Literacy Blogs

We in education tend to have very strong beliefs. And, those beliefs can overwhelm our knowledge—or even our willingness to gain knowledge. Last week’s entry here focused on teaching kids with more challenging texts than we’ve been told to use in the past. The reason for the change wasn’t some brilliant insight on my part, but a gradual accumulation of direct research evidence. Evidence that shows beyond beginning reading there is no benefit to controlling the difficulty of texts in the way that we have done—matching kids to books with various accuracy criteria. I certainly understand the suspicions of those who have ...

Recently, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) posted a report on multi-sensory programs for teaching children with reading disabilities. The report indicated that Orton-Gillingham, Wilson Reading, and other similar programs lacked convincing empirical evidence of their effectiveness. This has set off a lot of angry e-mailing this weekend from those who “know” these methods work. http://http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/   Although I serve as a reading content expert for WWC, I had nothing to do with this report. They only involve me in those aspects of their work when they have a substantive question about reading instruction or assessment, and on this report, I guess there were ...

Originally posted June 26, 2010; re-posted on August 31, 2017. This post is timely given some of what I saw on Twitter this week as well as some recent questions and responses to my posts. There is still a great hunger to use research to support one's claims rather than using research to try to figure out what instructional actions to take. Too many principals buying programs then seeking reasons why they did. I will write more about this soon.   I remember the first time I was asked to testify before Congress. I was so full of myself. Wow, what a big ...

It’s good to be back from Africa—I guess. Each day (and night), Cyndie and I had fascinating new experiences, sometimes frighteningly so: like the night we were awakened by a lion fight; or the hippo that chased us; or the time we mistakenly found ourselves inconveniently between a bull elephant and what he wanted to eat. Scary stuff. Not that I’m home, I’ve been going to meetings, reading emails and the latest journals, and maybe I was safer with the cheetahs! Just in the past few days I’ve been hearing over and over the kind of anti-research rhetoric that was popular ...