Reading teachers matter.

There is no nobler act than to teach someone to read.

Literacy is power.

It is the power to work and to provide for oneself and for one’s family; the power to participate in the civic and social life of our society; the power to learn; the power to pursue happiness.

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We must be saved by love.

As teachers and parents we know that the literacy we strive to provide cannot be accomplished alone—we need to work together, and therefore we must be saved by love.

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Powerpoints

You can download slides from Tim’s presentations

UpcomingAppearances

Find out if Tim will be appearing in your area sometime soon

AboutShanahan

Bio, vita, and other information about Tim

Most Recent Blog Posts

03 June, 2023

How I Teach Students to Use Context in Vocabulary Learning

Teacher question: I recently read an interview that you did. When you talk about kids needing to recognize when they don’t know a word and how to figure it out – did you mean to leave them on their own to do that? When you ment...

20 May, 2023

Why I Encourage Teaching Children to Read Disfluently

06 May, 2023

What about the new research that says phonics instruction isn’t very important?

Teacher question: Recently, I saw results of a meta-analysis that showed phonics instruction to have a much smaller effect size (.19) than many other approaches to reading instruction. Doesn’t that mean that we are overdoing phonics? If we want to improve reading comprehension it looks like it would make more sense to emphasize motivation, fluency, and inferencing than teaching phonics.RELATED: Which Reading Model Would Best Guide Our School Improvement Efforts? Shanahan responds: In 1986, Gough and Tunmer presented a model indicating that reading comprehension was the product of...

29 April, 2023

Which Reading Model Would Best Guide Our School Improvement Efforts?

Teacher question: I’m the lead reading coach in our school district. We want to present one of the reading models to our teachers and administrators to guide our efforts to improve reading achievement in the elementary and middle sch...

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