Science of Reading: The Podcast

S10 E3: Finding fluency at the heart of comprehension, with Doug Lemov

• Amplify Education • Season 10 • Episode 3

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by Doug Lemov,  former teacher and school principal, to discuss how teachers can identify when disfluency is actually the root cause for students’ struggles with comprehension—and what they can do about it. Using his new book, The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, to guide the discussion, Susan and Doug address building attention stamina, the argument for reading whole books, and the value of expressive read-alouds. Finally, Doug ends the episode asserting that humans are meant to live in community, and that a deeper level of comprehension is unlocked through deep empathic connection to text and the experience of reading with others.

Show notes: 

Quotes: 

 “If you're not a fluent reader, you can't be a deep reader.”—Doug Lemov

“The research is clear that when you start to read expressively externally, then your internal reading voice while reading silently is much more expressive and therefore infused with more meaning.”—Doug Lemov 

Episode Timestamps
03:00 Introduction: Doug Lemov
05:00 The importance of the middle grades
07:00 Book: The Teach like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading
13:00 How to build attention stamina
16:00 Background knowledge and vocabulary
19:00 Writing’s impact on memory and reading
22:00 The value in reading whole books
25:00 Embracing smaller writing assignments
27:00 Fluency deep dive
30:00 Working memory
35:00 Troubleshooting fluency
39:00 Expressive reading
41:00 Read-alouds
44:00 Reading as a social act
52:00 The argument for books
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute


[00:00:00] Doug Lemov: ' we're not attentive to fluency, we're pouring water into a leaky bucket. Because it's such a simple task, we don't realize its consequences and its consequences are very far reaching.

[00:00:12] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert and welcome back to Season 10 of Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. I hope you enjoyed the latest Science of Reading Essentials episode on dyslexia. If you haven't listened yet, it's available right in our feed. But now we're onto Episode 3 in our season-long deep dive into comprehension.

[00:00:34] Susan Lambert: So far, we've explored the Simple View of Reading and orthographic mapping. On this episode, we're focusing on another prerequisite to reading comprehension. Fluency. My guest is Doug Lemov, former teacher and school principal and author of Teach Like A Champion. In July, he published his latest book with Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway titled, The Teach Like A Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. This book has an entire chapter on fluency, and that's what we'll dive into today. By the way, midway through the conversation, you'll hear Doug reference a video of a teacher in the U.K. If you want to check it out, we've got a link right in the show notes.

[00:01:18] Susan Lambert: Okay, let's bring on Doug Lamov.

[00:01:23] Susan Lambert: Doug Lamov, welcome back to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you back. 

[00:01:28] Doug Lemov: Thanks, Susan. I'm very happy to be here. 

[00:01:30] Susan Lambert: I was trying to remember what the topic was the last time around, and I think we talked about your book, Reading Reconsidered.

[00:01:37] Doug Lemov: That seems right. Yeah.

[00:01:38] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Does it seem, does it seem right? It seems like it was yesterday, but yet it was a really long time ago.

[00:01:43] Doug Lemov: I remember it might've even been during the pandemic. I remember I might've been in my backyard.

[00:01:47] Susan Lambert: Oh, that could be.

[00:01:48] Doug Lemov: We have the conversation. It's possible. 

[00:01:49] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That could be. It's a great book. Well, before we dive into the topic for today, for those of our listeners that maybe don't know who you are, can you just give us a little bit of your background and your claim to fame here?

[00:02:03] Doug Lemov: Well, I don't know that I've a claim to fame, but I can tell you about my background. I'm Doug Lemov. I'm the chief knowledge officer at an organization called Teach Like a Champion. We study teachers. And that started when I wrote a book by the name. The idea was to find teachers who were positive outliers, who especially worked in communities of need, and despite all the challenges there, achieve, you know, positive outlier effects, did incredible things with students. And so part of that project was not just talking about what they did and trying to name the things that they did that made them different from the rest of the field, but to videotape them, sneak into the back of their classrooms with you know, with a camera.

[00:02:39] Doug Lemov: The first video looks like really bad wedding footage, by the way, because I shot it myself. But after that, we actually paid someone to do it. So, that was Teach Like a Champion, and that sort of began my journey of studying teachers. Along the way I kind of realized that of all the things that we teach, reading is the first among equals, it's the most important thing that we teach. And really your ability to learn almost anything else depends on reading.

[00:03:02] Doug Lemov: But it's also first among equals maybe in difficulty. That, you know, if you look at a really high performing school, high performing schools can often close the gap between kids of privilege and you know, kids who grow up outside of the bubble of privilege in two or three years in math, but they often never close the gap in reading.

[00:03:19] Doug Lemov: Why is that? Why is it so much harder to do that? Why have we struggled? And that kind of began a journey, which I should say happens alongside all of my colleagues on my team, but especially Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway, who are my, co-authors on my most recent book and who are ... they're the brains of the bunch.

[00:03:35] Doug Lemov: I'm not sure what I bring to it, but they're, yeah. Anyway. 

[00:03:38] Susan Lambert: Shout out to them. What I love about your work too is, you know, well at least here on Science of Reading: The Podcast, we spend a lot of time talking about early literacy, sort of this frame of pre-K through 2, 3, 4, whatever, but you really carved a space in those middle grades too. Why has that become important to you? 

[00:03:55] Doug Lemov: Well, it's a good question. One is I think that, well, I'm a parent. Also, you know, like a producer and a consumer. And I think that it's so important to me for my own kids to read, it's probably always brought it to the foremost of my attention. But I think that, you know, I sort of tell this story in the Telac Guide to the Science of Reading that, you know, I think Emily Hanford's podcast, Sold a Story, is the most important piece of education journalism in the 21st century. It's been so profound in its influence, and yet it only describes two to three years of a student's journey.

[00:04:30] Doug Lemov: Do we desperately need to make sure that we're heating the call of the science in K one and two and making sure that we're teaching systematic synthetic phonics? We absolutely do. But we could win that battle or it could be a Pyrrhic victory. What else needs to happen between grades three and, you know, and when you go off to college or even in college? And what else should be happening during K, 1, and 2?

[00:04:50] Doug Lemov: Like does that mean it's all phonics every minute of the day? No, of course not. And so, you know, the book sort of starts with this, for me, the profound lesson that we took from Emily Hanford's podcast, which is, as a profession, we have been slow to heed the call of the science to use the science.

[00:05:06] Doug Lemov: And that was a tragic story in early reading. But that bent away from the science often unintentionally. I'm not really talking about teachers, I'm really talking about a profession and the way that it socializes teachers and engages teachers and what it expects of teachers and the way it trains teachers.

[00:05:25] Doug Lemov: There's a bent away from what the research tells us, and that has real costs for real kids and real families. And so that was just kind of, I have never been, or I've never taught kindergarten, first grade, second grade, I was a middle school teacher and a high school teacher, so maybe that's why my interest in reading focuses there.

[00:05:40] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah. 

[00:05:41] Doug Lemov: Thinking about maybe all the things that I could have done differently and better. 

[00:05:43] Susan Lambert: Hmm, that makes sense. So the book we're talking about is your brand new book, The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. So you and your colleagues threw your ideas into the hat of this world of Science of Reading. How did this come to be outside of, yes, there was something missing from what Emily Hanford has done in this momentum in the early, early reading space? 

[00:06:09] Doug Lemov: I think a couple things happened. You know, we'd written about reading before you mentioned our book, Reading Reconsidered. We loved writing that book just because we care so much about reading, and I would say that like we care so much about books too. They're so profoundly important. And I think we originally set out to sort of update that book and we realized in the course of writing it that really, it was a totally different book and it was a totally different book for a couple of reasons.

[00:06:30] Doug Lemov: One important reason is that we'd spent the last six or seven years writing a curriculum, and that's taught us a lot about the design of reading. You know, not just the pedagogy of teaching, but the design of teaching materials. We didn't even want to write a curriculum, but I think we realized very quickly that you couldn't really change pedagogical practices, teaching practices, unless the curriculum was aligned to them.

[00:06:50] Doug Lemov: And so, we learned a lot writing a curriculum. We learned a lot reading the science, you know, for five or six years and thinking about how the science applied here. And then I think the world has changed.

[00:07:02] Doug Lemov: We'll probably go in this direction, but the cell phone has rewired the way that students think, it's rewired the way that students read, it's rewired the way that students do not read. And that has real implications for what we do in the classroom. And I think that we've been slow to think about that. So I think that those three factors, like the rise of technology, everything we thought about reading before being updated by understanding the science more, and by writing a curriculum and combining that with watching great teachers in action has kind of spurred us to think, "Okay. It's time for a book on reading, but it's, it's not really the same book anymore. It's a totally different book."

[00:07:35] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Interesting. And I think we're going to dive into this too, but the book is organized in such a way that you're not just providing sort of narrative to the readers of the book, right? You've combined that with your better video footage, so no longer this amateur stuff in the back of the room. But you sort of combine those two things together. Why did you think that was important to do? 

[00:08:00] Doug Lemov: Yeah. Well first of all, like our goal is always to honor teachers. There's nothing I like more than to talk about an idea and then show some brilliant teacher implementing it. 

[00:08:08] Doug Lemov: Because one, I think it like shows that it's possible and it shows how it's possible. We describe ourselves in the book as translators. I'm not a cognitive scientist. I've read a lot, a lot, a lot of cognitive science. But I think that our role is to translate it. Because once you know that an idea is important from a learning standpoint, you're only a small portion of the way there in terms of the journey of like, how do I implement that idea in front of 30 seventh graders on Tuesday morning? You know, combine that with like, and what else? If I know that background knowledge is very, very important to reading comprehension, how do I do that?"

[00:08:41] Doug Lemov: What are the decisions that I make? And how do I combine that with the fact that like fluency is also important and writing is also important, and so what's the, what's the balance? And I think that, you know, one of the things we write about in the book is how important it's to respect the decision-making capacity of teachers.

[00:08:56] Doug Lemov: I think we have to combine that with professional knowledge, right? They have to know the science. And that those two things go together, that when you know the science you should have the autonomy to make real decisions and to solve problems in your classroom. because that's how education works.

[00:09:10] Doug Lemov: So we wanted to both describe the science, but also show real people in real classrooms. Mm-hmm. And can I just say about the videos, like, we never, we never change them. We never tell people what to do. We never like, you know, cut, go back. You know, they're like, they're authentic videos from real classrooms... 

[00:09:25] Susan Lambert: Oh, that's great. Yeah. 

[00:09:25] Doug Lemov: Of real people implementing powerful ideas and, you know, with real kids. And I think that you have to have that, I think both from a credibility standpoint and from a reality standpoint. Just like this is what it looks like when the rubber hits the road. 

[00:09:38] Susan Lambert: I appreciate you sharing that because it's true because a teacher can watch a video and say, "Oh yeah, that's great, but how much was it edited? Or how much scripting happened, or how much this, or how much that?" Because the reality is, and I was a former classroom teacher— it's been a long time, but I still remember the reality of that is—it's quite complicated, even when you have the knowledge that you need to have in the moment with those 30 kids in front of you doing five different things. It's tough. 

[00:10:04] Doug Lemov: I mean, we talk about this, you know, the rest of my work is in pedagogy. Take a very, very simple idea in pedagogy, which is like wait time and how important that is. Like the principle of wait time is very simple to understand, which is after you ask a question, wait a few seconds before you take an answer. Right? And the research is overwhelming clear that the average teacher waits a fraction of a second before taking the first answer. This is an incredibly simple change to make in your classroom. But even the simplest of changes is actually very, very hard to do, as I think almost any teacher will attest, in an environment as complex as a classroom when you're trying to do so many things at once.

[00:10:38] Doug Lemov: And I can speak to this myself, that even like running a workshop for adults, I will often be doing a workshop on wait time and my own wait time will be, I will struggle to make my wait time good. Right? Implementing even a simple idea in an environment as complex as a classroom is challenging. 

[00:10:54] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. And then combine that with, "Okay, let's look at Doug Lemov's new book that has seven main arguments about seven things you need to remember to do in the classroom when you're teaching reading." And it's like, oh my gosh. All right. So, a little bit of a segue to your book. You do include sort of seven main arguments, each of which gets its own chapter. I would love if you could sort of outline those seven arguments at a high level. 

[00:11:22] Doug Lemov: Sure. And be ready to just like, yank me off stage when I start ...

[00:11:25] Susan Lambert: oh, don't you worry.

[00:11:26] Doug Lemov: ...When I start rambling on these words.

[00:11:28] Doug Lemov: Okay, the first argument is about attention and how, you know, Maryanne Wolf, the researcher says that, you know, any learning activity starts with attention, and people underestimate how important attention is to any task. And reading, in particular, is an especially cognitively, attentively demanding task to focus your attention on the text—often challenging text—for 20 minutes at a time, or 10 minutes, you know, and I think as adults, we feel this all the time.

[00:11:53] Doug Lemov: You find your own eyes wandering down the page, you find yourself getting distracted. So we know that that attention is central to reading. I think the thing that we haven't wrestled with is how much attention has changed, that the cell phone hasn't just caused students to desist in reading outside the classroom, it has caused them to change the way that they read and it has caused them to be, to have, you know, attention is malleable. And if you spend six hours a day on social media like the average teenager does, shifting your attention to new and shiny stimulus every few seconds, after a while, you come to expect that. Your mind is waiting for it. And even when your cell phone is not on or in the room, you are waiting for the next shiny distraction every few seconds. Attention is malleable. And we have seen a generation of students who have been rewired. And so this chapter is a lot about how can we push back, how can we rewire, how can we build stamina and attention and focus?

[00:12:54] Doug Lemov: And I think one of the things we talk about there is how powerful it is to bring reading back into the classroom. If we read together as a group, we can curate the experience to cause students to read for five minutes in a really attentive and engaged and interesting environment. Five minutes today, six minutes tomorrow, seven minutes next week, 10 minutes by November, and we can rebuild attention.

[00:13:16] Doug Lemov: And that is really foundational to everything we do in reading. So there's a chapter on that. You know, the key phrase from that chapter, if I could just say, is: We wire how we fire. The brain is neuroplastic, and so the experience we have when we're reading becomes how we will read in the future.

[00:13:31] Doug Lemov: And so we need to be attentive to that. The next chapter is on fluency, which is so profoundly and easily overlooked. Fluency is automaticity, accuracy plus automaticity plus prosody. Right? Can I read correctly? Can I read at speed? Can I invest the words with some semblance of expression that makes it sound like they would've been if they were spoken?

[00:13:54] Susan Lambert: Great. And we're going to dig into that chapter. We're going to come back to that. 

[00:13:56] Doug Lemov: Great. So I'll be very brief. Correlation between students' fluency and their comprehension is usually above 50... is above, you know, above 0.5. So you know, if I understand how fluent a reader you are, I understand about half of your reading comprehension.

[00:14:12] Doug Lemov: And then I think the kicker is like, what is the percentage of students in middle school and high school who are disfluent? Because if you can't read fluently, you're in trouble. And the answer is, no one knows, but the number is massive. So we'll come back to that. So I'll leave that hanging there.

[00:14:26] Doug Lemov: The third and fourth chapters are about knowledge. The first one is about background knowledge, how we often presume that reading comprehension is a set of transferrable skills. That learning to inference from a text is something that someone will explain to me. Maybe they'll come up with the five steps to make an inference, and we'll repeat that a few times. And then we'll practice making inferences from Tuck Everlasting. And then after a while we'll be able to read Oliver Twist and make inferences from Oliver Twist. And I think the cognitive science is overwhelmingly clear that that is not the way that higher order thinking, that comprehension works.

[00:14:56] Doug Lemov: That higher order thinking is domain-specific and that having background knowledge is what causes students to make inferences and understand things in the text. So we have to move from this model of transferable skills, it's going to be a 45-minute lesson on main idea to a model of knowledge-driven reading where we give students the background knowledge they need to make inferences and insights about the text.

[00:15:18] Doug Lemov: And the fourth chapter is about vocabulary, which you could argue is a subset of knowledge. But it's such an important subset of knowledge, maybe the most important form of knowledge. You almost can't conceive of an idea that you don't have a word for. And generally, I think we teach vocabulary as if it was a skill.

[00:15:33] Doug Lemov: Which is to say, you know, we do a lot of context clues, a lot of guessing, right? Like, this is a beautiful, beautiful dream. Let's just close our eyes while I describe this dream. We're going to teach our kids to be able to infer word meaning from context clues so that any unfamiliar word they encounter in their reading for the rest of their lives, they will simply be able to infer the meaning of that word from the words around it on the page. It's a beautiful, beautiful dream. Sadly, uh, it runs directly in conflict with what the science tells us about, and so we have to teach vocabulary differently knowing this.

[00:16:08] Susan Lambert: Can I stop you quick? 

[00:16:09] Doug Lemov: Yeah, please. 

[00:16:10] Susan Lambert: So for our listeners, the two chapters on background knowledge and vocabulary, we've done so many episodes on those two particular topics. But the way that you handled it in the book is beautiful and it's just another voice and another sort of affirmation that, number one, these things are important, and number two, they aren't disconnected from each other right? So I really appreciate the way that you handled those. 

[00:16:33] Doug Lemov: Thank you. And can I say just one more thing about it, which is. I can't tell you how many schools my colleagues and I have visited where the principal or staff at the school will say, " we believe in background knowledge. We understand how important background knowledge is to reading comprehension and we're sold on this idea." And then we walk into their classrooms and we see 45 minutes on main idea, we see, here the seven steps to making it, and we see lessons that we describe as "skillsy." Even people who believe and understand, struggle to make this change practically in classrooms to envision, what does the model, how does it look differently if I'm actually knowledge-driven in my teaching?

[00:17:06] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:17:07] Doug Lemov: And so this is a place where like the videos and the examples I think were really, really important to us to give teachers a mental model of what it looked like when it was done differently. So at that came through, I'm happy. 

[00:17:17] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, for sure it did. I love those chapters. Okay. Keep going.

[00:17:20] Susan Lambert: After vocabulary comes... 

[00:17:21] Doug Lemov: The next chapter's on writing and how profoundly important writing is in a variety of ways. One, because writing is such a great memory tool. But two, because you know, if we teach writing intentionally, we teach students the code that they're also using when they're reading.

[00:17:35] Doug Lemov: And so I think one of the things we talk about in the chapters, we think of three different types of writing. One type of writing is formative writing, which is writing that you use not to demonstrate what you think, but to discover what you think. And that this rarely happens in classrooms.

[00:17:50] Doug Lemov: But if I'm reading a book and I say, "Pause there, take 30 seconds to jot down your thoughts. Why might Jonas have reacted this way to the givers statement? Take 30 seconds to think through some possible ideas." Right? Now, I invest you in the idea that writing, thinking slowly and deliberately, can be a tool to help discover what I think and think deeply about the book, especially coming right out of reading while the text is still in my working memory.

[00:18:17] Doug Lemov: When we talk, we speak at 150 words per minutes. Now 150 words per minute is a really fast rate at which to draw on an idea that you have not deeply encoded in your long-term memory, that you're just discovering, that you're wrestling with, a new word that you can barely use. If you've tried to learn a foreign language, you've probably experienced this, which is, I can write... 

[00:18:38] Susan Lambert: I'm experiencing it now actually.

[00:18:41] Doug Lemov: I can write a pretty good email to, you know, the front desk at a hotel in Spain, if I'm going there, asking for a late checkout. But if I had to walk up to the desk clerk and do that at 150 words per minute, no chance. No chance that I'm going to use the conditional, I'm going to forget half of my vocabulary, because there are things that I know that I can't access that fast. And so when we use writing, we slow students down and we allow them to use ideas that are nascent in their brains, and I think that's really important. Another type of writing that's really important is developmental writing, which is writing that is deliberately designed to cause you to expand your range of syntactic control.

[00:19:15] Doug Lemov: So, I ask you to write a sentence about the chapter that we just read, but I say, " Write one beautiful sentence and begin your sentence, 'At first glance,'" which is really interesting because I cause you to think about, "I have to look at this chapter twice. I have to use an introductory prepositional phrase."

[00:19:35] Doug Lemov: And the students who struggle to read, if I let them write as many sentences as they want, they would say, "I think boop. I think bink, I think bop." They would write wooden subject, verb object, repetitive sentences, and then they're undone when they go into text and the subject and the object are reversed in order or far from each other.

[00:19:54] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:19:54] Doug Lemov: And one of the ways that we think we can help students to master a syntax is by having them expand their own syntactic control in their writing. So, those are some of the things that we talk about in the writing chapter. But writing and reading are incredibly synergistic. Last two chapters, I'll try to hit them quickly because...

[00:20:09] Susan Lambert: You're good. Go ahead. 

[00:20:12] Doug Lemov: The second to last chapter is about the book and how profoundly important reading books, whole books, is for young people. Some people might be surprised that you would need to write a chapter in defense of the book, but books are disappearing from schools. It's not just that they're disappearing from students' lives outside of schools, they're disappearing from classrooms. Students rarely read books cover to cover in classrooms anymore. And this is tragic and highly suboptimal from a learning standpoint. So in this chapter, we sort of summarize the arguments from a research standpoint for why books are the optimal tool for students to be reading if we want them to learn.

[00:20:48] Susan Lambert: I love that you included that because in all the conversations we have about how kids learn how to read, we're forgetting to talk about that. We're forgetting about the tool of the text. And how and when and why we want kids to interact with different types of them. So that's awesome.

[00:21:04] Doug Lemov: Yeah, thanks. Last chapter is about close reading, which is how you learn to read text that is above your comfort level, which, among other things we just talked about, this is the gatekeeper to success beyond K-12 education. You know, there's a really incredible body of research drawn from about 1.2 million test-takers of the ACT, which basically says when they look at students who took the ACT and who struggle to remain in college and succeed in college and to pursue the majors that they want to do, the thing that differentiates those students is they can't read complex text. They can read simple text, they can read leveled text if someone hands them a book on their reading level, they're fine. If someone hands them a text, that is challenging and difficult, they both struggle with the skills to read those and they struggle... the technical skills and the psychological skills of persistence and learning how to approach text, that's difficult. And my coauthor, Colleen Driggs, says that close reading is really like, this is what a lesson is all about, is to teach students to be able to read what is challenging well and insightfully.

[00:22:05] Doug Lemov: And so, we talk a lot about approaches to complex text, how to put things in what we describe as an attentionally privileged or our cognitively privileged environment, letting students study small pieces of text with small changes made between sentences so they can look at like, how does a sentence mean something different if it's written this way or if it's written this way? So we're trying to build up students. There's sensitivity to how text works sort of unit by unit, and often that involves just reading very carefully, smaller units of text. 

[00:22:33] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that makes sense. And you know, it sort of goes back and reminds me of what you were talking about with the chapter on writing about the importance of teaching kids how to write and think about sentences differently as they're authoring them.

[00:22:46] Susan Lambert: And that translation then to what that looks like in text and you know, this power of the sentence, it's been kind of an aha for me lately. Within the last, I would say year, and I even think about it differently when I'm reading myself, when I am doing the reading now myself. I actually find myself stopping to think about, how am I taking these sentences? Like I'm doing this whole sort of close reading myself. It's kind of crazy when you think about it as a reader, how important that sentence is and how the author has crafted it. 

[00:23:17] Doug Lemov: Yeah, it's so interesting and, you know Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler's really, really brilliant book, The Writing Revolution, they make this point that American teachers assign a lot of writing but they don't really teach writing as much. And that in fact, one of the secrets is, if we assign smaller amounts of writing, a single, well-crafted sentence, we can do a lot of things suddenly. We can cause people to be really attentive to the craft of that sentence, and I can ask you to rewrite it right away, as opposed to when I was an English teacher, I would assign a paper. You'd do drafts of your paper, you'd turn it into me, and then it would sit on my desk for six weeks while I like steeled myself to be able to get through that stack of papers so that by the time I gave you any feedback on your writing, you barely remembered writing it yourself.

[00:23:58] Doug Lemov: And you basically would just scan through and ignore all the feedback that I gave you and look at the grade at the bottom. 

[00:24:04] Susan Lambert: Yep. 

[00:24:04] Doug Lemov: So the idea is if we ask kids to write in like a single sentence about what they just read, then we can look at what they just said and say, "Great. Now recraft your sentence based on what your classmate, based on some insight that your classmates shared. Or now recraft your sentence, putting it in the active voice."

[00:24:18] Doug Lemov: Or, we can cause you to leverage the science of deliberate practice if we have you write actually in smaller units of analysis in the study. 

[00:24:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah. It's so amazing and we've done a lot of work about the sentence level too. And just one more quick comment is, I'll never forget, I can't remember if it was on the podcast, if Natalie and I were just talking, but Natalie Wexler said, "You know what? Authors sweat on the sentence level, not the paragraph level, right?" Not the overall text level, but when you're an author you sweat about sentences. So they're important things. 

[00:24:51] Doug Lemov: I like probably rewrote every sentence in the book, you know, 37 times. But in many ways that is why writing is so powerful is because it causes students if we do it well...

[00:25:01] Susan Lambert: yeah. 

[00:25:02] Doug Lemov: ...to constantly have this conversation with themselves, "Have I said exactly what I meant to say? What exactly did I mean to say? Is there a better way to say it?" And that is the way to master the code at the deepest possible level. 

[00:25:14] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:25:14] Doug Lemov: Both as a reader and as a writer. 

[00:25:16] Susan Lambert: It's so true. It's so true.

[00:25:17] Susan Lambert: And not to make a uncomfortable segue, but I think there is a really good segue back here to talking about the importance of fluency. And getting back to fluency, because if we aren't fluent, if you're not a fluent reader at the word level and the sentence level, you're not going to be able to take the author's ideas.

[00:25:36] Susan Lambert: So let's just jump back there. You said something that I really want to hear more about. You said fluency is often overlooked. So before we talk about what fluency is, can you expand on that? 

[00:25:47] Doug Lemov: Yeah. And thanks for asking that. It's so important. It's so unsexy. And things that are mundane and things that happen invisibly, because so much of it's invisible, are... teachers are by their nature, they're ambitious and they're aspirational and they want to go to the richest and the deepest things first. Of course they do, that's one of the beautiful things about teachers. But when we identify something that we can't skip over, it's often really powerful.

[00:26:10] Doug Lemov: So, I'll just start with a really fascinating, scientific, fun fact, which is if you look at written text in your native language, barring extenuating circumstances, you can't not read it. By which I mean like if you look at a sign and it's a no parking sign, you glance at that sign and if you glanced at the sign and you were like, I'm not going to read that sign, you read it faster than you can make a decision not to read it. It takes you, this is really fascinating, it takes half a second to have a conscious thought and you would've processed the words already, before you could take half a second to decide not to read it. That is how quickly and how automatically we read text.

[00:26:47] Susan Lambert: That's so crazy.

[00:26:47] Doug Lemov: So, unless you were distracted by your cell phone or by your spouse shouting you or something like that, you would've read it. You read it instantaneously. So we take our definition of fluency from Mark Seidenberg's outstanding, outstanding book, Language at the Speed of Sight. Fluency is reading at the speed of sight.

[00:27:02] Doug Lemov: I'm just going to like go a little bit nerdy here and cite some research. So, one really fascinating piece of research, it says Lucia Bigozzi and her colleagues, this 2017 research is done in Italy, which I think is interesting because Italian is a much less or orthographically deep language than English. It's an easier language to read. She found that fluency was the single greatest influence on students' grades in every subject area. This is like sixth and seventh grade students, with reading rapidity being the greatest single influence whether students can read accurately and quickly.

[00:27:35] Doug Lemov: Here's why: When you read at the speed of sight, you can read without using your working memory. When we think consciously about something, we're using our working memory. It's our human superpower. It's where we, you know, creative thoughts, deeper thoughts, analytical thoughts, perceptions about the world. "Hmmmm. That's such a fascinating word to use." The problem with working memory is that it's tiny and it's easily overloaded. You can really only think about one thing, maybe two things at a time using working memory. So everything that I'm using my working memory for that is not deep thinking about the text, is going to keep me from doing that deep thinking to the text.

[00:28:12] Doug Lemov: If I'm not fluent. When I'm trying to read in Spanish, I'm not fluent. I can read the text, but it takes me a while. I have to think about what the words mean. Sometimes I have to go back. Even if I don't have to look up a word, I just have to think about it. 

[00:28:25] Susan Lambert: Yep. 

[00:28:25] Doug Lemov: By the time I'm halfway through the sentence, I barely remember the beginning of the sentence.

[00:28:28] Doug Lemov: If I remember the whole sentence, I'm so focused on, what does it mean in just a literal sense that I, like, there's nothing left over for me to think about, like, why that word? What is it indicate? How does it, you know, what subtle nuances are coming out here? And this happens to students in their native language, which is, if you can't read at the speed of sight, you must use your working memory to make sense of the text.

[00:28:47] Doug Lemov: If your working memory is making sense of the text, it can't be used for comprehension. It can't be used for perception. It can't be used for insight. So when we have kids who we otherwise find to be brilliant and insightful and quick-witted, and suddenly we put a text in front of them and all of that breaks down and it falls apart, the first question we should ask ourselves is what could be disrupting their working memory? And the answer is, it's often fluency. That they're not able to read at the speed of sight. And I was really fascinated by this and some of the data on this, because some of the best research on this, like David Page at University of Northern Illinois, is one, I think one of the best researchers on fluency in the country.

[00:29:22] Doug Lemov: He did this really fascinating study on sixth and seventh graders where he found that, you know, if you knew their level of fluency you could predict up to 60% of their comprehension. 

[00:29:31] Susan Lambert: Hmm. 

[00:29:31] Doug Lemov: And I was like, this is fascinating! Like sixth and seventh grade. When was the last time these kids fluency has even been tested? It was probably last tested in second grade at best. Like we stopped thinking about it. 

[00:29:40] Susan Lambert: Can you stop and say that again though? Say that one more time. About the connection between fluency and comprehension. 

[00:29:47] Doug Lemov: Yeah. Fluency is a prerequisite to comprehension. If you have to use your working memory to understand the text, you cannot be thinking, you cannot be making perceptions, you cannot be thinking about what it means, you cannot be drawing connections. And so if you're not a fluent reader, you can't be a deep reader. And the fascinating thing is how late in students' school lives disfluency persists. And how prevalent it is. So I tried to find research on, well, what is the percentage of students who are just fluent at various grade levels? And literally it is not out there.

[00:30:19] Doug Lemov: So, I emailed David Page and then called him. He was incredibly gracious and he wrote me back this email and we took a look at one of these studies together and he was like, "My best guess from looking at the data table in this study is that 40 to 50% of students in middle school and high school grades are probably disfluent or are not reading at the speed of sight. And in communities of the highest need, it may be as high as 80%. 

[00:30:42] Susan Lambert: That's incredible. 

[00:30:44] Doug Lemov: Like that is an epidemic and it's getting worse because kids aren't reading outside of school. 

[00:30:49] Susan Lambert: Right. Right, right, right. Yeah. 

[00:30:51] Doug Lemov: So, if we're not attentive to fluency, we're pouring water into a leaky bucket. It's just this epidemic that's ... it's such a mundane task, right? The act of reading fluently, it's hard to see. It's mostly automatic that we don't notice it because it's such a simple task, we don't realize its consequences and its consequences are very far reaching. 

[00:31:10] Susan Lambert: Yeah. So, I want to back step a little bit, backtrack, whatever, to automaticity. So accuracy first. 

[00:31:18] Doug Lemov: Mm-hmm. 

[00:31:19] Susan Lambert: And we have had a lot of conversations about that. Many, many episodes with many folks. Dr. Jane Ashby is the one that I think of right now, all the way back to making sure that automatic sound spelling recognition ...

[00:31:32] Doug Lemov: Yeah. 

[00:31:33] Susan Lambert: ...builds into, or the accurate, builds into this process that you described.

[00:31:38] Susan Lambert: She calls it "instant words." Basically, you can't unsee the thing. Right. Like how you described. 

[00:31:44] Doug Lemov: Yeah. 

[00:31:44] Susan Lambert: So when we think about that, and then moving in, we haven't talked about prosperity yet, but moving into that, how do we think about, and I don't know if you have an answer to this, but how do we think about those kids that are disfluent?

[00:31:59] Doug Lemov: Yeah. 

[00:32:00] Susan Lambert: And how far back do we have to go to figure out where their breakdown is happening? 

[00:32:04] Doug Lemov: Yeah. Well, they're often hiding in plain sight, right? Especially because they're reluctant to read. Of course they're reluctant to read, and often, therefore, teachers that the kids who teachers are least likely to ask to read, allows them to persist in hiding. And they're often very smart kids, right?

[00:32:17] Susan Lambert: Oh, for sure. Yeah.

[00:32:18] Doug Lemov: Right. So, where does it start? It's a fascinating question. And I think there are a variety of possible answers. It could be a decoding issue, right? We know that for generations, different gaps in the way that we've taught students to decode those gaps compound. Some of the issues could be that there's not firm decoding, you know, that we have to go back to decoding. For some students, they probably can decode. They probably know all the decoding rules. They're not quite fluent at them, or they don't have a good orthographic map, which is, they actually know the decoding rules, but they haven't glued written words to their pronunciation in their head.

[00:32:51] Doug Lemov: So like when you see a word and you say it as soon as you see it, that's an orthographic map. And that just requires a lot of exposure, a lot, a lot, a lot of exposure to develop fluency with a word that you can decode, but you can't make sense of as soon as you see it. And so that requires a lot of oral reading.

[00:33:06] Doug Lemov: And once you read orally well, then lots of silent reading, like lots of miles on the page. But Christopher Such, he's an English researcher, his book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading, is just outstanding.

[00:33:17] Susan Lambert: That's a good one.

[00:33:18] Doug Lemov: He talks about how important repeated reading is to building fluency. So, he suggests taking 10 sentences... we actually adapted this idea. We take 10 sentences from an upcoming lesson, so we're going to read this in the book tomorrow, or we're going to read this in a nonfiction passage tomorrow. I'm going to take 10 sentences out of that. Maybe I'll adjust them slightly to simplify some of the words. But my really weak readers are going to practice reading them two, three, four, five times back to each other, each time seeking more prosody and more automaticity. And as that is the thing that research suggests is most effective for students who understand decoding rules, but aren't able to either chunk syntax quickly or don't have a sufficient  orthographic map to be able to internalize words quickly.

[00:34:04] Doug Lemov: So I think I have to do a bit of triage, which is like, is this a decoding problem or is this a straight orthographic mapping/chunking problem? If it's the latter, it's a lot of repeated reading.

[00:34:14] Doug Lemov: And so, you know, one of the things we suggest is that if you can link that repeated reading to what you're doing in class—so if I can have you read practice sentences that we're going to be reading in class tomorrow, then I can say, " You've read it three or four times and then I can call on you to read in class and you can be really successful reading in class because you've familiarized yourself with this sentence and then you're confident and you're comfortable doing it. And then I can keep calling on you to read in class. 

[00:34:37] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:34:37] Doug Lemov: But one of the things we talk about is that there are really... one of the solutions to fluency is reading a lot, and there are three ways to read. This is a really mundane observation, but it's a really important one.

[00:34:49] Doug Lemov: There are three ways to read. One is someone can read aloud to you.

[00:34:51] Susan Lambert: Oh, love the power of read alouds.

[00:34:52] Doug Lemov: The power of read aloud is like another mundane thing that is routinely overlooked, right? When I read aloud to students, I build for them a mental model of what expressive reading sounds like. And the research is clear that when you start to read expressively externally, then your internal reading voice when you're reading silently is much more expressive and therefore infused with more meaning.

[00:35:09] Doug Lemov: So reading aloud to students is incredibly important. It's also a way to pick up the pace in a lesson and like accelerate the amount of vocabulary and background knowledge I'm getting from reading, when the teacher just takes a passage and says, "You know, I'm going to read this aloud to you."

[00:35:22] Doug Lemov: That's one type of reading. The second type of reading is silent reading—students reading silently to themselves. And the third type of reading is students reading aloud. And we have a system for this that we call FASE reading, which is FASE stands for fluent, accountable, social, and expressive.

[00:35:36] Doug Lemov: So I want to have a system where students can read out loud as a group, in short chunks that are working memory favorable, where they can be successful, where they can infuse the text with their greatest amount of expression, and if they start to struggle, "I can say, thank you. That was beautiful."

[00:35:54] Doug Lemov: Then I can pick up reading and model it for them through read aloud. I don't think there's a right answer for the exact balance between read aloud, student oral reading, and student silent reading. But it's one of the most important questions that teachers can ask, which is, what is the right balance for the text that we're reading and how much time can we spend reading this text in class?

[00:36:12] Doug Lemov: In other words, instead of spending 45 minutes talking about what a main idea is and chanting the main idea is what the sentence is, what the text is mostly about 15 times over and reading one paragraph in the course of an entire lesson and subjecting it to, you know, deep meta analysis for what it's really about.

[00:36:29] Doug Lemov: The problem is actually not that kids don't understand what that means, what the text is mostly about. The problem is that they're probably disfluent. 

[00:36:34] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:36:35] Doug Lemov: So let's read eight pages from the novel aloud together in a combination of like, I read the first page to you and just bring it to life in a beautiful voice. You've never heard someone read so beautifully before, and you're like, "my God, this stories are so interesting." And then I ask you to do it, and then you start to like mimic me a little bit and you're trying to read as expressively as you can. And maybe there's even a little bit of social competition of the kids to read as expressively as they possibly can.

[00:36:58] Doug Lemov: And kids are laughing while other kids are reading sentences and they're getting social cues from their peers that this is great. And then I say, " read to page 1 36 on your own. Go." And all of that verbal, expressive language is now in your head and it's echoing as you read it to yourself. I would just say like, this is a really simple solution. About 45 minutes spent reading a chapter of the novel as a group.

[00:37:22] Doug Lemov: Pause for a few questions. You know, there's some discussion in there, but it's a lot of reading. It's far more productive than 45 minutes spent on, you know, quote, learning how to inference or find the main idea, et cetera. 

[00:37:33] Susan Lambert: Yeah. It's so interesting because as you were talking about this, and I sort of have this mental model going in my head about this classroom, you know, with all this rich, beautiful language, the teacher modeling what this looks like, you know, carefully scaffolded so the students can sort of pick this up.

[00:37:50] Susan Lambert: It occurs to me that ... and I know this right? I know the bidirectional influence of fluency to comprehension. And then as you're comprehending more, your fluency also tends to improve, because of maybe this voice that you're hearing or whatever this is. But, I wonder again how you think about this deep connection between fluency and comprehension.

[00:38:16] Doug Lemov: Fluent reading when it includes prosody is meaning made audible. 

[00:38:19] Susan Lambert: Oh, that's beautifully said. 

[00:38:20] Doug Lemov: It's like, think of all the questions I don't have to ask you, like, what is the character's perspective? Well, if you read it with a sense of like shock or humor, I don't have to ask you that question because you've made it audible to me, right?

[00:38:32] Susan Lambert: Yeah. You made it clear. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. 

[00:38:34] Doug Lemov: And people might interpret it differently and their like, "That's really interesting the way you read that. Tell me about why you read it that way." 

Oh, beautiful. Yeah. 

[00:38:40] Doug Lemov: Yeah. But when we read something, it's impossible to read something with prosody effectively unless you are understanding.

[00:38:48] Doug Lemov: So there is this really, iterative relationship between reading aloud and comprehension. But I think it's just, you know, a very mundane, fundamental thing that's easily overlooked. I can't tell you how many times a teacher has said to me, "I would love to read more with my kids in the classroom, but I'm really worried that my principal will come by and he'll walk in the room, she'll walk in the room, and she'll say, 'why aren't you teaching?'" If we're reading aloud we're not teaching, and I think that's wrong. 

[00:39:16] Susan Lambert: Yeah, and I've often heard too, "Well, you shouldn't be reading aloud to kids when they're in fourth grade or fifth grade, or sixth grade." Right? I'm sure you've heard teachers talk about that too, of having to defend the read aloud. 

[00:39:29] Doug Lemov: Yeah, this is one of the reasons why video is so powerful. There's a video in the book of a teacher named Gabby Wolf. She teaches at the equivalent of 11th grade at a school called King Soloman Academy in London. It's this beautiful class. They're reading Robert Louis Stevenson's, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

[00:39:44] Susan Lambert: Fun.

[00:39:45] Doug Lemov: It's a very fun book and a very hard book. And she starts by reading it aloud to them. Well, she first she gives them a passage to read about Victorian social mores and how important reputation was.

[00:39:58] Doug Lemov: And she talks a little bit about sensationalism and what that word means. And she says, "To honor the sense of Victorian sensationalism, let's try to read this aloud in the most sensationalist way that we can." So she starts reading. It's, I mean, it's beautiful.

[00:40:13] Doug Lemov: And the interesting thing is she's prepared it. Like she's read it a couple times. This sounds so simple. She's read it a couple times herself, so she's pretty good at reading it, and she's prepped it to read it well, so that it just comes to life for the kids.

[00:40:25] Doug Lemov: Then she says, "Ahmed, pick up." And Ahmed starts reading and he's like, he's breathing life into the text too, right? 

[00:40:31] Susan Lambert: That's so great. 

[00:40:31] Doug Lemov: And then she calls on, she says, " Saba, start reading." I mean, it's interesting. Ahmed and Saba, like most of the kids in this classroom, are not born in England. Many of them don't speak English at home.

[00:40:41] Doug Lemov: And so this beautiful model that she's given them of what it sounds like, they're now replicating and copying it. So they read aloud for a little bit. You know, the class is just like, they're so entranced. Then she says, "Read to the bottom of the page in pairs with the person next to you. Read to the bottom of the page until you get to this point. And then I'll just ask you some questions to make sure you understood everything that's happening." The room just crackles to life instantly, like it is unmistakable that the kids are loving reading aloud, that they're enjoying it. It gives them pleasure. They read beautifully. They have a quick discussion and then they read the rest of the chapter on their own. But they're just, they're just bought into this and it's, really remarkable. So, and again, like, these are 11th grade students. 

[00:41:23] Susan Lambert: So Cool.

[00:41:24] Susan Lambert: We had a recent episode with Molly Ness around her book that she wrote about the power of interactive read alouds. We'll link the listeners in the show notes just as a reminder. It's so cool. 

[00:41:33] Doug Lemov: Can I just say, you mentioned interactive read alouds. I think that one of the other things that's happening in this classroom is again, like, we're making reading a social act. And we're a profoundly social species. Group formation became incredibly important to us. Evolution. We are the heirs to the group formers. The people who could not form groups, who couldn't maintain their membership in groups, they all died, right?

[00:41:57] Doug Lemov: We are the group formers. This is relevant to reading because one, stories started well before there was written text and we sat around campfires in prehistory. I talk about this phrase from Daniel Willingham's book, Why Don't Students Like School? The stories are cognitively privileged. If you give a student a passage in the form of a narrative and you give them the same information in the form of expository text, they're far more likely to remember more of it for longer from the narrative version? 

[00:42:22] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah. 

[00:42:22] Doug Lemov: Because for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, we sat around these campfires telling stories to each other about how do we hunt an antelope? How do we make fire, right? Like really, really important things. So the people who listened to the stories gained one, evolutionary advantage by transmitting survival critical information. But they also reaped this evolutionary advantage of group formation, that we listened to the story together and we laughed and we cried, and because we experienced the story together, we were bonded. There is no culture on earth that doesn't have myths, right?

[00:42:54] Doug Lemov: These are the stories that we told that told about who we are. The purpose of those stories is to bond us into a group. So I just think it's easy for us to overlook how profoundly groupish we are, how we yearn for group formation, how stories, when they're told well, when they're shared, they bind us together. It's really important to read a story together and hear other people's perspectives cognitively.

[00:43:19] Doug Lemov: But it's also really important to hear a story together and all of us laugh and all of us react to the story because it connects us to a group and makes us feel inclusion and belonging. And if we want the book to win in its death struggle against the profoundly isolating technology of the cell phone and social media, I think the way back is through making the book social. That if we read it together and I feel connected to the 30 people around me and we've experienced it together in a way that makes me feel a sense of belonging because the story was meaningful to all of us. 

[00:43:51] Susan Lambert: Right. 

[00:43:52] Doug Lemov: And by reading it aloud, I hear as you read it aloud that it's meaningful to you and then you're laughing when I'm reading my version of it and then it tells you that you care about, then I make the act of reading meaningful and pleasurable and connect students to it.

[00:44:05] Doug Lemov: I think it's really interesting that in this day and age when reading is dying among adults too, and reading rates among adults have are dwindling, the book club has never been more popular. Why? Because it's a shared experience, right? It's us connecting together. I just think there's something very powerful there for us to think about when and how stories are experienced by students to make them connected to the reading process. 

[00:44:32] Susan Lambert: I want to make a connection too, with this, because I think often we talk about wanting students to experience deep meaning and deep connection and the stories that they're...

[00:44:42] Doug Lemov: meaning of social. Yeah.

[00:44:42] Susan Lambert: Yeah. But you know what that is too? That's a type of comprehension, right? We often think and talk about comprehension as a very shallow, either you have comprehended it or you haven't comprehended it. But when you get to this level that you're talking about, that we're sharing this experience that we're, well, I mean, going back to fluency too, that we're able to connect with the text itself. We're able to be able to infuse some meaning through how we're reading that text. That lends us to a depth of comprehension. That's really where we want kids to get to, or any reader to get to. 

[00:45:19] Doug Lemov: I think that is so true. What we want is cognitive understanding, but also like deeply empathic reading where I feel the experience of the people in the story, of the person talking to me. I understand their viewpoint, right? I can internalize what they...one of the other reasons why stories are cognitively privileged is because they replicate in some way the internal cognitive processes of a human being, right? It's like, me narrating the story of my life is very similar to the protagonist of the book narrating the story of their life.

[00:45:47] Doug Lemov: So, I do think that this is true, that we want emotional and psychological connection to the text because that's the deepest level of meaning and understanding. And I think that it also goes back, can I say to technology? 

[00:45:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah. 

[00:45:58] Doug Lemov: I tell the story in the book of my son when he was in high school I made him read for 45 minutes three times a week, because he was a voracious reader until he got his cell phone. And it was a struggle to get him to read. And I was like, reading is so important. So I was like, okay, three times a week for you, big guy.

[00:46:13] Susan Lambert: Meany. 

[00:46:13] Doug Lemov: And when he would read (right, right), he would be lying on the couch on his back with the book open in front of him, and his cell phone would be on his chest.

[00:46:21] Doug Lemov: And every five seconds, "Bzzz. Dude, over at Byron's, you coming over?" "Bzzz. Dude, got the math homework?" "Bzzz. Dude, check out this video," "Bzzz. Dude, that girl in your math class, when are you going to ask her out?" And so, he might have read the same book that I read 30 years before, but his psychological connection to the text is constantly disrupted and constantly interrupted.

[00:46:40] Doug Lemov: He doesn't lose himself in the text in the same way that we would through deep reading. He's reading a different and far shallower book. Unless—and this is why I think it's so important to attend to the reading process Itself—if I can bring reading back into the classroom and I can cause you to read deeply and...the other thing about that Gabby Wolf video that I was telling you is that those students read aloud from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for something like 15 minutes straight. You know the version changes, who's reading it changes, but they're reading deeply and in a highly connected state for 15 minutes. And that is a fundamentally different experience from reading for 15 seconds, breaking your train of thought, you never quite immerse yourself in the world of the book. If you're interrupted, I 100 percent agree with what you said, which is it's that state of deep immersion that is profoundly meaningful and profoundly pleasurable.

[00:47:34] Doug Lemov: I mean, no one gets to the end of a day when they've spent doom scrolling on their phone, and said, "I'm really glad that I did that." Even a teenager, like at the end of the time, you're like, "I can't believe I wasted three hours doing it. I wish I'd played guitar. I wish I'd gone to the gym. I wish I'd read a book."

[00:47:47] Susan Lambert: Right. 

[00:47:47] Doug Lemov: Part of what we're doing is trying to connect students with the very difficult experience of disciplining yourself to experience a text in a deeply empathic way for a sustained a period of time. And when you do that enough times, you come to discover the power of it. 

[00:48:03] Susan Lambert: We're starting this new season all about comprehension, and I think what you're talking about is you definitely think comprehension is something worth exploring, right? A topic worth exploring? But you have just broadened our definition, I think, here of comprehension and helping us understand that comprehension just isn't coming out of a book, knowing what the author said. It's deeply connected to the content that you just experienced. 

[00:48:29] Doug Lemov: Yeah. It's another argument for books too,. I just finished Ian McEwan's book, Atonement. I don't know if you've read that. Someone recommended to me. People say it's often one of the best novels of the 21st century.

[00:48:39] Doug Lemov: I read 60 pages of it and I was like, "eh, okay, I'll keep going." Like it was good. It wasn't great. I was kind of counting the pages. I was like, "I'm on page 49 now." And then around page 60, something shifted and I looked down and I was on page 103. You know, it just like, suddenly it takes some time to lose yourself in the world of something.

[00:48:58] Doug Lemov: Nothing else does this like a book because it's long and you have to struggle through it. You're almost kind of resisting and then suddenly you have enough context that you start to enter this world in a way that like really, like nothing else can do this for you in society.

[00:49:10] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:49:11] Doug Lemov: And then you find yourself like having an experience of incredibly deep meaning that is really just not available to you through any other means, and that you would never have access to if you weren't caused to persist with a book that, like, it took a while. And that is a really important experience for a student to resist it and not to be sure that it's worth it and persist anyway, and then suddenly find that you've been transformed into a state of thinking that is unlike anything else that you've ever done.

[00:49:35] Susan Lambert: That's so lovely. That's really lovely. It makes it all worth it, for sure. I hate to really cut off this conversation, but I wonder as we're starting to wrap up in some closing thoughts, bringing it back to the book, what do you really hope that readers will take away? 

[00:49:55] Doug Lemov: If we teach well, according to the science—I mean, I think there's a narrative out there that if I teach background knowledge, if I teach facts, if I teach according to science, that will be boring, right? Like somehow that will be not engaging to kids. But if I teach well and I find a way into the book for students and I increase the amount that they understand the book because they have context for it and we read it aloud and it comes to life. If I amalgamate the tiny benefits of each of these small things and I teach the book better, I can give students access to a world that has, like, this is the world in which every idea that our society is based on has been communicated through written text and through books. And it's profoundly important and has been profoundly important to people for a reason because there's nothing else like it. It's at risk of disappearing. And if I can give them access to that world, I give them an immense gift, right? It has immense economic value to them.

[00:50:48] Doug Lemov: If you're the kid who can read deeply, are you better set up to be a doctor or a lawyer, you know, or a government official or a scientist? Absolutely. If you can read a really challenging text more deeply than the next guy, and persist, you know, at 80 pages, and yes, you're going to win.

[00:51:02] Doug Lemov: It's going to be an immense second, but it also makes you a better person and a more rich and complete version because you've had access to patterns of thinking that are deeper and richer and more meaningful, and that makes you a better person. So, our goal should be for students to read the best things that are available to them.

[00:51:21] Doug Lemov: It's tragic to think about how many students that the books that we read in school with them will be the lion's share of the books that they read in their lives. But it means we better make those books sing and we better make them powerful. And the way to do that is to attend to the science and listen to what the science tells us about the path to bringing great text to life for young people.

[00:51:40] Doug Lemov: And often it starts with really, really mundane things like fluency and attention. 

[00:51:46] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Beautifully said. And of course, listeners we'll link you in the show notes to where you can purchase this book. I'm super excited about the way that you brought the format to life, but also very thankful of the way that you put this in the context of a little bit older reader to sort of help bridge that gap for folks that need to have more of that science in their classroom.

[00:52:11] Susan Lambert: Doug Lemov. Thanks for joining us. I always learn so much and laugh so much when I spend time with you. Thanks again to you and your colleagues for bringing this book to life, so thank them from us.

[00:52:22] Doug Lemov: I will for sure.

[00:52:22] Susan Lambert: It was a pleasure to have you. 

[00:52:24] Doug Lemov: It was my pleasure too. Thanks.

[00:52:28] Susan Lambert: Thanks for listening to my conversation with Doug Lemov. His new book with Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway is titled, The Teach Like A Champion Guide to the Science of Reading: Translating Research to Reignite Joy and Meaning in the Classroom. We've got a link in the show notes.

[00:52:46] Susan Lambert: Also, we have a brand new comprehension bundle. This free collection includes e-books and on-demand professional learning. Download it now at at.amplify.com/comprehension101. We've also got a link in the show notes. You can access more free resources at our new professional learning page, amplify.com/soressentials. And please don't forget to submit your questions about comprehension. We'd love to address them in an upcoming episode. Go to amplify.com/sormailbag. Next time we're exploring the cognitive processes underlying comprehension with Dr. David Rapp. 

[00:53:37] David Rapp: It's interesting from a researcher's perspective, because we'd love to know a lot about process, but it's really hard to get at what's going on in the moment as someone reads a blog post or looks at a newspaper, or, you know, consults a menu at a restaurant.

[00:53:51] Susan Lambert: Also for research backed tips to help you extend your reach in the classroom, check out the latest episode of The Beyond My Years podcast. 

[00:53:59] Guest: When I know something about the structure of these students in their home language, I can understand better the error patterns. And I say errors inform instruction. 

[00:54:10] Susan Lambert: That's available now in the Beyond My Years feed. There's a link in the show notes.

[00:54:15] Susan Lambert: Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.