These barriers that we have erected between reading and writing are kind of artificial. And need to come down. But also between reading, writing, and learning. This stuff is all connected.
This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. I hope your new year has gotten off to a great start! And I hope you're excited to return to our Season 9 reading reboot. All season long, we're reexamining and building on foundational literacy concepts. So far, we've explored the fundamental differences between standards and curriculum. We've rethought comprehension.
We've revisited the critical role of text diet and so much more. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome back education writer and author Natalie Wexler, whose brand new book is "Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning." Natalie will help us unpack the fundamentals and latest research on learning science.
We'll also reach back into our mailbag to tackle another fabulous listener-submitted question. Let's now welcome back, Natalie Wexler. Natalie Wexler, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode.
Delighted to be here, as always, Susan .
I was gonna say, again, and for those of you that are new listeners, you may not recognize Natalie Wexler, but she is a friend of the podcast. And I think this is your third appearance. Is that the right word?
Yes, I suppose, if not everybody's seeing me, but I am appearing. At least via audio. And yeah, I think it is the third time.
It's really exciting. You launched this podcast into existence way back. Several years ago. I can't even remember how long ago it was, but it was right after you published your very first book. Is that right? When you published your first book, "The Knowledge Gap" ?
Yeah, that came out in August 2019. And it was a month or two later, I think, that I was the first guest on the podcast.
And since then, you've also done , in the book publishing world, you've done "The Writing Revolution," part one and part two.
Yeah, the first edition came out in 2017, so actually before "The Knowledge Gap."
Oh, true . Yes .
But we came out with "The Writing Revolution 2.0" in I think July of 2024. So pretty recently.
Congratulations! Very exciting. And I will tell you that there is almost no place that I go across the country, no district, no school, no classroom, that doesn't know about your work. For sure either on "The Knowledge Gap" or on "The Writing Revolution." That's pretty amazing, isn't it?
It's totally mind boggling . It is not at all what I was expecting. And it's been incredibly gratifying to have so many people be aware of, and often embracing, the messages in those books.
And the great thing about those books is they both sort of go together, right? So this idea of knowledge building, super important, and the idea of extending knowledge building by incorporating that into what you're doing in writing is also pretty exciting.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it is all connected. And we've been treating these things as separate.
Yeah.
But they're really not.
Yeah, yeah. For sure. And you're joining us today because you have a new book out called "Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning." So why a new book? And tell us a little bit about it.
Well, I actually was not planning to write another book. I felt like that was exhausting. I'm not sure I can do it again. And we were sort of in the middle of "The Writing Revolution 2.0," but I had blurbed a book by someone else, and the publisher said, right after I sent in the endorsement, "We're looking for someone who might be interested in writing a book on why the Science of Reading needs to go beyond phonics.
Do you know anyone who..." And that is an issue that had been on my mind for some time. When I wrote The Knowledge Gap, I don't think I'd ever heard anybody use the term Science of Reading. Maybe the first time was your podcast, I don't know. But certainly when I was writing the book, that was not a term that people were using. And it has since become one.
Not that the Science of Reading is limited to science relating to phonics instruction, but the spotlight has really been trained on problems with phonics instruction. H ow phonics instruction doesn't line up to the science on decoding or on word recognition, foundational skills. And it was a little frustrating to me, because of course there is a lot of science relating to other aspects of reading, like comprehension.
And literacy generally, like writing. And that was sort of getting defined out of the Science of Reading in a way. I think it was leading to the idea that if we just fix that phonics part, everything's gonna be fine. So I definitely wanted to address that.
But I went beyond what they asked, because I have had sort of one foot in the Science of Reading world and another in t he Science of Learning, o r cognitive science world. And I've noticed both of these movements, the Science of Learning, cognitive science movement, has been smaller, h as gotten less attention than the Science of Reading movement. But both of these movements are d oing great things.
Bringing news o f what science tells us about learning and about reading to educators. But I saw that there was a disconnect between these two movements. And that the Science of Learning community, they too were kind of just focusing on phonics. If you're doing a good job of teaching phonics, then your instruction is in line with t he Science of Learning.
But they were overlooking the ways in which the typical approach to teaching reading comprehension and writing, the way those approaches actually conflict with what cognitive science tells us about how people learn to do those things.
Can you talk a little bit more about cognitive science, and what it tells us about learning? I know we're gonna get into maybe reading and writing and relationship to that. But generally, when you say the Science of Learning, what does that, at a meta level, sort of mean to you?
Well, it's hard to summarize it in an elevator speech .
An elevator pitch .
Yeah, an elevator pitch. But I will try. So, there are a number of principles of learning and teaching that have accumulated a lot of evidence behind them, going back to maybe the 1970s or so. And basically, there are things like, for example, retrieval practice.
So retrieval practice means that the more you try retrieving an item of information that you have somewhere in long-term memory, but you've maybe slightly forgotten it. Recalling that information makes it easier to retrieve in the future. And I think that is a sort of fundamental principle. And then there are variations on it. Like it's good to sort of mix things up, and that's called distributed practice or stretch.
That kind of this practice out over a period of time spaced practice. And then there's things like elaboration, or sometimes it's called elaborative rehearsal, where explaining things, coming up with examples of things that really helps with comprehension of information. And so there are conferences I've been to, and lots of books out there, and articles sort of listing these principles and why they work.
And that is actually another point that I think is crucial. There's something called Cognitive Load Theory, which really explains why these things are so helpful to learning. And that has to do with the way we take in new information. Basically it's called working memory, which is the aspect of our consciousness where we're trying to make sense of new information. And it's very limited.
It can only hold maybe four items for 20 seconds before it starts to become overwhelmed. And the best way around that is to have information stored in long-term memory and to be able to retrieve it. 'Cause if you can retrieve some relevant information, whether you're reading, or listening, or whatever, that is going to expand your capacity in working memory to take in new information.
So if you're reading about baseball, or listening to a radio broadcaster, if they still have those things of describing a baseball game and the terminology, you know what a double play is or whatever, you don't have to look it up or whatever. You can just attend to that information. And so I'd say that, overall, what these principles of cognitive science depend on is knowledge.
They're all sort of geared to enabling students to retain information in long-term memory. Be able to retrieve it easily, so that they can analyze it and think about it in various ways. And so that's the basics of cognitive science, as applied to teaching and learning.
That's super helpful. And it reminds me that we've done a couple of episodes on this. So, most recently, we had Greg Ashman on to talk about Cognitive Load Theory. And then we had another episode too with Peter Brown, "Make It Stick." Do you remember that book, Natalie?
Yes, I do. Yeah. That's sort of the granddaddy of these books that are, I forget when it came out, but it was at least 10 years ago or more . And since then, there have been more and more books. Greg Ashman is among them. ButI, list them in the new book, some of them in one paragraph, and there are like eight different titles that I could come up with almost off the top of my head.
So there's no shortage of books aimed at acquainting teachers with these things. I don't know how much it's really penetrated. It's penetrated more, I think, in some other countries, like England and Australia. But it's been a little slower to get off the ground here in the United States.
So was that when the interest to take all that information that we know about how we learn and sort of intersect it with what's this look like in literacy? Reading and writing?
Yeah, well, one of the things I've noticed is that when I go to these conferences, etc., that the discussion of cognitive load and the Science of Learning-informed teaching really focuses on things like science, math. Maybe history to some extent. But not so much on reading. And certainly not on reading comprehension, or writing. There's been very little research applying Cognitive Load Theory to those things.
But I was sitting there thinking, or reading these books and thinking, "Well, how does this apply to what I know about how reading comprehension and writing are taught?" And so one thing I noticed was, if you look at those things through the lens of Cognitive Load Theory.
And the idea that if you're trying to juggle too much new information in working memory, you're gonna lose your ability to comprehend, or retain, information. We're making reading and writing much harder for kids than they need to be, because we are asking them to apply skills like finding the main idea, or summarizing, or whatever to topics that they may or may not know anything about.
The way literacy instruction is organized is there's a focus on a skill. The teacher may model the skill on a text on one topic, but then kids are supposed to go off and practice it on texts on other topics. Or write about other topics that they may have limited, very limited, information about.
And so they're not only juggling in working memory, the cognitive demands of reading, and especially writing, which if you are not yet a proficient reader and writer, those cognitive demands are very heavy.
Yeah.
But they're also trying to deal with content that they may not really know anything about. And so that makes it harder to read and write. It also makes it harder to use reading and writing as ways of learning and deepening knowledge, which clearly they are, but the other thing that I noticed is there's been very little application of Cognitive Load Theory to writing. Surprisingly.
Because we know writing imposes a crushing cognitive load. If you're not an experienced writer, even if you are.
In addition to asking kids often to write about topics they may not know much about, like in a separate writing curriculum or whatever, we don't explicitly teach them to write, we spend much more time trying to, with greater and lesser degrees of success, teach them to read, but we kind of expect them to just pick up writing. And that really, for most kids, it does not happen.
And if you think about the cognitive load that they're encountering, that really helps explain why. And it also deprives writing of its potential power as a lever for deepening and reinforcing knowledge of content.
Let's go back to the reading piece. Because when we think about and we talk about either the Simple View of Reading or Scarborough's Reading Rope, there's two elements to it. This word recognition side are the foundational skills. I hear a lot of folks talking about these things are important, because we want to develop them to automaticity, the foundational reading skills, right?
We wanna develop those to automaticity, so that kids can use their cognitive energy to put to the upper part of Scarborough's Rope or the language comprehension element. So is that a small step into applying Cognitive Load Theory into what it takes to become a proficient reader?
Yes. And I have seen in both camps, on the Science of Learning side, the Science of Reading side, I have seen people make that point. And it's a completely valid point. You are not gonna have the cognitive capacity for comprehension analysis, etc., if you are expanding so much cognitive effort on just figuring out what the words are. So, yeah, we have made progress there.
Yes. That's great. But I think your point is that the same applies to the upper part of the rope, or the other element of the Simple View of Reading. This sort of language is that there's things we can do to support kids in developing background knowledge, or building background knowledge, that would actually help them be better readers or writers, right?
Yes. And I'm glad you raised that, this isn't so much in the book because I've continued to think about it and it's too late to add things to the book, But I think, first of all, we're never going to have some of these skills practiced to automaticity. And I think there has been an idea out there for a long time for kids to master some of these comprehension skills, like making inferences or finding the main idea.
And then they will just sort of do those things automatically. Or they'll be metacognitive, which is not supposed to be automatic, but that is a conscious monitoring of your comprehension.
I don't wanna get into this, but I'm not sure that there's a huge difference between those metacognitive strategies and the supposedly automatic skills, because I think really expert readers when they're reading, they're not consciously saying, "Well, I wanna visualize now." Or "I'm gonna ask myself questions now." It does become kind of automatic, but not in the way that decoding is.
I think that it's not so much that you can practice this on a simple text. You can practice finding the main idea, it will become automatic, and then you will be able to apply that skill to any text. However, I think there's a distinction between transferable skills and non-transferable skills that I think is important.
Yeah.
So decoding, like riding a bike, is a transferrable skill. For the most part. It doesn't matter what bike you're riding, the principles remain the same. No matter what word you're decoding, you should be able to apply them and figure out what that word is. The two that I would like to focus on are making inferences and finding the main idea. Let's take finding the main idea first.
I don't think it's completely transferrable, but I'd say it's also summarizing. I would call it summarizing, finding the main idea, they're pretty much the same thing. They're sort of semi-transferrable. If you explicitly teach kids how to summarize a paragraph or a text, that doesn't mean they're gonna be able to apply those skills to summarize anything easily.
If they have more background knowledge, it's gonna be easier to summarize that text. They have less background knowledge, it can be harder. But if they have some idea of what goes into summarizing, they're definitely a step ahead. So I do think there's a reason to teach that sort of thing explicitly.
The problem is we've been teaching it basically by saying, "Well, OK, just put in the important stuff and leave out the unimportant stuff." And that's not enough for most kids. You really have to help them determine what's important. Let's now move to making inferences. It's not so much like a transferable skill that you can explicitly teach.
The basics of making an inference is something that human beings just do naturally, right? I mean, babies, toddlers make inferences. That doesn't mean they're gonna automatically, naturally be able to make an inference about any text.
Right, right, right.
But I don't think we need to sort of teach the skill of making inferences in the abstract. What we do need to do is repeatedly, in the context of whatever text kids are reading, guide them to make sure they're understanding how to make inferences about that text. And that they have the background knowledge to make those inferences.
Because no matter how good you are at making inferences, if you don't have the requisite background knowledge you're not gonna be able to do it. It's not like this idea is , "Well, we can teach making inferences or whatever for six weeks the way they do in these studies and then we're done."
No. These are things that need to be continued across a child's academic career, but not as discreet, like you're just gonna learn to make inferences and we'll use this text to learn to do that, or whatever, but rather as a means to an end of understanding a particular text or a particular topic repeatedly.
Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. My understanding of inference too has developed just over the course of the last 12 to 18 months. Because if you think about it, if you have a lot of knowledge of a topic, you automatically make an inference and you don't even realize that you're making that inference. And to sort of backtrack and unravel that and figure that out, it's like, "Oh, oh."
Right. Right. So many of these things, I think, as expert readers, we don't do consciously. And that's where all of this research on strategy instruction began. They wanted to figure out what are expert readers doing sort of unconsciously that we can extract, isolate, and try to teach to inexpert readers or developing readers. So that's where it started, but at a certain point it adds to your cognitive load.
I think if you are focusing on the strategy, or the skill, rather than the content, and you're thinking, "OK, I have to make an inference now. Like how do I do that again?" I think what makes a lot more sense is that kids should know the term inference. They should understand what that means.
But I think it's probably more effective to just ask questions about a text, or about a topic, that implicitly requires kids to make inferences. And I've certainly seen that work very well in classrooms. They're getting into the habit, consciously or not, of thinking, reading in a particular way that involves making inferences.
I just had a connection too , with things that you have said before, which is some of these, like finding the main idea, making an inference, cause-effect relationships, that when you put the content first, and those things come up to support developing knowledge of the content, that's really the most effective means by which to help support students.
And to me then, this really relates to what you're talking about in terms of cognitive load. So, in other words, you wanna focus the kids on the text, and what's in the text, and use the strategies to help them learn what's in the text. And that can release some of the cognitive load for them.
Yes. And just add one thing about that. I think that is a great summary. You've probably heard me say this many times, so I'm not surprised that you can summarize it .
but speaking of summarizing , so with something like, and here I'm drawing on "The Writing Revolution," one of Judy Hochman's insights, which I don't think Cognitive Load Theory really had come into existence when she was creating "The Writing Revolution" method, but she, through trial and error, and instinct, I think the method incorporates a lot of what cognitive science would tell us about what works best.
And one of the things that she emphasizes is that when you are introducing a new writing strategy, and I would say writing strategies are probably the most effective way to teach all the things we try to get at through reading comprehension strategies, but when you're introducing a new strategy, like summarizing, or using subordinating conjunctions, or whatever, you want to introduce it in the context of familiar material.
Maybe a holiday, Halloween, whatever. Or something that's already been covered in the curriculum. Because you don't want kids to have to be understanding unfamiliar content at the same time they're trying to understand a new writing strategy. So I think that is an attempt to modulate cognitive load, whether or not you put it in those terms.
So unlike making inferences, you can explain what that means, but I don't think you have to have kids practice making inferences in the abstract before they can do it in the context of something they're reading. But I do think with something like summarizing, which is a lot harder, it makes sense to introduce it in the context of some familiar material.
But then, very quickly, once kids have the basic idea, you wanna start having them apply that to content that they're currently learning. Because it's gonna really boost their understanding, retention, and ability to analyze whatever the material is that. Something like summarizing is a huge boost to comprehension.
It's really interesting, because everybody knows sort of the term "First we learn to read, and then we read to learn," which I think is a false dichotomy. But, we talk in education a lot about learning to read and then reading to learn. We don't talk as much about learning to write and writing to learn. Like the distinctions between those two.
Yeah.
How do you think about that?
That's interesting that you mentioned that, because I recently wrote a post for my Substack newsletter on these write to learn studies. There's a strand in writing research, or in education research, going back to I believe the seventies on, about do students learn more when they write about content? And these studies have found, yes. There's a sort of moderate boost. But results are ambiguous.
And sometimes you get a negative result. So sometimes writing about content somehow decreases learning. So why would that be? Well, the missing piece here that I think helps to explain why that might be is writing is really hard. Maybe in some of these studies you had more inexperienced writers. Writers who got less support, less instruction.
And so, their working memory was so overwhelmed by the effort of trying to put their thoughts into a written form that they did not get those learning benefits. This is why it's so important to bring together the Science of Learning and the Science of not just Reading but Literacy.
And the flip side of that is, I have repeatedly come across studies from cognitive science that say they're about retrieval practice or elaboration, but when you look at what they asked students to do, it was writing. And retrieval practice has come to be associated with testing. It used to be called the testing effect. And quizzes, tests, that is one great way to engage in retrieval practice.
But the iconic retrieval practice experiment actually had college students writing about an article they had read.
Very interesting.
And they found a really significant boost from that. But that was college students. Here's an interesting thing. When those same researchers did the same experiment with fourth graders, using fourth-grade level text or whatever, they found those fourth graders did not get that learning benefit.
I think the college students remembered 81% of the concepts that they had read about after writing about it and tested a week later or whatever. The fourth graders remembered 9% of those concepts. Because they did not have the cognitive capacity to get the learning benefits. And then those researchers did a couple more experiments.
If you gave the kids more support, or you asked them not to write but just to like memorize vocabulary words, you did find that retrieval practice had significant benefits for them, as for the college students. But it doesn't work to just ask inexperienced writers to just write down stuff that is not going to provide the cognitive benefits.
It reminds me of the differences between writing instruction and writing activities. Because I think a lot of teachers in the elementary grades, from my experience, are giving kids opportunities to write with little instruction. So, it would go to say that the cognitive load there is too big for them. Because you need to break this down into something much more discreet.
Yes, absolutely. And you need to start really at the sentence level, if that's what kids need. And we barely try to teach that. And you need to teach kids how to create linear outlines for paragraphs and essays, again to modulate cognitive load. 'Cause even if you know how to construct sentences, writing at length can impose a heavy cognitive load of its own.
But if you've got a linear outline, then you've offloaded some of that burden onto the paper, or the screen, or whatever, and that gives you more working memory capacity for the writing itself.
Hmm , oh my goodness. So much here. And for our listeners, I send over our guests a series of questions, just to sort of keep the conversation going. We went way off script , didn't we?
Yes, we did. But you know, it's still good .
It's so great. I am gonna bring us back a little though. Because you have a chapter in your book that's titled "Bringing Science-Informed Teaching to Scale." And I'm really curious about what led you to include that chapter?
Well, I think that is the ultimate question in anything to do with education. I think maybe it was Dylan Wiliam who said, "Everything works somewhere, and nothing works everywhere."
Oh , that's a good one.
How do you find an intervention or something that works and bring it up to scale? Where not only a few kids benefit, but masses of children benefit. It's tricky. And I think what I'm talking about is not impossible, but it does take effort. It takes understanding.
And, I do wanna say, and I think this is one of the things I say in that chapter, that I'm not necessarily saying we should tell teachers, "OK, you've heard about the Science of Reading. You have to figure that out. Now there's also the Science of Writing. And in addition, Science of Learning. And here are all these principles, and you need to figure them out.
Understand them, and figure out how to apply them in your classroom." That is, I think, a crushing burden. And I would not be surprised if teachers ran screaming from a room where anybody told them that. I think that what our best chance of success is is, to first of all, reliably identify good content-rich curricula, beginning in kindergarten, including literacy curricula that cover topics in science and social studies.
And then some of them may not have the support they need, especially with regard to writing, for people to really get the full benefit of that content.
So marrying a content-rich curriculum with an approach with explicit writing instruction, that's embedded in whatever the content is that you're teaching, at any grade level, that can bring students and teachers all the benefits, and possibly more, of cognitive science-informed teaching. But it may be more appealing because I think t hose teachers know that they need help with writing instruction. It's really hard.
Teachers generally don't get much training i n how to teach it. And if they give any writing assignments, they're probably aware that many of their students need help and they're not sure what to do.
So I think if you say, not necessarily, "Here's cognitive science, and you're gonna apply that in your classroom," but saying, "Here's some help with writing instruction, across the curriculum," and I think they will see, and I saw this happen in a district that I visited, that it's not just about writing. It carries over to all sorts of other things. Reading comprehension.
And one reason for that is a big barrier to reading comprehension is the syntax. The sentence structure of written language. But if you teach kids how to use complex sentence structure in their own writing, subordinating conjunctions, whatever, they're in a much better position to understand it in their reading. It also makes their oral language sort of richer and more sophisticated. Language is connected to thinking.
If you can talk and write in a more sophisticated way, that reflects that you are thinking in a more sophisticated way. So there are all these benefits that come along with effective writing instruction.
That's lovely. So I wonder what you think readers will like most about this book?
Well, I hope that they will see the connections, and they will appreciate these connections, between things that don't always get connected. Like they may have heard about retrieval practice, but if they're teaching reading in an elementary classroom and they're trying to teach reading comprehension, they may not have understood why retrieval practice can't really be applied there. 'Cause there's nothing to practice retrieving.
So I think I'd like teachers, and also those in the cognitive science world, to see that these barriers that we have erected between certainly reading and writing are kind of artificial. And need to come down. But also between reading, writing, and learning. This stuff is all connected. And I hope that they will appreciate hearing that. Every literacy teacher also needs to be a content teacher. And vice versa.
Every content teacher needs to be a literacy teacher. And think about, "Are the kids understanding this text? What vocabulary do I want them to focus on and retain? And how about writing, what writing activities could I do that are embedded in this content that will increase their understanding and retention of the information?"
Well, I want to bring a question from our listener mailbag. This one comes from Laurel D., A coach specialist in Pennsylvania. And she really wants to know how to bring colleagues over to a Science of Reading approach. And she asks this, "How can one person do this within their school? Make meaningful change without getting burnt out?"
So one of the things I learned in the writing of this book was there's an education journalist named Holly Korbey who has an excellent Substack newsletter called "The Bell Ringer." And she has also been writing about cognitive science and teaching and learning in the United States. And she had a profile of a principal at a school in the Midwest, I guess it was an elementary school, who requested anonymity.
And he requested anonymity because he was aligning instruction in his school with the Science of Learning, but apparently, it's the education method that dare not speak its name . And he said, "Their scores had increased, but he couldn't get other schools interested in what they were doing." But, one of the things he said was, "We don't call it the Science of Learning. We just do it."
And I think in some ways that makes sense. Because I think what convinces teachers is when they see results. I think if you introduce them to a bunch of scientific principles, I'm not saying you shouldn't, but if people are skeptical, I think that just doing it and seeing what happens can often be a better way of bringing them around. Of course it helps if you're a principal, if you're a school leader, district leader.
As an individual teacher, there's a limit to what you can do. Another thing that Holly Korbey has written about is teachers who are the only ones in their building feeling like they really can't talk about it, because they don't always get a good reception from their colleagues. So maybe just trying these things in your own classroom, to the extent that you can, and talking about what's happening in your classroom.
Getting some other teachers interested in maybe coming and taking a look, a nd they might wanna try it a s well.
I think that's great advice. And thanks Laurel for the question. Natalie, any final thoughts for our listeners before we let you go?
Following up on that last question, I would just sort of encourage classroom teachers who might be listening to just try some of this. One way to identify whether your curriculum is set on content is if you ask kids to write about something that's in the curriculum and they don't have enough information to write anything coherent, that's a sign that you need to supplement the curriculum.
Bring some more content in to see what happens. It takes a little while. You gotta get used to it. The kids gotta get used to it. So maybe try it more than once. But just be open to approaching things in a different way, and and seeing what happens.
Great advice. We're looking forward to your new book coming out. We don't know if it's gonna be out by the time this episode drops, but for sure it'll be on a pre-order. And we will make sure we link our listeners in the show notes to that.
Great, thank you.
Thank you again. We really appreciate you, Natalie.
Well, it's always a pleasure, Susan. Thanks for having me .
That was Natalie Wexler, education writer and author. Her new book is "Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning." We'll have a link in the show notes. We'll also have a link to Natalie's website, nataliewexler.com, where you can learn more about her Substack: Minding the Gap and Season 1 of the Knowledge Matters podcast, which she hosted.
And if you'd like to hear more from Natalie, we'll also link to her past appearances on this show, on these episodes. She talks about some of her previous work, including her books, "The Knowledge Gap" and "The Writing Revolution," which she co-authored with Judith C. Hochman. Next time on Science of Reading: The Podcast, we're continuing our reading reboot with a focus on language and language development.
Dr. Tiffany Hogan is going to unpack the key components and complexities of language, and she'll delve into developmental language disorder.
Just like we know that if a child has severe difficulties in learning to connect letters and sounds, we would characterize that as Dyslexia. On the other hand, on the other side I will say, of that simple view of reading, if they have difficulty in learning language, then we see they have that difficulty called Developmental Language Disorder, that's associated with language comprehension.
And importantly, there's a high overlap between these two, but there's not a one-to-one correlation.
That fascinating conversation will be right in this feed in two weeks. Also, be sure to check out the latest episode of the Beyond My Years podcast. Host Ana Torres just led an in-depth conversation about how to actually be coachable, and get the most out of feedback from other educators.
For those newer educators that may have a hard time with that, what's your message about handling critical feedback?
I would say those people who are in a position to get feedback, try to depersonalize it. As the person receiving feedback, try not to take everything personal. I used to say, "Every kick in the butt is a boost up ."
I like that. I like that.
OK. You might get kicked in the behind, and it may hurt, but it's a boost up.
That's available now in the Beyond My Years feed. We'll also have a link in the show notes. Remember to subscribe to Science of Reading: The Podcast on the podcast app of your choice, and share it with your friends and colleagues. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.