Why the ‘Science of Reading’ Needs the ‘The Science of Teaching’—A Conversation Between 2 Literacy Leaders

The “science of reading” refers to a vast body of multidisciplinary research providing a rationale for what must be taught to ensure almost all students can learn to read. Our podcast guests have championed this movement and supported organizations such as the International Dyslexia Association®, The Reading League, Decoding Dyslexia, The National Council on Teacher Quality, and The American Federation of Teachers who are advancing awareness of reading science.

But is this movement enough to develop more effective literacy instruction? Join us as our guests discuss why it may not be, unless teaching practices themselves receive more attention.

The “what” or content of reading instruction is often characterized with reference to the “five pillars” or “five components” that were each addressed by The National Reading Panel Report of 2000. Most state standards and policy guidelines name these essential components of instruction: phoneme awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Often added to the list are oral language, spelling, and writing. The content-related issue now being debated concerns the interrelationships of these components, their relative emphasis—for whom and at what point in reading development—and what level of content mastery to expect. We know the impact of curriculum content is diluted without systematic, explicit, cumulative teaching of the lessons.

Our experts will discuss:

• How policy and practice guidelines about the science of reading often mention the importance of “systematic, explicit” instruction. Yet, the “how” of teaching seems to be getting short shrift in comparison to the emphasis on the “what.”
• Why the right reading content must be married to best teaching practices of the “direct instruction” variety
• The importance of structured language teaching, especially for students who are struggling, with an emphasis on language
• Why developing expertise in lesson delivery and evaluation is a long-term but very rewarding undertaking which will transform the “science of reading” into “success for all”

Transcript

Narrator:

Welcome to EDVIEW360.

Dr. Anita Archer:

In other words, keep learning and keep being very sensitive to always looking at what will work, what will make a difference for children.

Narrator:

You just heard from Dr. Anita Archer. Two literacy icons are our guests today on EDVIEW360.

Pam Austin:

This is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. We're so excited to have you with us today. I'm conducting today's podcast from my native New Orleans, LA. Today, we are excited to welcome two literacy leaders who have impacted the instruction of reading in so many ways. For anyone who teaches reading or follows the science of reading as an approach to helping kids learn to read, you're in for a great experience today as we talk to Dr. Anita Archer and Dr. Louisa Moats.

Let me tell you a little bit about our guests before we begin our conversation. Dr. Anita Archer serves as an educational consultant to state departments and school districts on explicit instruction and literacy. Dr. Archer has won numerous awards and has served on the faculties of three universities, including the University of Washington, University of Oregon, and San Diego State University. She has co-authored numerous curriculum materials, including REWARDS® and REWARDS® Plus literacy intervention programs focused on explicit instruction, and judicious practice to build student literacy competency, and a best-selling textbook, Explicit Instruction: Effective and Efficient Teaching.

Dr. Louisa Moats has been a teacher, psychologist, researcher, graduate school faculty member, and an author of many influential scientific journal articles, books, and policy papers on the topics of reading, spelling, language, and teacher preparation. Dr. Moats has also won numerous awards, and is the author of LANGUAGE! Live®, a blended reading intervention program for grades 5–12, and the lead author of LETRS®, professional development, and the book Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers. Dr. Moats is also co-author of Spellography, a structured language word-study program.

Oh, welcome. So happy to have you here, Dr. Archer, Dr. Moats. Wonderful to have you here as our guests for EDVIEW360, as we discuss why the science of reading needs the science of teaching. Let's get started. Welcome, Dr. Archer and Dr. Moats.

Dr. Louisa Moats:

Thank you, Pam.

AA:

Hi, Pam. Good to see you. Thanks for inviting us for this conversation.

PA:

All right, very first question. You are both trailblazers in education. What remarkable careers as authors, mentors, speakers, instructors, and more. You've heard that introduction. Let's chat a bit about the early years and what led you both down your respective career paths. Can we start with you, Dr. Archer?

Dr. Anita Archer:

At 76, we have a long path but I'll shorten it to the highlights. It was a wonderful question to be asked, Pamela, because I could reflect back on the 56 years of my career in education. It just seems like it was filled with magical opportunities. I'm a Washingtonian. I grew up in the state of Washington in small communities, seven small communities, and I followed the tradition of my brother and went to University of Washington in the big city of Seattle. During my undergraduate career, I was blessed to be an assistant to very prominent people in reading and instruction, Tom Lovett and Joe Jenkins. I was not even looking at special ed, or looking at education, but I got to do studies with them. When I finished 94-142 had just been passed, and I was given a scholarship and got my master's degree again at University of Washington. Then, I taught at an elementary school and I've taught both general ed and special ed students.

And then, a very sad thing happened, but it was certainly, immediately it changed my career. I was teaching, teaching, teaching, and a professor at University of Washington who taught methods courses in reading died. They called and said, "Would you take it over?" I said, "I'll take it over." I was young. I was very young, 26, and I went off to University of Washington and taught. Later, I went into their doctoral program. And then, another major miracle, my husband at the time was an accountant and an attorney, and he got transferred to Eugene, Oregon. I got to apply to University of Oregon, where I became the head of their reading center and taught methods courses. Now, this was fortuitous, because of all the research that was done on direct instruction, explicit instruction. I got to teach with my colleague, Doug Carnine, and taught from the book he wrote called Direct Instruction Reading.

I actually did the study for my dissertation in Eugene, Oregon, graduated then from University of Washington, and had a great time working at both University of Oregon and then San Diego State. While I was at San Diego State, I taught classes on reading but I taught classes on instruction and taught classes on management and it's all of those things together that paves the way for what I do today, because all of them are necessary. It was just one wonderful, magical opportunity after the next and I got to meet Louisa, in the meantime.

PA:

Right. Miracles and opportunities led to fortunate opportunities for all of the lives that you've impacted, definitely, Dr. Archer. Tell us, Dr. Moats, tell us a little bit about your background, and what led you to do all the wonderful things that we've listed previously.

Dr. Louisa Moats:

Well, I'm glad I heard Anita's story, because first of all, I'm a little older than she is, so I have an even longer, slightly longer path to try to describe in a few words here. But definitely, I would say I was extremely fortunate in many instances not only to be in the right place at the right time, but more than that, I've been extremely fortunate to have people who urged me toward a certain choice or a certain opportunity that I myself might never have taken advantage of. That began when my first boss, who was a neuropsychologist who'd hired me to type the reports, decided to make me into a technician in the neuropsych lab, so I could learn all about the brain and whatever. That sent me off to also a fellowship program in learning disabilities, because he said, "You have to do this," and I was pretty content to just keep going.

And then, one thing sort of led to another. This could be a long story, but I would say that most fortuitously, when I went back to work for him 10 years after that first experience, after trying to be a musician and deciding that wasn't for me, he said, "OK. You're the learning specialist in neuropsychology. Now, you have to get a doctorate because I wrote this job description for someone with a doctorate or at least trying to get one." So, I said, "OK. I will. Harvard's down the street, so I'll see if they will take me." I mean, it was really that thoughtless.

I fortunately was accepted and that experience of really being educated in what I'm known for shaped the rest of my career and that is a deep, passionate interest in language processes as they are not only in play during reading, spelling, writing, and language in the classroom but also as everyone knows, I think, my concomitant interest in how to get teachers and educators and people I work with to understand the same things that I learned about only in my doctoral program. Only fortuitously, that I had Carol Chomsky as a professor, who in the reading department at that time, at the Harvard Ed School was...I think Jean Shaw was the department chair, and Jean Shaw at that time was trying to combat the beginning phases of whole language that were taking over the country and doing a very good job of it except it was a tidal wave too big to push back.

But Carol Chomsky, as the linguist, insisted that anyone in the reading department, masters and doctoral students alike, had to study language. She put us through the wringer and it wasn't easy. A lot of people didn't pass that class. But for me, it was a completely eye-opening experience because up until that time, I had been a lousy teacher. I knew I was a lousy teacher. I knew I was a bit of a charlatan as the specialist in neuropsychology. I was trying to learn stuff from other people but without the real grasp of what was going on in reading processing and in how teaching really was an exercise in enabling kids to build insights about language that would enable them to process the code, to produce the code, and to work with words expressively and receptively in the classroom.

I would have to say, it's so interesting to hear Anita's story, because I feel like the two of us have been in this parallel track with varying expertise. But as time has gone on, I have realized more and more, and I think the last year, for me, was a consolidation of what started out as a dim awareness and now is a very clear understanding of the necessity of marrying the kinds of things that I know about with Anita's incredible expertise in instructional science. Because as I said in the written blog, it's just so clear from data if we really look at what works with kids. Also, it's not only that. I look at what goes on in classrooms with people who get some of what I'm teaching them but they're not using instructional methods and instructional formats and routines with the purpose of accomplishing outcomes. It's not happening. But they think they're doing "the science of reading" if they do this little activity here or that like, "Oh, let's do a sound wall." Well, that's terrific but it needs to be part of a whole, planned, intentional process of accomplishing clear objectives with kids.

Anita and I have come at this from different backgrounds and different pathways but more and more, it's the consolidation, the wedding of both points of view that is necessary to get the outcomes that we want for kids.

AA:

Absolutely. It is the content and it is the instruction that brings the content to the students, so that they can learn it, so it really is a marriage of both.

PA:

Definitely. Oh, thank you so much for sharing your journey of who you were, before you became trailblazers. If I were to sum it up, I was thinking that your life abounded with opportunities, great fortune, as well as mentors, mentors with a capital M, I would say. You were so right. Definitely, your comments segue directly into the next question I wanted to ask you to respond to. Exactly when did you meet each other and when did you understand that impact? Dr. Moats, you started to express that a little bit just now, that impact on each other, the impact that each of you were making on literacy, and learning and teaching. You began that answer, Dr. Moats. Do you want to expound upon that? And then, Dr. Archer, if you can add to that as well, I'd appreciate it.

LM:

Yeah. Well, sure. We were both authors with the old Sopris West, when they hired me basically to write professional development that became LETRS and that was in 2001. I think Anita had already published with them. There was a whole group of authors at the time who had done research, and who had research-based programs, and researched programs that Sopris was publishing.

Mine had just grown out of lots of successive approximations in various settings for the previous 10 years. I became aware of the University of Oregon group and diaspora, the influence of Doug Carnine on many of the people who were writing programs. Many of these people were saying to me, maybe for several years before I actually met Anita at one of the Sopris institutes, I think that was it. They said, "You have to meet Anita Archer. She's just the most amazing teacher, she's just...Well, I mean, there's nobody better. You just have to get to know each other." Finally, I remember there was some back room at a Sopris conference and I met you and I said, "Hello." I thought, "Oh, this is an interesting person."

AA:

So, then after that, conferences. How many times have we been at the same conference, where we have a dinner but always discussions that made us go out and learn more? I mean, we just had a discussion last week that made me spend three days on an answer.

LM:

Great.

AA:

That's exactly what occurred. But one most memorable time was speaking at the same conference in Alaska, during the earthquake, where we bonded in the lobby.

LM:

Yeah. Trying to escape a very noisy, creaky building that was swaying back and forth with a 6.7, whatever it was, earthquake in the middle of the night. Anita said, "Well, I know I've had a nice life. I don't know if we're going to get out of this."

PA:

Well, to keep you going, did the discussion extend to literacy, reading, and instruction?

LM:

Yes. One thing I remember, Anita, every time I talk with you, I get days of follow-up thinking to go through, and there's always a lot of after thinking whenever we talk. One time, we walked around a golf course in California and that was great. But also, when the Common Core was taking hold, you and I had the same reaction. I remember us being in a meeting with people who were talking about the Common Core and implementing the Common Core. Both of us were saying, "Wait. We're just going off track again, forgetting what we know about foundational instruction in reading, in literacy, and especially what we need to be doing with those kids who are not on track, and the importance of teaching people about the instructional process." I remember, I think that was the first time I saw you pretty upset and I thought, "Good. She's upset. I'm upset. OK. I have a compatriot in this fight."

AA:

We have found that again and again, haven't we?

LM:

Yes, we have.

AA:

Where our two paths came together with the same concerns.

LM:

Yeah.

AA:

The same information, yes. It is a combination of those things of the science of reading and the science of teaching, both are needed if we're going to have outcomes.

PA:

Right. Thank you. Our audience would love to hear you both weigh in on the current state of the science of reading in American schools right now, and if it alone is enough. You gave us some little tidbits that would help us understand that maybe not. Is it enough to advance more effective literacy instruction? What are your thoughts, Dr. Moats?

LM:

Well, it's not enough, Pam, if we put it that way. It is very heartening that there is so much interest.

PA:

Yes.

LM:

It's very heartening to me that Emily Hanford's podcast received so much attention. She's being listened to, as she explains a lot of what has gone wrong and what has gone off the rails and why. That's fine. But there's another side to this story and I think Anita and I see it maybe again from slightly differing perspectives but we see the same thing, which is that there is never going to be a pat solution, there's never going to be. It's never going to be simple. It's never going to be as simple as saying, "Oh, we need to inject this component or we need to get back to the 'five pillars' or we need to remind people to be more attentive to using decodable texts," or all these things that come up on the list of things people are supposed to be doing better now.

The issue is that teaching is so difficult and complex. We so underplay what's involved in being an effective teacher. As a society, we are so unfortunately oblivious to or unwilling to elevate the teaching profession to the level of regard and compensation and support that it needs. From both of our angles, from my angle, I really embrace also the angle of instructional science. But the thing I've always written about is that teachers cannot teach these aspects of reading purposefully, and intentionally, unless they themselves have a grasp of the content. It's not as simple as telling them this, that, or the other thing. It's not as simple as handing them a program, although a good program helps a lot, especially for a novice teacher. A novice teacher can learn a lot from systematically applying what is written on the page, if they don't know it, so that's very important for a novice teacher.

But ultimately, there is an interaction between teachers' understanding and their behavior and student outcomes. My thing has been to try to find ways to produce that knowledge and that insight in teachers, and I realize it takes time. You don't do it overnight. The learning process for teachers, which is understudied I think in this area, involves giving people time to grapple with their misconceptions, to grapple with the complexity of our writing system, to grapple with the choices that teachers have to make in the instructional interaction with kids, so that anything that's not scripted on the page, if they're choosing the examples or choosing the feedback, or choosing what task to do next, or judging whether the student has it, all of that comes from an understanding of what's going on with the student, what needs to go on through instruction, what the goals are, and all that. It's not easy.

This is a point I've tried to write about. The Rocket Science paper is an allusion to this but we don't acknowledge in our pre-service training programs, or in the professional development. I mean, I'm hoping LETRS is a departure from what's gone on in the past but we don't acknowledge the complexity of what we're asking people to understand and do. And then, there's the doing part. The doing part and every time I see Anita coach teachers on the doing part, my first thought is always, "Oh, gosh." Every time I watch this, I think, "Could I do this? If I were back in front of a bunch of kids, which I haven't been for a while, how am I going to mess it up, or do a rough approximation of what is called for in a really effective instructional sequence?" It's not easy. We disregard and we undervalue what it takes to build expertise and what it takes to nurture teachers in a nurturing way, not a punitive way, but a nurturing way through that growth process. We have a long way to go with that.

AA:

As I thought about this and one of the things that I did during COVID was I was providing staff development to districts for reading grants that they had. I watched a little more than 200 videos of teachers teaching to give feedback to the teachers and train the principals. I was hit again at just what you talked about is, they had exposure, but not in-depth yet, on the science of reading, and that means decoding, and fluency knowledge, and vocabulary knowledge, and background knowledge, and comprehensive. I mean, think of all of it. I said, "First of all, I think that they need to have very good programs," because I just wrote down what is necessary. It's logically sequenced, it's broken down into obtainable pieces. It has clear goals. It has clarity and demonstration in modeling. It uses both examples and non-examples and moves from demonstration to guided practice to independent practice, and it has deliberate practice, retrieval practice, and space practice. See, a whole body of knowledge.

First of all, both of us have written curriculum materials and we know how much difficulty that is, picking the examples, picking the non-examples, having the routines, having the right language. Oh, my God, it's exhausting. No teacher who has a life after school like dinner and children is going to have time to do what is necessary. I'm hoping that very good curriculum materials come from it, in terms of the design, and in terms of really looking intently at the examples they use and looking at how much practice is necessary, I still am seeing, Louisa, exposure. "Oh, we're supposed to do phonemic awareness in terms of blending, so today, I'll do it."

I made a presentation not too long ago that taught the strategy for reading multisyllabic words that's used in REWARDS. Circle the prefix, circle the suffix, underline the vowels, say the part, say it fast, make it a real word. One person came up afterward and said, "That is such a good strategy. I'll teach it on Monday." I said, "Here's just a little bit of a challenge there, in that we provided 800 words of practice to get the kids to practice, so I don't think you're going to wrap it up on Monday."

It is the design aspects, which for even competent teachers, could be partially handled by very, very good materials, a curriculum, because when you have good curriculum and you have the knowledge that you need about language and everything that you bring to the table and back of it, so that you can make better choices of what you're doing and evaluate it. But if you have a curriculum that's really well-designed, then your cognitive energy can go to the students, to their corrections, or to their errors.

The other half of the coin is delivery and I think that's what you were also alluding at. I see that delivery of content, whether it's in reading or writing or math or science or social studies or health or PE or art or music, it needs to be present starting with attention. In explicit instruction, we talk about a sequence of attention, input, question, response, monitor, feedback, adjust, and that's the rhythm of good teaching. I get their attention; I give them quality input that's unambiguous; I ask for a response; I question; I get a response from them; I give feedback to them. That could be positive feedback of praise, it could be informative, "Here's how to improve upon your performance." It could be corrective and should be if an error occurs and then an adjustment in the lesson. I can go forward, I can't go forward. I have to give more instruction. I have to do this again tomorrow. I need to meet with a small group.

But it is that and I find people who have not taken courses do not have the knowledge at your level of LETRS and of the science of reading, also do not have that knowledge. We have the knowledge. It has to be in a curriculum, so that the teacher has that cognitive support. And then, it needs to have the teaching skills on delivery.

PA:

I just love listening to the both of you talk. We can sum it up with the fact that, yes, reading truly is complex, and often, we like to press the easy button. With reading, we cannot press the easy button. Developing teachers, design, delivery, dedication but dedication to teaching in the manner that's going to ensure that our students gain knowledge in the end, right?

AA:

Well, Pam, I think teachers are dedicated but they're often not dedicated to learning as the outcome and learning has to be constantly. That is how we judge the quality of what we've done. We want to be supportive to children, we want to be equitable to children. We have all of those skills, but in the end, it is the learning that we have to keep our mind on and attend to.

PA:

Thank you so much. Wonderful hearing the two of you discuss this. I'd like to move on and ask you about policy and practice guidelines. The conversation, I think, has really intertwined a lot of the questions that I have, so maybe we can even just extend a little bit more, based on this. Policy and practice guidelines, let's think about that for the science of reading. They often mention the importance of systematic, explicit instruction. We alluded to this already. Yet, why is it the how of teaching reading is getting less emphasis in comparison to the what? You both mentioned already, teachers have some idea of what they're supposed to do, it's that delivery. What's getting in the way of teachers being able to learn that delivery?

LM:

That's a great question, Pam. Anita may be closer to an insightful answer than I. I would speculate that, first of all, it's easier to talk about content, because you can nail it down in a description. We can teach it in LETRS. I mean, LETRS is pretty good for what it does. But what it doesn't do is enable teachers to get enough supervised practice and modeling of how to implement the instructional sequence that Anita just described. We have some videos. They're great. We talk about it, we have lesson frameworks but it's only a step toward the goal and something else needs to happen.

I think it has to do with a lot of different things. One is the willingness of our society to expend resources, building expertise. I think it's this underappreciation across the board of how challenging good teaching is, how challenging it is to develop expertise, what it takes. It may be the tendency of people to grab onto what we call the shiny object in the world of ideas and get distracted by that and get pulled away from the hard work of sticking to the point, which is as Anita said, "Are we getting results? Are we getting the outcomes?" When we get the outcomes, how do we get the outcomes? If my neighbor is getting better outcomes, can I learn from that person or persons? Is there a mechanism within the educational community I'm a part of to help me become more like the more successful teachers without a sense of failure or shame and admitting that I want to be more like the successful teachers?

I mean, there's just so much that seems to get in the way of this approach where there's a community of collaboration where everybody's striving to improve their practice along these lines. It happens in some places, and when it happens, it's magical and wonderful and it's a joyful learning experience for everybody. But that's more the exception. But Anita, I'm sure you have more to say about this.

AA:

Well, so one of your later questions was, "What practices inspire you?" I looked at the states that I have coming up the rest of this year that I'm going to be doing staff development in. Every single one of them has state documents coming out, in regards to teaching of reading, teaching of writing, teaching students with dyslexia. Oregon has documents, Montana, Michigan, Hawaii, Alaska, Ohio, Washington, and I'm certain people listening to this their state does too. They will articulate the five pillars, and things that should be taught within them and things that we shouldn't do like three-queuing systems consistently. But they have one line that says, provide systematic explicit instruction. It isn't even articulated in the documents that are meant to carry it out, and so it's like having a medicine without the doctors' orders about how to take it and so we don't get well. Universities don't always have classes on teaching, where you practice teaching, where people observe you, people give you feedback, you watch videos of yourself, you watch videos of your peers. I mean, it's so possible, and powerful.

Louisa, we both got the new (John) Hattie book, Visible Learning, and direct instruction has high effect size of 0.56, which 0.40, above that, we'd say, "Let's do it." Explicit instruction 0.63, mastery learning 0.67, versus discovery learning for new material 0.27. OK. We know so we should be doing this, so we know the details of it too. But that starts at the teacher training level. Do we have courses that teach you how to teach? Do you practice it? Do you take it into practicums? Do you get feedback? Do you watch yourself teach? Do peers watch yourself teach? All of that, which really can make...I mean, when I taught at university, the midterms were, you had to come into a room, get a content, you had 30 minutes to develop it, and you had to teach it. I mean, that was important was how to teach.

All along the way, we are often assuming that teachers know what kind of practices would be useful. But many times, they're even using practices that would be unequitable, that they had used for so many times that they wouldn't even realize it. Like one lesson I watched, this was not in reading, but science, a science teacher who kept saying, "Got it?" 26 times in the lesson, "Got it?" Not asking a question, not validating it, not having them write on a whiteboard, not having them say something to their partner. They all said, "Got it. Mm-hmm." "Got it?" Well, see, he wasn't aware of it. Or a teacher who calls on volunteers. It's still the most common experience that we saw in videos. I ask a question, I open it to volunteers, three children raise their hands, I call on them, they're the highest-performing, most-proficient in English, most assertive students. Or teachers monitor and they walk around but they don't look at students' work. They don't talk to them. They don't give them feedback.

It's like, Ugh. It is in the doing that we need to focus on but the curriculum design for reading is also extraordinarily complex. And then, we have to deliver it in a way and we must because we both agree that reading and writing are absolutely essential. They're civil rights. If you come to this country, you will learn to read and write so that you can go about our society. We cannot not have the power of this.

PA:

I just listened to the both of you and I just have goosebumps. I really do. I am so inspired by your experiences. But just taking away from what you just shared, the content is important but it is not enough. In my mind, trying to organize everything that you just shared, it's application, application, application, right? Model, practice, collaborate, refine that instructional delivery, then do it again. Application, application, application, model, practice, collaborate. Is that a good summation right there?

LM:

One of my favorite sayings that I have to remind myself of, often, is that telling is not teaching. The teacher that was saying, "Got it? Got it?" was telling and not teaching. It is so fundamental and I'm guilty of said mistake over and over. But it helps to at least know when you catch yourself doing it.

AA:

Yeah. Well, right now, this summer I have six weeks that I'm doing week-long trainings on explicit instruction. I said, "You need to add more retrieval practice here." I mean, you feel really guilty when you're teaching it not to do it. But even for me teaching adults, I have to include everything, so that they see it and then they practice it, so that they will do it and it can happen. It definitely can happen, particularly if they have good curriculum materials and we're able to concentrate on the delivery and the equitable delivery. I think that both of us better have a lot of people we're training out there and you certainly do, Dr. Moats. We'll have to increase the amount of training that goes into explicit instruction.

Here's the interesting thing about our careers. My focus was on instruction and I wrote good curriculum materials in reading. Yours was on, "What do we need for reading?" As you've gone in your career, then you've seen, "Ooh, we need to look at instruction to go with it." We need to have teachers with both paths on the same path.

PA:

Well, I was just about to ask, what are your hopes for the future of reading instruction? That's a perfect segue, don't you think?

AA:

Mm-hmm.

PA:

I guess immediate and long-term. Dr. Moats?

LM:

Well, my hope is that this current movement toward the science of reading will not do itself in with overly simplified solutions to the complex problem, which is the history of a lot of good ideas that have come along in education, and that somehow we'll reach some stability and acceptance across the field of what it takes to develop effective teachers and put in the mix enough background knowledge of the thing that we teach, enough modeling and practice, enough ongoing consultation, and collaboration of teachers with each other within an education setting. I don't know if we can do much to change pre-service education but if that actually began in pre-service education that would be a great leap forward as well. But even the best pre-service programs, no, it's not one and done there with your degree marching out the door. It's a long process. I'm still with my colleagues when we do an institute together, we spend a long time figuring out, "Well, what should we do?" It's problem-solving over and over, trying to employ what we know about the how and the what.

AA:

It's basically, "Do we know what to teach?" Even that has been around for such a long time. Fifty years, we've known a lot about the science of reading and we keep getting it expanded upon and clarified as we go forward. For 50 years, we've known the power of direct or explicit instruction, which then is also expanded over time.

What I'm hoping is, first of all, I am really hoping that we will have a significant, intense instruction in teacher training and treat it like a high-level profession that it is that this is the information needed. Just like my good friend who's a surgeon did a lot of studying and then a lot of practice and he told me about the practice that was not done on live human beings, which I appreciated, so that people coming out of teacher training would have more ability to utilize really good curriculum and would recognize when they needed to look at it from the point of view of the science of reading, look at it in terms of the science of teaching, to make a difference. Now, I've seen school districts who have enacted very good staff development and then have teachers go out and utilize it and come together and video themselves and analyze it and analyze it with a coach and analyze it with the peers and the quality of their instruction has gone up. I know it is teachable, usable, and it makes a difference with student learning.

We know what we want to get to but it is not going to happen in one year. It's going to happen over time. But we can't give it up. Remember Reading First. Reading First basically taught critical content, critical instruction, and then boom ended, and people fell back. But I do see more energy from teachers, really, I mean, who've been involved in LETRS, who do podcasts, who do classes online, a significant higher energy around this, Louisa. I think that both of us are, and many other people are lifting up the energy, and the urgency and we must do this. It is what our country must do if we are going to be a functional democracy. We must do it.

LM:

We must do it. I see that too, Anita. I see energy that comes from people who have been through this learning process, and see the results.

AA:

Right.

LM:

See that this path is extremely rewarding and who are energized all over again and then rededicated to teaching and not threatening to leave the profession, thank goodness.

AA:

Right.

LM:

That's what it takes, this feeling of competence, efficacy, collegiality, purpose, certainly not the money in many cases but it's all these other extremely rewarding consequences for becoming effective at helping kids learn.

AA:

It's why they became teachers and it's what's going to maintain them in teaching is I see the success. How many teachers have you worked with and I've worked with who said, "I've taught 22 years in kindergarten. I've never had children who could actually say that. Yeah, doesn't sound out words, right?" I've taught fifth grade forever and I never had children who came in who had the code down, so that we could work on advanced background knowledge and vocabulary. I mean, it definitely can happen and that is what keeps people in our profession. That's what our profession is about. That is what teacher training must be about and staff development and collegiate interactions with the staff. We have had too much my door is closed, no one's coming in, lack of transparency.

We've not had the joy of being humans in the same field talking and learning from each other, which I see doors flying open and staff development occurring, people getting together to discuss specific points, going out and trying it, getting videos, coming back, looking at their peers' videos. I mean, it's coming alive and it feeds the soul of the human beings involved in teaching and administration and the children and their parents. 

LM:

Amen to all of that.

PA:

Amen. Your comments surrounding teacher learning and instructional refinement is something that never ends and it is always focused on that, the student outcomes.

AA:

Right.

PA:

This is wonderful. From listening to you also, I am getting the gist of the science of teaching should be getting the same, or in some cases, even more attention as the science of reading. Your thoughts on that?

AA:

Here's a reason more. Well, not more. I don't believe that, because the science of reading is very complex and so much to it. But it's not just the science of teaching and design and delivery of instruction needed for reading. How about math? How about science? How about social studies? How about PE? How about art? How about music? Because the goal is very effective teaching, you got it. One day, I taught a lesson on algebra, and it was on the order of operations, and afterwards the teacher said, "Oh, my goodness, they got it." That is the purpose of teaching. That is what teaching is about. It is a body of knowledge that carries over into other situations. I do believe that we need to have more serious attention to management research also because there's disruptions in classrooms that take students' attention away from looking at the letter and hearing the sound, so it's a number of bodies of knowledge.

PA:

Let's add another layer of focus and talk about the importance of structured language teaching, especially for kids who are struggling with an emphasis on language. Oral language is so important and language in general as we're teaching. What can you say about that?

AA:

I'm turning it over to Louisa because she is queen of language.

LM:

Well, in a nutshell, it means that the content of what we teach explicitly enables kids to understand, be aware of process, rapidly and accurately process different layers of language that are all represented in print, and that all are involved in comprehension. It just means that we explicitly teach what the speech sounds are, we explicitly teach how they're represented in our alphabetic writing system, we explicitly teach what the morphemes or meaningful parts are. We explicitly teach the relationship between what's a syllable and what's a morpheme because they're a little different. We explicitly teach how a sentence works and how to write one and if you are reading a difficult sentence, what to do to find the nucleus of meaning in that and on into paragraph structure and text structure. The other element not only is the what but it's also the continuous process. I think this is embedded in everything Anita teaches and models, the process of exchange between what the teacher says and what the students say back, or to each other, or chorally or however it's going to be done.

That structured language teaching means that the language used is overt, observable, it's modeled, it's responded to, and it's a constant verbal exchange. It's not quiet, it's not so low. It's not supposed to go on covertly inside the kid's head that these connections are to be made. It's auditory verbal exchange with whatever kinesthetics you want to put in the mix.

AA:

Basically, the foundation of reading and writing is language because it is language?

LM:

Yes, it is language. It is not visual imprinting, right? I think this is a key idea in the science of reading that reading is not primarily visual it's linguistic in nature, and so there are many implications to that statement.

PA:

OK. Thank you so much. That was a great deal and so well said. Looking back on your careers, thus far, thankfully, there's much more here for both of you. What do you wish you could tell your earlier selves? Dr. Moats, you go first.

LM:

Gee, that's a hard one. I don't like to think about my earlier self that much. I think I would have said to myself the process of continuous learning is extremely rewarding and I should always choose opportunities that offer that possibility of collaboration with colleagues, learning from mentors, making the most of those opportunities. Because I think as a younger person, I was not fully aware of how important that is, how important going through all of this in partnership, or as a student, either in partnership with colleagues or as a student of people who know more, and who are more experienced is, as we come up in the field, I would've liked being more aware of that.

PA:

Thank you. Dr. Archer.

AA:

What would've you told the 30-year-old Anita Archer, 46 years ago, as she was headed to teach at University of Oregon? "Stay the course, stay the course, stay the course." Now, the reason why I said that was that I had already been exposed to a body of knowledge on very explicit instruction. I'd already been exposed to a body of researchers that were looking into the decoding aspects, the vocabulary aspects, and so forth. I said to my younger self, "Now, more knowledge will be added and you must continuously learn. You must." I have to tell you, I'm certain this is true with Louisa, that now I read more books, listen to more podcasts, spend more of my day learning than I ever did at 30. But I said to the younger person, "Stay the course," which was extraordinarily wise because later I went to Southern California, San Diego, and whole language was totally being birthed and fed.

I just said to myself, "Remember, stay the course." Use what we know because in the United States we have often gotten off course and gotten onto other things that sound good but that they don't deliver what children really, really, really need, and we have to be careful. We have to constantly be asking ourselves this. One of the things I'm doing now this summer is I'm speaking at Mount St. Joseph's University to their 60 doctoral students and saying, "What do you do when you don't have an answer? Well, first you try to find research that directly answers that question. But sometimes that's not possible. So, then, what do you do? You look at the task that you are interested in and analyze the task and what's necessary for the task. If that is not enough, then you look at research that might inform but has not been directly done on that. But we have to, in other words, keep learning and keep being very sensitive to always looking at what will work, what will make a difference for children."

PA:

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Archer and Dr. Moats. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. It's been inspiring and I know I speak for educators everywhere when I say we thank you for your contributions to literacy learning. Please tell our listeners how they can learn more about you. Do you both have a website that you can direct our listeners to? Dr. Archer then Dr. Moats, please share.

AA:

Mine's easy, www.explicitinstruction.org with videos that you're welcome to utilize in your own trainings. Louisa, I just want to share something. So, I had a file on Louisa Moats, and Louisa, these are all of the presentations you've made over many years to Reading Rockets. There I said to myself, now, I have all your books, your book two, and all your articles but it's not hard to find Louisa Moats online. But they were in a nice big folder, so I read them this week before we met.

LM:

Yeah. Oh, Anita, I hope you weren't bored.

AA:

Wasn't bored once.

All right. But it shows the complexity because every one of those was on an issue like high-frequency words, morphographs that you should teach the meanings of. It just really illustrated that this is not a one and done. This is not exposed and not teach deeply that the complexity is great.

LM:

For her. Well, yeah, I do that. Thank you. My website is www.louisamoats.com. On there, I have a lot of the presentations and articles, and a few articles by other people that I think are really helpful and important, that I've had permission to post. There we go, so that's it. Anita's videos are fabulous. If anyone has not checked those out, they're just wonderful and it's a great service that she made those and posted them. Thank you.

AA:

Thank you, Louisa. You have totally changed reading in the United States and you are deeply honored.

LM:

Well, you too, Anita. I have the greatest respect for you and everything that you have done and continue to do. It's wonderful.

PA:

Just listening to your conversation, it's obvious that you have a vast amount of respect for each other. It's just so appreciative to be able to hear that you all share your thoughts and ideas.

LM:

We really do. I have such deep respect for Anita and Anita is so kind. It's also, we didn't talk about this so much, but Anita's soul, her spirit, her kindness are legendary, and I think it's transmitted in everything that she does. That's the intangible thing that also makes her such a revered teacher of others.

PA:

I'd like to say thank you from all educators everywhere. We appreciate both of you, Dr. Archer, Dr. Moats. This is Pam Austin, bringing the best thought leaders in education directly to you. Please join us next month for another great EDVIEW360 podcast.

Narrator:

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