How assessment directs our attention and how Applied SWI brings meaning and structure into literacy instruction
A participant in my Applied SWI class went back to look more closely at…
What schwa reveals about the limits of pronunciation-first spelling instruction
A conversation on social media recently began with a familiar question: How do you teach spelling when a vowel is…
It moved the guessing from context to pronunciation.
For decades, one question sat at the center of arguments about reading instruction:
What should children do when they come to a word…
What the learner connects is not the same as how the written word is built.
Orthographic mapping has become one of the most frequently discussed ideas in literacy, and there…
What Happened to Developmentally Appropriate Practice?
A literacy group recently asked a simple question: What classroom practice do you wish would disappear forever?
The answers were revealing. Teachers and parents…
Why repeated oral reading does not solve the language problems that keep older students stuck
Timothy Shanahan recently wrote about fluency instruction for older students in middle and high school,…
How handwriting becomes part of word study when students are ready
I do not bring handwriting into literacy intervention because I am sentimental about pencils or cursive. I bring it…
A teacher asked Timothy Shanahan a very reasonable question: Is there a grade-level list of morphemes to teach in K–5, something like the Fry sight word list but for morphology?
That…
When people cite the National Reading Panel, they often talk as if the panel simply gathered the studies, added them up, and reported what the research said.
But research does not…
I saw a post recently about a virtual “Syllable Division Lab” for tutoring. Students label syllables, draw bridges between vowels, and divide words on a shared screen. The example word…
Stop Calling Phonology “Phonics ”
What each one is, and why the distinction changes instruction
People keep using phonics where phonology is the accurate term, as though no distinction were needed.…
Phonics is Not Phonology
Why mistaking a teaching method for a linguistic domain distorts how we think about reading.
Why This Distinction Matters
I learned to read under conditions…