ERRR #107. Doug Lemov on Teaching Reading

This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri, Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded and the colonisation and dispossession of both ongoing processes.

This episode of the ERRR podcast is brought to you by the Explicit Mathematics Program. The EMP is an all-encompassing mathematics program from foundation to year two, built by some of the most prominent mathematical educators. in Australia and based upon the science of learning. With everything from daily reviews to complete teacher lesson plans, student independent practice and both formative and summative assessments, the EMP has everything you need to run maths in F2.

at your school. We have mapped the explicit mathematics program to every curriculum used in Australia. So regardless of where you're based, the EMP has you covered. This is a program written by David Morkunis. Tony Hatton Roberts, Dr. Wendy Taylor, Michael Roberts, and yours truly. And we've been working really hard on the EMP for over two years, applying every principle of effective teaching and learning that we know to the design.

of this program. And now the EMP is ready for you and your students to benefit from. To find out more and even to book in a demo of the program with me personally, go to www.explicitmathematicsprogramme. That's explicitmathematicsprogram.com. This episode of the ERRR podcast is also brought to you by Catalyst, a project pioneered by Catholic education in the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn.

Catalyst is an evidence-based educational project that's working directly in schools and with teachers across the SAT and parts of New South Wales. Catalyst has its genesis in this podcast and is a structured and strategic approach to bring the science of reading and the science of learning to life in more than a thousand classrooms.

It's drawing on both local and international expertise, including several guests from the ERRR podcast to realize the bold vision of transforming students' lives through learning by developing excellent teachers and leaders.

If you'd like to find out more about opportunities at the Catalyst Project and Catholic education in Canberra, including the professional development that they're running, the ways that they are engaging Australian and world leaders in evidence-based education, and even to explore employment opportunities, just click on the Catalyst logo. or follow the link in the show notes. It reinforces cycles of disadvantage.

Hello listeners and lovers of learning and welcome to the Education Research Reading Room, the podcast that brings you into the discussion with inspiring educators and education researchers. I'm Ollie Lovell and it's a pleasure to be your host in the ERRR. Today we're speaking with Doug Lamov. Doug is a former teacher and school principal whose books describe the techniques of high-performing teachers.

His best-known book, Teach Like a Champion, is now in its 3.0 version and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, the book we're discussing today, is out now and is co-written. with Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolaway. The book provides an immensely detailed, rich, and well-argued approach to how to teach reading.

Doug holds a BA in English from Hamilton College, an MA in English Literature from Indiana University, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Now to me, the interesting thing about this book is that it doesn't cover the science of reading ground in the way that I've commonly come across so far. Usually this kind of book will talk about the principles of the big five of reading, you know, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

and often talk about these from a more principled based approach. What I feel Doug, Colleen and Erica's new book does is it focuses on the final three of these. fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. And it unpacks not only why these three things are crucial to develop, but also detailed descriptions of the how, complemented with countless written and video examples.

The other thing that strikes me about this book is it's a how-to-teach reading book which is perhaps more directed at upper primary and secondary school teachers. This is as it's less about the mechanics of getting kids to decode and comprehend more simple texts and more about driving them to develop deep understandings of richer and more complex texts. More broadly, it's also about supporting students to develop a love for...

and a habit of reading, as well as the important role of books in an educated society. I'd probably go as far as to say that this is a must-have book for anyone focusing on teaching reading in upper primary. and secondary school. I thoroughly enjoyed this podcast discussion with Doug and I have no doubt that you're going to love it too.

Also, if you're keen for a weekly dose of educational insight, stimulation and resources, you might like my Ed Threads newsletter. Each week, I share with subscribers all of the juiciest educational tidbits that I've collected over the week, wrapped up in an easy to digest.

email message. Join thousands of other educators around the world and stay up to date with the most important ideas in education with this Friday afternoon message. To sign up, go to ollielovell.com forward slash subscribe. That's ollielovell.com forward slash subscribe.

Now, without further ado, let's jump straight into this episode of the ERRR podcast. Doug Lamov, welcome to the Education Research Reading Room. It's good to see you again, Ollie. Thanks for having me on. Absolute pleasure, Doug. Always a pleasure to have you on. I have my hot little hands here, your brand new book called...

Guide to the Science of Reading, Translating Research to Reignite Joy and Meaning in the Classroom. And I've just been reading over the last week or so, thoroughly enjoying it, Doug, and really excited to... really dive into some of the key points from it today with you. But where I really want to start off with today is a bigger question, and that is I would love for you to tell us about how books are dying.

Yeah, I think this is one of those slow, steady, but inexorable changes that sometimes we're not as aware of as we need to be.

And the fact is that the book is dying for two reasons. One, it's dying outside of schools, that people's reading behavior has changed dramatically in the age of the smartphone. That if you look at... data on how much not just young people read but adults read you know reading behaviors are being extinguished it used to be if you were an eighth grade teacher or a middle school teacher in the united states

Let's say at the beginning of the 21st century, you would likely have three times as many kids in your class who read daily as you had kids who never read. And that. That ratio has flipped now and you're likely to have three times as many kids who never read as kids who read daily. If you look at the amount of time that young people and adults spend reading, it's now, you know.

measured in minutes at best during the day, and it's five or six hours on social media. So one, young people are not reading books outside of school. But I think maybe the biggest surprise, certainly for American parents, I assume for Australian parents as well, is that, you know, books are not getting read in school either for a variety of reasons that we can get into one of them is it's hard to get kids to read books let's be honest when you know

One of the outcomes of the rise of social media has been to fracture young people's attention, fracture everybody's attention, but particularly young people's attention. So it's harder to get them to persist in reading books. And maybe we live in a culture where we are better at rationalizing, not doing hard things. And then I think there have been other shifts in the profession that have caused us to be less likely to say, you know, what we ought to be doing in this English class is...

reading a book cover to cover. And so, you know, there's a bit of a social media dust up, ironically, in the U.S. last year.

About an article in a major magazine described a professor at Columbia University as one of the Ivy League schools, you know, one of the... universities in the U.S. and he had this interaction with a student who came to him outraged because he had asked her to read multiple books in the course of the semester and she had been getting into one of the best universities in the country never.

read a book cover to cover in the course of her high school preparation and she just didn't think it was reasonable to be asked to read multiple books like that um and I don't think that's a single, I don't think it's a single anecdote. You know, people, you know, professors who I talk to, I am related by birth to a professor at Harvard University. And even she says it's really, really hard to get kids to read books.

That's fascinating. Some really interesting stats there, Doug. One of the interesting things that comes out of that is that that student who went to the teacher, the lecturer to complain. So traditionally... students would realize that they're meant to be reading books and they wouldn't go to their professor and admit that they're not reading the books. They would just keep cheating. But we've got to a point now where students are so oblivious to the...

necessity of reading books that they're surprised that they're being asked to read them to me that just blows my mind i mean it's shocking it suggests both the critical mass that other students around them are not reading the book so they're you know that's part of it but also you know, just the role of books in the culture.

He's going dark. You know, I just remember being I was not a spectacular student in high school, but I remember feeling this like the importance and the obligation to have like read the things that were important. And that I was so aware that I'd never read these books and that there were people who'd read all the works of, you know, Dickens and Twain. And I felt that it was important to be in touch with the ideas that were captured in these books.

And I don't know that that's the message anymore. I think there are a lot of changes that have brought this about. Part of them has to do with what happens on university campuses. But I think it's really scary. I just finished reading a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson. who wrote, you know, Treasure Island and Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde travels in this event with a donkey. That's the next one I want to read, by the way. It's just interesting to, you know...

The idea of the literary biography is like, here's a life of someone who lived 44 years only and wrote a bunch of books. And he was so important that we're going to write a 400 page biography of him now. I think we're at the end of that, you know, and all of the works of, you know, the things that I used to think about, you know, really to be educated, I really should have read some Trollope and some Chesterton and some Henry James and some Virginia Woolf.

it's going dark on the like the you know we're maybe people will have read one of you know one of those people's books but the idea that like someone would have set out to read all of those or all their books or to be in touch with the history of written thought. That's a very 20th century notion. Yeah. A hundred percent. Being a, being a notion of the current. and previous century potentially.

There are probably some listeners who are listening going, yeah, maybe. Why does that matter? Does that matter? Who cares? I haven't read a book. Or they've got kids who said, I've never read that book. And I feel fine. So tell us, Doug.

Why does it actually matter? Right. Is this just moral panic? Am I just an old grouch? But I do think that it matters. And I think it matters for a variety of reasons. So I apologize if I... meander here but a book first of all is is an exercise in long-form thought um and i think that there are some you know if you can i think there's some benefits some important

aspects of long-form thought that we should not overlook. The first of which is at the Enlightenment, in the age of reason, in the age of science, and capitalism, and rational democratic society.

Those all rise essentially, historically, in parallel with the printed word and the book, because the book allows us to capture complex, carefully thought out, evidence-based arguments for ideas that are too nuanced and complex for us to hold in our working memory that, you know, to make the case for democracy.

or science, sometimes you need 300 pages, that the weight of argument in a book is really profoundly important. It captures an idea that is, it suggests that the important ideas in society are are weighty. And, you know, if you think about the, I think one of the most important phrases is the medium is the message. You know, that's the Marshall, the mid 20th century social theorist Marshall McLuhan said that.

When you consume information through your phone, for example, or through social media, the message is you can understand the world. in 128 characters. You can understand the world in a fraction of a second in a hot take. Your hot take was probably right. Social media is a confirmation bias machine. You can always find someone who exactly agrees with what your impulse tells you is right.

And a book does the opposite. The book tells you slow down, think deeply about this. This is a complex topic that requires sustained reflection. You know, one of the unspoken things about a novel is that the protagonist never believes at the end of the novel what they did at the beginning. It's always...

and exercise in understanding the depth of ideas. And I just think that that is a very important concept right now as an antidote to so many of the things that are happening as a society. I also think that...

Stories are cognitively privileged. This is, you know, Daniel Willingham says stories are psychologically privileged. I use the word cognitively, so I think it's a little clearer what he means by that. But we remember things better when we read them in the form of a story. If you give young people an expository passage or just don't.

passage to read or uh a narrative in which to read it they will remember more from the story for a bunch of like evolutionary reasons you know we're inclined to stories and the fact that we draw stories that we like stories gives us the opportunity to make reading social, to connect with other people, you know, and we live in an era when people are increasingly disconnected by social media.

And then I think the idea of cultural capital is embedded in there, which is like the most important ideas that we have developed as societies over the last hundreds of years. are almost all encapsulated and communicated in books. And to be able to communicate in that discourse, you need to have read many of those books. It's easy to get by.

without much of that if you are privileged already and you come from a family that you know where you talk about the name orwell and the name shakespeare like those things come up at dinner and if you don't you're cut off from from knowing the things that allow you to enter literate and informed society. And so I just think it's a critical form of access that we're likely to overlook, particularly for students who are not born.

weren't a privilege and opportunity. You've covered a lot of points there, Doug. So you talked about the role of books as a... sorry on and on there like a 300 page and an exemplification of extended thought you talked about how the medium is the message which i think you articulated really nicely what message does it send if you you know you can just swipe something out of the way if it doesn't work and wait till the

you get that confirmation bias. You want to say something else? I was just going to say, can I say one more thing? I just finished reading Atonement by Ian McEwan, which is a novel that I didn't like for the first 60 pages. Right. That I just like, it's not that I didn't like it. I just wasn't that into it. But, you know, when I was kind of counting the pages, 58, 160, and then suddenly I was on page 100.

you know 112 and then I was on page 160 and like I kind of entered the world that he created which is important because it's a world that's changing the way that I think about things and that's reflected in my increasing interest in the book and I do think that there's a Real powerful notion and persistence that it takes time with a book to enter the world that the author is creating for you.

whether it's fiction or nonfiction. But there are immense rewards to that persistence. And the rewards are not just that you learn to do hard things, though I think that is important, but that it takes a while to understand an issue. enough to be able to see its merit and see its worth and i think that we are increasingly becoming a more impulsive less persistent society and that is like i think it's just it's

I'm really glad that I stuck it out with the book. And in the end, you finish the book and you're like, I am really glad that I read it. And over and over you have that experience of like, it was kind of hard getting going. It took a little while, but wow, the level of thought that I have at the end, it was worth the struggle. It was worth the effort.

to do that kind of cognitively persistent attacks. Yeah. I just think that's a very important part of one living in society, but certainly a part of the young person's education. Yeah. I had a, um, Very, very similar experience with 1984. I remember saying, I will get to 100 pages and I was like kind of slogging through and I think it was like 96 or something. I was like, oh, this is actually getting interesting. And then before I knew it, I was at the end and I was like, that was great.

I think another point about the persistence there is that in your book you also talk about stories and the power they have to promote empathy. And, you know, it also takes time. to come to understand another human being's perspective. You can't just interact quickly with someone and be like, oh, I get where you're coming from. You actually kind of have to enter their story, enter their world to really feel what their experience is like.

or sufficiently to kind of empathize with him in some way. So I think it's a nice model for that as well.

It's one of the most interesting things about reading this Robert Louis Stevenson biography that I just read, which is like, you know, I was reading it because, you know, we're writing a curriculum and I wanted to know more about Robert Louis Stevenson. But a lot of what I found myself thinking about was just, you know. He lived his whole life like so many people did at the end of the 19th century with some sort of mysterious lung ailment that caused him to cough up blood every few months.

and no one understood what it was and his whole life was built around trying to get into climates that was the best that they could do where he was less likely to die you know just like The normalcy of your whole life being spent trying to live somewhere so that you didn't cough up your lungs. We are so detached from that experience. It's so much of humanity.

live through. That was just like a fascinating subtext of reading this book that I did not, you know, I certainly didn't see that coming as one of my takeaways from. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I've been dipping back into meditations by Marcus Aurelius recently and just reading the intro again and it's like he had 13 kids.

Guess how many of them survived to adult healing? Yes. There's like, there's such a, yeah. I mean, it's shocking the normalcy of suffering. And I think that this is really important. I think. We talk a lot about diversity and diversity of perspectives and how important it is to expose students to that in contemporary society.

And to me, the most important form of diversity that you can be exposed to is the past and the voices of the past and the experience of the past and the normalcy of suffering, of what it was like.

150 short years ago to watch six of your children die and go on with life you know like uh that is a really important piece of perspective for people who live in the modern era to think about you know so if you know If we care about diversity, one of the most important, that's one of the most important formats is to hear and understand how people thought about, you know, everyday issues 150 years ago, 250 years ago, whatever, you know, I just think that that's.

That example is so striking. Yeah, it certainly helped me a lot. And I know that if I felt like I was facing a... I've thought about this many times. If I was facing what I felt was a great tragedy in my life, I know that I would go back to earlier writings to try to, as a coping mechanism for myself. That's kind of, I'm hoping I'm not going to have to do it for that reason, but that's kind of something.

thought of quite a bit um so we've talked about a little bit about how this can help us build build empathy and greater understanding reading reading great books something you talk about in in your recent book and Something we haven't talked about as much, although you did touch on it briefly then, is the role of books and shared stories to cultural cohesion and as an antidote to some of the fractioning of society that we're seeing now. Can you talk a bit to that?

Sure. Well, let me just start with like what are students doing in... English class if they're not reading books. Well, sometimes, you know, they're reading a lot of, like, short passages and extracts. But one of the other solutions to the difficulty of getting students to read is to let everyone choose their own book and go off to the corner of the classroom and, you know, book choice.

and i think that this is a very short-sighted antidote to the problem because um the best case scenario you know Uh, first of all, you know, should an 11 year old be deciding, you know, 11 or when I was 11, like I was really into soccer, football. And if you'd let me choose anything, I probably would have read a biography of, you know, an eminent football player, soccer player.

Am I the best positioned person to, you know, having read four books in my life to decide what the most valuable book will be for me to read? Probably not. But the other thing that happens when we send kids off to read, I'm all for book choice and independent reading. But in the classroom, part of the power of the book is reading together and having a shared experience. You know, I think one of the reasons why are stories cognitively privileged? Why have we evolved to have stories be valuable?

Well, stories started before they were written, when we were all sitting around campfires. And one of the things that makes a human unique is that many of the things that we need to survive are not instinctual to us. Dog left on its own will probably learn how to hunt. A human left on its own will not learn how to build a fire and hunt an antelope successfully as a group.

And so a lot of the cultural capital, like the built up shared knowledge that we need to survive, we communicated to each other through stories. We sat around campfires and we told the story of the hunt, and here's how we cornered the antelope, and here's what we did, and here were the tricky parts. And those became our stories and our myths, etc. And as we did that...

The act of telling a story together in the dark and gasping or laughing and crying also built us into cohesive groups. And I think that that conferred a double selection advantage. One, you knew how to start a fire and hunt an antelope.

But evolution was really a group sport, which is if you had stood up on the savanna for most of prehistory with your big brain and your opposable thumb and all the things that make you special and unique as a human, you would have been some fitter creature's stomach.

you know by noon because you can't smell your enemies at a mile and a half away you don't have night vision you have no claws and even one of those really cute chimpanzees that we now see on like nature videos like one of those things would dust you in a fight faster than you can say you know um jugular vein, we were actually prey for most of human prehistory until we became group formers and until we could form reliable, consistent, inter-trusting groups.

One of my favorite books is The Social Leap. It's by an American expert who lives in Australia, William Von Hippel. It's just such a brilliant book. And he describes how important the history of throwing rocks was, that humans are the only species on a planet that can... attack or defend from a distance with a projectile and being able to do that allows you to defend your your family your species your family group from a lion or to attack and hunt the lion and so when we realized that we could

But it only works projectiles in groups. That if it's you, Ali, and it's me, and it's 10 others of us, and we all hide behind trees, we can drive off that lion or we can hunt the lion. But if we can't rely on each other, we can't trust each other. And you run away and I'm left me alone against the lion, right? We're back to being prey. And so the people who survived.

The people who became us were the group formers, and we are drawn to being part of groups, but everything that tells us that we're part of a group connects to us, right? We're bred to want. to be groupish. And when we read together, so reading together, first of all, historically, the double selection advantage was information and group formation, that the experience of reading together, of telling myths together, who are we, what are our stories, made us into societies.

And we experienced that all over again. I can, you know, there are videos in the book of teachers reading books aloud with students and the kids are laughing together or gasping together as they experienced the story. It's almost like a recreation of that. group formation narrative which was we connect yes it's important to discuss the book together and hear other people's perspectives rationally but just as important is the fact that we connect socially

When we experience a story together and the empathy that we feel or the fear that we feel or the aha that we feel is part of, part of the power of it is that we experienced it together. My, I have three kids. Two of them are off at university. They were home recently for vacation. We're watching a family movie in the dark in the living room. And I just noticed this very strange behavior in myself, which is when there's a funny scene or when there's a fraught scene.

I keep on glancing over at my family behind me on the couch to see how are they, what are they doing? Why would I be looking at someone else during a movie? It seems like a very irrational behavior. But the reason I'm looking is to see if they're experiencing what I'm experiencing, that that is important to me, that part of the experience of the story is understanding and sharing our empathetic response because it makes us closer because we've shared something.

And I think that happens in the classroom, too. It can happen in the classroom, too. And in an age of social disconnection, if the book has a chance, a lot of it, I think, has to do with that social shared experience of being... of the story being brought to life as a good, as a shared experience for young people. Yeah, so that's in the classroom. Does this...

Do you feel that it has a role to play at the societal level as well, those shared stories? I mean, I certainly think, you know, I'm an educator, not a social theorist, so I'll be careful in my answer. But I do think that from just from a teaching perspective.

It is really hard to discuss the significance of a dystopian novel you've just read. You know, you've mentioned 1984. If no one else has ever read a dystopian novel, or if you don't know any other books that other people in the class, all the kids in the class have read reliably, so you can say, how is 1984 like?

uh you know we read the giver how is the portrayal of of dystopian society like or unlike what we saw in the giver or in red scarf girl or in uh in some of the books that when we have read things in common

To your point, from a social perspective, when we've read things in common, we have touchstones, we have things we can refer to. We talk about Big Brother all the time. It's part of our shared discourse as a society. When we have that in the classroom, it allows us to have... deeper richer more significant conversations because we have a shared body of stories that we have in common i don't think it's coincidental

that every society has myths, right? Like you almost can't have a society, a culture. without a series of founding stories that we originally started talking to each other about. Those myths have now been replaced by other stories, but they're still part of what makes us ourselves. And so I do think that there's this idea of...

We have a series of meaningful narratives that we can all always talk about and refer to that allow us to encapsulate core ideas of our identity. I'm sure that's important in society more broadly as well. I think that's a really good point. I'll confine my remarks to the classroom, but I think it's a great observation. Got it. Got it. Yeah, I think it's absolutely crucial. I mean, ultimately, what is a society?

It's a group of people who says, you know, this story applies to me, the same story. It might be a story of founding fathers or of conquest or discovery, whatever it might be. I mean, in America, the story of social mobility, like the rags to riches story is, you know, there are 15 rags to riches stories, but that's fundamental to how we perceive ourselves as a society. And back to that dystopian reference, one of your quotes in your recent book that I really enjoyed was as follows.

Relating back to a lot of what we've just been talking about. Every citizen of a free society should have read at least one book that describes the means by which totalitarianism can emerge and sustain itself. I thought that was... very poignant and very fitting in terms of some of what we're seeing in the world today you know it's funny you mentioned rereading 1984 i read it last year the last time i read it was as a you know

a somewhat meatheadish 17 year old when i was like i have to get through this book and of course now i read it i reread it as an adult and i was like every teenager should read this book we should be forcing all the 17 year olds to read because it's so you know uh it's so important in helping you under you know like if you live in a democracy it is a luxury i see around me all sorts of people who have forgotten the struggle and the benefit and the uh

how lucky they are to live in a place that enshrines rule of law um and democracy and that that can that can disappear very easily There are important ideas that are captured in books, captured in no other way in a book that to be educated, you have to understand to participate in a democratic society.

Doug, your book is centered around seven key principles. We don't have time to go through all of them today, especially given how long we've been talking about these high-level ideas. Sorry. It's fun. Hopefully, listeners are enjoying as much as I am. But would you just take us to a whistle-stop tour of these seven?

Yeah, sorry, I will make up for my long-winded previous answers by making the Whistle Stops tour really whistly. The first idea is attention, which is like you can't learn something unless you pay attention to it. attention has been fractured. One of the things we know about the cell phone is that it's proven to us that attention is malleable. But the book...

Not only is it necessary to attend to that and to recognize the way that that affects people's experience of reading, but the book can be the antidote to that, which is if we cause students to read for sustained periods of time, first five minutes at a time. then eight minutes, then 10 minutes of time, we can actually help them to rebuild their attention, their ability to sustain focus and attention on difficult tasks. And that is a beautiful gift that we can give young people.

And part of the way that we would do that would be to bring the book back into the classroom and make it social and make the reading shared among multiple people. And one of the most important things that schools could be thinking about doing is rebuilding student attention. The next chapter is about...

the profound importance of fluency. Fluency is reading at the speed of sight. You almost cannot read words in your native language. When you see words in your native language, you almost cannot read them. unless you're distracted. So if you're driving along and you see a no parking sign, you will read it automatically faster than you can think, oh, don't read that. And that's how deeply wired into your brain.

your orthographic map of of words is and so uh what that means is that when you can read at the speed of sight when you can read words as soon as you see them faster than you can decide not to read them

All of your cognitive capacity, your working memory, you've written a beautiful book on cognitive load theory. All of your working memory can be focused on meaning making. What has been perception and all the things that working memory does. If you have to slow down and think about what does that word, what does it mean? If you have to map the word. suddenly your working memory cannot be allocated to meaning making and your comprehension will be disrupted. Disfluency is an epidemic.

Interestingly, no one really knows what the percentage of disfluency are. I talked to one of the sort of leading fluency researchers in the U.S., and he said, I can guess. But we basically stopped measuring fluency in students after, you know. second or third or fourth grade in the US. But the disfluency percentages are probably 50%, especially if we're talking about complex texts with reading a book like 1984. So we have to attend to fluency. It's a hidden barrier to comprehension everywhere.

The next chapter is about just the profound importance of background knowledge, that we like to see higher order thinking, inference making, insights from text as transferable skills, that we will practice making inferences from texts. But I think this is a fundamentally unscientific.

belief that thinking, higher order thinking insights are domain specific, that you make inferences and insights when you have background knowledge to understand the thing that you are reading about. We can go into some examples of this if you want to. So the next chapter is just about how do we build knowledge-rich environments when we're reading with young people.

The next chapter is about vocabulary because the single most important form of background knowledge is vocabulary. You almost can't conceive of something unless you have a word for it. I have a really fascinating, happy life where I get to spend 20% of my time working with professional sports franchises. And I'm a soccer guy, not a basketball guy, but I've had to learn the game of basketball with a bunch of clients. And it turns out that like a three-point shot...

I used to weigh the guys taking the three. There are actually two types of three point shots. I don't know if you know the solid, but there's a step back three and a catch and shoot three. Step back three is really, really hard to hit, and only a very elite number of guys in the NBA can reliably hit a step back three. Catch and shoot three, if you can't hit 38% of your catch and shoot threes, which means...

you're open when you receive the pass. If you can't hit 38% of those, you're not in the NBA. And a lot of NBA strategy is about speed of ball passing to get guys open to hit a catch and shoot three. Well, I never knew the difference between a catch-and-shoot three and a step-back three, and until I had a word for it, all three-point shots were the same to me. Suddenly, I have a word for it.

a phrase for it, catch and shoot three. And my perception of what's happening on a basketball court is radically changed. Suddenly I understand the strategy of everything that everyone's doing. And it starts with having a name just to be able to distinguish in my mind, catch and shoot three from step back three.

So vocabulary is just the most important form of knowledge. So how we teach vocabulary is very important. And I would just say that like as a teaser, the way the vocabulary is routinely taught is mostly wrong. And so we just talk a lot about like... start with the background knowledge, give students the definition of the word, let them play with them. The next chapter is just about the profound importance of writing, that writing is...

Judith Hochman says, we assign a lot of writing in American schools. We don't teach writing very well. The ways that we teach writing can help students to understand the written code through which they also read. And that can be a real boost to their experiences as readers.

The next chapter is about is a defense of the book. I think I've covered that one. And the last chapter is about close reading, which is how we teach students to understand complex text that is complex and challenging and above their comfort zone and to be. not only willing to persist and struggle with challenging text, but to be capable of making meaning from complex text. And a lot of that you'll be happy to know boils down to putting complex text in.

cognitively privileged environment meaning just be being super super attentive to working memory and uh you know and limiting loads on working memory i hope that was whistly enough whistle stop tour

Very whistly. Thank you. It was great. And it's made me think, wow, I wish we had more time because I would love to dive into all of these areas in a lot of detail. Some of them we've covered in quite a bit of detail on the podcast already. I think Natalie Wexler talked in particular about the importance of knowledge. Had Don Hirsch on as well talking about that also from a cultural perspective. I'm a bit of a step down from those guests.

So listeners, if we don't have time to get to kind of everything, there is a lot in the ERRR corpus already on some of these. So I'm going to pick up on a couple of topics that maybe we haven't.

touched on as much in the past but also that I think are like really practical for for listeners as well the first one that really caught my eye in this book and then I thought wow that's that's quite new for me and I think potentially be new for a lot of listeners and also really important valuable for them is the idea of book driven objectives and this kind of does relate back to what we were talking about about shared stories and and the importance of the knowledge that's contained within

within books. So could you tell us, Doug, what are book-driven objectives? Give us some examples and how do these contrast with the skill-driven objectives that we commonly see today? Great. So if we're reading Animal Farm, a skill-driven objective is students will be able to make inferences from the text, you know, like the purpose is this idea of a transferable skill. And a book-driven objective is students will understand the ways that the...

pigs are increasingly manipulating the rest of the animal's memory about the battle of the cow shed. One of them is about understanding the book, and one of them is about executing an allegedly transferable skill. And I think that there are two problems with skill-driven objectives. The first is that transferable skills are an illusion, that practicing making...

1,000 inferences won't allow you to make further inferences successfully because the inference happens when you have the background knowledge. But what it does socialize us to do is to waste... an incredibly valuable resource time with students in English class doing things like Here are the nine steps that we go through to determine what the main idea is. And we have a 45-minute lesson where we read a paragraph the entire lesson. And we...

flay that paragraph with nine non-replicable steps that don't really help in understanding what main idea is. Everyone in the classroom knows what main idea is. We don't need nine steps to understand the steps that you go through in your mind. What you really need to do is read a lot and have background knowledge of what you're reading a lot and then you will understand the main idea of the passage but the other thing that happens is like lots of like when some schools read books

The book becomes a vehicle for this, like the first unit we do is making inferences. And so I'm setting out to find examples of inferences in Animal Farm that I can use to practice making inferences and talk about what an inference is. And I just think that nothing kills the book faster than taking a great book that is about the experience of humanity that has endured through generations because it's such an incredible story and making it a service for...

Making it a device for practicing in the seven steps of inferences. Also, in a, you know, like a... Part of being able to execute a skill about making an inference, having an insight is perceiving when is the right time for me to be thinking deeply and making an inference? And when is the right time for me to be asking these questions of myself? In other words,

part of understanding how to read is perceiving what the text is, what the text is telling me. And so book driven objective, which is like, this is what we should be, what we should come to understand by virtue of reading this portion of the book. It doesn't preclude our practicing making inferences and asking cause and effect questions. It just causes us to practice them when the book tells us they will be useful to us. And I think it helps to bring the book to life.

But this is kind of an outgrowth of the misunderstanding of how reading happens, you know, sort of like universal, at least in the U.S., belief in transferable skills. And to some degree of reflection of, you know, I think reading tests generally are poorly designed and imply that.

you know, we can skip this issue or get into it, that imply that reading is a set of transferable skills and that that's how I should organize student thinking. And I just think that that's a flawed, unscientific notion.

Dear listeners, if you're finding this discussion stimulating and you'd like to be able to easily refer back to and remember some of the most valuable takeaways from our discussion, why not consider becoming a patron of the YouTube podcast? Patrons are listeners who contribute a monthly donation to support the ongoing production. of the show and in return receive a summary each month of the key takeaways for the episode.

Patrons also receive access to an interactive transcript of each episode, meaning that if you'd like to listen back to a specific part of the episode, you can simply do a word search for a key term then be taken directly to that spot within the podcast and listen back at the convenient click of a button.

In this month's summary we cover how and why books are dying, how we can select books to read, the role of books in society, Doug and his colleagues' seven key principles for teaching reading, the idea of book-driven objectives with examples, teaching writing both summative and formative, the ideas and power of writing as both a tool for processing thought and emotions, and the idea of... developmental writing in addition to this

I also share important ideas from the book that Doug and I didn't have time to explore in this podcast, including the three types of reading, teacher accountable reading, phase reading, and accountable independent reading, in addition to how it is that we can actually get students to read. independently, both at school and at home.

At higher tiers, ERRR supporters also have access to a members-only podcast with special insights and episodes that go beyond the standard ERRR. This often includes my bonus content from the Tools and Tips for Teachers podcast with Craig Barton, and it's the only place that you can...

hear Craig and I discuss more personal and private topics in terms of career development, challenges, highlights, and tactics and techniques that we have both used and continue to use both in education and in our personal lives. Patrons at higher tiers can also make clip requests for their favorite episode segments and even have the opportunity to personally connect with me to discuss teaching.

and learning. So if you'd like an actionable summary of this episode of the HRL podcast and to explore additional benefits, such as the members only podcast, or if you just like to support the ongoing production of the show, simply go to patreon.com forward slash ERR and sign up to support.

the show for as little as the price of a cup of coffee per month. That's patreon.com forward slash errr to support the show and help to keep it sustainable for the long term. Now, let's jump straight back into this episode of the ARRR podcast.

I think that's a great point and it transfers to a lot of what we see in mathematics as well. surface level strategies or kind of almost guessing strategies things that don't help someone if they don't understand the fundamental problem things like solve a simpler problem it's like well I don't know how to categorize a simpler problem because I don't understand the original problem things like that these kind of

as you said, allegedly transferable skills when really knowledge is, knowledge is sitting at the base of everything. Can I just give you another, another sports analogy? Cause I think like one of the things that in this like weird life that I have where I live in the world of education, the world of sports. One of the most important things in being an athlete is perception, right? That there are lots of guys who can drive to the basket and make a layup or dunk in basketball.

But the guys who make the team are the guys who perceive now is the right time to do it, who perceive the body movement of the defender so they can understand which direction to drive, that any skill is incomplete unless it's connected to.

the perception that tells you it's on or it's not on or it's on left or it's on right and so a lot of the work with athletes is actually about directing their eyes right that like the decision starts with perception and in fact when the decision is made fast in a fraction of a second like it is when you're reading, the perception is the decision.

But a lot of the things I would talk about with a sport franchise is instead of asking players, what should you do? You should be asking them, what do you look at? What should you see? What is the cue that tells you? And reading is not much different, which is. the insight the perception the skill happens from whether whether you perceive something about the text uh and so a lot of what we should be doing is letting is causing students to

attend to the cues in the text that tell like the, um, think about the difference between a sentence that says, um, Ali mimicked Doug and Ali imitated Doug, right? Like, One of those, imitated, could be any wide variety of potential meanings of that. It could be nice, could be a delightful imitation, could be a respectful imitation, could be a playful imitation. Mimic tells me that that is not very nice.

To understand the difference between those two sentences, it's an active perception, right? I notice something about the, I perceive something about the word mimic versus the word imitate that causes me to recognize and shapes the meaning of the rest of the sentence.

I just think it's like a lot of what we're doing when we're teaching students to read is putting them in a position where they're working memories free, where they perceive more things about the text that directing their eyes to the most important details is. overlooked, both in reading, whether we're talking about reading the game in a sports setting or whether we're talking about reading a text. Totally. And I think it also enables students to...

As you said, something that struck me earlier and something that really struck me in the book was how a focus on these kind of supposedly transferable skills draws us away from the richness of the story, which I think is, yeah.

a crucial point so if listeners are listeners are listening and they're thinking wow this idea of moving away from skills driven objectives which you know the curriculum to be honest is probably telling me to do so that's something we might be able to come to in a moment as well but the curriculum is probably telling me to do that but i i want to i want to kind of do this book driven objective thing like where where do they start how do you

you know what kids are supposed to be taking out of the book? Like, what is the key knowledge? What are the key points? How do we start to identify them? Well, I think this is, first of all, I think that...

This is really an argument for curriculum, which is ideally what you would read the book carefully in advance and you decide what the most important themes are in the book and what the key ideas are and try and orient your... reading to paying attention to like the gradual rise of tyranny in uh in animal farm and you know power of hypocrisy and the inevitability of um

human self-interest or human hierarchy, right? If I think about the things that are important now, I kind of have an idea of like what I want students to pay attention to and perceive about the book. Colleen Driggs, my co-author, who also has done a lot of the work in the reading curriculum that we've...

We've spent the last six or seven years writing a reading curriculum, and I think that's informed a lot of what's in the book. But she talks about how important it is to have the... daily objectives not be sort of like all over the place and here's what fascinates me today but generally to have them pushing towards three or four key overarching ideas that cohesive ideas that we think are important in the book that's a really challenging thing to do

uh and it implies pretty deep knowledge of the book i hope that teachers have time to do that but teachers are busy already uh and they have families of their own and kids of their own and i think this is one reason why you know writing a curriculum is a different skill from teaching it. And in some ways, I think it's an argument for shared curriculum, either finding a good curriculum and spending your time thinking about how do I want to prepare for it? How do I want to teach it?

or getting together in groups of teachers and dividing the responsibility because preparing a knowledge-driven lesson that brings an important book to life is labor-intensive. And I just think we need to acknowledge that. and perhaps not constantly put teachers, especially teachers who are new to the classroom, in the position where they are both teaching the book and designing the lessons for the book. And I think one anxiety that people have about, you know, curriculum that someone else...

is that it's a straight jacket. And I don't think that that's necessarily true. If someone gives you a lesson plan for, you know, for... chapter three of Animal Farm. And it has a series of questions. It has a book-driven objective and a series of eight or nine questions that you're going to ask about it in the course of the lesson. It doesn't mean you can't change them.

That like, if you're an experienced teacher who's been teaching this book for eight years, you have a conversation with your head teacher, your principal, and you're like, I'd like to change some things in this lesson. And your head teacher, your principal, if they understand or they're like, sure, go ahead, go for it. You can always change it.

But you start with a starting point of a lot of this work having been done. And if you're a first year teacher and you're like, I think I'd like to change this entire lesson. Maybe as your head teacher, I say to you.

first time through, why don't you, why don't you just go with what Colleen wrote? It's going to be pretty good. And you'll probably understand, maybe you'll understand more about why she asked the questions that she did. And then maybe when you've done it a few times, we can talk about your makings or make some small changes, but don't make wholesale changes.

Decision rights. I just think your job description should not be exactly the same in every year of your teaching career that you do accumulate wisdom and knowledge and you should. earn the right to more flexibility and more autonomy but people brand new to the classroom should also have both the support and the humility to understand that they're like there are people who do this uh and we should start by understanding the way that they think about it and then

gradually work our way up to like assuming that we know how to. Yeah, totally. And I think coming back to, coming, coming back to navigating that discussion with that teacher, I think that kind of can help us to. Coming back to the question of, you know, how do we know what the things are that we want students to take out of a book? Asking that teacher, you know, why do you want to make that change? Like, obviously, that might not be something that every...

you know head of department has time to have a really deep but but you know why do you want to make that change what outcome do you think that's going to have have and relatedly like um at a high level when we're thinking about those curriculum decisions Why do you want students to read book A over book B? Because I think that takes us to the point of you're arguing for that book because you want them to get something out of it.

what is the thing you want them to get out of it? Because that is in many ways, hopefully the answer to, you know, what's the point of teaching this book? What are our book driven objectives? I love what you just said. And I think just to go back to where we started. The answer to why book B over book A can't be because I like book B better. I mean, you should love a book that you teach. But for many of our students, these will be the only books that they read.

in their school you know like the 20 books that we read in school will be the only books that they read in high school or in their you know like it's book choice is very very important and it should be that it is really important that students have read this book because It tells the story of tyranny and helps us, or it's one of the most important, one of the most, like...

important experiences of empathy that students will get right you know wonder is it is a book in our curriculum like it is a great book because it helps students to understand how to be empathetic towards towards other that's that's a strong rationale for reading

book with a fifth grade student. If the answer is, well, I really like this book, it doesn't mean you shouldn't teach the book, but there should be a better reason than just like your own personal proclivities as a teacher. There's a higher bar.

Yeah. And the connecting question could be like, why do you like the book? What have you personally got out of that book? And is that something that our students are likely to get out of their book, the book that they're not going to get somewhere else? And that's valuable. So we've been focusing on...

on reading and kind of what we want students to get out of a book crucially. And we may circle back to reading as well. But something else, and this did actually really strike me in the book as well, because I've thought about... In terms of teaching writing, I've thought about writing very operationally, you know, and I've, you know, had Judy Hockman on talking about the writing revolution. I think that's really...

really phenomenal resources in terms of getting students writing, getting to be successful with writing. But in the book, you explored writing in a way that I have found in terms of the impacts it's had on me personally, but not that I'd thought so much in terms of...

the impact it could have for students. So for example, I mean, the way you essentially talk about it is writing is an act of thinking. And there was a few sentences where you were like, you know, I can't remember who you're quoting, but you're saying writer X says that he sits down to a page. And he often doesn't know where he's going to end up. And that's 100% where I feel a lot of the time when I write. And when I write and I enjoy it the most, it's when I write in that way. And often my...

Friday kind of blogs are like that. I just kind of sit down and I'm like, one I'm going to write in a couple of days is about scripting and coming back to what you were talking about. previously about teacher autonomy and it's like what can we learn from music in terms of the role of scripts and the idea that novices should start with scripts that other people have come up with first to kind of

master the domain before they start to write their own scripts and similarly to, you know, reading manuscripts and music and then writing. But that's as shaped up as the idea is for me. And I'm really looking forward to sitting down with that idea, fleshing it out and seeing where it goes. So really interested by that. Can you talk us through writing as an active thinking as a concept? Yeah, thanks for asking. It's such an important idea.

I feel lucky as a writer in that I experience what you have just described all the time, which is I start writing and I don't know where I'm going to go. And oftentimes I will come to the end of a passage and I will be like, where did that come from? Professional writers talk about this all the time, which is it's almost like I'm in the act of writing. I become a conduit for ideas that are inside me that I don't fully understand. I almost feel like sometimes someone else is controlling me.

I think the idea that they're working on here is an idea that we call in the book formative writing, which is writing when you don't know what the answer is. And most of the writing that students do in class is what I would describe as summative writing.

Summative writing is writing where you know what the answer is and your purpose in writing is to explain the answer and provide evidence for it. That is an important thing for students to do. They should for certain do that, but they should also do writing where We're in the midst of reading a chapter and we pause and we say, why might the pigs have said that? Why might Jonas be reacting this way?

30 seconds to think on paper, go. Where I don't know what I'm, where I'm asked to write before I know what my thinking is. And the writing is a tool to discover my own, discover and expand my own thinking. that several things are beneficial about that. One is that it lowers the stakes, right? Just the word might.

in a writing prompt which is like i don't have to know the answer lots of times when you give a writing prompt in class half the kids in class don't start writing because they're like i don't know yet but that was me as a student which is meaning and understanding accrues slowly if you're if you're

engaged in an important cognitive task like reading 1984 or The Giver, right? I shouldn't, I always felt like teachers asked me my opinion before I had an opinion. That's way too soon for me to have my opinion.

What if I could just explore and say, what are you thinking right now? What possible explanations could there be? What might be happening here? Then I give you, it doesn't take a lot of time, 30 seconds, what might be happening? What are your initial responses to this? What are some possible... outcomes of this that allow me to conceptualize writing as a tool that i use to discover and expand my own thoughts i think it builds buy-in it lowers the stakes if i then have a discussion after that

All the students who are not likely to throw up their hand during the discussion and say, well, here's what I'm thinking of the students who need a little bit more time to start start developing their thoughts. it levels the playing field for them. They can kind of start to articulate where they're thinking. If I align those formative exercises, think on paper for 30 seconds, to the summative writing that comes later, and three or four of those exercises are, why might this, why might that?

Start to discover what you think about it. Reflect on it. Then we have a discussion afterwards. And maybe even after the discussion, we're like, rewrite your original thinking, you know, based on what you learned from the discussion. Maybe those lead up to a summative problem, which is like now they've had time to think about a lot. What is your opinion on why the pigs do what they do? And, you know, et cetera. I think it leads to better summative writing.

But it also allows students to glimpse this powerful world in which writing is a tool to not explain your thinking, but to discover and expand your thinking, which is, I think, the gift that writers...

you know, kind of stumble onto the course of writing. But it also allows students to feel more prepared for discussions that come after. One of my favorite videos in the book, by the way, is this. video of a really beautiful discussion in a reading class where two students participate.

And the first kid he gets called on, his name is Omar. And he's called on, as he's talking, he's glancing down. The teacher says, you know, write for 30 seconds. What do you think about this character's decisions, et cetera?

And as he's answering the question in class, he's glancing down at what he wrote before. He's refreshing his working memory of what he wrote. He's a little bit nervous. And so if he's afraid that he's going to forget his ideas, they're right in front of him. He can glance down and look at them. This makes him a little bit more confident and a little bit more able to speak in class and feel successful.

and then another student goes and she builds off his ideas and she says i'd like to expand on what omar said i'd really like his point about this and here's how my idea is different i think one of the easy things to overlook in class is that she is able to listen carefully to Omar's ideas while he's talking and consolidate them with her own ideas because she is not trying to remember what she wanted to say while he is talking. And that one of the other things that writing does is it allows us to

It's working memory preferential. It allows us to put down our ideas so we can come back to them. If you call in a student in class, sometimes during discussion, Omar will go first. We'll call in Danielle and Danielle will say, what I was going to say is. which is a way of saying to Omar, what you just said is completely relevant to me. I'm going to go ahead with what I was going to say before you even spoke.

Why do students do that? They do that because while Omar is speaking, Danielle is literally rehearsing in her head, don't forget your idea, don't forget your idea, don't forget your, here's what I wanted to say, right? Because we force them to choose how they apply their working memory between listening. listening to someone else and holding on to their own thoughts. If we let them write down their thoughts, their initial thoughts.

they can listen much better to each other. They don't have to choose between listening and holding onto their thoughts. And then afterwards they can glance down at what they wrote, refresh their working memory, connect what they heard to what they thought about.

And so not only do we allow students to, with formative writing, explore and discover their own thinking, but we allow them to consolidate it and connect it to what other students are thinking just because of, you know, we cause them not to divide their working memory as often during.

or discussions yeah it's super interesting that's it's not something it's it's i'm sure it's in the book but it's not a portion that i really pulled out in during the reading and it stuck with me the the cognitive benefits of getting the ideas on paper to free up their working memory so they can listen and process.

while you were saying that i was distracted because i was reflecting upon the way that that's exactly what i do in these podcasts i've got like a note i've got my main notes here and i've got my working notes on the like above me and i've got my work notes on the right hand side and that's where i jot as you say things i say you know

reinforce this come back to this and that enables me to you know cognitively offload that and then kind of know that i trust myself that i'm going to be able to come back after i've actually responded to what you said It's so interesting. I occasionally do a podcast that's not as good as yours, but I'm often struck when I listen back to how well the guest is answering.

I'm thinking about what my next question is and I missed something really interesting that they said. And I'll listen back and I'll be like, oh no, like they said something really fascinating. And I just went on to my next question. Because in some ways, like I, I.

I was thinking about where I was going next. I hadn't written, you know, if I have a script in front of me, like, you know, generally where I want to go next, then I can listen, decide if I want to respond if I don't go on to my next thing. So, you know, I do think that.

The connection between writing and listening is under-recognized for sure. And listening is just one of the most important things that we socialize for young people to do in schools. Yeah, 100%. I mean, that's the foundation of... of empathy, one understanding of two of empathy. Is that listening? I wanted to come back to talking about using writing as a form of...

like formative writing as a way of processing ideas. But I think just to circle back to stories of history, some of the best, most important stories and experiences for us to be aware of, as you said earlier on, are the...

experiences of people who came before in a different time. I think something that people used to do a lot more than they do now is use writing as a form of processing emotion. I think that... A lot of people these days will avoid and be afraid of processing emotion in a deep way and actually going into it, you know, sitting there with a feeling inside you and a blank page in front of you and thinking.

By, you know, giving life to, you know, getting it on the page, I will actually be able to process, work out what's inside me. Again, I've personally... personally find that incredibly valuable when I do need to process something emotionally. And I think that as we take away opportunities for students to formatively write, we take away opportunities for them to realise the value and the power of that as an emotional processing tool as well.

yeah that's really beautiful i hadn't thought about that at all but i think you know i wish i'd written that in the book right that the the one of the really positive outcomes of my writing My using writing intentionally in the classroom could be that students look at a blank page and perceive it to be a tool that they use to process their complex thoughts or their complex emotions, like, you know, which you would experience reading a great book.

yeah being a teenager yeah or being a teenager right like that's um that's lovely and thoughtful thanks doug um oh another another just a side note on that if you don't want to write something else i do which makes me look particularly weird but i do do sometimes as well if i need to process something it's just talk to myself out loud because i find it it has a similar function you know when i'm talking to you here i kind of have to be coherent i will have edited out the parts before

they go live but you know i've struggled to be coherent a couple of times today um but the fact that we're talking means that i actually have to put that into words in a coherent story like structure and narrative and that means that it makes sense whereas if i'm in emotional turmoil and just thinking about stuff, the tendency to go around in circles is huge. And so it's kind of like, I feel like it's two steps, like talking helps, but talking can be disjointed.

putting it into writing is an even more powerful way to sort those emotions out i think it's so important which is maybe like because i i want to make sure to give to not give short shrift to summative writing, which is the process of creating an argument. There is something important about creating a methodical argument to make the case for something that you believe or think.

So by talking about the power of formative writing, we're not trying to say in the book that formative writing isn't good, but we're just saying that students should have a balance of both. Those are very different cognitive activities and very synergistic activities. And so being intentional about... First think in writing, first use writing as a tool to explore. Allow yourself to discover the depth of your own thinking and process your thoughts. Now take those.

exercises those preliminary exercises and turn them into something more formative where you push yourself to make sense in a methodical organized logical way like of an idea

Both of those things are immensely valuable. But I would say that typically, like they're out of balance in a lot of, like most of the writing that students do is summative. And the summative writing will be better if we allow students for formative writing, and they will be able to glimpse this world in which writing is a tool for discovery.

I think it's one of the reasons why students maybe don't like to write is they don't have the opportunities to see it, to see its full value in their lives. Yeah. It's a process of discovery. Yeah. And hopefully, you know, that those formative and summative.

processes are recursive i mean i feel like i'm sure the way that you wrote this book and the way that i write my books you're like you will dot point you will know where you're going but then when you start to do that summative piece of writing there will be formative sparks that emerge and you'll be like oh i can talk

about this thing now and and you'll make connections and that will just enrich the writing as you're trying to do it summatively there will be formative parts that come out as well 100 yeah absolutely is there anything else you wanted to say about writing

Well, there is a third type of writing that we discussed, which is developmental writing, which is writing which is intentionally used to cause students to expand their syntactic control. And syntactic control is just your ability to master the use of different... syntactic forms grammatical forms uh and so developmental writing which i think students should also do are often very short exercises where we might ask students to write a single sentence

encapsulating an idea but we might give them some sort of a parameter like we sometimes uh uh you might say like uh describe uh that we described um The pigs purpose in their speech to the rest of the animals. Begin your sentence with the phrase at first glance. So this does two things. At first glance causes me to begin with an introductory prepositional phrase, which causes me to expand my ability to write complex sentences that capture nuanced ideas.

If you have weak writers in your classroom, if you look at their writing, they will write a paragraph that is a series of subject, verb, object, sentences. I think boop, I think bop, I think bink. If we want them to be able to... write sentences that encapsulate more complex ideas, we can cause them to by saying things like, you know, by start your sentence at first glance, or here's a kernel sentence.

pigs are hypocritical, expand that sentence with three different coordinating conjunctions, because, but, and so. The pigs are hypocritical because the pigs are hypocritical, but the pigs are hypocritical so. that if I am intentional about very short writing exercises, I can cause students to master different syntactic tools as they write, which expands their ability to like to think about and create ideas.

And also in that at first glance, I almost cause students to think about the two layers of meaning, right? That there's a surface intention and there's a deeper intention. And so I can shape their thinking as well. Because it's a very short exercise, one sentence.

From a working memory perspective, students can be really intentional about crafting and creating just one sentence and really focus their working memory on that act of creation. We teach that the definition of the sentence is a complete thought. teach them to have one really well-articulated, complete thought at a time, which I think is a real gift to students. And if it's a short sentence, then we can also discuss it, edit, give feedback on it right away.

When I was an English teacher, most of the writing that my students did was in essays and paragraphs. They would write their essays, and then they would sit on my desk in a stack for six weeks before I gave them any feedback on it.

Finally get their essays back eight weeks later when they barely remembered writing them I would have written a page and a half of feedback for every kid and they would skip down to the bottom to see the grade and ignore most of it. If we ask students to write in very small units of a single sentence at a time.

We can then give them feedback right there. Great. Let's take a look at a couple of your sentences and talk about how we can have more active verbs or how we could, you know, do X, Y or Z from it. Great. Now go back and rewrite your sentence. And I can make the act of rewriting and revising and improving.

more part of students' everyday lives as opposed to something that they only do when they write essays. And I think that that act of free writing is important because it's an act of metacognition. It's an act of asking yourself, did I say what I think I said? Did I say exactly what I wanted to say? How could I?

choose better words or sequences of words to capture exactly what i'm thinking and i just think that is one of the most rigorous and important things that we do in school which is is this exactly what i think over and over again. I just think it's easier to do when the unit of analysis is a single sentence and that often happens with developmental writing exercises. Yeah, I love that part of the book as well. And some of what you've said there has...

has brought out two other reflections for me. One is that supporting students to craft really high quality sentences like that also helps them to... feel more like a writer themselves it's like i can actually write something that's beautiful and it looks like the kind of stuff i read in books and so there's that identity piece that's coming in which i think is really powerful

But also, and in doing so, we're expanding the literary toolbox. And if we come back to that idea of writing as a formative activity, the... The greater the diversity of the ways that they can explain things in writing, the more they can explain, therefore, the more they can process. So I think that on many, many levels, it's such a powerful approach.

I love that. I think we focused on the second more in the book, but I think your point about the first, like the experience of creating something that you're like, wow, that's really good. I wrote a sentence. It's really good. It's really interesting. I didn't know that I could do that. It is really powerful for students.

I always think about this story that I heard about Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist, when he started playing cello very, very young. His parents were professional musicians. And when they started teaching him to play cello, when he practiced, instead of causing him to practice for like an hour at a time, when he was you know four or five they would ask him to practice for just three or four minutes at a time just a few he would just play a few bars at a time

But what they socialized him to do was to play as expressively, as high quality, as beautifully as he could. So he was practicing very small iterations of really high quality expression. And over time, he learned to link those together and obviously became, you know, arguably the greatest, you know, one of the greatest cellists of all time.

quality of production is probably more important than duration than extent of production when you're learning a skill that like uh if i can cause you to both to write in a way that is at your highest level of expressiveness and you know over time i can link those things as opposed to asking you to write a whole lot

where you practice a lot of like fairly mediocre unintentional writing with sentences that you're not really thinking deeply about the more i can i can cause you to practice at your highest level of cognitive engagement the more likely you are to build up that skill to the point where like

You're good at it and you see the capacity within yourself. Definitely. We could build the reps. We can give. feedback because it's it's it's smaller um it's essentially deliberate practice and what that means is we're actually starting to build a habit out of it which means it's likely to be a skill that actually sticks around rather than that one bit of feedback you got once then forgot about

And I can celebrate it and valorize it and take your beautiful sentences and put them up on the classroom wall. It's like, here's a spectacular sentence about, you know, someone wrote about this. Here's a spectacular sentence. And I can just be surrounded by like, here are examples of the, I can't put up a whole.

I mean, I can put up a whole paragraph in the corner of the room where no one ever sees it, but I can put up, you know, a really spectacular sentence on a big sentence strip on the wall where everyone can be like, wow, look what Ali wrote. Amazing. That's awesome. Love it. So there's a bunch that there's so much we won't have time to cover today, but I'm just going to preview a couple of things that we won't be able to.

touch on in detail that I was hoping we would manage to get to, but we've only got about 15 minutes left and I want to respect your time, Doug. One thing I found really interesting in the book is you talked about three types of reading.

So you talked about teacher accountable reading, phase reading, which is fluent, accountable, social and expressive reading and accountable independent reading. And I thought that they were... too tight like often we think about oh as a class we're going to read this book right what does that actually mean

what are the different types of reading you're going to do and what is each of those types going to achieve and therefore at which point are you going to use which type. I think your book does a phenomenal job of articulating that and it's really important for anyone to read if they find themselves in the context where they are.

reading a book um with a class and another part that was really good is how do we actually get kids to read how do we get kids to read at home that was actually a shorter part of the book that i anticipated um because you said like let's let's focus on

keeping it simple and you talked about the value and the promise of using short quizzes and some guidelines for those quizzes. You know, in a minute or less, did you want to make a comment about either of those prior to us moving to the next question? Just to say that I'm glad that you pulled those out, particularly the importance of ways of reading, the three ways of reading. One is not better than the other. We just need to give kids a healthy, balanced diet. It's really...

Beautiful. It's so powerful to hear a teacher read aloud to you. One of my favorite videos in the book is of a teacher. She's a high school teacher. You're 11 in England. She's reading. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to her students. We never read aloud to students of that age.

her reading is so beautiful and allows them to build a mental model of what stevenson's prose sounds like that they can then internalize as they read silently to themselves and because she reads it so beautifully and they're like they're building this picture of like what complex victorian prose sounds like she lingers on these you know beautiful phrases then she asked them to read aloud to each other and they're practicing like their ability to like be fluent readers and to

capture some of that expression i just think that their silent reading experience with a very complex text will be so much richer when they have a mental model it's very easy to overlook How many students don't have a mental model of what text sounds like when it's read beautifully aloud?

So that chapter is just sort of about the synergy between teacher reading aloud to students, students reading aloud to each other. What a powerful social signal when the kids start to mimic the teacher and try to read as expressively as they can and they show each other that that's what they think is a delightful thing to do. And we laughed together. You know, your reading was so expressive. I enjoyed it.

And then thinking about like then lots of opportunities for you to read silently on your own, but take the skills that you've learned, that you've externalized in those two experiences and make the silent reading experience richer.

Yeah, that's an important part of classroom reading and I appreciate your calling that out. Yeah, love it. And yeah, would really encourage people to... to check out those parts of the book as well as the whole book. And yeah, I'll summarize a few of my thoughts on that in my summary for patrons as well. Doug, you started the podcast talking about how attention is fractured. I wanted us to bring back...

bring us back to that and i also wanted to ask you how you personally manage that in your own life like as you've done this reading as you've learned about the importance of great books and the importance of attention what does your current reading look reading look like and how do you actually support yourself to have that healthy habit yeah i've really changed the way that i i read um i've always been a reader like i can't read without a pen in my hand

that I'm like underlining and margin noting. And I do think that that connects to one thing that's useful for students in the classroom, which is annotating. process of deciding and thinking about what's important as you read. And I do think that that causes you to be more engaged. But in the last few years, I've started keeping

just a reader's journal. This is my commonplace journal. I have a bunch of them here on my desk. You know, I just realized that the most overlooked thing in learning is often forgetting. that um i have this like little in my i have an office in my inside my house where i have like a shelf of books that i put books on when i want to kind of remember them because they were really powerful

And I walked by the shelf a couple of weeks ago and I looked at one of the books on, it was a novel that I read a few years ago. And I looked at it and I was like, oh, that book was so good. And then I asked myself, you know.

wait, what was the name of the protagonist? And like, I remembered where it took place, but like, what was so great about that book? And to be honest, it's all gone. Like I've forgotten all of it. All I remember is that I love the book and crucially one line that I wrote in my journal.

And I realized that I forget almost everything that I read. Sometimes I can't even remember. People are like, what have you read recently that's good? And I can't remember what I've read recently. Never mind what was important to me to take away from it. After I read a book now, I try and discipline myself to go into this journal. I choose, you know, I go through all my underlines and I choose 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 things just to like write into this book. The act of writing.

is an act of memory consolidation, right? It causes me handwriting. It causes me to remember the important things. And then I have this like highlight reel of the important things that I was, that I thought about when I read the books and I can flip back through it. And I find I'm just much closer to mastering books or to like remembering books and making them useful in my life and thinking about them more as opposed to just experiencing them and having.

all of the powerful thoughts that they create for me disappear into the ether. So, you know, and maybe there's, hopefully that's useful for people in their private lives, but certainly for students, I think it's one more benefit to why, why writing is so important as a. in synergy with reading a hundred percent yeah i think and tying that back you know to what we were talking about right right back at the start as well in terms of book driven objectives

the things that I would choose to try to underline and memorize are the answers to that question, you know, why should other people read this book? And what was that key thing you got out of it? Yeah, I like to think that the books that have changed me are the ones where the lessons have stuck around. So Collapse by Jared Diamond. The thing that I learned from that book is societies that look great and invincible can actually just fall apart.

And it usually happens when societies continue to carry out outdated practices.

that once served them well, but they haven't adapted to a changing environment. So that's Joe Diamond. I hope you're not talking about our education system right there. Well, that's what I'm going to ask you about next. i couldn't agree more what's the point of um

of reading a book if you can't remember any of it. Apart from, you know, it was a nice experience at the time. And so taking the time, you know, spending 10% of the time you spend reading books, actually remembering the books, I think is a very, very fantastic investment.

So you mentioned education trajectories there, and that's kind of the last question before closing questions I wanted to come to. How do you feel about where we're at at the moment, Doug? How do you feel about where we're going? And you can answer this locally. You can answer this internationally. I'm really keen to hear where you're at. Great. I guess the answer to how do I feel about where we're going depends on where we are.

I feel really optimistic about education in most of the English speaking world, possibly the possible exception of my own country. I think that, you know, one of the, maybe the. One of the best books that I've read in the last couple of months is Reforming Lessons by Nick Gipp. It's a story of how he, as you know, over 10 years as a school, schools minister of England, he made a series of.

policy implementations that have radically improved English schools in just dramatic and important ways. And I think a lot of what's behind that is the rise of cognitive science. When I spend about a third of my time in England working with teachers and when you have a conversation with teachers in England about cognitive load theory and the role of background knowledge and thinking and retrieval practice.

There's been a sea change in the profession. In the last 10 years, the profession has come like, it's hard to find a newly qualified teacher in England who doesn't, who's not familiar with those concepts. And so you then instantly start talking about, well, writing is working memory preferential and you're like halfway down the road.

in the u.s the science of learning is like learning people believe in learning styles you know you go to school and most most people have never heard of cognitive load theory or working memory I think that in most of the English speaking world in England and Australia and other places, we're on the brink of hopefully turning the profession into a much more research informed.

science-informed endeavor, and I feel very hopeful about that. I don't feel that way about the U.S., and I think that that's tragic. But hopefully Nick Gibbs' book will help to change that a lot. It was a story of how he...

uh in embedded that understanding in a culture but i also think that where we started that you know we're at risk of coming to the end of print culture The age of enlightenment, the age of rationalism that rose with print, with the universation of reading, and we are opting into becoming a...

a post print culture in some places. And I think of that as a very scary, uh, and very dangerous and we should all be really alert to that. And I think that, you know, if there, if that's going to end with a call to action, it would be.

We need to be reading books, whole books together as groups in our English classrooms, and we need to get cell phones out of schools. What happens to them in society more broadly is not really our, you know, my job or our role as educators, but they should not be in schools. To help us back on that track, Doug, three book recommendations. Ah, interesting. I just, I read, this is super nerdy, I apologize, but I think you have a pretty nerdy listener base.

I read a book by Stephen Mithin called The Singing Neanderthals. It is the story of the similarities and development between music and language. And he argues that in many cases, music. at least co-evolved with language and possibly we sang first and then we learned to speak. But it's just fascinating about how important

tone and rhythm art and language. It's just a fascinating reflection of the similarities and connections between language and music. So I really loved that book and I thought it was a great read. Nick Gibbs' book, Reforming Lessons, has to be at the top of the list for me. It's so good. It reads like a novel, just like the process of getting people to change their perception of how learning happens. It was brilliant. I read George Orwell's book.

homage to Catalonia um in part because I wanted to understand what caused him to write Animal Farm more you know and like uh but it's such a good book it's so interesting and you know just to go back to like the world going dark on like the deep corpus of most writers that maybe for like the most important writers will remember one or two of their books and the rest of their, their overall will like disappear into the, into the.

darkness like darkness of time you know there used to people be people who read all of orwell i want to be a person who reads all of orwell because like homage to catalonia was so good it was so good uh and so fascinating um Yeah, so those are, you know, three picks from my 2025 reading list.

Thanks, Doug. And they'll all be in the show notes. Doug Lamov, thank you so much for your time today. It's an important book. I really encourage listeners to check it out. And also, thank you for continuing your own exploration and being such a model of... scholarship, but also continual development and evolution in your career. I think what you've done all the way from uncommon school work, teach like a champion.

You've actually contributed to more books than I could even count now. But the way that you've brought that continuing drive to write, to learn, to read and to share what you've learned is a real inspiration. I hope that I can do some similar things as I continue my own.

career so thank you and i can't wait can't wait to the next for the next book well thanks ollie it's been great talking to you good to see you hey all it's ollie again one more thing before you take off and that thing is ed threads

Would you enjoy a short email every Friday that provides a little fun, a little mental stimulation before the weekend ahead? My weekly free newsletter is super short, easy to sign up, easy to cancel, and is basically a half page every Friday that shares all of the coolest ideas. and teaching tips that I've come across that week.

It's kind of like my diary of teaching and learning that you can get access to for free. I often link to recent papers that have come out, tweets and Twitter threads, important reports, new books and blog articles and even other important podcasts that have been sent to me by leaders in education, including many guests.

this show and that I've discovered from scouring the internet. I filter these ideas and resources so that you don't have to and only pass on the very best ones to you. So if that sounds like fun, If you'd like a little bit of goodness before you head off each weekend in a concise, quick-to-read format, just go to ollielovell.com forward slash subscribe to get in threads. Stop what you're doing right now and sign up before you forget. That's ollielovell.com forward slash subscribe.

Thanks for your time and listening today. Have a wonderful week. And until next time, keep learning.