Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ® | Science of Reading for Teachers

Today we have a special episode featuring four parents from all over the United States. One thing they have in common is that they have children with dyslexia. They are courageously sharing their stories as reading science advocates working for systemic change.  

Resources

• Dyslexia-specific Resources:
  • International Dyslexia Association 
  • The Dyslexia Initiative
  • These resources from the International Dyslexia Association are helpful to spread the word on social media about October as Dyslexia Awareness Month! 
• Featuring Parents from Today’s Episode: 
  • COKID Colorado Dyslexia advocacy group  
  • COKID Literacy Dialogue Tool 
  • Both Sides of the Table,  Dystinct Magazine featuring Erica Kaufmann, July 2022 
  • Behaviors Before Dyslexia, The Dyslexia Initiative, Lauren Taylor

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Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum. 

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at [email protected].

Dr. J. Richard Gentry, Dyslexia Expert and the “Guru of Spelling,” joins us on the podcast today to discuss dyslexia. Dyslexia is a specific learning disability, neurobiological in origin. It’s the #1 reading disability that manifests itself in a continuum. People with dyslexia have difficulty in accurate fluent reading,  spelling, and decoding abilities. Dr. Gentry shares his personal story of overcoming dyslexia, how dyslexia affects people, and how teachers can help students with dyslexia in the classroom. 

Resources

• Dr. J. Richard Gentry’s Psychology Today Blog: Raising Readers, Writers, and Spellers 
• Dyslexia Resources from Richard’s Psychology Today Blog: 
  • 7 Ways to Accommodate People with Dyslexia in the Classroom 
  • Recognizing Dyslexia May Prevent Low Self-Esteem and Anxiety
  • Educators Can Help Young Children Diagnosed with Dyslexia 
  • A Guide to Early Markers of Dyslexia
• These resources from the International Dyslexia Association are helpful to spread the word on social media about October as Dyslexia Awareness Month! 
• Susan Barton 

Connect with us!

• Facebook and join our Facebook Group 
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Visit our website to sign up to stay connected with Melissa and Lori. 

Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum. 

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at [email protected].

In this coming Friday's episode we get to talk to the fabulous Richard Gentry again! This time we talk to him about dyslexia to kick off a series of episodes for Dyslexia Awareness Month. Until then, listen to our first episode with Richard Gentry about the importance of spelling! 

March 4, 2022
We’ve been asked about spelling and the connection to reading science more times than we can count. Today, we talk with expert J. Richard Gentry,  author of Brain Words and blog contributor to Psychology Today: Raising Readers, Writers, and Spellers (An Expert Guide for Parents).

He tells us all about spelling and how it connects to our speech and language system. Moreover, he supplies teachers with practical, meaningful, science of reading-aligned strategies to teach spelling.

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at [email protected].

Virginia Delegate, Carrie Coyner, and University of Virginia Professor, Emily Solari, championed action for a bill (now a law) that put $70 million towards changing colleges of education, professional learning for educators, and curriculum and materials to align to reading science across the state of Virginia. On this podcast, they will share how they accomplished this with 100% agreement from all state representatives, regardless of political party. 

Resources 

• Virginia Literacy Act 

Connect with us

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Visit our website and stay connected with Melissa and Lori!

Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum. 

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at [email protected].

Andrew Watson, educator and author of Learning and the Brain Blog and the book The Goldilocks Map, teaches us how to become healthy skeptics. Cognitive science and literacy intersect as we are inundated with information about reading science, curricular materials, motivation strategies and more. As we learn to discern and distill information, we ask the question: Is there research to support that? There are three steps to the process of unpacking the legitimacy of research. 

1. Determine if you trust the speaker. Ask: What is the best research you know of that supports that idea? 
2. Review the study. Ask: Is this study a good proxy for my students or scenario? 
3. Look for more research! Consider: Which direction does most of the research point me? 

Resources

• Learning and the Brain Blog by Andrew Watson
• The Goldilocks Map by Andrew Watson
• Isn’t Independent Reading a Research-Based Process? Reading Rockets /Tim Shanahan
• Tools to determine validity of research: 
  • ConnectedPapers.com
  • Scite.ai
  • Google Scholar 

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Visit our website to subscribe to our newsletter. 

Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum. 

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at [email protected].

This episode with Lior Klirs connects to Ep. 124: Innovative Assessment with the Louisiana Assessment Team. If you haven't heard this one yet, definitely listen! 

From original episode (5/6/22)
This episode is the first in a series on a really important topic: Assessment. How can we debunk the idea of ‘standards-aligned assessments’? What about ‘standards-aligned report cards’? 

Today’s guest teaches us that when we overfocus on the format of an assessment (i.e. the standards), we miss out on what matters most and lose track of the goal (i.e. comprehension). Comprehension is not a single construct. 

When we think about assessment data, there are two important questions to ask: 

1. Are the data useful? 
2. How are we preparing students for assessments? Are we confusing format with goals? 

The assessment data is a pathway back to the content. In case you’re wondering, here’s where the science of reading comes into play… knowledge building is a necessary and (very) important part of assessment!

Related Episodes

• Ep. 35: Reading Assessments NEED an Upgrade! 
• Ep. 37: Meredith Liben and Sue Pimentel on the Standards, Assessment, and Data 

Resources (bulleted list of resources mentioned in the podcast) 

• Garbage In Garbage Out 
• Beyond Multiple Choice conference agenda Jay McTighe 
• Why the Pandemic Experts Failed (The Atlantic) 
• What is the Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom (DIKW) Pyramid?  
• Researchers blast data analysis for teachers to help students (Hechinger Report) 
• Why State Reading Tests Are Poor Benchmarks of Student Success by Hugh Catts
• Educational Redlining (Reading Groups) with Sonja Santelises 
• Like most superintendents I cared a lot about test scores. Too much, it turns out. (Chalkbeat) 

Connect with us!

• Facebook and join our Facebook Group 
• Twitter 
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Visit our website and subscribe to our newsletter. 

Helping educators learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum. 

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at [email protected].

Louisiana is a state taking assessment to the next level. In this episode, the assessment team from the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) discusses Innovative Assessments. Reading comprehension is often assessed through cold reads and sometimes familiar topics. The LDOE team tells us how we can change our approach to assessment. We know comprehension is tricky to assess. Why? One word: KNOWLEDGE. Reading science tells us that knowledge is a critical piece of comprehension. Listen as the LDOE team tells how they are innovating to provide equity and respect for teachers and students through assessment. 

Resources

• Louisiana Guidebooks 

Connect with us!

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Visit our website to subscribe to our newsletter. 

Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum. 

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at [email protected].

Diana Leddy of the Vermont Writing Collaborative joins Melissa and Lori to talk about a topic we love: Writing. Specifically, Diana discusses a simple, easy to use tool used to support students with expository writing called The Painted Essay. The Painted Essay works because it helps students understand visually what they are writing and why they are writing it, as well as organize their thinking around a thesis statement. This structure requires students to think about what they want to say and use writing skills to say it. 

Resources

• The Vermont Writing Collaborative’s Painted Essay Tool 
• The Vermont Writing Collaborative

Connect with us!

• Facebook and join our Facebook Group 
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Visit our website to subscribe to our newsletter. 

Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum. 

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at [email protected].

• Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading by Chase Young, David Paige, and Timothy V. Rasinski
• Teaching Reading: A Blend of Art and Science 
• “That Sounded Good!”: Using Whole-Class Choral Reading to Improve Fluency by David Paige 
• Chase Young’s website: Thebestclass.org 
• Ep. 110: Baltimore Secondary Literacy Teachers Talk Fluency 
• Ep. 116: Sonia Cabell on the Importance of Content-Rich ELA Instruction 
• Ep. 62: Effective Fluency Instruction with Tim Rasinski 
• What Works Clearinghouse 
• Young, C., Durham, P., Miller, M., Rasinski, T., & Lane, F. (2019). Improving reading comprehension with readers theater. Journal of Educational Research, 112(5), 615-626.
• Young, C., Durham, P., Rasinski, T., Godwin, A., & Miller, M. (2021). Closing the gender gap in reading with readers theater. Journal of Educational Research, 114(5), 495-511.
• Just for FUN: Dropkick Murphys 

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Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at [email protected].

Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading by Chase Young, David Paige, and Timothy Rasinski is a next step for educators steeped in the science. When we understand reading research and science, we can add art and creativity to the learning space. What does it mean to teach artfully? How can we creatively approach teaching aligned to science? These questions answered (and more) in this book talk. 

Resources 

• Dr. Becky at Good Inside on Instagram

Connect with us!

• Facebook and join our Facebook Group 
• Twitter 
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Visit our website to subscribe to our newsletter. 

Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum. 

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at [email protected].