Shanahan on Literacy

What Role Should Pictures Play in Teaching Reading?

This podcast explores the role that pictures play in teaching decoding, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

Disciplinary Literacy Goes to Elementary School

This podcast explains the nature of disciplinary literacy and lays out a description of what role it should play in the elementary school reading curriculum.

Our Middle School Reading Scores are Dropping – Help!

Middle school reading scores are stagnant or dropping all over the country. What can we do about that? This podcast explores what a science of reading based response should look like. If you want to help upper elementary, middle school, and high school readers, please tune in!

Rejecting Instructional Level Theory

This episode explores the idea of teaching students with leveled books at their so-called instructional reading levels. For 70+ years, educators have been told that this was the key to optimum amounts of learning. This podcast challenges that idea.

Modeling in Fluency Instruction

"Experts" make lots of recommendations about how to teach oral reading or text reading fluency. One of those recommendations is that it is important to "model" oral reading for the students. The research is nearly silent on this issue, so what makes sense?