The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:12] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Doug Lemov. Doug is the best-selling author of Teach Like a Champion 3.0 and is co-managing director of Teach Like a Champion, designing and implementing teacher training based on the study of high-performing teachers and exceptional classrooms. He's taught English and history at the university, high school, and middle school levels. And he's the author with Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway of the new book, The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, Translating Research to Reignite Joy and Meaning in the Classroom, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:47] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:50] SPEAKER_00:

Doug, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:52] SPEAKER_02:

Hey, Justin. Thanks for having me on. Good to see you.

[00:54] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'm excited to speak with you. I've had multiple editions of your book, Teach Like a Champion, which I know has sold millions of copies and is in pretty much every school on every educator's bookshelf. What prompted you to write the Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading?

[01:09] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, well, I'm a recovering English teacher, and I guess you'd say, you know, once an English teacher, always an English teacher. Everything we do in school is important, but to me, reading is the most important thing. And I think I've written about reading before. I have a book called Reading We Considered. I wrote with Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway, like this one. I think we set out to rewrite that book.

[01:27]

Maybe at first we were thinking it would be a version 2.0, and we very quickly realized that, you know, the science as we understood it and the science that's available have changed dramatically. our understanding had changed a lot because I think we, in the first version of the book, tried to speak about the importance of pedagogy, but not as clearly about the importance of curriculum and curriculum design. And so this book takes the topic of reading that we love and I think, you know, renews it with what we've learned from working with teachers in the last 10 years and adds to it our experience writing a curriculum for the last six or seven years. And as to that, you know, just a really deep dive that we've taken into the science of reading. We were deeply inspired by Emily Hanford's podcast, Sold the Story.

[02:12]

I think it tells a profoundly important and a sad, and you could say, I don't like to overuse the word tragic, but I do think it's a, you know, a tragic story of how a failure to respond to the science by the sector resulted in millions of kids not learning to read at the primary level. And we're all for systematic synthetic phonics, but I think there's a similar argument. similar discussion that needs to be had about what does reading look like after kids have acquired letter sound recognition after they've you know after they've had mastered their phonics in grades 3 through 12 and on into university what does the science tell us about reading instruction and what it should look like and i think that science too has been ignored might be too strong a word but not by much

[02:54] SPEAKER_00:

Well, and a lot of people hear the phrase, the science of reading, and they think of phonics and they think, well, phonics isn't new. But you said there are some things that are new in the last 10 years. And as you said, often we don't think about what the science of reading means after the primary grades. So take us into some of that science that is a little bit newer, that does focus more on the secondary years.

[03:14] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Well, I think the newest thing is the second chapter in the book is about attention and the critical role of attention in learning. And I think that we've known a significant amount of the science of attention and how, as Marianne Wolfe puts it, you know, any learning task begins with attention and with your ability to sustain your attention and focus your attention on the learning object. And we know that reading is intentionally demanding, right? It is really hard to focus on the challenging book and sustain your attention on it for 40 minutes or for, you know, for hopefully longer, right? But we also know that people, you know, young people's attention, but people generally, our attention is changing.

[03:51]

Our attention is being fractured by our persistent use of cell phones and social media. And so our ability to sustain our attention is significantly degraded. And I think that that creates a really challenging choice for teachers. Are we going to give up on the book? Which I think, you know, this is the point of maybe the unrecognized tragic story of English and reading in American schools right now is that books are disappearing. I think a lot of parents would be really surprised to find how rarely kids read books in school.

[04:22]

And I think we have a choice. Are we going to give up on reading books and challenging texts because it's harder for kids, because their attention has been degraded, their attentional skills have been degraded, or are we going to try to rebuild attention and systematically try to give them the gift of use reading as a tool and a reward for their growing their capacity to pay attention. So I think that's just a key area of new inquiry. That's really happened in the last five years. I think it's hugely important.

[04:48] SPEAKER_00:

You reminded me, I have a tab open on my computer to your article in Edutopia, why students should read whole books. And I think it says a lot, even that that article needs to be written today, which it very much does, that that attention has been fragmented. We're used to bite-sized content. And it's hard to get students to read whole books today.

[05:08] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, for sure. But I think it's doubly important. And so there's a chapter on attention and there's a chapter actually is really a defense of the book and how important, how central books are. I think there's become a little bit of a narrative of that. I have three kids. The last of them leaves for university next year.

[05:24]

So I've watched them go through school. And I say this lovingly because they had so many really great English teachers and reading teachers. But if I had to say, honestly, I think that the profession as a whole has sort of lost its sense of clarity of purpose. What is it that I'm trying to do? Is it sufficient to read any book and just ask and answer questions about that book? Am I doing my job?

[05:49]

What is it that I'm trying to accomplish, particularly maybe in a high school English class? And one of the purposes I think has to be to read books and to read great books that are profoundly important and that create the best arguments that are out there. So there's a chapter just about why books and why, you know, what the, what I think there's a lot of science behind why books are the optimal tool for learning to read. And a lot of that is relatively new as well. And thank goodness it's here because the book is, you could say is in a death struggle against the cell phone and it's not winning.

[06:21] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, Doug, you say in the subtitle of the book, translating research to reignite joy and meaning. And you're saying the quality of the books that we choose to do that, like they have to be meaningful books to ignite meaning. Do I have that right?

[06:36] SPEAKER_02:

I 100% think so, yes. I think that one of the sad truths is that students read less and less outside of school. In the, you know, I would say 20 years ago, if you look at the data, it was a pretty safe bet. Let's say if you were a sixth grade English teacher that you had three times as many kids who read every day as you had kids who never read. And so that shapes the way that you engage reading in the classroom when you have, you know, three X the number of regular readers versus non-readers. Those numbers have flipped.

[07:08]

And now you would be likely to have probably two and a half times as many kids who never read. compared to kids who read regularly. The books that we choose to read in class will, for many students, be the only books that they read in the course of their schooling career. Possibly, it breaks my heart to say this, but possibly in their lives. They will read a handful of books outside what they are assigned. The books that we choose to read are very, very important.

[07:35]

Can we afford to squander one to waste a shot on Captain Underpants? Probably not. And is Captain Underpants the book that is going to, you know, I think it's lovely to hand a student a book like that to read and go read it on their own. And maybe they love the lightness of it and it brings access to something. But to me, the task of the English teacher and the reading teacher is to give them a worthy book and to bring it to life in a way that makes them think this is an incredible experience. I want to read the best that has been written.

[08:05]

And I like the challenge of reading books that don't come to me incredibly easily. I just finished reading Ian McEwan's book, Atonement. A colleague of mine recommended it. And honestly, for the first 60 pages, it was a slog. Like I was forcing myself to read it. And then suddenly I looked down and I was on page 106.

[08:26]

because the book started to accelerate because it takes a while to build a world. But the whole, one of the points of a book is you, then you enter this world and you, the world is different. It causes your perceptions and your understandings to be different. And from there on out, you know, from page 116, you know, I looked down and I was on page 300 and something. It just took work to get myself there. But once I did, I would like pass through the mirror to the other side in a way that no other medium does.

[08:52]

I think that's incredibly powerful. And I do think that it's an incredibly important message for students to like that everything shouldn't come easily and instantaneously and that there is some. deep and profound sense of meaning and often pleasure connected with that from like fighting your way through into the other world and yet took 40 pages and then I was grateful that I did it and every pleasure and every meaningful experience that I have in my life will not be instantaneous to me like I think that's one of the unspoken messages of a good education and that's one of the many things that a book communicates that really very little else can very well said

[09:29] SPEAKER_00:

You talk quite a bit in the book about background knowledge and vocabulary that we often think of from an elementary perspective. Take us into how and why those matter at the secondary level.

[09:42] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think this is the single biggest point of misdirection for American schools. I would say if you're going to describe how American schools, particularly upper elementary and middle school level, think about reading, they think of it as being made up of a set of transferable skills. Inferencing, finding the main idea, identifying character motivations, and that that is a skill that if I learn, I can then apply, will be able to apply it to any text. And so our classrooms are made up of, you know, the objective is we will practice making inferences. We will practice finding the main idea of a text. And I think that is a sadly and profoundly unscientific view of how reading comprehension and understanding happen.

[10:22]

I think a cognitive scientist would tell you instantaneously that Inferencing, any form of higher order thinking is domain specific. Quick, Justin, make an inference about particle physics. Or make an inference about Napoleon's decision on day two of the Battle of Waterloo. Was he right to attack? Was he wrong? You can only make an inference about things that you have knowledge about.

[10:44]

And the process of reading is often about disintermediating the ambiguities of a text. So there are ambiguities in any text, and our job as the reader is to unpack those ambiguities. And the author often assumes that we will be able to do that. So we give the example of a really simple sentence that we wrote in the text. The wooden box was heavy. She put down her bear so she could pick it up.

[11:07]

Something very similar to that, right? So like... There are a bunch of things you have to, without even realizing it, disintermediate. Ambiguities you have to disintermediate.

[11:18]

She put down her bear. Obviously, you know that that is a teddy bear and not a real bear. You have the background knowledge to know that a human could not hold in a bear. And you've probably decided that this is a child who's narrating that the sentence is about because who else would be holding a teddy bear? If not, you would be explained. And then even the pronoun it, it was going to be heavy.

[11:38]

Like, is it the bear or the box? Well, you know, the weights, you know, like obviously that's the box. And so without even being aware that we're doing it, every time we're reading, we're resolving ambiguities. And the way that we resolve those ambiguities is by having background knowledge. In this case, I'm giving like very simple examples of background knowledge. But, you know, like the landmark study on this is the study of baseball, which is if you take a group of readers and you give them a passage about baseball, even lower skilled readers who have more knowledge about baseball will outperform higher skilled readers who have no knowledge about baseball because the passage asks you to disambiguate or to solve small areas of ambiguity.

[12:19]

about baseball. And so insights, inferences, understanding what the text is about, having deeper insights, and even remembering and understanding things is driven by your background knowledge and not by transferable skills. And so this is one of the profound things that we need to change about instruction is we need to, that background knowledge is the driver of comprehension and understanding, not transferable skills. But I can't tell you how many classrooms I've been in where it's 45 minutes of the seven steps to finding the main idea. What is it that I'm doing when I'm finding the main idea? And that is literally a waste of time.

[12:53]

You would be much better served just reading the text aloud for 45 minutes and doing those exercises. We also mentioned vocabulary, and I would just say that vocabulary is a form of knowledge. But we want to think of it as a skill. And what I mean by as a skill is that the way we often teach vocabulary is that we presume that we can teach kids to infer word meaning from context clues. And so we're constantly asking them, you know, can anyone tell me what the word, what the word mimic means from the clues in the sentence? Or does anyone know what the word mimic is?

[13:23]

You know, how, you know. We should close our eyes for a minute and just imagine the beautiful world in which I could teach kids to infer the meaning of any word that they read in any text for the rest of their lives by using context clues. And then we should open our eyes and realize that this is profoundly, you know, this is a pipe dream. That in fact, as Isabel Beck points out in her brilliant book, Bringing Words to Life, sometimes context clues are directive. Sometimes they're non-directive. Most of the time they're non-directive.

[13:50]

Sometimes they're misdirective. And when the sentence is most important, when the word is most important in the sentence, the context clues are least likely to be helpful because the sentence pivots around the unexpected word. So I think in the book, we give the example of like, the boys were exhilarated when they reached the top of the cliff, right? And so if you had to guess, you might think that exhilarated there means exhausted. But actually, exhilarated is the opposite of exhausted in many ways. And it shows like the sentence pivots around the...

[14:21]

unexpected valence that the word exhilarates gives there and so if i'm trying to use context clues they're going to they're going to lead me astray and i'm not going to be able so i really have to teach vocabulary as a form of as a body of knowledge And we can talk more about that, but I think that's one of the biggest oversights. Just first of all, how important vocabulary is. It's the most important form of background knowledge. You almost can't conceive of a concept unless you have a word for it. And then we have to teach it as a form of knowledge.

[14:51] SPEAKER_00:

So you're saying the common view is that it's kind of a skill, but you're saying it's not really a transferable skill. It is a body of knowledge. Yeah, that's right.

[14:58] SPEAKER_02:

And I would say, like, every state assessment reinforces this mistaken belief that it's a skill by, you know, vocabulary is measured via context-clued questions on every state assessment that I'm aware of. And it's a false god.

[15:09] SPEAKER_00:

So I want to ask your perspective on something that I've asked many of my guests about, and that is Bloom's taxonomy and this idea of higher order skills. And I think there has been an understandable desire to get away from things that feel like drudgery, to do things that seem more interesting, to do things that seem more like the kind of interesting thinking that adult experts get to do about their subject. And to any of our listeners of Emily Hanford sold a story, you know, many of these arguments will be familiar, but I really hesitate when I hear people talk about critical thinking and higher order skills to the detriment of knowledge. Talk to us about your understanding of kind of Bloom taxonomy and how all this fits together.

[15:50] SPEAKER_02:

I don't have a problem with Bloom's taxonomy. I have a problem with the way that it's interpreted and sort of, you know, the best defense of it is that it's beneficial if you turn it on its side instead of having it be upright. When people see a pyramid, they want to be at the top of the pyramid. Of course, I want to ask the most rigorous questions that I can. I think the point, if you believe the sort of defenders of Bloom's taxonomy, the point is that you can't get to the top unless you've built the foundation. And so you have to ask knowledge.

[16:16]

You have to feed knowledge before you can ask higher order thinking questions that they are built upon it. But I don't think that's how most people interpret the Bloom's taxonomy. I think the best description comes from Daisy Christodoulou, the British education writer. She says, thinking about the difference between knowledge and skills is like thinking about the difference between ingredients and cake. You need the ingredients to make the cake. It's not a choice between ingredients and cake.

[16:44]

When you have ingredients, you have cake. When you have knowledge, you can have higher order thinking. And so... We have to give students lots of things to think about.

[16:51]

Dylan William makes a similar point like this. He says the big mistake we've made in trying to teach higher order thinking is we try to think of it as a skill on its own, but what students need is more to think about. And when I have things to think about, then I get higher order thinking. And I do think of that as...

[17:05]

a beautifully accurate statement of the problem. So if you want to get to the top of Bloom's Taxonomy and ask integration questions, you have to have lots and lots of knowledge to integrate. And I think the issue is that people want to do the most rigorous things, so they start there. And of course, maybe that worked for you in your senior thesis as a science or English major in college. But of course, experts and novices learn differently. So another like routinely misunderstood thing in the education sector that novices need knowledge and they need direct instruction.

[17:38]

And the types of problem solving based experiential experiences that resonated with you when you were an expert will not work as well with a sixth grader who has read five books in their lives.

[17:53] SPEAKER_00:

I agree completely. And I wonder what you say to people who kind of denigrate anything that has to do with knowledge as drill and kill. It's like we have different shorthands for not liking knowledge. People don't come out and say, I hate knowledge. I think it's bad. But they have ways of kind of dissing it by calling it drill and kill.

[18:10]

Yeah.

[18:10] SPEAKER_02:

Well, the first thing I say is I see the drill, but I don't see the kill. I have this weird secondary life in the professional sports sector. I have a book about sports coaching. So I have a couple of NBA teams that I work with. no one in the NBA thinks that it's drill and kill. It's like you drill and automate your foundational understanding so that your eyes can be up and you can be perceiving and you can be reading the game and you can be solving problems live in real time.

[18:39]

That in many cases, it's the drill that is necessary to the fast, perceptive, intuitive thinking that we value so much. And I think you used the word tongue-in-cheek drudgery before. I think this is This to me is so fascinating. I can show you a beautiful video of a teacher. I'm thinking of a teacher video in the book of this teacher, Christine Torres, who's an English teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts. And she's teaching vocabulary.

[19:05]

And the first thing that she does is she tells her kids the definition of the word. The word is caustic. The word caustic means very harsh and unforgiving or very harsh and destructive words. You could have a caustic liquid. You can make a caustic comment. She shows him a picture of like a caustic liquid.

[19:22]

What about this liquid is caustic? 30 seconds, go. Would you want to be friends with someone who makes caustic remarks? Why or why not? What is a caustic remark a judge could make about the contestants in a talent show? 30 seconds with your partner, go.

[19:34]

And in this room, every time she says 30 seconds, you know, turn and talk with your partner to talk about the word caustic, the room explodes to life. Like you can almost hear the percussiveness of the kids in the classroom on the video. Why are they so incredibly enthusiastic? Two reasons. One is because suddenly everyone has the background knowledge that they need to be able to do the problem solving, right? Instead of saying, does anyone know what the word caustic means from their experience or maybe from the context clues that they read in the book?

[20:06]

Well, half the kids in the room have never heard the word caustic. And if they have heard it maybe once, they're very unsure. So they are not able to participate in the problem solving that comes from it. But if I give you the definition first, right, most people perceive the purpose of vocabulary instruction to arrive at the definition. She starts with the definition, and then she does this very engaging, fascinating wordplay and problem solving and application of the definition to a liquid or a person. They can both be caustic.

[20:34]

How they're similar, how they're different. So the amazing thing is it's the opposite of drudgery. Somehow, like something has convinced us that like, if, if I give kids knowledge about things, they will become less curious about it. But that is the opposite of how the more you know about something, the more, you know, the more likely you are to be curious, the more fascinated, the more able you are to play. when someone asks you a really interesting, fun question about it. And so I think that's the most fascinating part of the like drill and kill argument, the belief that somehow knowing things will destroy young people's curiosity.

[21:06]

And I think the evidence is squarely on the opposite court, which is that the more you know, the more you're able to participate, the more interesting the thinking is, the more curious you become.

[21:16] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Doug, I feel like you've just explained what to most Americans is the quintessential boring lesson. And that is in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where there's the lecture about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. And the teacher does the exact opposite of what you're describing, right? He starts describing something, and then he wants the students to fill them in. Anyone? Anyone?

[21:37]

Bueller? And he's not giving them the information or asking them to do anything with it. He's just asking them the basic information.

[21:46] SPEAKER_02:

talking a little bit more and just kind of doing the opposite of the teacher you're describing which he may not have even talked at the beginning right and by the way this scene is legendary and with the lomov children you know ferris bueller's day off great great film and we couldn't be having this discussion about it by the way if we hadn't both seen the film and we didn't have shared background knowledge of you know what you mean by that scene which i think it's a great example but yeah you know if i describe to you a smooth holly tariff. Here's what happened. How is this similar to or different from X? How might this raise similar issues to the teapot dome scandal, which happened relatively contemporaneously? Why might people remember them as connected in some ways? 30 seconds to discuss, go.

[22:27]

Now I've given students information and I'm letting them play with and connect their knowledge. And I just think about the cognitive scientist Hector Ruiz-Martin, whose definition of learning is Thinking students thinking hard about the meaning of the learning object and connecting it to other knowledge in their long-term memory, which is exactly what we're doing in that situation, which is how do I connect the pieces of knowledge to my memory? How do I think hard about them? And when I'm intentional about background knowledge, it's much easier for me to get that to happen in class. And maybe the takeaway from Christine's class is, and kids are happier. They actually enjoy it a lot more.

[23:04]

And that's maybe the most unexpected part, that it's whatever the opposite of drill and kill is, like, you know, feed knowledge and then tap into the joy that people feel about knowing things and being able to use them practically. That's really the true story of knowledge in the classroom.

[23:20] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think when we think of boring lecture, we of course think of the clear eyes guy from Ferris Bueller, but we don't think of teachers like Miss Chella from social media, right? What she often does in her videos is she gives a ton of background knowledge very, very rapidly. She has these incredible videos on history and they're funny and engaging in lots of ways, but she does not shy away from giving background knowledge about whatever the topic is. And it's very, you know, It's loaded with knowledge, but then students have what they need to actually discuss the topic and actually think about the topic and do something interesting with it, because it's not an attempt to draw something that they don't have out from them. It's giving them information and then getting them to do something interesting with it.

[24:06] SPEAKER_02:

You know, that's so interesting because I think that the biggest misunderstanding about explicit direct instruction, which is kind of what we're describing here, is the big breakthrough for me was reading Zach Groeschel's book, Just Tell Them, which I think is a great book. He describes the alternating principle, which is a phrase that I never heard before, but that's what really... great direct instruction involves giving students small packets of information and then asking them to think about it apply it and use it in this in contrast to the you know the teacher in ferris bueller's day off who's just kind of like droning on and asks and has no interaction and so that's really what christine is doing in her class right caustic means very harsh and unforgiving How could, you know, here's a picture of a caustic liquid. How could a liquid be caustic?

[24:51]

What might happen if you touched a caustic liquid? Go right there. Or even like I was watching a video of a science lesson. Pritesh Raichara, he's a great science teacher in England, describes covalent bonds. 10 seconds with your partner just to rehearse that. What is a covalent bond?

[25:06]

How's a different phrenotic bond go, right? It's just like, just rehearse it, right? we have two we have sodium and chloride what type of bond we've talked about two different types of bonds which one would be uh so and so which what type of bond would you find in sodium chloride and why go feel free to use your notes go right but like they're giving students pack small pieces of small packets of information and then letting them use them and this that's to me is the alternating principle in zach rochelle's book which is feed information let them play with it wrestle with it try and apply it feed more information same thing When students do that, they're also unloading or unburdening their working memory and so they're much more receptive to new information. Direct instruction can be incredibly dynamic and engaging and fun and interactive. I'm actually going to try to develop a set of videos this year to really demonstrate this to teachers so they can see it and imagine it because I think teachers, when they think about direct instruction, imagine the teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

[26:10] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is the Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, Translating Research to Reignite Joy and Meaning in the Classroom. Doug, if people want to maybe see some of this in action, learn about some of the other resources that you have, where's the best place for them to go online?

[26:24] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I have a blog. It's teachlikeachampion.org backslash blog.

[26:32]

Thanks for catching up. I try to post every couple of weeks with a nice video of some teacher doing something brilliant to shine a light on her or a quick discussion of one of the concepts. There are a couple of excerpts from the book there and hopefully some videos you can find from the book there as well. So that's a great starting point.

[26:47] SPEAKER_00:

Doug Lamov, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[26:50] SPEAKER_01:

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Justin.

[26:52] Announcer:

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