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.

My thoughts about research that challenges some of the Science of Reading’s Interpretations of Brain Research: A blog post by Dr. Sam Bommarito

One of the more recent posts about brain research was made by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, famous for his work in physics. His post was made to his Facebook Group on June 30^th. His public group has almost 320,000 followers. He is a world-renowned, well-published expert in physics —a scientist in every sense of the word. One of his posts contained an enry by Dr. ASKY, a well known medical doctor.

In his post, Dr. Tysen quotes Dr ASKY who said:

“Reading seems simple, but a new meta-analysis by neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute reveals just how complex the brain’s activity is during reading. By analyzing data from 163 brain imaging studies with over 3,000 readers, the researchers mapped how the brain dynamically processes every stage of reading—from letters to full texts—showing that different brain areas are involved depending on the reading task.”

My takeaway from this is that it seems to support the traditional views about reading words.  Words are first decoded by sounding out (think “b-a-t”). After several exposures, the words are then stored in a different part of the brain as sight words. These are the whole words, words that we know by sight (think “bat”). Sentence-level reading and reading of longer texts are processed in different ways and in different parts of the brain. As Dr. Tyson indicates, “The Study Reveals reading is a complex, flexible brain process involving multiple neural networks.”

The name of the study is The ‘reading’ brain: Meta-analytic insight into functional activation during reading in adults. Here is a link to the study  LINK

Here are some highlights from that study:

The scientists at the Max Planck Institute, where the study was conducted, are not alone in viewing reading as a complex, interactive process. In 2023, I did several interviews with Dr. George Hruby on the topic of brain research. Here is a LINK to one of those interviews. The talking points from that interview are listed below:

As you can see, Dr. Hruby also reports that different reading activities are stored and processed in different parts of the brain.  

These are far from the only criticisms of SOR claims about neuroscience but they are ones that I think are important for all literacy folks to know. MY TAKE on all this is that science around the teaching of reading (and writing!) is far from settled. I’ve had many online conversations with SOR advocates who make the claim that readers sound out all their words, even their sight words. Brain research simply does not support that view. In addition, historically, one-size-fits-all solutions have proven ineffective. See what Dr. Hruby said about that in his famous video LINK.

I’ve been teaching since 1970, and I’ve been teaching reading since 1977. I’ve taught every grade, from K to graduate school, including graduate-level reading courses. I often started those courses by announcing that I was going to show a slide containing all the things that would help every child every time. After a dramatic pause, I would put up a blank slide. The point is that what works for one child doesn’t always work with another. For the past five years, I’ve been blogging about the idea that rather than taking sides in the Great Debate, we should take positions on various methods and how and when to apply them. Methods should not be banned simply because they come from the “wrong” point of view. Many in our field have  begun taking what I call nuanced positions. This means taking a position where teachers are allowed to use research-based information from all sides, ensuring that they examine all the research, both qualitative and quantitative. It also means working toward the day when there are no sides. When that day comes, it will be a day when teachers are allowed to locate the research-based practices that will help the particular children they are working with. That would be the day when Empowered Teachers are allowed to use alternate methods when the current mainstream methods fail a particular child. Only then will we have a shot at ending the ever-swinging pendulum of reading instruction.

Dare to Dream!

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

This post is part two of a blog series entitled:

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.

It’s Time to Empower Teachers: Let’s Stop the Nonsense and Start Using Common Guide Our Reading Practices. By Dr. Sam Bommarito

For those who don’t know me, I began teaching in 1970 and became a reading teacher in 1977. I’ve taught every grade from K to graduate school, including master’s degree courses in reading. Most of my career was spent as a Title I Reading Teacher/Staff developer. Today I am a reading consultant, blogger and I still find time to do pro bono literacy work for teachers and students.

Ever since the publication of the First-Grade Studies in 1967, we’ve known that when it comes to reading instruction, teachers make a greater difference than programs. The study also demonstrated that programs incorporating phonics instruction yielded better reading performance among students. During most of my six-plus decades in literacy education, there has been a war going on between two camps. The current iteration of those camps includes SOR folks (code-emphasis) and the Balanced Literacy folks (meaning-emphasis). In that time, I’ve seen the pendulum of reading instruction swing several times between code emphasis and meaning emphasis approaches. Yet each time the literacy world moves to the exclusive use of one or the other of these approaches, overall student performance fails to improve. Each approach helps many students, but never all students. The bottom line is that WHAT WORKS WITH ONE STUDENT DOESN’T NECESSARILY WORK WITH ANOTHER. That is the reality that faces classroom teachers every day.  

Currently, many SOR advocates claim they’ve finally found the solution that works with all students. They present data claiming to show huge improvements. Yet critics examining that data challenge whether that is the case. I’ve written about why folks like Dr. Paul Thomas feel that the decline in the NAEP scores demonstrates the need for a new story LINK. He is not alone in that analysis. Teachers using successful practices,  who really did teach both phonics and comprehension all along are being forced to abandon their practices and implement one size fits all programs being mandated by many states.  So, the Great Debate continues. It has become increasingly contentious, especially on social media. What has happened is that both sides use strawman tactics, presenting the other side at its worst, and ignoring or discrediting studies that support the other side. The most concerning thing is that instead of promoting things that help teachers and students, they promote things that help them make the most profit.

What do I have to say about this?

Of all the many hats I’ve worn over the course career the one I am most proud to wear is that of a teacher. I am writing this blog series from the perspective of a teacher. Teachers, especially more experienced teachers, are being put in impossible situations. This has had dire consequences. A recent University of Missouri survey found that 78% of nearly 500 teachers have considered quitting, with more experienced teachers being likelier to make that decision. Teachers who have been teaching phonics (and comprehension) for years are being mandated to follow plans created by individuals who don’t know their students and are unfamiliar with the nuances of their particular setting. Districts are being stripped of their right to create curriculum, and teachers are being mandated by law to follow “research-based programs” that fail to consider all the research, including both quantitative and qualitative studies.

It’s time for all of us to agree that we should apply practices from different perspectives and incorporate those supported by both qualitative and quantitative research. It’s time to empower teachers by helping them to learn about AND USE a variety of practices. They would use those practices within the confines of each district’s curriculum. In that way, teachers won’t find themselves in the impossible situation of replacing things that were mostly working with the latest greatest product, only to have that product replaced in a couple of years with the next latest greatest product. Wouldn’t it make more sense to replace the parts that aren’t working, but keep the parts that are? It’s time to stop the Swinging Pendulum in the middle and for all sides to allow teachers to examine all the practices. It’s time for folks to start taking a more nuanced position on the whole issue of how to teach reading.

My future blogs will deal in depth with each of the topics listed below. Taken together, I think the discussions around these topics will promote the finding of common ground and common practices. For this to work, both sides must acknowledge they don’t have all the answers. These answers are best found at the district level, where districts empower teachers by providing training and then allowing teachers the latitude they need in the practices they use with different students. This would be a major improvement over what is currently happening. Too often, the answer to what to do when the latest greatest programs don’t work for all students is to give them even more of the same program and to blame the teachers who have carried out the latest/greatest programs for not doing them correctly.  They fail to consider the possibility the programs clearly don’t fit all of the students in the population being served and that is why the practices fail..

It’s Time to Empower Teachers: Let’s Stop the Nonsense and Start Using Common Sense to End the Reading Wars.

Dare to Dream!

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

Here is the list of topics:

What brain research really says- READING IS A COMPLEX PHENOMENON. We will do best if our practices reflect that fact. Some of the claims being spread on social media are simply not supported by brain research. LINK

Instructional time is a finite commodity. Let’s not Rob Peter to pay Paul. We must find a way to balance the time spent on comprehension instruction and decoding instruction. We can’t give teachers mandates of teaching time that exceed the time we allocate for classroom instruction. Yet we are routinely doing that, especially at the elementary level.

The history of Structured Literacy and Direct Instruction. Direction Instruction as an instructional method vs direct instruction as a marketing tool- Andy Johnson’s ideas about that.

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

 “   https://readingrecovery.org/profit_over_progress/  Some SOR advocates seem intent on “selling their product”. Too often, they ignore or discredit alternative approaches.

Best practices in teaching decoding: The role of prosody in reading instruction and Rasinski’s work in teaching prosody and using his research in repeated reading to improve the fluency instruction for readers K-12. 

Writing to read- ways to use writing in Reading Instruction. We will explore ways to connect reading and writing instruction at the word, sentence, and passage levels. See the work of Leah Mermelstein. https://www.leahmermelstein.com/

The case for having a nuanced view of Reading Instruction. Doing that can lead to identifying common ground.

One clear example of common ground is the case for using gradual release of responsibility as a central feature of our educational instruction, especially reading instruction. This seems to be a model that most educators still agree on. Done correctly, it helps ensure that students move beyond naming and describing strategies to internalize and use them effectively.

I want to propose a more provocative example of Common Ground. It is this: Seidenberg’s “takeoff point” and Clay’s “self-extending system” indicate there is an area of important agreement between some SOR and BL advocates. Kids really do reach a point where they start teaching themselves how to use phonological information to unlock words and their meanings. https://doctorsam7.blog/2024/09/07/the-ever-changing-world-of-literacy-my-analysis-of-what-seidenberg-is-now-saying-about-sor-by-dr-sam-bommarito/

Resolving the issue of when this should happen would go a long way toward cutting through the Gordian knot we face regarding reading instruction.

ClauDean ChiNaka Kizart discusses her book, Beyond Implicit & Explicit Bias: Strategies for Healing the Root Causes of Inequality in Education, in an interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito.

ClauDean ChiNaka Kizart is a longtime friend and colleague. I first got to know her and her work when she was at Harris-Stowe State Teachers College in St. Louis. As you will see in her biography, she has accomplished a great deal since then. She is a teacher of teachers, a strong advocate for educational equality.

Her new book was not about what I was expecting. It was about bias, but not institutional bias. Rather, it was about bias at a personal level. Based on the research she cites, we are all biased in some way. She has identified six such research-based biases in her book. The book focuses on how teachers can manage their personal biases in a way that doesn’t adversely affect their teaching. 

Let’s talk about one of the biases she explores. That is the group bias. That bias occurs when you identify with an in-group. Let’s say you identify with a particular group, say women. Her book provides you with several tools to use so that you don’t treat boys or men in your class unfairly. Those tools would be valuable for any teacher to use. Let’s now look at ClauDean’s biography and learn what she had to say in her interview.

BIOGRAPHY

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)

Here is a link to Kizart’s Book:

LINK

Here is a link to a book review of her book. The review was written by Walter Hudson

LINK

Here is a link to her LinkedIn page:

LINK

Final Thoughts

ClauDean ChiNaka Kizart has spent her entire career addressing the issues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. As Walter Hudson says in his book review:

 “The book’s greatest strength lies in its practicality. Kizart—who is director of student success at Tidewater Community College—consistently bridges theory and practice through authentic school-based scenarios that illustrate how biases manifest in educational contexts. These narratives, drawn from her 25+ years of experience as an educator, resonate with authenticity and provide readers with contextual understanding of how bias impacts decision-making.”

I highly recommend this research-based book to any teacher who wants to explore the best ways to address bias in the everyday decision-making processes found in our educational institutions.

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.

PS If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following it to ensure you won’t miss future posts.  Use the “follow” entry on the sidebar of the blog.

Gwen Pauloski, Teacher, Researcher, Consultant, and Author, discusses her new book, Making Deep Sense of Informational Text, in an interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito.

I’ve been on hiatus now for over a month due to some health issues. Things are much better now and Dr. Sam is back! This is the first of several posts I’ve gotten ready. By the way, the next one will be about a new book by Dr. Claudine Kizart. It is about social justice.

Dr. Gwen Paulski is a teacher, researcher, consultant, and author. It’s not often that you find a person who has a clear-cut, compelling background in each of those roles. A review of her biography and interview in the next sections of this blog provides ample evidence that Dr. Gwen Pauloski is clearly such a person. Like many intermediate and secondary teachers, Gwen has been on a lifelong quest to find things that can motivate adolescent readers to read and also to make sense of what they read. To help in that quest, Gwen not only reviewed the research but also contributed to it with articles of her own. She eventually used all the things she learned in her teaching to complete a Doctoral Thesis. Her new book’s audience is her fellow teachers. For many of them, the what and how to teach adolescent readers has been a Gordian knot. I think teachers will find Gwen offers some practical solutions that will help them help the kids. Her consultant work shines through as the book explains what teachers can do and why they should do it. Her story tells how she helped students who lacked confidence in their reading, become readers and critical thinkers. Before discussing that, let’s take a look at her biography and interview.  

BIOGRAPHY

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

Here is a link to the U-Tube Interview:

Here is a link to Gwen’s Book:

LINK

Here is a link to Gwen’s Web Page:

LINK

Final Thoughts

Due to Gwen’s unique background, she has a wealth of knowledge to share with her fellow teachers. Her seventeen-plus years as a social studies teacher and nine years spent coaching teachers and principals mean she knows the nuts and bolts of teaching adolescents and knows how to address the concerns of those who work with them. Having someone as well-known in the field as Cris Tovani write the forward to her book is a clear indication that Gwen really knows her stuff and that her stuff is worth learning about. I strongly recommend that my readers take the time to visit and carefully examine Gwen’s web page LINK. There, you can learn about her pedagogy and discover the strategies she believes are worth teaching. If you like what you find there, you could then consider adding her new book to your go-to resources LINK.

For those of you who might have doubts about taking the  time to teach reading strategies, please review the work of Dr. Tim Rasinski  LINK, LINK, LINK. Please examine his slide about the effect sizes of various components of the reading process.  He included the slide below in his keynote at last year’s Lit Con conference:

There is a considerable effect size for word recognition. However, there are even larger effect sizes for the bridging processes like reading fluency and language comprehension processes. We need folks like Dr. Gwen Paulski to remind us that comprehension strategies can be, and should be, taught. We need folks like Dr. Tim Rasinski to show us ways to use fluency development to help build orthographic knowledge. That doesn’t mean doing these things instead of word recognition. It means doing them in addition to word recognition. Dare to dream!

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.

PS If you found the blog through Facebook or Twitter, please consider following it to ensure you won’t miss future posts.  Use the “follow” entry on the sidebar of the blog.

My Take on the Recent Hechinger Report about Comprehension: It still takes more than building background knowledge and vocabulary to improve comprehension. Comprehension strategies can and should be directly taught in a way that assures students can internalize and use them.

 If you haven’t seen the new Hechinger Report about comprehension, here is a LINK  and a brief excerpt:

  A landmark study          relatively good evidence        paper published in a 2025 issue  

Here is the results and conclusions section of the 2025 article Reading Comprehension Instruction: Evaluating Our Progress Since Durkin’s Seminal Study by Philip Capan et al.

As a reminder, Durkin’s landmark study  found that in 1979 less than 1 percent of classroom time was spent on TEACHING comprehension. Over 4 decades later, Capan et al.’s new study reports that time spent on TEACHING comprehension is still woefully inadequate. Time spent on comprehension, more often than not, comes in the form of simple comprehension checks, not in  the form of teaching comprehension. Things like improving knowledge of text structures or teaching reading comprehension strategies continue to be ignored in 2025, just as they were in 1979. I’ve written before about how and why this has happened- LINK.

I think part of the reason this is happening is because of the misinterpretation of what research by Willingham and others shows about how comprehension should be taught, specifically how much time needs to be spent on teaching comprehension strategies. Even staunch SoR advocates like Tim Shanahan called Willingham’s conclusions about significantly reducing the amount of time spent teaching comprehension strategies to be faulty LINK.

For more information on Shanahan’s views, please see his March 10 2025 post. LINK

In my blog about this topic, I also point out that research by folks like Nell Duke indicates that teaching comprehension strategies should be an important part of any literacy program.

I talk about Duke’s idea that reading is much more than decoding words- LINK. I also talk about her idea that it is clear that “if we explicitly teach and then give students lots of opportunity to practice specific comprehension strategies, their reading comprehension will improve….” This even includes students in the very early years of schooling LINK.  I also discussed what Duke had to say at the What Research Says about Reading Instruction session at the 2019 ILA convention.  She said, “It’s as though because we think content knowledge building is so important, we’re just going to ignore three decades of research on comprehensive strategy instruction,” said Duke. “This isn’t a zero-sum game saying, ‘if you can’t attend to content, then you can’t teach comprehension strategies’ or ‘if you teach comprehension strategies, you must not be paying enough attention to vocabulary or morphology.” LINK

Please do not interpret what I’ve just presented as meaning that teaching vocabulary and background are unimportant. Rather, I’m saying that teaching vocabulary and background is necessary but not sufficient.

When In-servicing teachers on how to teach comprehension strategies, here is what I have to say:

I am saying that the first step is teaching the strategy. Then, ask the students to use the strategy when they are reading. Finally, after several weeks of using the strategy AS NEEDED, report back to the class about what they did and how the strategy helped them. By the way, NRP indicated that teaching more than one strategy at a time is effective. So these discussions can and should include information about more than just one strategy.

Instructional time is a zero-sum game. So, how we spend our instructional time matters. When I asked Shanahan about recent studies on how teachers actually spend their time, he indicated that there was not much current information. Without that information, we are flying without instruments. I have listened extensively to folks from all sides of the great debate in reading. When talking to teachers who say they are following SoR, I hear much evidence of time spent on decoding, with little or no evidence that they are directly teaching reading strategies. At best, their comprehension work falls into the category of “checking comprehension” and building background and vocabulary. In addition, many of the most popular decoding programs require so much class time that there is a real danger that if you follow all the prescribed lessons,  there won’t be time for anything else. Perhaps the recent drops in NAEP scores can be partly tied to the failure to teach comprehension strategies directly. That means teaching them in a way that guarantees students internalize and use them. As Leah Mermelstien and others have said, we need to learn how to teach things so they stick. We need new observational studies along the lines of those done by Durkin.

Here is a final thought about why it is important that reading instruction needs to include a wide range of activities. Tim Rasinski shared this chart as part of his LitCon2025 keynote address:

Notice the effect sizes of the various components of reading. Word recognition does have a significant effect size. However, so do Active Self-Regulation, the various Bridging Processes et. al.  Spending too much instructional time on one (in this case, word recognition) means that others are ignored. We should be looking at the reading curriculum through all these lenses, not just the lens of word recognition. Most importantly, we must act on something we’ve known for decades. Comprehension/comprehension strategies can and should be directly taught in a way that assures students can internalize and use them. Dare to dream.

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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I gave three in-person presentations in Missouri last week and will give a virtual presentation in New York today. So, I will be taking a break from the blog today, I will resume next week to discuss all the ideas I’ve been presenting.