Peter Afflerbach
To the classroom: episode 4
March 13, 2023
Today my guest is Dr. Peter Afflerbach who researches individual differences in reading development, reading assessment, and comprehension. We’ll talk about the differences between skills and strategies – and why that matters for the classroom, as well as his new book Teaching Readers Not Reading in which he argues that factors such as efficacy, motivation, engagement, epistemic beliefs, attributions, and executive functions play a significant role in developing readers. Later, I’m joined by my colleagues Lainie Powell, Lea Leibowitz, and Gina Dignon for a conversation about practical takeaways.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Dr. Afflerbach, welcome. It's an honor to meet you and be in conversation with you after all these years reading your work.
PETER AFFLERBACH:
Well, thanks. Thank you for inviting me. I look forward to our conversation.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yeah. So I thought we could start with a 2008 paper that you wrote with P David Pearson and Scott Paris titled, "Clarifying the Differences between Reading Skills and Reading Strategies." And this <laugh> clarifying the differences between those terms is something I talk a lot about. I'd love to ask you a few questions based on it to get us started.
PETER AFFLERBACH:
Sure. Great.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
So you start off the paper by explaining that you investigated the uses of these terms and found some confusion out there.
PETER AFFLERBACH:
Yeah.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Can you talk a little bit more about what you found?
PETER AFFLERBACH:
Yeah, well, just a little background. David Pearson and I used to do what we call it a tag team series of presentations at IRA in the early to mid two thousands. And we decided for this particular year to look at how strategy and skill were used in the professional literature, both classroom based research and theory based. And so we started with this really informal polling of our colleagues at University of California at Berkeley and University of Maryland at College Park.
And the responses from all the different people that we spoke with were all over the map. And David and I had a real commitment to the idea that the more we have a common language in the field of reading and literacy I think the more precise we can be with our arguments and presenting evidence and ultimately linking what's meaningful research to effective classroom practice.
And so we after sort of verifying our hunch that people are using strategy and skill as synonyms and defining them differently, we really went into the research literature. So we went back into the cognitive psychology literature. We went back into the instruction and teaching of reading literature, and we used that. And then when we actually did our presentation at ira, it was in San Antonio, I forget the year, but Scott Paris was in the audience, and he came up to us afterwards and we had a continuing really interesting conversation, and we decided we'd try to write a manuscript for the reading teacher. So that's like the genesis of that.
But what we really were focused on is trying to bring some clarity to those two terms, strategy and skill, and delineate them while at the same time associating them one with the other. And if I can continue, mean, what we ended up doing was arguing that strategies are things that are mindful that a student must be, or an adult must be paying attention to and be in control of as opposed to a skill, which is what we sometimes hope for with our reading and our students reading, which would be the automatic or near automatic calling up use and successful use of something like recognizing a word, decoding a word figuring out an unfamiliar vocabulary word.
Reading comprehension strategies are invisible, and how do you teach something that's invisible? And so we know that a proven approach to strategy instruction would include explanation, modeling and thinking out loud. And so if David and Scott and I are arguing that strategies are conscious step by step, sometimes approaches to trying to figure out what a text means, then if we're able to deconstruct an act of reading and break it into its individual comprehension strategies, and then look at each of those strategies and then break them down further so that we make that invisible visible to our students, then we're on a good track.
And at the same time, the holy grail or the prize at the horizon would be that when we teach strategies well, that our student readers will be practicing and using them successfully to the point where they get more and more skillful. Here's where the skill part comes in, and sometimes approach that automaticity because we know that one of the constraints that every human being has in terms of cognition and cognitive operations is working memory. And when working memory gets jammed up because a kid is applying strategies to decode a word, or to make an appropriate inference from a text where the author hasn't provided all of that information that can jam up working memory. So the more we become skill filled with our strategies, the more space we have to do those little things like remembering what the heck we're reading is all about and remembering what was the goal of reading in the first part in the first place.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yeah. Thank you. So it sounds like yeah, the terminology is just so critical because we've got to know exactly what we're doing and be precise about it in the classroom. And to me, strategies are really about explicitness of being really clear, like you said, making the invisible visible, breaking things down into clear steps for students. So if we know that that is a good practice and we have a name for it, then we're more likely to include that in lesson plans, and we're more likely to be deliberate as teachers about, about supporting students with it.
PETER AFFLERBACH:
I think where the biggest divide in terms of people using the term skill and strategy comes down at the decoding level sound symbol matches consonant blends, all that stuff. But we know that beginning readers do need to have strategies because they don't automatically see the cl consonant blend and say /cl/. They have to be able to bring those things together. And that's very strategic thinking. It's very strategic reading.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
So your new book out just last year is called Teaching Readers Not Reading: Moving Beyond Skills and Strategies to Reader Focused Instruction. So let's start with just what do you see as the main difference between teaching readers versus reading? It's a very provocative title.
PETER AFFLERBACH:
Yeah. Well I was first an elementary reading specialist in 1979 and I taught up in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. And I had students who I thought I was doing a decent job of teaching things like sound symbol correspondences. I was a K-6, Chapter one teacher. So I had kindergarten through sixth grade. And it became really apparent to me really quickly that strategy and skill instruction wasn't going to turn these kids around on their own.
Children thrive in classrooms when all of their individual differences, and that would be both strengths and needs, are attended to. And my concern over the years, and then it really came to a point the last few years with the rise of the science, that's a singular science of reading movement that is, I think, often interpreted--and certainly if you look across the country where state legislators are picking up on what they believe to be the science of reading-- that all we need is a really strong phonics program. And things will fall into place. And I, I'd be the last person to argue against the importance of phonics, but I'd also be the first person to argue that doesn't guarantee much of anything except the child who might do very well on a phonics subtest or a phonics skill test. So this idea of teaching readers not reading is one where I saw too much of trying to fit children into a reading program as opposed to trying to fit the reading program into a child's totality. What's their emotional profile, what's their level of motivation and engagement in general, but also specifically to, is the child reading something that's of interest, or is it something that's demanded by the curriculum?
Is the child reading to then share with a close group of friends so that we're bringing in the whole social aspect of why we read in the first place? Or is it detached to answer four multiple choice questions or 10 multiple choice questions?
And to fast forward to what I think I was just saying I get really upset with the idea that there's one science of reading and that this one science of reading jumped out of the forehead of the No Child Left Behind Movement and the National Reading Panel report. Because if we ignore affiliated fields of research that can tell us a lot about being effective teachers and about how children thrive in addition to how children learn, I think we're just setting up instruction to be much more effective. And so in the book Teaching Readers Not Reading, there are individual chapters dedicated to things like metacognition, motivation, engagement, self-efficacy attributions, and epistemic knowledge. And if you look at really successful, thriving lifelong readers, all of those things are operating, they tend to be operating in a very sort of symbiotic and positive way. And if you look at struggling readers, excuse me, in the classroom, what you see is all of those things sort of ganging up on the individual reader and dragging them down.
I like to point out that the research in that volume is at least a quarter of a century old, because it was released 23 years ago, and it was a synthesis of published research. So I think any vibrant science is one that is continually evolving and holding on to replicated understandings, but also changing understandings.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yes
PETER AFFLERBACH:
And a couple of examples would be have a chapter of the focuses on metacognition, and I'm sure Palinscar and Brown's work from the mid 1980s.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yup
PETER AFFLERBACH:
So this is five or six years before the National Reading Panel report came out, and it actually way before that 10 or 15 years. And what it told us was that metacognition is not only important, but if you do good job teaching it, you can change the lives of struggling middle school readers, which if you've taught middle school, which I have, that was the hardest job I ever had. Think about a seventh, eighth , or ninth grader who's been pretty worn down across their academic career often populating the low reading group or whatever animal we call a low reading group, trying to hide the fact from them. And so we've known about metacognition since the late seventies as a powerful influence on human performance. And I also don't want to figure out how old Carol Dweck is, but I remember in graduate school reading about attribution theory, which derived from locus of control and social psychology back in the 1950s. And if you know attribution theory, you know that human beings who are in situations where they have time to reflect on what's going on will make attribution for their performance outcomes. And we know that struggling students often make attributions like this, the teacher doesn't like me. The book was too hard, or heaven forbid, and I'm just using this word because I've heard students say it's I can't read because I'm stupid.
PETER AFFLERBACH:
And once a child is locked into a particular attribution view of why they perform the way they do, it's really hard to undo that. But I was reading about that in the 1970s in graduate school, and that really predates the National Reading panel.
And so the idea here is the sciences of reading to me, is a much more legitimate, much powerful corpus of work from which to draw as opposed to the science of reading.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
So let's get back to the focus of the book about motivation, engagement, self-efficacy, attribution, all of those. And let's just take one of them, and I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about what the science says about this particular area. You touched a little bit here and there on it and what teachers can do. How do we actually help kids who we identify as needing support in this particular area?
PETER AFFLERBACH:
Let me start with self-efficacy. Okay.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Okay. Yeah.
PETER AFFLERBACH:
And also say that if you were to draw a nice chart with strategies and skills in the middle and around you surrounded, you say, that's one of the sciences of reading, excuse me. And then you would put self-efficacy, motivation, engagement, metacognition at attribution, epistemic development around that center cell. What you would see in the real time of a successful reader reading is interactions between all of these things. And those interactions are happening prior to any act of reading, during an act of reading and after an act of reading. So the self efficacious reader, or the reader in second grade or third grade, who has high self-efficacy is going to be motivated to read.
When we care about something, we pay better attention to it in general. And so that kicks in the metacognitive part or that particular science of reading. And when we're metacognitive, we have a better sense of how things are operating and whatever undertaking we're involved in, if we're metacognitive about our reading and it's going well, the attribution that we make for our performance will tend to be more positive and internal as opposed to negative and external, meaning I think I read well because I've been learning how to read and I gave effort. That's a nice positive internal set of attribution as opposed to the teacher really doesn't like me, or I'm stupid, or I'm unlucky, which are negative external attribution. And then as kids move through elementary school, we can think about something like epistemic growth kicking in when we ask kids to start evaluating author's work and critiquing their classmates writing in a, of course, a friendly, constructive way. But that helps teach them that knowledge is fungible sometimes and that it's it's not always the case that what you read or what you hear is true.
So it's not only that these are powerful individually, but they interact with one another. And before I get in depth to any of them one of the things that I do in the book is I bring out the notion of the Matthew effects and reading from back in the mid eighties from Keith Stanovich, and he was interested in how some elementary school students just grew exponentially. They were unstoppable as readers. And what he found was this reciprocal relationship between vocabulary and comprehension, and that a child's decent vocabulary accumulation of words, allowed them to access and understand increased amount of text. Reading increased amounts of text contributed to vocabulary growth. So it's like this just this big symbiotic positive thing going on,
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Virtuous cycle...
PETER AFFLERBACH:
But what I just described was it, it's not just strategy and skill operating there. It's not just reading specific knowledge. It's like if a child in first grade is having success, that child, he, she, or they will go back to something that has bought happiness, that has probably bought positive recognition from teacher, maybe peers and parents. And that will, in general, have a child more closely attend to what they're doing, so the metacognition kicks in, self-efficacy is blooming because nothing succeeds like success. So it's a lot of stuff that is closely related that I think is the essential wraparound to something like skill and strategy, instruction and learning.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
So I love that visual of it being, it just sort of encapsulates it all. It's like you can't get through into the other stuff until there's an attention paid to this and that there's reciprocal relationships between between all of it. So what do I do if I'm a teacher and I identify, oh gosh, I've got this fifth grader who's had maybe negative experiences with reading so far, maybe has never gotten to choose his own books or hasn't had access to books or maybe hasn't been as successful in his peers as is reading below grade level. So now the books that he could read, he's not really interested in reading, What do I do? How do I support that sort of child? What does the research say that's helpful there?
PETER AFFLERBACH:
I always thought my best teaching successes were when I communicated through words and actions to students that I was in it for them, that they could trust me that that's always to me, the foundation of effective instruction. And the thing that does turn around low self-efficacy is a continued series of success experiences.
Consistency is needed to help undo what may be a longstanding self-concept within the kid's head. Another thing is self-efficacy. Research shows the social persuasion can be very powerful, and that's a teacher on the side saying, I know you can do it.
Another thing that one of my really close friends in the field, Peter Johnston, has written books about this, and it's when we choose our words to talk with children, you can say, great job, great job. But the more specific you are, I really appreciate that you bore down because you're giving effort that's making a specific link between the student's performance and what you're seeing in that performance. I really appreciated that you thought before you acted about what strategy here would best help you understand what the author's trying to say. And that not only can build self-efficacy, which contributes to motivation and engagement, but it feeds that metacognitive growth also, because as we are explaining our view of the things they're doing they probably can't do that because their working memory is so fully involved with try to figure out what does the text say in the first place, especially with our struggling readers. So again, what are the things that are intertwined with or wrapped around cognitive strategy and skill that our best teachers have known forever?
I love that the sciences have filled in a research base where our best teacher intuitions were operating prior.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
I completely agree. So I guess I think of some of the things we're trying to help kids with in terms of engagement and motivation. We know that having books that you are interested in reading, all of us know this. Who are readers... A book I'm interested in reading. I finished that thing in a weekend. If I'm, it's fine, I'll take weeks to finish it, right? Or knowing that if I have a purpose for reading, I have a plan for reading, I'm more likely to be engaged with the reading and more motivated to read it because there's a reason why I want to read it.
And I think of strategies as a way that could potentially help a student breaking down for them. What are the steps to choosing a good book, or how exactly do I make a good plan and stay focused on my plan as I read? I don't know if you think that's a misinterpretation of strategies or what you think about that idea.
PETER AFFLERBACH:
I think the toughest part from a motivation and engagement perspective is we know that connecting with the child's interests can be a very powerful motivator. And we also know that being literate and reading in relation to things that we want to do individually or with groups of people is really powerful. But often the curriculum operates against that. Mm-hmm. In elementary school, a lot of the curriculum is about stuff that we think students don't know. That's why they're in school to learn it. And then the way that a lot of classrooms are set up is more individual than collaborative. And so that sort of runs against the experience that I hope most of us have with reading after formal schooling, which is we read to talk about stuff we've read with friends, we read to solve problems in, let's see, in our garden, in our family, all these things. But the curriculum is structured in a way that we have kids move from period to period, and we still have a lot of walls between the different disciplines and reading is offered separately.
PETER AFFLERBACH:
I think this is a lot of the reason why problem-based learning is so popular and and rightly so, because it sees literacy and reading more as a tool than an endpoint. And it seems it's social action and problem solving as the really appropriate end of what we do with what we read as opposed to answering questions.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yeah. Well, you're right that there are a lot of mandates on teachers and programs they must use or particular practices that administrators expect to see. But if you, Dr. PETER AFFLERBACH, could go in and design a third grade classroom where there weren't those kinds of constraints, knowing what you know about the research around motivation, engagement, self-efficacy, attributions, all that, what would that look like? How would the reading day go? What kinds of reading stuff would kids be doing? What would it look like?
PETER AFFLERBACH:
Well, the school structure would be really important as it impinges on the classroom structure. And one of the things that I would strongly advocate for is that a second grade teacher starting in late August or September which is pretty common in the states that I've lived in is not only looking at score profiles in reading and writing and math, but also looking at a reliable consistent set of assessments for children and how they become engaged, how they have been motivated or not motivated, how their self-efficacy is, and what do they attribute success or failure.
I would have a classroom where there's the acknowledgement of very wide individual differences amongst students in all of the areas that I've been droning on about this morning.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
And no, you're not droning <laugh> so helpful. No droning...
PETER AFFLERBACH:
Well because I'm assuming that I'm going to be working with a mandated curriculum, something like that. I'm going to be looking for
where in strategy and skill instruction do I have the best opportunity to look for building self-efficacy? And what are my teacher verbalizations and what modeling and explaining can I do throughout the school day that introduce a message and then just consistently reinforce it? And then can I advocate for a school-wide approach to these things? I don't want kids only getting a boost to motivation and engagement, in reading class and the things that work in reading class will work in mathematics.
So individual opportunities to work on things where small group, whole group are just not going to do the trick but also collaborative work, problem-based learning with small groups shared towards the more joyful end of the curriculum whole group experiences.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Thank you so much for spending time with me and for your scholarship and for your writing. I'm going to link to your book in the show notes, and I hope everyone checks it out. Again, thank you so much for your time.
I am so excited to talk about practical takeaways with my colleagues, Gina Dignon, Lainie Powell, and Lea Mercantini Leibowitz. Welcome, you three! I'm so excited to talk to you. Let's talk about that practical application of that message, that terminology, language, the words we use to call things and what they really mean matters a lot. Practically speaking, if you're a leader of a building or if you're a teacher and you're working vertically to align language, how have you tried to do this? Lead teachers with this in your work with them?
LEA MERCANTINI LEIBOWITZ:
One of the things we just did in a school here on Long Island was trying to reenvision the beliefs and values the school has or the district has around literacy. And when everyone laid out on the table what their beliefs and their values were, it looked like different things. Yet when they said more about it, we were saying the same thing.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Oh, interesting.
LEA MERCANTINI LEIBOWITZ:
And so we came to this common language through first just putting out what is it that we believe in. And then after we saw the similarities
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Patterns,
LEA MERCANTINI LEIBOWITZ:
And then we put a name to it and we said, instead of calling it this, this, or that, this is what this district is going to call this. And it helped us to move forward in having much more productive conversations because at first it seemed confusing and misleading. It seemed like we were all over the place, but really we all did have the same values and beliefs, but until we named it, used those words to discuss it, we were not thinking we were on the same page.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
What a valuable exercise. And I'm thinking having administrators at the table, coaches at the table, maybe a teacher lead from every grade level at the table to be part of those conversations could be so valuable. Gina, I know you've been doing some work supporting whole school change in some of the districts that you're working in. Are there any ideas that you got from Peter's conversation that you'd want to share?
GINA DIGNON:
Yeah I agree with what Lea was just saying. I've done similar work with schools around just sort of settling on the basic kind of language that you're going to use for ideas or categories. But then I think about and I've used your progression for vocabulary around then, how do we explain it? How do you explain this or how do you take the definition and then use that as a lens to go in and out of classrooms and then explain, this is what we mean by engagement. This is how it can look in K, 1, and 2; this is how it can look in three, four, and 5, 6, 7, and eight. And also thinking about how you talk to kids around what engagement looks like or feels like. That's something that I got from the talk just now, is that kind of coaching that teachers can do around reminding kids what it feels like to be successful. And there was one part where he was my close friend Peter Johnston, and I was like,
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
<laughs> I've heard of him!
GINA DIGNON:
I have his book. Yeah. And I was thinking about how you referenced Peter Johnston as well in the specificity of feedback. And I think it kind of goes together with what Leah's saying is how can we be specific as leaders with our school staff and meeting them where they are and having them know what it feels like to be successful. And then there's the other step of how can teachers talk to kids and remind them as specifically as they can about what they did when they were successful. And I think he said something about the more specific you are, the more you can build self-efficacy and metacognition within children, because sometimes students can't do that for themselves yet.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Well, I love this idea of having really clear terms, having a definition of what we mean examples, especially grade by grade examples of what that can look like and practice looking for it and celebrating success. That seems like a recipe for school focus and to have a really targeted, mission driven ability to block out distractions kind of a focus at the school level. Let's shift gears now and talk about this idea of strategies being explicit step by step. I'm all about that <laugh> really clear, explicit language. Any thoughts about that part of the conversation? I think you all want to share.
LEA MERCANTINI LEIBOWITZ:
I think that it was so powerful when he said it's not just that we need kids to have strategies, but we have to understand why are we giving them strategies. And it's like almost, I'm going to offer you these strategies to help you become more skillful.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
There's that research around conditional knowledge. So when do I apply the strategy and why do I apply the strategy? And I agree, Leah, that his message of layering in the thinking about motivation, engagement, efficacy on top of the strategy instruction by making it more purposeful, more tied to their goals, more aligned to this belief that you can do this. And I know you can, it's not like an extra thing. It's just a layer within the strategy instruction. I love that. Lainie, what were you thinking?
LAINIE POWELL:
I was just remembering how I love this phrase, and I've used this with teachers before that he we're making the invisible visible for kids. Because reading is something that we, I think sort of take for granted as skilled readers about the enormous sophistication that happens even just on a neurological basis when you're going from print to sounds to speech to meaning.
GINA DIGNON:
And I think that just everything Peter said, just sort of reaffirmed the importance of setting up your classroom in a way where you can meet with kids because how are you going to build up their self-efficacy? How are you going to be specific in your feedback to them if you don't have that time to meet with kids or have time to set up for kids to meet with each other?
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
For listeners who may not be familiar with conferring or different kinds of conferences, let's just describe a couple different conference types so they can visualize how that might go. So one conference type, I know we all like to start with teaching teachers about is a compliment conference. So does anyone want to take that one and explain what it is or describe what it looks like so people who are unfamiliar can visualize it?
LAINIE POWELL:
Sure. It is a wonderful entree into conferring. Teachers tend to gravitate towards this. It's quick, it's like a minute and a half. And you just simply are noticing and naming for readers or writers some habits and skills that are serving them and highlighting that for them in really specific ways to build rapport, to build trust, to build confidence, and also to increase the likelihood that that student continues that behavior because you've kind of highlighted what they're doing and tied it to an important reading or writing skill.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Beautifully explained. Thanks Lainie.
LAINIE POWELL:
Let me just give an example. So if you notice that a child is in a chapter book and is talking across chapters, you might say, I noticed that you're coordinating information across chapters. And that's really important because in these kinds of books, the plot is going to develop a change across the chapters and not rise and fall within one chapter. So keep doing that
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Beautiful example.And then once we've got those kinds of conferences going, those are something you can use all year long at any time. And especially I think for children whose self-efficacy trying to build, you're trying, like you said, give them lots of opportunities to be successful and point out those successes, which builds trust and also helps them become aware that they're capable learners. So that's a good tool to always have. And then you might do a research complement teach conference where you're not just complimenting, but you're also offering a strategy and then some feedback. If we think about that conference structure, I wonder about this idea of self-efficacy as a lens. The way the micro interactions we're having with students during that are going to be so important not to make them feel like, well, I guess I now need to teach you this strategy because you're not doing it right. That tone or that approach is not going to build self-efficacy. But if you say to them, what are some little moves within? So a research compliment teacher, I'm going to figure out what they need, give them a compliment, give them a strategy, and give them feedback and support. What are some little moves in there that you think support the self-efficacy?
LEA MERCANTINI LEIBOWITZ:
I always like to think about what goal it is that I see on the hierarchy as being their need. So let it be that character is where I believe they need to become more skillful. I might think about what do they know or what are they doing as readers to attend to the plot in the setting of the story, the goal before character, and give a really nice compliment that's specific to that kind of plot work they're facing and say, because you're so good at [insert plot description here], you are ready to, and now [insert what that goal is going to be]. You're now ready to see how these characters are so much more complicated and they have more than one side to them. And you're ready to do that because you are able to see that in the plot of your stories. There was more than just one big problem. Yeah. There's smaller problems that are happening because of that big problem.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
That Peter Johnston language, those language nuances and now you're ready for, or, oh, you know what, the next thing we could try is, or it's exciting and you're hopeful that it's going to be successful.
LAINIE POWELL:
It's empowering. So
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Matters so much. Yeah,
LAINIE POWELL:
A teacher talked to me like that versus Lainie, you know what you're not doing.
LEA MERCANTINI LEIBOWITZ:
How about that is unbelievable that you're able to see how there's so many different things, but what you're not doing. Yeah,
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yeah,
LAINIE POWELL:
Yeah. Way.
GINA DIGNON:
Yeah. Well, as you were giving your example, Leah, I was looking on page 22 of Reading Strategies 2.0, the little orange box "Principles of Effective Feedback." And I was like, it was encouraging, it's relevant <laugh> specific. It's almost like I was going through this as just checking what you were saying and how it was specific to the student's goal and strategy. It was generalizable, it was encouraging and it was actionable and it was brief, but all in the same time focused on strengths.
GINA DIGNON:
Peter acknowledged that often the curriculum battles against some of the practices and even some of the ideal things he suggested should be in classrooms. And I think we all know there's real things that teachers battle against as far as maybe programs or top down things.
LEA MERCANTINI LEIBOWITZ:
As what I always say when anyone asks me about resources, which is the best resource for phonics? What do you think the best? And my answer always is the teacher, right? If you think about making the teacher your resource, the resources that you invest in are then just the tools they use to address the strengths and the needs of the children that they're working with. Yes. So it's about that shift in thinking of what I purchased is going to fix the gaps that I'm noticing. Cause it's not,
GINA DIGNON:
I think what you said, Leah, if you invest in teachers, we all know that's what the research says. The number one thing that makes a difference is the teacher. And they need the tools, but they also need sort of the permission to do what they know is. And I just don't know if all teachers feel like they have that right now.
LAINIE POWELL:
And trust
GINA DIGNON:
And listening to Peter made me think we need to, when we're working with teachers, increase their self-efficacy
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Absolutely.
GINA DIGNON:
In themselves, right? Because it's like you've got the one, you have the
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Knowledge. Absolutely. Absolutely. I believe in you. Exactly. Lainie, Gina, Leah—thank you so much for joining me today.
LEA MERCANTINI LEIBOWITZ:
Thank you.
GINA DIGNON:
Thank you for having us.
More about this episode’s guest:
Dr. Peter Afflerbach is Professor of Education at the University of Maryland. Dr. Afflerbach’s research interests include individual differences in reading development, reading assessment, reading comprehension, and the verbal reporting methodology. Dr. Afflerbach serves on various literacy-related committees affiliated with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the International Literacy Association, the Common Core State Standards, and the National Academy of Sciences.