In this interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito, Dr. Betty Porter Walls discusses the many insights she has gained during her nearly 60-year career in education. Those insights can help us all as we begin this new school year.

Recently, I interviewed my long-time friend and colleague, Dr. Betty Porter Walls. Betty has completed nearly sixty years of active service in the field of education. That is a remarkable accomplishment. She has taken on many roles over those years. At the start of her career, Betty spent a few years in the classroom. However, she spent the vast majority of her career in Central Office positions. She has been a curriculum coordinator, a school principal, a human resource director, and a director of state and federal programs. However, the position that has been closest to her heart is that involving professional development, including being a university professor. I’ve had the honor of collaborating with Betty on numerous projects, including the St. Louis Public School’s BTAP (Beginning Teacher Academy Program), annual read-ins at Harris-Stowe State Teachers’ College’s preschool, and several book giveaways sponsored by the St. Louis Regional Literacy Association. Betty has done presentations at the national and international levels. In our hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, Betty is a beloved fixture on the St. Louis Literacy Scene. Let’s learn more about her and hear what she has to say about what it takes to be a successful educator in 2025.

BIOGRAPHY Betty Porter Walls, Ph.D.

Dr. Betty Porter Walls, President of Walls Educational Services, is a former school district administrator, professor of literacy at Harris-Stowe State University (HSSU) and University of Missouri-Columbia (UMC). She’s past president of the Missouri Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (MACTE) and serves as a board member of state and local affiliates of the International Literacy Association (ILA). A social justice and literacy advocate, Betty is a member of the ‘1st Class Educators’ consulting firm. Internationally, Betty has presented in Hawaii, Iceland, Germany, and Senegal. She presented “Literacy is a Family Affair” at a Hawaii International Conference on Education (HICE). Betty serves on the Emerson Electric Scholarship Committee and the Educational Advisory Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis which recognized her as Educator of the Year.

Here is a link to the YouTube Interview:

Here are the time-stamped talking points for the interview (so you can go to the sections that interest you the most first)

LINK to one of Betty’s partners, the St. Louis Black Authors of Children’s Literature.

LINK to the St. Louis Fed Honors Program press release.

ST. LOUIS – Betty Porter-Walls is the recipient of the 2024 Economic Educator Advisory Board Educator of the Year Award from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The award is given annually to recognize a board member for his or her commitment to economic and financial education.

Porter-Walls, retired associate professor at Harris-Stowe State University, was honored at a May 8 dinner at the St. Louis Fed for helping to connect educators with St. Louis Fed teaching resources. She has served on the St. Louis Fed’s Educator Advisory Board for many years, said Eva Johnston, senior economic education specialist and board coordinator.

The board is composed of local teachers who review curriculum, attend meetings, present at events and contribute in other ways to the success of the St. Louis Fed economic education program, Econ Ed at the Fed.

“Betty Porter-Walls is an inspiring, devoted educator who is a role model and motivator for teachers across a wide range of curricula. She is tireless in her efforts to help teachers understand and adopt the best practices to help their students,” Johnston said. “We are deeply grateful for her work on our Economic Educator Advisory Board.”

St Louis Fed Economic Education Officer Scott Wolla expressed his gratitude for the service of Porter-Walls and Johnston, who is retiring from the St. Louis Fed on June 30.

“Eva has been an exceptional economic education practitioner and ‘teacher of teachers’ in her 10 years at the St. Louis Fed. She has inspired hundreds of educators across the nation to delve deeper into how they teach economics and created lessons and other resources that made their teaching more effective and engaging for students,” Wolla said. “Her positivity, encouragement and expertise will be missed by the many educators she inspired and all of us at the St. Louis Fed.”

Among her many activities, Porter-Walls serves as the facilitator of the Beginning Teacher Assistance Program for the St. Louis Public Schools and was president of the Missouri Association of Colleges for Teacher Education in 2019. She also has organized “read-ins” for International Reading Day.

In addition to teacher professional development consulting for 1st Class Educator Group, Porter-Walls has presented at the Write to Learn, Early Learning, and Interface (STEM) Conferences in Missouri and nationally for the International Literacy Association, National Council of Teachers of English, National Network for Educational Renewal, and the American Educational Research Association.

Internationally, Porter-Walls has provided professional development in Iceland, Germany and Senegal. She presented her noted “Literacy is a Family Affair Project” at the Hawaii International Conference on Education.

She has received numerous honors/awards, including those from the governor of Missouri, Harris-Stowe State University, University of Missouri-Columbia, B’Nai B’rith and the St. Louis American newspaper.

The St. Louis Fed’s Econ Ed at the Fed offers more than 400 free educational resources about economics, personal finance, money and banking. In addition, the St. Louis Fed’s Econ Lowdown™ teacher portal allows teachers to create a syllabus of resources and assign the syllabus to students. The St. Louis Fed’s lessons, videos, online courses and more are free and available for pre-K through college, as well as for parents and other consumers.

Final Thoughts

I know that for Betty, of all the roles she has taken on over the years, the one she likes best is that of teacher, and teacher of teachers. Ever since the First Grade Studies were published, we’ve known that teachers make more of a difference than programs. Over the years, Betty has consistently made the most of every program she has been involved in. She is always open to new ideas. We would all do well to follow the advice she gave in the interview (tape position 22:27). She says, “Education is about the Big R, relationships. It’s about treating people with respect. You must remember that you can’t be a leader in an instructional program unless you understand that you’re not just teaching reading, writing, or social studies. You’re actually teaching people. You must respect the child, the person sitting in front of you. Only then can you respect the material.” These are words that can guide us all as we begin the new school year.  

Happy Reading and Writing,

Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the center taking flak from all sides)

Copyright 2025 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author’s views and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.

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Sam Bommarito shared a memory.

This memory from P David Pearson https://www.facebook.com/pdavid.pearson popped up today.

It’s about a poem he wrote. The timing couldn’t have been better. I just had a conversation today with Tun Rasinski https://www.facebook.com/timothy.rasinski and David Harrison https://www.facebook.com/david.l.harrison.37 about the numerous uses of poetry in reading instruction. Poems are meaning-rich, and they are often short. Those facts can make them a powerful tool for teaching literacy. It is a tool that is too often ignored. Tim, David, and I plan to have future conversations around this untapped literacy resource. In the meantime, I hope you have fun with David’s poem. Dr. Sam!

1 Year Ago

See your memories

P David Pearson

August 26, 2024 ·

One of the things I have been doing in retirement is writing poems–mainly doggerel that aspires to be amusing. This one, though, pleases me because it memorializes an all too real everyday routine. I call it Mobile Lover. You may recognize some of the characters!

I have a mobile lover

Whose name’s Potential Spam.

She calls from sites exotic,

Like Mumbai or Siam.

She calls at any hour

Of the night or of the day,

But sometimes when I answer,

She has nothing much to say.

At other times, it’s different.

And once she starts to speak,

I cannot seem to stop her;

She runs a steady streak.

Once her spiel is finished,

I politely say, “no thanks.”

And then she keeps on talking,

I think she is a crank!

But I hate to cut the tie,

Say, “no more calls at all.”

For if I take that action,

Then who, I ask, will call?

Who then will be my lover,

And call me night and day?

Be faithful and devoted

To endless mobile play?

I’ve heard that there are others

Who enjoy a chat or holler.

So, I’m trying to connect

With one named Unknown Caller.

pdavidpearson ©pdavidpearson…, all rights reserved

Dri Sam is taking a break this weekend to have some family fun time.  The blog will resume next week. See you then!

Dr. Sam

When it comes to Literacy Practices, I don’t want Old Wine in New Bottles by Dr. Sam Bommarito

When it comes to literacy practices, I don’t want old wine in new bottles. Unfortunately, that is what is being offered up by what I have come to call the social media version of the Science of Reading (SOR). They claim they have a new paradigm. They claim that those of us who question that paradigm are too caught up in the old paradigm to properly understand the “true” path to improving literacy instruction. They say that all of what has come before failed. They take a scorched-earth approach to all that has come before. They effectively ban practices that don’t follow their particular model of literacy. Centrists like myself reject going to extremes and embrace the idea of nuanced approaches. My op-ed today is designed to serve as an introduction to the next two parts of my series about literacy instruction. Those next two parts are as follows:

The history of Structured Literacy and Direct Instruction. Direction Instruction as an instructional method vs direct instruction as a marketing tool.

Let’s not let profit get in the way of real progress. An analysis of what Billy Mollaso and others have had to say, in his blog entitled “Profit over Progress? When Market Hype Masquerades as Science, Kids Lose”   

https://readingrecovery.org/profit_over_progress/.   My take on this is that some SOR advocates seem intent on “selling their product”. Too often, they ignore or discredit alternative approaches.

My next two blogs in this series will look at these two topics in depth. Right now, I want to give a quick overview of where I’m going with this part of the series. Those of us in the literacy world have tried approaches that overdo phonics (synthetic phonics) and underdo comprehension. It has not worked out well. After over a decade of mandated synthetic phonics, England has failed to improve reading instruction in a way that improves student comprehension. In the U.S., programs like No Child Left Behind dumped BILLIONS of dollars into programs that emphasized mainly code-based approaches. There is no evidence that student comprehension improved. Districts that opted for programs that mainly emphasized meaning-based approaches helped many students. They were not the total failures that social media would have you believe. HOWEVER, they did not help students who need direct systematic instruction in phonics. So, this approach also failed to result in improving all students’ (most students’) reading comprehension. Centrists like myself are saying that the one thing we’ve never tried is to draw the most effective practices from all sides and to allow districts to construct programs that draw on the effective practices that best fit their population. There are folks out there that are trying to do just that, but unfortunately the scorched earth policy that some (not all) folks in the SOR community are taking is standing in the way of that progress.

The overall narrative of the scorched earth folks goes like this. Balanced literacy programs, especially like those carried out by folks like Lucy Calkins, were a total, utter failure. We need to replace them with our version of SOR.

One of the problems with that position is that NAEP scores remained flat after BL came on the scene, and they stayed that way. How could BL cause a problem that the NAEP scores indicate never happened. I’ll refer readers to the work of Paul Thomas about the phony reading crisis. Paul also points out that the data was presented in a way that exaggerated the problem. My take on all this is that the folks making the claims that BL resulted in poor scores and the reading crisis are simply wrong. They were interested in getting rid of all that came before them and replacing it with their vision of what literacy is. They showed little or no interest in fixing what had come before. That fact leads me to point out one of the missed opportunities in this ongoing debate.

Today, many literacy leaders from the BL camp have begun modifying their programs. SOR practices are finding their way into Balanced Literacy Programs. Yet so far, there has not been a reciprocal set of actions from the SOR folks. Instead of drawing on things like teaching comprehension (as opposed to checking for comprehension) and taking full advantage of the symbiotic nature of writing and reading, they ignore and ban practices that don’t fit their paradigm. That happens even when the practices work.

Which brings me back to my point about old wine in new bottles. Too often what SOR folks are trying to sell is simply old wine in new bottles. We’ve already tried that path. I’d like to suggest a different paradigm. It is one that embraces effective research based on practices for all sides. The next two blogs in the series will talk about that in depth.

Dare to Dream

Dr. Sam (The guy in the middle, taking flak from both sides!)

This post is an introduction to the next two parts ot the series:

Let’s Stop the Nonsense and Start Using Common Sense to Guide Our Reading Practices

Copyright 2025 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.

Blast from the past. This blog was posted at the start of school last year. It has been updated to reflect my current views about how to get your literacy program off to a good start.

Dr. Sam’s Advice for the Start of the School Year: Follow the Child, not the Program

Getting your literacy program off to a good start.

For the past five years, I’ve advocated for a centrist approach to literacy instruction. That means using ideas, practices, and programs from all sides. What should that look like as we start the school year? What that should look like is allowing teachers to follow both the Art and Science of reading instruction.

First, teachers should take care to directly and explicitly teach the students strategies they need for both decoding and comprehension. That means using a gradual release model. Most importantly, that means making sure strategy instruction goes beyond naming strategies or applying strategies. Strategy instruction needs to include helping students INTERNALIZE AND USE THE STRATEGIES. A simple way to check whether this is happening is to periodically ask students to share what strategies/combinations of strategies they’ve used lately. That thought —that they need to learn to use combinations of strategies — is often overlooked. However, it is supported by research going back as far as the NRP report.

Explicit, systematic phonics instruction should be a necessary but not sufficient component of each district’s literacy program. It can take the form of a synthetic phonics program. For most students, that is the program that best works for them. It should also systematically teach them orthographic knowledge and how to use it to unlock words. Take care about program implementation. There is some research indicating that when teachers teach orthography, students often fail to learn it and, most importantly, fail to use it.  Make certain that any program you adopt does.  I’ll say more about this in a minute.

There are two problems. 

• First, the exclusive mandated use of synthetic phonics programs has produced unclear results. Too often, what happens is that decoding improves, but comprehension does not. Read the research from England. Read the research from the United States indicating that reading achievement scores have remained flat for decades, including the era since the SOR movement has taken hold. As a matter of fact, NAEP scores dropped last year. Check out what folks like Bowers, Johnson, Thomas, Wyse, and Bradbury have reported about the research cited in the current rush to use what some call SOR. In addition to these critics, some folks in the SOR community have championed alternatives to OG-style synthetic phonics, such as linguistics-based phonics. Programs using that form of phonics have consistently outperformed the more traditional OG-based phonics. Also, check out what Seidenberg has said about OG and its limits and limitations. A close look at ALL the research will indicate that it is far from settled science. Choosing what form of phonics program to use is often a buyer-beware situation.
• Second, some students thrive on using an analytic approach to phonics rather than a synthetic phonics approach. Yet, despite this, these students are often denied access to this approach. The Achilles’ heel of the analytic approach is that it is sometimes done in a way that is not systematic. There is a simple fix to that problem. When using “follow the child” schemes like those advocated by folks like Billy Molasso, teachers need to track what sounds have been taught and periodically fill in any gaps that may arise. As a centrist, I strongly advocate ensuring that children have access to all forms of phonics so that the program can fit each child’s needs. Well-designed three-tiered instruction can allow this to happen. So…, my advice around this issue is simple. Make sure you fit the students’ phonics instruction to what each student needs. Make sure that both synthetic and analytic phonics instruction is available to students as needed. Both these forms of instruction can scaffold students to use the orthographic information readers need to decode text effectively. LINK, LINK

Motivation matters. Recently, there has been some pointed criticism of SOR programs regarding motivation. Teaching reading should be done in a way that encourages the student to want to read. Rasinski’s research around repeated reading and his newly minted Fluency Development Lesson provides instruction that builds fluency and comprehension while motivating students of all ages to want to read. Work by folks like Eric Litwin, Ann Chase, Chase Young, and David Harrison has clearly demonstrated the efficacy of using music, poetry, and Readers’ Theatre to develop the fluency skills readers need. When I am asked what to do for older readers who have not yet developed their sound-symbol knowledge, I often recommend that teachers investigate ways to use music, poetry, and Reader’s Theatre to build that information. It is a win/win situation since the readers not only develop the needed sound-symbol knowledge but are also motivated to use it to read.

Wide reading in self-selected material matters. Somewhere in the rancor of the current debate about reading instruction, an important fact has been ignored. Wide reading in self-selected texts builds readers’ background knowledge, which is crucial to reading comprehension and builds a student’s vocabulary. In the process of reading self-selected materials that the student finds relevant to their lives, students’ reading improves.

Finally, remember that building background knowledge is necessary but not sufficient to teach comprehension LINK, LINK. There are decades of research demonstrating that teaching students to  UNDERSTAND AND USE comprehension strategies does dramatically improve students’ reading. Even SOR advocates like Shanahan have pointed out the flaws in Willingham’s suggestion that teachers spend less time teaching comprehension strategies LINK.

I could add more things to the to-do list for getting off on the right foot this school year, but I think I’ve given you a good starter set of ideas. I’m currently lining up other educators to talk about how to get literacy instruction off to a good start. At the end of the day, my answer to that remains: use practices informed by all the research. That includes direct, explicit instruction in both decoding and comprehension, balancing the time spent on decoding and comprehension instruction LINK, and making motivation a key component in all that you do. I hope you have a wonderful start to your school year.

Until next week, Happy Reading and Writing.

Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the middle taking flak from all sides)

Copyright 2025 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author’s views and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.

We can’t give teachers mandates for teaching decoding and comprehension that exceed the instructional time available in the classroom: Part 3 of the Common Sense Series by Dr. Sam Bommarito

Time on Task

Instructional time is a finite commodity. It is often said that you should not rob Peter to pay Paul. Yet many districts are routinely doing that, especially at the elementary level. I’ve talked to teachers carrying out mandated phonics programs who find there is little to no time left for things like teaching comprehension if they carry out the phonics instruction program the district has mandated. Compounding the problem of some districts over-teaching phonics is that research does not give a clear answer to the very important question of how much time is the right amount of time for teaching various phonics components. Consider this recent research paper from the Scientific Studies of Reading journal: A Meta-Analysis on the Optimal Cumulative Dosage of Early Phonemic Awareness Instruction. Here is an excerpt from an Educational Weekly article by Sarah Schwartz reporting about this paper:

Schwartz goes on to say that there is no magic number.

In addition, the comprehension activities that accompany many code-based kits/programs do not always follow what research around best practices in reading comprehension calls for.   Capin et al., in their 2024 study Reading Comprehension Instruction: Evaluating Our Progress Since Durkin’s Seminal Study, said the following:

“Integrated analyses revealed that reading comprehension instruction infrequently aligned with research-based practices. Findings revealed that, on average, 23% of instructional time during reading/language arts instruction was dedicated to reading comprehension. Like Durkin’s study (1978–1979), the results indicated that teachers spent much of this time engaging in initiation-response-evaluation conversation patterns rather than engaging students in extensive discussion of text or teaching knowledge or practices (e.g., text structure, reading comprehension strategies) that support reading comprehension.”

In a nutshell, the above excerpt is saying that simply asking and answering questions about what is read is not enough for the comprehension component of instruction. You must also engage in extensive discussion or teach concepts such as text structure or reading comprehension strategies. I’ve written about that before LINK, LINK and will talk more about this in future entries for this series.

So, where does this leave the classroom teacher in terms of what she should teach and when she should teach it? In my opinion, it leaves her between a rock and a hard place. When states mandate programs without considering how much instructional time will be needed to carry them out, they leave the teacher with the choice of using up most of their instructional time on phonics, leaving them little or no time for comprehension. When states mandate programs that only check comprehension (Ask and answer questions) instead of teaching comprehension (reading comprehension strategies, etc.), they leave the teachers with a blueprint for failure. When the kids are given higher-level comprehension questions, they often lack the necessary tools to answer them. Teaching children to use those tools should be a critical part of every literacy program.  To add insult to injury, when the mandated programs fail, the blame falls on the teacher rather than on the inadequate programs that many of them are being asked to carry out.

Let’s look at some commonsense answers to this situation:

Common sense suggests that the phonics programs picked must have demonstrated success with students like those being served and demonstrated the ability to achieve that success within the typical time allotments used for phonics instruction.

Common sense dictates that program success in comprehension should demonstrate that the program has been successful in teaching students to use the tools they need to comprehend.  The program needs to have demonstrated success with students similar to those being served by each district. They must also demonstrate the ability to achieve that success within the typical time allotments used for literacy instruction. Let’s end this era where many of the most experienced teachers are leaving the field out of frustration, partly because of the way ill-conceived mandates are being carried out. LINK.

I began writing this blog 5 years ago because of complaints from teachers who were forced to give up many things that were working, dispose of them and then replace them with magic kits, many of which simply didn’t work. Wouldn’t it have made much more sense to have them keep what was working and tweak what wasn’t? I remain steadfast in my belief that the real solution to our reading problems does not lie in adopting either phonics-based or meaning-based approaches. It lies instead in allowing districts to use things from both approaches and put together a system of instruction that fits their particular population.

Dare to Dream

Dr. Sam (The guy in the middle, taking flak from both sides!)

Copyright 2025 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.

This post is part three of a blog series entitled: Let’s Stop the Nonsense and Start Using Common Sense to Guide Our Reading Practices.