Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning

32. Reading is learning: Breaking down the artificial barrier with Natalie Wexler

• Bedrock Learning • Season 2 • Episode 25

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Natalie Wexler joins Andy Sammons to tackle one of education's most persistent challenges: the artificial barrier between reading and learning. This eye-opening conversation dives deep into why traditional approaches to reading comprehension don't work - and what cognitive science tells us actually does.

Wexler, author of The Knowledge Gap and co-author of The Writing Revolution, unpacks how our current methods of teaching reading comprehension - as isolated skills, divorced from content - fundamentally misunderstand how comprehension works. She explains why background knowledge functions as "mental Velcro" for new information, and why simply practicing skills like making inferences without content knowledge, fails to develop proficient readers.

The discussion takes a fascinating turn when exploring how narrative serves as a powerful vehicle for learning across all subjects. Wexler shares compelling research, showing that students who received content through structured narratives demonstrated significantly better understanding than those who participated in seemingly engaging hands-on activities. "The human brain is hardwired to take in information more easily when it's presented in narrative form," Wexler notes, challenging us to reconsider what effective instruction looks like beyond superficial engagement.

Perhaps most valuable for educators are the practical strategies Wexler offers for implementation. From sentence-level writing activities like appositives, to structured retrieval practice, to explicit outlining instruction; she provides concrete techniques that enhance both reading comprehension and content knowledge simultaneously. She emphasises that writing about content powerfully reinforces learning, but requires appropriate scaffolding to avoid cognitive overload for inexperienced writers.

Whether you're a literacy specialist, subject teacher, or education leader, this conversation will transform how you think about reading instruction. Listen now to discover why bridging the gap between reading and learning is essential for developing truly proficient readers and thinkers.

Speaker 1:

hi everyone and thank you for continuing to listen to the bedrock talks podcast. I'm the host, andy sammons. I lead teaching and learning here at bedrock. It's a real privilege for continuing to listen to the Bedrock Talks podcast. I'm the host, Andy Sammons. I lead teaching and learning here at Bedrock. It's a real privilege for me to do that and get to have lots of exciting conversations such as the one we're going to have today.

Speaker 1:

I wasn't sure what would happen when I reached out to Natalie Wexler. She's a big name to get and she's been incredible in coming back to me and she's come on and lots of you will know. I think lots of you who listen to the podcast will know exactly who Natalie Wexler is. She's an educational writer who wrote a book which changed. I've just been speaking to Natalie off air about how it changed my teaching approach and it's lovely that I get to tell that person what they've done for me. They've done for me. So, co-author of the Writing Revolution, writer of the Knowledge Gap, and now just about to release a book that's right up our street at Bedrock, and right up do you know what it should be? Every teacher's street the science of reading. So Natalie joins us today to talk about her new book primarily, and the recent work she's been doing. So thank you so much for coming on at well, 10 am, at your time right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, it's a morning here and the afternoon for you. I've got to get it's easier than Australia, though I'll tell you that's really hard to work out.

Speaker 1:

But thank you anyway. It's lovely for you to have you here. So I'd really like just to start off with a question around. In your new book, one of the things that you talk about is this artificial barrier between reading and learning, and I really want to ask you why that's so problematic. I feel like disciplinary literacy Timothy Shanahan's work in that area has been incredibly useful, certainly in the UK but why do you think the barrier between reading and learning is so problematic?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think in the United States certainly we have come to see reading and I'm really especially talking about reading comprehension as separate from the content areas. So you teach reading comprehension and then maybe, if you have time, you teach history and science and those things, but certainly at the elementary level and often through middle school. Here the bulk of the time is devoted to reading comprehension and a lot of that is having kids practice reading comprehension skills and strategies like finding the main idea of a text or making inferences, and of course we want kids to be able to do those things. But there's been this assumption that we can teach those things in the abstract, divorced from any particular content. So they'll just you know that skill might be modeled on a text chosen not for what it's about but for how well it lends itself to demonstrating the skill of comparing and contrasting or whatever the skill is. It's often a skill of the week and the text is used to teach the skill. And then students go off to practice the skill on texts on random topics they may or may not know anything about, that are determined to be at their individual reading levels because of the length of the sentences or the frequency, how common the words are, or whatever.

Speaker 2:

But that's really not how reading comprehension works and when we know from cognitive science that it's far more important whether you have knowledge relating to either relating to the topic that you're reading about or, more generally, general academic knowledge and vocabulary.

Speaker 2:

The more of that you have, the better your chances of understanding anything that you try to read.

Speaker 2:

So I mean I think we need to see these things as connected and that the content really needs to be in the foreground and the process of knowledge building needs to be in the foreground.

Speaker 2:

It doesn't mean you never ask kids to find the main idea of a text or to make an inference, but you bring those things in as appropriate to the text or to the topic, and that is really the way, the only way, for us to inculcate these skills that we want students to acquire. It just does not work to teach them in the abstract. So I think in both research and in classroom practice, we have to pull down these artificial walls that have been erected between reading on the one hand, and also reading and writing, and then reading is treated as separate from writing and both of them are treated as separate from history, science, the content areas. But when you think about it, really, what we can understand when we read reflects everything we've been able to learn, everything we've been able to learn, and it is also a way of learning. So why do we consider it as something separate from the learning in general, learning in the content areas?

Speaker 1:

I think it's interesting because, in the UK at least, a lot of educators will be nodding as they say as I say this, I would imagine We've got this. We have an issue with literacy being this thing in schools, where it's a thing that's done once a year in a cpd, where it's about capital letters and full stops, and I know that that there's been. We're not quite at that stage now, we've moved on from there, but often it's a thing that's done in the abstract, in any in any sense. And what I find really interesting is and and correct me if I'm wrong but would you be advocating for a move towards more disciplinary literacy when it comes to this type of thing? Because what you're, what I suppose you're saying is is it's about specific knowledge and specific domain areas to unlock understanding and reading. Is that, is that your argument?

Speaker 2:

to some extent, yes, and I think disciplinary literacy makes more sense when we're talking about secondary level, I mean at the elementary level. I mean, yeah, you'd approach a historical topic differently from a science topic, but not that differently, I mean, when we're just introducing kids to these topics. But I think the important thing to bear in mind is I think that the ultimate goal here is for students to acquire a critical mass of general academic knowledge and vocabulary and familiarity with the complex syntax of written language so that they can read and understand texts on topics they don't already know something about. But the only way to get to that critical mass is through immersing them in lots of topics they do know something about and being attentive to what those topics actually putting that content in the foreground. And if yes, I mean as appropriate. I mean I have a background as a historian, so I know that there's a certain way of approaching historical texts and historical evidence, and it's certainly students should learn that. But I don't think that either should be put in the foreground.

Speaker 2:

I think what we really need to focus on is you know kids are especially young kids, they're curious about the world? Is you know kids are especially young kids, they're curious about the world, and a great way to feed that curiosity is through narratives. So and that could be done with science too Biographies of scientists. You know, the human brain is hardwired to take in information more easily when it's presented in a narrative form. It doesn't have to be fiction, but just a story with a beginning, middle end, some conflict maybe, and so I think we, especially for younger kids or kids who are new to a topic, narrative is the way in, and then you can start focusing on. You know, how would a historian approach this or how would a scientist approach this?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we have a. I'm sure you've come across the name Mary Myatt. We've in the UK. She's a well-known educator and she often talks about the human brain privileging narrative, and I think that's a really important thing, that the stories that we tell around, the learning that we have, and just how would that look, though, in a subject like a science, do you think in an elementary school? You know, if we were to go back into a, you know what we call a primary school in the UK, what does that look like? Giving them narrative for a nonfiction topic, do you think?

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean, my expertise is more in history than in science, but this brings to mind a study that I came across that was actually done in England. It was out of the University of Bath and it was designed. It had to do with science education, it was about natural selection and evolution and it was done with 10 and 11-year-olds and the idea was to see well, first of all, could 10 and 11-year-olds learn about, were they equipped to handle the concept of natural selection? And yes, they were. But they were divided into two groups. One of them got hands-on activity and one of them got a narrative delivered through a PowerPoint by a teacher, and the topic was the peppered moth.

Speaker 2:

I believe peppered moths they're in England but I don't think they're in this country. So this was an unfamiliar concept to me, but the idea being that the coloration of the peppered moth has changed depending on the environment. So when they like to hang out on trees that have light bark, and they come in two varieties a light variety and a dark variety bark. So, and they come in two varieties a light variety and a dark variety. And when the trees in the 18th century the trees the bark was light, so it was easier for the birds, who were their predators, to pick off the black colored peppered moths, so the white ones became more prevalent. But then, as the industrial revolution happened and there was pollution, the bark got darker and so it was easier for the birds to see the white m. The bark got darker and so it was easier for the birds to see the white moths and pick those off, and so the black ones became more prevalent. And then when pollution controls came in in the 20th century, the situation reversed again and once again it was easier for the bark became light, easier for the birds to see the dark moths. So that was the story.

Speaker 2:

And I think what's interesting is I don't think that the researchers were so much. I don't think they were expecting this. In fact I communicated with one of them. So the kids, so some kids got that narrative and they wrote about it afterwards, which I think is also important. The other group got a hands-on activity. They were given fake moths in two different colors and different colored backgrounds and then some tweezers and they pretended they were birds picking off moths and and the teachers all thought that the kids who got the hands-on activity that was much more successful because they were so engaged. But when the researchers tested which group of kids actually understood the content better, it was the kids who got the PowerPoint narrative, that who were way more conversant with the concepts that you know that were intended to be the learning goals here.

Speaker 2:

So I'd say it doesn't mean you could. I think, especially in science, there's a lot of emphasis on hands-on activities and they do have a place, but maybe not when kids are new to a topic. Maybe the place to begin is with a straight ahead narrative and that doesn't mean just a lecture. It could definitely mean it should mean back and forth checking for understanding, having kids write, and then maybe you have them do a hands-on activity to make that knowledge stickier, you know, make it more memorable. But I think too often we go for that hands-on activity first and we mistake engagement for learning, when if you do need engagement in order for kids to learn, but they can be engaged without actually learning much of anything.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, recently my, my, my dad recommended me the the Shard Lake dissolution series you know the historical detective and I picked it up thinking I was going to really, really love it. But it was just. I really struggled to immerse myself in that world because I had no prior knowledge or understanding of that period of British history. And I know that some people can look past that and they might have more knowledge than they think they do. But I just couldn't for the life of me enjoy the story and I ended up giving it up.

Speaker 1:

But then the other day in a charity shop I came across a book from a non-league football player for 50 pence and he documented his story. It's called journeyman, it's called. He's documented his story in the lower leagues and that's because I love soccer, like soccer and that's what I've got lots of familiar, familiar knowledge with it and it was just so interesting that my that I think what you're saying is right around a story and pre-knowledge and understanding and familiarity, whatever that looks like in schools, is going to help particularly disadvantaged learners, I guess, bridge those gaps.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, I think that's common sense and it's backed up by science. I mean, you know, not only does having prior relevant knowledge make it easier to understand what you're reading, it makes it easier to retain information and it also increases your motivation, maybe because it's easier, you know, it's not as much, it's not as effortful to read about a topic you already know something about. But you know, it's been said that knowledge is like mental Velcro it sticks best to other related knowledge, and I think that's another way of putting this.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and you can see it all the time with my children as well. You can see that they're much more interested and, as you say, like Velcro is a really nice analogy there, isn't it? Because there's all sorts of positive reinforcement and prior existing structures and all sorts of really interesting things going on. And so, moving into this idea about what teachers need here because we're talking about reading as something that's so all encompassing, because we do I wholeheartedly agree with you that there is a barrier between reading and learning. We're actually reading. They're one and the same thing. You need one to, to act, you know you need, you need to read, to access the learning and to and to ingratiate that into your knowledge. So what you feel you know in an ideal world, what? What would this guidance look like? You referenced the fact that the teachers need to apply evidence back strategies. We've touched on narrative already. If you had control over state policy and you could control these things, what do you think best scenarios look like?

Speaker 2:

well for teachers. I mean, I think first of all teacher training, teacher prep. Certainly in this country and I know I think historically in England teachers have often been taught things about education that actually conflict with what science has found about how learning works. I mean, they may have been taught it's better to focus on skills like critical thinking or whatever, than on having kids actually retain factual information and, in fact, or concepts. They can always google that, but in fact science has confirmed that it is the more you know about a topic, the better able you are to think critically about it, do all sorts of things. So it would certainly be helpful I mean, teaching is a difficult profession but it would be certainly helpful if teachers came into the classroom with grounding in these principles of cognitive science that are pretty well established. Things like retrieval practice you know that it is actually testing is not just a way of evaluating a student but also a way of helping them learn, helping them retain the information that will enable them to engage in higher order thinking, et cetera. So that would be hugely helpful.

Speaker 2:

But I do think that teachers need additional support in order to translate these principles of cognitive science into classroom practice and I think that should come from a curriculum that has been designed by experts in curriculum design who themselves are quite familiar with principles of cognitive science, so that, you know, and then teachers can devote their resources to the difficult task of ensuring that they're delivering that curriculum in the best possible way for their particular students, of ensuring that they're delivering that curriculum in the best possible way for their particular students.

Speaker 2:

But I do think in the United States and I think in England, there's been this idea that good teachers create their own curriculum, essentially, and that's an enormous burden to place on teachers. And then, in addition to having curriculum that's grounded in the principles of cognitive science, I think it's really helpful to have continuous support for teachers and, you know, coaching, collaboration among teachers so that they're not alone in figuring out how to adapt or deliver that material, the instructional materials, in the best possible way for their students. So I think, you know, ideally you'd have all three of these things combined Teacher training aligned with cognitive science, curriculum aligned with cognitive science and ongoing support for teachers in delivering all of that.

Speaker 1:

It's interesting, though, because we often see that teachers in the schools we work with they're so time poor and they're so resource poor as well that creating a space for these things is just so, um, it's so difficult. Uh, I certainly, in the latter part of my teaching career, started to build a lot more of the cognitive science into my teaching and I and I, I saw, I, I I really enjoyed the benefits of that as well in terms of my own positive reinforcement with the pupils were coming to me with things and they'd learned things that they just otherwise weren't learning before. You know, embedding that in my practice, and and so those three things together, when you were, if you were, if we were to just take a little bit further into the teacher training, what would you say are the kind of the, the core pieces of cognitive science, that? A teacher listening to this, who may or may not be familiar with cognitive science, what would you say to them about? Well, what can they do, you know, from tomorrow to make their practice more effective?

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean, if they are focusing on reading comprehension strategies in sort of a divorce from content, I'd say that's the first thing. You know. You want to put the text or the topic in the foreground and bring in strategies as appropriate. But beyond that, I think retrieval practice is sort of the foundational principle. I mean, there's lots of stuff that teachers should know. You need to be able to, first of all, get kids' attention and an orderly environment is going to be very helpful for that, with students actually facing the teacher and not just each other. So that's sort of the first thing. And then, whenever you're teaching something complex, it's really important to break that down into manageable chunks and check for understanding before moving on, and a great way to do that is through sentence level writing activities.

Speaker 2:

But then something like retrieval practice. The idea there is, first of all, that the more information we have stored in long-term memory, the easier it is going to be for us to learn new things and so to get to ensure that students both have information in long-term memory and are able to retrieve it when they need it. It's really helpful to engage in retrieval practice, which is having kids in some way retrieve information they have in long-term memory, but they may have slightly forgotten and just bring it to mind. So you can do that through quizzes, and that's often how it's done. But actually what's even more powerful, I think, is through and we may get into this in a minute but through having kids write about what they are learning in a with a caveat there in a manageable way.

Speaker 1:

I was going to ask you about just pick you up on when you said about sentence level activities. Could you describe what one of them looks like for me?

Speaker 2:

about sentence level activities. Could you describe what one of them looks like for me? Yeah, sure. So these are drawn from the writing revolution method, which is not my method, but it was created by Judith Hockman, my co-author, who is a veteran educator, and she basically created this while she was a teacher through trial and error over many years. But it turns out to align very well with what cognitive science tells us about what will work. So and I would add that one reason to begin at the sentence level, no matter what grade level students are in, if that is what they need, if they have not yet learned to construct a good sentence, it's really crucial to begin there, and that's to modulate that heavy cognitive load that writing imposes. That's one reason, but another reason is to familiarize students with the complex syntax of written language, sentence structures that appear really almost only in written text, that we don't use in conversation, things like subordinating conjunctions or appositives, which are phrases describing a noun.

Speaker 1:

That was my first takeaway from that book. Every student that week got a positive exercises for a whole week.

Speaker 2:

And you know I just showed a slide that I borrowed from the writing revolution but it shows just takes an article from the New York times and all of the positives in that article are highlighted and there's like 12 of them. So it's you, you. You see this a lot in written texts. It could be a real barrier to comprehension. If you're not familiar with it. You don't know what that means. So in a positive would be one way of one kind of sentence level activity. For example, when I give presentations I have a slide and this is taken from an article I came across involving a 10-year-old boy sort of a study who had average decoding ability. But he struggled with comprehension. And the researcher read the boy the following sentence Rachel Carson, a scientist, writer and ecologist, grew up in the rural river town of Springdale, pennsylvania. And then she asked the boys so what do you know about Rachel Carson now?

Speaker 2:

And he said they grew up together in the same place which sounds weird, but it was because he was not familiar with that a positive Rachel Carson, a scientist, writer and ecologist. He thought those were four different people who all grew up together. So what do you do about that? Well, first of all you teach kids what an appositive is phrase describing a noun and you want to do that using familiar content and orally, to again to modulate cognitive load.

Speaker 2:

So kids are not juggling I mean, if they're not yet great writers juggling the mechanical tasks of writing, but also not juggling new content along with a new grammatical concept. But once they've got the idea of an appositive, then you can embed it in content they're learning and let's say they are learning about Rachel Carson, so you could give them the sentence Rachel Carson comma blank grew up in the rural river town of Springdale, pennsylvania. And then they need to supply the appositive, and they need to do that. They have to retrieve information from long-term memory, put it in their own words, and that's very powerful in terms of reinforcing that knowledge and also getting them to really think about it. And so you're accomplishing two objectives there You're teaching them a grammatical concept, but you're also reinforcing and deepening their knowledge of content.

Speaker 1:

I just love that and I remember to this day we're doing it with the story, with with the play Macbeth, and writing about Macbeth, or Lady Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth Blank coerces Macbeth into murdering his King, and it, and it not only is it making their writing, as you say, more sophisticated, because they're able to then take that into their own essay writing, but it's thinking, well, what knowledge retrieval, what, what would be appropriate to go in there then as well, in that, in that space, I just think it it was.

Speaker 1:

It's so simple, but it's so, so clever. And, of course, the type of thinking that you've just done there around the appositive there will be conventions for historical, for scientific, for geographical writing that that colleagues will be able to look at and then use in their own teaching practice as well. And I mean that. That does bring me on to this idea about thinking about the writing a bit more, because it's used a lot now, this idea about, you know, writing for reading and reading for writing and the two being interconnected. I just want to drill into that a little bit more and I know we've just touched on this. But what does the science tell us about the link between reading and writing? Because I think that's a really important point for teachers to understand.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so there are studies done with K through 12 students, as we say in the United States, before elementary and secondary. They're called writing to learn studies and they're having students write about content they're learning in social studies, math, science not necessarily English or reading and those studies generally find a pretty positive effect, size significant positive effect from having students write about the content they are learning so and that they're reading about. There's also evidence that when you write about what you are reading, that enhances your comprehension, your retention of that information. There has been, though, a puzzling to some researchers, ambiguity here. So 18,. So there was a meta-analysis of 56 different of these right to learn studies. On average, there was a positive-analysis of 56 different of these right-to-learn studies. On average there was a positive effect, but 18% of those studies students actually found that there was a negative effect. Students actually learned less when they wrote about what they were learning.

Speaker 2:

So why would that be? I think the explanation is that writing for inexperienced writers is so cognitively overwhelming that you don't have the cognitive capacity to absorb, retain, understand the information you're writing about, and we have some evidence that confirms that hypothesis or, I think, does so. You know, I mean I really wish there were more cognitive scientists writing about writing or researching writing. There isn't much research, so I am putting things together that cognitive scientists writing about writing or researching writing. There isn't much research, so I am putting things together that cognitive scientists themselves might not have put together in the same way, but it makes sense to me, and I I do have endorsements from several cognitive scientists for my book, when which I make these arguments.

Speaker 2:

So, um, so there have also been studies at really with college students in. You know, cognitive scientists, as opposed to education researchers, tend to do studies with college students because they're teaching at universities and that's who's around. And so there are studies like the study of retrieval practice. That is iconic. It actually had students read something, read a text, and then put it aside and write down everything they could remember, so it was actually, to some extent, a writing experiment.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And when those researchers tried to do the same study with fourth graders, they got extremely different results. Instead of students retaining 81% of the concepts that they'd read about which is what happened with the college students the fourth graders could retain only 9% of the concepts they had written about. And that's probably because those fourth graders were much less experienced writers and it was just too overwhelming for them. And when researchers modified the study so that less writing was involved or the kids got more support, in fact, yes, they did get the benefits of retrieval practice. But the bottom line is writing has enormous potential power to deepen and enhance learning and reading comprehension. But it's not a question of just telling students to write. You actually have to teach them to write in a way that modulates that heavy cognitive load.

Speaker 1:

And so what might that look like in, let's say, a history lesson for you? How would you do that?

Speaker 2:

Well, one way to do that is to I mean just any these activities, the writing revolution activities can be adapted to any subject matter and any grade level so you could have them constructed a positive about, you know, henry the eighth or whatever. Or I mean it's not just sentence level activity, I just do want to make that clear, it's also have in teaching kids explicitly how to create clear, linear outlines. So in a history class, let's say you're studying henry the eighth, you got you could pause. Well, and you want to do this repeatedly as a collective practice under teacher guidance.

Speaker 2:

Before you expect kids to do this on their own, let's try, based on what we've learned, let's create a topic sentence about Henry VIII. Henry VIII, maybe using a positive, who had six wives, you know was one of the major rulers in English history. Then let's brainstorm some details relating to that topic sentence. And that is, you know, coming up with a topic sentence, first of all, is a very difficult, you know. We just expect kids to do that, but it requires the ability to generalize and kids don't just naturally have that ability and they may need practice. And then, and similarly with coming up with the details that relate to a topic sentence. That requires practice as well and figuring out what is relevant, what's not relevant.

Speaker 2:

What order do we want to put those details in? And let's put that in note form so that we're actually processing this and not just copying something from a text. All of that and then coming up let's say, if this is a paragraph, coming up with a concluding sentence that wraps things up. It doesn't just repeat the topic sentence, and if students practice this enough, they will be able to do it on their own, but it also all of this carries over to students' oral expression, to their thinking. If you can write in more complex and sophisticated ways, you can then think in more complex and sophisticated ways. So, as I say, it's all connected and I think that those same techniques could be used in a science class or, if you're in an English class, whatever.

Speaker 1:

It's interesting because we have on our platform there's a couple of things. We have something called Bedrock Mapper where colleagues can drop tens of thousands of subject-specific words into a sequence and then pupils will be pre-tested, quizzed on them using a range of different things, and then afterwards they're writing about them as well. And on our other kind of core platform we have a vocabulary trends where the it will identify the words that the pupils are struggling with for the teachers and one thing I often say to teachers is yes, to a certain extent I don't like the term, but the system is plug and play, it is. It can work on its own, but it will be really powerful if you can look at those knowledge trends and then help the pupils to map those, map those words into their own writing to express themselves, because it's all about the thought and then the writing and then the read, or it is all interconnected and I think that's what we've got to make that shift, I think, in teaching and, of course, getting them to transfer all of this to their own writing.

Speaker 2:

It doesn't necessarily happen overnight, no-transcript. If that's reinforced across the curriculum, it's much more likely that they'll really internalize that. And what teachers who've used the writing revolution have told me is that they see when kids sit for the state tests that require them to respond in writing to a prompt, that they spontaneously will create an outline first before drafting writing their response, which of course makes their response a lot more coherent. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And so, as the book starts to make its way onto shelves in the UK, what are you most excited about with this book? Because I think it's. I get the sense that you felt. I think, having read a couple of pieces that you've written recently, you felt like you needed to write this book. Is that right? What drove it?

Speaker 2:

Well, there's a couple of different things. One is, I mean, really what I was asked to do was write a book on why the science of reading needed to go beyond phonics to include the evidence relating to the role of knowledge and reading comprehension, lot of attention being paid to problems with the way we've been teaching decoding and phonics, and states have been enacting policies and adopting legislation designed to fix that phonics problem, and the assumption has arisen that if we just fix the phonics problem, things are going to be fine, kids are going to be proficient readers, and of course there's a lot more that needs to be fixed in order for that to happen. So I did want to make that point, but I also wanted to, you know, talk about what we started with with these artificial walls between the science of reading on the one hand and the science of learning on the other. There are these two sort of movements here that I've had a foot in each one, and it has increasingly been evident to me that there's not much communication between these two.

Speaker 2:

And so when I go to, you probably have heard of the research ed conferences and they're great and they're not as quite as big a thing here in the United States as they have become in England, but when I go to them I don't really hear much discussion of problems with our approach to reading, comprehension or writing.

Speaker 2:

It's focused on I mean, to the extent that they talk about literacy at all. They might say, well, of course, the phonics part has to become as automatic as possible so that frees up capacity and working memory for comprehension, et cetera, and that's true, but there's a lot more that needs to be said, and if you do look at the typical approach to both reading instruction and writing instruction and I'm talking about reading comprehension instruction through the lens of cognitive science you see we've been making reading and writing much harder for kids than they actually need to be, and so I hope that educators and researchers, including cognitive scientists I would love them to take this book to heart, and maybe I would love to see more research by cognitive scientists on writing in particular and both the potential of writing and why we have failed to unlock that potential.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's. I mean, I feel like education in the UK is a very different place to the one I walked into 10 years ago. I think things have moved on, but I really like what this book is going to contribute to that around making sure that we do not separate these two things reading and learning that we have to move them together, and it's been such a privilege listening to you speak about your experiences and your thoughts on this, and I know that this will be a heavily downloaded podcast. So Natalie's book Everyone is out in the UK. If it's not already out, it's out very, very soon.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's on Amazon in the United States now, so um, I hope it's it's available in the uk as well and, I think, lots of literacy coordinators, lots of leaders around the country, we have cpd shelves in our schools.

Speaker 1:

Buy multiple copies of this book to get it in your libraries. It's that there's, there's lots, there's a it's just an incredible plethora of strategies and information in there that you can use. So, so, yeah, definitely give it a go and, natalie, thank you so much for your time. It means the world. There's going to be lots of people who are thankful that you've come on. So have a lovely rest of day.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you, Eddie. Thanks for having me on. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

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Andy Sammons

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