Science of Reading: The Podcast

Leveled reading, leveled lives, with Tim Shanahan, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, top literacy scholar Tim Shanahan, Ph.D., returns to discuss his new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives: How Students’ Reading Achievement Has Been Held Back and What We Can Do About It. During his conversation with Susan Lambert, he outlines what existing research says about leveled reading—and why it’s not effective. He also shares how the misuse of theory can lead to ineffectual conclusions, makes a case for the efficacy of more explicit instruction, and provides a few simple tweaks teachers can make to classroom instruction that can make a big difference for their students. 

Show notes:

Quotes: 

“This notion of trying to match kids to books and get everybody to their right level is, at the very least, wasteful. It's not benefiting kids.” —Tim Shanahan, Ph.D.

“We're spending an awful lot of time doing a lot of work that is not only not paying off, but it's probably holding a lot of kids back.” —Tim Shanahan, Ph.D.

“When we try to ease the path so much so that the kids will hardly even know that they're learning anything, they're probably hardly ever gonna learn anything.” —Tim Shanahan, Ph.D.

“Maybe we should be having kids read some of these texts more than once. Maybe we should be doing some of our fluency work, not after we did the comprehension work, but ahead of time.” —Tim Shanahan, Ph.D.

Episode timestamps*
02:00 Introduction: Who is Tim Shanahan?
03:00 Most proud of as a researcher
05:00 Most proud of in education policy work
06:00 First book: Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives
07:00 Motivation to write: Addressing instructional levels
14:00 Relevance of misuse of theory
17:00 Leveled instruction isn’t effective
21:00 Self-reflections in the writing process
22:00 Parallels to verbal learning
24:00 What can teachers do?
26:00 Fluency and reading things twice
32:00 Grade level teaching opens opportunities
33:00 The future of literacy development
39:00 What is happening in American schools?
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute


[00:00:00] Tim Shanahan: This notion of trying to match kids to books and get everybody to the right level is at the very least, wasteful.

[00:00:10] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Level Reading, Leveled Lives. That's the title of a new book from literacy expert Dr. Timothy Shanahan. And today I'm thrilled to bring Dr. Shanahan back to the podcast to talk all about this new book, which explores the history and research on leveled reading.

[00:00:34] Susan Lambert: Dr. Shanahan explains why leveled reading is not effective. He details the importance of explicit instruction and he offers some specific guidance for educators that can make a big difference. We spoke with Dr. Shanahan in May ahead of the book's official publication date of Sept. 9, 2025. Here's my conversation with Dr. Timothy Shanahan, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

[00:01:03] Susan Lambert: Tim Shanahan, thank you for joining us yet again on the podcast. I think this is your third appearance perhaps. 

[00:01:11] Tim Shanahan: I think it is. Good to see you, Susan. 

[00:01:14] Susan Lambert: It's so great to have you here and I'm really excited to talk about, um, well, the reason that we have you on to talk about this new book of yours. But first, I cannot imagine that there is any listener, any of our listeners anyway, that don't know who you are. You've been around the literacy world for a really long time. Your career has been so vast. And if they don't know who you are, they can look you up. Instead of doing an introduction like we normally do, and normally somebody would tell me about their journey into literacy, I would love if you could talk to us just a little bit about the thing that you're most proud of in your vast career in this world. 

[00:01:56] Tim Shanahan: You know, that's, it is funny. It doesn't feel like it's been a single career. You know, I've been doing this for 55 years, but you're not always doing exactly the same thing. So sometimes I'm a researcher and sometimes I'm working on educational policy and sometimes I'm teaching and doing things like that. And so I'm gonna pick more than one. 

[00:02:17] Susan Lambert: Okay, good. I love it. 

[00:02:20] Tim Shanahan: I'll cheat. In terms of, you know, Tim Shanahan, the researcher, the two things I'm probably proudest of are, you know, areas of research that I think I made a significant difference. And one of those was, reading-writing relationships. When I started doing research on that, there really wasn't any research on that. And, it's become a really, a major strand of research in our field and I feel pretty good about that. 

[00:02:47] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:02:47] Tim Shanahan: And another one in that area is the work I got to do with my wife, Cynthia Shanahan, on disciplinary literacy, where we studied the ways that, you know, historians and mathematicians and chemists read and, you know, how you would share that with students. And, that's become, the basis of educational policy in something like 40 countries. So I, you know, feel pretty good about that too. So those are a couple things on the research end of things. 

[00:03:17] Susan Lambert: Can I just make a comment before you go to your sort of next space? Is the shared knowledge model, so that's the reading-writing connections that has resurfaced, and it is, it is hot right now to talk about the two of them.

[00:03:31] Susan Lambert: So thank you for bringing that work to life. And disciplinary literacy or academic literacy, like all of that too is another really hot topic. And so how cool for you that you built those foundations and now you're seeing people run with that. 

[00:03:45] Tim Shanahan: You know, it is so exciting. You know, when I was first doing the work, I thought, oh, this is just fun to do. But then after some amount of time, you know, it takes the world some time to catch up with those kinds of things. And all of a sudden you see other researchers not only citing you, but improving on what you did, making it better and extending it, and that's just so thrilling.

[00:04:06] Tim Shanahan: So yeah, those, those have been... and, and then when you see it showing up in classrooms and programs and things like that. 

[00:04:12] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:04:12] Tim Shanahan: You gotta feel good. 

[00:04:14] Susan Lambert: For sure. Okay. I interrupted you. Keep going. 

[00:04:17] Tim Shanahan: Well, another area that I've done a certain amount of work in is educational policy, and the work there that I've done that I'm pretty proud of, uh, our chairing and serving on various federal research panels, probably the most notable one being the National Reading Panel. You know, one of the reasons that so many schools and so many programs emphasize phonics and phonemic awareness and fluency and vocabulary and comprehension is because of that policy.

[00:04:46] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:04:46] Tim Shanahan: Our work that we did. Well, now, 20 years ago, 25 years ago. 

[00:04:51] Susan Lambert: Twenty five, yeah. 

[00:04:53] Tim Shanahan: Goes fast. And then finally the practice area, you know, I was a teacher and a school administrator and things like that. And my time as the director of reading for the Chicago Public Schools, where we took a school district that was really struggling in literacy, you know, 437,000 kids-- a very large percentage of those kids living in poverty-- and we showed that by applying research, we could raise reading achievement in literally hundreds of schools and, you know, among some of the neediest children in the country. So, very proud of that, of course. 

[00:05:32] Susan Lambert: Wow. And that's a great summary of, you know, all of the work that you've done. So if listeners don't know who you are, there you go. You just gave us a good summary. And now you found yourself in the space of being an author of a book. This is the first one, right? 

[00:05:47] Tim Shanahan: I have edited books, I have co-authored books and a lot of books in our field, I don't mean to put them down, but typically they're just collections of chapters, you know. Oh, here's a chapter on phonics, here's a chapter on comprehension, here's a chapter on, you know, classroom management or something. But sitting down and actually writing a book where all the chapters really connect with each other and all that. I've never done anything like that before in my life. Published a lot, but certainly not a book. And so I'm very excited about, this book, Leveled Readers, Leveled Lives, that Harvard Education Press will be publishing very soon. 

[00:06:27] Susan Lambert: That's really exciting. What was the motivation to actually-- we'll dig into the content, but what was the motivation for you to write that?

[00:06:34] Tim Shanahan: In 2010, the states got together and agreed to share educational standards, the Common Core State Standards. And they set these standards, they're pretty innovative, but maybe the most interesting thing that they did is they set, text levels that kids were supposed to be able to read by third grade, fourth grade, and so on.

[00:06:58] Tim Shanahan: And the idea of that was they wanted, by the time kids left school, that the kids would be able to read text challenging enough that would allow them to do well in college, to do well in the work place, to do well in the military, those kinds of things. And so this notion of having these standards made a lot of sense.

[00:07:19] Tim Shanahan: But historically we'd actually avoided doing that in reading standards. No state had ever done that before. And the reason was because we had a theory that said that, you shouldn't teach kids at grade level, you should teach them with what we called instructional level texts. You'd test children, you'd find their level, and you know, the child might be in fourth grade, but you'd teach 'em with a second grade book because his level was at second grade. And that was the idea of it. And so the reason states had avoided it is they were always afraid, "Wow. If we tell fourth grade teachers that the kids are supposed to read fourth grade text, they won't teach with the second grade text, in a case like that. They'll try to teach fourth grade books and they'll hurt them, the kids." That was the theory. That was the idea. And so these new standards come out, the textbook publishers adjust their books to fit those standards so that, you know, the texts are challenging enough. 

[00:08:18] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:08:19] Tim Shanahan: And what we found was when we did national surveys of teachers in the ensuing years was that they were less likely to teach with grade level texts than they had been before the new standards had been put in place. But if you think about it, it's both understandable and unfortunate. It's understandable because for years teachers had been told: avoid challenging text, and they were never given any methods or approaches to deal with that because everybody thought that would be malpractice to do that.

[00:08:54] Tim Shanahan: And so the teachers, you know, "I know how to teach kids with books that they can already read. I don't know how to teach them with books they're gonna struggle with." And so that's the understandable part. The unfortunate part was that research was starting to accumulate that was showing that kids made lesser progress when they were taught at their instructional levels than when they were taught with grade level texts. In other words, our instruction was holding kids back rather than propelling them forward. So that's, you know, that's why I thought it was really important that we really analyzed that idea of the instructional level and show an alternative. Give teachers some tools that would allow them to actually increase kids' levels of literacy rather than to really suppress them or keep them down. 

[00:09:46] Susan Lambert: Hmm. And you do an amazing job in the first sort of chunk of the book to talk about that historical context, right? This whole, how we got here. 

[00:09:58] Tim Shanahan: Yeah, you know, if you think about it, when somebody says, "Gee, if we were teaching kids at grade level, they would do somewhat better." You know, I think for a lot of parents and policymakers, they'd go, "Well, you know, that makes sense. Why would any smart person say that you have to hold kids back."

[00:10:15] Tim Shanahan: So I thought going through, I kinda gave a 400- year history lesson, explaining, you know, how we got here. Why a bunch of smart educators would do it the way that we'd been doing it, and also explaining how in some ways we'd fooled ourselves. We'd taken a number of popular psychological theories of the different periods, and we used them to misuse them to prop up this idea of the instructional level.

[00:10:43] Tim Shanahan: And just an example of that is the current one of Lev Vygotsky's theory about the zone of proximal development, which a lot of people think, is about the instructional level, but in fact isn't. In fact, he was saying some things that would be pretty much in opposition to what we mean by teaching kids at the instructional level.

[00:11:03] Tim Shanahan: So I think that historical record is both interesting and useful. I think it should make it clear I'm not blaming teachers, I'm showing how we came to embrace an idea without testing it sufficiently. And that's the sad part of it. If we'd tested it earlier, I think we would've found out earlier that this wasn't the best idea in the world.

[00:11:26] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Interesting. And, but it hangs on for a long time. I mean, you know, how is it that we can sort of extract these practices. You know, like you said, the National Reading Panel was 25 years ago. Some practices we're still trying to extract based on that work. 

[00:11:43] Tim Shanahan: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It takes a long time. Since we don't have a national school system, there isn't like one source of information. You go to countries in Europe and there's one Ministry of Education and if it says that you're gonna use a certain textbook or you're gonna teach certain math problems at certain grade levels, everybody does it. It's not something that's going to have to creep out over a long period of time.

[00:12:11] Tim Shanahan: I've seen some estimates that say when an idea comes up in education, it really takes something like 50 years for full adoption. 

[00:12:18] Susan Lambert: Wow. 

[00:12:19] Tim Shanahan: And so this instructional level idea, you know, comes up in the 1940s and it really becomes hugely important by the 1990s. And you know, these days most kids are taught that way.

[00:12:34] Tim Shanahan: In fact, I would venture to say, I bet most of our listeners, not just their kids were taught that way, but they were probably taught to read using the instructional level. I know I was. 

[00:12:44] Susan Lambert: Yep, yep, me too, me too. In one of the chapters, I wanna talk about this because I think it's particularly relevant today in the age of so much social media, teachers have, I feel like teachers are flooded with information in sometimes ways that they don't have the tools or the resources to be able to figure out, is this right or is this wrong? But that's a long way to get to your chapter two title. Sorry about that. And you called it, The Misuse of Theory. And you use examples there, but why do you think that's particularly relevant for now?

[00:13:20] Tim Shanahan: Well, you know, I think one of the things we do, because we're smart people, not because we're stupid, when we have an idea, when we think we should do something, we look for any information we can find that we think will support our action. 

[00:13:35] Susan Lambert: Yep. 

[00:13:35] Tim Shanahan: So, you know, this idea comes up originally in the 1920s. It doesn't get really crystallized and become a real specific instructional practice till the 1940s, but people are really thinking about this and as they do, there are various theories that have popularity. And so one of them at the time was readiness. The idea that you could hurt people if you had them try to do something earlier than they were supposed to. And so there's some real good reason to think that there's certain aspects of human development that really do have a readiness period and so on. But, you know, reading a fifth grade book isn't one of those. And so, but that doesn't matter. People apply it. And then when readiness theory is no longer that important, people grab onto something else and they grab onto frustration theory. "Oh look, frustration hurts people." And then over time they figure out, "No actually frustration, yeah, it can hurt people, but it's really useful. In fact, you can't get learning without some degree of frustration," and so on and so forth. And that's why, you know, these days that that notion of the zone of proximal development just sounds so, "Wow. You know, there's this space where kids should be working and if they're not working there, they're not gonna learn." But of course, Vygotsky knew nothing about instructional level theory. He was working in Russia and he knew things about American education, but he didn't know about that yet. And then he passed away, unfortunately, at a fairly young age, so he didn't get to. But his ideas were that you don't wait. You know, if there's something that's socially beneficial, and so, you know, nine year olds being able to read a fourth grade text is socially beneficial, you teach that, but you adjust it in various ways. You adjust the support so that the youngster can succeed with it. And so I would argue that even though Vygotsky is often misused to prop up this idea of the instructional level, I would argue that what I'm promoting in this book is probably much more in line with Vygotsky's theory.

[00:15:46] Susan Lambert: Really interesting. And you do take another, in your chapter here, we've got a summary of your book here, to really examine some of the research studies that have tried to look and evaluate to see, does this work or doesn't this work? 

[00:16:02] Tim Shanahan: There's a surprising amount of research on this, especially research that's been done in the last, say, 20 years, and it has, without exception, either found that the instructional level gave no benefit or that it actually diminished kid's reading, kept them from making full progress. And it's research that nobody's ever really pulled together before. So, you know, I did that and so overwhelmingly what it shows is that this notion of trying to match kids to books and get everybody to their right level, is at the very least wasteful. It's not, you know, benefiting kids, so we're spending an awful lot of time doing a lot of work that is not only not paying off, but it's probably holding a lot of kids back. And so then the question becomes, well, why is that?

[00:16:56] Tim Shanahan: If this was such a terrific idea and we all bought into it,  and I, you know, let me back up for a moment and say, you know, when I was a classroom teacher, I tested every one of my boys and girls in reading to get their level, and I had three and four groups going, you know, at different levels because I thought that's what you were supposed to do and that that was gonna be beneficial to the kids. So this isn't, "Boy, those, all those dumb people doing this, and I'm so smart." I was doing it too. I was part of the problem on this. But what you figure out very quickly as you look deeply at the research is there are three things that are necessary for instructional level to work, and one of those is you have to be able to test kids fairly precisely to find their level.

[00:17:44] Tim Shanahan: And then secondly, you have to be able to measure the levels of the text fairly precisely. And then, because remember, you're going to be different groups of kids are gonna be in different books, you're gonna have to reduce the amount of reading instruction that anyone gets to manage all those small groups.

[00:18:04] Tim Shanahan: Small group instruction is gonna have to be extremely powerful to overcome the diminishment of time. And what you find when you look at the research is, "Gee, we're not able to specify kids' reading levels that accurately." We can get within a couple grade levels, but you know, "Gee, what do I teach these kids at a fourth grade level or a third grade level?"

[00:18:28] Tim Shanahan: That's a pretty big difference, and it might not be fourth or a third, it might be third, fourth, or fifth. And you know that's not precise enough. And then you look at the texts and you find the same kind of thing. So now you've got two approximations that are pretty wide approximations and you're trying to fit those together.

[00:18:50] Tim Shanahan: And then finally, the small group thing. Small group is certainly more powerful than whole class instruction. But then when you see,  "Gee, the kids are only gonna get 20 minutes of instruction instead of 60 minutes of instruction." All of a sudden, that benefit goes away. And so you're looking and you say, "Well, gee, none of the basic ideas of it actually work or work well enough to allow us to derive any benefit from matching kids to books in the way that we're doing it."

[00:19:21] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I wonder, as you were writing those sections of the book, you know, how you were thinking... maybe it's just you were writing this and it was sort of in your head all along, but did you have any interesting reflections as you were going through that process or new learnings?

[00:19:40] Tim Shanahan: Initially I was just absolutely gobsmacked. Because I had taught teachers how to use informal reading inventories and things like that, you know, how to get kids to their instructional level, and had certainly used it in my own classes, I was just embarrassed. I was just, I can't believe that this isn't working and there must be a problem with this study. But as the studies piled up, it became obvious that we just managed to fool ourselves. And so that was the first part of it. The second part, you would start to find research that wasn't necessarily specific to this problem, but that was a pretty good analogy to it.

[00:20:26] Tim Shanahan: And so for example, there's a huge body of research that I had no idea about on verbal learning. And, you know, which is obviously similar to reading, but it's, you know, a different field of study. And what they had found was that if you taught kids things, if you laid out instruction so that learning was very quick and easy, without a lot of challenge and a lot of confusion and so on, the kids would learn things very, very quickly. 

[00:20:57] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:20:58] Tim Shanahan: But it would diminish very quickly and what wouldn't be usable. And if you made learning more difficult than that and more challenging than that, what you would find was that not only would the kids learn it, but they'd maintain it much longer and be able to use it.

[00:21:17] Tim Shanahan: And I thought, well, that's not really studying about this topic, but boy, that sounds like the same kind of idea. The kids are doing verbal learning here and reading, and when we try to ease the path so much so that the kids will hardly even know that they're learning anything, they're probably hardly ever gonna learn anything. We're being quite successful at that.

[00:21:40] Tim Shanahan: So there were surprises like that, that I just wasn't aware of. And then you find there's this body of research on reading comprehension that, you know, once people, this isn't with children, this is what, like with college students and adults. When the text is harder than the students can read, well, they end up with higher comprehension than when it's easier material because they expend more effort. They think about it more. They'll reread, they'll do things to make sure they get it. And of course they do then. So, it turns out that this idea is probably just a variant on a very strong theme in the psychology of learning that, you know, I hate to admit it, but I didn't know about some of that. A lot of that.

[00:22:31] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of work out there that we need to get access to, so that's very interesting. Well, the second part of your book, you sort of make a shift then, and you actually do give educators, you know, some specific nuggets of things that they can do. What does this look like in the classroom? And I wonder if there is a couple of those things that you wanna highlight. 

[00:22:58] Tim Shanahan: Sure. You know, like I said earlier, we had spent so much time focusing on making sure kids were at the right levels, we didn't ever pay much attention to what do you do if the youngster isn't at the right level?

[00:23:11] Tim Shanahan: What if they're in a book that they're going to struggle with? And that happens in classrooms even where teachers try to get everybody on level because you can only handle so many groups. And so you end up, you know, Bobby gets stuck in the third group, even though his reading isn't quite that good. But there's no advice, there's no information for teachers on, "so then what do you do?" You know, how are you gonna make sure that kid succeeds too? And so I thought it was really important that there be more here than just a "Wow. The way we're doing it is wrong. And good luck to you." 

[00:23:45] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Peace be with you. 

[00:23:47] Tim Shanahan: Yeah, exactly. And so one of the things that I found is certainly one of the areas where kids often have trouble and makes teachers a bit panicky is, you've placed this youngster in a third grade book 'cause he's eight years old and he really reads more like a second grader.

[00:24:08] Tim Shanahan: And what that means is he's pretty disfluent when he reads that text. And you'll know that if you listen to him read it aloud and he'll make a lot of mistakes and so on. And so what do you do in a case like that, because that's gonna happen no matter what grade level if you're teaching at grade level?

[00:24:27] Tim Shanahan: And so I went through the research on fluency and one of the things that you find is if you have the kids read such a book or you know, a text twice, the number of miscues, the number of mistakes that the youngster makes, typically drops by about 50%. So now think about this. Let's say your theory is that kids are at the instructional level if they can read, say 95% of the words accurately. So, if it's a hundred word passage, the youngster makes five words, you're fine with it. But if they make more than five words, that's not the book you wanna work with. Okay, now you test this youngster, you have him read, say, the third grade book. He only gets 90%, he makes 10 mistakes in it.

[00:25:14] Tim Shanahan: And so you don't wanna work with it. But if you just have the kids read it again, he'll probably read it at 95% accuracy without any instruction. And so you go, well, wow. So maybe we should be having kids read some of these texts more than once. Yeah. Maybe we should be doing some of our fluency work, not after we did the comprehension work, but ahead of time.

[00:25:39] Tim Shanahan: As preparation for reading it. I taught myself to read French and, you know, some of these things are insights that I gained from teaching myself to read in a language that I didn't know. It's not like, well, I could speak French, but I just couldn't read it. I can read English, but I didn't know the French language, so I had to learn all the vocabulary, all the grammar, everything.

[00:26:03] Tim Shanahan: But I didn't have a teacher and I wasn't online doing all that stuff. I was literally just working with books and magazines, trying to figure out how would you learn to read this? And, you know, that kind of fluency work would be a real good example. Of course, a lot of times kids are having trouble with other aspects of the text and I think, some of the most interesting areas are in the area of language.

[00:26:29] Tim Shanahan: We always say that language is important in teaching kids to read, and then we don't do much with it. Or we, "Oh yeah. That means the kindergarten teachers should be talking to the kids and encouraging conversations and correcting their mistakes and those kinds of things." But what about written language?

[00:26:49] Tim Shanahan: And so it seems to me that what we should be doing is looking at text and trying to figure out what mistakes their kids are gonna make, what's gonna complicate it? And sometimes that's, "Gee, there's a really long sentence in there that I don't think the kids are gonna understand" or, you know, maybe it's a complex sentence and it's got two independent clauses and they're connected by maybe a causation or something.

[00:27:15] Tim Shanahan: And it's really important. It's central to the whole text. If the kids don't get it, they're really not gonna understand it. We don't ask questions aimed at uncovering whether the youngster understood that sentence or not. And, you know, what we should be doing is looking for what we think will trip kids up and then asking them questions that will reveal whether they figured it out or whether they did get tripped up.

[00:27:41] Tim Shanahan: And so you have that really complicated sentence, you figure out a question you could ask that would reveal whether they understood it, and if they don't, then there's some things you can do. And I show in the book how you can teach kids when you come to sentences like that, what to do with them, how to break them down so that you actually can understand it. And the teacher can demonstrate that initially and then over time guide the kids to do it and then, you know, kinda stand back and let 'em do more independent kind of work with that.

[00:28:13] Tim Shanahan: And you can do that with cohesion and you can do that with figuring out vocabulary from context and so on. I don't think we're really teaching kids how to use what they know about language to comprehend. 

[00:28:27] Susan Lambert: Yeah, it's really important. I mean, language is the thing that, well, I'm super interested in that aspect anyway, but I think you're right. I think it was Louisa Moats or there's a couple people that have said this, that literacy is really a secondary system, right? And it's built on language as the primary system. 

[00:28:46] Tim Shanahan: Yes. 

[00:28:46] Susan Lambert: But if you ask educators, what is language? It's so, right? Like how do you define something like that?

[00:28:54] Susan Lambert: And so then taking that language and trying to apply it to reading instruction without any context or any education yourself as a teacher, it's really tough. 

[00:29:04] Tim Shanahan: Yeah, it really is. And unfortunately most teachers usually haven't had a course in linguistics, which would be really helpful. I know when I didn't get that until I was actually a doctoral student.

[00:29:15] Tim Shanahan: And of course found that to be hugely useful. Another aspect of this is that written language is more, it is a secondary language. It's based on your oral language, but it's more complicated. You use a much wider range of vocabulary. The sentences get longer and more complicated.

[00:29:35] Tim Shanahan: Authors are willing to link ideas in a more subtle way than you dare to do in oral language. And so, you know, 'cause people wouldn't be able to follow what you were saying. And anyone who's worked with young children know how dangerous pronouns become. 

[00:29:55] Susan Lambert: Oh yeah, for sure. 

[00:29:56] Tim Shanahan: You know, he and g and it, and who knows what they're talking about after a couple of minutes.

[00:30:00] Tim Shanahan: And so, you know, the notion that kids are going to just apply their oral language knowledge to this more complex version of language that isn't even clear to them is language, it really takes some more teaching. And so one of the things that actually teaching kids with text at their grade level instead of something they can already read reasonably well, it really creates opportunities to teach kids how to read, how to make sense of text, how to hold up their motivation and so on and so forth. And I think that's one of the benefits of this. Instructional level in a way reduces the amount of teaching that kids get. And I think what I'm talking about is increasing that explicit instruction to take texts that the kids couldn't read and make them into books that the kids really can read. 

[00:30:55] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Yeah, that's a beautiful way to say that. And it's, you know, in line with the Science of Reading movement. So I don't know, I'm using quotes there because we have to be, and here our podcast is Science of Reading: The Podcast, we have to be careful how it's interpreted-- but what are your thoughts about where we're heading with this momentum that we have now in early literacy and literacy development? 

[00:31:21] Tim Shanahan: So Susan, you and I both know that the Science of Reading is more than say, phonics, more than decoding.

[00:31:28] Tim Shanahan: Susan Lambert 

[00:31:28] Tim Shanahan: Yep. Absolutely.

[00:31:29] Tim Shanahan: Tim Shanahan

[00:31:29] Tim Shanahan: And yet the what captured people's attention and why state legislatures are involved in this and, you know, why it's been in the press so much is actually because there were popular instructional programs adopted by schools that didn't have any, or very explicit instruction in decoding.

[00:31:51] Tim Shanahan: And I'm fearful that in a lot of cases, now that the legislatures have put some requirements in place or school districts have said, "Well, we'll buy a different program and, you know, do a little professional development with our teachers to support 'em and using that." Okay, now we've got the Science of Reading, and so I fear that, you know, things might just end where we are.

[00:32:16] Tim Shanahan: And that scares me. I think maybe the mistake that's being made is, so much of the emphasis has been on how would we improve, say, K, first, and second grade teaching when the real goal should be, how could we graduate more kids from high school with higher levels of literacy? If you look at earlier reading wars and, you know, periods of time when we put a lot of attention on beginning reading, we have managed to raise third and fourth grade reading achievement and, you know, pretty markedly at times, which is good.

[00:32:55] Tim Shanahan: I don't wanna put that down. But then when you follow those kids, it's like they never get to eighth grade because the eighth grade scores never go up. And so we're making, you know, third and fourth grade teachers really happy. Wow. These kids are coming in at a better level, but we're not building on that.

[00:33:14] Tim Shanahan: And I honestly hope that my book helps with that. Because if we start to increase those reading levels, those challenge levels, and give kids the kinds of instruction that we were just talking about, it means taking the science of that aspect of reading and applying it, I honestly think we could start seeing not just better say third grade scores, but better eighth grade scores and 12th grade scores, and more kids coming out able to participate in our society in however they want to. 

[00:33:49] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Yeah, that's a really good point, you know, and I have a theory. This is just a theory. My theory is that in kindergarten and first grade, with this shift, we really are probably making progress in those word recognition skills.

[00:34:05] Susan Lambert: Right? Those constrained skills that we can teach one and done, right? Like we're probably making progress there. But has the instruction left out that unconstrained element or that language element, the thing that continues to develop over time. And I worry that if we don't teach that language part in parallel in the early grades, then there's nothing to grow into, you know, we've lost time, in other words. 

[00:34:31] Tim Shanahan: You are a hundred percent right. And so, unlike in some of the past reading wars where a lot of the argument was, you know, "Oh, you should use phonics. No, you shouldn't use phonics." That kind of thing. I think this time the argument has been, maybe a little bit more subtle, but certainly not any more helpful.

[00:34:50] Tim Shanahan: Teach Phonics, and then the other group is saying, "Oh, it's not just about phonics," which sounds like, "Don't teach phonics." What we really need to do is recognize that reading and learning to read are complex processes and that there's not just one secret ingredient, and if you teach that, everything's gonna be terrific.

[00:35:13] Tim Shanahan: You really have to work on, well, vocabulary and morphology and certainly the decoding aspects and all these language pieces I was talking about and knowledge building and, so on. All those kinds of things need to be addressed through instruction. Certainly the nature of the text that we're gonna have kids read and how we're gonna teach them to deal with those. I don't think that the popular conception of the Science of Reading has embraced that yet, and that scares me. 

[00:35:45] Susan Lambert: Well, hopefully Science of Reading: The Podcast can help bring that to light and do a little more in that area in our upcoming season. Alright, first of all, do you know when the book will be available for purchase?

[00:35:58] Tim Shanahan: The book is already on sites like Amazon so that it's possible to pre-order it. And it's officially coming out, and I don't remember the exact date, but sometime in the middle of September. However, the publisher has assured me that it will reach the warehouses in July, they tell me, and that they don't wait to ship. If they've got orders, they send them out. And so it sounds like people can actually get it this summer. 

[00:36:26] Susan Lambert: That's awesome!

[00:36:27] Tim Shanahan: Which I'm excited about. 

[00:36:29] Susan Lambert: Me too. Well, we'll put a link in the show notes to Amazon, where people can pre-order it. What closing thoughts do you have about why people should get your book and how it's gonna help them?

[00:36:41] Tim Shanahan: Well, let me, let me. I'm not gonna sit here and sell a book because that's not what I do, but let me do this. I've made a bunch of claims in this, you allowed me to make a lot of claims about the teaching of reading here, with challenging text. And there are folks who have book rooms and, you know, they've got colored dots on all their books that make sure that they're the right levels and they do all this stuff, and so what I've been talking about has to sound kooky to many of your listeners and I get that. Let me just describe a recent research study, very recent one. They examined the data from 28,000 American schools where kids are entering reading below grade level. So 28,000 of our schools.

[00:37:26] Tim Shanahan: Susan Lambert 

[00:37:27] Tim Shanahan: Ooh, that's a lot.

[00:37:27] Tim Shanahan: Tim Shanahan

[00:37:27] Tim Shanahan: That's the typical pattern. That's a lot. Right. Well, of those, only 1,300 are successfully making more than average gains. It's kind of interesting. What's the difference between that 1,300 and the other, roughly 27,000? And what they found was that there were a few characteristics, but the one I'm gonna focus on is in these 1,300 schools, unlike the others, they teach grade level reading and math.

[00:37:58] Tim Shanahan: They don't drop back to the kids' levels. Kids come in in second grade, they're not gonna teach 'em like they're a first grader, they're gonna teach 'em second grade reading. And they're getting 1.3 years gains for a year of instruction, which means every three years they're catching those kids up a full grade level almost.

[00:38:19] Tim Shanahan: So clearly we're not looking at this problem correctly. All these things that these teachers have done with, you know, absolutely great intentions are really not serving our kids as well as they should. And so I'd really encourage folks to find my book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives. I think it'll help schools to deal with this challenge more successfully than we're doing now.

[00:38:44] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Well thank you for that and thank you for putting time and effort into writing a book and crafting it in such a thoughtful way to help us understand how we got here and then giving us ideas, thoughts, strategies to be able to make a difference in the classroom. So, cheers to you. I can't wait to get the physical copy of your book at my house.

[00:39:06] Susan Lambert: I got to read the preview copy. So thank you for sharing that with us. But again, thanks Tim Shanahan for being here and for all the work that you've done. We really appreciate it. 

[00:39:17] Tim Shanahan: Thank you. See up the road a piece. 

[00:39:19] Susan Lambert: All right.

[00:39:22] Susan Lambert: That was Dr. Timothy Shanahan, distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

[00:39:29] Susan Lambert: His new book is titled Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives: How Students' Reading Achievement Has Been Held Back and What We Can Do About It. The official publication date is Sept. 9, 2025. Check out the show notes for a link to the book as well as to our brand new professional learning page, which is filled with great resources to help you extend your reach in the classroom.

[00:39:52] Susan Lambert: Next time on the podcast, I'll be speaking with Amy Burkholder, author of another great new book, Literacy Unlocked: How to Implement the Science of Reading with Young Learners.

[00:40:04]Amy Burkholder: I think sometimes, and I have these conversations with my teachers all the time, if you try to change everything that you're doing, you're not going to do anything well.

[00:40:13] Susan Lambert: That's coming up next time. Be sure to get that episode by subscribing to Science of Reading: The Podcast on the platform of your choice. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.