[Listen Again] Ep. 158: Science of Reading Beyond Phonics: The Ultimate Goal of Reading with Doug Fisher

This moment in time , Melissa is going to share more , but you ran into her at a conference about 10 years ago , or I probably should say she ran into you or maybe found you .

So I was , I was a younger teacher and I had , I'm sure , read one of your books at the time and saw you at the conference and we found you a bunch of friends and I , we found you and we were really really excited to ask you like a burning question and we wanted to know what you were going to say .

So we were really really excited to ask you like a burning question and we wanted to know what you were going to say . So we actually asked you like what do you think is going to be the biggest shift in reading instruction in the next like 10 years ? What do you think is going to change ?

And you told us at that time it was about text leveling and that we shouldn't be necessarily leveling by like the letters you know , and doing that kind of guided reading . And at the time we were , like Doug Fisher's , a little crazy .

Of course we do guided reading and that's just a memory that has stuck out to me for a long time , especially as that actually started to come to fruition , and I was like Doug Fisher was right .

Sometimes started to come to fruition and I was like Doug Fisher was right Sometimes , yes , Sometimes you have a lot of experience and you start to say you know what ?

And I think that's the hope , as literacy professionals , and the hope that when we say things like science of reading which is a phrase that's been around a long time when we say that we really mean it , that we mean we are taking knowledge and we're continuing to learn because we have a goal , a shared goal , that young , that children across their lifespan learn

to read , that every single brain is taught to read . This very complex , very nuanced process of I can read , I can make sense of the information in a text and I can use it , I can do meaningful things with what I've read .

But we're going to bring it all together today and we're going to think about comprehension as the outcome of all of those parts . So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this or react to this that comprehension is an outcome , not necessarily a skill to practice . What's your take ?

So we used to think of comprehension as like a strategy or a process , and I think we have multiple meanings to the word comprehension . And I'd like to push a little bit on when , whether you're five years old or 15 years old or 35 years old , when you read something and you understand it , what are you going to do with this ? Is it you know to ?

To talk to other people about it is to use it in an argument you have . Is it for entertainment ? So what is it ? What's the point of comprehension ? What do we want to gain out of that ?

And I just saw another article in the reading teacher David Pearson and colleagues wrote about uh , how do we use the knowledge we've gained from texts into to do meaningful things ? Nancy and I say take action in the world . What do you want to do with this ?

And I've been saying that the point of reading is not passive consumerism , and I think that many of us were taught , you know , that you read to consume , and I think that's only part of it . I think you also read to produce , whether that's writing or a partner conversation or , like I belong to book clubs .

The reason I go to book clubs is I want to talk about what I'm reading with other people , and so if I don't understand it , if I don't make sense of it , I really can't go do the thing that I care about , which is to talk with the other people about what we read .

I have , uh , my mother loves to read the news , uh , but I think she only likes to read the news to tell her children about what's in the news , and she loves to tell us what's in the news and , and you know , at some point you're like , yeah , mom , I read that , or I actually don't care about that , or whatever , but the point of consuming that information

is to know things about the world today and to talk to her kids about the world today and things that are going on in the world .

So we thought it might be fun to explore how , like each part of really leading up to comprehension connects to it and really impacts it . So I'm going to turn it over to Melissa to ask you the first question .

So all summer we've had this series where we've been looking at , you know , how , the science of reading is beyond just phonics right that there is research to support many different things that go into reading . But we do want to take a minute to talk about if the ultimate goal is well , now you changed our ultimate goal .

But if the step before your ultimate goal is comprehending what you've read , then let's go back to phonics and phonemic awareness . How does that set a stage and how does like ? Why do we need to make sure that that is actually solid for students so that we get to that ultimate goal ?

So if I spend all my energy trying to ascribe and blend and blend through , that's where my energy is and I can't get to the deeper understanding or meeting and my fluency gets compromised and I may not even know what the words mean . I am pretty good at reading in Spanish , but I don't always know what I'm reading .

But I don't have a problem telling my friends what the words say because I understand the rules Now , as as without understanding the rules I couldn't do anything . But I understand the rules Now , without understanding the rules I couldn't do anything . But I understand how it works and I can read most anything in Spanish and say it correctly .

But I don't always know what I'm reading , because I also need vocabulary , concept knowledge .

I need to read fast enough that I can remember what I just read , and I read really slowly in Spanish and often I'm super happy when I counter a word that I know , because then I can read that faster and or at sight and I like the , the , the comment , the joke that's been made that all words aspire to be sight words when they grow up .

And , um , I mean , that's that's how it is , a fun one . Um , I think that these are foundational skills and the reason we called them foundational we didn't call them optional .

We call them foundational because you gotta go through this process and automate them and get faster at them and and and recognize them , and we don't want to leave readers there , but it's not wise to jump ahead of it and say , oh , they don't need to know this . And here are the things we need to develop the students .

I think that the more interesting conversations around that are the scope and sequence , how they develop . Unfortunately , I'm still seeing , you know , letter of the week stuff . Now , I thought we already knew that , that we don't spend a whole week on a letter , but I'm still seeing some places where it's , you know , 26 weeks to learn your letters .

And then , like Ray Reitzel has studied a lot about what is the right way to teach alphabetics and you know , he's got these six conditions of , and it's not alphabetical order , it's , you know , with frequency , it's with the letters in your names of the kids in the class . I mean , he's got this whole system of of . Here's how letters develop Letter recognition .

Knowledge develops alphabetics . So Nancy Fry and I have a project , an early childhood project , in the Republic of Georgia , the country of Georgia . Their graphemes are they're very different from ours and I don't recognize them .

So I am starting to learn the letters because I spend enough time there and it takes a while because the formation looks different from what I learned and so I'm not going to be able to do much else If I don't know what the letters of the alphabet are . I see signs all around when I go to Georgia .

I can't read any of them , because I don't know the letters yet . As I start to learn them , I'm starting to recognize certain words . Oh , that means this , that means this , and so again , I'll leave it . It's important , it's foundational , and we called it that for a reason .

For a reason they're meant to be taught , to quote mastery , which differ kind of into the other pieces that we're going to talk about , which I'd love to dive into vocabulary and think about the connection between vocabulary and comprehension , and I'd also love to hear your thoughts on you know , can you teach vocabulary to mastery and what does that mean ?

We get we get so many vocabulary questions on this podcast .

Thankfully , some of the words we learn we learn from listening to other people , talking to other people and reading things , which we're lucky on that , because our vocabulary grows . It depends on the kinds of words that students need and the words that we're teaching for them .

I guess we're at the point of being able to say we don't actually learn words in isolation . We learn concepts , and vocabulary are the labels for those concepts . I think that's probably why knowledge is so popular right now to talk about in the world of reading is do you have enough knowledge to make sense of this ?

And what does the teacher need to do to build or activate that knowledge and the experiences you have ? Um and ? And the vocabulary becomes like oh , here is the label for this concept . By the way , when you go that direction , here's you have a concept , here's a label for it . It's way easier to remember , it's way easier to then use .

We have to have students producing language , whether that's in writing or in speaking . They need to produce the language and not just listen to the language .

So having a teacher use a lot of academic vocabulary is helpful as an apprentice , but to get to learn it you got to produce it yourself , and so there's a lot that goes on into like word solving strategies , direct instruction and then getting students to use the words . Selecting words is super important .

We tend to see some rare words and interesting , you know , like unique words being taught rather than a balance of utility words and multiple meaning words , polysemous words , and I was in a school happened to be a school for students who are deaf and they were looking at the word train and the sign for train on like a train on the train track is different

than the sign for train like train your dog or train a dragon , and they were going back and forth with what does the word mean ? If you don't have a concept for it , it doesn't actually matter what the label is because you don't understand it .

So the teacher had to work on the concept of train choo-choo train versus train your body , train your dog , train your dragon , you know , train for an X , train for a marathon , and so they're playing with this word and it's a fairly simple word but it has these meanings to it that are impacting whether or not you understand what you read .

The evidence suggests that students activate all known definitions of a word simultaneously and then they use what their knowledge , context , et cetera to predict the meaning .

So if you only know one meaning of the word train , your brain is probably going to use it and it's not going to make any sense , because why would we be talking about a train that has passengers on it when you're talking about a dog ? So we have to help students develop those more robust and depth of meaning of words .

Some of them I might , I may have , but you know , others , I just was trying to pass the test on Friday .

And it is so obvious that I'm writing letter by letter , not the whole word , because the handwriting changes , like all the T's are the same right and but it's clear it's not a connected word and so I'm going through a motion , probably useless maybe for letter formation , but I was way older than that .

But you know , there I am and my mom produces this random piece of work and she said Look at what I found . And because she does that every couple of weeks , and and I really I mean I was allowed to do that and thankfully I learned to read , but you know it probably didn't help my vocabulary at the time to write the word 25 times in letter at a time .

You know all the T's in a row and whatever else is next .

I can't remember numbers , but I feel like I remember seeing at some point , like I don't know how many , like 5,000 words a year or something like that that kids need to learn , and I'm like well , I don't have enough time to teach 5,000 words Right . I mean , what do you say to teachers Like how do we even start to tackle this ?

They already know some things um , probably higher levels of oral vocabulary than written vocabulary , print vocabulary , um but they know stuff about the world and they have concepts and labels for those concepts . Then a chunk of words we learn from our interactions with other people and with texts .

But there are certain kinds of words that we don't learn as well in those ways and we probably need word solving strategies and then direct instruction on some words . So I think about this is let's talk about text-based vocabulary .

If I look at a piece of text and the author has planned with context clues or the words have parts morphology that have been previously taught and learned , I should show students how to solve for unknown words .

If that's not possible and the word is important , if it's a one-time word and you don't need it ever again , I'm going to tell you what it means and we're going to move on . But if it's going to be an important word , then I probably need to move into direct instruction .

But again , if the author , if the piece of text has high levels of context or familiar morphology , then I'm going to focus on word solving and as teachers , we have to decide is this a time to teach students how to figure out unknown words using resources , or is this a direct instruction word ?

Or is this word not that important and I should just tell them what it means and move on Because , as you said , we're going to run out of time .

Um , and then eventually head into writing when we look at the oral language and speaking , and then eventually head into writing when we look at the oral language .

Okay , there's variations of some , some will argue with that , but your listening comprehension has to be strong enough and when kids come to us early , their listening comprehension is way higher than their reading comprehension when they're five years old .

And if we don't continue to stress their listening comprehension , are we building their world knowledge , their vocabulary knowledge , their speaking and listening vocabularies , so that the reading starts to catch up ?

Now , when I say that , I want to be careful that we don't just make you know the early years all oral , because print is super important , but I think there's times to read a more complex piece of text and discuss it and stretch some listening comprehension and then develop those skills and as kids get older and older , that oral , that the listening comprehension

and reading comprehension get closer and closer together and then we need to be pushing that I started thinking about , like when you get to fourth grade , and how do we push enough that that the reading stays high ? Um , that , you know people talk about the fourth grade slump and there's all kinds of theories about why that occurs .

And is it the transition to more information ? You know there's all kinds of people , you know , talking about this and we don't really have a solid answer on it . But could it also be that we haven't spent enough time on growing listening comprehension while reading comprehension is growing in that speaking and listening brain and it's not .

It's , it's not as simple as saying you know , I'm going to have you talk to your partner .

It's , it's active listening , it's processing and asking related questions and coming back around to it , and and essentially , you're developing some of the verbal reasoning skills , uh , that happen verbally first before they occur through print and some people talk about , like , verbal reasoning includes inferencing and backwards and forwards inferencing , and and the ways in

which the writers use figurative language and metaphorical kinds of things . So there's a lot that goes into that verbal reasoning and it's the thinking through and using what you know , what's happening in the text , to make these logical inferences about what's happening and and like . Like we said , we can't teach all the vocabulary .

The writer can't tell us everything . There has to be some amount of . I'm going to imply this . You're going to infer it . You know the writer implies . The reader infers and and that we're thinking through .

Do you have like a time ?

And it was concluded in the Common Core Standards in the appendix , and it shows like here's your listening comprehension , included in the common core standards in the appendix , and it shows like here's your listening comprehension , and they start to go like this and um , you'll see the gap closure , uh , and it gets almost almost the same in grade eight , but it's

super close in grade six , uh , and then the worry on that is if your , if your line is going up with listening comprehension but you don't teach listening comprehension and you flatten the line , let's say you flatten the line in grade three and there's no more listening comprehension and it's flattened , can reading ever go above that ?

That's the debate that we're having right now about , about oral language and listening comprehension .

Is , if we stop some stretching and I think there's some natural development on this and there's some intentional instruction required but if we don't push listening comprehension , let's say it fades off at grade three or four or something and let's say it ends at this flat level , can reading ever go higher than that ?

And that's the kind of the question that we have about what role should oral language and listening comprehension play in the teaching of reading .

do on their own . So I think more of an interactive read aloud would be where I would go with this right now and trying to build that verbal reasoning Like I'm hearing this , I'm processing it . Here are the bigger things that my teacher wants us to talk about with my partner , with the whole class , back and forth . So I think there's a role for it .

I think there's a place for it . Here's my worry , as you say this . So lots of instructional materials come with audio recordings and they were originally designed for kids who struggle with reading . What I'm seeing a lot now is that the whole class is listening to the digital recording and not their teacher .

And I understand you know we all get tired and things like that , but there's that passion that we bring as the reader that is hard on the digital recording and so I think there's a . You know like I'm reading , I'm reading with expression and animation , and then I pause and say , okay , what is going on here , what just happened ?

And turn to your partner because we have to unpack this . This is some . This is some confusing stuff . That just happened , the .

The dynamism that a teacher can bring in , that , based on my relationship with the students and the energy that I have , is a different dynamic than listening to it on a digital recording , and so I think we've overused the digital recordings that were designed for support for some students and now they've become the .

I'm going to turn on the recording and let the students listen , and the idea is these are professional readers and I appreciate the fluency model , yet I worry that the dynamism , the passion , the way that your teacher , who you adore , reads to you , is compromised .

You're there having a conversation as the teacher , yeah , yeah .

I have been reading dead dog books , like that's like a genre , I guess it is definitely for , like older elementary . I feel like , right , there's a whole collection of dead dog books right and so I'm like , oh , I better trade this out because this dog is going to die too .

So but I mean when they're , when they're comprehending and they're starting to make these predictions and they're inferencing and and that's a simple one . I don't mean to suggest that that was a complex inference , but just the idea that my brain is right there with my teacher and my brain is processing this information .

I guess come back to it like in a year from now , if you want to , when you're ready , I don't know , um , yeah , so let's , let's dive in .

Let's shift from , I think , like a lot about the , the oral language , as I mean talking about what you're reading as um , like a rehearsal for writing , and I'm wondering if you might be able to talk a little bit about writing and probably extend what I said in several different ways , but I'll hand it over to you , yeah .

And when we're really teaching writing , teaching composing and encoding , it's reinforcing the reading skills that our students do . They're also writing is helpful in , you know , looking at data formatively . It's diagnostic , you know .

If I look at what my students are encoding spelling , it helps me know what patterns they have under control and what they don't have under control and what's the temporary spellings that they're having that tell me they're not understanding certain patterns and they're probably going to have a struggle with them when they end up reading them .

But writing , you know writing is thinking when you are writing you can't do anything else but think , and so when we're seeing students writing , we're seeing their thinking . So writing in response to what you're reading , writing from sources , writing about what you're reading , writing about your own thinking .

All of that is helpful and it helps us think about how , and virtually every writer can read , but not every reader can write , and so I think there's a dosage of writing instruction that we need and we should be considering the ways in which writing and influence reading and the skills that we all want to combine together , that we want to weave together , bond

together to create strong readers .

So I don't know what the writing teacher was having them do . I think we should be very careful about that . I would rather have double the time with my students and be reading and writing , but that's I think we would separate .

That's exactly what we said , but we don't devote enough time to writing , and that's probably why schools have divided is because they can ensure the students are actually getting some writing instruction , because we all know I could teach reading for the entire school day . I know there are other things that are super important .

They have to learn mathematical thinking . They have to learn content . I mean there's evidence that's starting to say we should have more content learning , like science and social studies , to improve reading scores . In fact , the study that just came out a couple of weeks ago .

So , because content knowledge makes a difference in background knowledge or knowledge in general makes a difference in reading , a difference in background knowledge or or knowledge in general makes a difference in reading . So , um , so I do think that more systematic in terms of writing , in terms of writing , instruction is going to be useful .

I mean , we've got evidence on things like interactive writing across the grade levels , where you share the pen and you compose together and they get to see the speech , to print connection , the teacher is talking , you know spelling patterns , organization , you know capitalization , space , whatever it is that they're working on as a class .

And I've I taught ninth graders interactive writing and they shared the pen and they came up to the dry erase board and we composed sentences together so they could see how their ideas could get translated into print .

We talked about it more in the oral language , but I'm wondering , in written language too , even though comprehension is the outcome and so many things play a part in getting to the place where you understand what you've read , are there specific things we need to also teach students about how to comprehend a text ?

And these are things that come up that we have to show you how to get through them yeah , and I think there's .

You cannot read it , doesn't you know you can't do that . However , when those other forces have mobilized , you probably are creating images in your mind . You're probably monitoring whether or not you're understanding what you're reading .

You're probably synthesizing or summarizing information as you read so you can remember things , and those are things we can practice , and there's evidence that we can teach students to do this and improve their ability to have strategies for comprehension . The question is for what purpose ? To what end ? Why would I want to do this ?

And motivation , engagement , all those things like what's the reason that I'm reading this ? What am I going to do with it ? So we talk about what does the text inspire you to do ? Like at the end of a of a really like , if we're really into a piece of text at the end of it , what are you inspired to do based on this text ?

And and and maybe different students have different ideas of what they're inspired to do , and maybe someone to write and someone to make presentations and someone to have a debate . But are there times where we can open the door a bit and allow students to be inspired based on what they're reading ? Versus ?

We only can have one assignment to demonstrate your understanding .

Second , I would say we have to recognize , understand that all of these components of reading literacy get woven together and we need to be developing all of them . I mean we should be thinking about verbal reasoning with kindergartners , we should be thinking about fluency as they learn to recognize the words and start to see patterns .

All of that gets woven together and we have to make sure . So I have to be careful with this because different grade levels have different areas of emphasis and focus , but they're woven together in meaningful ways that help students say I'm getting it now , I'm feeling good about this . I want students to experience success with reading .

I want students to say this is cool , I'm getting information , this is interesting , rather than saying this is drudgery , it's painful and I hate doing this . I want students to have some joy and some experience with reading and I want them to see there's a utility to it . We read things to find things out that help us be better at something or read something .

And then , third , I probably would say we have to figure out what we mean by comprehension , and is the goal of comprehension really comprehension ? Can we get to the point where students do meaningful things , things they care about with what they've read ?

And I do like to know what's current in the world of movies , because my friends and family all talk about movies . So I go to . I like to go to movies and I like to see longer . I'd rather spend two hours or two and a half hours watching something and not parse it apart into like 40 minutes here , 40 minutes here , 40 minutes here .

I want to know what the current songs are that people are that , like my students are talking about , that people in the world are talking about . So I don't want to be left behind .

You want to do something that you help other people , and I came from a library assistant . My mother was the assistant in the library at my elementary school , and so when I got in trouble which did happen more often than I'd like to admit I got sent to the library to my mom . I didn't get sent to the principal .

And my mom was busy working as the assistant in the library and she'd say , go get a book and read in the corner . And so I think a huge part of why literacy uh made a difference for me is because it was safe . It was when I was in trouble , uh , it was with my mom .

It was when I was in trouble , it was with my mom , and so it was natural to move into helping other people . Young people learn to care about reading and the worlds that they can visit because of their reading .

We're having an impact on our learners and I wish we'd take a little credit for it , because we're working really hard and we're doing great things . I know the media is beating us up Sometimes families are beating us up .

Sometimes families are loving us and appreciating us , but it's a hard job and it didn't get any easier in the last two years and we need to take some credit because we are making a difference .