The Scientific Principles of Teaching: Bridging the Divide Between Educational Practice and Research

[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.

[00:13]

Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program Nathaniel Hansford. Nathaniel has taught every grade from pre-K through 12th in places as diverse as South Korea, the United Kingdom, the sub-Arctic of Quebec, and Ontario, Canada. And in 2022, he won the Literacy Leader of the Year Award from the Ontario International Dyslexia Association. Nathaniel has written hundreds of articles on the science of teaching and is most interested in using meta-analysis research to help teachers implement methodologies that have been proven to work. He is the founder of Sage Online Academy. And to learn more about Nathaniel's work in education, you can visit teachingbyscience.com or find him on X at NateJoseph19.

[00:53]

He's the author of The Scientific Principles of Teaching, Bridging the Divide Between Educational Practice and Research, which we've talked about previously on Principal Center Radio, as well as the new book, The Scientific Principles of Reading and Writing Instruction, Bridging the Divide Between Educational Practice and Research.

[01:10] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:12] SPEAKER_00:

Nathaniel, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[01:15] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for having me. I love being a repeat guest, actually. I always feel like if I'm a repeat guest, I must have done a good job the first time.

[01:21] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I love that your new book is a follow up that builds on your earlier book about the scientific principles of instruction. What did you see in the published literature on reading and writing instruction that prompted you to write this book? Because there's a lot out there, both in the research world and on the practical side for teachers. What gap did you see that prompted you to write the book?

[01:45] SPEAKER_01:

I think overall, I felt like there was a bit of like an ideological perspective on reading instruction. And you know, we sort of see generally speaking two major camps in reading instruction, one being that sort of whole language or balanced literacy camp that sort of sees the focus of reading instruction about comprehension and building joy and authentic texts. And not that there's anything wrong with those things. Those are all great ideas and important. But then we also have another side that's sort of more of that direct instruction explicit systematic camp, which really thinks that reading instruction should be really broken down into smaller skills and taught more explicitly. And then I think, you know, going a little further, we have, there's a lot of little tiny groups and organizations out there that have like an almost religiosity to them and the way they promote reading instruction.

[02:32]

They have a specific program or approach and they sort of sell that program or approach as the only way to teach reading instruction. And I think sometimes that leads to very dogmatic conversations and reading instruction. And when I talked about reading instruction online with people, I often found that that was, you know, Well, I am a speech-to-print person, or I'm an OG person, or I'm a UFLI teacher, or I'm a reading recovery teacher, or I'm a phonics panel teacher, or I'm a zoophonics teacher. And you just, you hear people even claiming that identity. And then all of their answers are then filtered through that sort of dogma that's associated with that specific idea. And I just, I really wanted to take like a neutral perspective, like just take a dive through the research and say like, well, what does the research show?

[03:15]

What can we say with confidence? I'm not trying to sell all the answers here. I'm not trying to say I know everything there is to know about reading section. In fact, I think there's lots of questions we still have in the reading research. But my hope was that we could have just a little more clarity with this book. So by just focusing on the biggest, most important studies and saying, well, these are the things we know with certainty.

[03:36]

And these are some things that maybe we don't know with certainty. And then saying, what are the next steps and conversations we have to have as a community?

[03:42] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And certainly the dogmatism is something that I've encountered. It's probably the thing that I've been yelled at about the most online specific approaches. And often those specific approaches are tied to specific programs and probably all of them have some basis in the research, but there are also lots of areas of conflict and it would not be a good solution to just say, well, let's do all of them. We can't do all of the programs. We can't use all of the approaches at once.

[04:07]

Some of them are incompatible. We run out of time. Sometimes there are good things that maybe are given too much time. I've seen some discussion of that lately. So let's explore the landscape a little bit. And I think part of the issue here that makes this complex and fascinating makes the book need 24 chapters is that there are different issues that unfold sequentially or, you know, as students become more fluent readers and they kick in at different times.

[04:33]

Let's start at the beginning, though, with phonemic awareness and phonics and some of those early issues. Take us into what you found about phonemic awareness and phonics, if you would.

[04:44] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, you know, I think my answer would be very different for each. I think there's a very strong body of research that shows being awareness supports learning outcomes, but I think it's kind of weird in that We know that phonemic awareness is important, but the predominant approach to teaching phonemic awareness doesn't seem to line up with the research. So it virtually all the studies of the topic seems to show the same thing that phonemic awareness works best when phonemic awareness is taught via segmenting and blending drills. You know, a segmenting drill is identifying the sounds and the words. So cat is cat. And then blending drills would be a teacher reads the word already segmented to the student, and then the student tries to identify the word.

[05:25]

So if I say to the students, what word is that? That's a blending drill. But we also know from the research that phonetic awareness works best when there's letters associated with it. So not just doing that as an oral drill, but writing the letters on the board or the chalkboard, a whiteboard, a piece of paper for the students. Whatever it may be, the letters need to be a component of that. And we see that if we have those two things in place that we see roughly twice the impact on learning outcomes, specifically reading and spelling, as if we were to take the opposite approach of say doing manipulation and deletion drills orally, which is the more popular, you know, way of teaching phonemic.

[06:01]

So for example, a manipulation drill. I would say we have the word cat now replace the word or replace the first sound C with the bus sound. And then you hope the students say that, well, that's a manipulation drill. But the research shows that improves students' phonemic awareness, but it doesn't lead to improvements in reading or spelling. So obviously we wanna stick to phonemic awareness instruction. That's actually gonna benefit students on spelling and reading outcomes.

[06:28]

So I find it's a bit of a strange debate that we have very strong research suggesting one thing, and we have strong research suggesting that phonemic awareness is important, but the people who are most in favor of teaching phonemic awareness are actually not aligned with how the research suggests it should be taught. And we get into these really funny debates. When I point this out online, the number one defense I get, and it's changed over time, but the number one defense I get is, well, it's not really phonemic awareness if there's letters there. You often hear people say it ceases to be phonemic awareness. And this is, I think, kind of a weird retort because it sort of doesn't matter because let's say they're right. Let's say the definition has changed and I can argue that they're wrong actually on the definition, but let's say they're right and the definition has changed.

[07:18]

And the second we throw letters into a phonemic awareness drills, it ceased to be phonemic awareness and we'd be teaching phonics. Well, then what the research would absolutely suggest is we shouldn't teach phonemic awareness at all and that we should just teach phonics. Now I would still see that as a difference because to me, phonics is saying this letter represents the sound. Here's examples of it, et cetera. And you're very explicitly trying to draw that connection. You know, phonemic awareness is the ability to isolate the sounds in words.

[07:46]

If the students know the letters or see the letters on the boards, they're still gaining phonemic awareness by practicing isolating the sounds in a word. It's just that they're also at the same time getting incidental exposure to the correlation of those sounds to letters. So you could argue that's a form of, you know, indirect phonics at the same time. You know, it's weird to me that we get into these debate of nuances of language rather than debates of what works and what's effective. Because I think at the end of the day, that's what matters. The other argument you really hear is that, you know, X author or X program uses these and I love that program and that person's really famous.

[08:24]

But it doesn't actually make the point aligned with research. If you look at like the predominant researchers in the world on language instruction, they all agree with each other. I can't think of a single really well-respected literacy expert on this specific topic who's a researcher who is not in agreement, except for maybe one. But when you have like 90 researchers on one side of the room and one researcher on the other, I think there might be a clear cut answer.

[08:50] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, that has been an interesting debate to watch recently. I think Mark Seidenberg weighed in and Education Week had some studies about an older version of the Hegarty program that didn't have the letter component and just had the oral phonemic awareness activities, but then they've since revised that program. So there's definitely a lot of debate around phonemic awareness. And then, of course, with phonics, you know, probably everyone is aware of sold a story and just the massive evidence base behind phonics. I wonder if rather than talk about phonics, though, we could talk about something that I've been interested in lately that you touch on in the book that I don't think gets enough attention. And that is morphology and, you know, the kinds of things that we teach around morphology that maybe we should be teaching.

[09:33]

But tell us what the research says about morphology, because this is an area that I'm eager to learn more about.

[09:38] SPEAKER_01:

Well, we have a large number of meta-analyses on morphology showing that it's effective at improving reading and spelling outcomes. And I kind of think of it as the lost pillar. You know, after the National Reading Paddle Study came out, a lot of people identified the five pillars of reading instruction being morphology, Enigmatic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension. But I would say that morphology instruction is equally as important based on in size in research. So when we think of the pillars, I think of, you know, types of teaching methods that have many, many studies have been done on them. And all of those studies show very positive outcomes.

[10:16]

I think one of the weird things to me about morphology is that the research shows really, really strong outcomes for spelling and it shows really weak outcomes for comprehension. And yet, truthfully, when I look at most morphology programs, they really seem focused on the idea of using morphology for comprehension. In the sense that they're really focusing on the meaning behind the morphemes. And this is, I think, an area where I probably disagree with a lot of people. I think the predominant opinion within morphology experts is that focusing on the meaning of the morphemes and the history of those morphemes is what matters. And I would say looking at them as spelling patterns or almost as a form of analytic phonics is probably what matters.

[10:57]

And I base that on one practical experience from the classroom. But two, on the fact that all of the meta-analyses that have ever been done on this have found no significant impact on comprehension. So I find that strange. I also feel like there's been very little research on the impact of going very deep on the etymology side, because a lot of morphology research or program story, I should say, really focuses on like deep level instruction on the history of morphemes. So. Yeah, I think it makes sense, actually, when you really boil down from a classroom perspective.

[11:32]

I'll give you an example. Lots of morphemes, they actually have more than one meaning. Some of them have like six or seven meanings. In fact, if you go to etymology online, which is a resource that can be used to identify the meaning of a morpheme and the history of that morpheme, you'll often see pages and pages of information about a tiny spelling pattern. You know, it might be a three-letter spelling pattern that rarely even occurs in words. And there's like a, you know, a 10-page entry into etymology online.

[11:57]

So I think getting students to have deep level knowledge of morphology, meaning side gets really complicated because the meaning actually shifts depending on the context. So it might have one meaning in this word and a completely different meaning in 10 other types of words. So focusing on that comprehension side becomes really difficult. And I think the cognitive load of that is probably challenging. So where I focus my instruction on morphology is spelling and specifically how do we add suffixes to words? Because when we add a suffix to a word, that typically is where the spelling of a word changes and it makes it more difficult.

[12:35]

And then there are three main rules that you can use for spelling words in using morphology that sort of makes sense of that entire system. So it's really easy to teach students those three rules. And then on top of that, there's only like 200 or so commonly used suffixes in the English language, whereas there are millions of words and hundreds of thousands of morphemes. The idea that you're going to teach, you know, 400,000 morphemes to a student doesn't make any sense to me. And then the idea that you would teach those 400,000 morphemes and the meaning behind those and the history of those, I think we get into a very impractical territory. Some people think we should really look at the root words.

[13:16]

Root words are words that we sort of borrowed from other languages and they don't exist in our language unless they have a suffix or prefix added to them. And I think there might be some value to that, but even there, I think it can kind of get messy too, because you really end up teaching your class Latin. And I don't know that we need to teach students Latin and Greek in modern times to achieve high level spelling accuracy. So that's my take. It's probably an unpopular take because most people who are teaching morphology are really much more focused on the meaning side, but I don't think we have any research to support that perspective.

[13:47] SPEAKER_00:

It's definitely interesting to look at the debates that are happening, to look at the programs that are available. I spoke with Sean Morrissey recently about teaching morphology, and he's developing a program on that. He said there really is not a lot out there that's available for teachers that's helpful. It's interesting to see how...

[14:07]

I experience, you know, hearing the meaning of a root word that I've just never heard anybody define. Like, oh, yeah, you know, all the words that have that do have kind of have that particular sense. And I, you know, you intuit some of that, you pick up on it. But it's interesting to think about teaching those explicitly and what the research says on that. And I think one of the unique contributions of your book is not advocating for this program or that program or against particular programs, but actually looking at what the research says. And often it's a bit messier and it's a bit less satisfying to look at the research.

[14:40]

than to look at a program, right? If I'm trying to sell you a program, I'm not going to point out the limitations in the research and the things that are kind of uncertain or maybe unclear in the research base. But I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about what the research says on writing instruction, because I know you have a whole section on the reading-writing connection, handwriting, spelling, and all of that. In recent years, I think these debates have been dominated by phonics. We're also talking about knowledge building a lot these days. But, you know, I remember decades ago talking a lot about the connection between reading and writing.

[15:13]

And certainly we have a lot of concerns now that if students are doing their work on devices, maybe they're not doing as much handwriting. They're not getting that, you know, certainly cursive practice. And maybe there's some research out there about those topics. Take us into what you found and what you included in the book on the writing connection.

[15:30] SPEAKER_01:

And I do want to just comment, sorry, for one second on the not recommending a specific program. I actually, like I have two programs I've created myself that I sell for reconstruction, but I'm a terrible salesman because you'll never hear me say, this is the only approach that works or this is the only program that works or all their programs don't. And I think a lot of the people who've been really successful, that's their marketing strategy. And I don't think that's actually a unique marketing strategy education, but I think we see that in a lot of fields where like, this is the cure, this is the magic solution. But I think when people are saying to you, my approach is the only approach that works, it should be a red flag, actually. It should be a sign that they're just a salesperson.

[16:10]

In terms of writing instruction, I think it is interesting that we have less evidence than we do for reading instruction. One of the big things that I have as a takeaway though, is that the two benefit each other. So for spelling, for example, the average effect size found for spelling instruction overall by Graham et al in 2011, I believe was almost 0.8. Whereas the average effect size for phonics on reading outcomes is 0.4.

[16:38]

So actually that tells me that instruction focused on spelling, generally speaking, finds higher outcomes than instruction focused on reading. And that was specific for reading outcomes. So for me, anytime I have any reading instruction, I'm always integrating writing into it, especially spelling. And I think it's important to do because spelling is actually inherently a harder task than reading. You know, there are 44 sounds in the English language, roughly. And once you realize that they can be represented a couple of different ways, it's pretty easy to decode.

[17:10]

But when you go to write a word, it's pretty difficult to know which spelling patterns you use to spell a sound. And that's where morphology comes into play too. Morphology, I think, is really useful for that. But it's generally speaking more challenging to spell. But there's a huge carryover from spelling to reading, and there's not necessarily a huge carryover from reading to spelling. So anytime you teach reading, I think writing should be built into it.

[17:32]

And I think that comes into play too for say comprehension. One of the things that's gotten a bad reputation for whatever reason is teaching main idea or summarizing. And I think maybe it's because it was overused or overused in younger grades, especially. But at the same time, I actually don't think of those as like a reading comprehension strategy personally. I think of them more as a writing task. You know, when I teach main idea, I'm not teaching like, this is how you think about a book to understand or identify the main idea.

[18:00]

I'm thinking about this is how you communicate and prove the main idea of a book, and this is how you write about it. You need to use supporting quotes from your chapter. You need to cite that. You need to explain that fully. You need to talk about how that directly ties the quotation to your argument. So I think sometimes things that we think are reading outcomes or reading instruction things are secretly actually just writing things.

[18:23]

You know, when you look at a lot of the comprehension assessments, they're often like read this text and then write about the main idea or read this text and summarize it. Well, I think the writing components behind that assessment are actually higher than the comprehension components behind that assessment. In terms of like, how do we improve writers? I think there's, you know, sort of stages of writing development we've got to think about. One of the first ones is just letter writing fluency, right? People, students, when they first come in, they have to learn how to print and write their letters.

[18:54]

There's a big debate on cursive writing. I think the majority of the research on cursive writing suggests that practice in cursive writing makes you better. at cursive writing. There is this crowd that wants to, I would say, describe sort of match qualities, for lack of a better word, to cursive instruction, where if you write in cursive, all other outcomes are going to go up. Reading outcomes are going to go up. My memory outcomes are going to go up.

[19:21]

I find that strange. We do have a handful of studies on the topic. Some of them are negative. Some of them are positive. Definitely nothing that I would be like, okay, this is settled. There's one recent good RCT that suggested that students who had cursive handwriting instruction paired alongside phonics did better than students who just had phonics instruction.

[19:43]

However, we do have a study from the early 2000s that found the exact opposite. And then I think... You know, sometimes there's a conflation there because some people will see the word handwriting in the scientific study and they'll say students who handwrite notes have better retention than students who type notes. But in the scientific literature, handwriting doesn't usually mean cursive.

[20:04]

It often means printing. So some of those studies are not saying that cursive is increasing retention. They're just saying physically writing with your hand is increasing retention over typing. But we also have some meta-analyses on typing instructions showing really large effect sizes. So when I talked to Steve Graham about it, and I think Steve Graham is like the leading researcher in the world on writing. I have huge respect for him.

[20:28]

So if he's saying something different than me, listen to him. Don't listen to me on the topic of writing, but. He said it's specific to the outcome. So if you want to get students better at handwriting, teach them cursive. If you want to get students better at printing, teach them printing. If you want them to get better at typing, teach them typing.

[20:44]

But this idea that one of those types of instruction is going to lead to, you know, very distal outcomes that are really massive on other things, that seems unlikely. Other things that I think are important is syntax. Now there's some debate on the importance of syntax because the studies on syntax don't tend to show massive improvements in writing outcomes. However, as a grade seven, eight teacher, I can tell you that the students struggle with grammar and then explicitly teaching them grammar rules helps improve their writing. At least in terms of that. One of the big ones that I think is sometimes forgotten, but not always.

[21:17]

And I think maybe the balanced literacy era did better on is teaching like a schema around writing. You know, when I teach writing, I often teach around different types of writing examples. I might have a unit on short stories or on poetry or on essay writing or on report writing or letter writing. And then I'm talking about how do we structure a paragraph here? What does the language type of language look like used in this example? So I think giving students explicit examples of paragraphs is really helpful.

[21:48]

I think we have some resources to support that and giving them like frameworks that they can draw on to construct a paragraph. is supportive. But to me, those form the core components of writing instruction that you're going to have letter writing fluency, you're going to have spelling, you're going to have syntax, and then you're going to have paragraph structure.

[22:11] SPEAKER_00:

I know in part four of the book, you talk about some of the nuances of current literacy instruction debates. You talk about linguistic phonics, decodable text, sight words, sound walls, embedded mnemonics, multisensory phonics instruction. Talk to us just a little bit about why you included that section and what you think of those debates as they... Impact practice, just kind of overall.

[22:34]

I know we don't have time to get into the specifics, but what do you see happening in the relationship between debate and research and practice?

[22:42] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we see a lot of strong opinions that are really more about belief systems tied to specific programs and not necessarily tied to research, because none of those things have a peer-reviewed meta-analysis showing they work or don't work. but people feel very strongly on those issues that either they're amazing or they're terrible. I would discourage people from feeling strongly about those things because we just don't know. I can point to you for all of those, a handful of studies on each one, but you know, And I don't think a handful of studies is particularly accurate. You know, you don't even find in a meta-analysis statistically significant effects typically with less than six studies. So attributing a high level of importance to say, you know, two or three studies where one of them has 50 kids and another has 100 and another has 20, you're really looking at a sample size smaller than one school.

[23:35]

Hold on. But people do feel very, very intensely. And I'll give an example, like the sound walls got really big for a while. I think that's an easy one to sort of pick on for a moment, but I forget which programs, but some of the programs had like very specific formats for even building a sound wall. And I start to see comments online like, oh, your sound rolls wrong. You have this letter in the wrong spot, or you have the wrong letters in the sound wall or the wrong letter sound correlation.

[24:02]

And you saw people like saying, oh, you need to include the mouth pictures in the sound walls, or you don't need to include the mouth pictures. And there were all these really strong opinions. And I think. At the end of the day, that just comes down to personal preference and opinion. There are elements to literacy instruction that you as the teacher, I think, have room to be like, hey, this is a thing that I like, that I think works, I found helpful for my students, and I'm going to do. And I'm not going to worry about what some person on the internet tells me is the right or wrong answer because we don't have a strong answer for that.

[24:34] SPEAKER_00:

I think that's such an important point that there is not necessarily going to be a definitive answer or not necessarily one right now on every single issue. And I think sometimes it's okay to have an opinion, but recognize that there's not a ton of strong evidence one way or the other. And I think it's okay sometimes to do things for aesthetic reasons, right? Like if you like cursive, I think it's okay to learn cursive. you know, for the sake of learning cursive, you know, without necessarily expecting that it's also going to give you the ability to play the cello or, you know, some other type of kind of remote and disconnected outcome that we might also value. Nathaniel, I really appreciate your willingness to take a calm view at the research and, you know, to look in particular at what we have a lot of research about.

[25:20]

So if I understand the process that you used, you looked for meta-analyses, and then those are cited in the book, and then each meta-analysis will then cite the studies that it took into account in its review. Is that right?

[25:34] SPEAKER_01:

That's right. You know, I didn't write this book because I was an expert. I wrote this book because I had questions. Now, this is a second edition of this book, to be fair. But there is three or four years to work into the second edition. So it was a huge effort, but I just, I had questions myself.

[25:49]

I didn't have all the answers and I just wanted to go look for those answers. And for me, a lot of ways, this book was a documentation of my own question and answer search, you know? I'd go online and I'd see his massive debates on social media and read instruction, but I wonder what the research shows. And then I would spend, you know, a week and a half researching that topic or sometimes a month, depending on how complicated it was. And then I sort of write my findings and then, you know, move on to the next chapter. At least that's how it started for the first edition.

[26:16]

The second edition was a lot of just updating things that I'd learned since or found since or new studies that had come out that changed my thinking a little. But yeah, you know, I tried to add in a little bit more. This is the second edition with the second edition, a little bit more about my own practical experience. You know, I think one thing that was hard for me is I started engaging in peer review research while I was doing this book and the second edition. And it changed my understanding of research a little and I think it became more nuanced and complicated in my own brain. But then I think that makes it sometimes harder for other people to understand.

[26:49]

So I tried to reground it by, you know, sharing examples from my own classroom and also sometimes sharing resources with people saying, this is what I think the research suggests. Here's a free resource you can use to implement that in your own classroom.

[27:02] SPEAKER_00:

Now I have one more question for you, and I think this is probably the most important question of all. When you are reading these meta-analyses, reading these research papers, are you doing it on screen or are you printing them out? Inquiring minds want to know. Electronic or hard copy for you?

[27:18] SPEAKER_01:

Oh, it's always electronic. I don't have time to print things out. I appreciate that some people want to print it out, but you know, truthfully, there's certain sections of papers that I skip and some people are like sacrilege when I say that, but because I think of the part of the peer review process, so much time ends up getting wasted in a paper and that you give your introduction and it has to be a certain number of pages long and you have to justify in the introduction, your reason for doing that. And I can say going through the peer review process myself, that was the thing I really struggled with at the start. Because it was like, well, I'm researching this because I think it's interesting. Isn't that enough?

[27:50]

And the journals were like, absolutely not. You have to prove to us first that your study is worth doing in the intro. So it took me forever to get the hang of writing an intro to their standards. That was like the feedback I got all the time is like your intro is garbage. And then you get to the discussion section. And to me, the discussion section is kind of already summarizing everything that was in the results section and trying to explain your interpretation of it.

[28:12]

But actually, I don't love reading other people's interpretations because I feel like it can almost bias your mind. I'm trying to get as objective and neutral a perspective as possible when I read the results of a paper. I don't want to... inject someone's feelings or emotions of their interpretation of that onto my own.

[28:29]

So I try hard to focus just on how is the study done and then what did they find and be very specific about that.

[28:36] SPEAKER_00:

And we didn't really talk about this today, but the first section of the book is all about how to understand and read educational research. And then your other book that we've talked about previously goes into a lot of that as well, just to be able to read and understand the different types of research. Lots of valuable insights there. The book is The Scientific Principles of Reading and Writing Instruction, Bridging the Divide Between Educational Practice and Research. Nathaniel Hansford, thanks so much for joining me once more on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[29:05] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for having me.

[29:08] Announcer:

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