Science of Reading: The Podcast

Science of Reading Essentials: Writing

• Amplify Education

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In this special Science of Reading Essentials episode, Susan Lambert pulls from past episodes of the podcast to give you everything you need to know about science-based writing instruction. Experts include Steve Graham, Ed.D.; Young-Suk Grace Kim, Ed.D.; Natalie Wexler; and Judith Hochman, Ed.D. Listeners will walk away from this episode with a solid foundation for creating a classroom of confident and capable writers, and gain a better understanding of the connection between reading and writing, the role of handwriting and spelling, the power of sentences, and the importance of applying cognitive load theory to writing.

Show notes:

Quotes:

“This is not learned by osmosis. And it's not learned by vague feedback, like, ‘make it better’ or ‘add more details.’ You've got to be very granular.” —Judith Hochman, Ed.D. 

"What we see with exceptional teachers is they have their kids write." —Steve Graham, Ed.D.

“The Science of Reading encapsulates decades of research about both reading and writing—because if writing was never invented, we would not have to teach kids how to read.” —Susan Lambert


Steve Graham

What we see with exceptional teachers is they have their kids write.

Susan Lambert

This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to the first ever edition of SoR Essentials, a special episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. We are very thankful for our listeners. You have really made this podcast both successful and interesting, and we put out a survey just to hear how you're using the podcast, what episodes you found most helpful, and we found out that a lot of folks really use the podcast episodes as professional learning. So with that in mind, we're especially designing these SoR Essentials episodes as a tool for you to use on your journey to learn more about the topics that are relevant to you. These episodes will give you the essential information that you need on one critical literacy topic.

Susan Lambert

We'll be sifting through our conversations with dozens and dozens of expert researchers to synthesize the key insights on a select topic. We've also developed a listening guide to accompany this SoR Essentials episode. This listening guide is going to distill the key information from this episode.

Susan Lambert

Recommend some resources to take your learning to the next level, and share strategies for bringing these ideas directly into the classroom. That listening guide, as well as other free high-quality resources, lives on our brand new professional learning page, amplify.com/ SoREssentials. I'm now so excited to tell you that the topic for our first ever SoR Essentials episode is writing.

Natalie Wexler 

These barriers that we have erected between certainly reading and writing are kind of artificial and need to come down, but also between reading, writing, and learning.

Young-Suk Grace Kim

A lot of educators understand the reading and writing are related. But I think as educators, we need to have really precise understanding about it.

Steve Graham

I think kids need to write, they need to write for a variety of purposes, and they also need to write for real reasons.

Judith Hochman

Assigning writing is not teaching writing, and having students write a lot is not teaching writing. It's just like, if you put a lot of books in a classroom, students don't magically begin to read.

Susan Lambert 

This is SoR Essentials Writing.

Susan Lambert

And I think it's important we start with writing because the Science of Reading movement has gotten a lot of pushback that all we're worried about is reading and all that we're worried about is a phonics-focused agenda. Again, that's not true. The Science of Reading encapsulates decades of research about both reading and writing, because if writing was never invented, we would not have to teach kids how to read.

Susan Lambert

And writing is so important because it helps make a connection with reading, right? So this reciprocal relationship between reading and writing, writing can be a real powerhouse in terms of helping kids understand the printed word in reading comprehension. So I think it's a topic that is so important to literacy development that hasn't gotten its space in the Science of Reading world.

Susan Lambert

But it's not because the Science of Reading community or research community believes that writing isn't important. It's just, it needs to be highlighted a little bit more. And to be completely literate, you have to be able to both read and write. And so if we don't address this topic of writing, then we're not giving kids all that they need to have to be successful.

Susan Lambert 

Thinking back on my own teaching practice, I don't think I ever taught my kids, my students, how to write ever, because all I did was fill their time with writing activities and I thought that they were proxies for instruction. Today we're going to learn how to provide writing instruction, not just writing activities.

Susan Lambert

I'm going to revisit some of the top insights from Dr. Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler, authors of the seminal book, The Writing Revolution, and we'll hear from Dr. Steve Graham, one of the top scholars on this topic. But first, we need an understanding of how and why writing is so interconnected with reading.

Susan Lambert

Which brings me back to Dr. Young-Suk Grace Kim from the University of California at Irvine. Dr. Kim joined us on Season 9, to unpack her model for understanding reading and writing. 

Young-Suk Grace Kim

This is my effort to explain reading and writing connections. People kind of know that, oh, they're related, but exactly how are they related, has not been examined systematically or comprehensively.

Young-Suk Grace Kim

So this is my attempt to explain why reading and writing are related and how they're related.

Susan Lambert

To explain this reading and writing connection, Dr. Kim uses the analogy of a house. And the reason that I wanted to start with that is to give listeners an image or a thought or a way to sort of connect what they know about reading to why it's important in writing.

Susan Lambert 

The big idea here is that both reading and writing rely on shared component skills and knowledge. In the house analogy, you can think of those shared skills as the pillars holding up both reading and writing.

Young-Suk Grace Kim

One pillar is lexical literacy. What I mean by lexical literacy, lexical means a word, the size, right? So that includes the ability to read words, so that's word reading, and the ability to spell words, that's spelling. As well as handwriting and keyboarding. That's one pillar.

Susan Lambert

So pillar one is lexical literacy.

Young-Suk Grace Kim

And the other pillar is oral discourse. By oral discourse, I mean listening comprehension and oral composition. It is our ability to listen right now, listeners are listening, right? The ability to listen and comprehend it, as well as produce oral text.

Susan Lambert

So these same two pillars, lexical literacy and oral discourse are supporting both reading and writing, and each of these pillars is supported by certain foundational skills.

Young-Suk Grace Kim

Now, let's think about what skills support lexical literacy pillar. So the foundational stone right underneath lexical literacy pillar is what I call code-related emerging literacy skills. That includes knowledge and awareness of orthography, phonology, and morphology. So orthography includes our knowledge and awareness of letter names, letter sounds, patterns that are allowed in a particular writing system, right?

Susan Lambert 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Young-Suk Grace Kim

And phonology is phonological awareness and morphology is morphological awareness. So, those are the supporting skills for lexical literacy skills.

Young-Suk Grace Kim

So the foundational skills supporting the lexical literacy pillar are code-related emerging literacy skills, which include knowledge and awareness of orthography, phonology, and morphology.

Young-Suk Grace Kim 

Now let's turn to supporting skills for all discourse. You know, there's variation in people's ability to comprehend oral text as well as produce. So what explains that essentially? so one chunk of skills is called higher order cognition and regulation. So by higher order cognition, that means our ability to make inferences, understand multiple perspectives— that's perspective taking— and our ability to reason, our ability to set goals, monitor ourselves, and self-reinforce our behaviors to achieve goals. And then right underneath it is what I call foundational language skills. And they include our knowledge of vocabulary words, and so, grammatical knowledge. So those support oral discourse.

Susan Lambert

So now we have this visual model for understanding how and why reading and writing are so interconnected. How they draw on the same skills. But now I wanna zoom all the way in to talk about handwriting and spelling. And here's why I think the mechanics of writing deserves proper attention early in this episode.

Susan Lambert

You know, we spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about the Simple View of Reading. How, you know, readers need two competencies, they have to be accurate in word recognition and then they have to understand the language of what those words mean, whether they're spoken words or written words.

Susan Lambert

Writing proficiency, just like reading proficiency, requires two important things. One of them is the mechanics of writing, which we call handwriting and spelling, and the other one is this idea that you need to organize your writing so that other people can understand what it is. And that requires, what kind of text type am I going to use? How am I going to build sentences? How do I have paragraphs? Right? So there's this sort of hierarchical process that happens when you're composing text. Back on Season 7, I spoke with Dr. Steve Graham of Arizona State University. He's sort of the original writing researcher. And something I found so interesting is that we spent a big chunk of our conversation focused on handwriting and spelling. Here's what happened.

Susan Lambert

Now, I remember when I was a teacher, we won't say how many years ago that was. That was a long time ago. But when I was in the classroom, there was a question of, "eh, do we really need to teach handwriting? This seems like something that's not that important, you know? They're gonna get it. They're gonna figure it out." And so I wonder how you would talk about handwriting being maybe, overlooked or being devalued in terms of instructional time? Instructional time is super important, right? Like we only have so much. What would you say to teachers about that?

Steve Graham

Yeah, I'd actually expand that a little bit and I'd put spelling in that same category.

Susan Lambert

Okay.

Steve Graham

So I'm gonna start with spelling because this is the one that, you know, English spelling is really tough. It's very, very difficult. One of the things that, you know, I observed during the 1980s when, you know, kind of naturalistic approaches to learning to write and read were in vogue— which, you know, basically is whole language— is that one of the things I think was the death of whole language was this issue around spelling, 'cause the idea was all you really needed to do was immerse kids an environment where they read and they wrote a lot for social and real purposes. And what would happen is that they would develop the skills that they needed.

Susan Lambert

Graham says his own daughter's school tried to take that immersive approach. 

Steve Graham 

Her fifth grade teacher, who was a great teacher, realized, you know, 80%, 90% of her kids in her class really had great difficulties with spelling. And so all of a sudden in fifth grade, she's taking this up as a crusade to teach spelling, which, you know, better late than never, but probably too late to have the effects that you would most like.

Steve Graham 

And so, there has been this kind of disregard for both handwriting and spelling, and the issue with handwriting is also a bit complicated, but in a different way. You know, I've seen kids form the letter U as an example by starting at the bottom of the line, going up to the right, all the way back down to the bottom, up to the left in terms of curving up, and then all the way back down that U part. And then they're lying down. It's like drawing a letter.

Steve Graham

Mm-hmm.

Steve Graham

And so, you know, if you leave kids to develop their own approach for doing each letter, you shouldn't assume that they're gonna do it in an efficient manner. And once a motor pattern gets established, or ways of holding a pencil, for example, it is really difficult to change it.

Susan Lambert

Graham witnessed that difficulty firsthand when he was a classroom teacher.

Steve Graham

I had a young man in my class, uh, fourth or fifth grade, who would hold his pencil like a bayonet, in terms of squeezing around it with his whole fist. And just down near the bottom of it. And so, you know, we got one of these kind of mechanical tools that kind of forced his hand into holding it in a certain way.

Steve Graham

And whenever he saw me, he would put it in that way. But if I wasn't around or I took a look, you know, to see what he was doing. He immediately reverted back. It was a year -long battle that I lost.

Steve Graham

Oh no.

Steve Graham

And then I realized that I wasn't gonna win that battle. He had to want to change this for that to work, 'cause it's very difficult. You know, I hate to say this, as a human species, if we have something that works, it takes little effort, and it works a good bit of the time, he could write out what he wanted. He didn't like it, but he could write it out. It's really hard to change a behavior if you're not dedicated or motivated to doing that.

Susan Lambert 

So. I guess then you're advocating for handwriting instruction in the early grades and spelling instruction in the early grades.

Steve Graham

Yeah, and you know, the data that we have is that, if you teach handwriting, typing, and spelling, those skills get better and students become better writers as a result.

Steve Graham

Hmm.

Steve Graham 

These are important skills that interfere with other aspects of writing. Any kid who has trouble with handwriting and spelling, usually dislikes writing much more than their peers that do not have those difficulties, and they typically don't produce as much, and what they produce usually is just not as coherent or well-connected.

Susan Lambert 

The interesting thing about the mechanics of writing, why I think it's so important that Steve Graham calls it out, is that many educators don't view that as writing. They don't see handwriting and spelling as part of the writing process, if you will. And handwriting and spelling are as important to develop to automaticity as word recognition automaticity, right?

Susan Lambert 

Those two things go hand in hand, and according to Dr. Kim's model, they're reciprocal, right? They're those things that are foundational in terms of reading and writing skills, and so without being able to do that, you're really limited in the kind of text that you can produce. Similar to, if you can't read the words on the page, you're limited in terms of the text that you can understand.

Susan Lambert 

So as Steve Graham has laid out, helping students become writers starts at the word level. But in order to communicate your thoughts, you have to write the first sentence, and then another sentence, and then another sentence. So this idea that sentences or syntax is so critical to the writing process. And to talk about helping students produce sentences, I want to turn next to Dr. Judy Hochman, founder of The Writing Revolution, a nonprofit that disseminates evidence-based strategies for writing instruction. She's also co-author of the book, The Writing Revolution. When she joined us on Season 9, we talked about the fact that a lot of teachers want their students to produce complete sentences. Let's listen in to that.

Susan Lambert

So, I've been watching a lot of kindergarten classrooms. Kindergarten teachers always ask questions and say to students, "Can you answer that in a complete sentence? Can you answer that in a complete sentence?" But we often don't think about the power of sentences. So, you know, what kind of things did you do with the students as you were teaching them to write sentences?

Judith Hochman

Well, first of all, to expect a 5-year-old to understand conceptually what a complete sentence is, and I've heard some very interesting definitions in the hundreds of classrooms that I've been in. It's a noun and a verb. Well, okay.

Susan Lambert

Subject predicate. Right?

Judith Hochman

Right. Subject predicate. Exactly. 

Susan Lambert

Thankfully, Dr. Hochman outlined some great strategies for preparing students to write sentences.

Susan Lambert

In fact, one of the courses that we give at The Writing Revolution is a K through 2 course, and it's primarily priming the pump for writing through oral activities. So we would ask them to expand kernel sentences, for example, we would give them a brief sentence like, They fought.

Susan Lambert 

Then we would ask them, "Who, when, where?" And if they were able to do it, "why?" And you would get a complete sentence. A sentence that tells the reader everything they need to know or the person who's listening to you, what they need.

Susan Lambert

Nice. You know, I love that you said that because I feel like when I was a teacher, I just assumed that all the writing activities I was providing my students were, you know, that was instruction. And so even though my kids were writing a lot, again, I was just giving them activities rather than helping them to understand what you called those building blocks, starting with sentences, understanding sentences, and building up from there. 

Judith Hochman

And although we have a sequence that we teach the strategies in and the activities within each strategy, it's a recursive approach. You keep going back to the sentences. So when you move from sentences to outlining for paragraphs and writing the paragraphs themselves, to compositions.

Judith Hochman

Mm-hmm.

Judith Hochman 

And the outlines that they must write before they write compositions. And along the way we teach them how to summarize and we teach them how to take notes.

Judith Hochman

Yes.

Judith Hochman 

And how to revise. This is not learned by osmosis and it's not learned by vague feedback, like, make it better or add more details. You've got to be very granular. This is not a naturally occurring skill in human development for any of us.

Susan Lambert

What I love about what she talks about is that you don't just learn to write a sentence and then a paragraph, and then overall text. You actually have to go back to the sentence, and go back to the sentence, right? And rebuild. And the reason that she talks about it that way is because she learned that that's what her students needed in order to be successful writers. Lo and behold, they found out not only did kids improve as writers, but back to the connection between reading and writing, kids improved as readers. And so, you know, just going back to that reciprocity, how important that is. And so, I mean, thinking back on my own teaching practice, I wish I would've understood the importance of the sentence, right? Sentence level comprehension in reading is so important, but helping students construct sentences and do that across content areas. If our ultimate goal is to develop students' academic literacy, meaning that they can use reading, writing, speaking, and listening in all of their content areas for the rest of their schooling career and life, that means helping them write sentences. In every single content area. And not just like writing about the content area, but helping them practice at that sentence level to be really confident in being able to construct sentences.

Susan Lambert

And this is a good place to remind you about our SoR Essentials listening guide. Which actually includes some sentence-level activities inspired by Hochman. That listening guide is available now at amplify.com/SoREssentials. But now I want to go back to Steve Graham, who shared some additional benefits of connecting reading and writing.

Susan Lambert

First, he reminded us of the critical reading-writing connection.

Steve Graham

When we think about reading and writing connections, I think there's three ways of thinking about this. And one of those ways is thinking about it in terms of shared knowledge. And so, Tim Shanahan presented a nice way of kind of visualizing this. If you think about having a well of knowledge and you think of having a bucket that's reading and a bucket that's writing, it's this common pool of knowledge that would include like these symbol sound, sound symbol, relationships, but would include a lot of other things too, you know, like the knowledge of the, whatever you're reading or you're writing about.

Steve Graham

Mm-hmm.

Steve Graham

So when you dip that writing bucket down there, it's pulling out of that pool of knowledge, say about outer space. And when you're reading about outer space, it's also pooling about that same knowledge.

Susan Lambert

Graham says that shared knowledge also extends to knowledge about the purposes of different kinds of texts that we read.

Steve Graham

You know, if you recognize you're reading a persuasive text, then those basic building elements of persuasive text you are likely to use as a framework for helping you remember and understand information.

Steve Graham 

Mm-hmm.

Steve Graham

You recognize a counter reason or a counter explanation that might be put forward. And those same things can be used in terms of purposes and text structure in terms of helping you write texts.

Steve Graham

So there's a lot of different kinds of knowledge, both, you know, kind of the strategies that we use, kind of this knowledge about genre, knowledge about content, you know, knowledge about how words and vocabulary, et cetera, linked together, that we can draw upon for each of these. Now, here's the good news about that. When you teach these various things, you teach decoding, kids become better spellers.

Susan Lambert 

Yeah.

Steve Graham 

You teach, spell, kids become better decoders. You teach kids strategies for writing, planning, revising, et cetera, that tends to have a positive effect on their reading. You teach strategies that we often use in terms of like visualization or, you know, critical reading, et cetera, that helps you become a better writer. So the evidence suggests that if, you know, you have kids do these things, you teach these things in each of these areas, it has a carry or a positive carry over effect from reading to writing or vice versa.

Steve Graham

So that's the first of Graham's three ways of thinking about reading, writing, connections. The second is something called a rhetorical relations perspective.

Steve Graham 

It's a simple idea with a long title, right? It's basically that reading and writing serves social purposes, right? So they have this kind of common purpose in mind. So when we read, we're making connections with an author.

Susan Lambert

Yeah.

Steve Graham

When we write, hopefully we're making connections with an audience. And so the idea here is that as you read, you can learn something that may help you in your writing. And as you write, because of the internal conversations you might be having about your audience, that may help you think about the writer who, you know, you're reading at the time.

Steve Graham 

And so I wanna be real clear about this. So, when I read texts, like I read every night, and right now I'm in my mystery phase. I don't read to really find out what the author's doing. I kind of read. I'm on a motorbike and I'm riding down the road and I don't care how the engine works, right?

Steve Graham 

But, you know, if I'm reading something in my domain, in terms of science and literacy, then I'm pretty analytic in terms of what I'm reading. You know, I'm questioning why the author said this, I'm questioning what, and that provides me with, you know, kind of a process and approach and sometimes tools for when I write my own stuff in the same area.

Susan Lambert

Oh yeah.

Steve Graham 

You know, it doesn't mean it happens automatically, but it can happen and can have a positive flow back.

Susan Lambert

So first is the shared knowledge perspective, second is the rhetorical relations perspective, and third?

Steve Graham

Now there's a third approach and it's called a functional approach. And that's basically the idea that reading and writing can be used together in functional ways. And so think about learning. We do this constantly. We read something, we write about it, and that facilitates our learning of that material. Or we're getting ready to write and we do some reading to gather information. And that not only increases our understanding of the material, but it helps us in terms of what we're gonna write, 'cause we have more to say about the topic and we're more informed about it. So there's multiple ways in which reading and writing work together. We haven't taken advantage of those like we should.

Susan Lambert

That last point, how we haven't taken advantage of all the connections between reading, writing, and learning brings me to our recent conversation with education writer and author Natalie Wexler. We had Wexler back on the podcast to talk about her recent book, Beyond the Science of Reading, Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning.

Susan Lambert

Part of her inspiration for writing this book was seeing an opportunity to better apply the principles of learning science and cognitive load theory to teaching both reading and writing.

Natalie Wexler

One of the things I've noticed is that the discussion of, you know, cognitive load and the science of learning informed teaching really focuses on things like science, math, maybe history to some extent, but not so much on reading and certainly not on reading comprehension or writing. There's been very little research applying cognitive load theory to those things.

Susan Lambert

And Wexler realized there's an opportunity to better apply the principles of learning science to reading, reading comprehension, and writing.

Susan Lambert

Writing in particular is really hard and it puts a cognitive overload on anybody that's attempting to do it.

Natalie Wexler

One thing I noticed was, if you look at those things through the lens of cognitive load theory , and the idea that if you're trying to juggle too much new information and working memory, you're gonna lose your ability to comprehend or retain information, whatever. We're making reading and writing much harder for kids than they need to be because we are asking them to apply skills like finding the main idea or summarizing or whatever, to topics that they may or may not know anything about. I mean, the way literacy instruction is organized is, there's a focus on a skill, the teacher may model the skill on a text on one topic, but then kids are supposed to go off and practice it on texts on other topics or write about other topics that they may have limited, very limited information about.

Natalie Wexler

And so they're not only juggling and working memory. The cognitive demands of reading and especially writing, which if you are not yet a proficient reader and writer, those cognitive demands are very heavy. But they're also trying to deal with content that they may not really know anything about, and so that makes it harder to read and write.

Natalie Wexler

It also makes it harder to use reading and writing as ways of learning and deepening knowledge, which, clearly they are. But the other thing that I noticed is there's been very little application of cognitive load theory to writing, surprisingly, because we know writing imposes a crushing cognitive load if you're not an experienced writer, even if you are. And in addition to asking kids often to write about topics they may not know much about, you know, like in a separate writing curriculum or whatever, we don't explicitly teach them to write. We spend much more time trying to teach, you know, it may maybe with greater and lesser degrees of success, teaching them to read. But we kind of expect them to just pick up writing.

Natalie Wexler

Mm mm-hmm.

Natalie Wexler

And that really, for most kids, it does not happen. And if you think about the cognitive load that they're encountering, you know, that really helps explain why. And it also deprives writing of its potential power as a lever for deepening and reinforcing knowledge of content.

Susan Lambert

Given that great point about the huge cognitive demand of writing, one key strategy is asking students to write about content they're already familiar with. Learning to write in the context of the things that you know is really important to then lighten the load, if you will, for the learning process. So if our students are practicing some new sentence structure, do that in the context of knowledge that they already have, so that they can draw from their long-term memory lightens the load for their learning.

Susan Lambert

And so I think the way that she talks about the relationship between writing in particular, and what it means in this, you know, thing called cognitive load theory, is really helpful to understand that kids need explicit instruction in writing, and they also need to be practicing their writing in the context of things that they already know or are being taught to help support them in their writing production.

Susan Lambert 

And now as we wind down, I want to share some final thoughts, tips, and encouragement on writing from today's group of experts.

Steve Graham

Reading and writing need to be much better connected than they currently are, both in the classroom and curriculum materials that are available to teachers.

Young-Suk Grace Kim

Sometimes I see a classroom that just focuses on phonological awareness or word reading, but without considering spelling, right? Without benefiting or leveraging the power of spelling for development of word reading and spelling. The same thing goes for other pieces.

Steve Graham 

And we wanna make sure that we're using reading and writing for the functional purposes of learning, because they make a huge difference. They're really, you know, the basic building blocks around which we acquire and understand information.

Natalie Wexler

A big barrier to reading comprehension is the syntax, the sentence structure of written language. But if you teach kids how to use complex sentence structure in their own writing— subordinated conjunctions, whatever— they're in a much better position to understand it in their reading. It also makes their oral language sort of richer and more sophisticated.

Judith Hochman

You know, the gift of writing is really tremendous because you teachers know, it's much more than the product on a piece of paper. It's helping students think more analytically and critically. It's helping them read with more understanding. It's a powerful learning tool. You are judged by how you communicate, all of us are, and it's not as heavy a lift as you think it is because once you break it down into its component pieces, it's gonna work for you.

Susan Lambert 

I do hope that as a result of listening to this episode, people are reminded or re- reminded of a couple of things. One, literacy development is complex and it involves more than teaching kids how to read. It also involves teaching kids how to write. Number two, those things should never be taught in isolation. You need to leverage what we know about teaching reading, and bring that in the world of teaching writing as well.

Susan Lambert 

How can you bring that into your practice when you're teaching something related to reading, thinking about, well, what's the corollary to writing? So if I'm teaching something in reading, how can I help kids cement this learning by doing something in writing? Or the same opposite, right?

Susan Lambert 

If I'm teaching kids how to do something in writing, like maybe writing a sentence, how can I bring that sentence- level writing activity or instruction into what they're doing in reading. So making sure we're making that reciprocal reading and writing process transparent for kids and connected in our instruction.

Susan Lambert 

I wanna close out this episode by revisiting that wonderful quote from Steve Graham that we used to kick this one off, which was, "What we see with exceptional teachers is that they have their kids write." And I'd like to add just one small addition, which is, I think exceptional teachers teach their kids both how to write and then help them use the writing process to become more knowledgeable and better thinkers.

Susan Lambert

I hope this episode will help you do just that a little more effectively. Thank you for listening to the first edition of SoR Essentials. Remember to check out our brand new site filled with high quality resources: amplify.com/SoREssentials. There you'll find lots of free resources, including our brand new SoR Essentials listening guide.

Susan Lambert

This guide summarizes the key insights from this episode, recommends some resources to take your learning to the next level, and shares strategies for bringing these ideas directly into the classroom. The listening guide also includes links to my full conversations with the researchers you heard on today's episode. And trust me, they each had a lot more wisdom to share.

Susan Lambert

Again, you can find that and other great resources on our new page, amplify.com/SoREssentials. We'll be back with more of these episodes in the coming months, diving into other key literacy topics. But in two weeks, Dr. Nathaniel Swain, author of the new book, Harnessing the Science of Learning, will share helpful strategies for making your practice more impactful.

Nathaniel Swain

Knowledge should be something that students are given and given in a way that is manageable and is achievable. So actually breaking down big concepts so that you can piece together knowledge over time and allow those smaller concepts to add up to larger ones.

Susan Lambert

That's next time. Science of Reading: the podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.