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Dr. Tim Shanahan’s distinguished career has led him from teaching first grade to leading groundbreaking research panels. With over 200 publications on literacy, his work emphasizes how to improve reading achievement based on the research. He is considered one of the premier literacy educators, is widely followed through his blog and on social media, and is a sought-after speaker. In this episode, Tim reflects on his legacy, his ongoing work, and what he sees as our greatest challenges in the teaching profession.
Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast elevates important contributions to the educational community, with the goal of inspiring teachers, informing practice, and celebrating people in the community who have influenced teaching and literacy to the betterment of children. The podcast features guests whose life stories are compelling and rich in ways that are instructive to us all. The podcast focuses on literacy as we know it (reading and writing) but will also connect to other “literacies” that impact children’s learning; for example, emotional, physical, and social literacies as they apply to teachers and children.
[00:00:01.390] - Speaker 1
This episode is brought to you by great publishers of Wit and Wisdom. Wit and Wisdom has transformed English language arts classrooms across the nation with knowledge rich lessons written by former teachers and relentlessly curated selections of art and books that build knowledge. Wit and Wisdom cultivates connected knowledge of a subject from an integrated and layered approach. Along the way, students are empowered with original thought and a questioning spirit. To learn more about Wit and Wisdom, visit Greatminds.org English Hi, I'm Laura Stewart from the Reading League. Welcome to Teaching, Reading, and Learning the TRL Podcast. The focus of this podcast is to elevate important conversations in the educational community in order to inform, inspire, and celebrate contributions to teaching and learning. On today's podcast, we'll be speaking to Dr. Tim Shanahan, and many of you probably know Tim from his blog or from social media. In today's podcast, we'll learn about Tim's humble beginnings in first grade, and we'll learn why it was important that Tim did not go into politics after all. So thank you for joining us and enjoy the podcast. Well, I think I speak for everyone listening in today when I say that you have had such a huge impact on our collective work.
[00:01:44.820] - Speaker 1
And what I really appreciate about you is that you're always challenging us in our thinking. So thank you for joining us today, Tim, and to give you a little background for those of you who don't know Tim Shanahan, which I'm sure is a handful of you out there, Tim Shanahan is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he was the founding director of the UIC center for Literacy. Previously, he was the director of reading for the Chicago Public Schools. He is the author editor of more than 200 publications on literacy education, and his research emphasizes the connections between reading and writing literacy and the disciplines and improvement of reading achievement. Tim is the past President of the International Literacy Association. He served as a member of the advisory board of the National Institute for Literacy under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And he helped lead the National Reading Panel, convened at the request of Congress to evaluate research on the teaching of reading a major influence on reading education through that he chaired two other federal research review panels, the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth, and the National Early Literacy Panel.
[00:02:57.750] - Speaker 1
And he helped write the Common Core State Standards. Tim was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame in 2007, and he's a former first grade teacher. So again, glad to have you here.
[00:03:10.840] - Speaker 2
Happy to be here, Laura. Good to see you.
[00:03:12.810] - Speaker 1
Good to see you, too. So let's go back to some origins because I know that people know you from your work, but maybe they don't know your origin story. So let's start with the whole why did you go into education? And especially how did you become a first grade teacher?
[00:03:28.270] - Speaker 2
Well, I initially certainly had no plan of becoming a teacher. I was not a kid who loves school or stuff like that. In fact, I played Hookie every chance I got. I was the kid who would pay no attention in class but sit there and read a book behind whatever I was supposed to be looking at. So I was not a great student. And the idea of spending my life in schools was not something that as a teenager I would have ever entertained what I was passionate about and very involved in. I thought I was going to have a life in politics. And I worked on a number of political campaigns in Michigan, got to know a number of fairly famous political figures in my work when I was 13 and 14 years old, that kind of thing and worked on, just, like I said, a number of campaigns. So that was going to be my life. When I went away to University, I thought it would be a good idea to be involved in some kind of public service. And so at various times I was involved in going into Detroit and working on housing, that kind of stuff.
[00:04:52.950] - Speaker 2
But at the University, the opportunity that was there was they had a tutoring program and you'd get on a bus and go into the inner city and they'd pair you up with some kids and you would try to teach them to read. There was no preparation for it at all. It was pretty much everybody doing it was a young lady who intended to be a classroom teacher. And then there was me. I thought this was a brilliant idea right up until the night before I was supposed to meet with this youngster for the first time fourth grader. And it dawned on me I had no idea how to teach reading, what to do, and out of fear went to the library and found two books on the teaching of reading. One of them, Rudolph Flesh oh my God, I Can't Read. And the other one, Roach Van Allen's book on language experience approach. So I couldn't have found two more different or different approaches. I read those two books that night and really started myself in that 24 hours period, started studying reading and teaching reading. I didn't feel like I was doing anything particularly remarkable with that youngster.
[00:06:20.310] - Speaker 2
But the other kids on the bus seem to think I was that I had a lot of interesting moves that I had picked up from reading these books and so on. And so I was kind of curious what I was doing that was good. And there was a course, obviously for education majors about how to teach reading. And I took it not as something I needed to take, but just something that I thought would be interesting given my situation. And it was taught by an outstanding instructor who had been a classroom teacher. He'd been a director of reading for the state of Delaware. He had a lot of experience and was probably the best reading consultant in the country at the time. And so I lucked out in that. And he kind of sucked me into it, made it my career. And so literally when I was 18 and 19 years old, I was going out with him and consulting in school on how to teach reading. Even to this day, he shakes his head. Just can't believe he did that. Nobody in their right mind would take an 18 or 19 year old kid out with them doing consulting.
[00:07:41.090] - Speaker 2
I've certainly never done that.
[00:07:42.460] - Speaker 1
Oh, my gosh, it was incredible experience. Who was that? And do you still keep in touch then?
[00:07:48.490] - Speaker 2
Not very much, but once in a while we cross paths. His name is Dorothy Hammond.
[00:07:52.750] - Speaker 1
Okay.
[00:07:53.320] - Speaker 2
And he published a certain amount, but he was much more of a hands on working with schools and doing that kind of thing. And he was just outstanding at it. He could get a group of teachers to do what needed to be done for a group of kids and getting to watch him and pretty much carry his books and participate in those discussions and so on was just like drugs for a drug addict. It sucked me in. Usually people in our field come into reading, they teach for a while. They become teachers. They want to teach. They don't necessarily want to teach reading. They want to teach. They teach for a while, and at some point they get turned on by the idea of teaching reading and maybe they go get a master's degree in that and so on and so forth, because I came into it through reading and really was doing this when I was 17 or 18 years old. I've been doing this for more than 50 years where most people say, well, I started when I was 27, after I taught for four or five years. And now for me, it was always that.
[00:09:07.060] - Speaker 2
It was always about teaching reading.
[00:09:09.850] - Speaker 1
So at what point did you change your major from political science to education.
[00:09:15.490] - Speaker 2
Pretty quickly after that course? Not immediately, but I had taken that course and about, I don't know, several months later that ended one term and I was away working in a machine shop for the summer and came back to school. And the faculty was on strike and I needed to be working or going to school, so I was kind of thrown I remember one afternoon going over to the student Union, the student center, and trying to get news, should I go back home and get to work or what should I do? And I ran into that professor from the class, Dorozy Hammond, and we went back to his office and hung out and talked and stuff. And like I say, from then on, I kind of got sucked into it, started taking education classes, and my grades went up remarkably, and as did my attendance and stuff like that.
[00:10:10.500] - Speaker 1
So it was kind of meant to be.
[00:10:12.200] - Speaker 2
It was kind of meant to be.
[00:10:17.050] - Speaker 1
The night before you read these two books and went in and started teaching.
[00:10:22.070] - Speaker 2
A fourth grader, it was spooky. Yeah, probably spookier for him than it was for me.
[00:10:33.050] - Speaker 1
Was your first teaching job?
[00:10:34.640] - Speaker 2
First grade, then third grade, and then I worked my way down. It was clear to me that there weren't men teaching younger kids. There were men teaching high school and stuff like that. That wasn't uncommon. And so I did think I was going to sort of lead a movement of men into that part of the profession. And obviously very few followed today still today. But it's funny, there are a handful of men who in that era were teaching first grade or second grade or kindergarten, and every so often I will meet one of them, and we kind of do that. It's so exciting to find somebody, but it was pretty rare. And so it made you a very odd duck. The women teaching those grades not only tended to be women, they tended to be women who'd been doing this for years and years. When I was teaching first grade at the school I taught first grade at, there were four first grade teachers, and I think two of them had more than 25 years experience.
[00:11:47.250] - Speaker 1
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, for sure.
[00:11:49.400] - Speaker 2
They knew.
[00:11:51.950] - Speaker 1
So connect some dots for us. How did you go from first grade to UIC Chicago in Chicago public schools to national reading panel? What kind of were the stepping stones along the way? Yes.
[00:12:03.800] - Speaker 2
We're always trying to do one thing and ends up doing another. I took my Masters at night. The University offered if I wanted an assistant ship, I could do it full time, but I really did it like most teachers do it teach during the day and go to school at night. And I felt like I needed that teaching experience. I really wanted to be doing that. But I was fascinated by the research information that you were picking up at the University. And I didn't see myself as a College Professor or anything like that. But I did think maybe I could be something like a curriculum director for a school district and I could oversee the reading program and that kind of thing. So I was going to go get a PhD for that. And the program I got into at the University of Delaware, I think that year there were something like eight doctoral students. Seven of them wanted to be a College Professor, and I wanted to be a creative director. I think they all had all or all but one of them had master's degrees in psychology, not in education, which is typical at the time.
[00:13:21.730] - Speaker 2
It's less typical now, and I clearly didn't belong there. They all knew so much more than I did about anything. We were studying. But over time, my experiences as a teacher started to kick in. I had maybe a better sense of what we needed to know. Maybe I had some better questions. They have maybe hotter questions at the time, but not questions that are going to matter in terms of instruction as much. So you get something from that. Almost all of them ended up doing something different than becoming professors, and I ended up becoming a professor and spending my career doing that. And it was lucky. It was so made for that kind of a job and that kind of life. A lot of people figure that out later than I did. I was very lucky to hit on that early and to spend really my whole life doing that. And boy, am I glad.
[00:14:28.810] - Speaker 1
Yes. And I think you bring up something really important that you grounded yourself in being a teacher. Right. Really teaching real kids. And you always brought that perspective to.
[00:14:39.920] - Speaker 2
Your work, always brought that perspective to my work. And was always even through graduate school and even in those early years at the University when I was being warned that if I persisted in working in the schools, I was probably not going to make tenure. But I always felt that I needed to do that. I always felt like that was the purpose of the work itself. So it needed to be grounded in that. It needed to be connected to it all the way along. It didn't actually interfere with my success at the University. I was managing to publish and to do the things that you need to do at a University to succeed. So it didn't really threaten me. But it was suggested to me that this wasn't my best career move. It worked out.
[00:15:39.790] - Speaker 1
So tell us about your work at UIC.
[00:15:43.790] - Speaker 2
At UIC, I was the lowest paid person in the entire University of Illinois system. I had a family with a new baby, and then soon after a second baby and was just struggling to hang on. I ended up getting a job offer from another University, which led to a really big raise, which saved my life. Unlike the other young professors, I spent a considerable amount of time teaching practicum courses, so I was actually working with the undergraduate. Most people wanted to teach the graduate students because those classes once a week for 3 hours in the evening. If you taught the students during the day, it was several more hours and it was multiple days and so on. For me, it was great because I could get my teaching done and go home and be with my kids. For them, it was, Gee, there's less of this work and we can do our writing during the day and it'll all be fine. So I kind of sought those courses out and taught, I don't know, something like over several years maybe. They offered 24 of those courses and I probably taught 20 of them. It was something like that.
[00:17:11.430] - Speaker 2
I was working with these kids who wanted to be teachers again, usually young ladies, and especially teaching the primary reading courses and the introductory reading courses, which you learn a lot from. I know people graduate folks put that down, and that's how you want to get beyond that. And you do in terms of your writing. It helps you to have those doctoral students and so on who can kind of push you on that end. But having to go through the basics of teaching again and again, you refine your thinking on that. You start to see contradictions. You find weaknesses in what you thought. Working on that foundational stuff, that much for that many years in a concentrated way was extremely beneficial for me.
[00:18:10.290] - Speaker 1
Well, you bring up that how you start to question your thoughts and think about question your own thinking. And like I said, at the top of this, I really appreciate that you do that with us. You help to challenge our thinking, and you have an incredible following with your blog and on social media. And why do you think that you've struck such a deep chord with people? Your work has struck such a deep chord.
[00:18:36.330] - Speaker 2
I think there's a practicality to it that I hope there's a depth to it as well. But I think there are a lot of people who have really deep ideas and deep understanding to communicate that very poorly and don't necessarily understand the implications of their work. Sometimes I'll understand the implications of their work better than they will. I think maybe that kind of stuff. This is a field where I think a lot of people chase trends and a lot of people like to be popular. And I think it's easy to flatter teachers and to tell them whatever the hot thing is right now and to pretend like you know that. And I mean, I'm not going to claim that I've never tried to do that, but that's not my strength. I'm much better at saying, well, I know you guys are really promoting phonics, but you're overdoing it because there are these other things. And I've been willing to essentially take the punches for doing stuff like that. And usually early on, nobody finds it terribly attractive. Over time, they come to appreciate it because quite often they find out whatever they were a true believer in maybe did have the flaws that I was pointing out, and that approach would be stronger and safer if the practitioners actually knew about those weaknesses rather than trying to hide them.
[00:20:13.270] - Speaker 2
I do think over time, the fact that I've done that repeatedly, often taking unpopular stands that turned out to be popular in the long run has put me in some kind of stead where folks might say I don't always agree with him, but I trust him. He'll tell me the truth. He'll tell me what he's thinking. He's not going to just try to make me happy.
[00:20:38.060] - Speaker 1
Yeah, right. I totally agree with you. And I think that level of challenge or that level of self reflection in education is really needed and really wanted. And what do you think people get wrong about your stance on important topics or the work that you're trying to do to elevate these discussions and really bring the evidence or the research to bear?
[00:21:09.890] - Speaker 2
None of this is universal, but especially in social conversation on things like Twitter and Facebook and those kinds of things where you can get literally hundreds of voices going. There is a tendency for the most vocal people out there to be true believers in whatever it is. They love reading recovery. They love independent reading. They love a particular phonics program. It's not enough that you teach phonics. You got to use the ABC program. That's the only possible way kids can learn to read. And they believe those things so strongly. And if you do terrible things like say, well, that's interesting. There have been three studies of that, and then two of them didn't actually work. Why is that? And they don't look at that as well. He's trying to understand this. They look at this. He's trying to destroy our world. He's a bad person. And so they kind of attack. Then what will happen is later on I'll get a letter from somebody saying, oh, I convinced my school district to use this such and such program, and I had no idea they'd be pushback once we adopted it. And the school board has questions and their parents groups that are coming forward.
[00:22:30.090] - Speaker 2
And what should we tell them? How can the research help us? And my approach, you should have been looking at the research before you adopted this. The research isn't there to give you cover for making a bad decision. It's there to help you make a decision. And so you're going at this wrong. And they're absolutely right that those weaknesses are there, and you should have been ready to address those. And if you're only going to adopt that part of reading instruction, what about the other kids that maybe that isn't their problem for whatever reason, they do well with whatever it is you're promoting and don't need what you're doing, but they struggle with some other aspect of it, and you're not helping them.
[00:23:16.380] - Speaker 1
Yeah. So what do you think keeps us in the educational world old from really doing that kind of research and looking at the research, looking at the studies and being really connected to that what keeps us from that.
[00:23:31.370] - Speaker 2
You mentioned that I was a member of the National Reading Panel, and when they put that panel together, the notion of it was Congress was asking a panel of scientists to make a scientific judgment about what the research was saying about reading instruction. And on the panel, they had a bunch of very prominent scientists, but they also had a middle school teacher an elementary school principal, a parent of a dyslexic child, and I was offended by that. I thought that was foolish. And I was other members of the and I tended to talk to those folks a lot, usually after the meetings, trying to explain to them what the discussions have been about, because they wouldn't necessarily understand the science or the statistics or whatever was the issue that day. I felt terrible for these people because they were on something where they were struggling to understand what we were even talking about, or they would try to read the studies and couldn't make heads or tails of them evaluating what they said they just couldn't do. And I thought, well, this is terrible. They would never do this in medicine, which is not true when you go and look this up and track it down, and I spent the time doing that.
[00:25:00.880] - Speaker 2
What you find out is, oh, no, if you have a panel like this in medicine, they'll put a nurse on there, they'll put patient advocates on there. They'll put those kinds of folks. But all of those folks have research training. All of them teachers don't have research training. Principals have extremely little bits of research training. They have absolutely no idea what those research studies are telling them, how they could actually read them. I think that's holding us back to a great extent. It's nationwide. And I'd love to say, well, that's true if you go to this little teacher's College that turns out 300 teachers a year, but it's not true if you go to the Harvard and the University of Illinois, it is true. It's just as true at the research one universities as it is at the teachers colleges that don't have researchers on their faculty. We are a non research field trying to become one.
[00:26:07.340] - Speaker 1
Yeah. So you're thinking was that in the national reading panel having these I guess for lack of a better word, these practitioners on the panel was going to make it more difficult because they didn't understand that the charge of the panel was to look at these scientific studies. But in general, what you're saying is, yes, having practitioners is not unusual in other fields, but we really need to understand the research, understand quantitative versus qualitative and effect size and all those other things that really aren't part of teacher preparation.
[00:26:43.610] - Speaker 2
Yes. My youngest daughter is an engineer. As an undergraduate in engineering, she got more research than a typical Masters student does in reading. That's just all there is to it. And that's true if you want to be a nurse. And that's true if you want to go into dozens of other business, any number of fields you're going to learn, probably be forced to take a statistics class, might have to take some kind of a class in how we know things. That whole notion. And you look at teacher education, you look at certification requirements, you look at again, sort of the personal trademark that universities place on students. And the fact is, in education, we just haven't treated making sure that these folks not that they're going to be scientists, but they need to be able to read science. They need to understand what the arguments are about. They need to understand what you find out from a correlational study versus an experimental study. They need to know what a meta analysis is and what it tells you and what it doesn't tell you, just a whole bunch of that kind of stuff.
[00:27:59.710] - Speaker 1
Do you think in teacher preparation that hasn't been part of it? Because we've always looked at teaching as more of an art than a science, or it's more emotional and more I know my kids better than a study or data can inform me.
[00:28:19.640] - Speaker 2
Yeah, it's probably both. I think teaching attracts I mean, if it had that there might be some folks, that if it had a science requirement, there might be some folks, and. Well, I don't want to go into that. Maybe I will do cosmetology instead. Seriously, it'll be that kind of thing. It's funny. The federal government has made so many moves to try to encourage schools to use research and to make research available and to translate research and so on and so forth, and spent billions of dollars, I think, to the good. And yet they haven't made sure that the practitioners actually know what any of that means or why it's there or why that would be beneficial. And I think that maybe we're starting at the wrong end perhaps, and that people like me should have been fighting to get some kind of a basic research course into all the undergraduate teacher majors. Maybe we should be doing more of that. But it definitely attracts a group of people who say, this is just about my relationship with kids. And I think physicians used to do that until they figured out you could still have relationships with patients and do more good for the patient if you actually had the science behind it.
[00:29:52.260] - Speaker 2
And I think maybe there's a group of teachers out there, but they're nowhere near the majority of teachers. So we have a big job to do that.
[00:30:01.110] - Speaker 1
Good job. You mentioned the National Reading Panel. I did want to talk a little bit about that, because when I think about my own self coming up as an educator, that was a real watershed moment for me with the National Reading Panel, because I think I was that teacher who didn't really understand that you can bring evidence to bear in teaching reading and maybe talk a little bit about what you believe was the impact of the National Reading Panel. What were the shortcomings, what work still needs to be done there?
[00:30:31.950] - Speaker 2
Yeah, there have been such panels in other fields of study. It's the first time anything like that had ever happened in education, and it came about because of what we're called the reading wars. The arguments a lot of people remember those as being arguments over do you teach phonics or not? And that was certainly part of the argument, but it was also an argument, do you use textbooks or not? Do you have a curriculum or not? It was really about all kinds of explicit teaching. And those arguments raged to such an extent that in national polls, people's confidence in their schools was dropping. We were starting to look like Congressmen in terms of what the public thought of us. These people don't even know how to teach reading, and you don't want to see your teachers saying nasty things to other teachers in public because one of them uses a different method. But those kinds of things were happening. And so that's why the panel came into place initially. And it wasn't clear at all that it would have any impact. Nobody really knew. I figured it would be controversial and so on, but it was important that at least the attempt be made.
[00:32:00.250] - Speaker 2
So we worked on it for a couple of years. The government thought this would be like the medical panels or the engineering panels, and we could answer the question in a couple of months, and they would get into their laws quickly and so on, not understanding that there might be on a particular issue in medicine. There might be six studies on it. They're big studies. They might have 450 people in this study, and there were 20,000 young women in that one. And you get the panel, they sit down, they read the six studies, they talk about it, they make a decision about what it says. You do the meta analysis of it so you have the results. It's really straightforward. I'm not going to say easy, but it's really straightforward. They can say there's a clear finding this way or that way or it's not clear at all. And so this is what we recommend in education and reading. Okay, what works in reading? Well, there are thousands of studies. People are looking at all kinds of issues. And so it took us several meetings even to decide what are you going to look at?
[00:33:10.530] - Speaker 2
You can't look at everything. So we picked seven or eight topics that we would pursue, and we went out and searched for the evidence on those topics and so on and so forth. It took us, like I said, about two years to do the work. Congress, when they saw our plan for doing the work, actually extended our time. They wanted to shut us down, but when they saw that we had such an ambitious and sophisticated plan, they said, okay, we get it, go ahead and do another year. And so the results came out. A couple of newspaper articles, not a huge amount of interest initially, but over time for, I'm going to say, a good ten years. It really did settle down. A good deal of the controversy school started looking for programs that included certain kinds of things. We started seeing achievement going up again, which is a good thing. So there definitely were some good things to come out of it. But as the politicians say, in a Democratic society, there are no final victories. Oh, well, now that we know that you need to teach those things, because this is a trendy field and people do change their hair colors and their skirt lengths and all that kind of stuff.
[00:34:39.150] - Speaker 2
Do you wear a pronounced lipstick or do you want one that's more subtle, all that kind of stuff, and we do the same thing when it comes well, I taught reading like that for the last four years. I'm bored with that. I'd like to. Can't we do it some other way? I'm glad my physician isn't getting bored with taking those same old blood tests. We're too fat, is too willing to just go along. So I think for about ten years, it really settled things down. And now over the last ten, it's been people have been drifting away from it, and you can see we're no longer raising achievement nationally, and things are starting to get much more diverse in how we're teaching. And so you'll see people going off in all kinds of extremes, some worse than others.
[00:35:33.050] - Speaker 1
Interesting. So you saw the work of the National Reading Panel really kind of brought some focus for a while, but now you kind of feel like maybe that's kind of diverging again in terms of practice.
[00:35:45.500] - Speaker 2
I mean, it never shut it down entirely. It just narrowed it. You'll still find people out see things on the net where somebody will say, oh, the National Reading Panel found, somebody else will say, oh, I never pay any attention to what that panel found. They were just doing it for the money or whatever. There's a lot of myths about what the panel didn't do.
[00:36:15.710] - Speaker 1
Our latest edition, as you know, the Reading League Journal is going to be about the National Reading Panel 20 years later. And I know you did an interview for the Journal, and I'm really interested for people to read that because I think it's really well done in terms of looking at the findings, the corroboration of those findings, where we've been, and the work that's left to do. So let me ask you this. In terms of our ability to raise student achievement in the area of literacy, what do you think are the biggest things that are left to do? What's left to do?
[00:36:52.670] - Speaker 2
Well, there are only three things you can do to improve literacy. When you get right down to it, there are three things. And I think what you'd find, if you went to any particular school or classroom or district or state, you picked the grouping, you would find a great deal of variation in these things. And so what we need to do is start really following the science, the three things that really matter is how much reading instruction and experience the kids actually get. That's number one. Number two, what is it that you're taught? There are certain things. If we were talking about history or science or the arts or any number of fields of study, what we teach is a matter of our values. So should we put more of our, say, our high school time into physical Sciences or into life Sciences? Where do you think we should have more courses? You're going to find that differs by community. There are communities that, frankly, their economy is so tied to their health care system that they want the kids to get more life Sciences. That would make the greatest sense. They believe other communities.
[00:38:11.310] - Speaker 2
Well, Gee, it's farming or mining. We think more. And so it's a choice. You're learning science. In both cases, it's just a decision. Is it better for kids to learn the performing arts or the plastic arts? Is it more important that they learn American history or world culture? Well, we give them some of all of those things. But where do you want the preponderance or do you want it to be equally balanced? What are you going for? Those are all values judgments. When it comes down to what do you want to teach kids so that they can be readers? It's a different thing. It isn't about what would you like to teach? What kinds of things would you like to expose kids to it's? What skills are necessary? What abilities do you have to develop? The analogy I usually use is if instead of reading, we decided to teach bicycling, what would you say if somebody said, I love teaching pedaling, but I hate teaching braking? I'm not going to get into that. Come on, that's ridiculous. Nobody would do that. But with reading, people will do exactly that. I don't feel comfortable teaching vocabulary.
[00:39:17.130] - Speaker 2
I don't like teaching phonics. I think it bores kids. I'm not going to do that. But then how do they figure out what it is they need to know? So what we teach matters. And then that third thing is how well do you deliver it? So how much of it, what do you teach and how do you deliver it? The quality of that. There are ways of teaching things that are more effective than others. Teaching phonemic awareness, where the kids can actually see your mouth forming the words is really important because part of perceiving sound is done with the eyes, not the ears. And so that youngster who the teacher can kind of get in it. Well, these days you got a mask on or you're doing it over Zoom and it's harder to learn it that way. You have to think of those kinds of things. Gee, more repetitions is usually better than fewer repetitions. And you can kind of go through a whole bunch of quality things. And so when you say, Gee, what's missing in a given place. It might be they're doing a lot of really good things, but they're doing very little of anything.
[00:40:31.500] - Speaker 2
The kids are getting an hour a day of reading instruction and nobody's learning very much. You go to another place, they drop social studies and science. They only do reading, but they're not teaching fluency. They don't know about that or they don't believe in that, or they didn't buy a program that included that, or they're trying to do all these things, but they're just not very good in their delivery. They don't explain things well. They don't check to see if the kids are actually learning it. They just kind of take them through. So with a given teacher, a given school, a given district, you would probably come away with a different diagnosis for each. But those are three things, and they're the only three things anyone's ever found that improve achievement. And yet we pick the ones we like.
[00:41:30.190] - Speaker 1
Yes. That kind of begs the question. If you think about those three things, how do we bring Coherence to that and do you see it happening anywhere, and how do we bring that Coherence? Is it teacher prep? Is it leadership? What are the keys to bringing those pieces in a coherent way, in an accountable way, into a system so that we can see the kind of results that we want to see?
[00:41:57.310] - Speaker 2
Well, it's always going to start with leadership. You always have to have somebody who has a coherent vision or some group that has a coherent vision who's going to call the shots. In Chicago, that person was me. We increased the amount of reading instruction. We made sure that everybody was teaching all of the essentials, not just the parts they like they felt most comfortable with. How do you do that? Well, a lot of professional development, a lot of teacher education, but you can do it by buying some programs. That's not how we did it, but you can do it. Gee, these teachers aren't sure how to teach reading comprehension, but there's a program that can support them in that. So if they follow that, they'll be stronger. You can do that kind of thing. But leadership is big. Certainly professional development is big, and that has to be connected to everything you do. Getting parents on board is big. There are just a number of systems in a school system, everything from the school boards role to the community's role. Your businesses in a big city like the one I'm in, the Zoo and the park district, the museums and all of them were working with us.
[00:43:27.990] - Speaker 2
It's all of those kinds of things. Certainly the parents are big. So you definitely have to start with a coherent vision. You have to take a kind of a long term view that you need to do all of those things in the vision, but you always have to start taking one step.
[00:43:46.090] - Speaker 1
One step. It's the next best step always, right?
[00:43:50.230] - Speaker 2
Yeah. And you just keep putting 1ft in front of the other. But that's where the leadership comes in. That's why in a small district, it could be a Superintendent or a curriculum director. In a school, it could be the principal. But in some cases, the principal even seeds that territory to the there's a second grade teacher who knows more about teaching reading than anybody in the school. And so she speaks for me. You'll see things like that. It can come from a lot of different places. I've seen places where it was the teachers Union, but you definitely have to have somebody who has that trust, respect, authority, whatever it is that will make people listen to them. In my case, having the Mayor behind me made huge difference. People who didn't want to listen to me would go, hey, but there's a guy over his shoulder that's a lot bigger than he is, and so we better pay attention. But again, in a school of 300 kids or something, the principal can do incredible things or two or three teachers getting together can do incredible things.
[00:45:05.390] - Speaker 1
Amazing things.
[00:45:06.150] - Speaker 2
Yeah, they can.
[00:45:07.700] - Speaker 1
Well, this hour has gone so fast. I want to learn from you. What are some of the greatest lessons that you've learned in the different roles that you've played?
[00:45:24.110] - Speaker 2
Actually, I think the things I just laid out, those three things, they sound so easy. They're all really hard to do. I worked with a group of teachers in the burbs here in the Chicago area a while back, and these teachers worked on this, trying to do these things and to try to teach these critical things that I said they needed to. And I insist on two to 3 hours a day of such teaching. And we gave them professional development in the district, bought all kinds of stuff. And at the end of it, the reading achievement had gone up remarkably. They were seeing the highest scores on their tests that they'd ever seen, and the families were happier. And we were meeting to sort of go through all this. And one of the teachers stood up and she said, you know, this is really great, but I've been teaching for 25 years, and I've never worked hard in my life. I don't want to go back, but you need to tell people how hard it is to do all this stuff that you make it sound so easy when you say there are those three things we have to do, but doing those is really hard.
[00:46:39.160] - Speaker 2
And so this notion of trying to keep everybody focused on those same three things, trying to make sure that those essential things are being taught and not just the ones that people feel comfortable with, making sure that if you have coaches, the coaches know how to teach each of those things and so on, being able to recognize when somebody is doing it a little different and they're not hurting anything. Maybe they're helping it. And when they're doing something different, that maybe is pulling you down, that kind of thing, but you need to maintain focus. And so, for example, when I was working first year out, I had 114 reading coaches in Chicago, and I was responsible for not just hiring them, but training them and supervising them and so on, placing them. We would meet twice a month. Once they did two full weeks of training, ten days of training, Monday through Friday, Monday through Friday. Then they were in schools, and I pulled them out of the schools two days every month for additional training and meeting every session in those first two weeks, morning and afternoon and every session throughout the year. We always started with those three things.
[00:48:04.270] - Speaker 2
How do you keep people interested when you're always going to talk about the same things every time? And so I would get them presenting it right. I do it as a quiz. You had to find a way to keep saying the same things, to keep doing the same thing. Right now we're in this COVID crisis. I would imagine health care workers. How many different ways can you tell people to wash their hands? How many different ways can you tell people to wear their masks? How many different times can you tell people if you feel sick and think it's respiratory, you really should stay home?
[00:48:40.170] - Speaker 1
Right, Jim, I think that's where your experience as a first grade teacher really came in handy.
[00:48:48.410] - Speaker 2
That's absolutely true. Yeah. Because, in fact, if you're teaching a group of six year olds, no matter how well you thought you taught them today, tomorrow is a different day.
[00:48:59.770] - Speaker 1
Tomorrow is a whole new day. So it sounds like really there's so many rich ideas here. So vision, leadership, relentless focus. And like you said, always taking that next best step and just continuing to move forward and knowing that this isn't a short term thing, this is a long term commitment. But that's what education really is. I don't think we're never going to completely get it right because we have so much that we're always learning that we're unfolding into our practice. But we have to keep taking those next best steps.
[00:49:36.740] - Speaker 2
We have to keep taking those next best steps. Our kids need it. Our nation needs it really is. In that sense. The vision is simple, it's straightforward, it's understandable. The work is hard and it's relentless. And there are days you don't want to go back admittedly, where you just want to climb into the closet and close the door and shake.
[00:50:03.650] - Speaker 1
I think I share this with you once. I always say I have my Trader Joe moments where I just want to work at Trader Joe's, wear a Hawaiian shirt, make people happy.
[00:50:12.410] - Speaker 2
Absolutely.
[00:50:13.440] - Speaker 1
So tell us what you're working on now. What's your work now?
[00:50:17.930] - Speaker 2
Oh, these days? I just finished a paper I've been invited to do two papers, both for Reading Research Quarterly, which is one of the top not only research journals in the field of education, but one of the top social science journals. And so normally I'd be saying, oh, no, I can't dig that on, but I had to take both of those on. So one I just completed, and I guess they published it online. It's not in the Journal yet, but it's an article on the science of reading. And it explains the kind of research that really should be the basis of the science of reading because I think we're going a little bit wrong. There a second one I've been asked to do and I've been working on all day and want to tear my hair out is on tier one instruction for Dyslexic students. And what does the research have to say about that, and how do we look at that research?
[00:51:14.870] - Speaker 1
Well, that sounds terrific. Where's that second one going to be published?
[00:51:18.170] - Speaker 2
That'll also be in Reading Research Quarterly. That one. Sharon Vaughn is editing a special issue. And so, you know, that'll be terrific with her leadership on it. But as I say, tearing my hair out over my piece and hope it ends up being a good one. I hope it will be at this stage. It's too early to be sure.
[00:51:40.790] - Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, we'll definitely have to keep an eye out for those. So you fulfill so many roles. And, you know, when you look back about the legacy, what do you think is one of your just name one of your what you think is one of the most important contributions you've made?
[00:51:59.730] - Speaker 2
I definitely think I've certainly played a role in the increase of our attention to the science of reading and making instructional choices and instructional decisions. I think you say that you felt like you learned a lot from the National Reading Panel. I was using research more formally than I had ever used it before to try to steer practice. And that was a life changing, a career changing event for me in many ways. I ended up becoming sort of the spokesperson for the National Reading Panel in a way that I certainly never envisioned and the people who ran the panel never envisioned it turned out I had some ability to do that, that I could explain those concepts and had led the science enough on the panel. That was one of the roles I had played was it became obvious that you needed to have some kind of almost like a clearing house that would make the scientific decisions or would bring those questions back to the whole panel so that they could actually formally vote on them. And so I suggested that and they said that'd be great. Why don't you do that? Go ahead.
[00:53:29.470] - Speaker 2
That turned out to matter. I just think that whole notion of using research as the basis of how we teach and what we teach and for making these policy decisions in education was certainly not common before the work that I did on the national reading panel. And it is certainly much more common now, and not just because of me. Obviously, there have been all kinds of people playing in that, but I definitely feel like I made a real contribution to that part of it.
[00:53:59.530] - Speaker 1
Fair enough. I asked you what contributions you made, and I appreciate you giving it to other people. But like I said at the beginning, I do appreciate that you translate a lot of this for us and you challenge us in our thinking. It's not always easy, right?
[00:54:15.610] - Speaker 2
Well, the phonics one is an interesting one because phonics people have fought for years trying to get phonics into the curriculum and keep it in the curriculum. They're very passionate about that, and they have seen the science as a way of making that happen. And then at times, they will fall in love with particular aspects of teaching phonics, even when those don't necessarily have the same kind of scientific backing. And it scares them when someone says the studies don't actually show that that's needed or that's effective. And instead of seeing that as well, that's really important. We need more science on that. I wonder how else we could do this. He's anti phonics, which is obviously not true. I've been phonics for more than 50 years and often doing that at times when, like I say, you take a punch in the nose for it.
[00:55:15.670] - Speaker 1
Yeah. And I think that, again, that level of self, that challenge and that self reflection is really important for us in our profession. Thank you. Thank you for jumping on that opportunity to teach a fourth grader to read, Tim, because you hadn't taken that opportunity, we wouldn't be having this discussion today.
[00:55:36.890] - Speaker 2
No question. He had a bigger impact on my life than I had on his.
[00:55:40.630] - Speaker 1
Oh, my gosh. But isn't that the truth, really? We think about influences on our lives as teachers. A lot of kids that brought us up short and kids that challenged us and kids that made us go, okay, I don't know what I'm doing, and that would pretty much encapsulate my whole first year teaching.
[00:55:59.750] - Speaker 2
Absolutely. No question about it. Me as well.
[00:56:03.930] - Speaker 1
Yeah. So thank you for this. I do want to end with some I'm taking a page out of Brene Brown's playbook and asking some quick fire questions at the end of our podcast here. So who was your favorite teacher growing up?
[00:56:20.810] - Speaker 2
Favorite teacher growing up? I had a 7th grade teacher, the first male teacher I ever had, and he was interested. He brought a lot of life outside the classroom into the classroom, which was good for me. He also was tough on me because I was always doing something else. When I was supposed to be doing work, I was writing a novel or something like that. He didn't always appreciate that. What was that teacher's name Joe Heinbuck.
[00:56:55.850] - Speaker 1
Thank you. Mr. Heinbuck, what was your favorite book, either as a child or as an adult?
[00:57:01.830] - Speaker 2
Oh, goodness. My favorite book is one of your favorites. Probably the earliest reading experience that really mattered for me, that I can remember a serious reading experience when I was, I think, in fourth grade, my mom, who didn't have much education herself, insisted that I stay in after lunch for half an hour to read every day. And she took me to the library to get books. And I don't remember if we could take out four books or five books, but I took out four or five books on Abraham Lincoln, and I read them that week and have been a Lincoln fan ever since. So that was a very.
[00:57:40.710] - Speaker 1
Yeah. I think that's so funny because I think you and I talked about that actually when we were sitting next to each other on that trip. Absolutely. I'm a huge Lincoln fan, too. And of course, we're fellow Chicagoans, so we share that. But yeah, that sucked me into one of those things. Good for your mom. What a great idea.
[00:58:00.780] - Speaker 2
Yes. And those were the days you go out and play for 810 hours.
[00:58:05.620] - Speaker 1
Right.
[00:58:08.530] - Speaker 2
Without supervision.
[00:58:10.130] - Speaker 1
I know. Yeah.
[00:58:11.310] - Speaker 2
So I don't know what made her say he should stay in. I don't know if the teacher is told or something or whatever, but she just decided and that was a good thing for me.
[00:58:20.590] - Speaker 1
What are you reading right now?
[00:58:22.570] - Speaker 2
What am I reading right now? My goodness. I just started a book, the name of which escapes me because it's a big, long name. It's about a fellow by the name of Jim Simon who came up he's the guy who figured out that you could essentially make a huge amount of money in the financial markets using algorithms that changed everything. And he's a guy I'd never heard of before, like three or four days ago that he did all this and made hundreds of billions of dollars. One of the richest men in the world, one of the most powerful men in the world. Nobody's ever heard of him because he doesn't do interviews. He doesn't like publicity.
[00:59:01.640] - Speaker 1
Wow. Isn't that interesting?
[00:59:03.410] - Speaker 2
It was a fascinating man. And it's something like the man who figured out how to tame the markets with mathematics or some such thing. It's a crazy name, but it's a wonderful book. I'm having great fun with that.
[00:59:17.640] - Speaker 1
That's fun. And my last question is, what are your greatest hopes for today's children?
[00:59:23.470] - Speaker 2
Oh, goodness. Right now, my greatest hope is they get to go back to school and be with other kids. To tell you the truth, I've got eight grandchildren, and some of them are handling it better than others. But yeah, we've got to get our kids back into society. They've got to get back in the long run. Obviously, what I want for our kids is I want them to have what I think I had, which was the freedom to make a lot of choices in my life, to pick my career choices the way I did, to choose who I would marry, to choose my religion, to choose where I was going to live, and so on. And I think literacy gives people that kind of power. It allows them to know about worlds that they wouldn't know about otherwise, to find out what other people are thinking and feeling in ways that people usually won't reveal to each other. I definitely want them to be deeply literate, but not just so that they can read, but so that they can actually choose the lives that they want and frankly, make the mistakes that they choose to make.
[01:00:40.720] - Speaker 1
Yeah. Literacy opens up that world. Like you said, it gives that power and that freedom. And there's such a beauty in living a literate life, and that means so.
[01:00:54.270] - Speaker 2
Many different things to people. And see, that's the thing where I see a lot of teachers. Oh, yeah, I love reading novels. I want these kids to read novels. That's going to be great. And I love reading novels, but that's not what I want for them. I taught a class for several years. Hardest class I ever taught at the University. And it was a class. Usually when we look at the relationship between literacy and society, you look at the impact of, well, poor people don't learn to read as well as rich people because they don't go to as good as schools and so on. So you look at all that. But we were looking at it the opposite way. What's the impact that literacy has on how we think and how we relate to each other and how we work and how we govern ourselves and so on. And so one of the things that students were required to do was to go out and study a profession. They couldn't study teaching. They couldn't study school principals, but they could study anything else. And people went and looked at working at McDonald's as counterman. They looked at I had a young woman literally rode around in the back of a police car all night with a couple of cops, all kinds of things.
[01:02:08.230] - Speaker 2
And what you'd find is like a woodworker, this man who made furniture, and he wasn't academic, he had no interest. But as he explained to us, all of the different varnishes and all of the different that you had to protect yourself against that. You had to protect your workers from that work certain ways with certain woods that required a huge amount of reading. His deeply literate life was enabling him. It wasn't all I go read for enjoyment. I read so that I can do the thing that I adore more than anything, which is working with wood. That's a deeply literate life, but it's not the one that most of us see ourselves preparing somebody for.
[01:02:55.430] - Speaker 1
Very nice. That's a great story. To end with Tim, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon and I'm really glad you didn't become a politician. So thank you for that. Really thank you for ongoing contributions and we really, really appreciate you. Thank you.
[01:03:13.640] - Speaker 2
Thanks so much. Laura, good seeing you and good luck with your work as you go forward. Thanks everybody very much.
[01:03:19.330] - Speaker 1
Thanks again. All right. Take care. Bye bye. So thank you for listening today. I've known him for a long time and it was just so wonderful that he could join us today. We at the Reading League are committed to bringing you great conversations like this as well as valuable resources to support you in your knowledge building and your practice. If you haven't already checked us out www.thereadinglead.org we have lots of great knowledge building resources on our website. Also we have a very robust collection of videos on our YouTube channel and we have a vibrant Facebook community. We encourage you to join and check out all of those things. Also, please become a member with a subscription to our Journal. You're going to get this wonder valuable resource that really bridges researched practice the Reading League Journal. So again, thank you for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you next time.