Literacy Blogs

The world’s all atingle with artificial intelligence (AI). OpenAI reports that ChatGPT serves 700 million users each week. Seventy-eight percent of businesses and other organizations depend upon it, too. Private investment in AI is more than $100 billion in the U.S. alone. Given that, it shouldn’t be surprising that the nose of this technology camel is poking under the Education tent. Even when educators eschew it, students themselves find ways to bring it in.   In my last blog entry, I decried some uses of AI in the teaching of reading comprehension. My concern was that these would do more to undermine kids’ ...

Teacher Question As my teachers continue learning together about text-centered planning, I would love your help with a quick reflection. When you sit down to plan a unit: How do you decide which comprehension standards the anchor text naturally requires? What steps do you take to analyze the text before identifying standards? How does the text guide the sequence of lessons and questions? Shanahan Responds: I’ll answer your questions. But before I do, let me try to fend off some of the defensive comments my response is sure to elicit. First, yes, I understand that teachers are busy and can’t design every lesson themselves in depth. No, I ...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several inquiries about the importance of whole book reading within reading instruction. And no wonder. Social media has been aflame with righteous claims about this purported and purportedly damaging shift to having students read excerpts within reading lessons rather than taking on whole books. I say “purported” because the claim seems to be that in the past teachers were teaching their kids to read books, and now they aren’t. I’ve been around quite a while, and I don’t remember the past that way. I say “purportedly damaging” because the idea that teaching reading with excerpts ...

Blast from the Past: This piece was first published on May 7, 2022, and was republished on October 25, 2025. The original posting explained the distinction between a comprehension effect and a learning effect. Recently, I published a book on “leveled reading” that addresses this difference more thoroughly (Shanahan, 2025). The failure to make a discernment between these two outcomes has led to many pedagogical failures. Given that, I thought this to be a good time to sharpen the points made here, providing greater clarity and some background information about the source of this unfortunate misunderstanding, along with some specific ...

  Teacher question: Middle school reading scores are either stagnating or dropping in my state, and they are looking at things they can do to help students improve. I’ve read the materials on the need for kids to reach a certain level of decoding to succeed in the upper grades. What do we do from here? What interventions should schools/states add to help these kids catch up on what they missed? Shanahan responds: The most likely reason middle school scores are down in your state probably has little to do with phonics instruction. Most phonics is provided in grades K-2. Doing a better job with ...

Regular readers of this blog know I get lots of questions. I do my best to answer them. Occasionally, I have no idea the answer. If a topic is straightforward, I investigate and usually can craft a response that I hope manages to be both informed and helpful. Other times, I may decide that a query that puzzles me may not be worth the candle. Not that the topic isn’t important to the questioner. Only that even a terrific answer would hold little value for a wider audience. And then, there are those times when an interrogative has the three I’s. It’s ...

Previously, I discussed two observational studies (a landmark from the 1970s and a valuable recent effort). Both aimed to determine the amount of reading comprehension instruction in American schools. That’s an endeavor that requires clear definitions. According to the older study conducted by Dolores Durkin (1978), comprehension instruction included any action teachers took to help children “understand or work out the meaning of more than a single, isolated word.” The newer study, this one by Philip Capin and colleagues (2024), didn’t provide a definition as much as a list of acceptable actions: teaching word meaning knowledge, developing background knowledge, selecting texts ...

Recently, Philip Capin and his colleagues published a valuable study in Scientific Studies of Reading. This research combined data from 66 observational studies of reading. Capin and company found that 23% of reading instruction was devoted to reading comprehension, and that this amount has increased since 2000. However, they also identified some unfortunate trends. In the 1970s, Dolores Durkin shocked the reading world when she reported the results of her landmark observational study. She revealed an appalling paucity of comprehension teaching. Her team observed almost 75 hours of reading instruction in upper elementary classrooms but only found about 20 minutes of ...

  Parent question: My son is 11 years old, and he suffers from dyslexia. I’ve been told you oppose accommodations for dyslexic children. That is irresponsible. I don’t think you understand how these children suffer.RELATED: Eight Ways to Help Kids Read Complex Text Shanahan responds: I do oppose some – though not all — accommodations for students with dyslexia. The purpose of accommodations is to enable people with disabilities to access and participate in activities, jobs, and learning. An accommodation is an alteration to an environment that increases individual access. Examples of accommodations that I fully support are modifications to curbs to allow those who depend ...

Years ago, I posted a blog that recommended teaching “text structure” (March 17, 2019). Such instruction can improve reading comprehension – as proven by copious numbers of rigorously designed research studies carried out with a wide range of students (e.g., across the grades, English Learners, kids with learning disabilities). Texts are not just lists of sentences. Authors organize what they have to say so that readers can follow the discourse and remember the information For example, stories depend on plot structure or story grammar. Characters have goals and confront problems in trying to achieve those desired outcomes. Accordingly, stories include one or ...