On the Podcast: Inside The Reading Strategies Book 2.0, Episode 1- The Research

Brett Whitmarsh:

So Jen, the Science of Reading (SOR) has been with us now for a few years, and your most recent Reading Strategies 2.0 book is very much aligned with the science of reading. When you sat down to do the newest edition of the Reading Strategies Book, how did you approach science of reading? How do you define the science of reading?

Jennifer Serravallo:

Yeah. Well, I'd say Science of Reading (SOR) as a term in the local or the common lexicon is kind of recent, but we've had science of reading for decades and decades and decades. I mean, a lot of people point to the National Reading Panel of course, but even before that there was research into how kids learn to read and how best to teach them to read. So I think a pretty agreed-upon definition is that it's a interdisciplinary body of research, which means it's drawing from fields such as psychology, education, linguistics, neuroscience. We're looking at all these different fields to try to figure out what happens when a reader reads proficiently, how do we help develop reading skill, and what are the best ways to teach reading so that we have the biggest chance that the most kids develop that proficiency?

I actually just got asked today by a school district that I work with as a consultant. They said, "Can you give me a really simple, just a really short article that I could use for back to school PD that just breaks down what the science of reading is?" And the shortest one I could think of is Duke and Cartwright's "Active View of Reading" paper. And that is not short because it's such a huge topic. What part of science of reading? Are we looking at developing phonics and phonological awareness? Are we talking about vocabulary? Are we talking about comprehension? Are we talking about working memory load? There's so many aspects to it because teaching reading is so complex. So we need to draw from all these fields and understand that this research is always evolving, which is exciting, and it also means we're going to be learning. We're constantly going to be finding out new things about how to best reach all learners.

Brett:

Well, and I think that's what's so critical about Reading Strategies 2.0 is you have brought that thinking and that evolution of everything into the newer version of Strategies 2.0, which is why I think it's so critically important. And when we talk about reading strategies, why are reading strategies so important? And can you talk a little bit about the research base that supports why we teach with them?

Jen:

Yeah. I think strategies are important with everything. I think about anything I want to learn how to do, if I can have it broken down for me into steps, I'm going to learn it better, right?

Brett:

Yeah.

Jen:

Strategies are essentially just explicit teaching. I'm just making sure that the thing I want the learner to learn is really clear and broken down into a step-by-step how-to. So think about anything you know how to do, like perfect a family recipe or drive a stick shift car or perfect your backhand at tennis or really anything. All of these things are examples where if you're going to teach me well, you're going to break it down for me. And so that's what reading strategies do too. Reading strategies break down things we want kids to do. And so there's research support for really anything we want kids to do as a reader.

We want them to decode better. Yes, of course they need phonics instruction, but also there's strategies. We could teach them how to look at the beginning and the middle and the end and then blend through all the sounds. That's a strategy. It's a step-by-step how-to. We want kids to better summarize the text that they're reading. We could teach them to look for what happens first, second, and after that, and wrap it all up with a conclusion. That's a how-to to be able to summarize. So we're just really breaking down the proficiency, the skill, into really clear actionable steps.

And there's research... I mean, there's tons in the new Strategies Book 2.0, 700 citations. So I can rattle off a bunch of researchers names and put everybody to sleep. You're going to find these researchers' names that are sort of known well for research around strategy instruction, like Palincsar and Brown. But then you're going to find researchers who study specific aspects of reading, like Linnea Ehri, who really looks at how orthographic mapping happens in the brain and how we teach kids to learn how to read words. Timothy Rasinski, who's going to be focused on fluency instruction. So there's different researchers who are going to show up in each chapter because that's their particular area of expertise.

Brett:

You mentioned all that research in there. Where can people find a little bit more online about that research that's there. Obviously, it's within the book if they purchase the book, but you've made that research available as well.

Jen:

Yeah, I thought it was important for people to see the entire references section, all 700 citations. So even if you don't have a copy of the book yet, you can take a look at all 700 citations if you're questioning or wondering what research am I drawing from and am I referencing in the text.

Brett:

And one of the things I love about that is Rachael Gabriel, who you cite within Reading Strategies 2.0, has referred to you as "a faithful translator of research," and you are famously known for making things more accessible. What does that mean being a faithful translator of research?

Jen:

I just melted when she said that because it means so much to me because it's really what I strive for. I am a classroom teacher at heart. I spent a lot of years in the classroom before I started doing speaking engagements and consulting with schools and writing books about teaching reading. And so I know firsthand how challenging the job of being a classroom teacher is, and also how short on time you are to read tons of research and then try to make sense of how do I put this into practice in my classroom. So that's what I try to do, and that's what she meant by that was that I have the ability to understand the research that I interpret it accurately and that I help show teachers exactly how to do it. So what does this look like in practice in the classroom?

A lot of times, if you read original peer reviewed research, they'll have often a classroom applications or some kind of implications section, but sometimes it's still sort of vague. You're not able to click and watch a video of what it looks like. So that's the kind of stuff I try to do for teachers in my modeling when I'm consulting with schools. In the videos that are available with a lot of my books, not this one, but many other books or when I'm giving workshops, I show a lot of videos to try to help people see what it looks like. Here's the research and here's what it looks like in action in the classroom.

Brett: 

And to that point, what would you say are the three most important ways the research behind strategies does play out in the classroom?

Jen:

Three, let's see. I think one of them is to remember what I already said, that strategies are an important element of explicit instruction. So if you are somebody who cares not only about the science of reading, but also the science of learning, which looks into how do we ensure that our instruction is engaging and explicit, we have the biggest chance to reach the most kids with it. One of the elements is that we're breaking down concepts into steps. And that's, again, just what strategies are, that we should be thinking about those strategies and breaking things down into steps in all subject areas, English language arts, but also science and social studies.

I think another really important thing, maybe this should have been first, but another really important thing is that sometimes strategies get a bad rep because they have been, in some classrooms, in some places, in some moments in time, been taught as an end goal, right? So can you do these steps? Check, we're done. That's not really what strategies are for. Strategies are to help you reach a goal. Strategies are to help you to be active as a reader so that when you're faced with a challenge, like a hard word to decode or a text that's more complex than what you're used to or a vocabulary word that you don't know the meaning of yet, you have something that you can do. You have tools in your toolbox as a reader.

And so we should always be thinking about, why am I teaching this strategy? There has to be a reason beyond just the strategy itself. There has to be, I'm teaching this because I want kids to understand the words in their text. I want to teach them a strategy because I want them to build this knowledge and this science text and understand it more deeply. So I want them to be more skilled so that when they come to a similar text, they know what to do and they know how to handle it. So that's an important element. That's two.

Brett:

And that's building lifelong learning skills at the same time.

Jen:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that's so powerful about strategies is it's not just something you use in this one lesson, in this one context, it's that you're applying it across contexts. So you can use the steps to be able to figure out what are the most important events in a story so I could summarize it well. You can use that again and again and again across many, many stories. And then eventually you don't have to think about the strategy steps anymore. You're just skilled. You can just do it, right?

Brett:

Yeah, instinctual. Yeah, yeah.

Jen:

That's what we want is the proficiency. I think the third thing maybe to think about is kind of related to the last point about how strategies are not an end, they're a way to get to a goal, is that a good lesson isn't just a strategy. A good lesson, I would argue, should include strategies as part of the lesson. But teachers should also be keeping in mind, how am I building vocabulary? How am I building knowledge? Because if you look at the research around comprehension, for example, there's a lot of discussion about the importance of vocabulary and knowledge building alongside strategies and skill building. They're all important to support comprehension. So I think it's important to think about... When I was in college to become a teacher, we talked about every lesson- we want to think about what can students do at the end of the lesson and what do they know at the end of the lesson. So we want to think about those two things and not just make strategies the only thing that we're focusing on in a lesson.

Brett:

My thanks to Jen for her time in this first of three conversations. Be sure to like and subscribe to get all the conversations. And if you haven't yet, check out the Reading Strategies Book 2.0, in particular the skill progressions, which is the key focal point of what makes this new version of the Reading Strategies 2.0 so critical to pulling everything together. And of course, The Reading Strategies Book 2.0 is curriculum agnostic, which means it can work in any school and any reading program across the country. So be sure to check out that. For more, check it out on Heinemann.com, or you can also check that out on Jenserrevallo.com. Thanks for listening. Be sure to check out more episodes in this series.