E25 | Integrating Reading and Writing with Dr. Steve Graham

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Teaching Literacy Podcast. I am your host, Jake Downs. I am an elementary literacy coordinator at a local school district, a PhD graduate from Utah State University, and someone just wants to know more about reading. This is episode 25. I am so excited to get this podcast published and out to the masses. Dr. Steve Graham joins me in this episode to talk about integrating reading and writing.

I learned so much and I can guarantee that you will learn a ton from this episode.

One item of business before we get to the show though. In the episode immediately prior to this one, I talk about a special Q and A episode that I am doing with Dr. Tim Rasinski and Doctor Chase Young. And we are doing a teacher QA with your questions on reading fluency. So please. If you have a question on Reading Fluency, go and listen to that episode. Look at the show notes. There's a link that you can go and use to submit your Reading Fluency question.

Uh go do it. We would love to look at your question and uh we're gonna curate some of the questions to discuss on the show. I've loved reading the questions that have been submitted so far and I look forward to reading many more. So if a fluency QA sounds like your thing that you want to get in on, go and check that out and get your questions submitted.

And with that, let's get to today's show. As I mentioned, Dr. Steve Graham is joining me on the episode to talk about integrating reading and writing. And uh we use that term pretty liberally. We we meander a bit where we talk about reading and writing research and reading. theory and reading and writing instruction. Um and and so it's a bit of all of those which which is fantastic because I think our understanding of one of those helps uh inform the other area.

as well. Dr. Steve Graham is a prolific researcher. He's been researching writing for for several decades. I think in the episode he said forty-two years he's had an interest in in writing research. Which is incredible. Doctor Steve Graham is the Warner Professor in the Division of Leadership and Innovation in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. And he just last week was awarded the ILA, the International Literacy Association's highest honor, the William S.

citation of merit. Certainly an award that is well deserved for Dr. Steve Graham. What a fantastic accomplishment.

So a little bit of background on today's episode. Reading Research Quarterly is one of the top journals in literacy, and over the past nine months it's released a special double issue on the science of reading. And the science of reading has sort of had all of the the who's who in literacy research has come and and submitted articles and published articles talking about different aspects of reading and and several folks that have been on the Teaching Literacy podcast.

uh actually are in the the episodes of Reading Researchers Quarterly's special issue. Folks like Tim Shanahan and Seth Parsons and Margaret Vaughan and Chase Young, uh Emily Phillips Galloway probably over half the folks that we've had on the show thus far have articles or that have either authored or co-authored in that special double issue uh from Reading Research Quarterly on the Science of Reading.

So Dr. Graham joins me on the show to talk about his article that he wrote where he talks about the the research of reading and writing needs to be better integrated. And so we we talk about several meta analyses that he has worked on and published as as well as a a litany of other things.

I learned so much from Dr. Graham in this episode. It it's a marathon one. It's a long one, but but stick with it. Buckle in because there are many gems along the way. After the show, stick around for my two cents on the topic. And without further ado, I present to you Doctor Steve Graham.

Dr. Steve Graham, welcome to the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Thank you very much for inviting me, Jay. Uh you've been very active with writing research over the past couple decades and uh and and and doing a great job of communicating what you find to teachers. I'm curious, can you explain to us how and why you became interested in in researching writing?

My initial interest was in reading. And when I was a doctoral student, I was at University of Kansas and pursuing a doctorate in special education. But I did a minor in reading and the primary reason is that I didn't really feel when I was a teacher that I knew enough about how to teach reading to kids in general or to kids with special needs. And um I did a dissertation That involved MISQ analysis. And one of my committee members after the I I passed the dissertation thing.

But one of my committee members, uh, Anita Sunby, who was in reading, said to me privately after the offense, she said, You could have done better. And I reflected on it. for a little while. You know, that's never the news anybody wants to hear, but I respected her opinion because she was always very forthright. And I thought about it and I thought, you know, this is like one out of eighty miscuanality. of studies. It did do something a little different, but it really didn't move the needle.

And I thought about, you know, why didn't I do something more meaningful? And I realized that while I was still interested in reading, what had happened in about the last year's time is that. Uh, I had become fascinated with writing. I was having to write as a doctoral student, you know, really for the first time in my life. And I didn't have very high expectations about my writing in general. But as I started writing, I started reading the Paris Reviews, which are interviews with

With people like Steinbeck and Hemingway and and um uh Maylor and other uh famous authors of the time. And they were focusing in on process. Well, you know, that's what I was struggling with, how to go about organizing. thinking about, you know, evaluating, monitoring what I was doing. And I became increasingly interested in that. Now this is not the place that a young scholar wants to find themselves in.

Uh, I took a job at Auburn University on soft money. And all of a sudden I realized I wanted to switch my area of interest. And really I knew very little about research and writing. And so what I did was over a three-year period, I did three reviews.

One looking at composition in general, one looking at handwriting, and one looking at spelling. And I did the last two because a lot of the kids that I worked with when I was a teacher had difficulties with handwriting and spelling. And I tried to make those reviews as expansive as possible. Uh going as far back in time and moving forward. And in the case of some of these that meant going

back you know to to 901 or around there taking a look at work by Thorndike and others in terms of what they were doing in terms of test development. And then in the twenties and thirties and from there forward, intervention studies and writing that started taking place.

And I really haven't looked back since that point. I've spent, I think this is my 42nd year where I've had um a continued interest with writing being what I most want to do. And I suspect that will continue till they lay me to rest. I appreciate your systematic reviews and meta analyses.

uh simply because that really helps synthesize the field and and at a macro level help us understand what what do we know about uh writing and what questions have yet to be answered. And I I think our conversation will will tap into a few of those.

We're talking specifically today about an article that you published in in Reading Research Quarterly's special issue on the science of reading, and you titled your piece, The Science of Reading and Writing Must Become More Fully Integrated. And you open that piece by saying despite the many contributions of science to the study of literacy, I contend that the sciences of reading and writing are too narrowly focused on how to teach either reading or writing.

and not focused enough on how these two skills can be used to support each other. Can you elaborate a little bit on that opening statement you made? Yeah, and and I'm gonna put some kind of parameters around this as well. So one of the things I think is important to realize is that you can learn to read and not learn to write. In fact, historically We've known of many people who have read, but writing wasn't part of the instruction that they received. However, you can't learn to write.

without learning to read. And um, you know, there's a couple of ways of looking at this. One of the ways is to think about, okay, if you're somebody who finds uh reading challenging, what does that mean for writing? Well Almost ex i in every study we looked at so far, if you had difficulties learning to read, you had difficulties with writing. Now it doesn't necessarily flip completely the other way. Generally, if you have difficulties with writing,

you're likely to have difficulties with reading, but not everybody who finds writing challenging finds reading challenging. So I want to put a little bit of parameters around this first.

uh it's not a perfect association um between the two. But with that said, we've been able to collect over the last um I'd say 10 years through the meta-analysis that you mentioned, uh, evidence that cuts both ways that suggest um and suggests strongly, I I have to say, that if you have kids write more. And you teach writing and you have them write about what they read, all three of those things.

uh result in better reading. And that includes reading comprehension and can include uh subskills like reading fluency as well as um uh word reading. And so just an example of this on a much more macro level. uh one of the meta-analysis that we looked at looked at what happens when you teach spelling so a couple of things one is kids get better at spelling so that's no surprise if they didn't you know we'd we'd need to reconsider that whole process

But the second thing is, is we found that their word reading gets better. And that's not a surprise because, you know, basically, while it's not again exact. Um, decoding words and spelling words are a flip of each other, one going from sound to symbol, the other going from symbol to sound. And so if you gather information in terms of spelling, if you learn more about how the orthography is put together, then that has a good chance of generalizing over

to the code words. But more importantly, we found that reading comprehension improves as well when you teach spelling. And so you know the basic mechanism behind that that we suspect, and I think this is a good suspicion. is that as you become more as as your spelling gets better, you become a more fluent word recognizer. And as a result, that helps you in terms of the bottleneck.

That sometimes word recognition can create for young children in terms of reading comprehension. Now it goes the other way as well. So when you have kids read more and you teach reading, or you even have kids observe.

What others are doing with something that's written, there's a corresponding improvement in writing. So the quality of students' writing gets better and then various sub-skills can get better as well. Now, obviously, if you think about it, if you teach phonological awareness or phonics, then not surprisingly, spelling gets better.

Um, if you have kids read more, then they're, you know, basically they become better writers. And the assumption there is that what's happening is that as they read, they're doing at least enough analysis. so that they're learning something about the craft of writing.

How this author thought about, you know, the material he's presenting, how he puts together, how he organizes it, et cetera. Now, the the real cap on this, though, in a lot of ways, is that we completed a meta-analysis in 2018 that's published in reading research quarterly as well. And we took a look at what happens when you give kind of equal time to reading and writing instruction. Now by equal time, we didn't go 50-50, we went 60-40.

So 60% of the time was spent teaching reading and 40% writing or vice versa, 60% writing, 40% reading. Well we found is when you do that, both reading and writing get better. and on on the most important skills, writing quality and reading comprehension. So, from a practical point of view, as a teacher, obviously we can use writing to leverage students' reading. We can use reading to leverage students' writing as well.

And so it's kind of beggars the imagination in a way. Why haven't we been connecting this more in our research? Now I'm not saying anything That we haven't recognized for a long time. When I wrote that piece for Reading Research Quarterly that you mentioned, it was sent out for review, like all peer review articles are. And two of the reviewers commented: don't we already know this? Don't we already do this?

And the reality is we don't uh to a large degree. And in fact, um I think we do a better job of teaching reading than we do writing. You don't see a lot of writing instruction going on in schools. And I'm basing this on national surveys that we've done. where we've asked teachers about their writing um processes that they put into place. And this is random samples of teachers, either in the US or in other countries like in China, Norway or Chile.

Um, where we've done some research. And we see the same thing over and over again. Very little time spent on writing, very little time on writing instruction. So, you know, there's really not much chance to integrate. I really appreciate uh your perspective on that and especially that you've validated in some of the research that you've done. But if we think of

reading and writing as uh as as you referred it to as two sides of the same coin that can simplify down instruction a little bit to where we're not thinking that we're not siloing it as as much anymore. I mean there there certainly will be times where we're focused on just reading or just writing. but that we can think of the reading as the input and then the writing as as the corresponding output. Uh would would you say that say that's a fair synopsis of of some of what you just mentioned?

Yeah, I'm really glad that you mentioned that, Jay. So when I say that we need to bring reading and writing together, I'm not saying that we don't need some dedicated time just for reading and some dedicated time just for writing. What I'm saying is we need to look for places we can link them together more effectively. And maybe a a simple example of this is when you think about creating the story. You know, if it's a story that you're creating.

in the US and you're a a seven-year-old kid, you basically know the the parts of a story. You know, to put this in an academic thing, you have a setting and then you have episodes. And the setting is the who, when, and where. the protagonist off, what their goals are, what their actions are to meet those goals, what the outcomes are, and how people react. Now, knowing that, you know, knowing that stories are created a particular element. uh helps you in terms of generating ideas.

And a lot of little kids do that almost automatically because they're so familiar with this. But it also helps you in terms of reading. on which to hang ideas. And so sometimes you'll stop in the middle of the story because they've thrown a switch on you. You know, they've gone a little outside the genre and it makes you, you know, think, but uh, which is a good thing.

But, you know, that's one way in which we can take advantage of this connection is making sure that students know the purposes of the types of genres they're going to be working in. how they're structured and the basic elements of them so that they can use them to their advantage when both reading and writing.

Now I do want to say one other thing about this. I'm not suggesting that for writing, we get stuck in that genre. Sometimes it's good to go beyond the bounds of the structures that we present to kids. And I would uh actively encourage teachers to to push those boundaries. Um, because I think that's really where the fun is. It's it's nice to create a story, but it's kind of it's much more fun when you can go outside of the boundaries and still have a cohesive story that a reader enjoys.

That's fantastic. Thanks for that additional elaboration. I want to talk specifically about theory for a minute. I I think theory can do a lot to frame a teacher's approach to uh how they make instructional decisions in their classroom. And on page 37, you know, it's not possible to speak about reading and writing as if they are unrelated. Reading and writing are connected at the most intimate level. We write so others will read, and we read what others write.

And after that you uh you elaborate on two specific theoretical supports that for connecting reading and writing. The first one being shared knowledge theory and then functional theory. Um, can you explain both of those for us? Yeah, and and I've been holding off on that because I knew you were gonna ask that sooner or later. And I'm actually gonna expand to three things.

Um I didn't mention one of them in the paper. So the first one, the shared knowledge theory. And I need to give a shout out mostly to Tim Shanahan because he's helped promote the these theories and expanded on them. He and Jill Pitzgerald over time. With the um shared knowledge theory, the analogy that Tim often uses is that you can think of having a well of knowledge.

And you have a bucket for reading and a bucket for writing, and they can both go down into well and draw upon the knowledge that's needed. And so I think an easy way of thinking about this is there's a lot of different kinds of knowledge in that well. So for example. Content knowledge or topic knowledge. So to write something that's well done, you need to know something about that topic. If you're writing, let's say about the westward movement, you need to know something.

And it's similar in terms of reading. It helps if you have, you know, at least some background knowledge as you kind of hit your stride as you read through that. That's common knowledge that can be drawn. We mentioned earlier, you know, the knowledge of purposes and the elements and structure. of genres. That's a similar kind of thing that you can draw on for either one. And I'll give one more example that we've also already used, which would be the links between sound and symbol.

And so we have a considerable amount of that knowledge and it can be drawn on in both direct Now, why that is important is instructionally. So the the basic idea is the one that I talked about in the research end a little bit ago, is that if I increase Say on spelling, then that increases our pull of knowledge that we have in terms of the links between letters and sounds or sounds and letters.

So that gives you more to draw upon when you read. So that's the basic idea is that if we increase our knowledge, topic knowledge, discourse knowledge, knowledge of basic foundational skills in reading and writing.

Then that should facilitate your ability to read or your ability to write. And that's what the evidence says. The second theory that you mentioned is more social cultural in orientation. And the basic idea is that both reading and writing exist. And that purpose is meaning making. And you kind of touched upon that with the quote that you gave from the article. And that is, you know, when we write, we're typically writing for someone else. Sometimes it's ourselves.

You know, like when we're writing a diary or we're writing about something that we're learning. But often it's meant to be something that's read. And so the basic idea here is that as you read, or as you write, you can gain information. In a sense, we come back to that well again, you may gain information about what readers and writers do. So when I write, you know, hopefully I'm thinking about my reader, my audience.

And so what that does by thinking about reader and audience, it may mean that when I read, then I'm thinking about what the author did to address his readers and audience. He has to give appropriate amount of background information. Or it may be as simple as reading with a writer's eye or writing with a reader's eye. You know, so that I might take a look at the word choice.

that a writer is using and then say, you know, that's pretty nifty how he did this. I may try something similar. Or a teacher might have kids read something that has a clip hanger in it, and then they try to uh develop a clip hanger for their own story. And then they share it. So we look for reading as a way to gain information about writing and the process of writing to be a way to gain information about reading. Now there's a third approach that I didn't talk about, and that's the function.

So if you think about what the purpose of reading and writing are, there are multitudes, but one of them is to learn. And in school situations, um, you know, starting now, right when you come to school, we're using reading and writing for those purposes. As students are gaining their facility and fluency with both those skills, we're having them read to gather information, we're having them write to think about information, and we can use those two together.

And so, you know, a perfect example of this and a simple one is when we write a report. We have to go out and find information. We read for it, we read it critically, we think about how we're going to uh uh present it, and we share that information. And so those three views are all supported by research.

in terms of empirical findings saying that when you when you teach some aspect of either reading or writing, there's a good chance that it'll carry over, if there's a reasonable expectation where you can see where it'll have an effect.

When you have kids read and write, particularly from first grade to sixth grade, we have evidence that they become both better readers and writers. And then when you put reading and writing together for the purposes of learning, we have evidence there that that improves students' learning.

Two things that really stuck out to me is theoretical paradigms can get really complex really quick. And the the well analogy of of there's a single well of knowledge and we can draw the bucket down for reading or writing. uh really is uh it communicates that really clearly. Uh but specifically also you mentioned reading with a writer's eye and writing with a reader's eye and I think that frames it.

frames perhaps how ways we might approach our our reading and instruction uh in a way that might uh promote both reading and do you want to add one thing to that Yeah, please go for it.

mentioning that I was thinking about it. So with this idea of reading with a writer's eye and and writing with a you know writing writing with a reader's eye, um I'm often reminded of a interview that I read with Tony Morris. And basically she was asked, how did you learn to write? And her response was by analyzing what I read.

Okay. Now, if you asked me that same question, it would be a completely different answer. Because when I read, I don't really, I'm not concerned about what the the writer was doing. I'm kind of along for the ride. You know, so as a Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance kind of thing, some people are very analytic when they read and they, you know, want to know what's going on underneath, you know, in the engine, so to speak, under the manifest.

Others of us are along for the ride. We don't care how the engine works. We're just enjoying the ride. Now, I say that. Because some kids seem to do this naturally in terms of kind of picking up on those things. And other kids need support to make those connections.

But they're not that difficult of connections to make. But I did want to point that out is that, you know, don't assume that all kids are gonna make those connections because they may be riding a different bike, so to speak, in terms of how they think. I love that. Um, and I think that speaks to what we do very naturally in reading is some kids are along for the ride and they just seem to get it, but then we have to get a little bit more

clear and explicit um to to help support their progression. And it it's only logical then that we would also have the same sort of approach or the same sort of concept with uh writing instruction as well and motorcycles. We don't get to talk about motorcycles often enough here on the show, so thanks for bringing that up.

I want to talk about empirical support because this is one of the one of your great contributions to the field is the meta-analyses that you've contributed to. And so uh one specifically that I I want to talk about first is and you've already mentioned, you already referenced this one.

Uh but Graham and Harris 2018, where you talked about effective uh practices for writing or sorry, effective practices for writing instruction. Can you elaborate what that meta-analysis found on on some effective practices for writing instruction? Yeah, and I'm gonna uh paraphrase it a little bit because over time your thinking starts to shift a little bit. Um, what we did in that 2018 meta-analysis is we looked at twenty or so.

Previous meta-analysis of writing, uh, intervention research, um, true experiments, quasi experiments. We also looked at single-case uh design studies, which have a different metric, and we took a look at um qualitative studies of exceptional literacy teachers to see what they do in right. And I'll explain that a little bit later. But on the group studies with the 20 meta-analysis and the true and quasi-experiment, Basically, there's uh four basic takeaways. And I think about this.

in terms of what that research tells us in terms of kind of the, you know, the macro aspects of writing instruction, but they also provide some micro aspects as well. So and I'll expand on this and add a fifth uh thing when I talk about uh looking at uh exceptional literacy teachers and the qualitative stuff. I'm probably not going to mention the single case design studies because they pretty much replicate what we saw in the true and quasi-experiments, the group studies.

So, one way of thinking about what meta-analysis can tell you is it can give you some ideas of general structures or things that need to be. And you know, this does involve some speculation on part of whoever puts this together.

But I would say there's at least four, and I'll add a fifth one in a second, basic elements to a good writing program based upon what we've learned from these reviews. One is kids need Okay, so I always mention that first. I think one of the issues with the National Reading Panels report in 2000 is they had all these things that need to be taught.

But they didn't say, you know, kids need to read. And the reason I suspect they didn't say that is because they probably didn't have direct evidence showing that if you increase how much students read, their reading comprehension or other aspects of their reading. But in a lot of the interventions you look at, there's an awful lot of reading going on. So the good news for me is that at least from first to grade six.

What we saw is that when you increase how much students write by about 45 minutes per week, there was a corresponding positive improvement in the quality of their writing and corresponding positive improvement in the in in their ability to comprehend text. So it's a two girl. In addition to that, another thing that we found is that when you write about what you read,

Well, guess what? Your reading comprehension gets better. So that's another way of thinking about writing. And when you write about what you learn, you're learning, you know, learning that content material gets better. So basically you could expand this out a little bit and say kids need to write and they need to write for multiple programs.

And I would add from looking at the exceptional literacy teachers, they need to write for real purposes as well. But that would be one basic building block of a program. So another basic building block that we found is that as students write, we need to support So what do I mean by that? So I I'm being very specific here. I'm saying as a writer.

So those can be supports that we provide right up front. So you know pre-writing activities where they generate their ideas using a graphic organizer that helps them organize uh information. It can involve reading. to gather information for what you're going to write about. It can involve setting goals for what you're going to write.

When you're writing, it can involve getting feedback from others. It can involve working with another person. Because when you work with another person, you get support as you're going along. Hopefully. Sometimes these situations don't turn out quite like we we hope they will.

Um but uh or we could be using a computer program that provides support through spell check, through grammar check, or may even have built into it, you know, b vocabulary help or planning assistance up front, or may even give a value. And we're gonna see more and more of that. as time goes on. So that's the second basic component. And I want you to notice as I talk about these.

I'm not giving all the specifics, but you can see some of the specific things that from an evidence point of view we have evidence or we've been able to show that they work or demonstrate they work.

A third thing that's also very important is that we need to teach critical skills. Processes. Um and so what do I mean by that? Well, you know, if you broke writing down into a, you know, it's most basic level and think about this. I'm gonna write a sentence. Well, I have to have an idea, right? Then I have to translate that idea into an acceptable sentence with the right vocabulary and the right syntax so that it gets at my intended meaning.

And I have to transcribe it onto paper. And so that gives you some ideas. So part of what we have to do is we have to help kids with the thinking aspects of writing, planning, evaluating, monitoring, revising. And we have evidence that when we help kids apply strategies that facilitate those processes, there's a big jump, not a small jump, a big jump in the quality of what they run. We also have evidence that when you teach kids how to become more facile in terms of creating sentence.

that there's a positive impact both on sentence structure, but also in terms of quality of writing and reading fluency. Another one of those two two percent. And then when we teach text transcription skills like spelling, handwriting, or typing. All of those get better, and there's a corresponding improvement in writing quality, as well as a corresponding improvement on some of the reading skills, as I mentioned earlier.

And then of course, you know, we need to know more uh in terms of knowledge. We need to know more about the genres that we're working in so that we know their purposes, we know how they're structured, so we can use that as our starting point for generating text and go beyond.

Now I could go further into this, but I want I don't want to get so far down in the weeds that things get lost. Another thing, um I actually was gonna say four, but we're gonna stick with those three. I'm gonna make it four this time.

So one of the things that was very interesting to me. Um, in 2007 and again in 2015, at studies where it wasn't mostly teachers that were identified as highly effective writing teachers. We just couldn't find that many studies. but they were highly effective reading teachers. And what we did is we we took a look at each one of those studies and treated it as like a case in a qualitative study. And across all of these qualitative studies, we started looking for themes that occurred frequently.

that were highly common, not something that occurred, you know, with just this teacher but cut across. There were a number of things that we found. So, one, I'm going to add another dimension to what we're talking about, but when you look at highly affected teachers, they create a writing classroom in which kids can thrive and grow. One, they can take risks there. Second, the teacher is positive about their capabilities and what they can do. They set high but realistic expectations.

They share their writing with their kids. They look for ways of making the writing classroom a motivating writing classroom where kids are doing things for real purposes and they're sharing what they're writing with an audience. The other thing that we were fascinated with in terms of this is that all the things that I said before their kids wrote, they wrote for extended periods of time.

Teachers taught skills, processes, and knowledge, and they supported kids in terms of their writing. So when you look at this as a package, You know, all the research in a sense fits together very well into supporting each other with the addition from studying high-quality teachers that we want to create a classroom in which kids can thrive and grow as roads. So a long explanation, but that's the basic uh finding. And I have one I have one caveat.

Okay. And that is basically there is not a direct correspondence between a teacher's classroom and a research study. You know, research studies are often done with support to the teacher. Um, you know, nowadays you get professional development, uh coaching as you go along. Those things are not available to most regular classroom teachers. So it's good to assume that.

the procedures if you try any of the specific procedures out in your classroom is that you know that they've worked in multiple other classrooms, but it is no guarantee that it'll work in yours. So you want to monitor. if this works. The other thing that's sometimes missed in I said one thing I'm actually going to go to, something that's often missed in evidence-based practices is The basic idea behind evidence-based practice uh came primarily out of medicine, but other fields as well.

is that we saw a lot of practitioners, I shouldn't say we, a lot of practitioners were basically using knowledge that they had acquired either from their mentors or on their own practices over time. And um, you know, basically any kind of scientific uh evidence that was available wasn't making its way into many doctors' office.

And so the evidence-based practice movement is based on the idea that we want practitioners, whether it's teachers or or doctors, to use the best scientific evidence available. But that has to be put into practice within the context of your situation, your students, your classroom, your knowledge, you know, et cetera. So it's not a devaluing of teacher's knowledge.

Um and quite frankly, in either reading or writing, I don't think we're at the point where we could ever, I don't think we're at the point now, and I doubt that we'll ever be at the point that we can say, if you do this. Everything's gonna go all right for everybody. That's that's a pipe.

I just don't ever see that really happening. I think what we can do is we can provide good guidelines and great tools, and teachers can make judicious and smart and intelligent and evaluative decisions about what they do. I think that's gonna be our best bet. Yes. That's fantastic. I that I a big reason I started this podcast is there's a lot of nuance.

between where research comes in and by the time that gets into practice and and sometimes things get lost along the way or there there's um you know there's there's hiccups to that. Um but I I think you're talking about supporting teachers to becoming very smart, very savvy, having excellent content and pedagogical knowledge so they can make

the research fit. It's not research, I don't I don't think it's meant to be just copied and pasted, whether we're talking about a specific study, you know, or or a meta-analysis or systematic review. It's meant to be adapted for a specific circumstance. So I really appreciate adding that caveat because that is such an important part. Of making that bridge from research to practice, in my opinion. Um, we've already addressed quite a bit about um

writing and writing instruction improving reading and reading and reading instruction improving writing. And that's a pair of meta-analyses that uh you completed with colleagues in 2011 and 2018. Is there anything that you wanted to add uh to to that conversation from what we already have discussed?

Yeah, I you know, basically I was a history major in college. So I always liked to be upfront about the history behind, you know, kind of where you're coming from. Everything has um in my opinion, um either a hidden or an explicit um direction is trying to move. You know, if you for academic. And so my primary interest is in writing. So initially we did a report for the Carnegie Corporation called Writing Next, where we basically identified for kids from fourth to twelfth grade what the research

Quasix studies and true experiments had to say about what might be effective in writing. And the idea behind that wasn't as much practice as policy. What we were trying to do. In the in that document, the third first three pages had this really simple summary. Aids to Congress. to look at to get the ideas really quickly and then to share.

Um, and so if you said to me, did this really move the needle very much in terms of making writing more prominent and schools? Because that's what our intention was. That was a policy thing we were trying to do. I'd have to say probably not. Yeah, and the thing was downloaded like two million times. So you say, oh, it must have had a big impact.

But I have to say looking at the schools over the next couple of years, I didn't really see much in the way of change. So this interest in terms of reading and writing connection dates back to the fact that my initial log was was reading, so to speak. But also as we started thinking about this, um, Carnegie Corporation asked me to do another meta-analysis looking at writing's effects on reading. So we tied writing.

to reading. And then eventually uh I looked again to tie writing to learning. Now you might ask, why did you do this? Well, one, I'm interested in writing, so it's pretty odd. But second, there's just not a lot of writing going on. And I see writing as an essential and critical tool for success, not only at school, but in one's life and increasingly in the world of work.

And I'll give a simple example of that. I heard a police officer in Scottsdale about three years ago. I don't even remember what where this was at. And he said he hadn't drawn his gun in a year, which I thought was great, but he said he drew his pencil every day. So you know he's writing, uh, you know, you don't think about um cop. being writers, but about eighty to ninety percent of blue collar jobs now require writers.

And so um I think when you think about these connections between reading and writing, um, it's not that we need to do more time with reading. I think we're probably doing uh a pretty good job with that in terms of allocating. Uh what we're not doing is a good job of allocating time to writing. And I think if that's going to happen, writing needs to be a player in learning and reading. That's going to be one of our avenues. So this is more for the writing affectionato that I'm saying.

You know, I I wouldn't be saying if I didn't think it was a good idea and the evidence didn't support it, but it will have the positive benefits of helping kids become better readers. You know, that's one of the pieces missing from the National Reading Panel report. There are other pieces, obviously, but this is one that seemed to be an obvious thing that was left out.

You know, I I I keep thinking in my mind, I keep going back to what you talked about initially, that um you can learn you can be a good reader. But not necessarily be a good writer. But in order to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader. So there's not quite a two-way road there.

Is that would you describe that as being a developmental perspective, meaning that writing is more complex than reading? Right, writing quality writing is more complex than than making meaning from text. And so therefore making meaning from text as somewhat as a precursor, or I I I'm wondering how you might frame that because I I keep going back to that in my mind.

Well, I'm I'm always a little leery about making these some things more complex than the other. And so I'll give you an example of this and I'll I'll answer the question. So there was a review in the 1980s by a guy named Patrick Goff at uh San Diego State University. I suspect a lot. People don't know who he is anymore. But he did these great reviews that were well written. And and he had done a review saying that, you know, basically.

uh oral language was not a good model for writing after kids turning about 10 years of age. And what he was saying is that writing is more complex than oral language. And on the face of it, that seemed Reasonable, right? Well, when you take a look more deeply into this, what you find is it depends upon the context and the type of speaking that we're talking.

And the type of writing we're talking about. If I'm writing a note to my wife saying, honey gone, I'll be back at four o'clock playing basketball. Sounds pretty much like speech to me.

Uh but if you look at a speech that somebody's given, often those are very complex and look pretty much like writing and can be more. So you have to be a little bit cautious in terms of But with that said, I would say that the production of written language is generally uh with you know that around quotes on that, more complex than reading.

But the reason that I I said this before actually, and this will get me in a little bit of hot water here, you could look at reading as being a subskill of writing. Now that's a provocative statement, right? Because I said earlier that you can read without having to be able to write. So I recognize, you know, the the disconnect here between the two things that I just said. But as a provocateur, Think about this. You know, when you revise your text, you're rereading.

Usually you're rereading it, sometimes to spot mechanical errors, et cetera, but often we have an uh, you know, an eye towards making sure that it's clear. That it's understandable, that the sentence says what we wanted to, and that our overall goals for writing are being met. Okay. So if I set a goal, I'm going to write something to be witty, then you know that's a hard thing to evaluate, but when I read back through it, I'm going to be reading critically for that.

So you can see in that case where reading becomes an essential skill or a subskill if you'd like to write. Another way of thinking about this is that we don't always write about things that are just in our heads. You know, a lot of writing uh is about things that are in our head and outside our

that we're pulling from written sources or through interviews or other things. And if they're from written interviews or from written material, we have to read that material. We have to understand it. We have to analyze it in relationship to our writing goal. We have to think about what's important. We have to think about how we're going to bring that information from multiple sources together. So it's very difficult to disconnect.

reading from writing for specific kinds of writing tasks. And you could, you know, provocatively make a claim that reading is a subskill in this case for writing. And that is I've said that before and it's driven a a couple of reading people around the bed. So

I like it though. I I think that's fantastic. So in your in your piece that you wrote for Reading Research Quarterly, you didn't specifically mention handwriting, but I know you've done work on handwriting in the past. How would you say handwriting fits into all of this? So um, you know, this is kind of an interesting question. My interest in handwriting, uh I had a my daughter um had a devil of a tie with handwriting. I mean, it just was a killer.

And I think, you know, she's a good writer, but she's never gonna like writing because of handwriting. Uh, because it was so difficult for her to form the letters. Now she, you know, composes on a word processor now and that's not a problem anymore. But, you know, basically one way of thinking about handwriting is that handwriting is a tool for transcribing ideas on the text. And until it becomes automatic and vacile, it interferes with other writing processes.

Does that mean that learning to handwrite makes you a better reader? Not necessarily. We don't have a lot of evidence that would support that contention. Now, with that said, Think about, I'm going to switch out of English orthography and think about a logographic morphosyllabic language like Chinese, where you have characters that are very complex. So typically when you teach a Chinese character, you're you're teaching its formation, which would be handwriting.

Your teaching because of various features on it, and the way they're put together, basically they tell you what word it is, which is a spelling component here. And these features also give you a clue to meaning. And so what you see in China, I've been doing some work with Elizabeth Sing at Macau University, is that Chinese teachers often teach all three of these components together. Why separate them when it's much more efficient? So when you do that.

then you know you're really going to have an effect not just on how quickly you can correctly and qu quickly you can produce that symbol, but you know, that you produce it in a way that others would recognize. the correct spelling and get to the correct meaning of it when it's used in context. And the same thing would apply when we think about teaching um Writing in the US. So if you're teaching, you know, the letter B makes a particular sound, and then you connect that to words and using it.

then yeah, you know, then there's going to be a corresponding effect, but they have to be brought together. If all I'm doing is showing a kid how to form a letter B and they're tracing over it and they're tracing over it and they practice several times. There's not a whole lot of reason to expect that's going to have an effect on um reading. The only thing it does is make you more familiar with letters. And there is some evidence that, you know, kids who know letters earlier.

Um, tend to be better readers, but my guess would be it's probably a proxy. Because if they know, you know, the letters of the alphabet in kindergarten, they're probably getting a lot of help with other things in reading at home. It's probably not a straight indication that knowing letters makes you a better reader. It's that other things are happening. That this is also standing for a part.

That would be my interpretation of that. So unless handwriting is directly linked to reading or to sound, I don't think there's, you know, my interpretation of the evidence is that there's not a strong link here. Now it doesn't mean you shouldn't teach handwriting. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't integrate the two. It's just I'd be very careful about making it clear. And what about handwriting efficiency of of just the aspect of taking

when you're writing, you're trying to synthesize everything in your mind and then you've got to get it, you know, through your arm and your pencil onto the paper. Um, how does handwriting efficiency maybe tie in?

Yeah, so um I want to give you an analogy here. Since I use the Chinese characters before. You know, I think it's around 6,000 characters that uh depending upon where in China, somewhere between four to six thousand characters students are expected to learn. Uh that's a lot of characters, right? Um, you know, there is a way around this. One is is you know, learning to tie.

I don't know if you've ever seen a Chinese typewriter that's not in Pinion. Pinion's a form of Chinese that's alphabetical. But you know, your top speed is about five words per minute. So, you know, you're really talking about here 25, 30 letters per minute. Um so if you're typing that slowly or you're producing handwriting that slowly. Think about how you write.

So when you're writing, you have an idea. You got it circulating around in your working memory. And what you're trying to do is to take that idea and craft it into the appropriate vessel or cell. with the right words to convey your intentions. Keeping it there in working memory can be disruptive.

When you have to think about how to form a letter, right? So that if you're if we're really talking about very young kids, all of a sudden I'm thinking, okay, I'm kind of drawing the letter B, then that information can slip away. out of working memory is a way to think about it.

And maybe you'll get that information back and maybe you won't. So one way in which handwriting, until it's mastered, Can influence writing, disrupt writing, is that it can cause us to lose ideas or plans we're holding in working memory and working. A second way is that our hand may not be fast enough to keep up with our mind. Everybody's experienced this. Ideas are coming just like this, and we can't get them down fast enough and we lose someone.

So if your handwriting is very slow, so this is slightly different, it's not that you don't know how to form the letters or some of the letters, it's just that you're slow in producing them, then ideas can slip away. And a similar thing happens at the sentence level. So, you know, while we're trying to think about, you know, how to form this sentence. You know, I was thinking about, I was talking about the ideas and plans, but as we're working out how to form this sentence in our working memory.

And we're struggling with writing letters, either we're slow at it or we don't know all the letters. that can be disrupted as well. So one of the studies that Bruce Sadler and I did.

In 2005, took a look at what happens when you teach kids to become more fluent with sentences through sentence combining. And what we found is their sentences got better. And we also found that the quality of their And their sentences, you know, so the sentences got better because one, we taught them how to do that directly.

The quality of the writing got better because the sentences in that writing were improved and they had more resources available for doing other things in writing. Now that last one's a bit of a conjecture because we didn't directly So like to be as forthright as possible when I make those conjections.

Well we appreciate that. That's a really f I I really appreciate that perspective on handwriting and those details. And it it sounds like to me then that if we're going on the opposite sides of the same coin thing that

Perhaps, you know, the efficiency of handwriting can be a bottleneck similar to on the reading side, word recognition or or fluency. And so there's a there's a component where it matters, but there might be also a level where there's diminishing returns as as well with perhaps overemphasis, but but likewise underemphasis would also have likewise, you know, negatively impact.

So so let me give you another way of thinking about this. That's the writer of that. There's also a reader of. So um we did a meta-analysis that's not as well known. It was published in a special education journal that went out of print. Um, but basically the studies that we looked at, the way that they operated is uh you might have kids, you know, 100 kids produce writing and you rank them from

The weakest writing to the best. And you pull out the one in the middle at number 50, so the 50th percentile average. And then you take that piece of rod. And you make it very neat. You don't change any words. You just make it neat and easy to read. And you also make another version that's readable. But much less legible, you know, so.

Um, it differs in terms of the legibility aspect. You know, you talked about the efficiency or the speed. There's two basic aspects to handwriting: legibility and fluency. And so when you ask teachers or other adults, um to rate those samples. You know, you you take 400 teachers and 200 rate the, you know, randomly assign and rate the less legible one and 200 rate the more legible one.

What you find is that there is a huge effect in terms of rating on the quality of the ideas in the same text. We haven't changed a word. We've just changed what it looks like. And it's almost a full standard deviation. So making that going back to that 50th percentile, a kid at the 50th percentile in the worst situations, score drops to number 16. He gets moved down to the pile to number 16. In the best situation, they get moved up to number 86.

And, you know, that's really a stark example of how, you know, presentation effects in writing can affect writers' judgments about the quality of what the writers say. And for those of us who have taught, If you haven't had this experience, you're a better person than I am. Because invariably, if I have a handwritten paper that a student gives me and it's difficult to read, Even though I know better, I tend to form a negative impression of what's going to be said. And I know better than that.

Um, but it's hard not to do. Thank you. I that's uh I feel like I understand handwriting so much better now. So I thanks for taking the time to answer those.

Um so transitioning to the the future, we're advocating that the the science of reading and writing instruction should become uh more fully integrated. What do you see the next generation of reading and writing research looking like? And uh what what questions are remain unanswered? Well, I think one of the things that um, you know, I'm going to start small and move move forward. So if you take a look at reading research now as it exists, and we look at writing.

Um almost every time a writing measure is included in a reading study, it's fellow. Um, is kind of like reading researchers or love with spelling. And it's not hard to understand why that might be the case for quantitative researchers who tend to take a skill-based approach, because we know that spelling and word recognition are highly

uh 0.6 to about 0.80. Um you know it's very strong correlation. But if we're to know more about the connections between reading and writing, both reading research And that's where the bulk of the literacy research takes place, and that's where the bulk of the funding is. as well as writing researchers need to make reading and writing measures a common aspect of their studies, their intervention studies.

So you know when I say this is what we know, as I said at the start of the there's a lot that we don't. Okay, so something as simple as vocabulary, right? So you would think that teaching vocabulary, which is often part of reading instruction, we would know that that has a strong effect on writing. But we really don't have much information.

Um, we don't know what hardly of anything from writing influences reading fluency. So we need to have a better flight of measures on both ends of this when we're doing reading and That's probably the simplest starting point that I can think of. I think a second thing that's very important is that if we're to expect that researchers in the future

And I would say same thing with teachers in the future. If researchers are going to do reading and writing research that is integrated, looking at the effect. In a cross-sectional way and looking at ways of bringing these things together successfully and effectively, we need to do a better job of making sure that both teachers and researchers know more about Ryan. Um, notice I didn't say more about reading. We might say for writing researchers, they need to know more about reading.

But I would also say very strongly that we just don't do much with writing in our academic universities. Um, you know, we ask this of teachers in every survey that we uh give. And we ask how well prepared they are, uh, through their college, through in-service, through their personal efforts. Secondary English teachers, 72% said they're unprepared to teach writing, or their preparation from the from the academy or university was inadequate.

If that's the case for teachers, it's also the case for many researchers as well. So if we're going to move into this area of doing more um research that's integrated across these two. Um, researchers need to be better prepared to think about and more knowledgeable about both.

And so I know I put a heavier emphasis on reading than I did on writing. And part of that stems from the fact that I can't think of hardly any grant in writing I've written that a reading researcher hasn't told me we need to have reading measures. They're right. But on the other hand, I hardly ever hear writing researchers telling reading researchers they need writing measures. And I think that's right as well. I think the other thing from the practical point of view.

You know, it it's all good and fine to say, hey, we need to use reading and writing together. But we need to investigate ways in which teachers can use these so that we give them multiple tools and multiple activities that they can put into place. that uh we have some um expectations that they would work uh because they've been replicated multiple times. So I think that's you know another direction we need to go. And then the final is model building.

So, you know, when you take a look at models of liter, you know, where where is a, you know, where is the grand model of literacy, so to speak. Okay. You have individual models of reading, you have individual models of writing, uh, you have models of oral length. Um, and you know, you look at models of oral language, uh, not surprisingly, there's a lot of similarities with models of writing because they're production.

Listening would be the same thing with reading, but we don't have a grand model of language use. is a way of putting it. And we need to be able to test that and refute it, parts of it or all of it, and move forward with that. So that we become more sophisticated. In terms of how we think about this. Now, the caveat I want to give to this is that take something like the simple view of It's Purpa.

Okay. Um and I say that it's not preposterous in the sense that it doesn't capture a truth in reading, but it's preposterous to think that that's all that's involved in reading, right? Because we know that you know motivation is important. We know. you know, that some of the discourse knowledge and skills that you bring to this are going to be important. We know that there's specialized reading skills beyond word recognition that you need. But

That model provides a way of focusing in on a aspect or aspects of reading. So I don't wanna downplay the importance of those smaller models, but what we've done is we have plenty of those. What we need is a grander model of how all of this operates that can provide a way for teachers to think about this, as well as for researchers to expand, refute, and modify. So glad you brought up the simple view of reading. I there seems to be a lot of

talk about that lately. You know, uh Gina Cervetian colleagues and Reading Research Quarterly, they talk about going beyond the the simple view of reading. Thanks for your insight on on, especially on models. I'm I'm a model fan, so I I appreciate your insight specifically on that.

Uh so perhaps we can conclude with a couple of of practical implications. And our conversation's already just been sprinkled with those throughout the whole way. You know, if I'm a if I'm a literacy teacher and I'm a I'm a I I believe in integrating reading and writing together to support my students, um, what What mindsets or approaches might you recommend to me as I'm trying to do this better within my class?

I abscribe to a a simple is better approach when you're trying something that you haven't done before. So one of the things I think is fairly simple and gives positive results is making sure that students write about what they read and they read to write. Uh now that's not saying that's simple. Okay. So let me give an example of this. Um we have um a couple of studies that are not published at this point.

uh with kids who find writing challenging, um, that basically we're teaching them two strategies. We're having them write a persuasive text, say in social studies or another area or an expository. But they have to read source material before that. And so just giving them the source material isn't necessarily an effective approach.

You're teaching them a strategy for helping them think about the material that's going to be important for their writing. That's a little different than teaching them a strategy to understand material. You know, we're they have to do that, but what we want them to do is think about the text that's here and things that might support their reasons or things that they might refute. So they're reading that text with a very specific purpose.

Which is related exactly to what they're going to write about. And so in this case, we're teaching them both a strategy for the reading and a strategy for organizing their information on the right. Now, sometimes it can be a little bit simpler if we're writing about something that we read, because it, you know, all kinds of things make a difference there, taking notes, but you have to know how to do that.

Uh generating questions of your own that you answer in writing, but again, it's more effective when you model. Having kids summarize. But again, it works better if you teach how to summarize. And then there are some other things that we don't know as much about, but seem to have even larger effects. Having take having kids take material that they're learning about and writing a story about it, or writing something where they apply it, or

Defending a point of view, if that's appropriate for material you're learning. For example, social studies material. I think that's one way to start that's quite easy. A second way to start quite easy is the that idea that I mentioned before, reading with a writer's eye and writing with a reader's. So that when we um have kids read.

uh whether it's to go back or whether it's during, depending upon your approach to doing this. We have kids analyze text and we don't stop there. Then what we do is we have them try out the techniques that they're seeing in text in their own. And then when we write, we hold discussions and conferences for kids or class discussions about their writing and what they're doing and how they're approaching their audience. That means having a clear idea of their audience in mind.

And then, you know, if we wanted to get at a more basic level, obviously if you're teaching phonics, then you can be teaching spelling at the same time. You know, so any of those three kinds of things are good places to start. And my feeling is you start with one and then you add something else in and you add another thing. Or if you're using a commercial material, which a lot of teachers do, then you look for something that already, you know, does a good job of doing.

And it really ranges. You know, I don't recommend particular materials because I'm an author on two. And I do these meta-analyses and I make recommendations. So it seems, you know, a little disingenuous to do that. But you know, I would say look for materials that do a good job. And a lot of time with the

Yeah, sorry to cut you off there. And a lot of time, you know, even materials that are doing a pretty darn good job, but not a great job, a teacher with knowledge can adapt those and tweak it and and make it make it fit for their

No, and that's that's a great point, Jake, because just taking these materials outright, it doesn't make it's just like, you know, what I said about evidence-based practice, same thing with commercial materials. If you're going to use them, you've got to make them fit to your students. And I mean, you know, and anybody who's ever used a basil series knows you'd be teaching for four years to do all the activities uh they have in in each of those basal series. It's overkill.

So Dr. Graham, thank you so much for joining us on the Teaching List Podcast. I have pages of notes. I'm excited to go back and edit this just so I can get to listen to it again. Um one last question for you. What do you think makes a great teacher? So, you know, this is a really difficult question. I I think um, you know, one of the things that's important is that you're knowledgeable about what you're going to teach, reasonably knowledgeable. Notice I didn't say that you're good at it.

You can be a good writer and may not be a great writer, you know, a great great at teaching. But if you're knowledgeable about how writing fits together and how it acts and procedures for teaching it, then I think that gives you a leg up, so to speak. A second thing that I think is critical is that you're organized. I've seen more. Mm. Good lessons. you know, take the the short path to hell, so to speak.

because of disorganization. And the disorganization isn't always with the teacher, it's sometimes within the class. Because there's not, you know, there's been a I don't want to say a failure, but there's been um uh uh less success at setting up a class so that it operates in a a smooth manner. And I don't mean robotic, but it you know, things get done as you hope they'll get done and you move forward and in a progressive way with your less than as you plan. I think enthusiasm is another

uh important part of this. You know, you you have to like teach. Um you have to like kids. Um, so you know, those are three things. There's other things that I could say, but I always think knowledge and motivation and being strategic in terms of, you know, how you present things, how you organize your class. If you ask me about anything, what success is made of, it's made of knowledge, motivation, and strategic prowess.

Dr. Steve Graham, thank you for joining us on the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Okay, thank you, Jake. I really appreciate it. A great big thank you to Dr. Graham for joining me on the Teaching Literacy podcast. And a shout out to all of the guests who join us on the show. These are folks who they volunteer their time to talk about literacy research with me and they do it because they care about kids and they care about teachers and they care about teachers having access

to the kinds of knowledge that they need to be successful. So a great big thank you to all of the guests that have been on the show. Before we close up the show, I want to offer my two cents on what we talked about. I got a whole quarter's worth out of the show, uh, but for sake of time we'll just keep it to two cents. The first one I want to talk about, that phrase that uh he said a couple times in the show has just stuck with me ever since we talked.

where he said, uh reading with a writer's eye and writing with a reader's eye. Uh if you've listened to some of the earlier episodes, you'll know that I am very fond of reading comprehension. That's probably my favorite area I like to think about and I like to talk about. And as a result of that, writing is quickly becoming a uh also a favorite of mine. And thinking about reading comprehension, things like text structure and genre and theme.

tend to be emphasized in instruction these days. They're they're written in the common core state standards. Uh they can be really tricky to teach. But I find that teachers also sometimes find that it's tricky to understand why we would teach it, why we would care about teaching uh text structure or why we why students might need explicit instruction or or some clear instruction with what genre different types of genres are.

And I think that frame that Dr. Graham provides us with, reading with a writer's eye, and writing with a reader's eye, explains it very well. My second scent talks about with writing about what we read. I have a short confessional I need to deliver here. When I was teaching writing in my classroom I always felt like I needed separate texts for my writing instruction. That I would have this reading block and then I would have a writing block and and I wouldn't

Pull the text that I was using during my reading block into my writing block. So I would go out and curate different text, shorter text that uh either were connecting maybe with our social studies or with our science, but they weren't very long texts and they weren't very meaty. And uh I I just never felt I don't know, I guess I felt like it was cheating if I used the text that we were already reading about for writing.

And looking back, I feel like I would have done my students a much better service by spending more time during my writing time writing about what we had been reading. Um that's really very clear to me now because I would I would, you know, cast one line and get two fish back, so to speak. That by writing about what we are reading, I would improve both the the reading comprehension of my

and their writing ability as well. So I would encourage you in your circumstance to think about if you're already reading text, which I know you are reading text during the day, Getting the water to the end of the row is then riding about it. uh organizing the information in a particular way that's that's going to make it meaningful and uh and and uh getting some text down on paper.

That is all I have for today's episode of the Teaching Literacy podcast. If you like this show or any of the other shows, please share it with a colleague. Uh the show is just growing leaps and bounds. Um every time I get little reports that talk about what the the download rate is, I'm I'm astonished. So thank you for your support.

your continued support. It does mean a lot to me that we are getting knowledge of of what experts in the field are thinking into the hands and into the ears of teachers, which I I I hope is supporting you in your class. This is Jake Downs with the Teaching Literacy podcast. And until next time, let's go and teach reading just a little bit better.