Maryanne Wolf
To the Classroom: episode 2
Febrary 27, 2023
Today I welcome Dr. Maryanne Wolf for a conversation about the incredible reading brain: what happens in neural circuitry when we are reading words accurately, the many different ways to read, and her important thoughts on how to cultivate true reading engagement in children—and in ourselves. Later, I’m joined by my colleagues Gina Dignon and Molly Wood to talk about implications for the classroom.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Dr. Wolf, thank you so much for being here. Welcome.
Maryanne Wolf:
Well, Jen, it's a nice opportunity for me to talk to you again. I remember our conversation, what was it, two years ago?
Jennifer Serravallo:
Three! It was January 2020, right before the pandemic, and you said you were heading to the Vatican. Do you remember?
Maryanne Wolf:
Now that I think about it, yes. I was talking to you and had, what I do remember is being excited by the convergent thinking we had about what is the real purpose of reading the deep reading processes. And I just thought, oh, this is such a lovely conversation. And that was it. And Jen, I didn't know all of your work. I knew a little of it. And then of course, then you ask me to discuss with you foundational skills and how you might write about it in your next edition. And
Jennifer Serravallo:
You were so generous to read that chapter. Thank you again for doing that. Yes.
Maryanne Wolf:
Yeah.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, today I'm so excited to connect with you again, and I'm hoping we could start off by talking about what you talk a lot about: what's going on in a reader's mind when they're successfully reading the words on the page. The way you talk about it specifically, I think it's just the most beautiful and awe inspiring way. Not to put you on the spot, but I was <laugh>.
Maryanne Wolf:
<laugh>
Jennifer Serravallo:
I mean, I just think you have a way of describing it that makes people fall in love with the brain if they're not already. It's just so beautiful and fascinating, and I was hoping you could just give us a quick summary of what's going on inside the brain when a reader is successfully reading words.
Maryanne Wolf:
Other than the fact that you set me up,
Jennifer Serravallo:
I did set you up. Sorry!
Maryanne Wolf:
The reality is it's not hard to be excited about it when you study both the beauty, the complexity, and the developmental aspect of what the reading brain really is. And for us who are educators, it's such a hopeful message that whatever we are doing is cumulative.
Maryanne Wolf:
Physiologically we begin, in ages zero to five, there are processes that we are developing autonomously that are genetically programmed language, all the different language processes, semantic, syntax, all of those are, that's genetic. We have a program, and as long as we're in the environment that is nurturing, that program unfolds. So language is developing and activating. Same thing with cognition, same thing with attention, which is, and all those very rudimentary executive function skills. Everything is moving along. And then you also have something that I always feel is neglected in that zero to five period in terms of our knowledge. And that's social emotional growth, affective growth.
So if you want to think about it, I wrote this in Reader Come Home, which I know you've read Jen,I really tried to think, how can I make an understanding of the reading brain's development as accessible as possible? And I kept thinking the hardest part was to talk about how parallel processes connect. And so I thought about it in terms of the circus that at the top, if you think of the top as attention, what we give attention to, and you see these, if you will, three rings up, it's closer to five ring circus acts that are happening at the same time, but that over time become connected.
Now, the beauty of reading is not that we possess reading. We don't. We build reading. I liken it to a circuit in the house. And you can have a very basic circuit or you have a circuit that's connecting everything. And so what we do when we learn to read is we take those three or five rings of language, perception, cognition, affect, attention, and all the things that go into executive function. If you take those five rings, and as teachers, what we are doing is we are teaching those rings to work together in one smooth, beautiful, basic circuit. Now it begins, and here's where it's a very important insight for educators. It begins when attention in happens in the visual area that says, I've seen this before. And what is happening is that representations of letters are happening. And these representations, the more you see it, the better represented it is. So it literally becomes an entity where neurons are in charge of letters and letter patterns.
But the big beautiful connection is what happens, whether it's the alphabetic principle or the logographics principle, or the syllabary, whatever it is, when that pattern of that visual pattern gets connected to the sounds within a language. So then we're connecting two rings and the tension. So we're actually connecting three rings of the circuit. But as all of us know, who cares if you can just connect a sound with a letter? It's what the alphabetic principle really is showing, which is that a child's cognition. This is what a lot of people don't think about so much. The cognitive aspect of understanding simultaneous, remember, we're talking about all these rings going on, that a child begins to understand that a word is made of those sounds and those are the sounds of the language.
And so my message in the first rings of connecting those rings is that we must learn to have children have a simultaneous grasp of the alphabetic principle and a grasp that words that have sound represent things and thoughts, objects and persons. So we have a lot going on in that circuit just from the start.
I have, Jen, since I've talked to you, I have a new way of describing this.
So I want people to, if they're listening, raise your elbows to the height of your shoulders and cross them so that the left elbow is up and the hand is down, and the right elbow is up and the hand is down. Well, this is how the circuit begins to change through education, the foundational skills top of the left elbow. We have to work really hard in the beginning to get them all connected. And the more fluent we can get, the more right elbow takes over. And the top of the right, all these are the deep reading processes that end up in the most beautiful elaborated reading brain. So I actually, Jen, I can send you this new paper called Elbow Room.
This was phonics, this was the common idea of what foundational skills was. Phonemic awareness and phonics and vocabulary. All that's great, but it's not enough. It's all of these connections among, of course, the getting that alphabetic principle, the concept understood, the correspondence between letters and sounds, getting all that worked on. But at the same time, developing an understanding of words, what they mean, how they're used in a sentence,
And this gets after something so important. We use our background knowledge in our inferential knowledge to become critical analytic readers. And we need to understand that takes time in two dimensions. It takes time to develop very much over the years we're developing, and educators are some of the primary helpers throughout all the way through college, all the way. This is a set of critical analysis. Is this set of processes that last till the end of our days.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'm so glad to hear you say that because I think it's so important that teachers of all ages understand they’re reading teachers, because what you're talking about—that a key part of reading, right, is this critical literacy, this analytic reading, this deep reading. And even adults sometimes need strategies for these things, right? College-aged students…
Maryanne Wolf:
All the time! Part of my work is to help adults recover their critical analytic processes because they become skimmers on digital screens. So much so that they're getting the surface almost like the basic circuit we began with. There's two dimensions of time. One developmental and one milliseconds. You can stop your reading at a surface. Shallow level. Nicholas Carr uses the term “shallow.” A lot of my colleagues use the shallowing hypothesis of what's happening to older readers, that they are reading the surface and they're so used to skimming that they are not giving the time to the deep reading processes like inference, critical analysis. And very importantly, perspective taking, empathy.
One of the most beautiful aspects of the reading brain circuit is that it adds the affective component to reading. It adds the ability to leave the ego, the whatever we call ourself, and transcend that self long enough to encounter the perspective of someone else that's different from ours. And it's two kinds of perspective taking. There's the cognitive perspective taking, that's sort of like the theory of mind. We are understanding what that other mind is thinking, especially in fiction that teaches us how to do that. But it also teaches us how others feel. And this is one of the best gifts, reading gifts. It helps people understand each other.
Marilyn Robinson said, the greatest threat to democracy is the trend towards seeing other as enemy. And so reading at its fullest in the circuit puts background knowledge, inference, deduction, empathy, perspective taking, critical analysis, all together. And that takes time. We have to give time to immerse ourselves in reading in a way that's deep reading. We can reach shallowly our email. That's all fine.
I would like people to understand that the full reading circuit at its best, and that's really your question, at its best, the full reading circuit takes time and can, at its acme doesn't always happen. In fact, it's all too infrequent. It can lead to our personal insights. That's the contemplative acme, the ultimate heart of reading. The ultimate heart. So when you ask me the simple question, oh, how's the brain <laugh>? When it reads words, I'm going to tell you it's a great story because it is a very, very complex, interactive, developmentally progressive circuitry.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And listening as a teacher, I think part of what's so exciting about it is to know that this circuitry, this changing, this connecting is happening because of the teaching and because of the experiences kids are having. And I just love your description of the complexity because I think there's sometimes a desire to simplify or make things easy or put things into separate blocks, like you say, right? Yes. And the integration, the crossing of the arms, the weaving of the strands, whatever you want to think of it, the orchestration, all that putting together is really what reading is. It's a multi-dimension, multifaceted.
More teachers than ever are saying to me, I just can't get them to settle and focus on their reading. It's really hard to get them to engage with their reading. What's going on in our mind when we are focused and what do we need to do to block out distractions and really engage and get into that deep reading state?
Maryanne Wolf:
Well, Jen, literally yesterday a new study was announced. It's in the JAMA Medical Association Journal Pediatrics. A study of 500 children in Singapore. The study was done, McGill, Harvard, Singapore, all these really amazing people coming together. And they were asking the following question: what is the effect of digital screen on the development of the young child's brain? Now, one of the major reasons for this is that we know already from imaging researchers, pediatric neurologists like John Hutton, that when children are listening to the story or seeing the story in a cartoon or full of imagery on their iPad versus having an interaction with the parent reading to the child, there are different activations in the language regions in the brain.
Basically, it goes like this. The caretaker, parent reading, interactive reading, of print—hold the child, hold the book—shows far more activation in the language regions than audio, which does more than the passive screen. The passive screen is not activating. Now, can you now just think of the implications? Well, the second part of that is that they get off the screen and want more. We call it dopamine lollipops. They want to be distracted, distracted, distracted. They are engaged, all right. But they are engaged in constantly changing stimuli. Linda Stone uses the term continuous partial attention. This is the enemy of focus. This is the enemy of this interactive and active brain as it encounters written language first through being read to and then reading. Well, the newest study that came out in pediatrics shows that the more screen usage, the more distraction, the more changes in the executive functions in brain imaging all the way into eight and nine year olds, that we have a distracted brain. Now it is endemic.
And so the child, this young child who's now eight or nine, is so inured to constant stimulation that their focusing ability—back to the study—the executive functions are not being utilized in the same way. So I am pretty clear about this, and as you know, the book that I wrote, Reader Come Home, the Digital Brain and Reading. Well, I wrote what I considered a developmental proposal. And it really is like Vygotsky. We have parallel tracks. We have the children learning and using digital very gradually up to 4, 5 and 6. They're actually learning programming like use of Lego coding, all that. Great. This is adding cognitive skills they must have in this 21st century. At the same time, I want print the dominant medium. I want books. I want books read to children. I want decodable books at when they are doing decodable books. I want them also to have books read to them by teachers. And then gradually getting more and more autonomous reading and so forth. Ten to 12 years, I want that the dominant practice, especially with children with dyslexia on using technology to help practice. That's all good, all good to supplement compliment, but not to have it as the dominant mode. Because the dominant mode is what I believe is the underlying source of what you are describing as a child or an adult.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I was going to ask about that. I used to be able to engage. I used to be able to sit and read a novel. You talk about this, you yourself used to sit and be able to read literature.
Maryanne Wolf:
Absolutely!
Jennifer Serravallo:
And now it's like, I dunno, my yoga teacher calls it a monkey brain. Your brain is kind of everywhere.
Maryanne Wolf:
He's right. And Buddha called it a monkey brain. Well, the reason why I called the book Reader Come Home is because we have a reading home that we've deserted, we've left it, and our children this, they're two different problems. There's the children who've never built that home,
Jennifer Serravallo:
Right
Maryanne Wolf:
Where they go and where they have what I call a sanctuary for thinking their own best thoughts, their thoughts, their personal way of thinking about Charlotte and Charlotte as or frog, and to our Harry Potter, who are they inside that home? Well, a lot of our kids never had the chance to build that home. And the second problem is for adults who've built it, but don't have lost their way, they can't go back to it. And I know one of your questions was, well, what do you do about that?
We have lost our ability to have cognitive patience, which is required. Think back to the circuit, now that you've heard me talk about the circuit that requires attention to be given to all those deep reading processes. When you give that time to affect, perspective taking, to critical analysis, that's the pathway to immersion. But skimming, scrolling, word spotting, which is how we all read so much on a screen that's almost the affordance of a screen as to hasten us along, which can be good for taking all the information we have to put together. There's so many good things. I'm never saying it's either/or—ever, ever, ever.
But I'm saying purposeful reading, immersive reading, requires the time, which we have no longer the set towards. Reading deeply requires a mindset, a purposeful, intentional mindset. And unless we discipline ourselves, remembering to ask, what is the purpose of this reading? Is it beauty? Is it a poem that we want the beauty, but that beauty requires us to go below the surface and that surface is what we usually are getting, the more we're online. So engagement is so tricky because the kids are engaged, all right. But they're engaged in something that is constantly stimulating themselves— and passively—instead of them actively going into what this means, what the reading means.
And so I actually, Jen, I'm actually working to revise my early intervention for children with dyslexia: RAVEL. But it's going to be trying to help the modern reader, the current reading child, learn how to immerse. I really not just learn how to read and decode, which I want desperately for kids who are struggling, but I want that struggling reader, especially my children with dyslexia. And I say mine as I have as you know, my oldest son is dyslexic, but they, I don't want to say that they have the most creative minds out there, but they have some of the most creative minds out there. And they're being neglected because they haven't learned how to read fluently enough to release their own creative thinking. I want that home for everybody. I want people to build it. I want people to use it. I want people not to lose it. And if they lose it, to learn how to return to it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think that's a beautiful place to stop. Thank you so much. I could never tire of listening to you talk about the reading brain and these processes and hearing the inspiration and then trying to imagine what does this look like in the classroom? How can we support children, give them time to get into these reading states, give them the strategies they need
Maryanne Wolf:
Exactly
Jennifer Serravallo:
…to really engage with their reading. Thank you again so much for being my guest.
Maryanne Wolf:
Oh, Jen. And thank you for your work. Bye bye.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Bye.
Maryanne Wolf:
Take care.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And now I welcome my colleagues, Molly and Gina. I feel inspired. What are we going to take to the classroom?
Gina Dignon:
It just made me think about how a lot of what's happening in early education, like K , 1, and 2 is not focused on the integration of all those skills. It's kind of slicing and dicing to find out where kids might be struggling, which I do understand the purpose of that. I do understand identifying kids who might be struggling but then what do we do with that information based on what she was saying around the developmental brain?
What if we we're trying to remediate decoding, for instance, and we want to get kids more automatic with the sound symbol, that whole idea of sound symbol. But then what else is happening to help with all these other rings that she was describing? I don't know if I have an answer per se, but I would love to hear what you guys have seen in schools or based on what she's saying, how that translates more to what we can do as teachers.
Jennifer Serravallo:
It makes me think about how there's a time for focus and there's a time for orchestration. And so if you're doing a really targeted lesson, be it a strategy lesson, a conference, a direct phonics lesson with a small group, there's a time for that really intense focus on a particular skill that students need. They need that support, they deserve that support. But if it lives stays there, and I think in particular about the students who maybe have that support in the tier one instruction, then they get pulled out and they have additional support with that particular skill area in tier two or tier three instruction. And if that's all they're getting and they're not given the chance to integrate, then they're not going to develop that complex network that Dr. Wolf described. So I think it's about, I'm going to say the B word, "balance," about balancing the very focused attention on certain skills together with opportunities for integration. Molly, what are you thinking?
Molly Wood:
I think for me, the standout message that I want to bring back tomorrow to classrooms is looking across the day when we do that focus work versus orchestrating and integrating or having kids do everything at once, looking across the day and thinking about how much of it is isolated and how much of it is integrated together.
It just was so validating to hear Maryanne—Dr. Wolf—speak about that. So in my mind, I'm picturing weekly schedules.
And looking and saying, “Are we accounting for everything that she just discussed?” So yeah, I wrote that words integrated across the day all over the place.
Gina Dignon:
And then adding on to what you're saying, Molly, how she was saying that the dominant medium she wants to be print and how that can, I don't know if she said this or if I'm just putting this together, but that print helps with this "cognitive patience…"
Jennifer Serravallo:
I love that phrase...
Gina Dignon:
Yea, that she mentioned. Yeah. Because of how it looks like kids are engaged when they're on screens. And I'm thinking of these popular digital text libraries that are people are using and I get why because they might be more inexpensive and kids all have Chromebooks now because of Covid and or because of other reasons. But I'm just curious about that. Does it look like kids are actually reading on Epic or My-ON or any of these and is that the same? I don't know. It makes me question those practices.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, I mean I think there's a couple things. There's the idea of reading print versus digital. And you're right, I think that having this library of texts that you can just click and open, expand one to the next, some of these online libraries that read to you, or you could read it yourself and you could choose the more passive option that certainly can't help with this engagement. But I think what she's also saying is that it's the digital world, not just digital text, but this idea that things are gamified, that you've got even some of the educational apps, you're getting points and then you're getting to go through a maze and then you're getting, and you're seeking that dopamine rush of passing the level or getting a reward. And how could a black and white text compete with things that bling and ding and reward and are filled with colors.
And it takes a training of the mind, is what I'm hearing from her. It takes, I'm going to say really specific strategies and guided practice from a teacher to train the mind to have that cognitive patience, to not seek that external reward. And it takes also, I think in the classroom, I think we have to think about how we're rewarding or not rewarding. And the idea of external rewards, it may seem as though kids crave them more and more, not just talking about reading, but across the day they crave these rewards because it's what they're used to in this digital medium. But there's a downside to that. The downside to that. The downside is that your brain, It's just continuously wanting that and it becomes hard to settle and focus the mind and stay attentive to a black and white text.
Gina Dignon:
Yeah. It also makes me wonder about I don't know if you hear this, Molly, from teachers that you work with, about how kids can't sustain in independent reading time or even in centers or when you're thinking, when you're talking about this whole executive function kind of thing. And so sometimes teachers then over-scaffold so that kids are moving at shorter. They're making these transitions at shorter time intervals. And I wonder if that's not helping to get this because I think you have to practice that this kind of sustained attention over time. So I don't know.
Molly Wood:
Well, that definitely I'm picturing, I'm remembering those conversations. I mean hear, I'm hearing them in my head. And it's really a challenge because it's an actual problem. Every single teacher I work with wants their kids to sit and read and enjoy reading. So it's an actual problem that this is something that we want that to happen, but how do we get there? And it is so interesting because part of that conversation I've had has been around building a reading life.
So Jen, in the engagement and motivation work that you've done, that's what it is. It's like we have to build a reading life and then we have to maintain it. And so it's so interesting that we're talking about kids in third, fourth, fifth grade from that I'm thinking of right now. I'm sure it extends through <laugh>. We know it extends through adulthood, but who haven't yet, like Maryanne said, built the reading life. And so that was also so interesting to hear her say that we have to acknowledge that and validate and value that, give it acknowledge it, say this is something that hasn't even been created. So let's start there. And I think let go of the fact that, oh my gosh, they're 10, they're 11. Okay, so they're 10 <laugh>, let's do this. Let's start now with and build up. And if we do have centers or we do have extended interruptions, it's a temporary scaffold that has to be revisited and revised as kids grow and as their stamina increases.
And Gina, when you were talking about the digital texts that kids are reading, I also, of course my mind goes to the digital assessment tools that we use. And so what are we really assessing and are we assessing the deep comprehension or are we really just assessing kids' shallow reading? And so if we're assessing shallow reading and we're valuing shallow reading, where do we go from there?
Jennifer Serravallo:
And it does drive how things are taught and what, what's practiced because there is this pressure to pass these tests.Definitely not a mirror of whether or not kids are able to get into this engaged deep reading state or do the kind of critical analytic, empathetic reading that Dr. Wolf was describing. Absolutely. Yeah.
Just one last thought. I was wondering about this idea of how teachers are able to build these networks that we're really changing brains. I find that so cool. We know that, but to hear her talk about it on a neurological or circuitry level, it's super cool. And I wonder how much kids are let in on this idea of them, how empowering it could be for them to understand that their brains are changing and that they are in some ways in control of whether or not their brains change. If you practice this and you build stamina or you practice this and you try to block out distractions and get yourself into this world of this story and empathize with these characters, you're actually creating new networks, new connections in your brain, you're changing your own brain. Have you seen teachers talk to kids about it in this way?
Molly Wood:
I, my son was lucky enough to have six months of a teacher with who did that work in kindergarten, and that was the year that of Covid. So he had six months of kindergarten with the phenomenal kindergarten teacher: Ms. Mosik if she's listening. And so she did a lot of work around brain chemistry and in a kindergarten way letting kids know that they were building knowledge and it was cumulative and they were active decision makers and a lot of the work around that metacognition and management strategies. So he still references it now.
Gina Dignon:
I’m thinking that kids would really love this idea of being in more control of their own learning. And if what she said is the acme, I think that's what she said of this deep reading is to lead to personal. It can lead to personal insights. To let them know over and over again that that's the main purpose of reading. Not how many words you read a minute or not how many, not what actual book you're reading.
I just feel like if we just reiterated the end goal and it's so much more than a standardized test, it's so much more than a DIBEL score or any of that. And just listening to Dr. Wolf say that was really validating to hear because she's not discounting all the other skills or what she called sub-processes that go into reading, but it's like she's keeping the end goal of what the brain can actually do in mind.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yes, and why it matters to people, to society, to democracy, these bigger, the goal is bigger than any of the individual concrete skills that we measure, or it's bigger than any of the scores that we report. That I think is so important to keep in mind, to not get lost in the weeds, but think toward bigger purpose and think toward integration of it all. So thank you Gina, and thank you Molly so much for being with me today. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Dr. Wolf as much as I did.
Gina Dignon:
Oh, I loved it.
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Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, a teacher, and an advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the Director of the newly created Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Previously she was the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007, HarperCollins), Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain (Edited; York, 2001), Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (2016, Oxford University Press), and Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (August, 2018, HarperCollins).