Episodes
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Whole Books or Excerpts? Which Do the Most to Promote Reading Ability
NOVEMBER 08, 2025
Recently, there have been claims that reading achievement is being suppressed because schools are teaching reading with excerpts and other short pieces rather than with complete books. These critics say that they want to go back to a time when reading was taught with complete books. This podca...
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Don’t Confuse Reading Comprehension and Learning to Read (and to Reread)
OCTOBER 25, 2025
Are we making our instructional decisions based upon comprehension data or learning data? Is our purpose to make sure that students gain immediate comprehension of the instructional text or is it to improve kids' reading ability so they will be more successful with future texts? The answer mig...
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Considering Running Records, and No, I Don’t Beat My Wife Anymore
OCTOBER 11, 2025
I've argued against teaching reading at students' instructional levels. Does that mean that I'm against running records and informal reading inventories? What could such tests possibly provide if you aren't teaching with leveled books? This podcast will answer those questions and many more.
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What Role Should Pictures Play in Teaching Reading?
SEPTEMBER 27, 2025
This podcast explores the role that pictures play in teaching decoding, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.
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Disciplinary Literacy Goes to Elementary School
SEPTEMBER 20, 2025
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.
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Our Middle School Reading Scores are Dropping – Help!
SEPTEMBER 06, 2025
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!
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Rejecting Instructional Level Theory
AUGUST 23, 2025
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.
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Modeling in Fluency Instruction
AUGUST 09, 2025
"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?
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What is the Science of Reading?
AUGUST 02, 2025
This episode explores what it meant by the term "science of reading" and it distinguishes that idea from a "science of reading instruction." The issue here has to do with what kind of evidence should be used to determine how best to teach reading.
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Print-to-Speech or Speech-to-Print? That is the Question
JULY 26, 2025
This episode explores the effectiveness of Orton-Gillingham approaches to the teaching of phonics as well as which method is best for facilitating growth in decoding -- teaching students connect letters to sounds or sounds to letters.
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