Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading: A Way to Empower Teachers to Help Kids by Dr. Sam Bommarito: Part Four- My Recommendations and Why I’m Making Them ©2026
This blog summarizes my position on Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading. I’ll begin with my recommendations. What does artfully teaching the Science of Reading mean? It means giving teachers and districts the freedom to choose research-based practices and use them to create district curriculum and the teachers’ daily lessons that flow from them. Within the district curriculum, teachers need to be allowed to apply the art of teaching. That means they should be allowed to decide the best ways to fit the practices the district has identified to meet the needs of their various students. They must be allocated enough teaching time to ensure that is possible. I can already see the comment section filling with remarks like, “Your recommendation is pie in the sky and impossible.” I’m going to outline steps that make it totally doable.
Step One: States and school administrators should adopt support models like those in LINK. Part of Jeff Austin’s role is to help districts create curriculum. In the first three minutes of the interview, he gives a brief overview of what that role entails. You can also get a more complete picture of what he does by reading the blog that accompanies the interview. Instead of mandating curriculum based on each district’s adherence to the belief systems of particular lobbying groups, states should help districts create curriculum designed to meet the needs of their particular population. State populations are far too diverse to create one-size-fits-all solutions at the state level. Instead, states should help local districts create curricula that serve each district’s current and future needs.
Step Two: As districts create curriculum, they should seek research-based methods that best fit their population. It’s common sense to look to successful districts with similar populations. One size does not fit all. States should ensure the methods they choose are developmentally appropriate for the children they serve. That is especially true when considering whether kindergarten should really become the new first grade. Read what Eric Litwin had to say that was related to this topic LINK. Also see some practical ideas Julia Lindsey had about teaching early literacy LINK.
Step Three: States and school administrators should recognize that some widely held beliefs do not stand up to scrutiny.
States should be cautious about what I call the Social Media version of the Science of Reading. Before jumping on the bandwagon of adopting narrow-focus approaches, state legislators would do well to have their own experts examine what the state tests require vs. what the so-called miracle programs provide. Such an examination would show that when states create mandates, they should judge program success by achievement test results, not by adherence to any one reading theory or reading model. Rachel Gabriel has pointed out that many districts are experiencing buyer’s remorse. That is because the miracle results being used to sell districts on particular approaches run into the problem that approaches based mainly on synthetic phonics do not result in gains on state test scores. Narrow approaches improve decoding but not comprehension. We’ve known that since the very first NRP report. Here is a link to Tom Loveless’s views on that topic: LINK
Step Four: District administrators and state legislators should be aware that:
It takes more than just improving synthetic phonics instruction to improve district achievement
Consider this slide from Dr. Tim Rasinski’s Keynote LitCon2025. He used Duke et.al.’s Reading model and added effect sizes for each component. BTW, I view Duke’s model as building on the reading rope research and taking the reading rope model to the next logical level. In my view, that is a perfect example of what research is about—building on the foundation of the old to discover something new.
ESPECIALLY NOTICE THE EFFECT SIZE FOR BRIDGING PROCESSES AS THEY APPEARED FROM THE PRECEDING SLIDE
These bridging processes are at the heart of why repeated reading OF MEANINGFUL TEXT has such large effect sizes. Rasinski has a very large research base demonstrating the efficacy of using repeated reading. See his website and Google Scholar page to get a sense of the depth and breadth of that research base: WEBSITE, GOOGLE SCHOLAR. I recognize the original NRP reported that repeated reading did not have much of an effect on fluency or comprehension. However, that older report is based on only a few studies and indicated that further research was needed. In light of the extensive research by Rasinski and others, the effect size of repeated reading is among the largest of any process reported in the above model. Overall, these results explain why doing activities like repeated reading, which is the heart of Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading, is something districts should build into their reading curriculum.
STEP FIVE: REVISIT AND REANALYSE CLAIMS ABOUT WHAT THE ORIGINAL NRP REPORT REALLY SHOWED.
Johnson’s new book LINK offers a good explanation of what the original NRP really showed. So does Paul Thomas’s book LINK about ending the reading wars. Both researchers have blogged extensively about the limits and limitations of the Science of Reading movement, especially some of the claims being made about it on social media.
Johnson Thomas
https://www.youtube.com/c/DrAndyJohnson https://radicalscholarship.com
https://thereadinginstructionshow.substack.com/ https://radicalscholarship.com
Based on what these two researchers have to say, is it accurate to say that Balanced Literacy has failed and that Balanced Literacy uses many failed practices?
NO!
That myth that balanced literacy failed grew out of a cauldron of social media posts. See what this recent study about such posts had to say. I also provide one of many examples of very successful balanced reading projects (other examples include both workship and reading recovery projects worldwide):
The upshot of the two slides above is that social media posts tended to take us/them positions. That leads both sides to use straw men. The result of that was disinformation/misinformation. It’s hard to understand how “failed” balanced literacy practices resulted in some of the best scores in the state. Or why the supposed bad effects of balanced literacy never resulted in a drop in the NAEP. Several years into the balanced literacy movement, NAEP scores remained essentially flat. Both Johnson and Thomas have made the point over and over that there is no “crisis” in education caused by balanced literacy. There are definitely problems to be solved in literacy instruction, so let’s turn to what science is and isn’t. Then we will look at the common ground emerging in current exchanges about the best ways to teach literacy.
STEP SIX- Include both comprehension and decoding activities throughout the entire process of teaching reading. Preschool children are perfectly capable of making inferences. That means we shouldn’t limit their comprehension work to lower-level comprehension. Instead, upper-level comprehension work needs to be included, even at the earliest reading instruction levels. The learn-to-decode-first, then-learn-to-comprehend approach is not recommended. Approaching instruction that way risks creating word callers instead of word readers. LINK, LINK.
LINK.
WHAT FOLLOWS ARE SOME KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM PEARSON’S ABOVE YOUTUBE POST LINK:
SCIENCE IS NOT ABOUT PROVING WHAT YOU BELIEVE; IT’S ABOUT DISCOVERING NEW THINGS. DONE PROPERLY, SCIENCE SHOULD RESULT IN RESHAPING YOUR BELIEFS AS NEW INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE.
I think that two-minute post from Dr. Neal Tyson, a well-credentialed researcher, really brings home the point that science is a way to discover new things. Science is not about proving what you believe.
MY TAKE- Scientific conclusions are written in Xerox, not in stone.
STEP SIX- Use the latest brain research. That research demonstrates that the brain is a problem-solving machine. The evidence from this study supports the theory that the brain uses two routes depending on familiarity. THE BRAIN ACCESSES REAL WORDS USING THE PARTS OF THE BRAIN THAT ENGAGE MEMORY AND MEANING. The key is that the brain uses more than just letter-sound information. Yet SOR folks continue to assert that using that other information is a bad thing. From my own teaching experience, I find this study supports the idea of cross-checking and using all the clues when figuring out new words. Here is a LINK to my blog about that study.
One of my readers pointed out that the brain research the SOR folks use to support OG and other similar programs was done based on an older view of how the brain works. That older view claims that at the word level, the brain relies almost exclusively on information about sound. The new brain model (which was not available when OG was created) suggests the brain uses more than sound information when encountering new words. That evidence supports the notion that the brain uses two routes depending on familiarity. THE BRAIN ACCESSES REAL WORDS USING THE PARTS OF THE BRAIN THAT ENGAGE MEMORY AND MEANING. So, reading real words involves more than simply storing the code. Hrubry and others have explored similar ideas about how the brain works LINK, LINK, LINK. So there is a large body of research that suggests the word-level strategies found in many balanced literacy programs do have merit.
STEP SEVEN: Take advantage of the symbiotic relationship between reading and writing. Many folks are now focusing on the best ways to teach writing. I’ve worked with some of those folks, including Calkins, Mermelstein, and Stienberg. I also studied others like Nell Duke. What I find in common is that they treat writing as a form of thinking. They use upper-level thinking from the very outset of writing instruction. This kind of approach is supported by the newest brain research.
My regular readers know that for the past year I’ve been involved in setting up a program in South Africa using the ideas of Rasinski and others about how to artfully teach the science of reading. We just finished the training of those teachers. In the next phase of the project, the teachers will begin working with 1000-plus South African children.
That next phase includes using writing to help students develop fluency. Minda Marchall, the on-site coordinator for the project, recently reported on what’s already happening. LINK.
I am in regular contact with Minda. One thing she said was that the students were learning phonics by writing their own stories and poems. They didn’t even realize that they were doing phonics, but they were. The teachers learned how to help students to write their own stories and poems using the activities/techniques they learned from Mary Jo Fresch’s book, The Phonics Handbook and Rasinski et al.’s book, Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading.
IN CONCLUSION
I am urging everyone to adopt a nuanced stance on how to teach reading (and writing!). I’m urging each of you to have conversations, not debates. I’m urging you to consider joining the movement to:
Artfully Teach the Science of Reading.
In my opinion, it’s the best Way to Empower Teachers so they can help kids.
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Dr. Sam
The guy in the middle taking flak from all sides
Coming up soon: Interviews with Laura Robb, Bruce Howett and Rachel Gabriel. (Please note I am talking to people from both sides)
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