Science of Reading: The Podcast

Adolescent Literacy, Episode 1: Foundational skills for adolescent learners, with Doug Fisher, Ph.D.

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In this first episode of our special four-part Science of Reading: The Podcast Adolescent Literacy miniseries, Susan Lambert, Ed.D., speaks with Doug Fisher, Ph.D., a celebrated professor, author, and one of the most influential voices in adolescent literacy. They explore what the evidence really tells us about supporting adolescent learners, and what it means for classroom practice. They also discuss why Doug and his colleagues set out to find a new model for adolescent literacy, how self-efficacy powers literacy development in adolescent learners and what teachers can do to build it, and what "foundational skills" in reading truly means for adolescent readers—and why it is non-negotiable.

Show notes:

Quotes:

"Our literacy skills contiue to grow across our lifetimes." —Doug Fisher

"The human brain operates on language, and reading, writing, speaking and listening, are the language operating systems of our brain." —Doug Fisher

"The word 'foundational' to me means not optional." —Doug Fisher

"Literacy is a gatekeeper. If we can develop stronger literacy skills in our student, we will change their lives." —Doug Fisher

"The passion that educators bring also makes learning relevant." —Doug Fisher

Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction: New adolescent literacy mini-series
02:00 Foundational skills for adolescent learners, with Doug Fisher
06:00 "Our literacy skills continue to grow across our lifetimes
08:00 In search of a new adolescent literacy model
14:00 Distinguishing early, general, and disciplinary literacy
17:00 Why the Reading Rope was not designed for adolescent learners
19:00 Introducing the reading circuit and self-efficacy
27:00 Sentence level analysis
31:00 Building self-efficacy through academic risk taking
34:00 Redefining "foundational skills" for adolescent readers
38:00 What this looks like in high school classrooms
43:00 Teacher self-efficacy and the joy of student learning
48:00 Closing thoughts: "Literacy as a gatekeeper"
*Timestamps are approximate

[00:00:00] Douglas Fisher: I think we have to redefine what we mean are foundational for adolescents. What are the foundational components that are important for adolescent readers?

[00:00:14] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify.

Over the past couple years, we've gotten a number of listener questions like this: "I'm a high school English teacher who has many, many students who read and write far below grade level. Are there any strategies specifically for secondary students?" And questions like this: "What's the best program for helping older readers, fourth grade and above?"

Well, today I'm excited to kick off a new miniseries devoted specifically to adolescent literacy.

[00:00:47] Kymyona Burk: There's a literacy crisis in middle school, too.

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

[00:00:49] Kymyona Burk: Yeah. High school, too, and so we have to take this both/and approach.

[00:00:54] Jeanne Schopf: The reality is that of the 75% of the kids that we have that are struggling, particularly in the upper grades, 90% of them are instructional casualties. They were never really taught to read.

[00:01:04] Julie Burtscher Brown: Yes, adolescent literacy is enormous. It's multifaceted. There's specialized instruction that needs to happen, but real, meaningful change can happen.

[00:01:15] Susan Lambert: Over the next four episodes, we're bringing on experts who have researched best practices for supporting this particular group of students. To begin, I'm joined by Dr. Douglas Fisher, professor and chair of educational leadership at San Diego State University. He's recently co-authored two major works on adolescent literacy.

One is a review of the adolescent literacy literature. The second is a new book titled Teaching Foundational Skills to Adolescent Readers, which he wrote with Dr. Nancy Frey, Dr. Sarah Ortega, Dr. Kiersten Barbee, and Aida Allen-Rotell. At the heart of this conversation is a new model for adolescent literacy called the Reading Circuit that Dr. Fisher breaks down for us.

Before we jump in, two quick things to share. To go along with this miniseries, we've put together a bundle of e-books about the Science of Reading and adolescent literacy. In addition to listening to these episodes, please go grab those e-books and free activities at amplify.com/adolescentliteracybundle.

We'll also drop a link in the show notes. Also, remember to join me for Part 1 of our Summer Learning Academy on June 16, 2026. Along with educators from around the world, we'll build on our recent comprehension symposium and discuss bringing these best practices on comprehension into the classroom. Reserve your spot now at amplify.com/summerlearningacademy. Now, here's Dr. Douglas Fisher.

Well, welcome to today's episode, and I'm so excited to have Doug Fisher join us today. Doug, welcome. Thank you for joining.

[00:03:03] Douglas Fisher: Thank you. Awesome. Thanks for the invitation.

[00:03:05] Susan Lambert: I so appreciate your work. I've been following you for years, and I really would love it if...

I'm sure our listeners know who you are, so I don't know that you need an introduction, but I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how you became interested in literacy.

[00:03:21] Douglas Fisher: Oh, gosh. When I was in fourth grade, I was a peer tutor to first graders, and my mom tells me that I would come home and I would talk about their reading and their learning to read and watching them read. So I think, formatively, I remember this, but not super vividly.

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

[00:03:40] Douglas Fisher: But I remember doing that in the afternoons in fourth grade, and I think that that formative experience was like, oh, watching other people learn and learn to read is pretty interesting, exciting, and it feeds your soul.

So I went off to college, and the very first paper I was ever assigned in my college English class was on illiteracy. And literally in this English class, we got assigned topics, and I got illiteracy. And I still have that paper. I have the four drafts of that paper that it took to get a passing grade with that English teacher.

That was my assigned topic. It was not my choice. I ended up reading a lot, learning a lot, mostly about adults and what happens in society when adults don't possess strong literacy skills. And I was in a teacher ed program. I wanted to be a teacher. I was working on communication, skills and teaching, and that's my formative experiences growing up that channeled me into this work of teaching literacy, learning about literacy, thinking about literacy.

[00:04:43] Susan Lambert: Wow. That's really amazing. I think this is the first time we've heard about that elementary peer-reading process, which is impactful to a lot of kids, but wow, that's a really great story. Thank you for sharing that.

[00:04:54] Douglas Fisher: Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

[00:04:55] Susan Lambert: And now we're talking about adolescent literacy, so we are kicking off a miniseries all, talking all about adolescent literacy, and I'm really excited that there's a lot of buzz about this because we've heard a lot about early literacy development.

[00:05:10] Douglas Fisher: Right. Right.

[00:05:10] Susan Lambert: And a lot of even upper elementary, middle, high school teachers are saying, "Wait a minute. How does this relate to me and what I need to do to support students?" So I'm wondering what your observations are about the Science of Reading movement and how we support older students.

[00:05:29] Douglas Fisher: Oh, yeah. So, as you noted, we got lots of evidence in primary grades. We have models. We have frameworks. We have ways of thinking about what it takes to really develop early literacy skills. And then there's a perception that if that doesn't happen by fourth grade or sixth grade or whatever, then it's all remediation.

[00:05:50] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:05:50] Douglas Fisher: But our literacy skills continue to grow across our lifetimes. I mean, I'm still learning vocabulary words now. So we're still learning across our lives. And as some colleagues years ago talked about, there are constrained skills and unconstrained skills, and those unconstrained skills, like comprehension and vocabulary, et cetera, continue to grow across our lifetime.

And given that, we should be thinking about the role that teachers play in continued literacy development all the way through the grade spans. The problem is we don't really have very good models.

[00:06:23] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:06:23] Douglas Fisher: We do have research, but we really don't have strong ways of thinking about it. In elementary, we have multiple models.

We have the Reading Rope. We have the Active View. I mean, we have ways to think about literacy and the components of literacy and the instructional models of literacy.

[00:06:39] Susan Lambert: And we were talking in the pre-call about Scarborough's Rope and, and oftentimes middle/upper teachers think, "Well, how does the Rope apply to me?"

And when I was thinking about this, and often I've responded to middle school, high school teachers, it's, "Well, it doesn't really apply to you, but I'm not sure that I have a model to help you understand what does apply for you." So you and your colleagues set out to create something like that, and first did a review of the literature, and you recently published a review of that literature on adolescent reading.

What was your motivation for doing this? What did you find in the process? And we'll talk a little bit about the model in a minute, but first of all, I'd love to hear the process.

[00:07:25] Douglas Fisher: So, the idea was... It came from... Several districts are overgeneralizing the Reading Rope specifically to older kids, fifth graders, eighth graders, whatever. And I was just concerned that the evidence behind the Rope draws from younger children and students with disabilities, and I just kept thinking, "Are we sure?" And I don't have another way to think about it.

So, what we wanted to look for was confirming evidence around the Reading Rope across the grade spans.

[00:07:57] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:07:57] Douglas Fisher: And so we set out to say, "Does this apply?" Now, my colleagues and I have argued that in the decades since the Reading Rope was first published, there are probably areas that we could, strands we would add today.

[00:08:10] Susan Lambert: Sure.

[00:08:11] Douglas Fisher: So, we've articulated things like morphological awareness, which really was not that big of a thing in 2001, and it is now. We know a lot about that. There's a debate about fluency, for example. Does it belong as the outcome or does it belong as an input? So we were in that space of "How would this apply? Are the strands really thin in middle school and high school and stronger?" We played with this for a while.

And then we did this deep dive in the systematic review. And there's a research process that uses this thing called Prisma, and it's a whole official process to go through to figure out what the world knows. And the rapid systematic review came out of COVID when researchers and doctors and things had to find rapid decisions based on the current evidence.

And so, educators have been beginning to adopt that approach, that methodology, systematic approach.

[00:09:05] Susan Lambert: And it's a methodology for sort of reviewing the literature, if you will.

[00:09:09] Douglas Fisher: Yes.

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

[00:09:10] Douglas Fisher: And in a systematic way, so you don't just "I did a little Google search and found what I could find," or whatever.

[00:09:15] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah, yeah.

[00:09:16] Douglas Fisher: So we really wanted to know what was confirming and how would we redraw the Rope, validate the Rope when you're talking about eighth-graders, for example.

[00:09:26] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

[00:09:27] Douglas Fisher: And so that's what we set out to do. And we went through this very systematic process of deep dives into... As a person who works at a university, I have access to these huge databases of literature. And so, I know everyone doesn't have that or has the paywalls.

Nancy and I can look at anything in the published research, and if our library doesn't have it, they will get it for us. So that's a service that I recognize not everyone has, but that's what we did. It was very systematic, very deep dive into this. And we limited it to grades four and above.

[00:10:01] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:10:02] Douglas Fisher: And it couldn't be special ed, and it couldn't be Tier 3 intervention.

[00:10:06] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:10:06] Douglas Fisher: We did include some supplemental interventions that were conducted in a regular classroom, not a pullout, not outside of the flow of the day.

[00:10:14] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:10:15] Douglas Fisher: And I'm flashing way back to something I wrote years ago.

There's been a mindset: every teacher's a teacher of reading. And I've taken a little exception to that because you're telling an algebra teacher, "You're now a reading teacher." And I don't think we would all say every teacher's a teacher of algebra, and that would freak us all out if I have to teach algebra or chemistry or whatever. But my mindset is that the human brain operates on language.

[00:10:43] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:44] Douglas Fisher: And reading, writing, speaking, and listening are the language operating system of our brain. And so, if we could say learning occurs through language, then teachers have to be building language. And part of language is reading, but it's more than that.

So that's where my mindset was going into this.

[00:11:03] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:11:03] Douglas Fisher: Whereas I think your average first-grade teacher says, "I'm a reading teacher, too. A big part of my day is to teach reading."

[00:11:09] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That makes sense. And luckily, this review that you published is open access.

[00:11:17] Douglas Fisher: Yes.

[00:11:17] Susan Lambert: And we can link our listeners to that so that if... Well, there's another reason they're going to want to read it, but if they want to read about this process that you went through. You explain that process where you went through to actually look at the literature. So that's super cool.

I want to make a comment, too, about this "Every teacher is a reading teacher," because I like the distinction that you make, because if I'm an algebra teacher... Thank God I'm not or never was an algebra teacher. I'd be horrible at it, but algebra's a language.

And so, these academic languages in our content areas of math and science and history and all that have their own unique language, that in order to have access to that content, you have to understand the frame of that language.

[00:11:59] Douglas Fisher: Right. Right. Absolutely. And language is how we all... It's how our brains organize. We like images, and we like language. Our brain does that. And when we think, we think in those terms, the language. If we have a concept, and then the vocabulary word is the label for that concept.

So, I mean, I think that applies to all of us as educators. When they say every teacher's a teacher of reading, I think where most high school teachers go is phonics. "Oh, I don't know how to teach phonics. I don't know how to teach reading." "I have my own child. I'm watching my child learn to read. I don't know how to do that." And so I want to help clarify that.

If I could add, in our adolescent literacy profession, and it's a smaller group. I mean, elementary reading is huge, and adolescents, it's much smaller, people who are interested in adolescent reading. There is this model of disciplinary literacy, and I have written about this. Nancy and I have done this. So reading in history, as you were saying, is different than reading in science. And there's apprentice models. High school students are not experts, but learning how to do that, how to think as you read and write and think and listen and view in science is different.

[00:13:08] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:13:08] Douglas Fisher: And I appreciate that body of research, but I think we have neglected the level below disciplinary literacy. As Shanahan and Shanahan talked about, is the generic literacy. There's the basic literacy which generally gets accomplished in elementary school, and then there's more general literacy, and then there's disciplinary or discipline-specific literacy.

And I feel like our profession is so hyper-focused on disciplinary literacy that we're not really learning more and talking more about general literacy. And we have a whole bunch of kids, I mean, if you look at NAEP scores, for example, there's a whole bunch of kids who are not yet proficient, and what do we collectively need to be doing at the generic literacy level while we're also developing some of their discipline-specific habits or ways of thinking?

[00:13:56] Susan Lambert: How would you distinguish between the early literacy and the general literacy?

[00:14:02] Douglas Fisher: Ah. So I think if you read the... I think there's a triangle model of this. The basic literacy, understanding how the code works, understanding how to recognize patterns in words, fluency, developing early fluency models.

And then you get past that, and you move into more generic things, vocabulary work or multiple meaning words, comprehension strategies. And it's more complicated than that, but I think there's a difference between very basic literacy that generally occurs in the early childhood space, then general literacy that continues to develop. I mean, note-taking is a skill that we can apply to lots of classes, lots of content areas.

[00:14:42] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:14:42] Douglas Fisher: But understanding corroborating sources or second and first-person view, that's a little bit more specialized in terms of disciplines. I expected to find way more research on general literacy with adolescents, because I thought people would be studying that.

[00:15:01] Susan Lambert: Let's talk about that a little. That's one of the things that you were surprised about, and I wasn't surprised when you said you were surprised you couldn't find it because we've... I've been looking for what is the body of evidence for adolescent literacy. What did you actually find?

[00:15:15] Douglas Fisher: Well, we found a series of studies. There's a lot of multi-component studies on literacy with adolescents. They take... they don't study one thing like vocabulary or fluency. They don't... There's some, but there's a lot of multi-component studies, but there aren't a lot of them. And so if you limit to grade four and above, not special ed, not intervention, and you look at literacy, you are narrowing the field rapidly to what people write about.

Now, if I would've added disciplinary literacy, the number of articles would just jump, skyrocketing in how many people write about disciplinary literacy. But that's not what we were looking for. We were looking for a reading model, originally to see if we could validate the Reading Rope for adolescents. We ended up with a different model, as you know, because you looked at it.

[00:16:03] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:16:03] Douglas Fisher: But when Nancy and I were, "Where are all the studies?" If you go back 20, 25 years, there was a lot more studies. We wanted to limit it to rapid review and a timeframe.

[00:16:14] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:16:14] Douglas Fisher: There's just not as much.

[00:16:16] Susan Lambert: Hmm, that's really interesting. And again, in the work of doing the research and publishing this article, you really think the Reading Rope does not apply to adolescents.

[00:16:29] Douglas Fisher: I don't.

[00:16:30] Susan Lambert: And what's the danger? I want to take a little step back. What's the danger of actually applying the Reading Rope to adolescents?

[00:16:39] Douglas Fisher: I... Well, first of all, I think they're...

[00:16:40] Susan Lambert: Danger is a strong word. Oh my God. But you...

[00:16:41] Douglas Fisher: Yeah, danger's a strong word. Well, I think we want to be careful about overgeneralizing, and that is a caution of every researcher: "Don't overgeneralize my work." And I think that's a fair comment around the Reading Rope.

It is primary grades. It is around kids, especially if you look at the source. It, the one that I use, it comes from a handbook, and it's about reading difficulties, and that's not what that specific Rope is about. But I just want to be careful about overgeneralizing from what we know.

[00:17:10] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:17:11] Douglas Fisher: And the Rope is what we know in a certain band, in a certain developmental time, and so I want to be careful with that. And so we ended up saying, "I'm cautious about that," because all of these strands, and they're divided into these two categories.

I heard Catherine Snow talk in December. She was talking about the Rope as being very visually, how it explains things. But one of the problems is there's a two-part framework for it, word recognition and language comprehension. And you split them, and it's as if they're two separate things that eventually braid together, and I think her argument was, in part, they're reinforcing.

And if you read what Hollis talks about since the Rope, she talks about all the strands are important. Any strand gets frayed, the Rope's going to be frayed. But I think the visual is there's a separation there. And people tend to focus on the bottom, word recognition, at the exclusion of the top.

[00:18:05] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:18:05] Douglas Fisher: The architect and author of that never said to do that, and has argued both are important, and they reinforce one another. So I think visually there's an appeal to it.

I think it's hard for high school teachers. It says "alphabetics" on there, and they're like, "What do you mean alphabetics?" You know?

[00:18:21] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:18:21] Douglas Fisher: And then, we just don't have lots of research on each of those strands for adolescents.

[00:18:27] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. So, and so in this article, I don't know if I mentioned the title of it, "A Model for Adolescent Reading Instruction," which again, we'll link our listeners in the show notes to that article, you then propose a model for adolescent literacy that you've called the Reading Circuit. Can you talk a little bit about the key elements of that Reading Circuit?

[00:18:50] Douglas Fisher: Sure. And we called it the Reading Battery and the Reading Cell, ended up Reading Circuit. Every analogy, every metaphor is going to have some problems.

But what we tried to say is, "If you think of a battery cell, there are parts of the cell internal. They're all connected. You can't separate them out." So we were really cautious about separating these out. Teachers will focus on one part and not the other. So we argue what fuels the cell, the power of the cell, is around self-efficacy and students' beliefs.

[00:19:23] Susan Lambert: You actually represent it as the plug that you plug in.

[00:19:27] Douglas Fisher: The plug.

[00:19:27] Susan Lambert: Right? Yep, yep. I love that. I love that.

[00:19:29] Douglas Fisher: And that was the appeal. There are ... If you're going to look at the body of research on adolescents and literacy, self-efficacy, agency is huge. There's a huge amount of work being done in this area.

Agentic beliefs... If I put forth effort, are good things going to happen to me?

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

[00:19:46] Douglas Fisher: And we started on this path of success-failure ratios. So by the time you're in fourth grade or eighth grade or tenth grade, you have a history of success and failure in reading.

[00:19:55] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:19:55] Douglas Fisher: And if you generally experience failure in reading, you come to expect failure. Why would you put forth more effort? Because this teacher is probably not things going to do anything different than the last eight have done for me. I'm not a good reader.

[00:20:09] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:20:10] Douglas Fisher: And if the success-failure ratio tips to success, learners generally expect success. And when they make mistakes or errors or don't understand, they see it as pretty temporary because they generally experience success. That all feeds into your self-efficacy beliefs.

[00:20:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:20:26] Douglas Fisher: You could have an amazing lesson, a brilliant lesson, and if a learner does not believe they're going to learn because they can't learn, if their efficacy is low, that amazing lesson's probably not going to do much.

[00:20:37] Susan Lambert: Fall flat. Yep.

[00:20:38] Douglas Fisher: There's all kinds of behaviors and blocks and affective filters and stuff going on. So we do believe that the efficacy powers the cell.

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

[00:20:48] Douglas Fisher: And without efficacy, the cell's not going to have a lot of power. It's not going to last very long. That's the analogy that we like for this.

[00:20:54] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:20:54] Douglas Fisher: The body of knowledge around efficacy and agency is so powerful. Then inside the cell, what fills it all in is background knowledge. Now, that just shouldn't surprise anybody.

[00:21:05] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:21:05] Douglas Fisher: Remember Hollis Scarborough had it in the Rope in 2001, and studies go back into the '80s on background knowledge, and probably before that, but I've been reading the ones in the '80s. So we have known about the role of background knowledge for a really long time.

[00:21:20] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:21:20] Douglas Fisher: So in our cell, background knowledge is filled in everywhere And then the four parts of the cell, because we had to collapse some research to make enough case that there was a body of knowledge here, not isolated pieces.

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

[00:21:33] Douglas Fisher: So, when you're in fourth grade, eighth grade, whatever above, one of the things that influences your reading is can you recognize the words, and then do you know what the words mean?

So word recognition and word knowledge are super important parts of that. As students get older and they move into multisyllabic words or multiple meaning words or more sophisticated words, do they know what the words mean? And there's a lot of debate about sight words, and I think people conflate sight words with high-frequency words.

[00:22:01] Susan Lambert: Correct.

[00:22:02] Douglas Fisher: Yeah. And we argue that sight-word learning is still important when you're in high school. And I have videos on our YouTube channel of a career tech teacher in fire technology working with kids who want to be firefighters doing sight word recognition with the word obstruction, because they're stumbling on the word obstruction, and if they're going to say this, they say, "Overhead obstructions clear."

And they're supposed to look before they raise a ladder that nothing's going to bang into the ladder. And they're stumbling on this word, so he practices it with them. They write it. They say it. They tap it out. And that's a high school career tech teacher because word recognition is still important as you grow up because your words continue to grow and grow and grow.

So listeners, you probably know the word Vygotsky, and if you saw the word Vygotsky, your brain would automatically recognize Vygotsky, activate a background knowledge on Vygotsky. But if you showed the word Vygotsky to your local barista, they would probably stumble over that word because that's not part of their fluent sight recognition word.

[00:23:04] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:23:04] Douglas Fisher: So I think that part we have to untangle a little bit more with adolescents. They're still learning a volume of words, and they have to orthographically map them. They have to get added to the category of sight words, as Linnea Ehri talks about, even when you're in twelfth grade.

[00:23:20] Susan Lambert: Can I stop you there? Because that is really interesting. We typically think of, and I just said this this morning, that word recognition skills are constrained. Right? And I've often said it's sort of like one and done. But what you just said is making me rethink that, because as I continue to learn and grow and encounter words that I don't know, you're right.

I need to look at those. Maybe it's multisyllabic. Maybe morphology is going to be important for me to understanding that word. But I'm still putting, I'm still putting that in my circuit, if you will, so that, oh, now it's easier for that thing to become an automatic word or for me to instantly recognize it. Crazy.

[00:24:01] Douglas Fisher: Right. So I was at a group of teachers. We'll go to math for a minute. And they were talking about subitizing. I don't know this word, never said this word in my entire life.

[00:24:10] Susan Lambert: I know it.

[00:24:10] Douglas Fisher: And I pronounced it... And you see, you know it. And they were talk... And I pronounced it subitizing because of course it looked like subitizing to me, like a substitute teacher. And they're, "No, no, it's subitizing." And I'm, "Well, I don't think it says that." I mean, I'm like, "My morphology says something different." But no, and I go, "Okay, that's how you say it." And then I learned about it, and I learned its meaning. So I'm still learning to apply my rules, when they work, when they don't work, to recognize a word. Now, if you show me subitizing somewhere at a conference, I instantly know what it is because I have experience with it.

[00:24:39] Susan Lambert: Yep, yep.

[00:24:40] Douglas Fisher: Here's another point. So, if you were to ask a teenager today what the word prime means, what does the word prime mean?

The first answer will be, I guarantee you, Amazon Prime. I guarantee you.

[00:24:53] Susan Lambert: Oh, yeah. That's not what came in my head. Well, first it's, oh my gosh, it's a multiple-meaning word. Which meaning is Doug going to ask me to...? But wow, that's fascinating.

[00:25:02] Douglas Fisher: They will say Amazon Prime. The second will be a sports drink.

[00:25:06] Susan Lambert: Oh, okay.

[00:25:07] Douglas Fisher: The third will be around meat products, prime beef, et cetera.

[00:25:12] Susan Lambert: Oh my gosh.

[00:25:13] Douglas Fisher: A very, very distant fourth will be a number divisible by itself and one. It's just not their language. So that's another word recognition. I can recognize the word prime.

[00:25:25] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:25:25] Douglas Fisher: But do I know what it means? So we go from word recognition to word meaning often. And so in the Reading Circuit, there's word recognition and word meaning, and both of those play all the time. And you can't separate them out for adolescents.

And so, that's why I think inside of a cell works because we're not saying this is, and this, and then this is over here.

[00:25:46] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Well, first of all, that goes to show I'm not an adolescent right now because... I'm not, I did not think of those first three things at all.

But also going back to language as the foundation here, language is constantly evolving. Right? And so very interesting.

[00:26:00] Douglas Fisher: Absolutely.

[00:26:01] Susan Lambert: Okay. So I interrupted you on your Reading Circuit. We've done word recognition and we've done word knowledge. What do we have next?

[00:26:07] Douglas Fisher: Super interesting, I would say. This year we're talking, the language association, this is the year of the sentence, and relearning about sentence-level construction. And there's really good research that older kids stumble at the sentence level. And a lot of teachers don't do sentence analysis work.

And I mean, the studies on sentences are phenomenal. Parsing sentences, one protocol called Juicy Sentences, close reading of sentences from the History Project. So, people are starting to pay attention to sentence combining, sentence analysis, dependent clauses. There's just all this work at the sentence level that you don't find in the primary grades.

You don't find as many compound and complex sentences. You don't find as many dependent and independent clauses. You just don't see that in the primary grades. It becomes increasingly complicated for readers at the sentence level. And words can vary in their connotations based on where they're placed in a sentence.

[00:27:13] Susan Lambert: Correct. Oh, yes.

[00:27:14] Douglas Fisher: And I play around with this, "She told him that she loved him", or some sentence like that, and then I play with the word only. "She only told him that she loved him." "She told him that she only loved him." If you move the word only around, the meaning changes even though I know the word only.

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

[00:27:30] Douglas Fisher: And so in a sentence, you also end up with a bunch of referents, pronouns, they, it, and what does it refer back to or forward to? All this work at the sentence level, and readers get confused when the sentences are not connecting, especially when the referent is missing or unclear.

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

[00:27:51] Douglas Fisher: So the sentence-level analysis is super important. And then the last thing we think about is, verbal reasoning, language comprehension kinds of stuff. And I know it says verbal reasoning, and I know people get weird because we're talking about reading. But remember, our brains are using the oral parts to contribute to reading achievement or reading understanding.

And so there is a reasoning process that readers have to go through. And again, that was, that's validated from the Reading Rope. There was that, that reasoning through is super important.

[00:28:22] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:28:22] Douglas Fisher: Inferencing, for example. Monitoring, for example.

So the reason we put them inside of a cell with background knowledge filling every space in between these four components is that we hope people don't divide them out, that all of these are contributing to students' ability to read at higher levels.

[00:28:42] Susan Lambert: Yeah, I think that's a really important distinction, and your visual image is really good because it stays with you. It's simple, but yet you get the sense that you can walk away with this and still keep it in your mind when you're thinking about what it takes in the world of adolescent literacy.

But this idea of individual component parts, we can't focus on them in and of themselves, but in the context of a whole, because you don't just bring one or another thing to either reading or writing. So if we wanted to put writing in here, it's the same concept.

[00:29:13] Douglas Fisher: Right. Right. Exactly.

[00:29:15] Susan Lambert: So one thing I want to talk about is you've translated this sort of article that you wrote in this review of literature, the model that you propose in this article, to a book called Teaching Foundational Skills to Adolescent Readers.

I want to talk in a minute about this idea of why you used foundational skills here in the title. But first of all, I want to talk about some of the... So what this book does is beautiful. Right? It talks about classroom implications of all of these elements and examples of what it looks like in practice. I want to come back specifically to this idea of self-efficacy, the thing that sort of powers everything.

You've got to plug into that self-efficacy. What in the world is a teacher supposed to do to help a student actually increase their self-efficacy? If you think you can't do it, how am I going to convince you that you can? What can I do to change that?

[00:30:12] Douglas Fisher: Awesome. So we're going to draw on the body of research called academic risk-taking for this conversation.

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

[00:30:17] Douglas Fisher: And young people are either willing to take a risk or not, based on the climate, the culture, their background, et cetera. So if this is not a safe space, I'm not taking a risk.

[00:30:28] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:30:28] Douglas Fisher: If I don't have a good relationship with my teacher and the peers in this classroom, I'm not going to take a risk. If the task is not worth it to me, if the value expectancy model is off, I'm not taking a risk. If I expect to fail again and again, I'm not going to take a risk.

And learning to read and reading growth is risky. It's embarrassing. Right? So we recognize that. So one of the things teachers can do is they can create more opportunities for students to experience success more frequently.

So if you take an hour-long lesson and you chunk it into four parts, and you say, "Here's what success looks like in the first 10 minutes. Here's what success looks like in the next 20 minutes," and you increase the success ratio for students, they start to think about themselves, "Oh, for whatever reason, this teacher's weird, but I'm learning things. I'm feeling successful, so I'm going to try again, and I'm going to try again."

And I think about this. What if every time they're in a class, they experience success four or five times, and that is counter to their history? They will start to see that putting forth effort gives a reward that feels good.

[00:31:34] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:31:35] Douglas Fisher: It is highly rewarding when we experience success. The reward pathway in our brain, shots of dopamine, neurotransmitters, feels great. And our brain learns, "Oh, whatever you just did, do that again, because I get reinforced."

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

[00:31:50] Douglas Fisher: So the first part for me about increasing efficacy is increasing success so that the ratio starts to shift. And then students have to learn to attribute that success to themselves, to their efforts.

[00:32:02] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:32:02] Douglas Fisher: Because a lot of times in the very beginning of this, they will attribute that success to the teacher. And the teacher is probably doing a whole bunch of stuff to make sure that kid is successful.

[00:32:12] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:32:12] Douglas Fisher: But we have to shift it and say things like, "Did you notice the way you did? You did this and it worked for you. You applied this rule. You paused, you analyzed, you monitored, and when it didn't make sense, here's what you did. You did that."

And if we can get the belief in students, "I have some agency, and when I choose to do these things, I get the reward and it feels great in my brain, and I'm going to do that again." The risk with all of this is we make everything too simple, and we lower the rigor, and students absolutely know this is not grade level. And I don't want anyone to see that I'm reading Hop on Pop and you're reading War and Peace.

So, I think we have to be very careful about the kinds of things we put in front of students. And some students need a text that they can learn to apply rules to, but there's some privacy, so I think we have to be careful with intervention versus regular classroom.

[00:33:08] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I'm going to ask you later about some of the things that you've been working on at the high school level and some learnings, and maybe we'll come back to this.

I loved your distinction between helping kids feel success, but they know when you're dropping from an eighth-grade student down to a first-grade or a third-grade...

[00:33:28] Douglas Fisher: They know.

[00:33:28] Susan Lambert: ... expectation level. They know. They do.

Okay, let's go back to this. You call your book Teaching Foundational Skills to Adolescent Readers. Why did you choose the term foundational skills, and are you worried that that's going to plant misconceptions?

[00:33:45] Douglas Fisher: Always worried about misconceptions, yes, and overgeneralization.

[00:33:48] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:33:49] Douglas Fisher: But I think we have to redefine what we mean are foundational for adolescents. What are the foundational components that are important for adolescent readers? The word foundational to me means not optional.

[00:34:05] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:34:05] Douglas Fisher: It means you can't skip 'em. And what I appreciate about foundational skills for early readers is these are not options. These are things that have to happen when you're in first grade, and we're pretty clear about that. These are foundational skills that then grow other things.

And in the introduction to what we ended up writing, we talk about redefining the foundational skills for adolescents, that these are the non-negotiable things that have to happen across their day to continue their literacy development and growth Then, on top of foundational skills, you will add disciplinary literacy, learning to read like a scientist versus a historian versus an art critic. Those come after foundational.

And I think there's some intrigue of, "Oh, foundational skills. Is he talking about phonics for ninth graders?" And I want to invite readers to say, "Let's consider what is foundational at this age group. What is the non-negotiable building block when you are 14 years old?"

[00:35:09] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:35:10] Douglas Fisher: And I would also argue, if you went to law school, I just picked a career, there would be some classes that were foundational for you.

[00:35:17] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:17] Douglas Fisher: That you have, in your first year of law school, some foundational knowledge that you have to develop before you can go into more specialized areas of law, and we're unafraid of saying that.

This is foundations of the Constitution. This is foundations of tort. We're unafraid of saying that, because we understand there's a level, but that is still introductory and non-negotiable.

[00:35:41] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah. Introductory in that particular context. And so, I love that you did this because when we're talking about early reading, kindergarten, first grade, some key foundational skills, and we often say that they are table stakes. They are the entry-level mechanism by which to get you to the next level.

And so, your, I'm going to say this another way, your Reading Circuit model then outlines the foundational skills for adolescents to get them then to perhaps that next level of some sort of disciplinary content.

[00:36:18] Douglas Fisher: Correct. Yep.

[00:36:19] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:36:20] Douglas Fisher: Absolutely. Oh. And I want to also say the opposite way.

[00:36:23] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:36:23] Douglas Fisher: What's foundational for adolescents should not be applied to kindergartners and first graders.

[00:36:26] Susan Lambert: That's right. Oh, thank you for that.

[00:36:28] Douglas Fisher: And so I worry, the opposite generalization is, "Oh, the Reading Circuit can be used when you're five or six years old." We don't have any evidence for that. We didn't look at anything related to early literacy.

[00:36:39] Susan Lambert: Yeah. So models are important because they help us think about things in terms of what needs to happen within classrooms, and I mean, I remember as a principal, I often said to my kindergarten teachers versus my fifth-grade teachers, "If you have the same literacy block and you're delivering the same kind of instruction, you're not doing something right because what they need is different from what fifth grade needs." \Which now you're saying is different from eighth graders and maybe high schoolers, so this is really cool. Really cool.

[00:37:08] Douglas Fisher: Thank you.

[00:37:09] Susan Lambert: So you've been doing... oh, by the way, we'll link our listeners in the show notes to this book because it's fabulous.

Somebody actually recommended it to me, and that's how we made it around here to have you join us, so this is just so, so cool.

[00:37:22] Douglas Fisher: Thank you.

[00:37:23] Susan Lambert: You've been doing a lot of work at the high school level.

[00:37:26] Douglas Fisher: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:26] Susan Lambert: And I really wonder if you can tell us a little bit about that and what you're learning.

[00:37:31] Douglas Fisher: Yeah. So, word recognition is hard at the high school level. Teachers feel uncomfortable integrating word recognition into their lessons. And when they do, we get great outcomes. We are involved in a 10-school study right now of word recognition, but word recognition in the context of word knowledge and sentence fluency, et cetera, or sentence analysis.

But they're pausing on important content words and building automaticity with those words, and that's part of our intervention. And the teachers are blown away. And not every single teacher in the 10 schools is doing it. These are big schools, but most are, and they're willing to give it a try to say, "What would it be like to add things like this?"

So not a huge amount of professional learning, but some to help people understand we're not just decoding words with ninth graders. These are the kinds of words, and we're not looking at when and that and those kinds of words. We're looking at your content words. Working on vocabulary instruction.

[00:38:32] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:38:33] Douglas Fisher: Meaningful vocabulary instruction, like word recognition, because what we see is a sign to fine test. Here's the words, look them up, and I'm going to test you on Friday.

[00:38:42] Susan Lambert: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Classic vocabulary instruction. Right?

[00:38:45] Douglas Fisher: Right.

[00:38:46] Susan Lambert: That doesn't work.

[00:38:47] Douglas Fisher: Right. And then integrating primary source text into classrooms so students have things to read where they can analyze sentences, where they can engage in verbal reasoning kinds of things.

And so, the teachers that we've been working with are thrilled that we're looking at primary sources, like, what comes out of science, what comes out of history, and they want their students to be able to analyze and digest and argue from these sources.

And we built a fluency routine, for example. It's five days a week, it's six minutes maximum, and it's with the content text that you want kids to really understand. It's not with some other kind of text. And we do a couple minutes each day. There's different routines on Monday versus Tuesday versus Wednesday, but it's still with your biology text, or it's still with your U.S. history text.

[00:39:38] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:39:39] Douglas Fisher: But it's a routine to help bridge word recognition and word knowledge. So we're trying to figure out, and some people are arguing high schoolers don't need fluency development anymore. Well, they shouldn't maybe, but they do.

[00:39:53] Susan Lambert: But they do.

[00:39:54] Douglas Fisher: And... Right? And we can't figure out how to grab eight kids out of 30 who really need fluency work, so we have to figure out how to do fluency work with the whole class.

And we can't take the whole class to do fluency work because there's other things to learn when you are in an art class or in a chemistry class. But if you're going to have text in front of learners, which most teachers do, could you add a fluency routine to it for a few minutes each day to build that skill with learners?

So, that's what we're really working on. I think it applies to middle school and high school, but I'm really working with high school people right now to radically change students' performance and beliefs about themselves.

[00:40:35] Susan Lambert: So I would imagine that this is a... We're looking at words within our content level within some pretty rigorous text if we're talking about the science or math or history.

[00:40:47] Douglas Fisher: Correct.

[00:40:47] Susan Lambert: And so that investigation at the word level, do you help teachers understand morphology?

[00:40:55] Douglas Fisher: Yeah.

[00:40:56] Susan Lambert: Multisyllabic words? What are the kind of things that you really encourage teachers to think about in this world?

[00:41:02] Douglas Fisher: So, what's super interesting is to watch them take apart morphology and syllables. And the difference between morphology and syllable. It's fascinating to watch. Oh, like T-I-O-N, where does the T go?

[00:41:14] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:41:15] Douglas Fisher: It's so interesting. And when they start doing this work, the teacher will say something like, "Morphology helps you with the meaning of the word, but understanding the syllables helps you with the pronunciation of the word and to automate the word."

And so they'll take it apart and say, "Okay, here's the morphology, but here's how the syllables work." And so they're doing short things with really academic words that I think, without good instruction, students would be stumbling on when they're assigned to read a short text. And if they stumble on them, and they feel incompetent, and they lose meaning because they're not reading fast enough to maintain the meaning, we know all of this.

And so, if teachers take on these few words, eight words or whatever, and they start going through them and building more automaticity and student knowledge, then the students don't stumble on those content words. And then they can focus way more on the meaning of what they're reading.

And so, I'm really interested in how we access the complex texts, that we don't read them to students and tell students what they mean.

[00:42:24] Susan Lambert: Mm. Yeah, helping them engage with it. And I'm thinking about self-efficacy from two points of view now. Right? So students are given some sort of explicit instruction in how to think about words at the word level. Right? So I'm imagining they can generalize that to other times and other places.

[00:42:44] Douglas Fisher: Right. Right.

[00:42:45] Susan Lambert: But what about the self-efficacy of teachers? I mean, because teachers in content areas, you just said, are typically not thinking about word level or reading or anything like this.

[00:42:56] Douglas Fisher: Right.

[00:42:56] Susan Lambert: They must be pretty excited by what they're learning and what they're seeing from their students.

[00:43:01] Douglas Fisher: Teachers like to watch kids learn things. That's it. It's rewarding to us to watch learning occur in real time and to have strong relationships with students.

Recent example, chemistry teacher working on acid rain as a reading, and there are very technical words in this article about acid rain. And watching the joy of this teacher saying, "My students got this. They got it. They understand it. I didn't have to then do the work for them. I supported them.

"They knew some of the academic words before the reading ever started. They knew the meaning of these words because we've used them in other places. They applied them to this text. They were negotiating meaning with each other. We parsed some very important sentences to take them apart and say, 'What did each part of the sentence contribute to our understanding?' They asked a bunch of inference questions around it."

And I think that feels amazing for the teacher. "I didn't just tell students things because I didn't think they could read." There's nothing wrong with teachers adding and modeling and bringing the energy and excitement, but when you're doing all the work for students and they're not doing the work, then the learning is going to get compromised.

[00:44:11] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:44:12] Douglas Fisher: And so I think there's a level of joy. I think there's a level of feeling efficacious yourself.

So, for teachers, I think we have to make sure they connect their effort to student outcomes. This learning occurred because of your design, of your, the learning experiences. And if you disconnect that, I think teachers start to get demoralized and frustrated and burned out, because they don't feel like anything they do is making a difference.

[00:44:38] Susan Lambert: Mm. Yeah.

[00:44:39] Douglas Fisher: And if we help them say, "What you just did had a huge impact on your learners. That was you. You did that." Helping them reconnect that again is important. Just like our learners. They need to see that if I put forth effort, good things are happening to me, and it's because of my effort that those good things happened.

[00:44:58] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And there is something so magical, I've seen it in the classroom, about when a teacher gets excited about the content or the learning, that it's contagious to the students as well.

[00:45:09] Douglas Fisher: Yeah. We talk about making learning relevant to students, and there's a whole body of research on relevance, a relevance continuum.

Dave Stewart did the nine values of learning, but one of the things that makes learning very relevant for students is when the teacher brings passion on that topic.

And we've all learned something that we really didn't intend to learn because of the passion that that person brought. Here's a quick example.

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

[00:45:34] Douglas Fisher: So, there's this linguist in England, and I watched a video of him, and at one point he says something about every letter in the English alphabet except for the letter V has a silent version And I'm, "Wait. What? Is that true? Let me think about this." And he said, "Okay, I'm going to give you a letter. Choose the letter B." And I literally shouted at my computer, "Comb!" Because B, and, and I am learning something, and it feels really good.

[00:46:06] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:46:07] Douglas Fisher: Something that I've never considered before. And then he said something about Benjamin Franklin wanted to eliminate some of the letters of the alphabet as redundant, and he really tried to get rid of the letter C, as an example.

And then he had us think about all the words where there was a C, and could it be replaced with another existing letter, and could we get rid of the letter C. And he did this whole thing about why the letter Q needs the letter U. I mean, this linguist had such passion about individual letters and their history.

He was so passionate that I fell into what this letter does, what this letter does, what this letter does.

[00:46:46] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:46:47] Douglas Fisher: So that's the power of it, is the passion that educators bring also makes learning relevant.

[00:46:53] Susan Lambert: Mm. That's so cool. And now I have a fun fact that I can use at my next dinner party, which is which letter of the alphabet doesn't have a silent representation, so...

[00:47:03] Douglas Fisher: You see? There you go.

[00:47:05] Susan Lambert: There you go. Well, this has been such a great conversation.

[00:47:08] Douglas Fisher: Thank you.

[00:47:08] Susan Lambert: I wonder, Doug, this is your last moment to provide any closing thoughts or advice for our listeners on this topic.

[00:47:17] Douglas Fisher: I want to acknowledge teachers on how hard they work. I think we forget how hard this job is, and all of the competing demands for your time. And my belief around, and my career, is literacy is a gatekeeper, and if we can develop stronger literacy skills in our students, we will change their lives. And I appreciate the work in trajectory changing.

We... Literacy opens doors. Literacy improves our life outcomes, including our health outcomes. And so, it's important work, and I recognize that all of us have all of these things coming at us that we have to do, and we feel that pressure, but growing students' reading, their performance in literacy is critical.

[00:48:05] Susan Lambert: Well, thank you for the lifetime of work, even starting at fourth grade, that you've put into literacy development.

[00:48:11] Douglas Fisher: Thank you.

[00:48:11] Susan Lambert: And I feel like I can say it's about time we had Doug Fisher on this podcast. So thank you for joining.

[00:48:18] Douglas Fisher: Thank you. I really appreciate that. Oh, thank you.

[00:48:20] Susan Lambert: Thank you so much for your time.

That was Dr. Douglas Fisher, professor and chair of educational leadership at San Diego State University and a leader at Health Sciences High and Middle College. He's the author of numerous articles and books, including the recent book Teaching Foundational Skills to Adolescent Readers, which we'll link in the show notes.

Remember to go grab our new adolescent literacy bundle. There's a white paper detailing four principles to genuinely engage middle school students, three e-books that explore how to strengthen middle school literacy instruction using the Science of Reading, and access to free poetry activities. All of that's available in the show notes and at amplify.com/adolescentliteracybundle.

Coming up on Part 2 of this adolescent literacy miniseries, I'm speaking with Dr. Julie Burtscher Brown, who will highlight some low-hanging fruit for seeing big improvement.

[00:49:22] Julie Burtscher Brown: One of the things that makes our story so hopeful is things don't look very different than they used to. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.

[00:49:32] Susan Lambert: You won't want to miss it. And don't forget to sign up for Amplify's Summer Learning Academy, which kicks off June 16, 2026. I'd love to see you there. Find out more information and reserve your spot now at amplify.com/summerlearningacademy. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify.

I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.