In this episode, I"m speaking with Dr. Marnie Ginsberg, founder of Reading Simplified. After discovering that many of her own students were years behind in reading, Dr. Ginsberg set out to find a better way. Today, through Reading Simplified, she helps teachers use the Science of Reading to dramatically accelerate literacy growth while making reading instruction simpler and more effective. We explore the myths of reading instruction, the science of how children learn to read, and practical strategies for teachers and parents to support literacy development.

education, science of reading, phonics, literacy, teaching strategies, reading wars, dyslexia, parent tips, teacher training

key topics

• The history and myths of reading instruction
• The science of how children learn to read
• The importance of phonics and decoding
• Strategies for teaching reading effectively
• The impact of social media on reading habits
• Supporting neurodiverse and hearing-impaired students
• The role of knowledge and background in comprehension
• Challenges faced by teachers and solutions

guest nameMarnie Ginsberg

titles

• The Science of Reading: Myths and Strategies
• How to Teach Reading Based on Brain Science

Sound Bites

• "You can't learn to read by recognizing whole words."
• "Struggling with decoding affects comprehension and confidence."
• "Teaching reading is an art as much as a science."

Chapters

00:00Introduction and Background

02:56Marnie Ginsberg's Journey in Education

08:15The Targeted Reading Intervention

12:24The Reading Wars: Whole Language vs. Phonics

16:34Teaching Phonics Effectively

21:29The Importance of Knowledge Base in Reading

22:40Teacher Reception and Legislative Challenges

25:18Navigating Educational Compliance and Student Outcomes

28:04Addressing Diverse Learning Needs

31:11The Impact of Social Media on Reading

34:22Myths and Misconceptions in Reading Education

37:12The Art of Teaching Reading

42:19Final Thoughts for Parents and Educators

Resources

• Reading Simplified
• Sold a Story Podcast
• Language at the Speed of Sight by Dr. Mark Seidenberg
• Targeted Reading Instruction Program

Guest links

Website

Host link: https://specialedrising.com/

Go Fund Me (Ray's Respite Care): https://www.gofundme.com/f/join-rays-respite-care-mission

Hi, morning.

How are you? ⁓ well, how are you? A okay, welcome to the podcast.

How are you?

Good.

Thank you. I love that. No parent left behind. Excellent.

Working on it. Thank you so much for your patience in getting here today and for being so flexible. I felt really badly about what happened last week and I wanted to get you on as soon as I could.

Yeah.

I'm really excited to hear your story and and have you explain, your approach and the differences between historic reading instruction and what I'd really like to do is just kind of get a quick little background and then my first question really is what have we been doing wrong all this time? So

maybe you could just give us a quick quick little bit about Marnie Ginsburg.

I am a teacher and a tutor and a mom of three girls and a wife and

I got started in my career as a middle school, high school teacher, mostly teaching English, little social studies and history. And when I was ⁓ in my second and third year in the public schools in North Carolina, my students I found out after some some work to even find it out, they were functioning two years below grade level on average. So I had about eighty ish kids all day long and they were two they were supposed to be at the sixth grade level, they were functioning like a fourth grader. and

Mm.

That's the disturbing thing that really changed my life because I thought I had no preparation for how to teach them. I had gotten a master's, I'd gotten good grades. but I knew that they couldn't attack the unfamiliar words and I didn't know how to fix that. And I thought that was what was keeping them from progressing. And

as you know, when you can't read easily, even if you can read somewhat, but if you can't read easily, it really puts a hindrance on your academics, on your sense of self, your identity. Maybe it changes your behavior. kids who really struggle with reading are gonna be more likely to

have behavior problems, maybe end up in welfare, drugs, the prison system, and we know low literacy levels is even associated with lower mortality. So

Right.

Yeah, because

the frustration is gonna lead you to give up much sooner than you need to. Right. And then it leads to those things, right.

All right.

All or all sorts of things, you know, acting out withdrawal.

Yeah. So I felt a lot of pressure to solve this and it got the and I was starting to search for solutions and that was in the time of the whole language era, which became ⁓ the balanced literacy movement. And and I knew that seven after seven years of school that immersion in literature wasn't gonna cut it. I mean like they've been around books enough that I didn't think that was gonna be the solution. So I was looking for

Yeah, just putting it

in fate in their face wasn't gonna necessarily do anything. Right.

Yeah, because they'd

been doing that and they were behind.

Right. Wasn't working.

Some of them quite

a bit. You know, the fourth grade was the average. So, I searched for explicit phonics approaches. Those were kind of hard to find and sometimes they took a lot of money to get trained in. And I would be buying products and looking at at them on the internet, going to the libraries, all even the university libraries, hunting down answers and most of what was being told to me was a whole language narrative. And then when I could find a phonics program, I just thought, my gosh, they're not really offering me much

Yeah. Right.

promise because they would say two, three, four years to catch up. And these kids weren't, I knew they weren't gonna get anyone to help them in beginning reading, foundational reading in seventh grade. I mean it was either me or is that was it. I kind of you know that was how the system worked. and I got really stressed about it when two kids that I had couldn't read at all. The day before school started my principal said you're gonna be an inclusion teacher and I said, What's inclusion?

Right, sure.

And you know how that went out, you know. That rolls out that way, basically. That's the training I got. And it was really scary for them, especially. I mean, and one of them was super grumpy. No wonder, you know. They they couldn't read like hop on pop. Dr. Seuss, basic, basic things. Exactly.

New concept, yes.

Yeah, exactly. You will do this and that's the training.

Yeah, so

Imagine the fear that's within them and the anxiety

having to go to school knowing that they don't have that ability. Everything is based off reading. I mean if we can't read we can't do pretty much anything else subject wise. Yeah.

Right. Right.

It's devastating. And

I felt that for them. so I finally found a book on the N Caps at Barnes and Noble and I just like I'm gonna give this one more time, even and spend my money, even though I d my salary literally with like three years of experience in a masters was twenty three thousand dollars That's the North Carolina state rates in the l mid to late nineties. Yeah.

Where was that?

Holy cow.

But the good news is that this book really did promise me phonics with something new to it. And I got excited when I was reading it and I I read it all in one night and then the next day that I had class I sat down with that book on my lap and and worked with one of the boys across from me, the one that was so grumpy, and he started to have light bulbs going off and so did I. ⁓ and then I worked with him and the other boy because I was so excited about it. I even went to get trained in it over my spring break, spent seven fifty to do that.

And across a couple of months, I worked with them when I could before school, after school, during channel one, if you ever did that, a news program in the middle the day.

I had to turn away from the TV to get their attention. You know, it's kind of challenging. But they they actually grew four years with me barely knowing what I'm doing, just a couple of months in the spring of that school year. And with me testing out this new approach. And that really was, like I said, it changed my life because there I was super frustrated, didn't have a solution. And something kind of easy and light changed that both of their trajectories potentially. Now they weren't still at grade level, but they went from being complete and non

Holy cow.

readers to functioning like a ⁓ mid to late third grader. That was a big deal. so then I went on to tutor privately and I was regularly getting my students to grade level in about twelve hours of one on one instruction. So that led me then to go to the University of North Carolina to get my doctorate because I thought we needed more s research on on this whole issue and ⁓

Huge deal.

Holy cow.

Yeah.

And then while I was there, I had an unusual opportunity as a doctoral student to lead the the development of an intervention which became known as the Targeted Reading Intervention. Now, 20 years later, it's named Targeted Reading Instruction, but that was a program that the federal government funded to research what could be done to help kindergarten and struggling readers in low income rural communities. And more than 10 or 15 articles have come out over these 20 years to show that this approach, based on that original

idea that I got the spark of from to work with those two boys and refined over the years of tutoring, it made a difference. And it was on the What Works clearing house. It has one of the highest effect sizes and evidence for ESSA. And then I was excited about that. We were working with teachers in multiple states, but no one ever heard about it. You probably have never heard about it. And that's really what often happens with research. Just sits on the shelf.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, right.

So ⁓ my husband got a job in Wisconsin and so I thought let this is a chance for me to try something new and I developed Reading Simplified as a way to take those same concepts in the system to and spread it to more students, whether ⁓ you're a beginner or a struggling reader of any age. We now at Reading Simplified help teachers primarily learn a system for teaching anyone how to read that's very efficient and in alignment with the the research.

and it's also easier for the teacher to learn because like I was, many teachers did not get well prepared in college to teach reading and they're having to figure this out on the on the go on the in the middle of the school year and whatnot. They don't have a lot of time to go get a master's in linguistics and study for fifty hundred hours or that kind of thing or a hundred and fifty.

Yes. Mm-hmm. Right.

So ⁓ yeah, we have s

Well

since twenty fifteen is when I kinda started launching twenty sixteen we actually finally sold it. For those ten years or so, we've now trained seventeen thousand teachers and parents.

And lots of kids have been impacted and we're really having a good time seeing what results when like I said, either teachers or parents or tutors come back to us with their success stories.

See, this is what

I mean about the dedication of a teacher and the lack of understanding of what a teacher does. Money obviously was the last thing that motivated you, right? You got you had none, but you got excited about something and you went and stepped beyond beyond your job in in a way to a level that teachers always step beyond the level that they're expected. They have to do so much more preparation, understanding how to teach.

But we don't prepare them correctly. And so that's always been a frustration for me. I know going into my job in special education, I was never really, you you do the subject matter, you get, you pass the classes and you get your masters, but there's nothing real, the real world learning or practical understanding of of how to apply these things and how to handle situations. And so reading to me has always been, for me, I've always appreciated it as the most important subject.

Right.

And I think that it hasn't gotten the attention that it needs throughout the years. And so thank you for what you're doing because a reason I wanted to have you on this program and also a reason why I have a lot of people on this program is because I want to be able to spread the work that you're doing to people and make it make it known. So with that said, let's just start off talking about quickly about what's been going on.

to date, I mean there's been a lot, there's a lot of discussion about how to approach reading throughout the years. A lot of there's always seems to be something new, but nothing really seems to take, you know? I'd like to hear more about your work and how you've kind of changed the game and based on how things have been taught really kind of wrong or incorrectly in the past, where our approach has been that way and and what you do. And and from this book, what is what is it that you gleaned from it that made

So it's kind of nuts in particular how we teach reading in ⁓ English speaking countries. I think we've gotten all twisted up in thinking that it's much more complicated than it needs to be. And we've been fighting about two different paradigms for literally over a hundred years, but especially in a heated way in the last Fifty, sixty years really. And those are t between two ideas. One idea has been kind of

manifested as whole word or whole language and then balance literacy they all have the same belief that it's easier for the child to learn to read if you look more at the whole instead of the little bits or the parts or recognize phonics.

Mm-hmm.

That has been so roundly disproven by science for so long, it's really disgraceful that we've that that idea has held on, but it's hung on ⁓ with

Great gusto.

Well said, yeah. And then

on the other side we have the phonics ⁓ approach, which is to teach kids how the code works and teach them letter sound correspondences that a B can be b and S H is sh and that that is how our code works. And those two have been competing, ⁓ but a whole language has been winning in the schools or a variation of it where we just kinda half heartedly teach phonics and it just doesn't work, especially for about forty percent of our kids.

And so Yes, it's some such a big fight that sometimes it's even called the Reading Wars. That's right.

Is this referred to the reading is this the reading wars that's referred to? Okay.

Okay.

⁓ and a big change happened about five about seven years ago. Emily Hanford is a journalist who had a profound impact on the field with her podcasts, audio documentaries, and also a podcast called Sold a Story. I really encourage your listeners to check that out. It was award-winning. And also Dr. Mark Seidenberg wrote a book called Language at the Speed of Sight and lots of decoding dyslexia. State groups of parents who were

clamoring

for change in the legislation about particularly about how to serve dis students with dyslexia. All those things kind of bubbled to the surface at the same time. And it began this thing that's called the science of reading movement. And so lots of states have now made laws to say you cannot do what was the theory that's critical to the whole language balance literacy approach, which is called three queuing. We can we won't probably take too much time to get into that, but it's me it's a the ideology

Basically, that's reigned for 50 years is being outlawed in most states. And now it's being mandated that you have to teach phonics. And that in overall is a really good thing. And phonics definitely has a strong research base. We know that the brain learns to read by cracking the code. We have to get the concept that our written language is a code for sounds. That when you see shout, you are a process.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Processing that is shh out. And that is the route in which you over time become fluent. You don't end as a mature reader, by paying attention to the sounds, but that's how you begin.

Okay. Is that

the perception of sound in terms of how it relates to reading?

Yeah, knowing hearing that the sh shout is those sounds and that tying it back to those symbols, the S H, the O U, and the T, that insight doesn't come naturally. And a lot of us are not so good at it naturally. And we have to be taught it very ex explicitly and shown how these combinations work. And then we need a lot of practice reading with speed back on how to get better. So it is good that that has been that has happened. And like I said, we have a

Robust scientific base on how the brain learns to read. What is weaker, however, is how to teach reading.

Mm-hmm.

And that's really what has kind of set apart the experience that I had back in the 90s with those two boys and has carried me for over 25 years now and with reading simplified. So it is still teaching phonics, ⁓ but it is teaching it more in alignment with how the brain learns to read much more efficiently without as many rules, without really any rules, without a lot of strange markings. it releases the information really quickly, and so kids just crack.

Okay. Hmm.

code and then they get into reading real books and the teacher gives them feedback and so it is still in alignment like I said with the research on how we learn to read but it's just a paradigm that's more modern. A lot of our phonics programs that you'll see in the schools are based on a paradigm that's over a hundred years old. And so

So you're translating it

into like a more simplified ⁓ practical strategies and things like that for teachers Okay. Can you talk a little bit about how that works?

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Mm-hmm.

Well, ⁓ one of the most powerful things we do is an activity that we call switch it. And it is one that that lays the groundwork for helping the the child to see how the code works, like get that foundational system for how sounds and symbols relate. Like I said, it just doesn't come naturally. If you've ever seen a beginning reader try to work through a sentence, it seems so arduous and you think it seems like it's so easy. Well, it's not so easy for the beginner. They have to they have to look at all those symbols.

Okay.

and S-H-O-U-T and then recognize that those are clustered in different ways and the and the OU could be ow, it could also be O, you know, and like soul. It's not a very simple process. So

Right. And and everybody processes in their own way. So it's really how do you connect to that? So yeah.

Yeah.

So

what Switchit does is it helps kids ⁓ see the inside parts of words and kind of learn how to rapidly match up the sounds that they hear with the symbols that they see on the page. So it would start with a very simple word chain activity like, well, okay, we're gonna build the word mop, and they build it with like letter sound cards, and then they and then you give them a challenge. Well you've got mop. Let's change it to map, now let's change it to mat. Now let's change it to sat, now let's change it to sit.

So you keep changing every position of the word that really does a great job helping the kid analyze the code, understand the inside parts of words, and then you just bump it up from there. So that was three sounds, then you can do flat four sounds like held to help, five sounds stomp to stump to slump, sprint to splint. And that is a great

Mm.

muscle building, so to speak, activity that gives the the child a framework for analyzing the the code and not glossing over the inside parts of words, which is actually what a poor reader does. They just kind of look at the beginning, maybe the end, and they're just like, I don't want to look at that. You've seen those readers, right? Just guess on the first two letters. Well, this is trying to

Yeah, right. Yes, yes.

deal with that. Another thing that sets this approach apart is that we release the phonics really rapidly. We don't just give like OA one day and O E R another day in this list of a hundred to two hundred things that just seems like you're never going to finish as a teacher. But we we cluster the the high frequency spellings into sounds because the student comes to us knowing the sound. So we say we're gonna learn some spellings for the sound ⁓ today. Can you say ⁓ right.

As in snow and grow and tow and boat and go and home. And then they read those words that are have the O sound highlighted, like the O W or the OA, and then they sort them by spelling. So they would put the snow and show under the OW and the boat and road under the OA and the home and note under the O silent E. And that releases that information really quickly and then helps them

group it as one thing as a mental framework or schema. So they're just building these really quickly. It doesn't take a lot of effort for them. And then when they write them, they read them and they sort them and they write them and they say the sound shh So they're always paying attention to how sounds and symbols map to to print. And that's not the whole thing, but that's

a big part of what makes a lesson really powerful and shows kids how to read the code. And then when they actually read real books, the teacher l is there listening to them to them, coaching them on one little snippet here or there, like, no, what else could that sound be? And then they do the hard work of trying to process it and d like you said, everybody's different. So one kid's gonna have trouble with the OW, another kid's gonna have trouble with the ER. Some of those kids gonna have trouble with remembering all though and

So you just respond to what they are doing and you're giving them really instructional match.

Right, so you that that individual approach is is very possible still. Yeah.

There's not a lot

of reading practice in K through second grade right now, which is really kind of crazy.

Well, right. And I wanted to talk to you about the idea of knowledge base. I know you talk about knowledge base and I feel like, that's an area that needs to really be focused on more because if we don't have knowledge references for whatever it is that we're talking about, I would think it would be these words kind of make no sense, right? They have no they have no connection to to a reality or to a concept. So how does that fit into to your teaching?

Right.

Yeah, well and that is actually ⁓ one thing that I overlooked when I talked about the science of reading, that's another entire movement that is under that umbrella that we've been missing as a field, thinking that reading is ⁓ comprehension is simply the a matter of practicing a few strategies like can you summarize or can you infer? And really you can infer if you know stuff. And so reading teachers should be teachers who are building knowledge.

Yeah.

⁓ we do that by making sure that our students comprehend when they're finished reading a passage. But by and large, what we're mostly aiming to do is like a triage method where we want to get kids decoding, figuring out how to attack an unfamiliar word really quickly and then read widely so they become fluent. And that is a a really efficient focus for us so that once they can be fluent, they can read anything. They could learn anything at school.

And then they should be able to be free to read widely and get a really good education so they get the knowledge, the vocabulary, the background knowledge that it takes to be a good comprehender. So that's not an element of our instruction per se. We have lots to say about how you we would recommend you could go about doing that. But it's our main thing is like is really just ⁓ a short twelve twelve level, often twelve weeks, ⁓ to get

Right. They do it in school. Right. Right.

into the code and and get them fluent and get out and move on to more enriching things.

Mm-hmm.

How do you find

the reception from teachers to your program?

Well, they're very eager because we're showing them a faster way to learn something themselves and then also a faster way to get students' results. Usually they will start with switch it and they'll be like, I didn't know that they could do all this and that that excites them. it's just now it's like interesting with legislation. This is just hasn't happened too much before. there's a lot more top down authoritarian kind of

Mm-hmm.

Leadership in schools. So if a program is on a list and the s district has approved it, that's what they're doing and they may not have the freedom to choose reading simplified. Whereas in the past they had more freedom.

That's yeah,

I mean that is the problem with education when when schools decide on what their approach is gonna be. It's hard to be creative as a teacher because you can't you don't have the time, the parameters are so so restricted because you can't interpret things your own way a lot of the time. You just have to do what you're told to do. There's not enough time in the day. And so what are you doing to kind of influence the field to be able to see your program as the way to go?

Well, we're trying to ⁓ point out that yes, phonics is great, but what we've been mandating as legislation is not really science based. Some states will even say you have to be approved by

The International Dyslexia Association, and they have things in their standards that aren't based on science. They're based on the tradition of that program approach. And so that's one way that we're trying to get the field to recognize that let's let's don't forget the science of reading was a good idea. Let's focus on the science and what scientific principles we have that are we're either using or not using in our programs.

Yeah.

Yeah, the science, when they hear the word science, a lot of people immediately reject it. Yeah. That's it's weird. Like science is rejected a lot now. it's it puts you in a difficult situation. And when you talk about how education is looked at today and the things that want to be focused on by those powers that be that don't necessarily have the knowledge and they're not in the classroom.

Yeah.

It's very frustrating for teachers and teachers don't have that outlet necessarily or the ability to be able to do what they feel is the right thing to do. Do you have anything to say about that?

Yeah, we

it's a it's a catch twenty two because I understand trying to get uniformity and I actually believe in that. Like if if everybody's doing ⁓ their own thing, that's not good.

I agree with you, but take let's get the right

thing to be uniform with. How's your puppy?

Sorry, just checking out my job. He's he's

not very happy. Just let me let him out. Sorry. Usually he's quite happy. But what I was gonna

Sure.

It's John.

He's like I can he's like I can

read already, I get it. There's mommy again.

heard this talk before he said

yeah I was just talking to a teacher who got the best results in her district for her her grade level because she was using Reading Simplify but she can't tell her her boss or or who

Right, I was gonna say was under the cover of night.

And that's

not uncommon. And so and it's and we hear like, you know, my my results are the best, but they're still coming around with a clipboard and checking to see if I'm using the district program. And I again I'm not against

leadership leading. It's just are we leading for compliance or leading for student outcomes? And you know, if someone's got the best outcomes and you're telling them to change, you can't it you can't claim to be basing your decision on outcomes.

Right, because we're talking about reading approach as opposed to why kids are struggling.

trying to understand where the struggle is and trying to find the fit for that and it sounds like you have a fit that really works. And I'm glad we're talking today because I wanna help get this out. ⁓ when I was teaching, I was teaching deaf and special needs kids. And so trying to teach reading to a deaf child very challenging, right? So, I give speech teachers all the props for

Extra heart.

The work that they do, the hours that they put into it. But it's very, very challenging. This is pre cochlear implant, so you didn't have the benefit of that. Kids had hearing aids, so obviously different degrees of hearing loss and ability. And so an approach to teaching deaf children how to read was fairly non existent. You know, we were always kind of just trying to reinvent the wheel constantly, and using, phonics wasn't necessarily gonna be the most

successful way to do it at with certain kids but with other kids it could be you know so it was really really challenging how does your program impact kids with different neurodiversities and hearing loss and you know autism things like that because a lot of these kids get lost in the sauce when it comes to that so can you speak to that

Well it

over the years we've had teachers implement with all

all shades of differences and from autism to aphasia to hearing difficulties and and beyond. so it definitely takes more time for most of those disabilities to demonstrate success, the same success that a more typic developing child would enjoy. But we s we seem to find that they still do much faster this way because of the concrete nature

Mm-hmm.

of it and we're drawing we're connecting all these important modalities. Even students who are hard of hearing can can still go through a phonological pathway to connect sound and symbol. And so

I felt like that was

in speech sessions that was really able to be focused on better than it was as a classroom teacher because you had all these kids learning differently, so it was really difficult to take the time to teach them specifically and that that's an injustice to them,

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think especially for reading. I mean, as you pointed out at the beginning of our time, it's one of it's if it's not the one of the most it's it's very close to the most important thing ⁓ that we can do. So we should be doing that in small groups in my opinion, or if or one on one when that's failing. And so that's how Reading Simplified recommends that most instruction goes. and it's since it's such a short time, ⁓ it's very doable and you ha and you're you have a very clear sense of where you are. We have a

12-level one-page view of how to get from step one to step 12. And so the teacher knows where she's headed. She knows what material she needs. And so it's not too complicated to have 30 kids doing all different things. No, she's got ⁓ maybe four to five groups that are basically on the same kind of level. and then they get their needs met, and then even if that's super difficult, one's like an outlier, then we want you to pull that child aside.

Yeah.

For five minutes, maybe, and give them a little extra oomph before they get into the small group session. So the the concrete nature of it, the more personalized approach, those are some things that make it ⁓ and also just more because it's more efficient, especially with kids with any kind of working memory difficulties. Why would we want to add a lot of convoluted phonics rules? It's a big burden for them.

sure. Simplified as right,

as simplified as possible, right? And so you can have different groups going at different paces and so you can keep right. So that's really cool.

Exactly.

Yeah, it's doable if you don't have ⁓ a a reading basil that takes up an entire desk. If you just have a simple one page plan to get from one to twelve, it's you can manage your thirty kids that way.

I I would think the teachers would just be dying for something like this. anything to make their world more manageable and their job easier to do and to be able to gain the success with their children. I don't know why we don't do try to do more of that overall, but I'm grateful that you had this thing in you that this passion that you needed to know more and and took it to this level.

Curious about

The impact of social media, I think there is possibly pros and cons to it, because kids are seeing the written word a lot of time, but then there's also abbreviations and words are misspelled and I think for some kids with disabilities the the short clip type stuff is good because their attention span may not be so advanced. But then you have your your typical reader who gets caught up in this.

I think the knee-jerkist always go, social media is bad and it's all negative for the kids, but I think there's two sides to it. And do you have any thoughts about it?

Well, we do know that kids are reading less than they've read since we began measuring it. So it's actually just in the last couple of months something came out that was pretty grim in terms of the volume of reading. So I think that this is so tempting. The short form nature of it is so temp so addictive and so tempting that it's very hard to develop the sustained attention to do something that that we used to do w because we were bored.

Yeah.

50 years ago or a hundred years ago, ⁓ we had longer attention spans. So we do know that both children and adults' attention spans are also ⁓ shortening. So all of that is ⁓ another battle that the teachers have to overcome. yeah, of course there's some good things about social media, like for instance, the whole science of reading movement has been like wildfire through social media Facebook groups.

To try to motivate them to want to do

And for instance, like and so many teachers now know about Reading Simplified and other new ideas because they had access through social media. So it's definitely got a lot of great possibilities there. But we I think as people who are working with parents and teachers, we need our eyes open. and if I could go back and take away my

Mm.

The phone from my youngest. I I when she was thirteen, or at least be a lot more controlling of it. I certainly would now that I've seen the data of what it's doing, especially to teen girls. ⁓ that's more of like the emotional well, there's some data that particularly teen girls who spend more time on social media, they tend to be more depressed, more anxious, more withdrawn.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Can you talk about that?

the children s are play less with their peers or they hang out less with their peers. There's less outdoor stuff. ⁓ it's just substituting a lot of childhood that that was good and healthy.

Yeah,

I agree and that's the negative parts of it for sure. Yeah, I I think it's sad because I think, you know, we were intended to be bored, so then we would use our creativity to play games and create things, right? And make art and music and all these things. What's that? And seek out other people, right? Connection, human connection with

Seek out other people. And seek out other people.

Real people. Not

Yeah, yeah, right. They're not avatars. ⁓

just not just Yeah.

you see kids together and they're with each other, but they're on their phone with each other and they're just not they're not connecting. So yeah, it is it's always struck me odd. Yeah, new parallel play, exactly. so what I would like to ask, I just have a couple of quick

Yeah, it's weird. Side by side, that's not what parallel play that's kind of a new parallel play.

questions I would like kind of rapid fire questions. and we might have covered some of these things already and maybe just like throw it out. What's the biggest myth about teaching children to read? If you can

That's a tricky one because there's there's so many I I I will pick one. I can sorry. I'm not good with this the short sale by. ⁓ I So no, it's a good it's a fair question. I think I think it we still have a sustained belief that

And you don't have to answer them.

All right, pick one. What's one myth? What No, it's okay. And I've never done it before, but I was like, let's What's one myth? What's one myth?

You can learn to read by recognizing whole the whole word. That's really hard to get rid of. And you can't learn you can learn hundreds, maybe some k lucky kids can learn a couple thousand words that way, but you can't learn the twenty to forty thousand words you need by the time you finish high school that way. You have to actually understand how the code works and ⁓ crack that code through learning sound symbol relations, not looking at a whole word like it's a picture.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

That's a great answer. That's a great answer. In fact, it's interesting when you're reading finger spelling, you're told to look at the whole picture. It's kind of the opposite. Like you're not supposed to look at every letter, right? You're supposed to try to like get the sound of it in your head. But if you're deaf, you don't have the sound because you know what it sounds like, but you're trying to piece the whole word together and it it's not easy for sure.

Yeah.

one mistake experienced teachers still make when it comes to reading.

not checking to see if kids are still struggling with decoding. Even when they get into fifth grade, eighth grade, tenth grade, their comprehension problem

is what they observe but it's the s root source is that they still struggle with decoding. If you're gonna read well and comprehend well, you need to be reading ninety-nine out of a hundred words accurately or better. And so when a kid you're listening to a kid as a middle school or high school teacher and they miss one or two or three words out of a hundred, you think they're doing pretty well. No, they're actually not. And that's a lot of mental struggle that they're putting into cracking the code or reading the word.

And that takes away from the brain power, so to speak, that they have to reason through the meaning and sustain their attention because they're struggling so much just to read the words fluently. So it is not that hard to give a nonsense word test, and that will show you how that foundational system is working and it and show you if there's a root that's deeper than just the upper level comprehension problem, which is probably masking a lot of things, including.

poor word identification, poor decoding, poor word identification, and poor fluency.

It's really amazing the levels, right? Who thinks about that? That's Yeah,

that's incredible. I I you the the idea of the art of reading, before we go, could you touch on what the art of reading is if in in any way that might be different from what we've spoken about already?

Yeah, I think, first of all, we don't have enough science to know how to do every little turn. So there is at at every instructional point a teacher's got got to make a decision and and some of that is gonna be art because she has ⁓

knowledge from what other people advise that's just received wisdom or because she's responding to that student. So there is just instructional art that you gather because you saw I tried this, I tried this, and it ain't working. I'm gonna I do this new thing, but I can't point to a scientific study for that. The thing that I think that is the most important art is to learn how to respond to the student's response.

Really how to meet them. And ⁓ particularly in reading, we see behavior, motivation, and engagement is a big chunk of what blocks kids from being successful. And so I say we as a reading teacher, you kind of have to be like a detective to figure out what is gonna, you know, make Mark get excited to learn to read. It's gonna be different than what Sally gets excited about, and that is an art. There's no scientific paper.

In the world that is going to help me know how to help Sally with what she likes. And if I can go out and find a book about Scooby-Doo because she loves Scooby-Doo and she's going to be excited to read Scooby-Doo books, you know, and if that works, then I'm thrilled. And ⁓ and and that's probably the the art. There's a lot of ways in which teaching is an art. And ⁓ when you're when you're working with a student who's

struggled, coming up with the the the various things that are the motivational inspirations for them is definitely art and it's really great detective work that we should be doing as teachers.

Yeah, I love that answer

and I love the idea of that because really it is meeting the child where they are and knowing who they are, We can't have the same expectations for every child and I think that's where parents struggle too because if they have a couple of kids, you know, one's doing really well, the other one's struggling. So, well why can't you be like this one? And it was so easy with this one, all that kind of stuff, right? But it's like no, we have to meet the individual because why do you struggle? You know, as a parent, the self-reflection is really important too, so I I I love that idea because it

Right.

Right.

is and it it's hard for teachers to meet the kids all the kids where they are because again all the things I mean it's it's it's an it's a nearly impossible job when it comes down to it. And anybody who faults a teacher for taking two months off in the summertime really needs to just like s stop talking. ⁓ You know? I don't know if you have anything you wanted to say to that. Yeah yeah

very hard. For sure.

Yeah, especially

Hundred percent.

No, I a hundred percent agree with you though. It's

it's a daunting job, especially as we move into middle school and high school and you have seventy-five to a hundred and fifty kids. It's it's it literally is impossible. So that and we need to think that keep that in mind when we're designing curriculum and program programming and scheduling and in the line in the reading line then

Yeah.

They need kids who aren't reading well, they need to be pulled out and given special time in a smaller setting where that teacher really knows them and then also gives them the a true intervention that changes their success so that they can go back in the general ed classroom and be successful. Not a program that is like six years that they're always in reading remediation, but we actually remediate them and then send them back and we actually have enough science now to show that almost every kid can.

can't get remediated and it's just it's a matter of finding the right program and having the system make that a priority and it doesn't seem like we do.

We don't, I don't think. And I think two, the

money needs to be put more into the science to help crack the codes the way you have, in order to be able to simplify things so things go a little easier and smoother and so you can get more in, right? As far as the knowledge base. And we don't think about it that way.

Mm-hmm. Right.

seventy percent of American fourth graders are not proficient according to the so if we were if it it's just that's the system. That's what we're getting from the system. We gotta change it.

Yeah. ⁓

And I and that's

in life, and that's after me spending so many you know, I know both of us probably could say we've we've worked with so many teachers who are just as dedicated as they could possibly be and tried all the things is what it probably feels like and they're still frustrated and they're working tirelessly and but the system is just kind of moves on and those kids are brushed off and moved into the next grade level, like the two kids that I had.

Thousand percent.

Yeah.

Yeah. it's very depressing, but you're a light and so I'm so appreciative of you for what you do. And anybody who's inspired by you should continue to pursue and and understand that, you know, you're not gonna get the recognition. It's just not where we are at this point. It's gotta be self motivating, unfortunately.

Ha ha ha.

So you're not gonna make the millions. But you're making an impact on children's lives in a way that maybe a movie isn't gonna quite have the same kind of impact. Probably not. ⁓

No, probably not. Yeah. Those letters you

get from when you've made the impact, that's pretty priceless. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's the best. That's

the best. What do do you have a final message for parents that are maybe trying to figure this all out?

Yeah.

keep listening to your child read aloud even after they are reading aloud successfully. You can still make a big difference in their ability to k keep improving their word recognition, but also you can help them learn a lot more words, listen to what they struggle with and help them make connections between the words and concepts that they're reading with other things so that you can keep expanding their

their knowledge base because the schools are again the system isn't quite designed to systematically build knowledge and and anything you can do at home to to have them read more and more

is gonna be a real life changer. Gives them much more opportunities because they'll be more successful in all their academic areas and they'll have more knowledge to give them confidence to do different jobs. So we're probably on average looking at the data, you're we're probably not listening to our kids read enough and

Also, if we can encourage them to read more silently. Both those will go a long way. and my favorite, you know, workaround is an audiobook. there are so many good ones. You can get them free at your public library, and they can be really gripping. Find something that your child likes. Don't be too worried about whether it's, you know, super academic. J if they're hooked on books, that that's the first thing that will open the door to then maybe deeper and more intellectual things later. But first get them hooked on books.

books and whatever by hook or by crook get them hooked on books.

That's a great motto. And

so do you well just quick the audio portion of it, if you're listening to the books, you're n are you following along ⁓ in in the book of you, is that what you're talking about? How are you how is the connection to helping them read more?

Well ⁓ yeah, so

⁓ if a student is still not fluent, ideally I would like them to be following along and looking at the print. If you list if you get like a Kindle fire, you can sync the ebook with the Audible Professional Nration and the little cursor will go along the words right as it's spoken. And if you lose your place, it'll pick back up with a narration. It's kind of amazing technology. There are other technologies like Learning Ally that do that that as well for students who have identified disability. ⁓ but

⁓ yeah.

even if you your student won't do that or if they resist, just listening will still help them indirectly with reading because it'll build their their knowledge of the world. It won't necessarily solve that word identification problem. But again, if they get hooked on books, maybe they will realize I it's worth my time to read this book. What's not what has to happen to to be able to read widely is you have to realize that it's enjoyable.

And when you all spend all your time like this looking at a screen, you haven't developed a habit or the practice of realizing that a book is great fun. 'Cause this is all that you know is fun. So it's a tr it's a training process that ⁓ ch all of our children are gonna have to go through that we didn't go through in the same way when older generations were younger. So,

Yeah, 'cause that was more natural.

That is why

no matter what, I would still say that an audio book would be really a great option because it can still make a child have sustained attention and and learn more about the world and then realize, wait a minute, these books are really cool. It's actually more cool than that TikTok thing.

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. Yeah.

Hey, let's change the world, man. So how can people find you?

Reading simplified dot com

Okay.

And I will post that in the show notes. Any other presence on social media as well, Instagram, things like that? Okay.

Almost everything is reading simplified. I think on

X it's read simplified, but everywhere else it's about it would be like a handle of reading simplified. Yeah.

Okay,

wonderful. Thanks so much for your time today. It was such a pleasure to meet you.

Thank you, Mark. I appreciate

your questions and thanks for your mission. No no slowing down.

⁓ my gosh. It's no slowing down, man. No,

just keep I wear this shark necklace. Keep sharking forward. Just keep sharking forward. It's always more to learn, always more to do to enjoy this life and celebrate it and help others, you know. And so that's what we're all about. So yeah, thank you. I appreciate what you Yeah, my pleasure. have a wonderful day. I'll talk to you soon. Okay.

I love it.

I appreciate it.