Science of Reading: The Podcast

Spring Special '26: Systematizing literacy, with Reid Lyon, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education

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On this week’s episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert, Ed.D., is joined by one of the most influential people in American education, Reid Lyon, Ph.D., to explore what it takes to make systemic change in literacy instruction. Together, Reid and Susan also discuss how literacy education could benefit from a shared vocabulary, how systems must work together from teacher preparation to classroom implementation, and what we can do to close the implementation gap.

Show notes:

Quotes:

"I know we've let children down, but boy have we let teachers down." —Reid Lyon

"The hallmark of a profession is a common language displaying a common knowledge." —Reid Lyon

"How is it that we know so much yet we are still far behind the curve in helping the majority of struggling readers learn to read?" —Reid Lyon

"Science is neutral. The Science of Reading is not a belief system. It's a container with facts that constantly evolves." —Reid Lyon

"Much of our difficulties moving the science [of literacy] into classrooms is a function of not having established ourselves as a profession." —Reid Lyon

"We have a responsibility to use the best information possible that has taught us how we can improve the person's life." —Reid Lyon

"Assessment is a great friend." —Reid Lyon

"What we know is only as good as what we do." —Reid Lyon

Timestamps*:
00:00: Introduction: Systematizing literacy with Reid Lyon, Ph.D.
07:00: We are still far behind the curve in helping the majority of struggling readers learn to read.
11:00: The hallmark of a profession is a common language displaying a common knowledge.
18:00: Listening and speaking occur with exposure and being showered with language around us.
23:00: The science of reading is not a belief system. It's a container with facts that constantly evolves.
29:00: Can the field of literacy have a common language and common knowledge?
35:00: The systemic challenge is understanding the whole picture.
41:00: Assessment is a great friend.
48:00: Explanation of the evolving 10 Maxim Framework
52:00: What is the work happening at Drexel?
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute



[00:00:00] Reid Lyon: I know we've let children down, but, boy, have we let teachers down.

[00:00:09] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Dr. Reid Lyon is one of the world's leading experts on literacy research. From 1991 to 2005, Dr. Lyon served as a research neuropsychologist and the chief of the Child Development and Behavior branch of the NICHD at the National Institutes of Health.

He served as an advisor to President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush in developmental science language and reading, and he authored the legislative language for the National Reading Panel. Lately, Dr. Lyon has had a big question on his mind.

[00:00:50] Reid Lyon: How is it that we know so much; yet we are still far behind the curve in helping the majority of struggling readers learn to read?

[00:01:01] Susan Lambert: On this episode, Dr. Lyon is going to explore that disconnect and share some of the opportunities he sees for improvement. He'll talk about the importance of understanding this issue at the system level, and he'll talk about opportunities he sees for increased professionalization. We will talk about all of that as well as Dr. Lyon's current work as a senior advisor to the Drexel University Allied Hub. Let's now bring on Dr. G. Reid Lyon.

Well, I am so excited, Reid Lyon, to have you back on Science of Reading: The Podcast. It's always such a pleasure and an honor to speak with you. Thank you for joining us again.

[00:01:43] Reid Lyon: Well, it's great to be here. It's great to be talking with you. You're always a highlight.

[00:01:49] Susan Lambert: Ah, thanks. Well, you're always a highlight for me too. For our listeners, just a reminder that you actually joined us back in September of 2023. It's hard to imagine it was that long ago.

[00:02:02] Reid Lyon: Right.

[00:02:03] Susan Lambert: And Reid, I want to tell you that you are the first and only two-part episode that we have ever had. So you had so much to say to us that we actually had to do this in two episodes. And here you are again.

[00:02:17] Reid Lyon: Well, thanks for having me back on. It's really an honor.

[00:02:21] Susan Lambert: So the last time we had you on, we talked a little bit about your ten maxims, and so we will relink our listeners in the show notes to that.

But we also talked a little bit on that episode about you reentering the literacy world and since then you've been even more involved, and I just wonder what you see differently now than what you saw back in 2023 when we had that chat.

[00:02:47] Reid Lyon: Boy, what I see now is a tremendous amount of progress thanks to the information that you constantly bring practitioners and consumers of literacy.

What I'm seeing now are very large issues with understanding how systems work. And I can go into that in a bit more detail. But I always thought we were doing pretty darn well when we had converging evidence coming to us from all the studies at NIH where we were learning about these components of reading. We were beginning to understand that reading is a componential process.

[00:03:31] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:32] Reid Lyon: That multiple skills have to come together in particular kinds of instructional interactions so that kids who don't get reading easily have to be taught very systematically. And putting all that together, we could see the complexity of that. Here you have a skill to learn that requires the mastery of many pieces that in their own right could be challenging, but in integrating them together are very challenging for the kids and the teachers and those who teach teachers.

And what I've learned is that my looking at the Science of Reading in 1992 and feeling like we were moving well with understanding these different reading components and how to teach them, I thought that that was good. I thought that if we just talked about that, people would say, "Oh, I didn't know reading worked like that. Now we know. We know how to assess it and how to teach it, and so we're going to be fine." I did not look at all of the systems that have to be understood and melded together.

[00:04:59] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:00] Reid Lyon: From preparing teachers at scale.

[00:05:03] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:05:04] Reid Lyon: Which in a sense is turning with the cog of faculty knowledge and expertise, which is dependent upon how regulations that are state driven typically set the bar: accreditation standards, reading standards, certification exams, all of that. Systems have to fit together. The core, what I'm understanding, particularly in my work with Doug Carnine, who's a brilliant, brilliant man, has brought me to an understanding he's had, that much of our difficulties moving the science into classrooms, to children, is a function of not having established ourselves as a profession.

[00:05:57] Susan Lambert: Hmm, interesting.

[00:05:58] Reid Lyon: And the more he and I have discussed, the more he's taught me, the more I see in spades what his concerns are.

And we'd been at this couple of years trying to understand the simple question: How is it that we know so much?

[00:06:16] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:06:17] Reid Lyon: And we can show that knowledge being implemented in selected areas and we can see kids flourish. How is it we know that, yet we are still far behind the curve in helping the majority of struggling readers learn to read.

And that mismatch is more glaring for me now that we have so many more people understanding we have a science of reading. We do have an understanding of how reading develops. We have an understanding of what in the world goes wrong with most kids who have a difficulty. We see the need for early identification and prevention, and we see the need to understand the instructional conditions that have to be in place.

[00:07:10] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:10] Reid Lyon: That have to be in place in order to bring readers from a lack of proficiency to loving to learn to read. So we know that. At the same time, we're looking at massive departures from that science in quite a few schools around the country. Now, let me say that I know we've let children down, but, boy, have we let teachers down. Teachers take the brunt of a lot of this.

[00:07:43] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:07:44] Reid Lyon: And they've come into their careers behind the curve in quite a few areas.

[00:07:51] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:07:51] Reid Lyon: And here is where having a good look at whether we are responsible for our professional ethics and our professional development, I mean, writ large. And that is, if I look at other professions, medicine is the low-hanging fruit you can look at. If I look though closer to home, it's speech and language pathology.

[00:08:18] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:08:19] Reid Lyon: Physical therapy.

[00:08:20] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:21] Reid Lyon: Audiology. If I look across those professions at engineering, at accounting, at flying planes...

[00:08:31] Susan Lambert: Yikes.

[00:08:33] Reid Lyon: At captaining boats, both of which I've done. I think you know I was a commercial pilot for years.

[00:08:38] Susan Lambert: Yeah, I do.

[00:08:39] Reid Lyon: But when we look at those professions, the first thing that knocks you back is that, wow, they have a pretty solid core of information.

[00:08:49] Susan Lambert: What do you mean by that?

[00:08:50] Reid Lyon: In reading, we call it the Science of Reading.

[00:08:53] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:08:53] Reid Lyon: They know, for example, speech and language pathologists know deeply how language develops. They know the individual differences that we can see among kids who are struggling in articulation, in language comprehension, in vocabulary development. They have a tremendous amount of information built upon a hundred years or more of outstanding research. That's why speech and language pathologists are within the realm of education one of the better trained disciplines. And I'll come back to that. Medicine, of course, has a common body of this knowledge as well.

[00:09:41] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:09:41] Reid Lyon: When I was a professor of neurology and teaching neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, I knew what the existing information was that these individuals who would be serving the public really had to know.

[00:09:57] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:58] Reid Lyon: Now we come into what we do with children in literacy, and still today you will notice quite a bit of negative discourse about what we know and don't know. That is, there is a lot of pushback still against what the knowledge base is within the Science of Reading.

[00:10:25] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:10:26] Reid Lyon: What you can see is in the professions that have this great knowledge, as we do, they have a way of talking about it.

[00:10:36] Susan Lambert: Okay?

[00:10:37] Reid Lyon: They communicate very clearly with one another about it.

[00:10:41] Susan Lambert: So, you're talking about in the profession of medicine or in the profession of neuroscience...

[00:10:47] Reid Lyon: Yes.

[00:10:47] Susan Lambert: They can clearly communicate.

[00:10:49] Reid Lyon: Yes. Meaning somebody says something to me in my field, I say, "I get it." There's a professional shorthand.

[00:10:57] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:10:58] Reid Lyon: But what that common language is representing is a common knowledge.

[00:11:03] Susan Lambert: Ah, well, that's really important, that distinction between common language and common knowledge.

[00:11:09] Reid Lyon: Right. And you'll notice the common knowledge that you and I talk about and have talked about...

[00:11:15] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:11:17] Reid Lyon: For example, is not systematically, across the country, common knowledge nor a common language.

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

[00:11:26] Reid Lyon: The hallmark of a profession is a common language displaying a common knowledge.

[00:11:32] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:33] Reid Lyon: We are towers of Babel still in many ways. We talk past one another.

[00:11:39] Susan Lambert: In education, you mean?

[00:11:40] Reid Lyon: In education. Yes. I'm sorry. I'm not being clear enough, but that literacy continues to strike me as somewhat divisive in its discussions, somewhat driven by beliefs and attitudes and philosophies, and we're so past that, given that our charge, our responsibility is to improve someone's life, just like medicine.

[00:12:10] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:12:11] Reid Lyon: Just like speech and language pathology. Whatever it may be. That means we have a responsibility to use the best information possible that has taught us how we can improve the person's life.

[00:12:24] Susan Lambert: Right, right, right.

[00:12:25] Reid Lyon: We are responsible for helping human beings develop a nice quality of life.

[00:12:31] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:12:31] Reid Lyon: That's the connection we have with other human beings and it's the real connection we have with kids. And we know how to do it, but we're not doing it. So, why the gaps?

[00:12:42] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:43] Reid Lyon: Again, when we're approaching this problem and you're speaking with me about it, and this airs, you'll find people resisting heavily the evidence that exists.

So we have to step back now and say, "This is part of my blindness. I did not know." What I did know for years is that we have a solid body of knowledge.

[00:13:11] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:13:11] Reid Lyon: It's called the Science of Reading. We built it with many, many other scientists. We understand how kids learn to read.

[00:13:21] Susan Lambert: This was all the work that you did back at NIH back in the...

[00:13:24] Reid Lyon: Yeah, but other people were doing brilliant work as well that weren't within the NIH teams. So what I do know is that was a great thing, I think, the people around the world coming together with developing this knowledge base. To develop the knowledge base in the way we did, we had to use the scientific method as a scientist.

What I felt as I was building the designs for the programs is that number one, we had to ask critical questions, almost open-ended questions...

[00:14:05] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:14:06] Reid Lyon: That could be studied. So, when I asked, "How do children learn to read?" I'm asking, "What are the genetics that make that possible? What are the neurobiological systems in circuits that are instrumental? What are the cultural supports for that type of development? What are the family and social supports? What are the behavioral issues?" and so on. Anything that impinges on what does it take to learn to read...

[00:14:36] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:14:37] Reid Lyon: When we ask that scientifically and then break that big question down into his pieces. For example, are there neurobiological circuits that activate when a youngster is trying to read a new word?

[00:14:52] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:14:52] Reid Lyon: We then study that by asking the question in a way that we try to falsify it.

[00:14:59] Susan Lambert: Oh, help our audience understand what that means.

[00:15:03] Reid Lyon: Yes. When we're asking the questions, if I were to ask, "Does direct systematic instruction impact word-level reading in a way that improves comprehension downstream?" I have to ask it in a way and design the experiments in a way to try to prove myself wrong.

[00:15:25] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:26] Reid Lyon: To do that, I have other questions I'm asking at the same time. And then, the way we design the studies is those other questions that I'm asking that don't have to do with direct and systematic instruction are also tried and measured at the same time.

[00:15:44] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:15:45] Reid Lyon: So, we come through the study and we say, "All right. If we ask these questions, are they developmental questions?" In other words, are we looking at direct and systematic instruction at one point in time? Or can we follow children over time as we're testing that idea?

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

[00:16:06] Reid Lyon: Kids are moving targets. We have to follow them.

[00:16:09] Susan Lambert: That's right.

[00:16:10] Reid Lyon: So we had to ask good questions. We had to structure those questions within a longitudinal framework. We had to try to prove ourselves wrong every step of the way. Why? Because I'm biased big time.

[00:16:26] Susan Lambert: Aren't we all?

[00:16:30] Reid Lyon: And that's something that we don't want to bring into whatever conclusions we reach because of common sense. And we also have to make sure that the studies we're doing are done elsewhere and bindings are replicated. We get the same results.

[00:16:48] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:49] Reid Lyon: These aren't single-shot conclusions. So, when we say things like, "The on-ramp to fluent reading and comprehension is decoding in the alphabetic principle," that's true.

[00:17:04] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:17:04] Reid Lyon: We can't overturn that. You don't find readers who are very good comprehenders and love to read, who cannot navigate the pronunciation of words on the page.

[00:17:16] Susan Lambert: Right, right, right, right.

[00:17:19] Reid Lyon: You can't do it. And we also tested the idea... Another question was, well, people may have these great ideas that reading is natural.

[00:17:30] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:17:30] Reid Lyon: Listening and speaking occur with exposure and being showered with language around us.

[00:17:37] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:17:38] Reid Lyon: We brought our kids up. We didn't sit them down at desks in the home and say, "Today we're talking about gerunds." We watched our kids just blossom with language, and they do so in a pretty predictable way, which also tells us that speech and listening are pretty natural. That is kids.

They'll start out with single words. They'll put two words together, what's called pivot-open grammar. They'll begin to extend syntax. They'll overgeneralize tenses, like "I go there," and that happens so predictably.

[00:18:18] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:18:19] Reid Lyon: It shows that the brain has evolved to develop a way to communicate.

[00:18:25] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:18:26] Reid Lyon: How about reading? Look at all the three- and four-year-olds at home who can read.

Well, we did. Let's go into those homes. Were they just being read to and showered with good literature, or were they playing games with their parents? Were they rhyming? Were they saying, say "big," without the buh sound?

[00:18:49] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:18:50] Reid Lyon: Were they doing linguistic gymnastics at home? Yes.

[00:18:55] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:18:55] Reid Lyon: Yes, they were. So, here's that question. Can we falsify that? Let's study it longitudinally in a number of places and see if using natural environments and more in-context ways of helping kids read words are effective. To be specific, how about cuing systems? So let's ask a question. How many words can be predicted from these surrounding cues?

Maybe 20%, 30%. That's it.

[00:19:31] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:19:32] Reid Lyon: That's not very efficient.

[00:19:34] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:19:35] Reid Lyon: Let's ask, well, when kids are reading, do they read just some of the words? Do they just gloss over the text? No. They read every word.

[00:19:46] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:19:46] Reid Lyon: We test that. We replicate that the reading is not a natural process.

[00:19:51] Susan Lambert: We found out through the scientific process and this falsification, then, that reading is not natural, like listening, speaking.

[00:19:59] Reid Lyon: Correct. So, let's bring us back to what a profession would do.

[00:20:04] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:20:04] Reid Lyon: A profession with a common knowledge like I just described, and let me make sure I'm clear on this one. Myself, other scientists, speech and language pathologists, engineers, physicians, we have faith in the knowledge because it's been designed well, and it's been replicated.

[00:20:27] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:20:27] Reid Lyon: It's got some oomph to it. It carries. We also know in science that you don't stop once you find something.

[00:20:36] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:20:36] Reid Lyon: Because we could have used different measuring instruments way back in the nineties, and what we're finding may be partially due to the way we measured it.

So we keep asking those same questions. We still ask "Is reading natural?" 40 years later, and we still replicate the fact that it is not natural. So, that tells us that science can actually be trusted if we study something that we thought we found five years ago, and the new studies begin to overturn that...

[00:21:13] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:15] Reid Lyon: It doesn't take long to remove the old piece of information and explain that newer information qualifies that finding, adjusts that finding, modifies it, or in fact, overturns it completely.

[00:21:32] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:21:32] Reid Lyon: And the science, like pancake batter, just takes that in, and a spoon is put in to pull out the old finding that wasn't replicated.

[00:21:43] Susan Lambert: That doesn't happen in literacy though, does it?

[00:21:46] Reid Lyon: No. So, when people talk about the Science of Reading and you hear the emotion coming out of it, what I try to help people understand is the Science of Reading, think about it as a large container of facts. The facts can only go in the container if the answers leading to those facts have been derived from the types of research that keep us from being biased, experimental research.

We want to know if A causes B, and the only way to know that is if we put in place the kinds of questions and the kinds of methods, research methods that will allow us to say, "Okay, A causes B."

[00:22:34] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:22:35] Reid Lyon: We can also say, "Well, if A caused B 10 years ago, when we have new studies where we're not getting that same relationship," then that finding comes out. It's very, very neutral. Science is neutral.

The Science of Reading is not a belief system. It's a container with facts that polices itself, that constantly evolves, that people developing programs or teaching children or doing podcasts can reach into that container and make sure that they're correct, to make sure that they're on the right page.

That's what medicine does, and speech and language pathology does, with its common language.

[00:23:21] Susan Lambert: Right. So, first of all, I love that visual. I have it in my head right now. I have a container full of facts, and in it goes science, and in this particular container is the Science of Reading.

[00:23:37] Reid Lyon: Correct.

[00:23:37] Susan Lambert: So, the way that you described how that works in every other profession, yet here we are in literacy. You're in reading.

[00:23:45] Reid Lyon: Yes.

[00:23:46] Susan Lambert: And we're letting... Let me see if I can make a relationship here. We're letting some false facts get into our bin. And our bin is becoming contaminated.

[00:23:58] Reid Lyon: Beautiful, beautiful. And we're not accountable for it. So, let's step back in the same discussion of what is a profession.

The knowledge in speech and language pathology, in medicine and engineering, drives the curriculum at places where they're trained.

[00:24:23] Susan Lambert: Okay?

[00:24:24] Reid Lyon: The science informs what the courses are, what the course content is, what the clinical experiences are, what the discussions will be. I don't go to a neuroscience conference and talk to people about right brain, left brain, because the evidence in terms of how that binary has been used too inappropriately, it's much more complex than that.

[00:24:54] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:24:54] Reid Lyon: Basically, neuroscientists know that, they know that the right brain and left brain have about 10 million fibers connecting both, and they talk to each other and blah, blah, blah. So that doesn't come up there. I know that it won't come up there because they are loyal to a science, to facts...

[00:25:17] Susan Lambert: Right, right.

[00:25:17] Reid Lyon: That can change at any time. You always remember that the science can be modified with continued replications, continued study. That keeps us from saying, "I know the answer."

[00:25:31] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:25:31] Reid Lyon: What we have is the preponderance of facts saying this is the right direction...

[00:25:36] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:25:36] Reid Lyon: And this is not a healthy direction. So, we have that science out of our container that we are now accrediting preparation agencies called universities of higher education.

[00:25:54] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:25:54] Reid Lyon: And specifically with literacy colleges of education, to build the programs that they will be offering on the basis of replicated knowledge. That's what happens in these other professions, and accreditation does not occur in other professions like medicine or speech and language pathology, if in fact there's a departure from what the container has.

[00:26:24] Susan Lambert: So in the container, we have this replication. So, studies are replicated.

[00:26:30] Reid Lyon: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:31] Susan Lambert: And when they produce similar findings, we start and we produce similar findings over and over and over again.

[00:26:38] Reid Lyon: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:39] Susan Lambert: That's called a preponderance of evidence. Right?

[00:26:41] Reid Lyon: Yes.

[00:26:42] Susan Lambert: We throw that term out a lot in the Science of Reading, so I wanted to be clear about that.

[00:26:46] Reid Lyon: Yeah.

[00:26:47] Susan Lambert: So, we have this preponderance of evidence, so that helps to keep that stuff within the container of science, for reading.

[00:26:56] Reid Lyon: Yes.

[00:26:57] Susan Lambert: And what you're saying is that that's the stuff that colleges of education should be using to teach future teachers about literacy, similar to how other professions do it.

Is that a good summary?

[00:27:11] Reid Lyon: That's perfect. Let's hang out, because you say it so much better than I do.

[00:27:16] Susan Lambert: But I'm learning from you. I have to learn these things to help you say it.

[00:27:21] Reid Lyon: But that's exactly right. Now in colleges or professional schools that prepare licensed individuals, they are accountable for that. They can't receive accreditation from their governing body. Now let's take a look here.

[00:27:41] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:27:42] Reid Lyon: Medicine regulates medicine.

[00:27:44] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:27:45] Reid Lyon: Speech and language and ASHA regulate what they need to know.

[00:27:50] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:27:51] Reid Lyon: Education, people down the street, regulate what teachers need to know.

[00:27:57] Susan Lambert: What do you mean by that?

[00:27:58] Reid Lyon: School boards.

[00:28:00] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:28:01] Reid Lyon: State policies.

[00:28:03] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:04] Reid Lyon: State certification areas. It's in the state's hands rather than the professional's hands.

[00:28:14] Susan Lambert: So there's no... So for, and this might surprise maybe the general population, but probably educators know this... So you refer to ASHA, which is the organization for speech and language.

[00:28:26] Reid Lyon: Yes.

[00:28:26] Susan Lambert: Medicine has a similar...

[00:28:29] Reid Lyon: AMA. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

[00:28:29] Susan Lambert: Yep. The AMA. And what you're saying is that the field of education doesn't really have a professional organization like that.

[00:28:38] Reid Lyon: No. We have committees, large committees, maybe some expert people on the committees decide what states will certify. Where do they get that information?

[00:28:53] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:53] Reid Lyon: Iowa does it differently than Florida.

[00:28:57] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:28:57] Reid Lyon: There's no common denominators, no common language across states with respect to standards, with respect to licensure-content question, with respect to accreditation of higher education. Those are pretty individualized. That is, there's no coherence to them.

So, I think sometimes people may say, "Well, why can't we have this common language and common knowledge?"

[00:29:29] Susan Lambert: What we just talked about, this idea of professionalism, this idea of science influencing the profession. Is this some of the conversations that you and Doug Carnine are having about professionalism in the field of education?

[00:29:45] Reid Lyon: Yes, and Doug is so brilliant to begin with and his ability to conceptualize and see the connections. Education is a field that does not regulate itself by professional input, so we have to step back a little bit. People preparing teachers and leaders in education preparation programs believe, in many cases, they are doing exactly the right thing.

This is where we're seeing another one of these cogs in the system exert its influence. People who are prepared and build their careers on a set of knowledge and have been successful, however that's defined, and using that knowledge do not want to give that up. That's human.

But educators aren't trained as scientists. When we go into the academy, into colleges of education, and I believe, check me on this, but NCTQ, I believe, recently published that only 37% of teacher-preparation institutions were using the Science of Reading as the anchor for their coursework for their field experience.

Somebody can come along and say to their dean, "You're not using the Science of Reading." And the dean will defend what they're doing on the virtue of the knowledge systems in the colleges. That is, there are multiple ways of knowing. You have evidence, but we have evidence. Just because you say it's scientific, that doesn't mean that that's true. So we have some very epistemological gaps.

[00:31:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:31:58] Reid Lyon: So if you're not agreeing on what counts as knowledge, what is accurate knowledge, we have some challenges.

[00:32:08] Susan Lambert: What you just described is what makes teachers go crazy, because why should we expect an education undergrad student to be able to discern what is science and what is not science, what is fact and what is not fact, when they're walking into a program. Right? So we're putting a responsibility on pre-service teachers and teachers in places that it's just not fair for them.

[00:32:44] Reid Lyon: Well, that's what I was saying. It's not just the kids. It is the teachers and also the leaders who don't have the information either.

[00:32:55] Susan Lambert: Right? Yeah.

[00:32:56] Reid Lyon: Notice they don't have a common language.

[00:32:59] Susan Lambert: And that's what a profession can do. Okay, so now we've come full circle back to what we were talking about.

[00:33:04] Reid Lyon: Yes.

[00:33:05] Susan Lambert: The language should reflect the common knowledge, and it's your contention that we don't have a profession to be able to do that. Is this where you're thinking that, oh man, we have a system problem?

[00:33:17] Reid Lyon: Yes.

[00:33:19] Susan Lambert: Okay. Talk to us about that.

[00:33:20] Reid Lyon: So here, picture if you know those cogs that you see in a watch or something, all the cogs are spinning and they make another cog go this way.

[00:33:30] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:33:31] Reid Lyon: You know what I'm saying?

[00:33:32] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:33:32] Reid Lyon: Just visualize that. Well, one of those cogs is a lack of common knowledge.

[00:33:39] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:33:40] Reid Lyon: And that cog is turning and spins the knowledge base that people who work with children in literacy carry with them. That spins out people with the knowledge that's being taught, the knowledge itself being non-representative of fact. If there's evidence, that's great. If there's not evidence, that's great. But that cog up there says, "Well, whose evidence are you talking about??"

[00:34:11] Susan Lambert: Right, right, right.

[00:34:12] Reid Lyon: Okay.

[00:34:12] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:34:14] Reid Lyon: Now, that can't happen in medicine because the stark consequences are so strong. There are hierarchies of evidence in medicine.

[00:34:25] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:26] Reid Lyon: You have randomized controlled trials that are top of the line for examining things that are applied with human beings to improve their health.

[00:34:38] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:34:38] Reid Lyon: You have departures from the RCTs that are almost as good and several of them can make up the slack.

I don't want to get into that, but epistemologically, keep in mind, in medicine, speech and language pathology, engineering, we want to know if A causes B.

[00:34:59] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:35:00] Reid Lyon: And we also want to know what could come between A and B that also influences B.

[00:35:07] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:35:08] Reid Lyon: And we've got to make sure we understand that whole picture.

[00:35:12] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:13] Reid Lyon: So, when I was talking about the hypothesis that children learn to read naturally, and one piece of evidence for that is that very young kids can pick up print and read fairly well at ages before formal schooling. So they've been around language, A. They're starting to be able to read words, B. They love to look at books. Okay.

But what comes between A and B? The mom is playing Ubbi Dubbi games with the kid.

[00:35:44] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:44] Reid Lyon: The mom has gone and got Sesame Street on the tube.

[00:35:49] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:49] Reid Lyon: All of these other factors that are part of the exposure bucket. The kid is actually being taught pretty well, sometimes very directly by parents...

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

[00:36:01] Reid Lyon: Who point out the letters and the sounds and so forth. That means to say that those kids are receiving information that has good evidence to it. It's direct and explicit.

[00:36:14] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:15] Reid Lyon: There's some clarity to it. All right, so we have the cog up here, the information cog that in many cases is filled with questionable information. That cog spins the knowledge generation and development core of a teacher and leader. They come into schools and are, to paraphrase Margaret Goldberg, my great colleague, Margaret Goldberg, that if they come into schools where they have students from those environments where the parents were very hands-on with literacy activities, the kids respond pretty well to a lot of things.

[00:37:01] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:01] Reid Lyon: They don't seem to need the clarity and directness until she goes into a Title 1 school. And then what happens? Those less than direct, those amorphous kinds of interactions around literacy features begin to reap their habit.

[00:37:22] Susan Lambert: Yep, yep.

[00:37:24] Reid Lyon: There's no clarity to them.

[00:37:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:37:26] Reid Lyon: Maybe some of the listeners can remember if they were studying algebra and had an instructor that was all over the map, didn't slow down, didn't give anybody a chance to check for understanding, and what people needed was direct clear explanations with practice and with numerous examples.

[00:37:48] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:37:48] Reid Lyon: So, there's that cog. Now, let's say we do now have great colleges of education, great in terms of their courage. Diane and I are going down to Alabama to speak to their state department personnel and to college of education faculty that are working extraordinarily hard. These are faculty who many have been teaching for two decades, many of whom had an information base from constructive balanced literacy perspectives.

[00:38:25] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:38:26] Reid Lyon: And are now saying, "I'm beginning to understand that is not useful when we're working with these kinds of children, and, by the way, in Alabama, most of our children did not come from advantaged homes," like any place. So those college of education faculty are coming together and they're putting their hearts into content. They're getting good declarative knowledge. They're learning the componential process. They're learning phonemic awareness, phonological processing, orthographic mapping. They're working hard, and they have been. As they bring that knowledge in, now they are struggling, as is most places around the country, with "How do we apply it?"

[00:39:16] Susan Lambert: The professors are struggling with how they apply it in their coursework. Is that what you're saying?

[00:39:21] Reid Lyon: And how they can teach teachers to apply it, which means they have to know how to apply it, which means if I'm teaching so and so and so on, I understand that it needs to be direct and systematic.

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

[00:39:35] Reid Lyon: But what if I over-teach it? What if I teach a kid something and they get it and I continue to teach them that?

[00:39:42] Susan Lambert: Ah.

[00:39:43] Reid Lyon: Or what if they don't get it? I think they do and I move on and they didn't get it, so there's no way they can get the second...

[00:39:50] Susan Lambert: Classic. So that's classic. Learning anything new, how to stay, I don't want to say stay in the guardrails, but get comfortable with what this actually looks like, because when you're working with teachers or you're working with students, it's all very nuanced too. Right?

[00:40:05] Reid Lyon: Yes, it is, and what helps with that is... this is so foreign to many people in education preparing teachers and teachers themselves... is to get their hands around the fact that assessment is a great friend.

[00:40:25] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Not an enemy. Not an enemy.

[00:40:30] Reid Lyon: If we screen, we can maybe prevent, if we're side by side with the kid...

[00:40:36] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:40:36] Reid Lyon: And assessing how they're applying what we're teaching. We can see if they have long E. We can see if they know digraphs or diphthongs. We can see if they are able to remember words that they've seen before and can read them. Orthographic mapping.

[00:40:58] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:40:58] Reid Lyon: If we're assessing, and the tougher it is for the kid to read, the more we should be progress monitoring, the more we should be checking in.

Yeah.

If the kid is really moving along fine, but here is where faculty are breaking down, not breaking down. This is. A lot to learn. I hope people understand that.

[00:41:20] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:41:20] Reid Lyon: I hope people don't feel bad when they hear these conversations. You and I talking about we need to know this, this, this, and this and this. I mean, I've had 50 years of it.

[00:41:31] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:41:32] Reid Lyon: And I'm still not fluent in many areas, but the fact is that what we know is only as good as what we do.

[00:41:42] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:41:43] Reid Lyon: And knowing that we're doing the right thing and tracking the student's progress means we have to be familiar with what does it look like when a youngster has lousy phonemic awareness, and how does that show up in the actual reading.

[00:42:02] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:42:02] Reid Lyon: That's what the assessment will tell you.

[00:42:04] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:42:05] Reid Lyon: It'll show up in a number of things. It could be that they can't decode words. They don't have the alphabetic principle. They can't place sound on top of letter structures. It could also mean they have that, but they have a difficulty with automaticity.

[00:42:24] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:24] Reid Lyon: And that's related to vocabulary. So it's learning how to spot whether or not a human being is acquiring the different componential skills that all work together. That's what I was saying before, because we can see a slow, labored reader.

[00:42:44] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:42:45] Reid Lyon: People will say, "Oh, that kid's got lousy fluency." "Too high." Why?

[00:42:50] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so all of this is all about, to bring us back to this idea of systems. So you're talking about this great big cog of, particularly in colleges of higher education, the professors that are working there to train the teachers, they need to increase their knowledge base because they're an important cog in this system, in terms of understanding how kids learn how to read, how to spot areas of difficulties, and then being able to communicate this information to their students, i.e., teachers, who then are the ones that are poised to then get this down to the students in the classroom as they're learning literacy.

[00:43:32] Reid Lyon: Right. Right. And those systems, yes, have to be meshed.

[00:43:37] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:43:37] Reid Lyon: And when we see that, as you and I are talking about it, I'm visualizing the amount of courage it will take.

[00:43:46] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:43:46] Reid Lyon: I'm visualizing the amount of money that will have to go into helping faculty prepare.

[00:43:53] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:43:54] Reid Lyon: I'm visualizing the time it will take.

[00:43:58] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:43:58] Reid Lyon: This isn't something you read on the back of a cereal box. Now, here we have people giving their lives, changing their philosophical point of view, appreciating that there is evidence that can guide us, and if that evidence is replicated and incorrect, it's replaced. Here we've got all of these people giving their hearts and minds to this, and different states have different standards for what colleges of education need to teach, or if they can even tell colleges of education what to teach.

[00:44:42] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:44:43] Reid Lyon: A cog in higher ed is tenure and academic freedom.

[00:44:47] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:48] Reid Lyon: They're great concepts. They were brought online for really good reasons. They weren't brought online to teach the wrong things. If we want to move our teachers forward with belief systems, with non-evidentiary-based ideas, that's well done in the humanities. We're in people-caring professions. We're in, we are responsible for human lives.

[00:45:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:45:27] Reid Lyon: A number of people that I've watched on your podcast have talked about the anguish that children feel, the embarrassment that children feel, the poor self-esteem that comes along. And full disclosure, and you know this, I had trouble learning to read.

[00:45:45] Susan Lambert: Right. Yep.

[00:45:46] Reid Lyon: Wasn't until late second grade, but that colored my entire public school or academic career. I never wanted to hang out in schools. That's the human life I'm talking about. So it's personal to me, which I probably shouldn't bring up, but I see kids all the time who can't look me in the eye. They just sink into themselves. That's the human cost.

[00:46:15] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:46:15] Reid Lyon: And it's not just loving children. It's loving the knowledge that will help us love children through action.

[00:46:25] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Wow. Pretty powerful statement. And so true, because, as you know too, I had a son, or I guess I still have him, who struggled to learn how to read. And I saw that, and maybe I shouldn't share that either, but I've shared it lots with our listeners, but to see the impact on his life for that, and educators have a big responsibility beyond just loving children. And I love how you said that.

So a couple of things as we're, we could talk for hours and hours and hours. So, precise definitions are going to be really important.

[00:47:02] Reid Lyon: Yes.

[00:47:02] Susan Lambert: I think that you're also paying attention to updating your maxims.

[00:47:09] Reid Lyon: That is correct. And everything we're talking about today is the rationale behind why. We are developing a doctoral concentration at Drexel University and an information resource hub to begin to provide an infrastructure to close these gaps we're talking about.

The maxims are, as we know, we talked about them when they first came out, just like we always reexamine evidence in the evidence container. When we wrote the maxims, or I wrote and people edited or whatever it may be, it was a team effort, we knew that things would be modified or changed or new facts came into the system, in other words, were evolving.

[00:48:08] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:08] Reid Lyon: Now, what's I think very powerful is new evidence continues to support old evidence.

[00:48:17] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That's so cool.

[00:48:19] Reid Lyon: Yeah. So we know reading is not natural. We do know that decoding is the on ramp to all of the other elements that allow someone to pull the print off a page and have fun with it.

[00:48:32] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:48:33] Reid Lyon: So, looking back at the maxims, we strengthened each maxim in terms of the tremendous impact oral language has on reading.

[00:48:46] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Love that.

[00:48:47] Reid Lyon: We strengthened the relationship between oral language and reading by helping people understand that reading is language. Reading is nested within language. They're not separate. And that means that all components of language, from phonology to semantics, to syntax, to pragmatics, to every piece of what the language system entails or has within it, all go into reading. And by realizing that we'll never come close to phonics versus whole language.

[00:49:32] Susan Lambert: As a reminder, listeners can go back and listen to the first two conversations with you where we talked a lot about the NIH and the research and the initial maxims. But is your update helping to clarify language too?

[00:49:46] Reid Lyon: Yes.

[00:49:46] Susan Lambert: To clarify terminology?

[00:49:48] Reid Lyon: As much as it can.

[00:49:51] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:49:51] Reid Lyon: The Reading Universe who houses the maxims have these wonderful people. One is Kelly Butler...

[00:49:59] Susan Lambert: She's amazing.

[00:50:00] Reid Lyon: Who's moved the maxims process along. I mean, Kelly, if you wanted to really say who is a prime mover, that was Kelly Butler. And Noel Gunther is a very good judge of what people can handle and need to hear. It's like you, he has great fingers on the pulse of what people know and what can be stated that will relate to what they know, rather than overwhelm.

So, again, the maxims are that first glance. And we've talked over the last however minutes we've been talking, there's an awful lot of content we've, you and I, have just discussed.

[00:50:51] Susan Lambert: Yep, for sure.

[00:50:52] Reid Lyon: So those maxims are equally important to leaders and the Drexel experience, this is going to be a program in literacy science. It's a doctorate for leaders in literacy science and systems change. And developing this is bringing in leaders who are already leading in schools into this program.

The people that are helping design what they will receive in this program, and what they will do is the genius of Lori Severino. She's the director of this program, an outstanding teacher in her own right, a good scholar in her own right, brilliant in her knowledge of language and literacy, and she can teach people about that in ways that I've never seen.

Now Lori is at Drexel, but she also is in the schools all the time, and so Diane and I have site visited some of those schools where she provided the professional development for the teachers.

[00:52:03] Susan Lambert: Oh, nice.

[00:52:04] Reid Lyon: You would not believe the common language. You wouldn't. The kids when we're in the classrooms are totally engaged and they can tell me what they're working on with respect to a component or components. "I'm working on phonemic awareness so I can put the sound on the letter."

[00:52:24] Susan Lambert: Wow.

[00:52:24] Reid Lyon: These are non-readers initially. They can talk to us using the same language the teacher uses with them and the teacher wants them to learn that language. The leaders can come in, the principal and the superintendent can come in, and see a kid working, walk up to that kid and say, "Wow. I see that your spelling is outstanding. You know the big word for that is, what helps that, is orthographic mapping." The kid says, "I know." So leaders have such an amazing impact and we want to provide an opportunity for leaders who want to be so intimately involved in their teachers' work and in the children's work that they have to learn the common language and they have to learn how to collect data, and they have to learn how to develop systems in their school, where data meetings are as prevalent as something else.

In other words, they are changing the structures and systems within the school to accommodate the intensity and duration of instruction that is required for children who do not respond at all to limited duration of instruction, limited, they don't respond. How do they know that? They're looking at their progress monitoring data.

[00:54:03] Susan Lambert: That's amazing.

[00:54:03] Reid Lyon: They're looking at their benchmark data, and I can sit down or you could sit down and talk with these folks and it would be similar to me talking to you.

There's a assistant superintendent in New Jersey by the name of Anthony Fitzpatrick. I've never... He just wrote a book on reading and reading instruction. I've never met a person at that level of administration who can brilliantly teach what you and I are talking about today. Brilliantly. You see that I get excited when I see the level of talent and commitment and devotion to learning something entirely new and excelling in it.

[00:54:50] Susan Lambert: Yeah. You know what you talked about with students talking about their own learning, which the teacher was teaching, which the administration can watch, and you're excited about this new program at Drexel, that is a great example of this idea of a system working to support the student to the student's life outcomes. Right? Because literacy is such a life outcome.

[00:55:15] Reid Lyon: Yeah, absolutely. And these leaders will be learning about the fact that teachers are coming through the higher ed pipeline, will arrive, and we'll have to have professional development that's top-notch.

And so, working in this program to make sure that we know what we're doing there is Louisa Moes, who's very hands on. We can know everything up the wazoo, but implementation is a bear.

[00:55:48] Susan Lambert: Implementation is everything. Everything. Everything.

[00:55:52] Reid Lyon: And Michelle Duda is the person responsible for designing what leaders need to know about implementation. Louise Spear-Swerling will be handling the foundations of literacy. Stephanie Stollar will be handling the assessment systems and Angela Hanlin, I don't know if you know Angie Hanlin.

[00:56:15] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:56:16] Reid Lyon: Angie will be handling how one can, like with Anthony, work with leaders in ways that they actually have procedural knowledge, that they can use what they're doing, that they hold themselves accountable. These are certainly names that I know a lot because they're brilliant, and they've all done it.

[00:56:39] Susan Lambert: I love it, and it gives us so many ideas for more that we can cover for sure. Before we close out, I want to go back to the updated 10 maxims.

[00:56:51] Reid Lyon: Yes.

[00:56:51] Susan Lambert: We can link listeners in the show notes to Reading Universe for sure. So we've talked about them before and we can keep an eye out for them. Just knowing that they're going to come out through that mechanism is great to know.

And I am just thankful that you... First of all, thank you for coming and sharing your thoughts again and for the work that you continue to do.

You and your wife Diane are working so hard to make sure then these systems get in place. You could have not come back to help the world of literacy, but you did come back and the world of literacy thanks you, so, really do appreciate all that you're doing. So thanks again for joining us.

[00:57:31] Reid Lyon: It's great to see you.

[00:57:34] Susan Lambert: That was Dr. G Reid Lyon, a neuroscientist and specialist in learning disorders. He currently serves as a senior advisor to the Drexel University Allied Hub, a comprehensive resource for multiple stakeholders involved in literacy education. Check out the show notes for a link to learn more about that, as well as links to Dr. Lyon's earlier appearances on Science of Reading: The Podcast.

Learn more about creating lasting change by downloading our free Science of Reading Change Management playbook. Find evidence-based strategies for implementation and more by visiting amplify.com/changemanagementplaybook. We'll also have a link in the show notes.

Next up, we have a brand new edition of Science of Reading Essentials. this time focused on learning science.

[00:58:27] Natalie Wexler: If you look at those things through the lens of cognitive load theory, we're making reading and writing much harder for kids than they need to be.

[00:58:35] Dr. Hugh Catts: To build a meaningful memory of something that you can hold on and use, you have to think about it.

One of my favorite quotes is from Daniel Willingham, where he said that memory is the residue of thought.

[00:58:49] Peter C. Brown: What we are intuitively drawn to do as a learning strategy, like rereading material, practicing something over and over and over again, those strategies are pretty much labor in vain. They don't stick.

[00:59:02] Susan Lambert: That's next time. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thanks so much for listening.