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Dr. Louisa Moats is a renowned teacher, psychologist, researcher, and author. In this episode, she talks
about her beginnings in the field, why there are still barriers to translating evidence to teaching practice,
the essential next steps we need to take to ensure all teachers can teach all kids to read, and her
greatest hopes for the teachers and children of this country.
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.
[00:00:00.370] - Speaker 1
Hi, I'm Laura Stewart from The Reading League and welcome to Teaching, Reading, and Learning the TRL Podcast. The focus of this podcast is to elevate important conversations in the educational community.
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In order to inspire, inform room and.
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Celebrate teaching and learning.
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When we think about informing and inspiring no one characterizes that more deeply than our inaugural guest, Dr. Louisa Moats. I'm guessing everyone listening would characterize Louisa as one of the tireless trailblazers in our field. She has certainly touched my life in very profound ways, and I'm sure you.
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Have for many of you. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this.
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Episode with Dr. Louisa Moats.
[00:00:49.110] - Speaker 1
So I am beyond thrilled to welcome our guests today. Dr. Louisa Moz. Thank you so much for being with us today, and I just want to start out by reading your bio for the few people who may not know you. So Dr. Moats has been a teacher, psychologist, researcher, graduate school faculty member, and author of many influential scientific Journal articles, books, and policy papers on the topics of reading, spelling, language, and teacher preparation. After first job as a neuropsychology technician, and we'll have to talk about that today. She became a teacher of students with learning and reading difficulties, earning her master's degree at Peabody College of Vanderbilt. Later, after realizing how little she understood about teaching, she earned a doctorate in reading and human development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Dr. Boltz spent the next 15 years in private practice as a licensed psychologist in Vermont, specializing in evaluation and consultation with individuals of all ages and walks of life who experienced reading, writing, and language difficulties. At that time, she trained psychology interns in the Dartmouth Medical School of Psychiatry. Dr. Miles spent one year as a resident expert for the California Reading Initiative, four years as Site director of the Nic HD Early Interventions Project in Washington, DC, and ten years as research advisor and consultant with Sopress Learning.
[00:02:22.290] - Speaker 1
Dr. Mos was a contributing writer of the Common Core State Standards. In addition to the Letters Professional Development series, Dr. Moatte's books include Speech to Print Language, Essentials for Teachers, Spelling Development, Disability and Instruction, Straight Talk About Reading with Susan Hall, and Basic Facts about Dyslexia. So again, thank you for being with us today. You are our first guest on the TRL podcast, and when we surveyed our membership, they just overwhelmingly wanted to hear from you. Louisa, thank you. And you're joining us from your home in Idaho.
[00:03:03.630] - Speaker 3
Yes.
[00:03:04.360] - Speaker 1
All right. Yes. So one of the things that struck me and many of us who've been, as I said before, profoundly influenced and inspired by your work is maybe we want to hear kind of what influenced and inspired you. So maybe we'll kind of go back to the beginning and hear about your origin story and some of your big moments. So let's go back to that neuropsychology technician. How did that get started? How did that lead you into teaching?
[00:03:32.730] - Speaker 3
Well, I majored in music in College and I had no ambition to be a teacher. Actually, I didn't know what to do. So after going to Wellesley and getting this Liberal arts degree I went to secretarial school learned how to type and take shorthand and got a job as a Secretary in the neuropsychology Department. It was the first neuropsychology clinic in Boston and my sister knew the director and that's how I got the job. So after about eight weeks of typing all the reports that were coming from the Neuropsychologist my boss said to me, I think we need to train you to be a lab technician and that we're sort of wasting your potential by having you take shorthand and type reports. Literally he put a white coat on me and several other young women he had recruited for this purpose and turned us into lab technicians and what that meant was we were trained to give the Hallstead, rate and neuropsychological test battery to all the patients from the Neurologists who were referred for evaluation.
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At first it was just adults, just adults with strokes and head injuries and.
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Tumors and chronic degenerative conditions. And in the process of doing all of this, my boss was trying phenomenal.
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Because.
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He wanted to nurture the potential of young women as professionals. Then children were coming into the clinic with learning disorders that were unexplained.
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And usually what happened was referred for.
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Not being able to read and write. And then we'd put them through 5 hours of testing. And then the neuropsychologist would say, well, there's no real evidence for brain damage here. This was 1966 and 67. You have to remember there was no.
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Such thing as.
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An imaging.
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Science.
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So no one could look at the brains of these kids or figure out.
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The word dyslexia was not used.
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People who used it were considered to be quacks. I remember that distinctly. There were no schools.
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I mean, there was nothing.
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The advantage of being as old as.
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I am is that I can see where we have come since then.
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And there were no special education laws. There was nothing. If you couldn't read and write, you couldn't learn.
[00:06:45.210] - Speaker 1
You basically blocked out of school or suffered greatly.
[00:06:53.370] - Speaker 2
So then my boss said after two years of this, he said, you need.
[00:06:57.220] - Speaker 1
To go to graduate school. Peabody College of Vanderbilt has received money.
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To pay the way of the first twelve learning disabilities teachers in the United.
[00:07:13.840] - Speaker 1
States, and you ought to apply to.
[00:07:15.500] - Speaker 2
Become one of them.
[00:07:17.250] - Speaker 1
So I did, and they accepted me. And I went to Nashville and went through a master's program.
[00:07:27.310] - Speaker 2
In which I learned very little that was useful in the talk I did for the reading. A couple of years ago, I reminisced.
[00:07:40.290] - Speaker 1
About this, and I got out of.
[00:07:43.920] - Speaker 2
There with my first job as a.
[00:07:45.460] - Speaker 1
Learning specialist and was in a state.
[00:07:49.230] - Speaker 2
Of high anxiety most of the time because I secretly knew that I didn't know how to teach. I didn't know how to teach the kids who couldn't read.
[00:08:01.140] - Speaker 1
Right.
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Then your job after Vanderbilt was learning specialist in an elementary school, or yes, first a public elementary school.
[00:08:11.770] - Speaker 1
And then I was recruited by a program for.
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A residential program for kids with severe learning, not just learning disorders, but emotional and behavioral disorders. And they made me the curriculum director.
[00:08:35.190] - Speaker 1
But that was I mean, I felt like a charlatan in that role because.
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I really didn't know very much.
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And I think he asked me about.
[00:08:44.970] - Speaker 2
The origin of my work later in.
[00:08:47.860] - Speaker 1
My career, which is so focused on.
[00:08:50.420] - Speaker 2
Professional development for teachers and what teachers need to know. I went through years of having kind of titles that actually didn't job titles and job roles that masqueraded for the kind of expertise I would have needed.
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To do the job well.
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And really, there were years of my feeling under prepared, unprepared in the dark, floundering for information, and feeling responsible for things that I really didn't know how.
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To do, but I think I was.
[00:09:33.980] - Speaker 2
Hired to do these jobs because no one else knew what to do, either.
[00:09:38.430] - Speaker 1
And at least I was interested, right. And.
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I hate to think of all.
[00:09:46.270] - Speaker 1
Those kids that I personally failed at.
[00:09:49.300] - Speaker 2
That time, and I think that's a lot of my motivation well, then, right after after that I went to California had another job.
[00:10:00.610] - Speaker 1
In a day treatment program for kids with serious learning and behavioral and emotional problems all combined, usually severe attention deficit, severe learning disorders. Again, I was the curriculum director and I tested kids and prescribed things well. I then began to learn by accident about direct instruction and reading because one of our teachers and we hired had been through a workshop. This was nineteen s, seventy s. And she had been through a workshop on what is now known as Reading Mastery and showed me how to teach reading. It was so eyeopening. But then I sort of went on not knowing anything, then was hired back in Boston as the learning specialist in neuropsychology. And at that point my boss said to me after rehiring me, he said, well, you know, this position I've hired you for requires a doctorate, so you have to get a doctorate. And at that point Harvard was down the street and I thought I was really kind of a lame brain at the time, I have to say, young, not very ambitious. And this boss of mine kept kicking me in the rear saying you have to do this. So I applied to Harvard and Gene Cha was the head of the reading Department and I thought I didn't know what I didn't know.
[00:11:57.430] - Speaker 1
So I empathize with people who don't know what they don't know because for years I was in that. And then when Harvard admitted me and I started my doctoral program and I had Carol Chomsky, she became my dissertation advisor, but she was obviously an eminent linguist. And she said to me, you can't teach reading unless you know this stuff. So that's when I began to really learn something useful.
[00:12:35.960] - Speaker 2
Right. So interesting because when you talk about feeling like a charlatan, I just feel like we hear that story all the time. I mean, that's kind of my story too. I think so many of us and those who started out as teachers, I think many times we feel like, well, I didn't know what I was doing. And when you talk about being in California and that's when you actually learned how to teach reading. Right. I think about many of us were taught kind of around reading, like things to do around reading, but understanding how children progress as readers and how instruction can match that progression. That's a big AHA for so many of us. And I just appreciate that we've all kind of gone through this journey and how that led you to really be sympathetic to how teachers really require that kind of linguistic preparation because you knew that that was critical for you moving forward in your career. So how far do you think we've come in terms of kind of our educational community as teachers of reading? How far do you think we've come since some of your early work?
[00:14:03.030] - Speaker 1
Well, the state of affairs with regard to that is very mixed. So I would say, well, in some ways we've come a long way. In other ways, we are shockingly out of step with what we ought to be doing. So let me clarify. I think there are okay, let's see. In the realm of research which really picked up speed in around the early ninety s. Ninety s, although it had been ongoing at the Haskins Lab, in particular at Yale University, early research on the relationship in language processes and learning to read and spell. I mean, to me, that was the nucleus of work that now informs what we know, what we should be doing. It picked up speed when the National Institutes of Health invested so much money, and a lot of that was reaction to all the missteps of whole language in California and elsewhere. The area in which we've made the most progress is our research based understanding of what goes on when kids learn to read and understanding brain processes, understanding reading development in quite a specific way, understanding how the threads of the reading rope interact over time, and reading development.
[00:15:59.130] - Speaker 1
I mean, all that science is quite well developed, Mark Seidenberg's remarks notwithstanding. But we have a lot to go on as we think about the students in front of us as we're teaching reading. At the same time, your average teacher, you're in a public school classroom, does not act on the basis of that information. And so that unfortunately continues to be true. So we are letting students down and look at our national data. We're not, on the whole, making a dent in our national reading problem. In spite of the fact that there are entities like the Reading League, which is having a big impact in many circles, we have a long way to go.
[00:17:17.520] - Speaker 2
Yeah. So basically we have this body of evidence, and it's been robust. It's been with us for quite some time. But what you're saying then is this translation into the classroom. Right. So is it a teacher preparation issue? Is it an inservice issue? Is it both? What are the barriers that you think are really keeping us from utilizing that evidence base?
[00:17:47.230] - Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, of course, that's the big question, the most important question, because if we can really get a handle on where the barriers are, then real progress can be made. And the answer is that there are many barriers that are co conspirators in maintaining the status quo, perpetuating bad ideas, failing to support teachers and better practices, and not any one of them. There's not one culprit. It's a kind of coconspiracy of resistance and barriers. The barriers are entrenched ideas in the schools of education that are changing very slowly. The barriers are the appearance that reading instruction should be pretty simple and straightforward. And so publishers put out these simple minded solutions to reading instruction that people embrace. They have face validity and intuitive appeal, things like level books or three queuing systems ideas. A naive person might embrace that kind of stuff, because if there's a void there and the publishers respond to the void with these simplistic solutions coated over with nice slogans. And then there's a culture in education which is very hard to put your finger on, which is Where's the source of this embedded culture and education of, quote, humanistic ideals and now social justice ideals are tied in with flaky ideas about how to teach reading.
[00:20:07.190] - Speaker 1
That if you have Julie Washington likes to talk about this. If you have a library of books that better represent the social strata and racial diversity in our society, and you have kids reading from books where the illustrations are more like what kids really look like, that's the solution to the problem. Or you have more a lot of energy is focused on, well, let's get more teachers who are of diverse racial and economic and experiential backgrounds to match the kids. Well, that begs the question, well, still, how do you going to teach them to read?
[00:20:55.560] - Speaker 2
Yeah, right. As you say, although those things are very important. But when we think about equitable access to education, are we ensuring that all of our children have access to high quality instruction to teach them to be successful as readers and writers? Isn't that essentially what we really are focusing on?
[00:21:21.250] - Speaker 1
And the high quality instruction requires people to be very well informed about several things. One is the structure of the language that they're teaching to kids. That's the missing foundation, as I often say. And another is all the practical skills of implementation. It's complex. And as I written, you know, TT reading is rocket science, meaning that there are no simple minded solutions that are going to work. You have to be a decision maker, and your decisionmaking has to be informed by knowledge of language, of individual differences and what causes them how to think about that and how to think about your choices as an instructor, which you're making all the time.
[00:22:14.830] - Speaker 2
When you do, you're making all the time. I was sharing with somebody recently how I read this article about how many decisions a teacher makes every day. And it's over 1000 decisions that a teacher makes every day. And how do you discern what's kind of the next best step with this child? And if we have internalized this body of evidence, and if we understand the linguistic underpinnings of the language, if we're equipped with that, that really becomes kind of a gatekeeper for those decisions that we make in the classroom. So it really comes down to that, doesn't it? The well prepared knowledgeable teacher.
[00:22:55.790] - Speaker 1
Yeah. I'm just thinking of an illustration of this. Okay. Because I am writing a paper for the World Bank about how to teach reading. The first thing kids have to know is the Alphabet letter names, I think upper case. Okay. And then so if you're teaching this, how do you do it? And what are kids going to be confused by? So as a teacher, you have to realize that the confusions can come from several sources. Confusions can come from the appearance of the letters. The confusions can come from the similarities in the names of the letters. The confusion can come from the fact that the sounds that the letters represent have confusable properties. So right there, there are three possible sources of confusion. And if you're looking at a kid who is learning the letters and they mix things up and they don't get it, well, what do you think of you have to think, okay, are they confusing what they look like, confusing letter names that sound similar? Is it confusing letter name, letter sound relationship? So right there it should seem to be simple that you're teaching the Alphabet, but it's not easy to figure that out.
[00:24:36.770] - Speaker 2
Right. That's such a great illustration because it sounds so simple. Right. We're teaching the Alphabet, but even that requires us to teach somewhat diagnostically teach with these confusions in mind. So, you know, kind of what the next thing you need to do.
[00:24:52.950] - Speaker 1
Right. For example, where do you put the letters M and N in that instructions? There are visual similarities. They're both represent nasal sounds which are fusible. And yet many programs just put those right in there in the first lesson because they're continuance. Right. So you can blend them in words, and that becomes the priority for the first lesson, the property of being a continuant. So those are the choices that the program developers should face and make choices about. But the teacher still, no matter what the program developer does, the teacher still has to be alert here. Okay. Am I paying it? Where do I go after that confusion?
[00:25:50.990] - Speaker 2
Right. She's the one that's making that next instructional decision. Yeah. So that kind of reminds me of the latest edition of Speech to Print, and that, I think, is, of course, a very groundbreaking book for many of us. Speech to Print. So what are some things that you've learned since the first edition of Speech to Print?
[00:26:14.410] - Speaker 1
Well, I've learned more about semantics and syntax and really revised those chapters. I think the field of understanding the structures of sentences and how linguists my thinking is so elementary compared to great linguists like John Mcworth or something like that. But when you come to teaching, you come into teaching sentence structure to kids. It's very thorny. And it turns out that the traditional grammar that I was taught in school has only very limited usefulness. And there are other ways to think about sentence structure. My thinking, I think, advanced some along those lines. When I did the third edition put more emphasis on the role of the verb in a sentence as the director of everything else that happens in the sentence and wrote more about that and wrote more about a functional approach to teaching syntactic awareness, where you emphasize in the dialogue with kids and exercises they do what their words are doing in the sentence rather than what their formal grammatical description is, because words play many different roles in a sentence. So there's a lot more emphasis in that.
[00:28:17.210] - Speaker 2
Yeah. The function.
[00:28:19.750] - Speaker 1
What function? Yeah. What are these words doing? How do they work together? Other words do they work with to convey basic ideas about the relationships between the entities in the sense. But a lot of people don't even get to that chapter. As far as the chapters on phonology and orthography. I think that's kind of the meat of the book and the chapters that are most used probably in the book. But I guess I find that the research confirms and elaborates what we need to know about phonological processing and particularly phoneme awareness. And while we've been talking about phony awareness for decades, it is shocking to me that your average teacher out there in kindergarten or first grade does not have a basic understanding of what it is. So I tried to do a better job explaining the relationship between phony awareness and learning to read and spell. There's been much more confirmation of those relationships and why they're important.
[00:29:49.890] - Speaker 2
One thing I really appreciate about your work is that as you present this information to a teacher, I think you're always helping her make that connection between this information. Why do I need to know this? Right. Like, why is it important for me to have to understand home awareness? Right. And I think I really appreciate that. And I wonder if that goes all the way back to what you were talking about earlier when you kind of first started out and you thought to yourself, I don't know what I'm doing. I recently heard you speak. I think I was watching a webinar that you did, and you mentioned that you have your typical song and dance. I think that was a phrase you use. This is my typical song and dance. The fact that teacher knowledge is critical. Right. And I just think that's underscored all your work. And is that really what led you to letters? Development of letters?
[00:30:49.290] - Speaker 1
Yes. I had written the first edition of Speech to Print in the late 1990s, and it was published in 2000. And at the time I was working in Washington as the site director of this big NIH project in the high poverty, mostly African American schools in Washington, partly out of just stubbornness.
[00:31:25.190] - Speaker 2
In my.
[00:31:25.770] - Speaker 1
Work with the teachers there, I just kind of insisted that they learned these things that ended up in the first edition of Speech to Print, and it was kind of an unlikely site for such an experiment. But the first professional development days we had in 1997, I started teaching them about phoning awareness. Imagine these are career teachers in the DC schools slept into a workshop on a hot August day in a room with no air conditioning, wondering who the heck this white lady from? Who is this was he was standing up in front of them trying to teach them about phoning awareness. But because of my you know, I just sort of marched in there thinking they need to know about this research. They actually were wonderful students and realized right away as they were implementing open court. Most of them and also the Houghton Midland program at the time, realized this was working right away as they started to do these activities and started teaching, they would say, my kids are learning how to read. These are the kindergarten and first grade teachers. My kids are learning. We over years formed a great partnership, and they were very receptive to the knowledge base, implemented it very skillfully, and saw the results.
[00:33:03.500] - Speaker 2
Right.
[00:33:04.090] - Speaker 1
And we saw the results. These kids went from the 17th percentile on average to the 48th percentile on average by the end of third and fourth grade.
[00:33:18.930] - Speaker 2
I think a lot of our listeners may not know about that NICHD project. So can you give us a little more background on that? I think they'd be interested to hear that.
[00:33:27.930] - Speaker 1
Well, the University of Texas Barbara Foreman and Jack Fletcher had been recipients of major NIH research grants in Texas, and they had proposed an implementation study basically to show that what they had already learned from an implementation study in Houston could be shown to be effective in high poverty schools. And Congress at that time was very interested in scaling up what was known from existing NIH research to more high risk populations. So that's where I came in. Barbara Foreman had proposed to the NIH that they do a joint project between Houston and Washington, DC, and talked me into being a site director in Washington, DC. And then the project was funded. It was a $10 million research project over five years, actually five years to get all the data. And what we had to show is that if we taught the teachers what to do, we provided coaching in the classrooms, we provided instructional materials, and we provided assessment support that these high risk kids for years, very low performing, could, in fact, be taught how to read and the teachers could be taught what to do. And that's what we did. So I was down the street from Congress.
[00:35:19.560] - Speaker 1
I testified to Congress three times in my years there around professional development, teacher training. And so part of what we provided was the impetus for the funding for the National Reading Panel Report and the work of the National Reading Panel, which began in went on through 2000. So I got to go and watch them at work several times.
[00:35:52.870] - Speaker 2
Yeah. And that was, in my estimation, a really exciting time. Right. During the National Reading Panel years and subsequent reading first years, that was a pretty watershed moment when I think about myself as a teacher coming up. I came up as a whole language teacher. So really at that point in time, knowing that there wasn't evidence base and understanding more deeply the foundational skills. That was a moment that really was a moment.
[00:36:26.890] - Speaker 1
Here we are 20 years later.
[00:36:28.770] - Speaker 2
I know. Yeah. So when you think about some of that early work and you think about the development of letters, why do you think your work has struck such a deep chord with so many of us?
[00:36:47.690] - Speaker 1
Well, first of all, I'm very gratified that it has. And along the way, I've constantly been surprised at the extent to which that seems to be true. And I think it's the power of the information. I think it's a combination of the fact that I stumbled on the information. I was again kicked into situations where I had to learn the information that, in fact, really opened these doors to what was going to be effective. And I think it's that the information itself has such power. And I remember going through this myself, and then when I started to teach teachers what I wanted them to know. And then there's a whole story behind that, how I just started teaching institutes in Vermont frustration that so many teachers hadn't had the opportunity to learn what I learned at Harvard and had discovered was really the kind of key to helping the kids who weren't getting it through Osmosis.
[00:38:10.500] - Speaker 2
Right.
[00:38:18.910] - Speaker 1
I think that once teachers have some insight into the speech to print relationship and they start seeing what's going on and we can show them what the spelling errors are telling us and what the reading mistakes are telling us about the learning process, it's so exciting. It's so exciting to finally feel empowered.
[00:38:44.730] - Speaker 2
I totally agree.
[00:38:46.990] - Speaker 1
Yes.
[00:38:47.730] - Speaker 2
I mean, information.
[00:38:48.890] - Speaker 1
We're just a conduit of this information that itself is empowering.
[00:38:53.620] - Speaker 2
It is so empowering. When I think about I do think teachers who've been brought up in a more, I guess you would say, holistic methodology where we kind of immerse children in print and let them explore and try to Intuit how all of this works. I think a lot of us have this disquiet. We just have this disquiet about that. It's like, okay, well, this is what we are doing. This is how I was taught to teach reading. But I have this disquiet because I don't know what's going on. And like you said, when we're available to that information, it's like, oh, yeah, this was the missing piece. This is what I didn't know.
[00:39:40.670] - Speaker 1
Yeah.
[00:39:41.700] - Speaker 2
It's so interesting, Lisa, while you're telling that little story, a bright shining light is coming from behind you.
[00:39:50.630] - Speaker 1
It's the sun. Exactly.
[00:40:00.110] - Speaker 2
What is the question you get most often about your work or questions you get most often about your work?
[00:40:07.080] - Speaker 1
Well, the question over and over again is why didn't anybody teach me these things before?
[00:40:11.830] - Speaker 2
Yeah.
[00:40:14.570] - Speaker 1
It's so common now that I'm trying to release responsibility for a lot of the work in letters to now dozens of colleagues who are wonderful and persisting through the Covet Age and everything helping people learn the information through letters and through using speech to print. And over and over, they funnel this back to me. You know what people say? They say, why didn't anybody teach me this before? And that there's a kind of grieving process that teachers share. I did that. I still do that. I think about all those kids I didn't help and it was my job to help them. And I wasn't empowered for so many years. That sense, that regret. Yeah.
[00:41:18.920] - Speaker 2
I just appreciate that so much. I appreciate that you say there's a grieving process. I agree with that. I mean, we as teachers that's what's in teachers hearts is to do right by our students and the grief that comes with saying, oh my gosh, I could have right. But then I also love the way you keep coming back to empowerment. Knowledge is power and having this base of knowledge from which to choose practice, that is a very empowering thing.
[00:41:54.660] - Speaker 1
Yeah. And our slogan, you have to be smarter than your program. I think teachers know that they are smart when they know these things. They can explain language to kids. They can make choices that are going to be good for problem solving. They are confident they can forge a path through this struggle of learning to read for so many kids. And that makes them feel efficacious. Yeah.
[00:42:33.040] - Speaker 2
I mean, it kind of feels like you've shown teachers what's behind the curtain or what's behind the veil so that teachers can show kids what's behind the curtain. I think back about my first year's teaching, and again, we taught around reading. We didn't really teach. It was kind of like this mystery that we wanted kids to somehow discover and let's demystify this, let's demystify this for ourselves as teachers so we can demystify it for kids. That's such a great gift you've given us. Really such a great gift. What do you think is kind of left to do? I know you identified some of the obstacles, the entrenched, maybe schools of education, publishers, some cultural issues, kind of what is on the horizon. And maybe this is a reflection of what's on the horizon for you in your next chapter. What's Left to do?
[00:43:41.250] - Speaker 1
Well, sort of two things I think about. One is on the research front here. Well, Mark Sunberg is a real inspiration and guiding light, I think for all of us. He's so brilliant and his book is so brilliant on language at the speed of sight. He's the ultimate skeptic. So just when I'm feeling pretty good about all that we know, he comes back and says, well, you know, we just don't know that much about how to teach. And I think that's a little harsh because we know a lot about how to teach. But I think what he's getting at is there's so many other questions that can be addressed with more refinements in research that would bolster our case. So that research is very hard to do because when you start researching the process of learning how to read, there are so many variables that you have to account for in order to put your finger on one thing. But nevertheless, we chip away at it. And I'm thinking of Linnaea's work as just the most outstanding example of how to chip away at the little things that add up and her evidence. At a certain stage, it really is helpful to teach kids about the articulation of speech, and it really is helpful to do connected blending of sounds at a certain stage of development.
[00:45:31.870] - Speaker 1
And those things that she is working on now, those are just about word recognition. All the other things about the relationship between background knowledge of language, is it really purposeful to teach kids about connectives in academic text and how do you do that and which ones and so on, those sorts of things, we have farther to go. So I'm hopeful. But in saying that, I would go back to saying we know a heck of a lot about how to do this well. And then the other frontier is how in the heck to ensure that teachers not only know what they need to know, but that they're supported in the workplace in practicing. And as my colleagues who are doing a great job in schools of education are saying to me, the most frustrating thing is we do a good job here at X University, and I know they do, but when they go out and they're not supported in practicing what we've taught them, that is so frustrating. So the whole field has to move forward together. Administrators have to know this. State Department leaders have to know. And of course, Mississippi is a good example of a state where all of the stakeholders have together progressed in their knowledge base and their willingness to pull all the levers that influence what goes on in the classroom and have seen the results of that positive result.
[00:47:22.300] - Speaker 2
So do you think that, for example, by the work of Emily Hanford in continuing to raise consciousness about all of this and Magnifying elevating stories like Mississippi, do you think that we're making headway on a national level in terms of.
[00:47:40.240] - Speaker 1
Our we are in a few States for sure. And I see state departments across the country, many of them not all struggling to kind of emulate the stronger initiatives. It's slow going when you have resistance and resistance against having a teacher knowledge test in California. Fortunately, that didn't go anywhere, but it took a huge effort from stakeholders to say, don't get rid of a teacher knowledge test about reading, really. But across the country, for example, Massachusetts has just reorganized its guidelines for the better. So we have various States in various pockets, essentially who are pushing better ideas and their implementation. But you know, what's behind all this, too, I think, is that intrinsically it is hard to understand what goes on as kids learn to read. The nature of the information is I've been saying a long time. It appears as if it should be simple because it's just kindergarten and first grade stuff, and it is not. So that's a paradox.
[00:49:26.990] - Speaker 2
There's the rocket science right there.
[00:49:28.850] - Speaker 1
Yeah.
[00:49:31.510] - Speaker 2
A couple of things that I just kind of keep coming back to as we're talking about this. And one is that engagement of all stakeholders. We've talked about schools and administrators and teacher preparation programs and publishers and parents. It seems like parents have really become quite a strong voice in enacting change and enacting, you know, kind of mobilizing people, especially around students who struggle, around their own students who might be struggling. And then the other thing I think about is this all it's pretty relentless work. Would you say relentless?
[00:50:16.430] - Speaker 1
It's hard, and you have to keep at it. The pace of change is so much slower than we want. But then again, as I look back 50 years from where I started, I do see progress. It's just that it takes a lot longer than any of us would wish.
[00:50:41.130] - Speaker 2
Exactly. What are the hopes that you have looking forward for the work that you've done? What are the hopes that you have? Okay.
[00:50:55.030] - Speaker 1
It's a concrete one. When my three year old grandchild enters public school in a couple of years that the teacher knows how to teach her to read. I mean, I'm really worried about it. I want every teacher to be empowered with knowledge that's going to do all the things we've just talked about. That's my hope for the future.
[00:51:33.170] - Speaker 2
Yeah, I know. I love it. So what are you working on now, Luisa?
[00:51:38.610] - Speaker 1
Well, I'm working on this World Bank project, right?
[00:51:42.450] - Speaker 2
Yes.
[00:51:43.190] - Speaker 1
I took this on because I found it challenging. I'm supposed to write a kind of series of guidelines about not only how to teach reading and English in 30 pages for third world countries and other places where they want kids to learn English as the language of commerce and higher education, which is challenging, but also have to consider if there are any universals about teaching reading in any language. I have to kind of be considerate of that, especially in the introduction. So it's a learning process for me. What can I say about a student in Africa should also learn to read in their first language? I'm right in the middle of it.
[00:52:56.860] - Speaker 2
Oh, that sounds really interesting. It sounds right up your alley. What a great way for you to kind of be able to encapsulate all your learning and really apply it in this direction. That sounds wonderful.
[00:53:07.330] - Speaker 1
Well, yes, but I have no direct experience in Kenya, so I'm talking with people who do work across the world, and that's enlightening.
[00:53:17.990] - Speaker 2
That's exciting, too, isn't it? Yeah. Well, best of luck with that. Thank you. So before we go, I do want to ask you some kind of ending question that we're going to be asking all of our guests on our podcast. So the first of those is, who was your favorite teacher growing up and.
[00:53:38.070] - Speaker 1
Why that's great or one of your favorite? Yes. I think of my English teacher in 8th grade, Mrs. Hunter. I remember her. She was rigorous, she was demanding, and she did what, to me is a model for teaching kids related to any level. She combined the close reading of great literature. And what stands out for me is we read The Odyssey word by word in 8th grade with your guidance. And she combined that with really good teaching and how to write a sentence and how to write a paragraph and how to the tools of good language use. So I'm grateful to her. I think I learned something about writing in 8th grade because of her. And I learned something about close reading of complex text that aid with me for life. Wow.
[00:54:51.390] - Speaker 2
Thank you, Mrs. Hunter, for that. Yeah. Thank you, Mrs. Hunter. So name a favorite book either as a child or as an adult.
[00:55:00.490] - Speaker 1
Oh, my. So many. Okay. A favorite book. Okay, let's see one that stands out. Okay, The Help. I mean, I have many favorite books, but The Help, because.
[00:55:22.830] - Speaker 2
The author has.
[00:55:23.890] - Speaker 1
Kind of disappeared from view. Elizabeth, whatever her last name was, what she captured was the dialogue of a culture, the dialogue of several cultures. It was so well written. And I remember her also.
[00:55:44.310] - Speaker 2
You know.
[00:55:44.720] - Speaker 1
The story because it was made into a movie and all that. She came to the Sun Valley Writers Conference and gave this most amusing lecture to us, the audience, about her own experience growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, with her African American maid and who was an inspiration for a lot of what went on in this story and also her personal education in, I guess, a religious school in Jackson, Mississippi, she said, where they denied evolution, science. And then she said, imagine my shock when I went to the Smithsonian Institution on a tour and discovered the dinosaurs because no one had ever taught me about that. She was funny, she was inspired. And she had this as a writer, as a new writer, this mastery of dialogue and use of language to make her characters come alive and all that has stayed with me.
[00:57:06.400] - Speaker 2
Oh, how wonderful. So the book itself, but then also just the author and her story. All right, what are you reading right now?
[00:57:15.010] - Speaker 1
What am I reading right now? I'm reading about the Hemmings of Monticello. I'm reading Annette Gordon Reed's marvelous, incredible history that was buried for 150 years. Since my experience in Washington, I'm always drawn to the stories of the legacy of slavery and the African American community and where we are now and understanding our current national issues. So the Hemings of Monticello, this woman, Sally Hemmings, who was Thomas Jefferson's erstwhile slave wife, who had five or six children with him, whom he, of course, could never formally acknowledge the paternity of. And all this brought to light in the 21st century. An amazing book. An amazing story.
[00:58:24.070] - Speaker 2
So that's it. Wonderful. Good to know. So, Lisa, what do you have on your desk that symbolizes you or is very dear to you?
[00:58:34.210] - Speaker 1
Let's see, what do I have on my desk? All right, hold on. I put it away. I don't know if you can see my grandchild. Nell and I have another one coming.
[00:58:59.690] - Speaker 2
Oh, and what is her name again?
[00:59:02.250] - Speaker 1
Nell Naiman. I love it. Yeah. Now three and I spent time with her, and she is fascinating language development.
[00:59:19.310] - Speaker 2
Isn't it amazing how your perspective with a grandchild is so different than your own children? I mean, as we're watching our own children grow, we Marvel at that, but we're also thinking about all the stuff we have to do with our grandkids. We're just marveling at them.
[00:59:34.840] - Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. I can just revel in being with her.
[00:59:41.690] - Speaker 2
Oh, wonderful. That's great. And last question, what are your greatest hopes for today's children?
[00:59:50.630] - Speaker 1
Oh, gosh. That this country goes through a Renaissance of concern for children as our future and that we as a society make a greater commitment to the importance of nurturing kids in every way.
[01:00:18.570] - Speaker 2
Yeah. What a wonderful. Aspiration for all of us. Well, thank you so much for this. I mentioned that you've touched me in profound ways and you're always so humble and you're always so gracious. So thank you for being with us today and thank you for your wisdom and thank you for the work you put out into the world. Well, thank you, Loris.
[01:00:44.630] - Speaker 1
And thank you for all the work that you're doing with the reading League. That's one of the great spheres of activity that is adding to my sense of hope. I love everything that's going on.
[01:01:01.500] - Speaker 2
Oh, thank you. Well, you know, there's work to be done, right? Onward and upward. Alright. Well, thanks again, Louisa. Bye.
[01:01:11.130] - Speaker 1
Thank you, Laura.
[01:01:12.290] - Speaker 2
Bye bye.
[01:01:13.110] - Speaker 1
Bye.
[01:01:15.970] - Speaker 2
I am so grateful that we were able to talk with Louisa moats today of what a gift. And thank you for tuning in and listening. We at the reading League are committed to bringing you important conversations like this, and we're also committed to bringing you lots of great resources to support you on your journey. So if you haven't had a chance to check us out, please do at www. Dot the readinglead.org. Check out our mission, our knowledge base page, our YouTube channel. We've got lots of great resources for you, and we encourage you to join us. Please become a member. And also please join our Facebook community so you can share your journey with fellow educators. So once again, thank you so much for listening, and we hope to see you next time.