Over the summer, I had the opportunity to attend the Northern New England Science of Reading School Leadership Summit with presentations from literacy experts Dr. Carol Tolman and Natalie Wexler. Dr. Tolman is best known for coauthoring LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling), while Natalie Wexler is coauthor of The Writing Revolution and has recently published The Knowledge Gap. While the presentations focused on different aspects of literacy, the message delivered by both experts was clear: students need instruction in both code-based and meaning-based literacy skills in order to become proficient readers.
The program began with a presentation by Dr. Tolman, which focused on explicit code-based instruction. She did, however, make a point of saying that different students need different amounts of explicit instruction in foundational literacy skills at different points in their literacy trajectories. This is something that is often overlooked by people who stress the importance of the lower strands of Scarborough’s Rope. Dr. Tolman said the important questions to ask when doing word work are: For whom (which students)? Under what circumstances? For how long?
Dr. Tolman talked about brain science and how literacy instruction helps students bridge the unnatural task of letter recognition in the occipital lobe with the natural task of sound recognition in the frontal lobe. She also mentioned the importance of spelling, and how encoding helps to solidify decoding, but not the other way around. Finally, she stressed the importance of different types of texts for different purposes. Classrooms should have decodable texts for beginning readers and spellers to read on their own, but educators also need to read aloud books with more complex patterns and vocabulary to help students develop language skills and comprehension.
Natalie Wexler’s presentation focused on the importance of a knowledge building curriculum that connects listening, speaking, reading, and writing about the same topic. She recommends a content-focused elementary curriculum that goes deeply into social studies, science, and the arts with complex texts (accessible to all students through read-alouds and discussion). This corresponds to what Dr. Tolman said about different types of texts for different purposes as well as Dr. Lupo’s work with quad text sets.
Wexler agrees that better phonics instruction helps in the early grades, but students’ reading scores will drop after 5th grade if they are not also taught meaning-based literacy skills. This is because comprehension becomes more important as kids get older and become exposed to increasingly complex texts. She stressed the importance of background knowledge in understanding what we read (as evidenced by studies like the “baseball study”), pointing out the strong correlation between general academic knowledge and general reading comprehension. Like other literacy experts, she talked about the “Matthew Effect,” which refers to the fact that good readers tend to read more and therefore become better readers while readers who struggle continue to struggle. She suggested five key actions educators can take to narrow the knowledge gap:
- Organize read-alouds by topic, not skill.
- Ask questions that put content in the foreground.
- Organize classroom libraries by topic.
- Spend lots of time on meaty social studies and science topics.
- Have students write about what they’re learning. Wexler also talked about the brain, particularly memory.
She explained how the capacity of working memory is limited, so we need to transfer information into long-term memory to retain it. She illustrated this with a metaphor of Velcro - prior relevant knowledge helps new knowledge “stick.” Talking about a topic helps transfer it from working memory to long-term memory and practice helps with retrieval of information from long-term memory, so it’s helpful to have students explain what they have learned to someone else. Also, writing can help compensate for lack of “Velcro,” but since it’s the hardest thing we ask students to do, it should be done across the curriculum.
Since reading and writing are more cognitively taxing than speaking and listening, read-alouds are efficient ways to expose students to complex texts, syntax, and vocabulary without causing too much cognitive strain. Speaking about what they hear in these read-alouds helps students transfer it into long-term memory. All of this makes it easier to do the more cognitively challenging tasks of reading and writing. My biggest takeaway from the event was seeing how each expert tipped her hat to the other’s area of focus, further illustrating the need for students to be taught to “crack the code” of reading as well as how to derive meaning (and hopefully pleasure!) from what they are decoding.