Inside Education 437, Professor Pam Snow on Teaching Literacy (29 April 2026)

My guest on this podcast is Pamela Snow, University Distinguished Professor from La Trobe University in Australia. She was in Ireland for the inaugural Right to Read conference, which was held in Dublin on Saturday, 21 March 2026. 

Among the topics discussed were:

• Why functional literacy is insufficient for full civic engagement
• What it means to be literate
• Students from some groups disproportionately underachieve in literacy
• The challenge of being critically literate in the world today
• Why teaching a knowledge-rich curriculum is essential to help students discern authentic news sources
• Why reading is a public-health imperative
• “Once you get to school, everybody should be exposed to high-quality explicit instruction delivered by knowledgeable teachers”
• “Low literacy achievement in the first three years of school really casts a very long shadow. We know from international research that if you’re behind in reading … after your first three years of school, only twenty per cent of children catch up.
• Instead of teachers choosing “their own adventure” they need to use proven methods of literacy instruction that work at scale to help all readers, especially those likely to be lower achievers.
• The difference between “balanced literacy” (grew out of whole language ideology – associated with people like Kenneth Goodman) and structured literacy (structure-explicit reading instruction – mapping speech and text as the “on-ramp to the comprehension freeway.”)
• Inquiries were held into poor levels of reading following the emphasis on “balanced literacy”: National Reading Panel in the United States (2000); National Inquiry into the teaching of literacy in Australia (2005) and in England, the Rose Report (2006). Finding was that whole language was not working at scale.
• English is a rule- and pattern-governed language when you understand etymology.
• “Reading is not biologically natural and we need to teach in a way that doesn’t leave reading to chance. We need to be bringing all children along by giving them the essential code knowledge that they need.”
• What it means to say that phonics is a constrained skill and essential but unconstrained skills (such as the size of your vocabulary; ability to work with active and passive voice) are also required to read competently.
• The importance of background knowledge for readers, depending on their age and stage.
• Background knowledge can help a reader see nuance, inconsistencies and inaccuracies in a text.
• What a knowledge-based curriculum looks like in practice.
• John Sweller and cognitive load theory. Something has been learned when it’s in long-term memory.
• Why “discovery learning” is an unjust and inefficient approach for many children but is still advocated to student teachers in many initial teacher education programmes.
• Pre-teaching that might occur and how it is different for fiction (e.g. metaphor and simile) and non-fiction (a lot of vocabulary, for instance).
• Influences on her thinking about literacy include Professor Kevin Wheldall, Professor Max Coltheart, Dr. Louisa Moats, Professor Linnea Ehri, Professor John Sweller, and Professor Jeanne Chall.
• Education has done a poor job of knowledge translation, in contrast to other fields such as medicine, engineering and aviation. See Nidhi Sachdeva’s Substack post on this topic here.
• She seeks “levels of evidence” – an article published in a peer-reviewed journal is a start but is not enough. She looks for rigour, how a research sample was recruited, how terms were defined, what was done, if it was an intervention study where the intervention came from, how well it was implemented and if there were fidelity measures. She also wants to know about the experiences of the teachers and what parents think of an intervention. Frequently a probabilistic approach needs to be taken.
• Teachers need to be critical consumers of research, using strong critical appraisal skills.
• Education has a tendency to adopt fads and fashions. No regulatory body in education tests approaches before they are rolled out in classrooms. This would not be tolerated in a field such as healthcare.
• Education needs to surrender its love of fads and fashions and be more evidence-led and evidence-aligned.
• Professor Snow and her colleague, Professor Tanya Serry conduct research at the SOLAR Lab at La Trobe University.
• The importance of having printed text present when teaching phonemic awareness, to help children map speech to print.
• Questions remain about how much of the phonics code to teach to all children. See work of David Share and statistical learning.
• Pronunciation correction as an exciting new frontier in reading instruction.
• Why she likes the Dibels suite and believes the running record should be retired.
• Research questions that are settled in literacy education: For now, all children need to be able to decode and this can best be taught by explicitly teaching children how the code works, enhancing automaticity and fluency. We need to not use predictable texts in the early stages of reading because they encourage children to guess, which is not reading. It leverages their oral language skills. But unlike aviation and medicine, education does not have a strong culture of de-implementation. Eclecticism is not the friend of evidence-based practice in education. Doctors and pilots sign up for a high level of scrutiny and they have low levels of autonomy in doing their work.
• Fluency as a bridge between decoding and comprehension according to Tim Raskinski.
• Pam’s blog.
• She admires the work of Carl Hendrick who collaborates with Paul A Kirschner. Both do a tour de force in distilling complex concepts in ways that teachers can pick them up and use them in their classrooms.
• Greg Ashman and his “Filling the Pail” Substack.
• She is currently reading Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton.
• Variability in schools is the enemy of quality.