Realizing the Promise of Reading Science by Staying the Course: A Conversation Between Dr. Reid Lyon and Dr. Louisa Moats

Narrator:

Welcome to EDVIEW360.

Dr. Louisa Moats:

What is there yet to do differently that may produce even better results, and I see a gap between what science is telling us about the relationship between language, reading, and writing and what is still going on in our classrooms. What we want to strive for, and what I mean by a speech-to-print approach, is we want a very planful and calculated marriage, if you will, of the use of oral language with written language for reading and writing, and we want there to be a continual interaction between the use of the spoken word for listening and speaking and the use of the written word in reading and writing.

Narrator:

You just heard from Dr. Louisa Moats, literacy expert and author of LANGUAGE! Live® and LETRS®. Dr Moats, along with her colleague, Dr. Reid Lyon, are our guests today on EDVIEW360.

Pam Austin:

Hello, this is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the podcast series. We are so excited to have you with us today for our March literacy conversation. I'm conducting today's podcast from my native New Orleans, LA. Today, we are excited to welcome two respected literacy legends. I'm thrilled to be able to talk with Dr. Reid Lyon and Dr. Louisa Moats today. For each of these literacy advocates, authors, and researchers, helping students learn to read has been their lifelong goal and their accomplishments are too numerous to list now, but I want to give our audience a brief introduction to these two trailblazers.

Dr. Louisa Moats is a nationally recognized authority on how children learn to read and why some fail to learn. Widely acclaimed as a researcher, speaker, consultant, and trainer, she developed the landmark professional development programs, LETRS for teachers and reading specialists, and the scientifically based LANGUAGE! Live literacy intervention for grades 5 to 12. In 1997, she became the co-principal investigator of an NICHD early interventionist project in Washington, D.C., public schools. In 2000, she published the first edition of her textbook, Speech to Print, which is now in its third revision. Dr Moats is an author of LANGUAGE! Live, a blended instructional program for middle and high school students, and co-author of Spellography, a structured language word study program for intermediate poor spellers. Dr Moats’ awards include the prestigious Samuel T. and June L. Orton award from the International Dyslexia Association® for outstanding contributions to the field, the Eminent Researcher Award from Learning Disabilities Australia, and the Benita Blachman Award from The Reading League. Such a mouthful. Welcome, Dr. Moats.

Dr. Reid Lyon is a neuroscientist and specialist in learning disorders. From 1992 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. In this role, he developed and oversaw research programs in cognitive neuroscience, learning and reading, development and disorders, behavioral pediatrics, cognitive and affective development, school readiness, and a Spanish to English reading research program. He designed, developed and directed the 44-site NICHD Reading Research Network. After leaving the NIH, Dr. Lyon held tenured distinguished scientists and distinguished professorships at the University of Texas, Dallas, Center for Brain Health, Neuroscience, and Southern Methodist University. So much power here between the two of you. Dr. Lyon is the author and co-author of over 130 peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and co-author of over 130 peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and book chapters addressing developmental neuroscience, learning and reading disorders, dyslexia, and translation of science into practice and policy. He also co-authored the definition of dyslexia used at the NIH and worldwide. Dr. Lyon received the NIH Director's Award twice.

Welcome, Dr. Lyon and Dr. Moats. Let's talk about realizing the promise of reading science by staying the course. You both definitely have stayed the course so much. I am in awe of all that you have accomplished in this work. Dr. Lyon and Dr. Moats, can you both briefly share what initially drew you to the world of literacy education, and at that time did you realize what your work would look like? How much of a part did it play in transforming the way that we look at literacy? Dr. Moats, let's start with you.

LM:

You can start with me, OK. Well, my first job was as a secretary in the neuropsychology department at the New England Medical Center, and my boss thought that I was underemployed, I guess you'd say. So, he put a white coat on me and taught me how to give neuropsychological tests and I started learning from direct experience something about brain behavior relationships. But after two years there, what really troubled me was that all the kids who were being sent to us, we weren't being helpful with. So, all these kids came in who couldn't read and couldn't write. The school districts were asking for help and guidance and we didn't have much to give.

And this was 1966 to 68. So, I got a fellowship to go and study learning disabilities, such as it was at the time. So, my initial reason for getting into the field was purely intellectual. I did not have any experience. I didn't have any specific training. I just was very curious about what in the heck was going on with these kids. I wanted to be able to participate in discovering and implementing solutions for those kids, because the field was wide open at that point.

PA:

Definitely, and that curiosity brought you a long way. Thank you so much, Dr. Moats. Dr. Lyon, can you share?

RL:

Well, sure, it's great to hear Louisa’s story. I came to reading a long way around. So, when I've gone to think back about it, one of the things that always bothered me is I had a tough time learning to read and I wasn't dyslexic. I was just slow and labored up until about the start of the third grade, and it was devastating to me. It was really embarrassing and my mother took things in her own hands and began to teach me phonics and I began to crack the code. It's hard to remember that far back, but I became a good reader then and a voracious reader as I went along. Be that as it may, my entire public school career was nothing to brag about for sure. I'm surprised I got out of high school, because I just think I carried a lot of resentment and a lot of anger towards schooling in general. So, not being a stellar student, my options in 1967 were pretty limited. There was one employer called the United States government, specifically the United States Army, that offered me a job. Unfortunately, the job was to become a paratrooper and jump out of airplanes and fight two tours in Vietnam. So, while I was in Vietnam, I said there's got to be a better way to make a living than this stuff. And while there, unfortunately, we had to work hard and I visited some fellows who I was serving with back in the states. They had been wounded and a couple of them had very, what we call punctate or very circumscribed wounds to their head. And it surprised me that one of the guys had lost the ability to read. He had a wound in a particular part of the brain and he lost the ability to read. I said my goodness, what in the world is going on there? So, after the service, the GI Bill took me through, let me see, about 12 years of school and in my doctoral training. I specialized in, initially, cell biology and neuroscience and learning disorders, because I wanted to combine the two. And in doing so, because I was working with kids a lot of whom couldn't learn well and many could not read, I decided to go teach school and I went to teach the third grade. To teach is a misnomer. I had no idea what I was doing. I left all the kids behind and I also taught special ed. kids with equal negative outcomes.

And so what set me on my research career combining neuroscience and learning disorders was, I had to ask myself how in the world do kids learn to read? I don't even know that. And, if I did know that, why are all these kids having difficulty? And why in the world are they coming to me in the third grade not able to read? Shouldn't we be able to prevent that? And since we're not preventing it, I've got kids in front of me and I would like to teach them and remediate their difficulties. So, those four questions that came into my mind way back then eventually led to the development of the NIH research programs.

PA:

Wonderful. Thank you for sharing so much, from struggling student to doctorate to that curiosity again, similar to what Dr. Moats experienced … That need to know that led you to where you are now. Curiosity doesn't always kill a cat, does it, right? It can lead to wonderful things. Dr. Lyon, can you elaborate on your 10 maxims of practice derived from research? You know you talked a little bit about your research. Can you expand on that for us? And, how can these guide educators in their daily teaching practice?

RL:

Well, I think it's important for people to know that the maxims are based upon the tremendous amount of research that our teams, Louisa and other teams, have done since the early 60s. The maxims stand on tremendous converging evidence and I think what the listeners need to know is you can read the 10 maxims, which talks about what kids need to know to be able to learn to read and also, with each maxim, is the citation of hundreds of studies which support that particular maxim. Be that as it may, and going back to the four questions, in my career and I think, working with Louisa so long in our careers, it's been rare that we can find teachers, for example, who really know how kids learn to read. It's difficult because their training doesn't cover specifics about the types of language capabilities they require, how to map language to print and so forth, which is Louisa’s specialty, and they hear all of these terms in their training and in their practice, but they don't have the background knowledge to really understand exactly what those terms mean. And, basically, the maxims cover my four questions: How do kids learn to read? What are the skills and the abilities and the environments and the neurobiology that in fact have to be in place to be able to pull print off a page and comprehend it?

The maxims talk about kids having difficulty and the kind of instructional interactions, strategies, programs that need to be put in place.

All of those have to be evidence-based, and one of the maxims the listeners probably will see is that instruction has to be very intentional, very direct, very systematic.

It has to be very clear to kids who are having difficulties understanding the code. And, there's another maxim which is extremely important it is that learning starts early. In fact, the brain begins to build circuits that will later be activated in reading when the kids come into the world from day one. The more they're spoken to, the more they're read to, the more they're priming neural circuitry that will ultimately come to handle the complexity of learning to read and doing it proficiently. One of the things that might be concerning to a lot of our listeners is they are working with kids, let's say, like third grade, where I was working, and they've got 30 percent, 40 percent of their youngsters who cannot read, and so they may be wondering how in the world did these kids get to my third grade classroom still struggling mightily in reading and understand what they read? And, so, the maxim talks about the essential need to start early. We've got to begin early building the requisite capabilities that kids will deploy for their reading, growth, and development.

PA:

So, taking a look at that base understanding. That evidence right now, and teachers understanding the evidence and having that knowledge and not only gaining that knowledge but moving forward and being responsive to students based on where they are. Dr. Lyon, this doesn’t sound like a very simple thing to do. When we look at those maxims, are those maxims something that teachers can easily dive into in a language that they can understand and gain that knowledge to be responsive to their students?  

RL:

No, they can't simply dive into it. The amount of knowledge, and Louisa is the master at providing that knowledge to veteran teachers and to novice teachers. The amount of background knowledge and deep knowledge about how reading develops and why some kids have difficulty is very complex. If you were to see one of my brain images, you would see the number of circuits that are activated when one just reads a single word. But the difficulty we have. I don't know how much you want to go into this, but professionals are at risk for failure in their profession, to be sure, for a variety of reasons. One of which is that they are prepared in institutions of higher education where the faculty typically do not understand the concepts embodied in the maxims either, and there's a lot of reasons for all of that. But if you're a young teacher and you've come through your bachelor's or master's degree program in a literacy-related topic and you get into your classroom and are now faced with the very thorny problem of kids coming to you having not background information and not having good instruction before, you're going to find yourself stuck. So, a simple answer is no. Just reading the maxims aren't going to get you a leg up. That is why Louisa is the blessing she is. She teaches people about those maxims.

PA:

Thank you so much for sharing that. Dr Moats, did you want to add anything to that?

LM:

Well, yeah. First of all, for anyone who doesn't know how to access this wonderful document that Reid put together, you can find it on the Reading Universe website that WETA sponsors. You can find it on the Internet quite easily. And, for those who are still kind of wondering what the term the science of reading refers to, if you just start looking at the compilation of studies that support each of these maxims, that is a concrete reflection of what we are talking about when we talk about reading science, and it dismays me to read something like today's article in The New York Times about the science of reading, referring to a set of strategies as if, and then it's just so off base.

So, these are the huge ideas that should provide a basic blueprint for things like early identification, systematic instruction, making sure that kids have ample opportunities to apply what they're learning and read a lot. So, these basic things that often are still not in place in schools and that are the obvious reason why we're not making the progress that we want to make, those are really good start points. But these maxims do not tell anyone the nuts and bolts of how to teach or the nuts and bolts of the content that we have to teach when we're teaching. So, we'll have more to say about that in a little bit, and both of us could talk for a long time about the things that get in the way of us or that have gotten in the way of us making more progress. And Reid and I have been working at this, either together or in parallel, for over 40 years. First in Vermont, then Washington, and so on. So, let's talk about some of the progress that we're seeing on this score. We ready to go there, Pam?

PA:

Yeah. I think so. One thing and I made some connections when I'm hearing you all speak and it's the idea of that knowledge base right, the complexity of teaching to read, and I've been there, that story of not knowing and not realizing what it is I need to know. And that's the start, right? And that's when we can go forward and take a look at the progress that we have made. So, with that in mind, I want to ask you both about your work with the National Institute of Health, how have things changed? What has the progress been over time and what's your goal from your work with the NICHD?

RL:

Well, I came to the NIH, the National Institutes of Health from Vermont, where Louisa and I did work together, and I was recruited to the NIH because I had that dual background in developmental neuroscience and learning disorders and my marching orders were to begin to build on the backs of some of the work that had been done there. A national research program that, again, I hate to keep repeating this could answer those questions I posed way 10 years before that, and that is: How can we understand how kids learn to read? What are the skills and the abilities they need? What's the neurobiology required? What genetic factors undergird these skills and the neurobiological networks, and so forth? We also had to learn, very importantly, why some kids were having difficulties, and then I talked a bit about how do we prevent and how do we remediate those kinds of things? So, over the span of 14 years, we went from 200 kids being studied to, at the end, 48,000 children and adults were studied. Quite a few of those youngsters struggled mightily. About 26,000 of those kids were studied.

One of the unique hallmarks of the NIH research was it was multidisciplinary. I felt that in order to understand the complexity that kids were facing, we had to understand the neurobiology of the difficulties, the genetics of the difficulties, the cultural social factors that impeded their learning or at least influenced their learning. And, so, there were 44 research sites across the country. Louisa was a part of one research site and she'll talk to you about that. And, again, each of those teams of scientists collaborated basically, for the first time ever, collaborated together.

We're biologists and neurobiologists and geneticists and linguists and teachers and psychologists and so forth. We were working hard together to answer a number of straightforward questions. And another unique thing about the NIH research is I demanded, if you will, that our studies be longitudinal in nature. We just weren't going to be looking at one kid at one point in time. The kids had to be studied for at least five years. The average number of years we followed each child was nine, and we have some kids who are now adults and have been with us for 34 years. So, it's a fairly massive undertaking in what makes the science as strong as it is, across these 44 sites, and across the thousands and thousands of children, we've been able to replicate every major finding that you see in the 10 maxims.

PA:

Thank you so much. The collaboration, the breadth, and depth of this research. So, when we think about something that has an evidence base, this is the epitome of what we would call that, that the line. Thank you so much. Dr. Moats, can you share your experiences a little bit with working with Dr. Lyon?

LM:

Well sure. Well, in the context of what has changed as a consequence of this enormous investment by the National Institute of Health and the U.S. government in understanding all these basic things about how kids learn to read, the issue now, 25 years later, is how well are we doing capitalizing on this evidence base for at least a broad outline of what's going to bring us better results? And I'm actually quite impressed with the progress that we've made in several areas. I think the general desire to understand the lessons of reading science is commendable. We have state legislation, for better or for worse, but at least it has the right language in it in many instances. We have bold leadership now from organizations, particularly, The Reading League, The National Center for the Improvement of Literacy, The National Council for Teacher Quality, ExcelinEd, and so on, and all of those organizations are working in a broad network of leadership organizations that are driving toward the same commendable goals. We know and have done away with pretty much some of the worst practices and they've taken a really hard hit in the last five years or so, which they deserved, and they're pretty much being relegated to a small minority position of some advocates remaining in the field. That's always going to be the case. We have, for the first time that I've seen, the involvement of professional communities that represent underserved populations. So, for example, we have a brand new dyslexia alliance for Black children just in the last two years, a nonprofit organization.

When I was working in D.C., in the almost all-Black schools there, the word dyslexia didn't exist. Reading intervention that had anything to do with dyslexia or dyslexia-related information, it just didn't exist. And, now, we have leaders in the African-American community coming forward and rallying interest, putting on conferences, working hand in hand with what, unfortunately, have been white majority organizations that have not been able to successfully involve minority groups in advocacy or policy. So, I'm really encouraged about that. I'm encouraged about The Reading League working with a coalition of advocates for multilingual learners and arriving at a consensus around the best practices for multilingual learners. So, all of that is very positive. Plus, I think nationally, the leadership that has emerged on changing schools of ed and the way teachers are prepared are making a dent in that issue. So, we have The Reading League, the IDA Knowledge and Practice Standards. We have The Reading Science Academy that Stephanie Stollar is leading, and so on. And state consortia of higher ed educators who are working together in many instances to improve the syllabi and improve teacher education, and Connecticut is leading the way, revising its standards. So, very encouraged by all that, and I’m hoping it means that we aren’t going to backslide and ever go back to the way things have been. 

PA:

The idea of using the evidence as leverage, and to take the evidence and to turn it into action. So, those are some really great examples. I really appreciate you sharing that with us. So, these are actionable organizations, actionable items, that we're actually seeing.

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PA:

Do you have any milestones that you would like to add, Dr. Lyon?

RL:

Well, I agree with Louisa that tremendous progress is being made. I'm somewhat of an impatient person. I guess after 40 years I would have expected us to be a little further along. But be that as it may, there clearly are very well-coordinated initiatives underway in different states. Kansas being one state that is really stepping up to the bar, both at the higher-ed level and at the local levels. So, just to watch the hard work of individuals in these kinds of state-level initiatives is inspiring, because a lot of the individuals that are contributing and participating have had to change sometimes 180 degrees in their belief systems, and you have to give people a lot of credit for being able to say: “Hey, maybe I wasn't prepared in this way. Now, I know the information. I need to know it at a highly skilled, expert level, but I'm willing to do that because of the impact that we see with our kids.”

Another major achievement that I never thought I'd see is the national awareness about reading and reading difficulties has burgeoned, and some of that is directly related to a journalist's work. Emily Hanford's work, who is with APM, and her production of her literacy programs really sparked a nerve in many people. She was able to articulate clearly what you hear me try to articulate not as clearly. She was able to, I think, foster dialogue among parents, in particular, and then parents and school individuals, and that's the biggest gain in that type of collaborative spirit that I've seen in my career, at least in terms of how that's motivated the reading community to begin to discuss these issues in detail.

PA:

That motivation and the need to know we're going back to that, right? That curiosity. You've mentioned so many examples of progress that are there, I just want to think about an obstacle. Dr. Lyon, you mentioned one obstacle being that shift in thought and understanding and being able to come to the table and say: “Maybe what I've been doing isn't right and here I'm going to shift.” Would you call that maybe a primary obstacle, or is there another one that you'd like to add?

RL:

Well, Louisa works so closely with so many teachers and students where the rubber meets the road in school. She has a massive number of examples. What I've been able to see and I think we touched on this earlier is one of the things that keeps us from being open and transparent about what we know is a lack of a common professional language, and this is kind of a soapbox I get on, because if a profession doesn't have a common language, it's literally impossible for collaboration to take place. If one is using particular terms to mean things that are ill-defined or whatever. You guys mentioned the science of reading. Well, the science of reading is not a commercial program, it's not a curriculum. It's the confluence of information derived from well-designed, peer-reviewed scientific studies that have been replicated. So, the example of The New York Times talking about strategies as the science of reading that takes us down to that lack of a common language, because the science of reading is the foundation for what we do with children. It's not the program that carries that weight, it's how the program was developed. If the program was not founded on essential principles derived from the converging evidence, then it's simply not going to work. So, one of the things that I've seen, for example, Kansas tackle is the lack of a common language from legislators to state superintendents to district-level superintendents to principals and on to teachers and specialists and coaches.

If people are not able to communicate, for example, if they're not able to say: “What types of assessments are we using? Are we monitoring the youngster's progress? Are we on the same page about how to interpret that information? Are we on the same page with respect to reviewing student data? Are we using the same terminology to identify and determine if a particular strategy or approach or commercial program has a high probability of success based upon its scientific findings?” So, you can't have a profession without you, Pam, and I, Reid, doing the same kind of thing, are responsible for the same outcomes. When I call X a Y and you call X an X, it's just impossible. No collaboration can occur.

PA:

Right. So, taking a look at building on the progress that we've made, right? So, that obstacle we are building in a common language. We are building an understanding. We're building that foundation so we can continue to progress from there.

RL:

Yeah. Let me just say, I think people are beginning to really realize that and because the outcome is a common sense outcome, collective problem-solving, collaboration, working with one another is a major benefit for our children. And having the same kind of background knowledge that some people will say: ‘OK, I didn't know this, but I'm learning it now.” It's important because I can see my students now learning to read is really showing great promise.

PA:

Great. Have you seen evidence of that, Dr. Moats?

LM:

Yes, and as I listen to Reid, I agree totally that as we move into the future, and I hope that we will stay the course, staying the course is so important here and not giving way to temporary discouragement that comes from the fact that we're not getting instant results. From having embraced reading science as a foundation for what we do. It hasn't brought us instantaneous results and we're not going to see instantaneous results because people are beginning to look at the right stuff for guidance. We have a long way to go, so we need, as a profession, to coalesce around common definitions. We need to coalesce around the idea of accountability, responsibility for the results that we're getting for all kids, and that means being able to look frankly at who is losing out with whatever we're doing in the current scenario. But we also, Reid and I, talked a lot about this with each other about implementation, about although we have all this guidance from science, about what ought to be going on, realizing it as a commonplace set of occurrences in our workplaces is the goal for the future, and we have a long way to go to truly understand what it takes to achieve the best results. And we call that implementation science. In the real world of work, what does it take to capitalize on what we've learned from science? And here are some of the things that people who are accomplishing great results now say, and this mirrors as well what I experienced as the co-pi for the Washington, D.C., Early Interventions Project, in these very tough, high-poverty minority schools where the working conditions were, should we say, very challenging. But we got results by doing these things, and what I'm saying here is echoed over and over again by those who are getting results.

Results you go for the long term, that is, you have at least a five-year plan for implementation, for carrying out change. You have adequate funding for coaching in the classrooms, for training the teachers, and for providing the teachers with suitable instructional materials and programs. You have clear, long-term, attainable goals for all students, not just the high achievers. You have sufficient time allowed for professional development and don't expect it to happen with a workshop here or there. We’re talking about embedded, sustained professional development that keeps teachers collaborating, learning from one another, deepening their own skill and knowledge as they go on. You give teachers time to figure things out and reward incremental gains, step-by-step improvement. And if you're the leader, you give the staff members who are responsible for outcomes, you give them responsibility for decision-making, as well. It doesn't work as a top-down directive, and a top down directive never lasts, even if it gets short term results because you have to have staff that fully embraces the goals and the process of getting there, and then you have to use the right stuff and teach the right stuff. So, that's another topic.

PA:

So, are you doing the right stuff? Are you teaching the right stuff? That whole idea of implementation science, it sounds so intriguing and when we think about administrators and we think about educators and where to go and how are we going to get it done, what I pull from your comments, Dr. Moats, was that collaboration, it's ongoing. It's a process. It doesn't happen overnight. No waving of a magic wand, right?

LM:

Oh, absolutely not. And people who want simple solutions, instantaneous results, and so on are just wasting their resources.

PM:

I do want to dive into a little bit, both you and Dr. Lyon mentioned the different kinds of strategies. You even spoke to maybe some commercial products that are out there that will work. I do want to first talk to your body of work, the speech-to-print approach to instruction, because it's not necessarily a program. It's an approach and it's an understanding and how it's been influential in regards to instruction and strategies. Can you just explain the core principles?

LM:

OK. I can try. And as I've been thinking about this, of course, for years and years, my thinking has shifted a little bit. And as I look at what is going on in the field now and I look at the very best examples of implementation that is working well, where improvement is dramatic at all levels of the student population and so on, OK, what is there yet to do differently that may produce even better results? And I see a gap between what science is telling us about the relationship between language, reading, and writing and what is still going on in our classrooms. What we want to strive for, and what I mean by a speech-to-print approach, is we want a very planful and calculated marriage, if you will, of the use of oral language with written language for reading and writing, language with written language for reading and writing, and we want there to be a continual interaction between the use of the spoken word for listening and speaking and the use of the written word in reading and writing.

Technically, sometimes, I use the term speech to print to focus more narrowly on how we present the relationship between spoken word and its printed form, and I have used that term to advocate for an approach where you start with a student's awareness of a word as an entity of speech, as a linguistic object, I like that term. The word and the sounds that make it up as linguistic objects and then point to the way we represent that word in print. And it turns out that in English we represent that word both as a sequence of sounds and as a meaningful unit, or as a word that's made up of meaningful units. So, our print system represents both phonology and morphology and we need to be teaching kids about that from the get go. I'm going to start using my term speech to print and I need to write about this, I think, to convey more broadly the importance of when we teach the code, if you will, we teach kids about word recognition that again, we link meaning, print and the sounds of spoken words together and we don't leave the meaning part out. Another way of saying this to practitioners is, we can integrate concepts from morphology, syntax, and word origin into our teaching of the basic code quite early in the process.

And where I fault a lot of what's going on now is that it's way too shallow a depiction for kids about how print represents language and it stops at the level of a grapheme representing a phoneme, whereas, as some knowledgeable colleagues argue and I agree with them a print system is also representing these meaningful parts of words and their use in the context of a sentence.

So, we need to integrate all those aspects of language in our instruction because they are in fact there in the print system that we want kids to learn to read and to write, and we need to then deepen our own knowledge as educators. This links back to teacher education. For me, the biggest leap still to make is what I was arguing for in 1994 when I wrote that paper on the missing foundation in teacher education. For me, that is still the missing foundation, although we're approximating it in more venues and there are more programs that make a point of saying they educate teachers about this content, which is language itself that teachers have to know in order to be really effective teachers of reading and writing and the use of language in general.

RL:

Yeah, Louisa is making so many great points. I think there's a couple of things that have been mentioned. One is that the clear need to stay the course with implementing the science of reading. We're so used to one-and-done kinds of initiatives or silver bullets and so on. Louisa's point that this is a marathon. It is the long haul. We may not see demonstrable results for a period of time where the political establishment wants to see gains next year if they take on a new approach or what have you. It's going to take longer than that for a variety of reasons. I think we've made a lot of progress in understanding pretty precisely what those reasons are that serve as barriers to moving implementation in a more rapid fashion.

But what I wanted to comment on is Louisa had talked about some of the superficial ways people might be looking at reading development and reading instruction. You'll see in the maxims and you'll see the scientific literature that supports this maxim and that is reading is a complex endeavor. It's a constellation of skills and abilities that must be integrated in a very expert way. You know, I've tried to use the term over and over again necessary but not sufficient, because in the history of reading, people have had this inclination to dichotomize or to pair off phonics versus something, whether it's phonics vs. three-queuing or phonics vs. whole language, or whatever that dichotomy may be. That is a dangerous way to think about reading development.

It is a complex skill requiring the participation of many smaller or more, I don't know what Louisa would say, it requires the participation of a number of sub skills that must work together in order to produce what you see as the primary outcome of reading, which is to understand what the heck you read. So, phonics is never used in isolation. It's never taught in isolation, but until we change the common language to understand what reading is, as Louisa is pointing out, and yes, it is complex and the fact is we have to address the complexity. We have to know the complexity. We have to be able to look and see within that complexity where each learner may be having some difficulty. It may not be in the phonics area. It may be in the speed at which they pull the print off the page. Or, it may be many things but we're not going to be able to assess the kids, to determine which of those essential components, linguistic language or language components, are intact or not unless we have this deep level of understanding in how reading develops.

PA:

So, that deeper understanding we're looking at. So, not only the isolation of: “Hey phonics, we know it's important,” but we also have to make sure we've got those layers of language and meaning and the structure of language as well. And I know our listeners are going to want to know, do you have some examples of successful programs or initiatives out there that help with that implementation science, that help to combine all those aspects of reading together?

LM: 

I see many examples all the time, but they're in specific schools, specific districts. Of course, the Mississippi story is well known. I'm not sure what's happening right now with Mississippi, but certainly between 2014 and 2019, they made huge gains and a lot has been written about how they accomplished that, you know. Again, I see many specific schools. We had three or four schools in Alabama who were part of LETRS and who got follow-up coaching with Carol Tolman. In a year or two, they went from the lowest ranking to the highest ranking in the state because they put everything together right and this was a population that was not regarded as likely to achieve this robust gain. So, these gains can be made wherever these aspects of leadership and implementation are being taken seriously and are being carried out over a long enough period of time. I don't know, Reid, do you want to add anything to that?

RL:

Well, I think on the broader system level, I've mentioned Kansas a couple of times. Dr. Cindy Lane, who is heading up their Blueprint for Literacy, has in a fairly short period of time, been able to develop a common language across the elements that are engaged in reading education. They all seem to be committed to the process of vetting what they do against the best science. It's very impressive that they understand the role of professional development. They've been very honest and very transparent. They've seen that a large percentage of the teachers coming out of the higher-ed teacher-preparation programs have not been provided the depth of information they need about the science of reading, and the higher-education institutions are addressing that in a mature fashion. The leadership is working with teachers and parents and community members about the need to make the changes that they have to make, and I think very noteworthy professional development and implementation has become a very high priority for them. In the state of Kansas, every local district does have LETRS training. In the state of Kansas, every local district has training in how one uses both formative and summative assessments, which is something that I think sometimes people know it's important but it's not discussed as strongly as we might like because we have to know where children are as a function of our instruction. We can be doing the best we can do and we may have all of the information we need, but if we do not look at the youngsters continuously to determine if our instruction is impacting their performance, then we don't know how, or we will not know how, to change and modify that instruction. One of the things you'll see and I think a lot of our listeners have seen is that their progress-monitoring information, their curriculum-based assessments, are showing nice growth, but at the end of the year the state-level tests don't mirror that growth. That has to be dealt with at a psychometric level, because it is that individual point that one assesses over time. That's probably the most valid. Be that as it may, I think you're looking at some states and some systems that are doing the right thing With respect to instruction.

I never talk about commercial programs. So, when I use this term it has to do with the principles involved, of all of the principles in reading instruction or instruction in general, direct, systematic, explicit instruction must be in place. Now, the teacher has to be very sensitive to how much explicitness, how much direction, and so forth is required but for struggling readers that is a must. The instruction has to be extremely well thought out. It has to be sequenced, as Louisa will teach her teachers. It has to be clear. 

I remember taking algebra and I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on and I'd ask a question and the answer confused me more because the clarity was just out the window. When having a teacher that could then explain to me in a clear fashion where the concepts arranged themselves, I did pretty well. Same thing with reading. One does not leave anything to chance. One has to make sure that all of the features of the code have to be addressed, and addressed strongly enough so that youngster can paraphrase and develop proficiency.

PA:

So, if we're looking at the what, without necessarily naming any particular program, we look at the features of that program? The evidence base, the strategies that were there?.

RL:

Exactly.

PA:

And, of course, the how would be going back to that implementation science. I hope. It's just so important. Just listening to both of you comment on this, I can see my mind keeps circling back to that implementation. Being in there for the long game. I'd like each of you to share your hopes for the future of literacy education. Let's go ahead and end on that high note. Tell us how we can honor the work you've done and all your accomplishments as we move forward, Dr. Moats.

LM:

Well, there's one thing we haven't mentioned yet in all of our talking about the ins and outs of reading science and its guidance for us in increasing the number of kids who are truly literate, and that is we're not going to succeed until kids love to read. Until kids actually do read. And as we fight so hard to improve reading instruction in the classrooms, especially at the early levels, the counterforce that's really powerful, that is limiting outcomes in the long run, is a society that is not embracing and valuing reading as it did in the past, before all these technologically based diversions were available to us and before there were all these electronics that now are absorbing kids' attention and time. And I really worry about this. But I think that it's possible. I see, for example, when cell phones are being banned from middle schools, hooray. Good for them. When I see that screen time, for whatever purpose, at elementary schools is being delayed until kids actually really have to use keyboarding to do things, bravo. Do not start early putting iPads and other devices into kids' hands before they've developed a real affinity for books.

We also know that when we read an object, a book or print material that's tangible, we tend to comprehend it better than when we read on screens.

So, I'm one who is very skeptical about the value of screens in what we do. I think learning language and learning to love reading is basically a product of human interaction and shared experience among kids who read something together and bond over discussion of that thing or bond over the learning that occurred because they had a thrilling experience together reading a wonderful story or discovering some information through print. The tide is against us until our society decides that we need to be more literate than we are currently, and we all know what the trend is now. There are fewer adults who read. There are fewer households in which reading is prized and valued and shared among family. So, we have to make a concerted effort to get that message out that we aren't going to get great results in the long term unless people read, and so they have to like it and gravitate toward it and want to do it and see the value of it. So, that's what I'm hoping we will become again as a nation of readers.

PA:

Shifting to that hope. Dr. Lyon, can you add?

RL:

Well, I just love what Louisa talked about in terms of readers really enjoying what the task or what the process is. It's really not a task, and you hear me talking about directness and explicitness. I'm not talking about drill and kill. I'm talking about the ability to make things clear for kids and, yes, a lot of them have to work very hard making it clear for themselves how to go about the job of reading quickly, of reading accurately, of relating what they're reading to their background, knowledge, and vocabulary. But at the end of the day, we want kids, even those who might be struggling, to be able to curl up in a corner on a beanbag and enjoy a book that they picked out themselves. That is related to the type of material used in the instruction. We never want to take that main purpose of reading out of the equation. So, again, what would help me realize a dream would be that we no longer speak in dichotomies, that learning how to read is not an either-or process.

Learning how to read is a constellation of actions that a brain must be skilled for. Learning how to read requires teachers who can communicate with one another. Learning how to read requires the best professional development we can find, but having a civil interaction among professionals, no matter what their previous preparation has been, and the love for learning that all of us, I think, hope to feel. I hope that becomes present, that we're actually a profession. We can be a self-regulating profession. We can work in collaborative fashion, using common language and information to solve very complex problems. 

And I’ll just mention, I talked with a college of education dean last week who was making great sense to me until he talked about implementation and reality. This individual said: “Well, you go into this school system, the reality is, you'll never be able to change it.” We make our own reality. We're the ones that put the reality in place that this individual says is concretized in that environment. The reality we know, and this is another hope for myself, is and Louisa pointed to this we know so much more than we've ever known, both about the science and why putting the science into place is possible. We know all of the barriers, or most of the barriers, that get in the way when we want to implement the science. That's taken a back burner and I would hope that implementation science begins to move to the forefront. The researchers will kill me but we have an awful lot of information that is not going to go away. That's been replicated about how kids learn to read. What we continue to see is difficulties putting that into place.

PA:

Thank you so much. I'll tell you, one of my big takeaways, and I think this might be a huge statement, is the fact that we have that evidence-based information that needs to be shared, that knowledge that the implementation science is so important and from that very last comment, we are social beings is what I take away from that. That we live, we work, and we learn in community and collaboration. And that's what we're dealing with, that implementation science. Would you agree? 

RL:

Oh, I would agree totally. And you can't have that collaboration … again, going back to a common vocabulary, a common language.

PA:

Most definitely. Well, we need to get some information from you. Where can our audience learn more about your work and the initiatives that you're currently involved in, Dr. Moats, and then you, Dr. Lyon.

LM:

OK. I have a website, louisamoats.com. I don't do a lot with that website. I should do more but some of my blogs and papers and webinars are posted there. 

PA:

All right. Thank you. Dr. Lyon? 

RL:

The best way is my business email, which is reidlyon@gmail.com, and the name of the organization that we have is Literacy Education Consulting, at that email address.

PA: 

I want our audience to know that there's some valuable information in the form of handouts that we will share with you. You can find that on our podcast page. What an informative conversation with you both. It's clear that you've both been enormously influential in how our nation's children learn to read and how you've changed the path of teaching reading through the different channels over the years. On behalf of every reading teacher, parent, and reader out there, I want to express our gratitude for your efforts and for sharing your expertise. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Moats and Dr. Lyon. And, thank you to our listeners. Please join us on EDVIEW360 next month for more insightful thought leadership. We'll see you next time.

Narrator:

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