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Reading Inspires is Reading Is Fundamental’s new podcast celebrating the power of books and the joy of reading. Each episode invites educators, librarians, families, authors, illustrators, and all who champion children’s literacy to explore one big question: What does reading inspire for you? Through engaging conversations and storytelling, Reading Inspires bridges the gap between research and real-world practice—showing what literacy looks and feels like in classrooms, libraries, and homes. Grounded in evidence yet open-ended in approach, this is a space for curiosity and connection. Whether you’re an educator seeking fresh ideas, a parent hoping to spark a love of reading, or simply a lifelong bookworm, you’ll find inspiration, practical insights, and stories that remind us all why reading matters—and how it changes lives.
Erin Bailey: Today I am interviewing Dr. Timothy Shanahan, who similar to me, started out as a first grade teacher.
He then became a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he founded the UIC Center for Literacy.
He served as the president of the International Literacy Association and he was on the advisory board for the National Institute for Literacy under.
Presidents Bush and Obama, and he was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame in 2007.
And a fun fact that I learned from his book is that he also hiked the Mount Everest base camp with his wife Cindy.
So welcome, Tim.
Tim Shanahan: Good, and good morning to you, Aaron.
Good to see you.
Erin Bailey: Thanks for coming.
So as I just rattled off there, you've had an extraordinary career from classroom teacher to leading the national literacy panels and shaping literacy policy.
Can you share for our listeners a little bit about how your early experiences influenced your views on reading instruction today?
Day.
Tim Shanahan: Yeah.
You know, I started out as a, well, a tutor and then a a teacher's aide and.
Classroom teacher and or a medial reading teacher and so on.
And I think I, I probably, I didn't hit the middle very much.
I was either at the extreme of thinking I was an idiot and didn't know what I was doing and, you know, why was I there?
These poor kids, you know, are being taught by me and they, they should have a real teacher to the other extreme of just super confident I know this stuff and, you know, just certain of how I was doing things was right.
And I think both of those had a long impact on me that, you know, that first part that, that being uncertain of myself and sure that I'm not bringing value, has really.
It's what made me go on to graduate school.
It's what made me seek a doctorate and wanna do research, was really trying to make up for that, trying to figure out what I didn't know.
And that really continues on today.
And then on the other extreme, there were a lot of things I believed and I believe them strongly.
That doesn't make them right.
It just, you know, but I grip to them and they've actually become topics that I've ended up studying that I, you know, I questioned myself on and so
I, you know, certainly one of my strongest initial beliefs was that writing was really important and kids reading development, and that was correct.
And yet it was a lot more complicated than I thought as a teacher.
And that there were a lot of things I could have been.
Issue about teaching kids at their levels and so on was something that I used in the classroom and I was certain that was why people thought I was a good teacher and all that kind of stuff.
And yet as I've studied it over the years, oh, I found out that maybe that wasn't quite as clever an idea as I thought it was, and that I should have been doing some things better.
And so, yeah, that those early experiences have turned out to be.
Really useful.
They've fueled my interest in learning just to make sure I knew more and they've given me topics to pursue that have turned out to be a
lot more complex and a lot more interesting than I recognized when I was so certain of their, you know, my simplistic ideas about them.
So, yeah, my, my early career has been really important to what I do today.
Erin Bailey: I think you hit on it.
I mean, I worked with a lot of teachers.
Training teachers.
I worked at a demonstration school where we had a residency model, and I always, this is what I noticed, first years teachers very clearly admittedly don't know what they're doing.
Second year teachers, they're like, as long as I replicate what I did in the first year, I know I'll at least survive the year.
And then third year teachers is where I always saw.
Folks start to question themselves, what am I doing?
Have I been doing everything wrong this whole time?
And that's, you know, a lot of times when folks go back to graduate school because they see a problem and they want to learn more about it.
Tim Shanahan: Yeah.
You know, there, there really are two groups of teachers that are the ones who get to that third year and go, I got this far, I'll just keep doing this.
And they're the group you're talking about who goes, man, there's gotta be more to it than this.
And they tend to become really good teachers over time.
You know, it's, that's how it seems to work.
Erin Bailey: Yes.
So we're here to talk about this book.
I'm holding up leveled reading, leveled Lives.
It's your newest book.
I do wanna pause for a moment for teachers who are listening to this, 'cause I know I had to say this to myself and I'm sure you did as well.
Tim, is that.
Take a deep breath.
What you're about to hear in the conversation may challenge a lot of what you thought you knew about using instructional texts.
And it's okay if you got it wrong.
It's not because you knew you were doing something wrong and you continue to do it.
You were trained on information that was incorrect, and that's what we're kind of here to debunk today.
So starting with that, why, what motivated you to write this book?
Tim Shanahan: Well, you know, one of those things I talked about being in, in my early toolkit was I had learned to give informal reading inventories and how to get kids into different levels of books that would match their needs and you know, all of that.
And I taught with all the little groups of kids and, you know, all of that.
Stuff I had been told to do and by people who I respected and who I still respect and admire.
But frankly you know, I did that and then when I became a college professor, I taught teachers how to do those things and insisted that was the right way to go.
So this was something.
I had spent a lot of time with over the years and, you know, it wasn't easy in those days.
I, you know, when I say in my early days, you have to understand that was almost 60 years ago that I was doing these things.
And so, you know, it's it, we didn't have all the little books, for example, that teachers have now to be able to.
To level.
And so I'd have to convince my school district to let me buy multiple Baal reader programs so that I would've, you know, different levels of books to be able to use without causing trouble.
And so, you know, and giving an informal reading inventory to every kid, you know, I had more than 30 kids in a classroom in those days.
And so, you know, it just took hours and hours of work.
So these were things that I really spent time on.
When I was early in my professorial career and teaching teachers about things like this, I actually did a I I.
For the first time, read the original study that had been used to set the criteria for determining whether a book was at a kid's instructional level.
And I was stunned because it was as if they just made it up.
It wasn't the, you know, I thought they would've tried to teach kids.
With books at that level and books at another level.
And they found that kids did better.
They didn't teach anybody anything.
They just gave 'em a test and went, oh, that's their instructional level.
It was like, eh.
I wrote about it.
I was, fortunately, I had enough integrity that I reported it so I didn't hide this result.
What I'd found out, but I never wanted to talk about it.
I put that article in my bottom drawer and hope nobody would ever ask me.
I mean, think about it, Aaron if I went into a, you worked with teachers, you go in and you say, oh, look, this scheme was just made up.
There's no evidence that it works.
Hand is gonna go up immediately.
So what do we do?
What's the alternative?
I had no idea.
I, you know, I had no alternative and so I didn't want to talk about it.
And so I kinda left it there for years, just avoiding it.
And then the next, the common core state standards came along.
Now, I worked on the common core state standards, but I had nothing to do with this particular item that they essentially said that to be on grade
level to be accomplish the standards of your level, the things you had to do, you had to do them within text, within a certain range of difficulty.
Standards had avoided that in every state for decades.
I thought, this is gonna be wild.
This, you know, people are gonna complain.
This is gonna be a huge problem.
So I wanted to prepare myself for what was coming, and I started reading the research on this topic that had been conducted more recently.
I was stunned to find that the studies were saying that the way what we were doing wasn't helping kids, it was hurting kids.
We were actually, kids were learning to read, but they weren't learning to read as well as they could have.
And I, so I, wow, this is right.
We should be doing this.
And I, so I wrote about that and I thought it would set off all kinds of big arguments.
Crickets.
It was quiet and that was a real problem because.
I assumed, okay.
The publishers have bought into this.
They're making sure the texts are hard enough.
The school districts are buying into this.
They're purchasing these materials and, you know, putting them in.
The states have this set of standards.
They're testing kids now at these levels.
This is, it's happening.
They're gonna do this.
There's nothing more for me to do.
And then I started seeing the teacher surveys coming in the, you know, nationwide and what had happened.
You'd think, wow, more and more teachers are teaching kids with grade level text went the other way.
Fewer and fewer teachers were teaching kids with grade level texts.
Once it was the standard teachers.
Having to confront difficult text with children.
Were seeing that it was difficult.
They, that the kids were having trouble with it and they had no alternatives.
They were right back where I had been 20 years before.
This might be right, but we don't know what to do.
By this point I, for fortunately, felt like I, I actually had a much better purchase on what should we be doing.
And so I decided at that point we needed a book.
We needed something that would both.
Be substantial enough that policy makers and school administrators and so on could buy into and would understand fully, but also that would have enough practical direction that teachers and teacher educators could look and say.
Oh yeah, we could do that.
You know, it, this is manageable.
It isn't you know, for so many years.
If you go through reading textbooks, you know, for teachers and so on, what you'll see is they didn't include anything about what do you do if the text are hard for the kids.
It was always move the kids to an easier text.
It's malpractice not to, and therefore there was nothing there for teachers and so.
Giving some practical guidance based on research and so on made a lot of sense.
And so that's why I wrote the book.
It really was something that we really need to take on if we actually wanna raise reading achievement in the United States.
Erin Bailey: I'm picturing myself as a first grade teacher now, and I had the library.
The classroom library that was organized with the bins a, you know, A through Z kind of bins and it was your, this is your independent reading level.
So go to the Level J Box and pick out the Level J book.
And I know for teachers listening right now who have similar organization in their classroom, they are on the edge of their seats.
Like what?
Are they supposed to do?
So what?
What do you hope is the outcome from your book for how teachers should help students find texts?
Tim Shanahan: Well, you know, the like I say, most states have standards now, you know, a lot of 'em have gotten away from the common core, but they haven't gotten
away from this notion of saying, gee, if you're a third grader, you should be able to read text with comprehension of, you know, certain levels of difficulty.
And they've got.
Lexis and three, four or five other schemes that you can use to, to determine levels.
And because these levels are far from perfect, they're ranges, you know, it's not a single point, you know, it's, you know, and they overlap a bit from grade level to grade level as well.
So, there's a lot of latitude, but there is a level of difficulty.
The state says that you should be.
Aiming for.
And the reason why that is, is essentially in the past, like when I was a teacher, you know, long before you were, but when I was a teacher, you know, the publishing companies pretty much set the levels however they chose to.
And that had been true for more than a hundred years at that point.
Now they're, you know, there's actually a scheme in place.
That tells you what a third grade level book would be.
You know, again, it's imperfect and so on, but it's, it is wide enough and overlapping enough that it's very workable.
And what that means is if we actually accomplish that moving kids from level to level successfully, what you'll see is by the time kids leave high school, they'll have the levels of literacy that they need.
And so it's really important that teachers.
Actually make sure kids accomplish the levels that are set for their grades.
And what that means is if you had a book room, if you had your, you know, all your you know, curtains of books set up the way that you described or whatever, you don't have to throw any of that stuff away.
It's not, oh, let's destroy this.
It's, let's figure out which ones fit my.
Fifth grade or my second grade it's not oh, everybody's at their own level and I'm gonna, you know, this kid should be working in, you know, in an H book and this kid should be working in an M book and no.
Now you've got a range of books to work with and all your kids should be working at those.
And therefore we might need to sort the books a little differently in terms of, you know, which grades get which books and so on.
But beyond that it's the same books for the most part.
And it's you know, books though that are.
Yeah.
Of a certain range of difficulty that you didn't have to worry about before you, you could, you were worried about trying to match it to the youngster in a particular way, and now you've gotta match it to your grade level in a particular way.
And then you have to adjust your instruction for those kids so that everybody has a chance of succeeding.
That it's a big shift.
It, it really is a very different way of looking at things.
Erin Bailey: So there are text levels or a range of text for a grade band, but the idea is that if you're in third grade, you should be ranging, you should be reading.
Within that range, you shouldn't be placed in a first grade level text because that's what you are able to read, so it's really on the teacher.
Then what needs to change is the teacher's level of scaffolding and instruction.
The teacher serves as the scaffold, the text doesn't serve as the scaffold.
Tim Shanahan: That's exactly right and so, you know, if you think about it, the way that we used to talk about this.
And the way some people still do is there are really only two variables in this problem.
There's the youngsters reading level and there's the books level.
And alls we have to do is make sure that we've put the right book to each child, and if we do that, they're gonna grow.
They're gonna make optimum gains in reading.
That was the belief.
The real issue the real problem that we're dealing with is really a three variable problem.
There's a book and it has a level.
There's a kid and he or she has a level and there's a teacher, and the teacher has to orchestrate how well the youngster can handle that, that text frankly.
The scheme that's been in place for so long minimized the teacher's role and essentially the teacher was there more for when things go off the tracks than actually to having the book was gonna teach kids.
The reading was gonna teach kids, the teacher wasn't gonna have to do very much of it.
That's a big shift.
Erin Bailey: Yes.
And is it the same for content area reading?
So let's say I'm a fifth grade teacher and I'm teaching my students about the American Revolution, and I wanna use a text to do that.
Should it be a fifth grade level text?
Or if a student's reading more at a third grade level, can I differentiate the text?
Because it's really about the content, not the reading.
Tim Shanahan: Yeah.
You know, I think what you see in most schools is that teachers don't have multiple books to choose from when it comes to something like teaching the American Revolution.
And so they might have a textbook or you know, some, a approved set of books that are.
Tend to be grade level.
And what teachers have done with those over the years is either read those to the kids, had the best readers, read it to everybody,
you know, round robin kind of style, told, you know, just made the book optional and just told the kids what they needed to learn.
You know, did a PowerPoint or whatever.
Or just ignored the fact that the kids couldn't handle it and didn't know what they were doing with it.
And you know, you go, well, none of those are gonna work.
And so you know what reading people like me would've told them years ago is, oh, you have to find an easier book there.
You know, there are easier books about the American Revolution and there probably are.
But they don't go to the same level of depth in the content.
They don't have the level of detail.
And so we actually we're cutting kids off from the curriculum and so yeah, I would really argue that the same kinds of techniques that teachers can use to scaffold the reading book are the same kinds of things that they could be doing.
With the history book and the science book, not saying there are no adjustments needed or there aren't some issues different in those situations
but the same notion is in place instead of avoiding dealing with grade level text, we need to enable kids to deal with a grade level text.
Erin Bailey: Yeah, that makes sense.
I mean, and what do you think about the use of AI to differentiate text?
Because I see that a lot too in webinars that I go to is you can use AI too.
And I'm not saying to do this, but feed in your text about the American Revolution and say, now make this at a third grade level so my students can read it better.
What is your recommendation there?
Tim Shanahan: Grab your wallet and run.
Erin Bailey: I.
Tim Shanahan: it's it is it's terrible.
I, it scares the heck outta me.
It's, you know, I talked to a lawyer recently who was saying, well, given that we have AI and the things AI can do.
There's no need, need to teach people to read anymore.
They don't need to know how to read.
And I think this is sort of falls under that same notion, well, gee, the kid can't handle a fifth grade book.
I'm not gonna teach 'em to do it.
I'm just going to move them.
You know, I can have this text rewritten and in fact.
Gee.
Kids could use ai.
They could just, if they need to read a book, they can just feed it in and have the AI read it to them.
Or dumb it down.
Gee, you know, I can't read it all.
Dumb it down to a first grade level.
You know, what the heck?
The fact is what we've known for years and years, when you make texts easy, when you reduce the difficulty of a text by the kinds of changes that we tend to make when we edit them.
Quite often what happens is the text don't actually even get easier.
They actually get harder because often you cut away a lot of the detail.
You make sure that certain words aren't repeated as often and so on because they have too many syllables.
And so we want the thing to look easier.
And what happens is the texts get well, actually less understandable.
There are a number of studies where people have rewritten texts to make them more understandable.
And their lexile levels go up.
They're actually, without, they predict that it'll be less understandable.
You know, they're using harder words, they're using longer sentences and so on.
And yet, oops, they, you know, the kids actually do better with those harder texts.
And so, you know, I, nobody has tested the ability of AI to actually come up with texts that are.
Easier and actually communicate the same information and without making it fuzzier or less specific or whatever.
So I think it's a big mistake for schools to do that.
What I'd much rather have a school do is feed the text in and ask it.
What's gonna make this difficult for a reader?
What are the least the words that are least familiar to most people?
What sentences are likely to be more complicated and could trip somebody up?
What ideas are harder to link across the text and let AI tell you?
'cause it can do some really good analyses of those kinds of things.
Not perfect again, but still quite good, which would save teachers a lot of time, or save publishers a lot of time.
But then somebody has to actually teach the kids how to deal with that rather than how could we keep the kids from having to deal with it.
Erin Bailey: That is wonderful advice.
I know teachers are going to appreciate that, and it goes back to what we said earlier is you as the teacher, you're scaffolding your instruction.
You're not scaffolding the text, so you can use AI to figure out you know, I teach mostly multilingual learners.
Are there any idioms in this text that are going, that I need to front load or pre-teach or stop when we get to it and monitor and clarify for understanding rather than just make this into an easier text.
Tim Shanahan: Exactly, but you know, what we've done for years is found ways of avoiding the difficulties and the problem is the difficulties are what you have to learn to deal with.
And so if I always make sure that you don't have that difficulty, you're only gonna have 'em when you're on your own.
You're not gonna know what to do with them.
And so what we should be doing is turning that around and saying, oh no.
I want kids to have difficulties with the text when they're dealing with them, with my assistance because I can make sure that they surmount it, I can show them what to do when they get into that kind of a spot.
And over time I can make them good at that.
I can, you know, build a proficiency so that these kids aren't afraid of hard techs.
But they're able to handle it.
You know, kids actually prefer it.
That's one of the interesting things.
They would much rather be reading the harder text than the ones we've been putting them in.
Erin Bailey: I believe it especially when the topic, you know, is interesting to them.
Tim Shanahan: Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Erin Bailey: So I wanna get back to KI kindergarten and first grade.
'cause as I mentioned, you know, I'm a first grade teacher and I'm just sweating right now of what kind of text do I use to teach reading.
So from your book, you know, most of the studies that you cite for using grade level texts are second grade through high school.
What kind of texts should kindergarten and first grade teachers be using to really build up those foundational reading skills?
Tim Shanahan: Yeah, I, you know, I do think it's different for beginners than it is later on.
I certainly and your point is well taken.
There are absolutely no studies with beginning readers saying that you need to place them in much harder text.
That's something that the studies begin at second grade.
So I always tell teachers if the youngsters can read, I'd say like a. Average end of year, first grader.
They're ready to handle grade level text From then on that if they're lower than that, they're still trying to get the basics of decoding.
Now, it isn't that you're, oh, once you're done with first grade, you're done with learning to decode.
That goes on, you know, for a lot longer.
But you've got the foundations, you've got the basics of it, you understand the principles of it and you have some of the more common patterns under your belt.
And so that's all you know.
That's all to the good.
For a young reader, I, you probably did it as well.
I'd ask my first graders what made reading hard and they'd tell you the words.
And in fact, it is the words that make things hard for a beginner.
They can't read the words.
The note, if you wanted the text to be much harder for a first grader, the way you would do that wouldn't be, oh, let's get unfamiliar content or really complicated sentences.
It would be, let's make the text less decodable.
In other words, use words that have spelling patterns that the kids haven't confronted yet and don't have any idea how to deal with.
And make sure when you do introduce words that you don't repeat them very often.
You know, if you do those things, you're gonna make sure that text is really hard, that you're also going to slow down the kids' progress and learning to decode, and that's not what we wanna do.
So I would say with beginners.
You want texts that have a reasonably high degree of decodable.
People go a little crazy with this, you know, it's not, oh, everything has to be perfect.
Yeah, no, you don't have to do that.
And the research is really clear.
You don't have to do that, but it doesn't make sense to teach kids a skill and then not give 'em any chance to practice it.
And so, you know, decodable text allow me to give kids a more intensive degree of practice with a particular pattern or, you know, spelling you know, rule or whatever.
That frankly, you know that than they would in just any ordinary text.
And so it's really useful to have that high dec accountability.
It's also very useful.
To have words in there that aren't necess, that don't necessarily fit the patterns.
Maybe they're exceptions.
The example I often use is, oh, you know, we teach kids that, that pattern vowel, consonant, silent, e you know, if you have that word you know that, you know, has that pattern.
The vowel is going to say its name.
It'll be a long vowel or a stressed vowel.
And so, you know, if you come to the word came you know exactly what to do with that.
A because of the e sound or you know, those kinds of things.
Well, that does work a lot and it's very useful.
It's a good pattern to learn.
But there are exceptions to it.
And so what about the word done?
What about the word come?
What about, you know, those different word?
Well, gee they, they have that spelling pattern, but they don't actually lead to that same pronunciation.
I would love to see decodable text that throw in some words like that.
So the kids have to distinguish you know, but that isn't how they tend to do it.
So we kind of overdo the decodable.
But you do want kids to see those patterns a lot.
And then the second thing is, especially for words that either are exceptions or aren't gonna follow the pattern, the word of the word the, those words need to come up a lot and they need to be repeated frequently.
And if you have other words, more complicated, oh, you know, we want to use the word dinosaur.
Nothing wrong with using the word dinosaur with a first grader.
Unless you're only gonna show it to 'em a couple times in the story, you know that word dinosaur should come up a lot.
So that it is worth learning.
It's worth remembering.
And so I, I would argue for a combination of decodable texts and what I usually referred to our controlled vocabulary readers, that is.
Books that aren't gonna have that many different words, but they're going to repeat those individual words a lot.
You know, I think of the old basal readers, the Dick and Jane kind of thing.
You know, look and run dick Run.
You know, that kind of thing where, well, those are kind of silly.
Uhhuh and decodable text can be kind of silly too.
But the fact is they help kids to build those basic reading skills.
And once they have those.
Then you have a lot more free reign to be able to say, now I want kids to deal with some other kinds of complexity, more language complexity and content complexity.
Not so much.
Decoding complexity.
And so you can like I say, by, certainly by the beginning of second grade, most kids are ready to go.
You still might have some laggards and that's, you know, very reasonable to protect them for a little while.
But at some point they really need to shift over to the grade level stuff.
Erin Bailey: I'm sure that's very helpful for the kinder and first grade teachers who are listening that they don't need to make all the changes.
Mean we've come a really long way with decodable text, but I do think we're, you know, a lot of companies have taken it a little bit too
far to your point of just like trying to go for a hundred percent de ability and it doesn't make a very interesting story, first of all.
And then I.
Tim Shanahan: It doesn't make an interesting story and it also has the tendency to mislead the kids to think that the system is a hundred percent consistent when it's conditional, where, you know, gee, this pattern works.
67% of the time.
But that means a third of the time when I come to this pattern, I've gotta know what my alternatives are, or I have to remember that this is exceptional.
And if kids don't learn that, they don't become very good readers.
And so this notion of we want everything to be perfectly decodable, really can do some harm in the long run.
Erin Bailey: What about, so you mentioned controlled vocabulary.
Is that similar to repetitive text where every page is, look at the boat, look at the bike.
You, I'm sure you've seen
Tim Shanahan: No.
Oh I'm so glad you asked that.
I actually enjoy working with those kinds of books with kids.
They're fun to read.
The kids, I like them to, as a starting point for some beginning writing, but for teaching reading, they're really lousy because in fact, they discourage kids from looking at the words you know, brown Bear.
What do you see?
I see a yellow duck looking at me.
Yellow duck.
Yellow duck.
What do you see?
I see.
By the time you get to the third stands of that kindergartners are reciting it, but they don't have the text in front of them.
Yeah, but they don't, but they don't have the text in front of them.
And that's what happens.
And so when you go, oh, I went to the store and ate ice cream.
I went to the store and ate candy.
I went to the store, and it's the kids are just looking at the picture to figure out what the one word is.
They're not looking at the word and they're certainly not looking at the other words.
And the teachers go, oh, that's great.
They're reading.
Well, no, they're not really reading and they're not even doing anything that's like reading.
Because you don't guess the words from pictures, and you do need to look at all the words.
So I would really discourage the use of those kinds of pattern books or those repetitive sentences.
So you want repetitive words, and so that means the sentences have to be more varied than that.
That requires you to actually go and read.
Oh, I went to the store.
I went to the store with my friend Millie.
Ate ice cream.
It's, whoa, you know, it's more complicated.
I, you know, I had ice cream too, you know, and so you're repeating a lot of the words, Millie and I like ice cream.
You know, we like to go to the store.
You know, you go, wow, you're repeating a lot of words.
I am, but not sentences.
And so the kids are having to actually.
Figure out what each of the words is and that's where the decodable should be helping.
That's where the word repetition should be helping.
Gee, they didn't teach ice cream, but the word ice that, those two words, ice cream came up six times in nine pages, you know?
Wow.
The kids saw that a lot, and in fact, a lot of them were reading it much faster by the third or fourth time because they'd seen it before.
I hope it comes up in the next story too.
A very different story perhaps, but that, that also repeats it.
You wanna avoid texts that have a lot of what the researchers refer to as singletons words that are only gonna come up once or twice and you're just not gonna see it again.
Those just overwhelm kids.
They make the text harder without actually facilitating the kids learning anything about reading.
The content either so.
Erin Bailey: So those story, I'm calling them story words or story vocabulary.
It sometimes kids do, I hate to use the word memorization because it's seen as, you know, a bad word now, but sometimes they do just memorize those words.
They haven't mastered the that phonics yet, but to your point, they see ice cream in a decodable book.
Besides the word ice cream and maybe the teacher front loaded, this is the word ice cream.
You're gonna see it a bunch of times in this book.
So sometimes it is okay to just memorize words if that phonic scheme isn't available to you yet.
Tim Shanahan: It absolutely is.
And it's even okay to memorize some words that fit the phonics scheme that you have the kids try to read.
But now I want you to see them often enough that frankly, they're automatic for you, that you're not having to sound them out or figure them out.
We don't really know what goes into memory.
Well, you know, some people there, there've been claims over the years that it's patterns and that's, you know, decoding fits that very nicely, that you learn those patterns.
You learn, oh I, I can see that there's a silent E at the end of this word.
And so that's pro, you know, it's that kind of thing.
Some people used to think it was rules, but there's some reasons to think that maybe not, and some people believe No, you actually, you learn the words.
Put those words in memory and, you know, your brain is, when it comes to a new word, it's kinda sorting through and looking for something that, that's similar to it in some ways.
My hunch is it's a lot of different things that go into memory and so yeah, kids are learning patterns.
But they're also learning words, and so it's okay to memorize words or to see some words often enough.
You taught first grade, you know what it's like beginning of the year, you try to teach words to kids.
It can take a long time, you know, oh we did 15 repetitions and little Johnny still didn't know it the next day, or he knew it the first day, but he didn't know it the second day.
What's going on by mid-year?
Gosh, I, you know, I introduced a word once or twice, and the kids, it sticks in their memory what's going on and what's going on is whatever they're learning.
They're reshaping the memory system to be able to remember words and to connect words to, you know, what's in print.
And they get better and better at that.
That's what we mean by site vocabulary.
They look at a word, they know what it is immediately.
And so you know, it, we're not teaching them phonics so they can sound out words.
So that's what they do initially.
You're really reshaping how they think about words so that when they see them, they put 'em into memory in a useful way.
And I think that's what phonics gives you without phonics.
Kids memorize words and then they have to figure out the pattern themselves, which works.
But not quite as well.
Fewer kids get it.
Erin Bailey: Some kids can do that very well and others not.
Tim Shanahan: Exactly, and that's the problem.
And so, and I, if we could predict ahead of time, if I could tell you, well little Janie here is gonna be able to figure that out.
And so you don't need to teach phonics.
And little Jimmy, he is gonna need a real heavy dose of it.
That would be terrific.
But the fact is.
We don't know which kids need a bunch of it and which need a little bit, and which can, you know, get by with less or more.
And so it's really important that everybody get an opportunity and that's where that explicit instruction becomes so important for those beginners.
We don't wanna mislead them though.
And that's.
Too much dec accountability or too consistent a set of spelling patterns and not enough attention to the memorization aspects of all this can be problematic for at least some of the kids.
Erin Bailey: Very helpful for teachers.
So we talked about instructional text, you know, that's what you're using to teach.
Reading.
What about leisure reading?
You know, sh should students be reading texts that are easy or independent level for them during their leisure time, or should they still be tackling challenging texts or does it matter?
Tim Shanahan: Well, you know, we've always assumed and had some evidence showing that the lowest readers tend to take harder books, and of course that makes sense that they would take harder books than they can read.
If you can't read very well, most books are gonna be harder.
And so, you know, just by chance you're gonna, you're gonna pick more of those.
But what the studies actually show is even the best readers don't select books at their in independent level.
Our good readers don't wanna read books at their independent level.
They wanna read harder books and so they tend to go I kids tend to choose what is aspirational, what they wanna be able to read, and there's nothing wrong with that there, you know, that can actually.
Lead to a lot of learning.
In the, in my book, one of the things I share a kind of a vignette of a librarian who's dealing with this.
You know, the kids wanna take books outta the library and here's this, you know, little kid who comes up and says, you know, here's the book I want to take out this week.
And the teacher, the librarian, looks and goes.
He can't read that.
You know, that's way too hard for him.
And so typically what they do is tell 'em no, you know, you gotta go pick something else.
And like, oh no.
Don't do that.
One, you could just let him give it a try.
If you're really worried about it and don't think it's gonna give him practice reading that he's gonna end up just looking at the pictures.
You might say something to him like, oh, you're interested in World War ii.
You know, that book's gonna be really hard for you.
I think you should try it, but would you like me to find another one easier just in case it's too hard?
You know, you could take both of them out this week.
That would be one kind of thing.
Or you know, Johnny, if you find that it's too hard for you and you'd like something easier on that, you'd let me know and I'll help you find one.
You know, either of those would be good and you know, when parents are dealing with it.
It, I'd argue for something very similar.
Oh, Johnny, we can get that book.
No, no problem.
But, you know, I think that's gonna be a book we're gonna have to read together.
Would you like one that you could, you know, read on your own?
Or I think you should get a second book that you could read on your own.
Let's see if we can find something like that.
But I wouldn't discourage the youngster from trying to take on the harder book and lot.
You know, I can remember when I was giving talks about this when the Common Core came on and a number of teachers would raise their hand and say, you know what you're talking about?
I, my kids often struggled with reading.
But the Harry Potter books, everybody had to read those.
And, you know, I had my lowest readers carrying those books around on the playground.
They were, you know, reading them and struggling with those books, but they wanted everybody to know they were reading it and they were part of the group.
And boy, I wouldn't ever discourage kids from trying to do that.
I tried to do that kinda stuff as a kid and sometimes didn't understand what I was reading.
Oh, well, but it was aspirational and I was trying, you know, trying things out and in fact, I kept doing that and it, it allowed me to read harder books over time.
And so I'd really I'd really discourage folks from telling kids for their independent reading, their leisure reading, that they have to read certain kinds of books or certain levels of books.
But I would give the kids some options and some support as well.
Erin Bailey: This is so refreshing to hear it.
It aligns very well.
With reading as fundamentals mission, because we're about choice and access, and when we host book celebration events, that's when we put out books for home ownership.
We specifically tell the librarian or educator, whoever's facilitating the event, do not level the books.
If you wanna organize the books in such a way, you can organize them at tab.
Tables around interest topics or genres for students, but do not level them.
Never say to a child, you can only get books from the green table 'cause that's your reading level, because it's about choice.
And I think some of the research in your book highlights that when you do self-select a book, you're more motivated to read it.
You're able to take on a more challenging text like your Harry Potter example.
Tim Shanahan: Studies back to the 1950s always showed that when kids were selecting the books.
They could read books that were harder than their instructional level or their independent level.
And so, you know, this is something we've actually known for a very long time.
And yet you do see people still putting limits on what they allow kids to read.
And it, boy, what a bad idea.
So I cheer for RIF fun on doing that and encouraging people to share books with kids in that way.
Erin Bailey: Thank you.
So the, a big question for you.
I mean, I knew when I picked up this book and read it, it was life changing to me.
As somebody who works in the field of literacy, it caused me to question.
Some of the practices that I did as a first grade teacher and some of the ways that I create content now it's this leveled reading.
It's a culture almost.
It's deeply embedded in curriculums, in assessments and teacher training.
What changes do you think policy makers, school level leaders need to prioritize to improve this?
Tim Shanahan: Yeah.
You know, I think you know, clearly just mandating this, which is what happened with Common Core States mandated this and then didn't do anything.
They didn't.
Invest very much in teacher education.
They didn't, so I would really suggest that the number one thing they've got to do is, you know, the books are there.
Now they, that isn't the hard part of it.
No.
They don't have to throw out the book rooms and so on.
But what they do need to do is they have to make sure that teachers, one, understand that this is holding kids back.
That somebody has to take the time to show them and explain to them why this is a problem.
And two, somebody has to take the time to provide the teacher development the professional learning that will allow them to see, well, what can you do?
You know, there's nothing more frustrating for a teacher than to see a youngster in their classroom struggling to read a book, you know?
Just can't, seemingly can't do it.
They don't know what to do with that.
And you're never gonna mandate somebody into knowing something.
You're gonna have to invest in making sure that those teachers.
Know what the alternatives are and it, and as your earlier question points out, and it's not just the reading teachers, it's what about the science teachers and the social studies teachers?
It's not just the second and third grade teachers, it's the teachers all the way up to 12th grade.
How do you work with a text that the students are gonna struggle with and to make that productive and to make the kids successful with that?
And so, you know, I honestly think this is one where the biggest changes have to be in teacher education.
So states making sure that the their professional development programs at the universities are addressing this issue.
School district, you know, the curriculum director, the head of professional development for a district.
Those folks need to you know, start thinking about, gee, you know, we've been doing a lot of phonic stuff.
This is really about comprehension.
How would we teach teachers to do the kinds of things that you know, to Tim Shanahan's talking about what's the guidance we can give around vocabulary?
What's the guidance we can give around building fluency?
What's the guidance we can give about dealing with complex sentences?
What's the guidance we can give in dealing with discourse structure and on?
Think of anything that can block your comprehension of a text.
How would you scaffold it without telling somebody what the text says without reading the text to them?
How could you.
What kind of guidance could you give that would allow a person to succeed with a text?
And I think you'd find there are a bunch of things we can do.
There's a lot of areas that have actually been researched and so that's why my book, there's a whole chapter on what do you do in terms of the words and the fluency.
There's another chapter, what do you do with all the language and the content stuff?
There's another chapter.
What do you do to make sure that it stays motivat?
Motivational kids prefer the harder text.
But they need to succeed with it.
And so teachers have to know how to make that successful.
And so the, you know, I put the, at least the bare bones of what's needed there.
Teachers need to see some of that stuff in action.
And I think that's really up to the, you know, the instructional leaders at the state level, at the district level, the school level and certainly at the universities.
That isn't happening to a sufficient extent right now.
Erin Bailey: Thank you Dr. Shannon.
I'm hopeful that it will, I see good momentum right now in the literacy landscape and a lot of policies being implemented, so hopefully this will happen.
I always end by asking my guest, what does reading inspire for you?
Tim Shanahan: Wow.
You know, I tend to, you know, when I'm reading for pleasure, I tend to read history or I tend to read, I read literature, but I read literature.
I don't tend to read the hot books right now.
I mean, I read some of that, but I tend to read more on what's considered the literary canon.
You know, I recently read Emily Wilson's Translation of The Odyssey.
I'm, right now I'm reading The Foresight Saga and the final book of that.
Well, that was published in 1927.
What do you know, I, you know, I. I guess what I'd say is that what reading inspires for me is I see myself connecting myself to the past, to the chain of humanity and the problems that we've faced and sometimes duct or failed to face.
I think there's something a lot to be learned from the challenges that humans have confronted in the past, both on a large level, like history tends to be, you know, nationally or, you know, those kinds of things.
But literature de deals with problems that are real in a personal level.
And you get to see.
You know, I wasn't long ago, I was reading a story, a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, probably written in the 1830s or forties, and it was about child molesting
And it was like, well, gee, we treat that, like, that's like a new issue that, you know, all the stuff on that every day you're reading about somebody has done some bad thing to a kid someplace, sometimes a teacher or somebody in the scout and you know, ooh.
Horrible stuff and you go, wait a minute.
That was 200 years ago.
And, you know, they, he was writing about that openly.
I can't believe it, that when I was a child, we didn't know anything about that.
And so I think there's a value to being able to connect yourself with that whole group of people who came before us.
There's much to learn from them.
I think we could do better if we knew more about that.
So that tends to be where my reading goes and it's.
There's some wonderful stuff out there,
Erin Bailey: Yes.
And the great thing is there, there keep, there's more and more, you know, every year more books are published.
You can read the hot and new or you can time travel and read the classics.
Tim Shanahan: Absolutely.
And I've got a daughter who's very literary, you know, she has a degree in English from Kenyan.
So she's, you know, so she gives me some of the more modern contemporary books, you know, that are on.
Science fiction or, you know, all these kinds of dystopian worlds that people are confronting.
So I get a little of that because if she gives it to me, I read it.
Fathers and daughters, you know.
But yeah, so I, you know, so I'm not completely bereft of modern and contemporary literature, but my preference tends to be.
These older pieces that have been around for a while and allow, like you say, time travel or you know, me to connect with a group of people I'd never be able to connect with otherwise.
Erin Bailey: Yeah.
Connection.
Well, thank you Dr. Shannon.
It was wonderful to connect with you today and thanks for joining us.
Tim Shanahan: Thank you.
Please keep doing the work you guys do.