This episode explores the role of principals in the improvement of school reading achievement. These days all of the attention seems to be on literacy coaches, but their success depends heavily on the school principal. This episode explores what the research has to say about principals and reading.

Educators wonder what is the best way to monitor students' decoding progress. What are the pluses and minuses of using tests that have students reading nonsense words?

The idea of placing students in texts at their instructional level has always tried to provide students with some degree of challenge. The idea has been that kids won't learn from texts the can already read well. But is that level of challenge really beneficial?

A teacher asks about the value of digital text for reading instruction. The research says that neither children nor adults read digital text very well, so what role -- if any -- should digital text play in reading instruction? The answer might surprise you.

This episode answers a teacher's question about whether he should teach comprehension strategies or focus on student knowledge.

This episode explains ways that teachers can enable students to read text successfully for longer.

The idea of teaching text reading fluency is widely accepted, but most of this work tends to focus on accuracy and automaticity. What about prosody or expression? This episode explores the research that explains the importance of prosody in reading development and examines the most effective ways to teach it.

The simple view of reading claims that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. But what is linguistic comprehension and what does it matter in the classroom? This episode explores the meaning of linguistic comprehension.

These days teachers are told to teach reading with complex text. However, while they might have complex text in their classrooms or in their lessons, their approaches may undermine the benefits of complex texts. This episode cautions teachers to avoid four of these common errors.

State educational standards now require that students be able to read grade level text. However, many teachers take actions that undermine their efforts to teach with complex texts -- actions that reduce learning. This podcast explains four of those unfortunate instructional practices. Be sure that you aren't making these mistakes.