Raising Kids Who Read

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Daniel Willingham. Daniel Willingham, PhD, is a cognitive psychologist with a particular interest in education. He is professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and he writes about understanding education research in his blog at danielwillingham.com. His book is Raising Kids Who Read, What Parents and Teachers Can Do. That is the book, one of many he's written, that we are here to talk about today.

[00:44] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:47] SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Willingham, thank you so much for joining us.

[00:49] SPEAKER_02:

My pleasure.

[00:49] SPEAKER_01:

So tell us the crux of your argument in raising kids who read. What is it that parents and teachers can do to raise students who do read, who can read, who love reading?

[01:02] SPEAKER_02:

Yes. Well, let me start with the motivation for the book. What we found, I had a suspicion that this was true, but I actually couldn't find any data confirming it. So we collected a little bit of data. And I'll be honest, the experiment we conducted was not exactly the way you would want to do it. But we were kind of trying to do this collect some data on this question that was kind of quick and dirty to confirm what we suspected was true.

[01:24]

What we suspected was true was that most parents like the idea of having kids who read in their leisure time. And so we did this little survey where we asked parents, we said, imagine that you've got a teenager and they've got about five hours of spare time on an average school day. Here are a list of activities. How would you like them to allocate their time during the day? And we asked that, put that question to 300 American adults. And what we found was they allocated about 75 minutes of that five hours they thought teenagers should be reading.

[02:03]

We actually know the amount of time that teenagers actually do read in their leisure time. And it's not 75 minutes. The estimates vary. American Time Youth Survey, which is conducted by the Department of Labor Statistics, puts the time at about six minutes per day for the average teenager. So that was sort of the starting point for the book, was most parents like the idea that their kids will grow up to be readers. Most kids don't grow up to be readers.

[02:35]

So how can you end up with a child who reads? What I argue in the book is that there are three big components to being a successful reader. The first is you have to be a smooth and fluent decoder. So you can't have any glitches or problems in the process of decoding print on the page into meaningful text. The second is you have to be a skilled comprehender. You have to understand what you're reading.

[03:06]

Both of those seem quite self-evident, right? And then the third is that you need to be motivated. You need to think of reading as something that you would actually choose to do in your spare time. And so the argument of the book is that if you're a parent, you really need to be thinking about all three of these things from birth. There are actually things you can do starting at a very, very young age that address decoding comprehension and motivation sort of all the way through. There's a tendency to not think of each of those components of reading Only when it becomes apparent that there's an issue or when kids start working on them in school.

[03:48]

So we don't really think about decoding until our child's in kindergarten and is starting to learn how to decode in school. But there actually are things that parents can be doing at home. Now, that said, a big sort of – theme that runs through the book is that all of this should be fun. The parents who do raise kids who like to read are not the parents who are at home with the flashcards showing them, you know, baby Einstein videos to try and make them geniuses. They're parents who weave these strategies sort of into their everyday life. And for the most part I think the parents who raise kids who are readers are not really aware of what they're doing, but researchers are aware of what they're doing.

[04:36]

So the purpose was to convey that information to readers in this book.

[04:39] SPEAKER_01:

Could you tell us a little bit about how you got into this kind of niche of speaking directly to parents and speaking directly to educators through your blog? Because it's refreshing and it seems to be fairly rare among what I would call serious researchers, and you definitely bring a lot of serious research to a more popular audience. What got you into doing that?

[05:05] SPEAKER_02:

What got me into it, my motivation for doing it was very much what you said. It seemed like there was not enough of that happening. Academics mostly talk to other academics, which is fine. I think that's the way it should be. Academics, we are in the business of generating new knowledge for the most part. But somebody's got to be communicating it to people who are outside of academia, I think.

[05:31]

I think that's a useful thing for somebody inside the academy to be doing. There were not very many people doing that, specifically in education, and so it seemed like a useful thing for me to take on. How it happened was, like so many things, was just utter accident. I was a researcher who studied basic processes of memory from both a behavioral and a neuroscientific point of view. I did that for about the first 15 years of my career and then really by accident got involved in education in small ways and then the The big thing that happened was I got invited. I gave a talk and the editor of American Educator magazine happened to be in the audience.

[06:18]

American Educator is a magazine that is published by one of the big teachers unions and goes out to about a million teachers. And this editor said, why don't you write about some of this stuff for us? And so I started that way and just got more and more interested in education. trying to bring research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience and other basic sciences to teachers in ways that was understandable and seemed to possibly be helpful to their work in the classroom.

[06:47] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And I think we as educators, we talk about research so much, but we we have so little understanding, I think, as a profession of what good research looks like and how it actually applies to our work. So that's one thing I wanted to say. I really appreciate about your blog and about the writing you do at RealClearEducation.com to really clarify it. issues about research findings and how they apply to our work.

[07:16]

I just have to thank you for that huge contribution to the profession, because as you noted, it is a major gap that very few people are attempting to fill.

[07:26] SPEAKER_02:

I appreciate that, Justin. I'll tell you, I'm a big believer in expertise. That you learn a lot when you've been doing something for a long time. And I feel like education is so complicated. All of us bring something different to the table. And so one thing that I'm always very quick to point out is that I'm not an educator.

[07:48]

I mean, I teach college classes. That's a very different problem than teaching K through 12. And so I'm a great respecter of expertise, not only in research, I'm a great respecter of expertise in the classroom. respecter of expertise in academic disciplines. I don't know anything about history of education, sociology of education. And so while interdisciplinary work is terrific and important, I think it's useful to remind people everybody has got a piece of this puzzle that each of us doesn't have, right?

[08:23]

It has to be a collaborative effort. And it's really important that we listen to one another in order to bring all these pieces of the puzzle together.

[08:31] SPEAKER_01:

So Dr. Willingham, in your book, you have recommendations for parents about what they can do to help their students, help their children become readers starting at a very early age, not just when problems emerge, when it becomes apparent that a student is struggling with comprehension or struggling with decoding. What can school leaders do to help parents take the actions that they need to early enough to give students every advantage that they can possibly have when it comes to becoming a strong reader? Sure.

[09:00] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So this is a challenge, right? Because a lot of what we're talking about, as I mentioned, I say we start at birth. That's maybe, you know, like when the child comes home from the hospital, you don't have to get all frantic about reading. But I mean, things do start really, really early. So for school leaders, there's a bit of a challenge here, right?

[09:19]

Because by the time the child comes to school, a whole lot has already happened. So one thing that the school leaders can do is try to partner with community organizations and parenting organizations that are going to sort of make it their business to get the word out to parents. about things that can be happening in the home from birth up through preschool that will build pre-reading skills. And again, a lot of these, we can get to this in a minute if you want to, but a lot of these things, they don't look very academic, but they end up they end up really helping. The second thing that school leaders can do is create an environment, and of course they can continue that communicative function, I should make clear, once the children are actually in school.

[10:09]

So this is all sort of by way of being information leaders, thought leaders, about parenting practices that are going to end up being helpful for school work. The second thing that school leaders can do is, of course, have a strong reading curriculum that includes decoding teaching of decoding that is known to be rapid and effective and teaching decoding is very difficult in the english language because our uh our spelling sound correspondence is is a bit funky as everybody knows um and also having a a curriculum a knowledge-based coherent curriculum that is actually teaching kids content because the main driver of reading comprehension It's background knowledge. It feels like reading comprehension is an all-purpose skill.

[11:03]

It's really not. It's deeply intertwined with knowledge. So you take a kid who scores poorly on a reading test and hand them a text, hand them something to read. that is on a subject they know a whole lot about, all of a sudden they look like a good reader. This has been demonstrated again and again in the literature. The first studies on this were in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, and it's been repeated over and over again in virtually any reading comprehension study you see.

[11:32]

They look at background knowledge, and they sort of statistically remove it. It's not very interesting if you're a researcher anymore because everyone's known this for 20 or 30 years. But background knowledge is a huge driver of comprehension. So that's the other thing that school leaders should be thinking about. In addition to a decoding curriculum, mechanism of teaching decoding that's effective, you want a knowledge-based curriculum that is coherent and sequenced. and is going to build background knowledge over time.

[12:00]

And the third thing is paying attention to motivation. There are fewer data points on this. What I end up recommending in the book is, again, it's not as research-based as I'd like it to be, but of course I think it's right anyway, so here goes. What I suggest is a practice that's actually used quite a bit, drop everything and read, which is basically time set aside for reading every day in an English language arts classroom where kids are selecting their own books. Now, the truth is the data on the effectiveness of drop everything and read is pretty mixed. What I end up arguing in the book is it's pretty mixed because it's actually really difficult to do well.

[12:47]

I think the strongest studies indicate that drop everything and read works well when teachers are actively teaching during that time. in some drop everything and read classrooms the teachers are also reading and you know it sort of makes sense like well they're kinda modeling what it what it means to be an engaged reader but I think the best experiments indicate what teachers really need to be doing during that time is actually teaching. They need to be conferencing with students, they need to be helping students select books, that sort of thing. I think that the drop everything and read has the potential to really help student attitudes because when you think about what reading means in early, reading attitudes are really positive in very early elementary grades. They steadily drop

[13:37]

through middle school, and then they kind of plateau at indifference or slight negativity towards reading. Why is that? Well, when you think about it, in early elementary, reading is purely for pleasure, right? It's always supposed to be about pleasure, and if you don't like a book, that's fine. Drop it. As kids get through middle and late elementary, we start being much more demanding about what they're doing with their reading.

[14:05]

The purpose is no longer just pleasure. The purpose becomes extraction of information. Maybe you're doing a research project. Do you need to learn something from this text? Maybe you need to overtly memorize this text. It's a textbook and you're going to be quizzed on it later.

[14:19]

So reading takes on all these attributes that are not only not pleasure, that you could say they're sort of, they're hard. They're diametrically opposed to pleasure in certain ways. And kids don't have, you know, a choice anymore, right? When you're a sixth grader, you can't go and say, well, I tried that photosynthesis stuff and I just didn't like it. So I want to read something else, right? So I think drop everything and read has the potential to sort of separate in students' minds.

[14:47]

There's reading that we do for pleasure. It's fabulous. It's enriching. We should keep doing that. Then there's other types of reading that we do for other academic purposes. Yeah, that's harder.

[14:58]

It is harder. It can bring pleasure as well. That's the goal. But it may be a different type of pleasure. So what I'm advocating, and again, I'm going out on a limb here. I cannot claim this is strongly rooted in formal studies testing this idea.

[15:13]

But what I'm advocating is some explicit separation by teachers and school leaders between reading for pleasure and academic reading. And my fear is that the, or my theory is that the reason that reading motivation drops throughout elementary is that these different purposes of reading are all getting munged up and confused in students' mind. And so pleasure reading is kind of getting dragged along with academic reading as recognizing as something that's tough and something I don't really want to do in my free time.

[15:47] SPEAKER_01:

And why do you think it is that in schools where we're so hesitant to give students substantial amounts of time to read books that they choose, why do you think we feel so compelled to specify all of the books that students read after a certain age, say maybe third or fourth grade?

[16:02] SPEAKER_02:

Well, there's a couple of reasons. First of all, I should be clear. I think when Drop Everything and Read is well executed, students have choice, but the teacher is also clearly using his or her expertise to guide students towards appropriate books. The great reading researcher, Nell Duke, in a recent book said that drop everything and read too often turns into drop everything and find Waldo time. It's sort of joking that kids will, if they've got complete freedom, there are a lot of kids who will choose books like Where's Waldo, which really don't entail any reading at all. And so, yes, you want kids to have freedom of choice, but you also want to, and this is part of what makes It makes it difficult to do this well.

[16:52]

You want to nudge them without coercing them towards books that they will find enriching, that will stretch them a little bit, that kind of thing. I think one reason may be that imagine yourself as a parent and you walk by a classroom and you see a bunch of kids lounging around and they're all just reading. and the teacher is, yeah, talking to kids, but it looks like most of the kids aren't being taught. Most of the kids are reading. It may feel to you like this teacher's kind of taking it easy here. And so if that's you, don't be that parent.

[17:25]

Another possibility is, of course, in some districts, there's a constant feeling of being rushed, There's a curriculum that we feel like we've got to get through. We're looking forward to the next state test and, you know, it doesn't feel like there's enough time. What I argue in Raising Kids Who Read is that there are certain things that in at least some districts are eating up a lot of English language arts time and probably we could do with less of those activities to make room for pleasure reading in the classroom.

[17:59] SPEAKER_01:

Well, that makes total sense to me. As someone who I think developed a love of reading and most of the skills that I have in reading by reading books that I chose, books from the library, I remember reading as a child very few books that anyone made me read, but having... basically open access to the library to read just about anything I wanted. And that was a very motivating experience.

[18:25]

You talked about motivation earlier. And I think that really hits home for me. And the question for me is, how can we give every student that experience at scale and not leave it up to chance that they'll have that experience? And I think what you're onto here is very powerful.

[18:40] SPEAKER_02:

So I think that – I just want to sort of reinforce what you said and also as someone who grew up as a reader, I agree. I mean the reason I love reading is when I – there were definitely books that teachers guided me towards, books that I read as a classroom requirement that I enjoyed. But when I think back about important books from my childhood, they're mostly books that I stumbled onto. And think about that kid who is a reluctant reader. Maybe this is a child who decoding came slower to him than it came to other kids in the class. So he's a little uncertain about reading anyway.

[19:15]

If his experience with reading, currently he doesn't really choose to read. Say this is a child who's in fifth grade. And if all of his experiences with reading are, say, five or six things that are going to be selected by the district, Well, if most of those are ones that he happens not to enjoy very much, what is the child supposed to conclude? It's easy to see how the child will go, well, this is just not for me. And many kids, I think, they think of reading that way as an activity. Like, you know, it's like tennis or it's like stamp collecting or something.

[19:51]

Not everybody plays tennis. Not everybody collects stamps. So, you know, reading is just not for me. Whereas what parents and teachers and avid readers, the way we want kids to think about reading is like, no, it's not like tennis. It's not like stamp collecting because it can be anything. Reading can be absolutely anything.

[20:10]

So the effort, I think, in the first go-to strategy, which is a good one but isn't enough, is to find the perfect book for the child, right? That's the book that is going to sort of open the world of reading. What I argue in the book is that what you're – When you think about how we choose what we do in leisure time, it really is a choice. The child is not just thinking, do I want to read this book or not? The child is comparing reading the book to something else they might do. Maybe it's go outside and play with my friends.

[20:43]

Maybe it's play a video game. That's what the book is being stacked up against. And so what I encourage parents to do is focus not only on finding books that are going to be appealing but also thinking about what else is in the environment and especially putting books in environments in your home where there's not much else to do. The most obvious example is the car. If the child is riding in the car, why shouldn't you have a basket of books next to the car seat if the child's young enough? But there should always be a basket of books in the car.

[21:18]

I can't imagine why you would put a DVD player in your car. Because, you know, the child, it's pretty predictable. Most kids are going to want to watch DVDs. If you want your child to learn how to enjoy reading...

[21:31]

make reading the most attractive thing that's available.

[21:34] SPEAKER_01:

Fantastic. Yeah, it's all about that opportunity. I've had that experience in other areas where you only provide the choices that you find acceptable for your child and you want your child to choose as much as possible rather than just be forced to do something. some powerful ideas for getting our kids to really develop a love of reading. So the book is Raising Kids Who Read, and I would encourage everyone to check that out. And Dr. Willingham, thank you so much for joining us.

[22:02]

If people want to connect with you and continue to follow what you're writing about and the education research that you're translating into plain English for educators and for parents, where can they find you online and on social media?

[22:18] SPEAKER_02:

DanielWillingham.com is my website, and the blog postings appear there. Also, articles that I've written that are freely available on the web are all collected there as well. And also, I've done a few YouTube videos. You can also find those at DanielWillingham.com.

[22:37]

Social media, DT Willingham. DT Willingham. That's both Facebook and Twitter. You can find me there.

[22:46] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high performance instructional leadership.

[22:50] SPEAKER_01:

Wow, what incredible insights from Dan Willingham. So high performance instructional leaders, how can we raise kids who read? I really appreciated Dan's emphasis on modeling and his insight that drop everything and read is a great structure, but it's not necessarily a time when teachers actually need to be reading because it is an instructional time and students often need help with choosing a book or getting through some difficulties in their book. But there is more than one way to model a love of reading. And I want to share an example from my colleague Jessica Johnson, a principal in Wisconsin. In her email signature, she always has as the very last line of that signature, the book she's currently reading.

[23:34]

Now, Jessica is an avid reader, but those books are not always work-related books. She includes novels that she's reading for pleasure, and I think that really models the kind of reading lifestyle that we want our students to develop. So look for ways to model for your staff that you are a committed reader, that you have that love of reading, and help your staff find ways to model that for students, not necessarily by reading in front of students, but by doing what readers do, by talking about books, by talking about

[24:04] Announcer:

insights and reactions based on what they've read when we do that when we model the way and create the opportunity for students to read books of their choosing that are going to move them forward as readers while being enjoyable to read we can create the opportunity for our students to become kids who love reading thanks for listening to principal center radio for more great episodes subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio