Science of Reading: The Podcast

S1-26. The basic science in reading instruction: Daniel Willingham

• Amplify Education • Season 1 • Episode 26

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Author and University of Virginia psychology professor Daniel Willingham discusses the “reading wars” (and mischaracterizations among their factions), the importance of understanding basic science to teach reading, and the variations in implementation of the science of reading in literacy instruction across districts.

Quotes:

“Reading is central to (virtually) every educator’s concerns.”

“Everything touches education."

 Resources:


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[00:00:00] Susan Lambert: Hey, listeners, it's Susan, with a quick announcement. Our listener mailbag is open again and we want to bring your questions about comprehension directly to our expert guests. 

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Susan Lambert: Please submit your questions about comprehension at amplify.com/SoRmailbag. Bonus points for anyone who submits their question as a voice memo.

[00:00:38] Susan Lambert: These are challenging times and we respect your unwavering commitment to your students. At Amplify, we are working especially hard to support you. And as we all grapple with what it means to focus on the Science of Reading in a new world of remote learning, we're committed to walking with you through the unknown.

[00:00:57] Susan Lambert: Welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast. I'm your host Susan Lambert. Join us as we talk with experts to explore what it takes to develop joyful, confident, and capable readers. Dan Willingham, a cognitive and neuroscience expert and author, joins me to talk about the reading brain, reading research, and how educators navigate messages about what reading instruction should include.

[00:01:25] Susan Lambert: Dan has been a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia since 1992, and his research has focused on the brain basis of learning and memory and applications of cognitive psychology in K through 16 education. His most recent book, The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads, covers every aspect of reading.

[00:01:50] Susan Lambert: Well, welcome Dan Willingham. So excited to have you on the episode today.

[00:01:54] Daniel Willingham: Delighted to be here.

[00:01:56] Susan Lambert: And I always start by asking our guests to describe how they ended up interested in or thinking about early literacy, and maybe you could talk about how it relates to your broader work.

[00:02:09] Daniel Willingham: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I did not start in early literacy and I would say if anyone listening has any familiarity with my work, you know that I'm very much a generalist. And a generalist really beyond education. So, starting really at the beginning, I began my training as a cognitive psychologist and a neuroscientist and worked in that field for the first 10 years of my professional career.

[00:02:38] Daniel Willingham: I was a college professor in a department of psychology and just doing basic research in the brain basis of memory, and got interested in education largely by accident in the early two thousands. And started sort of from my home base in memory and attention and trying to turn cognitive psychology towards the classroom.

[00:03:06] Daniel Willingham: What is it that psychologists know about the mind that teachers might find useful? I got interested in early literacy, sort of as a natural outgrowth of that as my…what's the right way to put it…my sort of research interests and applied interests became more focused in my own mind, of trying to bring whatever psychologists knew about how children learn to the field of education.

[00:03:36] Daniel Willingham: Literacy was obviously an enormous part of that, but I did not have a deep background in the psychology of reading. So we're now in the year maybe 2015 or so. So I spent about a year and a half [or] two years really immersing myself in that literature. And I knew some of it; I had some familiarity with it as you can't avoid that if you're teaching a course like an introduction to cognitive psychology, you need to know something about language. You need to know something about reading. But I spent much more time diving into that and ended up writing a book called The Reading Brain for that purpose. And so, yeah, that's how I got into it. It was, it really was sort of…it was not the starting point for me, and it just became obvious to me that this is a subject of urgent concern that was something that ought to have been something I was interested in and working on. So I took it on. 

[00:04:38] Susan Lambert: Was there a particular situation or something that you remember that you're like, “Wow. No, I really need to understand and dig into this more?” Or was it just sort of a general leaning?

[00:04:49] Daniel Willingham: I think it was a general leaning and it was also conversations with educators because when I would tell them the kinds of things that I was interested in they would always bring up reading. And it did not matter whether I was talking with a preschool teacher, early elementary through high school. Reading is central to virtually every educator's concerns. And so it seemed like something that I ought to know more about. And I was hopeful that psychologists would have something to say that was useful to educators.

[00:05:28] Susan Lambert: Yeah, well, you certainly do and you certainly have had something useful. And I'm glad that you mentioned that book, The Reading Brain, because it's really illuminating to hear it from your point of view.

[00:05:44] Susan Lambert: And I think also, really super accessible. And I think, you know, it's one of the things for sure we'll link our listeners to in the show notes. But it brought…a new realization, I think, into, you know, this is an important topic, an important thing that we need to get right and we haven't gotten it right quite yet.

[00:06:05] Daniel Willingham: And, to be clear, I mean the book, and my more general stance, is very much of a psychologist who's describing what happens in the mind as someone is reading. It's not really about instruction, but it does have fairly obvious implications for some of the goals for instruction probably need to be. And the syntax of that sentence was fairly convoluted, and it's probably because I'm trying to be really careful in how I talk about this because it's easy to get confused. So, one starting point when you're thinking about reading: Reading is really, when we think about teaching children to read, I think it's really important to remember there are different goals that one can set for kids as readers and those will have different implications for what instruction ought to look like. And this is something I think we don't talk about enough, and maybe you and I can explore it a little more deeply, but I bring it up because The Reading Mind you know, was sort of agnostic, mostly agnostic, as to what your reading goals might be.

[00:07:20] Daniel Willingham: And this is sort of the characteristic of basic science. You're not talking about how the world ought to be. You're just trying to describe the world as it is. And so The Reading Mind is just saying, “Okay, here's what, when someone is reading—someone who already knows how to read—here are the mental processes that are recruited. Here's how they work; here's the role of knowledge, and the role of vision, and all that sort of thing.” And that's quite different than…a book about how you get kids to that point. And again, it obviously has implications because it's showing you what the complete package is. And so you have a little better sense of what you're shooting for.

[00:08:01] Susan Lambert: That makes sense. And I think it relates a little bit to your recent blog, which we'll get to in just a minute. But because you found yourself ingrained in this world of reading science and learning more about it, what's your…I'd be really interested in your point of view on how you view the current Science of Reading momentum. And so, essentially the conversation has started; it's gotten polarized in some way. People are misrepresenting it; people are representing [it] appropriately. What's, you know, what's your take on all this? What's been beneficial, and maybe, some challenges that have surfaced?

[00:08:42] Daniel Willingham: I think maybe I'll start with the challenges actually. The challenges for someone who's been involved in education for a while, the challenges are that, Wow, this feels really familiar. Like, Have we not gotten any farther than this? And, as you say there, and for anyone who's—I expect most of the people listening know exactly what I'm talking about when I say that—for the few of you who may not, this debate focuses mostly on a small set of the aspects of teaching of reading, namely, sort of beginning readers and teaching them to make sense of print. Going from letters on the page to words in the mind—not even talking about sort of deeper aspects of comprehension or anything that comes before that, but really that process. That's been the focus of the debate, and the role in particular of teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondences and how central that is, how systematic it needs to be. That's what people seem to really love to argue about, and that argument's been going on since the 1920s. So that's what sort of makes you sad and exhausted reading Twitter. Is that that’s what the debate continues to be about.

[00:10:09] Daniel Willingham: Now the aspect of this that I'm more encouraged about is that it's taken a slightly different cast, the argument, this time. Because a lot of what people are fighting about is what are teachers actually doing? Because there's, I think, more agreement about what is ideal, and there's the question is whether or not that's actually happening. So…as you noted, there's a lot of misrepresentation on both sides. And so one side says phonics advocates want kids to do nothing except worksheets. And if the kids are miserable doing them, that's maybe even a little bit better, according to the phonics, right? And then on the other side, the people who do advocate for systematic phonics mischaracterize the balanced literacy people by saying all those balanced literacy people want is for kids to sit on pillows and drink hot chocolate all day, and look at picture books, and that, to them, is reading. I think we've gotten past that and both sides recognize there is value in high-quality children's literature. There's value in read-alouds.

[00:11:27] Daniel Willingham: There's value in a literacy block that includes time every day for children to speak and for children to listen and for children to do some writing…And both sides will say there is a role for phonics instruction. So the big question now, the point of contention is what should phonics instruction look like? How much time should be devoted to it? And the phonics advocates are saying probably not enough time and probably not very high-quality instruction is what's happening. Whereas the balanced literacy folks are saying, that's not the problem. The phonics component is fine.

[00:12:10] Daniel Willingham: So this is a long prologue into why I'm slightly more encouraged. Because what's bubbling to the surface is, “Oh, we really need to find out what's actually happening in classrooms.” And as a researcher, this is something that has been of enormous frustration to me as long as I've been in education, is we have terrible data on this. And it's of course, a huge problem. There are fourteen thousand districts in the United States. So characterizing even at a district level, “Here's how they try to teach kids to read” is terribly challenging. But we've just completely given up on that. And you just can't move forward if you give up on that; that's the problem. Because if you say, “Well, we need to make things better,” then you're contemplating a change. Well, if you don't even know what you're doing now, how do you know what ought to change?

[00:13:08] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:13:09] Daniel Willingham: So I'll leave it there. That, I think, is the most encouraging thing you can say about the current debate.

[00:13:16] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Just as an extension of that, I would just love to hear—so you mentioned something about we really don't have any research on what's happening in the classroom itself. Why do you think that is?

[00:13:30] Daniel Willingham: To really do that research right is extremely expensive and difficult. So I don't want to underestimate that. The easy way to do it is to ask teachers, “Hey, how do you teach reading?” That's not a great way to address the question. The reason is that this is going to be retrospective. So you're counting on people's memory, and we know that memory is fallible. And you also have the potential that you're dealing with what psychologists call “self-presentation issues.” That here you are with this interviewer and I, of course, want to look like I'm doing a good job as a teacher. So I may think a little bit less about exactly what actually happens in my classroom and more about what, during my professional development session or during my education courses, I was told the ideal is supposed to look like.

[00:14:30] Daniel Willingham: So the real way you want to do this is to have an observer sitting in the class recording what happens. And by recording I don't mean like videotaping; I mean like, you know, with a clipboard and they're sort of coding what's happening: Okay, now they're doing a literacy block and it's a read-aloud, that kind of thing. So you can see why that would be so expensive to have a trained person spend, you know, half a day or a day in a classroom, and to have enough people doing that so that you get something that's really nationally representative. That's extraordinarily expensive. There were studies of that sort where you had observers in at different grades between 600 and 1,000 classrooms. That's close to 20 years ago now that we, to my knowledge, have data of that sort.

[00:15:24] Susan Lambert: Hmm. And so what you're getting at a little bit, I think, kind of relates to a recent blog that you wrote that I'd love to dig in and explore a little bit.

[00:15:36] Susan Lambert: And this was, you know, essentially, okay, we need to get…if you're going to write about the Science of Reading, I think this is the title: “You Need to Get Your Science Right.” And you made a distinction between this idea of basic science and then applied science. First of all, can you just talk a little bit about what the motivation was to write that and then maybe we can explore some of the contents of that blog.

[00:16:03] Daniel Willingham: Well, the motivation was…exactly the motivation I try not to let the get the best of me…which is that I was, you know, frankly, irritated. I read this report and I thought it was really confused. I thought it made some points that were interesting observations, but it also made some points that I thought were in error. The one that really prompted it was the comment that we don't really know enough—this is not a direct quotation needless to say, this is from memory—sort of the gist of it was, the Science of Reading is really complicated and people are pretending that we know enough about the Science of Reading to draw any firm conclusions, but that's not really accurate.

[00:16:57] Daniel Willingham: And I thought that was far too negative regarding our state of knowledge. So that's what prompted me to write it. And then when I read the report a little more closely—this is, just so people [know], I don't think we've named it…

Susan Lambert: We have not, no.

[00:17:16] Daniel Willingham: Yeah, this was from the National Education Policy Center report that came out, and the blog was in late March, and I wrote the blog a week or two after they published this. So, yeah, I thought a significant part of the problem was a confusion of basic science where I think the Science of Reading—again, this was what I wrote a book about—The Reading Mind is the basics of Science of Reading, describing what we know about how people read and apply science. And a lot of the recommendations in the report I thought really had nothing to do with basic science. They…were more concerned with the National Education Policy Center’s priorities regarding how teachers would be treated, how to think about reading, and the goals of reading, and other things that really science can't help with at all.

[00:18:11] Daniel Willingham: And there's just no reason to bring up science in that context.

[00:18:16] Susan Lambert: Hmm. And so it goes back to an earlier comment you made about, or we talked about, misunderstandings and conflating of ideas and sort of the confusion that emerges as we try to sort of dig into what this looks like in the classroom.

[00:18:32] Daniel Willingham: That's right. And this has been an ongoing interest for me, trying to think very carefully about the relationship of basic science and applied science. And education to me is clearly an applied science, and it’s a field in which basic science can contribute and applied science can contribute.

[00:18:58] Daniel Willingham: But it's still only going to be a fraction of what really matters in classrooms. And so the analogy I've drawn is to architecture. Frequently, people draw an analogy to medicine, the basic science going, and then physicians sort of draw on basic science and are coming up with new treatments and new medicines and so forth.

[00:19:21] Daniel Willingham: I think the analogy is really misleading though. Because of the way we think of medicine—and actually physicians tell me, “Dan, you're thinking about medicine the wrong way.” And I'm like, “In a way I don't care.” Because I think, “You know, I believe you and I'm in no position to challenge it,” but the analogy is still…I think other people agree with me that this is the way they think about it. Namely that medicine is sort of….science is sort of determinative when it comes to medicine.That if science figures out the right way to treat disease X is with procedure Y or medicine Z, then you better use Y or Z.

[00:20:02] Daniel Willingham: That's the best available one. And otherwise, you know, you're sort of guilty of malpractice. And this is what my friend is saying, it's not really like that. It's more complicated. Nevertheless, I think it's probably more, definitely more like that than education is. In other words, education is clearly not going to be the case that once science figures out, you know, a certain number of things about mathematics, you had better teach mathematics in this way prescribed by science, or you're going to be guilty of malpractice with your kids. I think a much better analogy is architecture. In architecture you really should know some basic science.

[00:20:39] Daniel Willingham: You need to understand some basic principles of physics. You need to know some materials science so that you'll know whether this design you're concocting, whether it's going to stand and whether it will, you know, hold the load of people coming into the building or whatever it is. But science doesn't tell you anything about what the building should look like.

[00:21:01] Daniel Willingham: It's just a little fragment of the concerns that come in when you are designing a building. And just as we come back to the issue of goals again, you think about designing a building, there are all sorts of…there's not one supreme set of goals. Probably that it should stand and shouldn't collapse on people with loss of life. But beyond that, you're thinking about what the budget is. You're thinking about the aesthetics of what you want the building to look like. You're thinking about the function of the building and all of that. That part of the analogy, I think, translates quite well to education.

[00:21:40] Daniel Willingham: You've got bits and pieces of knowledge about how children learn and that's important. You know, you have to account for that. That's like physics and materials science, but that's just one little piece of the puzzle. And then there's enormous variation in what teachers can do in capitalizing on what we know.

[00:22:02] Daniel Willingham: And part of their concerns also is going to be what our goals are for our children.

[00:22:10] Susan Lambert: Hmm. And that makes sense. So in other words, much of what we're talking about is the context in which we are attempting to function, which can change from place to place.

[00:22:23] Daniel Willingham: Absolutely. Context is one part of it.

[00:22:26] Daniel Willingham: And, maybe you meant goals as well as part of context. Yeah, and I would include that. And I didn't talk about other aspects of context, but that's obviously enormously important too. What…are the home lives of most of the children that you're teaching?

[00:22:46] Daniel Willingham: What sort of support are you—or lack of support—are you getting from the administration, from the school board? What's the physical plant that you're operating in? All of those things matter.

[00:22:58] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that makes sense. And as a former teacher, I can resonate with that. I think those that are listeners, too, that are in the classroom right now can resonate with that. It's sort of the questions that they try to ask, “Well, what does this mean for me when I either have this situation or don't have this thing?” Right? So it's really hard to take a general idea and make it actionable in a variety of contexts.

[00:23:28] Daniel Willingham: It is. And, yeah, I think that's exactly the reason, is that it's very seldom that there's going to be an idea that is actionable where we can guarantee. And this is why it's not prescriptive. It's not just about the goals. I said that, but what I said was really too limited.

[00:23:46] Daniel Willingham: And, thank you for sort of that elaboration. The contextual piece really matters as well. I'll offer one other way in which I think basic science is really important, and this is something I've written about in the last couple of years, is the idea that everybody has a set of beliefs about what kids are like.

[00:24:09] Daniel Willingham: They feel like they understand how kids learn. They feel like they understand what kids' emotional lives are like, what motivates them, and so on. And you have to have that because the education that you undergo in order to become a teacher can't prepare you for everything. I love to tell this story of a friend of mine, his daughter became a teacher and I happened to run into her after she'd been in the classroom for a couple of months. And I said, “So, you know, how's it going?”

[00:24:43] Daniel Willingham: And she said, “Well, no one told me what to do about spinners.” And she didn't mean fidget spinners; she meant kids. And she's a second grade teacher and she's had a couple of kids who, at unpredictable times of day, would get up and go find a blank space on the floor and just start spinning.

[00:25:03] Daniel Willingham: And so this is a beautiful example of like, yeah [chuckling], you know, you were probably absent that day in the seminar when they talked about here's the scientifically proven strategy for helping kids who are spinners. So you're going to have unpredictable things that happen and in that moment, how she responded to that spinner obviously was influenced by her beliefs about what kids are like and what this child in particular might respond to.

[00:25:33] Daniel Willingham: So I think what basic science can contribute is, I sort of call that mental image of what kids are like a “mental model of the learner.” You have ideas—obviously every child differs in different ways—but there's some core beliefs you have that most kids are kind of like this until proven otherwise. Just as, we think about that with every object. You know, most dogs are friendly unless you give me some reason to believe otherwise. And likewise, you have, you know, sets of beliefs about what second graders are sort of generally like. And what science can do is help you think about that, I hope, more deeply, and more richly, and then sort of help shape that mental model of a learner in a way that is going to be more true to your experience. So it's a great example of what you were just saying before. It's like, this is not going to be actionable in any obvious way. Science tells you this is what kids are like, and therefore you are going to do this. But instead, it gives you this sort of background knowledge of what kids are, or at least contributes to this background knowledge, of what kids are like.

[00:26:50] Daniel Willingham: And you'll be drawing on that in small ways in many situations.

[00:26:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that makes sense. And I want to make a connection with that. Back to what you said about, let's go back to the architect and that sort of metaphor that we were talking through. So if I'm an architect, and I know that I have to take into consideration some laws of physics as I'm doing some design. If we extend that to the classroom, and let's just pretend it's the K through 2 classrooms, right? And I'm a first grade teacher, and as I'm working in the context and creating this structured environment for early reading instruction, the assumption there then is that teachers should have had the understanding of basic science of that reading process. Right?

[00:27:46] Daniel Willingham: Right.

[00:27:46] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And so I think some of the conversation now is, well, many of us, I will include myself in that, and many people that are in the classrooms right now, aren't getting that or have never had that. 

[00:28:00] Daniel Willingham: Right. Yeah. Exactly. And, again, this is what I think has been the most fruitful part of the conversation is just asking that question: “Well, wait a minute. What exactly, so when you become certified to teach, what exactly do you learn?” A friend of mine was certified to teach fifth grade in New York City, and he said, “My certification called for absolutely no knowledge of reading instruction.”

[00:28:31] Daniel Willingham: “I didn't take a single course in reading instruction,” he said, “and I taught fifth grade. I could have been teaching first or second graders. I wasn't, but…my certification covered that.” So yeah, I think this is a very useful conversation for us to have.

[00:28:48] Susan Lambert: Yeah. So I’m going to use that as a segue because right now it's, “Well, if I'm going to learn, what science should I go back to reading and studying up on? And who in the world can I trust?” Because one person says one thing and somebody else says something else, and you actually wrote an entire book about it called When Can You Trust the Experts?

[00:29:17] Daniel Willingham: Yes. Yeah, I think my mother read that book. [Laughs]

[00:29:21] Susan Lambert: It's been my goal since it's been on my shelf to highlight this book to everybody I know, because it's a really important topic about how you can actually tell if this is decent science and should I trust it or not.

[00:29:37] Susan Lambert: So what was your motivation to author that book?

[00:29:42] Daniel Willingham: Yeah. So, my motivation was…the idea for this book really came from teachers I was talking with. This book came out in 2012 and that was not that long after I got really serious about education and sort of turned away from basic research and turned all my attention to education. And as a result, I was talking to a lot of teachers and I continually heard from them this frustration.

[00:30:09] Daniel Willingham: They felt like science, or more broadly, research, was used as a cudgel to get them to do things. So they would, you know, they would be in a professional development meeting, or most often…you know, and forgive me, my administrator friends, most often it would be an assistant superintendent or an assistant principal who would get on a hobby horse.

[00:30:35] Daniel Willingham: They would get really excited about something and they would try and get all teachers in a school or all teachers in a district to enact some strategy in the classroom. And experienced teachers are like, “It doesn't make any sense to me. I don't want to do this.” And this is when the phrase, “All the research supports it,” would be evoked.

[00:30:56] Daniel Willingham: And teachers had this overwhelming sense, like, “I just, I smell a rat. Like I just don't believe the research. That doesn't seem right to me.” But they also knew, a) “I'm not really a researcher,” and, well, really, a) is, “I don't have time to go and dig up the research.” But b) “If I did, I'm not a researcher. I'm not sure it would make that much sense to me.”

[00:31:18] Daniel Willingham: So I had this idea to write a book that would sort of be a cheat. It would be a way of evaluating the likelihood that something was really research based without reading all of the research. And I'm very upfront about the fact that, you know, it is a shortcut and for that reason it may well be unreliable.

[00:31:45] Daniel Willingham: But, yeah, I thought it would be of interest to teachers because they were so frustrated by this “All the research shows it,” phrase they were hearing all the time.

[00:32:00] Susan Lambert: So in thinking—well, by the way, it's been very helpful to me. So if I'm your only fan of this book… 

[00:32:06] Daniel Willingham: Oh, God bless you. That's great. No, I already told you my mother liked it.

[00:32:08] Susan Lambert: Oh, bless her heart. [Chuckles] So as you're thinking back on this book now, in what ways do you still think this is relevant?

[00:32:17] Daniel Willingham: Oh, I think it's absolutely relevant. I think it's because we have all the same problems. I mean, one of the same problems that I described, which is that you've got practitioners who do not know where to turn to get reliable information about research.

[00:32:38] Daniel Willingham: So the way I framed it in the book, and I still think, I absolutely think this is relevant; this is, I think, unique to education. The problem is not unique to education, but most other fields have solved this. So the problem is, you're a practitioner. You go to school to learn your practice. You are educated in what are presumably the most up-to-date methods, and then you're in practice and research is marching on, and what you learned in school may become outdated.

[00:33:09] Daniel Willingham: How are you supposed to know whether or not that happens? Well, if you're in medicine, or accounting, or dentistry, you have the same problem. And the way those fields have dealt with that problem is they've created institutions that make sure that practitioners have access to reliable summaries of research, usually annually. And so the institution itself will hire, or they will oversee the production of, these annual summaries. So they're very well known in medicine. I've forgotten now the name, but there's one series in particular published by Little Brown that is really renowned and it comes on to sort of a spiral-bound volume each year.

[00:34:01] Daniel Willingham: And there's one for internal medicine, and one for surgery, and so on. And basically someone with a lot of expertise has spent the year digging into literature and deciding, is the way we treat strep throat still the best way? Or does the weight of evidence now indicate we should do something else?

[00:34:19] Daniel Willingham: So it relieves practitioners of the job of keeping up with the field. And education leaves teachers to fend for themselves on this score. And there's some notion that, well, you know, that this is part of being a professional. It's not. I mean, it's ludicrous to think you can be in practice all day and then go home and start reading journal articles for God's sake.

[00:34:44] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:34:45] Daniel Willingham: I mean, that's an unreasonable expectation. So it seems to me the obvious candidates for this would be professional organizations; the teachers unions have expressed very little interest in this sort of work. The AFT has done some of it. The NEA to my knowledge, has done next to none.

[00:35:06] Daniel Willingham: But they've traditionally been much more interested in operating as labor organizations and their concerns are more working conditions, and salaries, and that sort of thing. Other professional organizations could take it on. So, National Council of Teachers, Teachers of Mathematics, those sort of smaller professional groups, they have not taken it up either. But that's the problem as I see it. And so, that, to me, is the ideal solution. And until then, everyone should just buy my book. They don't have to read it. It's okay to just buy it and not read it. But they really should buy it.

[00:35:46] Susan Lambert: [Chuckling] Well, that makes me laugh because I just got this vision in my head of buying a book and putting it under your pillow and, you know, hoping that you wake up the next morning and it's just in your brain. But, you know…

[00:35:55] Daniel Willingham: Osmosis is, you know, you never know if that could happen. Sleep osmosis. It's not been tried enough, I think.

[00:36:01] Susan Lambert: But it is very true. I mean, I remember as a teacher that you can't even, you can't even get access to the articles unless…you pay to get access to the articles. So, just even to get access to research articles is one thing. To be able to actually engage with them and read them is another thing. And so it's frustrating.

[00:36:25] Daniel Willingham: And bear in mind, I mean, how ludicrous this idea is that teachers should keep up—because of the diversity of fields that you would want to keep up on. Even, you know, set aside if you are a second grade teacher—so that there's math and English, language arts, and science, and all the rest of it, right?

[00:36:45] Daniel Willingham: If you're a high school social studies teacher, you're trying to keep up with all the high school social studies stuff, but then you're also trying to keep up with literature on motivation, and what's happening in emotion, and what's happening in the sleep literature. You know, it's just, everything touches education.

[00:37:02] Daniel Willingham: So it's, you know, it's an impossible job.

[00:37:05] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, that's so true. I'm going to take a little bit of a turn here, because the hot topic these days is actually all about remote learning. Given that we're in the school closure environment, unclear what's going to happen in back to school. So what do you think we should be keeping in mind as educators? We're trying to teach remotely, either with technology or we're having to put together packets so, you know, kids are still doing stuff at home. What are the big takeaways there for us?

[00:37:44] Daniel Willingham: So, I want to be clear.

Susan Lambert: That's a big question, by the way. [Laughing]

Daniel Willingham: I'm very much shooting from the hip here. I mean, this is, and I think it's hard for me to imagine anyone who, except possibly a historian, you know, you don't want to write off school indefinitely. But you have to figure out some way of making remote learning work. And as we've seen, that's enormously challenging.

[00:38:16] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And I wonder, you know, I'm just thinking about, again, the early learners learning to read: our K[indergarten], [grade] 1 and [grade] 2 kids compared to maybe middle or high schoolers. So those missed learning opportunities are going to be very different between grades.

[00:38:38] Daniel Willingham: They may be. But…it may also, I mean, if I heard you right, it sounded like you were suggesting that, well, the older kids can kind of learn on their own because they're able to read. Is that what you were suggesting?

[00:38:51] Susan Lambert: Well, I'm more suggesting that maybe remote learning is easier to deliver to kids that are in middle or in high school that don't need maybe some explicit instruction in the code knowledge or in phonics. Maybe that's a lot harder to do remotely.

[00:39:08] Daniel Willingham: It could be. I mean, I think that I would not have, and again, I'm totally shooting from the hip here so this may be really naive. But I think the greater challenge with the younger age is that they're younger and they're just not used to being on task for as long a time… . The teacher needs to be there to monitor how it's going and to, you know, change direction as they drift away. Whereas the older you get, the more sort of self-regulated you are and the longer you can stick with a task that's set for you. In terms of needing explicit instruction and needing feedback, there's some tasks that we could think of in high school where you've got exactly the same problem.

[00:40:03] Daniel Willingham: That the ideal is that the instructor is sort of right there on the spot as you're doing something, providing immediate feedback so that as you take a non-optimal path, it can be pointed out to you. “Oh, well, here's why. Here's another way of thinking about that.” Or, you know, whatever the feedback might be.

[00:40:23] Susan Lambert: Hmm, that makes sense. Well, it's been a real pleasure to chat with you today. Again, thank you so much for joining us and I'm wondering if you can mention for our listeners the ways that they can follow your work.

[00:40:38] Daniel Willingham: Oh, sure. Well, danielwillingham.com is my website and that has anything that I've written to which I own the copyright you can download there. And then on Twitter and on Facebook, I'm DTWillingham, and I post on both places fairly frequently.

[00:41:01] Susan Lambert: Great. Well, thanks so much. It was such a pleasure and best to you.

[00:41:07] Daniel Willingham: Thank you so much. I had a lot of fun.

[00:41:11] Susan Lambert: We are so grateful to our amazing guest today, and to all of you making a difference in the lives of students every single day. Be sure to check the show notes for resource links from today's podcast, and we want to hear your stories and successes. Follow us on Facebook at Science of Reading: The Community, or if you're looking to help implement the Science of Reading, send an email to SoRmatters@amplify.com. Tell us what guests you think we should book or tell us about the research that really excites you. And be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, I'm Susan Lambert.

[00:41:59] Susan Lambert: Hey, listeners, we've got a lot more resources to help you support students when it comes to dyslexia. Get your free Dyslexia Support Power Pack now at our accompanying professional learning page, amplify.com/SoRessentials. This bundle includes our dyslexia toolkit, Dyslexia Fact Versus Fiction ebook, and dyslexia infographic, all designed to empower you with the knowledge and tools to truly make a difference. Again, you can get that and other free resources at amplify.com/SoRessentials.