Science of Reading: The Podcast

S10 E11: Learning to read vs. reading to learn, with Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education • Season 10 • Episode 11

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D., distinguished professor emeritus from the University of Illinois at Chicago, joins Susan Lambert to distinguish between reading comprehension, learning from a text, and the process of learning to read. He compares learning to read with athletic training, explaining that just as athletes need to vary their workout intensities to maximize their strength, students need to vary their text difficulty to maximize their comprehension, reading skills, and overall learning. Together, Timothy and Susan also discuss why reading comprehension is an ethical act and the power of simply rereading to increase comprehension.

Show notes:

Quotes:

"We're trying to teach kids to read, and a text that is immediately comprehensible leaves you very little to learn." —Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D.

"Reading comprehension is not just a psychological or cognitive action—it's an ethical action." —Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D.

"Comprehension is not automatic. It isn't just, 'Oh, if you decode, you're going to comprehend.'" —Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D.

"A good reader has to start out with a determination. 'My job here is to understand it, not just to read it.'" —Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D.


Timestamps*:
00:00 Introduction: Learning to read vs. reading to learn with Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D.
06:00 Reading comprehension is not just a psychological or cognitive action, it's an ethical action.
09:00 Authors know their readers and so they put in affordances aimed at the reader.
15:00 Timothy's motivation for writing his blog post, "Don't Confuse Reading Comprehension and Learning to Read."
17:00 A text that is immediately comprehensible, leaves you very little to learn.
19:00 You can increase the learning for most people if you increase the difficulty.
24:00 An argument for students to read more rigorous texts.
28:00 A good reader has to start out with determination.
35:00 The different between learning and understanding is an issue of remembering.
39:00 Teachers need to teach kids to be strategic.
42:00 Timothy Shanahan's new wrinkle in thinking about comprehension, understanding, and learning.
44:00 In conclusion: Kids should be reading texts with varying levels of difficulty.
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

[00:00:00] Tim Shanahan: A text that is immediately comprehensible, leaves you very little to learn.

[00:00:09] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. We were midway through this season on comprehension when we discovered a piece from Dr. Timothy Shanahan titled "Don't Confuse Reading Comprehension and Learning to Read (and to Reread)." Dr. Shanahan's post was only about 1500 words, but it raised some profound questions about comprehension and the circumstances in which comprehension is and isn't our primary objective. If you've been with me on the Season 10 journey, I think you'll also find Dr. Shanahan's ideas interesting, and I'm thrilled to welcome him back on the show. On this episode, we discuss the distinctions between comprehension, learning to read, and learning more broadly. And we discuss the classroom benefits that come with appreciating those differences. Here's our conversation that we recorded at the end of 2025.

Well, we have back Dr. Timothy Shanahan. You are not a stranger to this podcast, and thank you for joining us one more time.

[00:01:18] Tim Shanahan: I'm happy to be here. This is great! Thanks for having me back.

[00:01:22] Susan Lambert: Absolutely. Um, the last time you were here, we were talking about your new book, "Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives," and I want you to know it's one of our most popular episodes of the year. And so, if listeners haven't checked out the episode, they should. If they haven't bought your book, they should. This book has gone viral. Tim, did you expect that?

[00:01:44] Tim Shanahan: It's certainly getting a lot of attention. Uh, I don't know what I expected. I think my original plan was that I hoped it would end up in, like, 900 college libraries.

[00:01:55] Susan Lambert: That nobody would read, you mean?

[00:01:57] Tim Shanahan: Well, someday they might. It's turned out that it's maybe a little bit bigger book than that.

[00:02:05] Susan Lambert: Any clue why it's so popular?

[00:02:08] Tim Shanahan: Uh, you know, I think that a lot of people buy the basic, fundamental idea of it. That we should be teaching kids with more challenging texts than we have been.

[00:02:17] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:02:18] Tim Shanahan: But they're not too sure why that is, or how to do that. And this book, the amount of research behind what's in this book is ... you've never seen anything like it. The list of, uh, citations is almost as long as the book itself.

[00:02:35] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:02:35] Tim Shanahan: Uh, in fact, we had to publish it separately from the book because it's just too long.

[00:02:40] Susan Lambert: That's amazing.

[00:02:40] Tim Shanahan: Uh, so I think people, like I say, they were sympathetic with the idea. They liked the idea. But how does that actually work in a classroom? And why and how would you do it? And all those kinds of questions come up.

[00:02:54] Susan Lambert: Yeah, for sure. You know, not to say that you're old, but you've been around a long time. And I think the thing I appreciated most about it was the historical point of view.

[00:03:07] Tim Shanahan: Yeah.

[00:03:08] Susan Lambert: And that timeline.

[00:03:10] Tim Shanahan: Yeah, I usually take a historical approach to these things. You know, I was talking to somebody recently, and they said, "Oh, I never use a citation more than 20 years old," or something like that.

[00:03:21] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:03:22] Tim Shanahan: Uh, I'm much more interested in ideas that have been around for a long time, and how they've evolved. And one of the things the book does is takes readers through how did we get here? Why are we doing this? Are people stupid? Are they mean? You know, what's going on? And, of course, none of those things are true.

[00:03:41] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:03:41] Tim Shanahan: There were well-meaning, intentional actions that were meant to address immediate problems, and that maybe did. But, in the long run, have turned out, at least, you know, in our period, have turned out not to be such wonderful approaches. And we need to make adjustments, just like they made adjustments.

[00:04:00] Susan Lambert: Yeah, it's a great point. It's the evolution of science, right?

[00:04:03] Tim Shanahan: Exactly.

[00:04:04] Susan Lambert: Um, the ever evolving process. And I meant to go back and look at the book. I'm not sure that you explicitly talked about or addressed comprehension, which we're gonna talk about today, but we've been asking folks this season to just give their definition of comprehension. And I would love if you would provide our listeners with the Tim Shanahan definition of comprehension.

[00:04:27] Tim Shanahan: I do actually have one.

[00:04:30] Susan Lambert: Yay!

[00:04:31] Tim Shanahan: To me, reading comprehension is the ability to understand or make sense of the ideas expressed or implied through text by making use of a text affordances and surmounting any linguistic and conceptual barriers it may pose. Now, that's a mouthful. I know. That's complicated. Can I just break it down a little?

[00:04:54] Susan Lambert: Please? Unpack that a little.

[00:04:55] Tim Shanahan: Yeah. In that definition, understanding the author's message is key.

[00:05:01] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:05:01] Tim Shanahan: Uh, you know, reading comprehension's the ability to understand or make sense of the ideas expressed or implied. So, what the author intends matters. That makes reading comprehension not just a psychological or cognitive action, it's an ethical action.

[00:05:16] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:05:17] Tim Shanahan: You know, we have a responsibility to the author to try to understand what he or she is saying. And what they actually mean. Not, oh, you know ... you'll see politicians do it. "Ah, you know, this person said something in an inelegant way. I'm gonna make it seem like they said some terrible thing."

[00:05:35] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:05:36] Tim Shanahan: Eh, nah. That's unethical. That's not a good use of people, of their words, their ideas. And so, that's one piece of it. It's also comprehension is not automatic. It isn't just, "Oh, if you decode, you're gonna comprehend."

[00:05:52] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:05:53] Tim Shanahan: It requires intention. It requires action on the part of the reader, which means we have to take advantage of the affordances that an author builds into the text. And there are gonna be times when there are barriers to understanding. You know, the author used a word I don't know the meaning of, the author said something in a way that I thought was ambiguous. And so, you have to take action to try to make sense of the text. Authors construct their text with an intention of communication. They're trying to get their idea to us. And they use language. They use text-based devices, like how we organize the page and stuff.

[00:06:37] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:06:37] Tim Shanahan: They use how they treat the content or the information about what they're talking about. Those are all affordances. Those are the things that authors put in that they think are gonna help us, that they try to get to help us, and they're reaching out to particular readers. They know who they're writing for, and they try to say things in ways that are going to support their reader in making sense of the text. Now, as I pointed out, sometimes these affordances, these helps that they put into their text, turn out to be barriers. The easiest one to think of is vocabulary.

[00:07:13] Susan Lambert: Mm, sure.

[00:07:13] Tim Shanahan: Author uses very precise diction. Says exactly what they mean, so that you're gonna be able to get it. And you don't know the meaning of some of the words.

[00:07:22] Susan Lambert: Right. Or the nuances of those words. Yeah.

[00:07:25] Tim Shanahan: Absolutely. So, you just took something that was there to help you and it became a barrier to your understanding.

[00:07:31] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:07:32] Tim Shanahan: And as a reader, you have to recognize that and take some kind of action to fix it. To deal with it. Other examples, uh, you know, Hemingway wrote with such little sentences. So short. But what that means is you've got a lot of work to do as a reader to connect the ideas, 'cause Hemingway isn't gonna do that for you. Oh my goodness! So he's made the syntax really easy, but he's made the cohesion very difficult. You know, I've got work to do as a reader. And, of course, william Faulkner went the other way, you know, "Oh, I've got a hundred-word sentence here, and I'm gonna repeat one idea six different times. And I'm gonna say things in lots of different ways, and it's gonna be complex." I'm gonna have to learn to break down a sentence like that, make sense of it. So, you know, all of those things have to be there for comprehension to happen. The author has to build a text. You have to both use what he's put in there, but you also have to overcome those things that are barriers. And then there's finally one other aspect of this, and that is ... I said that authors know their readers and so they put in affordances aimed at the reader. An example of that, somebody's writing about communications.

[00:08:51] Susan Lambert: OK.

[00:08:51] Tim Shanahan: Online communications, something like that. And they wanna show you the complexity of it, or how it can break down. And they use a metaphor. And the notion of the metaphor is I'm going to take something complicated and I'm gonna explain it in terms that you're gonna understand. I'm gonna connect to your experience. So a traffic jam makes great sense. I'm gonna publish this in a newspaper, or a magazine, that a lot of adults are gonna be reading. They know what a traffic jam is. Terrific! So they use that metaphor to connect so that you can go, "Oh, I see! If too many messages are going through at the same time, it's all gonna get blocked up. Ah, I get it." OK. A teacher or a publishing company gets a brilliant idea. "This is such a cool article. We think sixth graders would really be interested in this," not recognizing, "Hey, wait a minute. That metaphor wasn't for 11 year olds. That metaphor was aimed at people like you and me." Now the kids are looking and going, "What's a traffic jam? I dunno. What are they talking about? I've never been in a traffic jam." What that means is that there are gonna be these unintended barriers, but there are also times when authors put in barriers intentionally to slow you down, or to get you to pay attention to something, or even just to interpret the words appropriately, to get the nuances you said.

[00:10:19] Susan Lambert: Interesting.

[00:10:20] Tim Shanahan: Lincoln is a good example of that.

[00:10:22] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:22] Tim Shanahan: Abraham Lincoln was terrific at it.

[00:10:24] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:10:25] Tim Shanahan: Famous, famous sentence from his, uh, second inaugural address, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away." Now, in a lot of ways it's an easy sentence, but it's weird. If you turn this over to the Lexile people, if you turn this over, somebody wants to make this so that kids can read it and it'll be at the right level and stuff. You wouldn't say, "Fondly do we hope."

[00:10:58] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:10:58] Tim Shanahan: You would write, "We hope fondly."

[00:11:01] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:11:01] Tim Shanahan: Right? You'd put the adverb after the verb. You'd start with the subject, the "we." You'd get rid of that "do." What do we need "Fondly do we hope?" I mean, we hope fondly. And the same thing with "fervently do we pray," we pray fervently. Oh, you know, "that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away." OK. You know, we just made it easier. We just made it simpler. That's not what Lincoln was going for.

[00:11:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:11:27] Tim Shanahan: You know. What happens here? Well, one of the things is by switching the order of that sentence around the weird way he has done, he makes it sound like Scripture. It sounds liturgical, it sounds religious.

[00:11:40] Susan Lambert: Right, yeah.

[00:11:41] Tim Shanahan: That would connect with his intended audience, right? Adults in the mid-1860s. He hides the "we," he buries it. Instead of starting with "we" are gonna do this, he emphasizes the emotions "fondly" and "fervently" over the actions of "hoping" and "praying," and he buries the "we." This isn't about agency. This is about feeling. He's saying to people, "Look, we've all lived through this horrible war. We need it to go away. I'm not telling you to do something right now. I'm telling you what we're all feeling." And so he does that. He gets rid of human agency and so on. He creates a rhyme scheme that makes it like a hymn. It makes it memorable, so more people will not just comprehend it, but they might remember it, which isn't bad. He's emphasizing morality and human emotion over the political things that you would usually see in these kinds of addresses ... You know, "We just won this election. We're wonderful. We're gonna do all these great things for you." Eh, you know, he's not doing that.

[00:12:47] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:12:48] Tim Shanahan: And it's got a formal tone that isn't sentimental. It doesn't feel yucky, you know, it doesn't creep you out. But what he's done is he's slowed down the communication. He forces you to consider that sentence more than once, which increases the chances of it having the impact.

[00:13:11] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:11] Tim Shanahan: Now, of course, they're gonna be readers who go, "Eh, I don't care."

[00:13:14] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:14] Tim Shanahan: And just read through it. That's not who he's writing for. That's not who HIS audience was. And so, you know, he's looking for people who want to think about this. And who are willing to slow down when the syntax tells you you have to. So you go, "Well, I thought you said they wanna communicate?" They do, but that doesn't mean they wanna communicate in the most trivial kind of way that, you know, in this case yeah he wants to say, "We all want this war to be over." But he is really trying to get you to think of that in religious terms, in emotional terms.

[00:13:48] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:13:49] Tim Shanahan: Not we're gonna end this war and here's how we're gonna do it. It's not that kind of a speech.

[00:13:54] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:13:54] Tim Shanahan: So comprehension requires that.

[00:13:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And it goes back to the first point you made that, right, the responsibility of the reader is really to get at the heart of what the writer was intending.

[00:14:06] Tim Shanahan: Exactly.

[00:14:07] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that seems pretty complicated.

[00:14:10] Tim Shanahan: It is complicated.

[00:14:11] Susan Lambert: So, this sort of is a great segway, because we reached out to you because of that post that you did, called "Don't Confuse Reading Comprehension and Learning to Read (and to Reread)." And I see some connections here between what you just said about comprehension. But can we talk a little bit about that? Like, this was a blast from the past article too, wasn't it? Like, what was the motivation there?

[00:14:34] Tim Shanahan: Well, a teacher had written me,. He was actually writing about a graduate class he was taking, I believe it was a he, and he, uh, wrote to me and said, "uh, you know, my professor says you're wrong." You know, I'm out there saying we should be teaching kids with grade-level text. And the college professor in an education class is teaching these teachers, or potential teachers, that they should be teaching kids with texts at their level.

[00:15:02] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:15:03] Tim Shanahan: Which, there are few different ways that people operationalize that, but typically what they mean is kids are gonna recognize a large percentage of the words, and they're gonna be able to comprehend a large part of the text, even without any instruction.

[00:15:19] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:20] Tim Shanahan: You know, that the kids would start there. And so, the notion is that there'd be just a little bit to learn. You wouldn't overwhelm kids, and so on.

[00:15:27] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah.

[00:15:28] Tim Shanahan: And the professor was essentially telling them and giving them articles showing that if the text is hard, kids don't comprehend it as well. Uh, if the text is hard, the fluency is likely to go down.

[00:15:39] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:15:40] Tim Shanahan: And so, essentially, the student was saying, "I'm confused." You know?

[00:15:45] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:15:45] Tim Shanahan: You say the research says one thing. He says the research says something else. Here's the study he gave me, and it was a good study. It was a study that really did show that harder texts led kids to read those texts, uh, with lower comprehension. And that's usually true. Almost always true.

[00:16:02] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:16:03] Tim Shanahan: The person was a teacher, and so he was saying, you know, "I think the professor's right. You know, when I try to teach kids with harder texts, they don't comprehend it as well." That's what led to me taking this on. And my response to him was that it depends on what you're trying to do. If the point is that the kids need to comprehend the text —

[00:16:23] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:16:23] Tim Shanahan: Um, you know, imagine the office has sent something saying, "Hey, boys and girls, when you're on the playground, we don't want you to go to this area, 'cause it's dangerous." There's gonna be some ... man I want really easy text. I want something that everybody can read with comprehension. You know, I don't wanna spend a lot of time trying to explain it, or break it down, like I was doing to that Lincoln sentence. Or anything like that. I want, "Oh yeah, dangerous. Stay away, boom. Yeah. Got it." You know, that's what we're going for. But, in this case, we're trying to teach kids to read. And a text that is immediately comprehensible leaves you very little to learn. There's not much that you have to do to figure it out. So, if we had made that text easier, that sentence easier, the kids would comprehend it. But would they actually comprehend it? Would they get to the depth of it? Would they understand that it wasn't just the words, it was how the words were arrayed that was making a difference there? And that the meaning of it was actually deeper, more layered than what the words themselves maybe were conveying?

[00:17:33] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:17:33] Tim Shanahan: And so, very, very important to make that distinction or you're gonna do what we've done for generations, which is put kids in texts where there's very little for them to learn, which means that they make very little progress, which explains a lot of our low literacy levels and our inability to raise achievement.

[00:17:58] Susan Lambert: Mm. Yeah.

[00:17:59] Tim Shanahan: It really is kinda crazy.

[00:18:01] Susan Lambert: So learning to read a text, you would say, is "Well, I can recognize all the words," right? I maybe started with decodables in younger grades, and now I can read all the words. And I can make it through the syntax, but maybe I can't completely comprehend this text. So you're really trying to separate these two ideas of reading and comprehension?

[00:18:25] Tim Shanahan: Absolutely! You know, learning to read is certainly one kind of learning. The other kind of learning is I wanna learn the information from the text.

[00:18:33] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:34] Tim Shanahan: And what studies there suggest is you can increase the learning, for most people, if you increase the difficulty. Because people have to think about it more. They have to work — it's the Lincoln sentence.

[00:18:48] Susan Lambert: Right, right.

[00:18:48] Tim Shanahan: If I can slow you down in reading through this sentence —

[00:18:52] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:18:52] Tim Shanahan: If I can make you go back and reread it a couple times, to make sure you're getting it, I increase the chances that you're going to get the real meaning that I'm trying to put across here. If maybe I don't have some depth of meaning, it's just some content I want you to get, the more easily that's understood by you —

[00:19:11] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:19:11] Tim Shanahan: The less you're gonna work at it. The less likely you're gonna remember it later, which means I just cut your learning of that kind of information as well.

[00:19:23] Susan Lambert: I love this! And I remember when we were talking in the pre-call a little bit, we were talking about if you wanna comprehend a text, just like you were saying, I'm gonna give you something that is really simple to read. I want you to comprehend everything that's in there versus I'm gonna give you a text because I want you to learn about something new. And so, maybe those are two different purposes for using a text.

[00:19:49] Tim Shanahan: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:19:50] Susan Lambert: And maybe there's a distinction between comprehension versus learning in general.

[00:19:56] Tim Shanahan: Yeah.

[00:19:56] Susan Lambert: And if we want kids to learn, you gotta struggle with the text. Is that kind of what you're saying?

[00:20:01] Tim Shanahan: Yes. Yeah, you do. And the struggle part, really, it plays both a role in learning to read and in learning information.

[00:20:10] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:20:11] Tim Shanahan: In the learning to read part, I can't teach you how to make sense of ideas. I can't teach you how to understand or make sense of those ideas that the authors expressed or implied unless I put you in situations that are gonna trip you up. So that you can see what those barriers look like. You need to come to recognize them.

[00:20:33] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:20:34] Tim Shanahan: You read that Lincoln sentence and you say, "I don't get what he's saying," or "you know, wait a minute, this is kinda weird. Oh, wait a minute. He's changed the order of the sentence from what we would normally do. I wonder why he did that?"

[00:20:45] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:45] Tim Shanahan: If you don't notice it —

[00:20:47] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:20:47] Tim Shanahan: You're not gonna get much out of it. You're not gonna think about it. And so, what you want texts to be able to do is certainly expose kids to new words.

[00:20:56] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:20:57] Tim Shanahan: You want it to expose kids to texts that have a variety of sentence types, and some sentences that frankly will trip them up, and you want those cohesion problems, and so on. You want those things to be there so that you actually have something. You can explain it. You can show kids, look, when you get one of those Faulkner sentences, here's what I do with it. Here's how you can break it up.

[00:21:19] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:21:20] Tim Shanahan: Let's practice that, "Hey, watch for that. When you're reading a text, make sure you're understanding those sentences, and if you're not, here's how you can separate the sentence out and make sense of it. Let's go looking for some verbs and see if we can find those in these sentences." That kind of thing. On the learning the content — so we're reading a science book and I'm supposed to know about whatever it is. The reason for the struggle there is it forces you to do things like reread. You know, I think I understood it, but I'd like to read it again. Or I think I understood it, but I'm not gonna remember it. I'd better go back. And then, oh wow. Well, you didn't struggle. You just didn't really get purchase on it. You weren't, "Oh my goodness, this was just so hard." It's not necessarily that. I'm not gonna remember this.

[00:22:09] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:22:10] Tim Shanahan: I remember talking to an accountant once, and we were looking at different tax forms and stuff, and he says, "I deal with a variety of customers. People bring in their taxes and I fill out all the forms," and he says, "I have to be especially careful on the easy forms. The ones where, you know, it's just like one page." And I said, "Why is that? It's not as complicated as these other ones. He says, it's easier for me to pay attention and to be careful with those really complicated ones."

[00:22:37] Susan Lambert: Interesting.

[00:22:38] Tim Shanahan: "Because you don't get as many of 'em. You have to go through them more slowly and carefully." He says, "These easy ones, you can just miss things really easily, 'cause you're not paying close enough attention, 'cause it seems easy and so I have go through it twice."

[00:22:54] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:22:54] Tim Shanahan: "I do various things." He built in routines. He had a strategy for making simpler routines a little harder, so that he wouldn't hesitate to look at them carefully enough.

[00:23:04] Susan Lambert: Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting. This reminds me of two things. The first one is, you know, when we talk about exposing kids to more rigorous texts, right? More rigorous texts, or those texts that they struggle a little bit with —

[00:23:18] Tim Shanahan: Yes.

[00:23:19] Susan Lambert: Teachers get a little scared of the concept of rigorous texts.

[00:23:24] Tim Shanahan: They absolutely do. And the scariest part of it is the word-reading part. You know, we give 'em the Aimesweb test, and they're doing OK. Or we give 'em the DIBELS, and they, you know, they're decoding is fine up to the second grade level or whatever. But then when we read the text in class, they're choppy. They make mistakes on words, and so on. And so it's, "Oh, I want to stay away from that." In my definition, one of the things I stress is comprehension isn't automatic. It isn't just decoding and I get it.

[00:23:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:23:58] Tim Shanahan: There's work to be done. And so, what teachers are looking for is I want that text that the kids are gonna read it and get it.

[00:24:05] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:06] Tim Shanahan: I'm not looking for a text where they're gonna have to read it, and go back and look at a sentence, and look up a word, and ask the te — but, in fact, when it comes to teaching reading, that's exactly the kind of text you wanna have. One of the things I learned in writing my book, that I found really interesting, there wasn't a huge amount of research on this, but there was research on it, you think of how we normally test kids to see what their instructional level is. We're gonna have them read some portion of a text aloud. Makes great sense. Good fluency measure. I've used it in my classrooms. Great sense. And let's say the youngster makes 10 mistakes in a hundred words. Most people say, "Oh, too hard. I want an easier text." You know, the normal way of instructional level is 95% accuracy. This kid is making way too many mistakes. I am not gonna let him read that book. We'll put 'em in the third grade book instead of the fourth grade book. One of the things the studies have found is when you — let's say you have the kid do that reading and he makes the 10 mistakes. Give him absolutely zero instruction. No support, no help. Just ask him to read the text again. Just let's do that again. What the studies find is usually the number of errors drops by about 50%.

[00:25:26] Susan Lambert: Wow! Just after one reread?

[00:25:28] Tim Shanahan: Just at one read. Yeah. And so you go, "Well, wait a minute. That would make an instructional-level text. So you're saying if I just had the kid read the text twice, I don't have to hold them back a whole year?" Or two years? Or whatever the duration?

[00:25:42] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:25:43] Tim Shanahan: Yeah. The answer is yes, that's exactly right. One of the things they find is yeah, it cuts the number of errors dramatically, but the kids don't make the same errors the second time necessarily.

[00:25:55] Susan Lambert: Oh, interesting.

[00:25:55] Tim Shanahan: They make some new ones.

[00:25:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:57] Tim Shanahan: They fix some of the ones they screwed up the first time, but the difficulty goes down. Which is probably why a lot of studies have found when kids were working with texts where they make 15 and 20 mistakes per hundred words, they do just fine. They actually learn more than the kids in the easier text.

[00:26:17] Susan Lambert: That's interesting. Well, you know, I mean I do that when I'm reading and a paragraph doesn't make sense. I have to go all the way back to figure out what — did I miss a word? Did I phrase the syntax wrong?

[00:26:27] Tim Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:27] Susan Lambert: What in the world is going on? So —

[00:26:29] Tim Shanahan: Absolutely!

[00:26:29] Susan Lambert: I find myself doing that as a reader.

[00:26:31] Tim Shanahan: Of course! And so a good reader, one, has to start out with a determination. My job here is to understand it, not just to read it. A lot of kids get the idea that it's just reading. I remember watching undergraduates talk. I was a doctoral student, and I'm watching my major professor talking to an undergraduate student that he's talking to, and she's got a low score on the test or whatever, and he says to her, "Well, did you read the chapters that were assigned?" And she said, "Yeah, I read them." And he said, "Well, did you understand them?" She said, "Well, no, I didn't understand them. But the assignment was that we had to read them, and I did." I did what you asked me to do. "Well, did you come into class and ask any questions about it? Did you come to see me about it? Did you go to my —" Well, no. The assignment was to read it." So let's start with that basic idea. The purpose is to comprehend. You have to try to understand this. That's something we have to teach kids.

[00:27:28] Susan Lambert: That makes sense.

[00:27:28] Tim Shanahan: Because they get into the, "I read it."

[00:27:30] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:27:30] Tim Shanahan: It sounded good.

[00:27:31] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:27:31] Tim Shanahan: And so determination to understand, first. Second, then you've gotta recognize when you're not understanding. Do just what YOU did.

[00:27:40] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:40] Tim Shanahan: That paragraph made no sense. So, I had to go back and reread that sentence, and break it differently this time. Absolutely. So the first thing is I didn't understand. You gotta recognize that. And then, two, you have to understand what are some of the reasons why I might not have understood that.

[00:27:57] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:27:58] Tim Shanahan: And then, can I do the things that are necessary?

[00:28:02] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:28:02] Tim Shanahan: So, I didn't know what that word meant, and it seems to be really important here. Sometimes I can skip a word and it doesn't really cause a problem. I get some sense of what it means and that's all it that matters. Or it is clearly just descriptive. And the description isn't the point here, so I can not worry about that one right now.

[00:28:21] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:28:21] Tim Shanahan: But then, you know, oh gosh, that word really does matter. I can't make sense of this, so what can I do? Well, can you figure it out from context? You know, is it a word you can break down morphologically? Are there, you know, there meaningful parts in there? Can you look it up on an electronic thing or on a paper dictionary? Can you do that? Come to a sentence that's not making sense. Is there a verb? Can you find it? You know, who's doing whatever that thing is or what's doing whatever that thing is? How would you break it down? Is there internal punctuation in the sentence? Are there, um, relative pronouns, thats and whiches and whos, which show you where to break? Are there conjunctions, like ands, ors, buts, and so on? And gee, you have some tools. What do you do if you're not on — you know, you can't follow those Hemingway sentences. Well, a big part of Hemingway, he's writing literature, they're characters, and so you get the hes and shes.

[00:29:18] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:29:19] Tim Shanahan: And it can take you pages to figure out —

[00:29:21] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:29:21] Tim Shanahan: Who's talking at any given point. You gotta go all the way back to the beginning. Who started this conversation?

[00:29:28] Susan Lambert: Right, right.

[00:29:28] Tim Shanahan: Count. Start counting. You know, you need tools. And so, the question is do you have those tools? And can you use them? That's not really how we teach comprehension. We teach comprehension by practicing comprehension. You read a text that the teacher hopes you'll understand. And the hope is in the future you'll understand more text, 'cause you understood this text.

[00:29:48] Susan Lambert: This one. Yeah. You know, that process you were describing reminds me of the term close reading, which when I was in the classroom, I don't recall that term. And I think it came about as Common Core State Standards came into being. But this idea of helping students take even a small, like one to two paragraphs, and really dig into the vocabulary, the syntax, like, the morphology. All the things that you were describing.

[00:30:18] Tim Shanahan: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:19] Susan Lambert: And help them really understand how to break text down.

[00:30:23] Tim Shanahan: Yeah. Yeah. It, again, it makes no sense if the text is immediately comprehensible.

[00:30:30] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:30:30] Tim Shanahan: It only makes sense if there's something in there that you're not going to get or you're not getting.

[00:30:37] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:30:37] Tim Shanahan: And so with close reading, it's been in American elementary reading instruction, like you say, pretty much since Common Core. You'd get it in high schools in the 1950s and stuff, but not so much in the elementary schools. It's an idea that came outta the universities in the 1920s and 30s, and was a major notion. And it's one way of reading, and it is. You kind of treat the text as a place where the author has hidden a bunch of Easter eggs and you gotta find them, you know. They're in there someplace.

[00:31:15] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:31:15] Tim Shanahan: Which is very cool! You know, and that means you read for symbols, and you do the kind of thing I was doing with that Lincoln sentence, and so on. And there are other texts that are much more mundane than that, where, you know, this is just a science text. Part of the information is in the graphic. They've got a table or a chart.

[00:31:36] Susan Lambert: Sure.

[00:31:36] Tim Shanahan: Or some kind of a drawing. And you've gotta connect the text with what's going on in that graphic. And nobody's teaching you how to do that. You're just supposed to do that automatically.

[00:31:50] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:31:50] Tim Shanahan: And that just doesn't make sense. But that, I would argue that's a different kind of close reading, but it's definitely a close reading. Gee, this table seems to be saying something a little different than what the text is saying, because look, these numbers seem to be going up from this thing to this thing, and it says that they weren't rising. And so, what's going on there? You know, you want people to be that kind of a reader.

[00:32:16] Susan Lambert: Yeah, and you can't do that with text you can already comprehend. This is like, "Aha!" I thought maybe this podcast episode would not be about your new book, but it actually has some connections back to it. So tell me, what do you think some of the pitfalls are for educators not appreciating this distinction you're making between, you know, learning to read and reread and really this level of comprehension?

[00:32:41] Tim Shanahan: Well, some of the real obvious ones that I see in classrooms — these days, because of the COVID after effects and so on, I don't just get into schools like I used to.

[00:32:51] Susan Lambert: Sure, yeah.

[00:32:51] Tim Shanahan: You know, you used to be able to just go into schools and, oh, Tim Shanahan, come on in. You can go look at our third grades, or whatever. But when I was getting into classrooms a lot, one of the things I would see is teachers making sure that their kids comprehended text. And they were doing that not by teaching the kinds of things we were talking about.

[00:33:10] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:33:10] Tim Shanahan: But by reading the text to the kids. Or telling the kids what the text said, so that the kids didn't have to do any of that.

[00:33:18] Susan Lambert: Oh dear.

[00:33:19] Tim Shanahan: They saw it as, you know, their purpose is to make the kids understand the text, and if the kids read it themselves, they might not get it. So if I read it to them ... I remember the first time I saw this, this was years ago. I was visiting a classroom out in San Francisco. I was supposed to come in at, like, 10 o'clock or something to watch this guided reading lesson where the teacher was gonna take the kids, direct them through a text, and I got there a few minutes after 10. And it looked like she just hadn't maybe finished with what she was doing, because instead of taking the kids through like the next basal story, it looked to me, she was reading a text to this group of kids.

[00:34:03] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:34:03] Tim Shanahan: So I thought, well this must be like a shared reading activity, and she's just finishing up. But it went on, and it went on, and it went on. And I was really puzzled. So, when it got done, you know, I talked to the teacher, 'cause it wasn't at all what I was supposed to be seeing. And she said, "Uh, no, this text is hard for these boys and girls. And so that's what I do. I read it to them." Uh, you know, she makes sure they comprehend it. All the discussion and all was of the ideas, which is nice. But that isn't really what reading instruction is supposed to be about. It certainly isn't making those boys and girls better readers.

[00:34:40] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:34:40] Tim Shanahan: It might be conveying some of the ideas in the text, so it's not a total loss.

[00:34:45] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:34:45] Tim Shanahan: But it's really not going to make these kids learn. And, in fact, the chances of them actually retaining that information given in that way is pretty low too probably.

[00:34:56] Susan Lambert: Oh yeah. Maybe they understood it when she read it, but they won't remember it. And they won't be able to, you know, learn to comprehend on their own.

[00:35:04] Tim Shanahan: That's exactly right. The difference between learning and understanding is just what you put your finger on. It's an issue of remembering.

[00:35:11] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:35:12] Tim Shanahan: There are times I read a text, and I get what the author's telling me.

[00:35:17] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:35:17] Tim Shanahan: But if you were to ask me to talk about it the next day, or go make a presentation on it, or when I'm writing to use the information, I'd have to go back.

[00:35:25] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:35:26] Tim Shanahan: Because I comprehended it, I didn't learn it. I know where the information is, but I don't have it internalized in any serious way. I certainly wouldn't wanna take an exam on it.

[00:35:39] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:35:39] Tim Shanahan: And so, there's definitely a difference between comprehending, I'm understanding this complex process that the person is telling me, oh, I know this was a lot of personal information about this person, and it told their hair color, and it told their weight, and it told their address, and, you know, who their father was, and I know that all that information was there. But I didn't memorize it.

[00:36:03] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:36:04] Tim Shanahan: You know, I've been learning French and at times you'll do these things that are these kinds of exercises, and I just skip over that information. I don't pay that much attention to it. And then the questions after it'll be, "What was her address?" And they'll be, "Well, I know her address was in there. I can go in and find it."

[00:36:21] Susan Lambert: I'll find it. Yeah, yep.

[00:36:22] Tim Shanahan: You know, I comprehended it. I knew they were giving somebody's address, but why would I care what her address was? That's not important to me. But oh, there is information in there that I'm supposed to learn. OK, now I'm gonna have to do more than read it for comprehension.

[00:36:39] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah.

[00:36:39] Tim Shanahan: And that's gonna require some work.

[00:36:41] Susan Lambert: Yeah, for sure. So what then are opportunities that come when educators understand this difference?

[00:36:47] Tim Shanahan: Well, I think the opportunities, uh, that accrue are really for the kids. What happens is teachers get less afraid of, "Well, why don't we try the grade level text? Let's see what we can do with that. Let's see how my kids do." And what they find out is quite often the kids are able not just to learn more from it, but that they comprehend the text pretty quickly. It might be, "Gee, we read it twice, and they were able to do it." It might be, "Boy, we had to work on some of that vocabulary, but they got it." Or you know, I showed them this trick of how to break down a sentence, and now my kids are doing that with other texts. And so on. What happens is opportunities to learn go up.

[00:37:32] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:37:33] Tim Shanahan: Uh, you know, if you're in a situation where the kids' level is this, and the text you picked is that, which is what we've told teachers to do —

[00:37:42] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:37:42] Tim Shanahan: If the kid learned every single thing they didn't know before they started that text, they would learn almost nothing.

[00:37:49] Susan Lambert: Right. Right.

[00:37:51] Tim Shanahan: If the distance of the text is like THAT, there's a lot more that the kid doesn't understand. If they don't do very well, they learn more than they did in the first case.

[00:38:01] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:38:02] Tim Shanahan: You know.

[00:38:03] Susan Lambert: That makes a lot of sense. And so, there's sort of this trying to improve their comprehension, is a little bit different goal than trying to improve their learning, is a little bit different goal than trying to improve their reading abilities.

[00:38:21] Tim Shanahan: Absolutely.

[00:38:22] Susan Lambert: So, how can we use that?

[00:38:26] Tim Shanahan: Well, one of the things I would say is let's be strategic. Let's be strategic as teachers, and let's teach our kids to be strategic. Things like how do you break down the language are really comprehension strategies. You're gonna certainly remember stuff that you understand better than you're gonna remember stuff you didn't understand. So if I can increase your comprehension. It might have some impact on learning. You'll remember more, perhaps.

[00:38:49] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:38:50] Tim Shanahan: But if you really have to learn this material, you're gonna be tested on it, or you have to use it for some reason, a comprehension strategy, like break down the sentence or, you know, connect the pronouns or something, is good, but it's not going to help. But rereading might increase it. Taking notes on it might. You know, doing all those annotations that people get into might do it. Doing things like, um, trying to do, you know, recitations of the information. Let's see, the author told me five things about that. What were they? Uh, it was this and this. And what was the fourth one? Let me go back and look that up. Essentially giving yourself tests on the material.

[00:39:34] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:39:35] Tim Shanahan: It's labeled the comprehension strategy, but I think it's more of a study strategy or a learning strategy. Read the text and then quiz yourself on it. Ask yourself questions, and see if you can answer them. And if you can't, go back and look. That's not as much a comprehension strategy as it is a learning, a study strategy, whereas breaking down a sentence is more of a comprehension strategy than a study strategy.

[00:40:01] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:40:01] Tim Shanahan: I'm not saying they don't overlap a little bit.

[00:40:03] Susan Lambert: Sure.

[00:40:03] Tim Shanahan: But they're really different. And so, I think teachers need to teach kids to be strategic.

[00:40:10] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:40:10] Tim Shanahan: If you're trying to solve this kind of a problem, what are the things that we can do? If you're trying to solve this kind of a problem, what are the things you can do?

[00:40:17] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:40:17] Tim Shanahan: You're gonna take a test on this. You're gonna need to do some things beyond just normally reading it.

[00:40:23] Susan Lambert: Right, right, right. It is so interesting, because I've never thought about it till right this moment of when I read a text and understand it, great! I've comprehended that text. I can put it away. I can walk away. I can not remember it. I can totally forget about it. If somebody quizzed me on it a couple hours, maybe 45 minutes, later, I wouldn't necessarily remember it. But in that moment, I understood what I was reading.

[00:40:51] Tim Shanahan: Yeah.

[00:40:51] Susan Lambert: If I'm using a text to help students increase their knowledge of something, or whether it's a vocabulary or the content that we're reading, it's very different than just simply understanding that text.

[00:41:04] Tim Shanahan: Exactly.

[00:41:05] Susan Lambert: And so we're going to have to use different instructional strategies to help that learning occur.

[00:41:09] Tim Shanahan: Absolutely. And some of the things we do are not necessarily put under the control of the kids.

[00:41:15] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:41:15] Tim Shanahan: Let's have a discussion of this text that we've just read, 'cause reading it and then talking about it increases your recall of it. Oh, now I want you to write about it. Oh gee, that's even more powerful. Now I'm gonna give you a test on it. Wow, i'm gonna have to read it and reread it, and study it. And so, those are all tools that teachers use to get that knowledge into the kids' heads, which is great.

[00:41:40] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:41:40] Tim Shanahan: But those aren't comprehension tools as much as they are study, learning tools for gaining the content. You need a different kind of text. You need to do different kinds of things to build the comprehension part.

[00:41:55] Susan Lambert: Well, there you go. Leave it to Tim Shanahan to give us a new wrinkle in thinking about comprehension, understanding, and learning. Ugh. So amazing! I wish I would've known some of these things when I was teaching in the classroom. Those poor students.

[00:42:08] Tim Shanahan: Me too.

[00:42:11] Susan Lambert: Poor students.

[00:42:14] Tim Shanahan: Yes.

[00:42:14] Susan Lambert: Oh, well, Tim, as we wrap up here, any advice you'd like to share?

[00:42:19] Tim Shanahan: Yeah, one. You know, clearly both this time and last time I was on, I've been stressing how important it is that kids be given challenging texts. Texts that they will not understand immediately. So that you can teach these things, and I won't back away from that. Not as long as the research is as strong as it is. That said, I would argue that this is maybe a little bit like athletics. Now I'm on thinner ice here, so, you know.

[00:42:51] Susan Lambert: Same here, same here.

[00:42:53] Tim Shanahan: Don't trust me too much here. Um, essentially athletes don't do all of their training at peak levels of difficulty.

[00:43:03] Susan Lambert: Right!

[00:43:03] Tim Shanahan: You know, weightlifters do both light weights and heavy weights. So, why would you do that? Well, because you don't want to hurt yourself. And I would argue that every text that you work with doesn't have to be equally hard. I think that's one of the things that comes out of the instructional level notion that, "Oh, you know, the kid is reading at a fourth-grade level. He has to be in a fourth-grade text, and all the text should be at fourth grade." I would argue, "Gee, the kid reads at a third-grade level and he is in fourth grade. I want him in the fourth-grade text, but I don't want him just reading hard stuff."

[00:43:36] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:43:36] Tim Shanahan: If every time you do your training, you're doing the heaviest weights or running the greatest distances, you're gonna break down. You're not gonna get stronger. And so, we should be varying difficulties. Kids should be, "Gee, you know, I did a shorter, really hard read." When, you know, the kids really had to work hard at it. And, you know, we spent two days on those four pages, and it was really something. And then we did a 12 pager where the kids read it all by themself.

[00:44:05] Susan Lambert: Mm. I love that.

[00:44:05] Tim Shanahan: You know, that kind of thing. So varying the difficulties, and I would argue it's both a stamina and strength thing. Again, a concept out of athletics, the heavier it's gonna be, the harder it's gonna be. The lower amount of work you're gonna do, the farther you're gonna run. I want the terrain to be easier.

[00:44:26] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:44:26] Tim Shanahan: Right.

[00:44:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:44:27] Tim Shanahan: You move those things together. It's not, "Oh, I just want it to be as hard and as much as it can be." No, you know, that just doesn't work. It doesn't make you stronger. It hurts you. And that seems to be true not just for physical things, but it's not in reading but there are some cognitive evidence that would suggest that there's truth to what I just said.

[00:44:47] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:44:47] Tim Shanahan: So, you know, yes, struggle is important, but so are some less difficult runs and efforts as well. I think it's that variation where kids can go, "Wow, this is a lot harder than the one we dealt with last week." But it also lets kids start to make those judgements. I think one of the things that happens with the instructional level is we hide from kids how hard the text is and we move them up, of course, as they get better. We keep moving them in harder and harder texts. Kids often have no sense that they're learning anything in reading.

[00:45:23] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:45:24] Tim Shanahan: We hide it from them.

[00:45:25] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:45:25] Tim Shanahan: But if they could see, "Wow, I really struggled with that text, but now I go back to it and it's a lot easier."

[00:45:32] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:45:32] Tim Shanahan: Or now you give me another text at that level, and it's not hard like it was before. I'm learning. I'm getting better at this.

[00:45:40] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:45:40] Tim Shanahan: And I think for the teacher that's true as well.

[00:45:42] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:45:43] Tim Shanahan: I don't think teachers can see that their kids are learning when they just every day come in and, you know, sort of keep that level. They can tell when they give the test that the test said "Move 'em up."

[00:45:53] Susan Lambert: Right. Uh, yeah.

[00:45:55] Tim Shanahan: That's not enough.

[00:45:56] Susan Lambert: It's sort of like, as a parent, watching your kid grow. You don't get to see your kid grow every day. But when grandma and grandpa come over, they're like, "Oh, wow! They've grown a lot!" And you're like, "Hmm, I don't know."

[00:46:06] Tim Shanahan: Yeah. Yeah. They're two inches taller than they were. Don't seem any taller to me.

[00:46:11] Susan Lambert: Oh, I love that final idea about varying this difficulty, and, and the idea of strength and stamina, because it really, really is true. We experience that in our own lives, right? Like I pick up texts that are much harder, and then other texts are a little bit easier. And when I do encounter a difficult text, there is a lot of times I have to say, "Whew, I need a break from this because this is hard work!"

[00:46:35] Tim Shanahan: I do the same thing.

[00:46:36] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And I read something a little bit easier.

[00:46:38] Tim Shanahan: You start feeling like you're running in mud, you know. You just are. You're not getting any place. So yeah, you go to something easier, something that you might be embarrassed to tell people that you're reading, because it's so dopey. But it's relief.

[00:46:53] Susan Lambert: Yeah. What a relief. Yeah.

[00:46:54] Tim Shanahan: And then, you know, you find yourself going back for something really difficult, really challenging, where you think you're gonna get something out of it.

[00:47:02] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:47:02] Tim Shanahan: Which is great! Uh, you know, so just like I said, you vary those distances and weights. I would also say you vary the amount of support the teacher gives. The harder the text, the more I want the teacher there.

[00:47:15] Susan Lambert: Oh, that's a really good point.

[00:47:17] Tim Shanahan: Uh, we tend to do the opposite. Uh, you know, you'll hear people who push certain versions of guided reading and so on, who will say, "Oh no, you know, we make sure when we're teaching that the kids are at their level. But when the kids are on their own, they can read anything they want to."

[00:47:32] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:47:33] Tim Shanahan: Well that's wonderful. So what you're saying is when it's really hard, the kids are gonna be on their own, 'cause they're gonna choose to read that difficult stuff.

[00:47:40] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:47:40] Tim Shanahan: But when it's really easy, we're gonna be right there to help 'em.

[00:47:43] Susan Lambert: Oh, that's kind of funny. I never thought about that!

[00:47:47] Tim Shanahan: It's a little goofy. It's not how we do other things.

[00:47:49] Susan Lambert: That's for sure. Oh man. Well, Tim, I always appreciate a good conversation with you. You always leave me thinking about things in a new way, and I'm sure listeners will appreciate this conversation too. So, you know, the other thing I wanna thank you for is thank you for taking these questions from educators that are trying to learn and trying to do the hard work. I really appreciate when you get questions like that and respond to them. It's very helpful.

[00:48:16] Tim Shanahan: Forces me to learn.

[00:48:17] Susan Lambert: Oh, there you go. Learning is a lifelong endeavor.

[00:48:21] Tim Shanahan: It's what makes it all worthwhile to tell you the truth.

[00:48:24] Susan Lambert: For sure. Well, thanks again for joining us. We always appreciate it.

[00:48:28] Tim Shanahan: Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it, Susan. Anytime.

[00:48:35] Susan Lambert: That was Dr. Timothy Shanahan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. You can find his blog at shanahanonliteracy.com/blog. We'll have a link in the show notes to the piece we discussed. For more on the power of rereading and other strategies for helping students approach complex text, listen to Dr. Mitchell Brookins' recent appearance on our sister podcast, Beyond My Years.

[00:49:05] Mitchell Brookins: These complex texts are very dense.

[00:49:08] Ana Torres: Yes.

[00:49:08] Mitchell Brookins: And so, the teacher that takes time to deconstruct a sentence, diagramming the sentence, and breaking it apart so that we get the core idea. Oh, you're doing it right! I love when I see that! I also love when I see the teacher that says, "Hold up. You know what? This is a lot of information. Let's stop and reread it over and over again. Let's do some fluency with it."

[00:49:29] Susan Lambert: Listen today on Beyond My Years, available wherever you get this show. There's also a link in the show notes. Next up on Science of Reading: The Podcast, Dr. Kristen McMaster from the University of Minnesota shares research-backed methods for improving students' comprehension abilities.

[00:49:47] Kristen McMaster: I guess I would just encourage teachers not to underestimate the importance of supporting even the inferences that might seem obvious to us.

[00:50:00] Susan Lambert: That's coming up in two weeks. And don't forget to submit your questions about comprehension to our listener mailbag at amplify.com/sormailbag. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.