time.
Speaker 1:For the good of all students, classroom Caffeine aims to energize education, research and practice. If this show gives you things to think about, help us spread the word. Talk to your colleagues and educator friends about what you hear. You can support the show by subscribing, liking and reviewing this podcast through your podcast provider. Visit classroomcaffeinecom, where you can subscribe to receive our short monthly newsletter, the Espresso Shot. On our website, you can also learn more about each guest. Find transcripts for our episodes. You can also learn more about each guest. Find transcripts for our episodes. Explore topics using our drop-down menu of tags. Request an episode topic or potential guest. Support our research through our listener survey or learn more about the research we're doing on our publications page. Connect with us on social media through Instagram, facebook and Twitter. We would love to hear from you. Special thanks to the Classroom Caffeine team Leah Berger, abaya Valuru, stephanie Branson and Shaba Oshfath. As always, I raise my mug to you, teachers. Thanks for joining me.