That, more or less, is the key to translating the science of reading into classroom practice, according to a new book by Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway called The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. The authors work together at Teach Like a Champion, an organization built on Lemov’s bestselling books by the same name.
The new volume is meant to be a practical guide for classroom teachers. It offers concrete tips and embedded QR codes that take readers to videos of teachers putting those strategies into practice.
The authors are attempting to tackle a big problem: how to boost students’ knowledge. They cite research suggesting that books — even children’s books — use more uncommon words than come up in most adults’ conversations. In practice, that means, “most of the words a student learns in their lifetime will be learned via encountering them in their reading.” The more kids read, and the wider variety of books they are exposed to, the better off they’ll be.
When people hear the “science of reading,” they might (mistakenly) equate it with phonics, but the authors spend little time on those core foundational skills. In fact, they take systematic phonics instruction in grades K-3 as the assumed starting point for literacy instruction and note that their book is about “the science of reading beyond phonics (emphasis theirs).”
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