Doubt Crept In: Questioning My Faith in Reading Research

Uh oh

I thought that the more I knew about the science of reading, the better my teaching would become. And I’ve staked so much of my identity on this belief that my newfound doubt has shaken me terribly.

At a recent conference for reading researchers, I realized:

“There is a whole world of reading science that is not meant for me.”

Panicked, I said to a researcher-friend:

“Please tell me I’m wrong. I really don’t want to believe that most of the science of reading is irrelevant to teachers.”

She shook her head:

”You’re not wrong and it’s a big problem.”

Since that conversation, I’ve been thinking about the path I’ve been on and where I can possibly go from here. And I’ve been thinking even more about teachers, the science of reading, and what comes next.

Years ago

When I began to see the flaws in Balanced Literacy, scientific publications addressed many of my questions. I read voraciously to learn how our brains process print and why reading difficulties exist.

Encountering information and ideas I’d never heard before, I felt as if a world of research had been withheld from me during teacher preparation and professional development trainings. My self-imposed crash-course was overwhelming.

When I shared my feelings with a colleague he said:

There is a lot of information out there. [Reading First activist] Marion Joseph said, back in the 90s, ‘The researchers need to stop researching. They are too far ahead of [educators] and they need to start helping with the application of their findings.’

Within recent years

I ran the idea of halting research in order to support implementation by nearly every reading researcher I met. Their responses were typically some version of this:

It is the job of researchers to research. We are not trained in implementation in the school context. Translation should be the work of [schools of education, curriculum developers, professional development providers, etc.]

I accepted that answer, until now, because I was an outsider to reading research and I was blissfully unaware of its problems.

As a nonscientist, I naively contrasted education and reading research…

I thought that reading science was running well and that we, in the teaching profession, simply needed to catch up.

Last year

At last year’s Big Sky Literacy conference, Dr. Julie Washington argued that the national debate about Balanced Literacy illuminated the cycle of science.

Holding tight to my belief that “real” research builds on a solid body of evidence, I objected to her assertion that the study of three-cueing had been scientific. When pressed, she stunned me by saying:

It was science. Maybe it was bad, but bad science has always existed.

I had heard, in other fields, about research conducted to support problematic ideas, but I’d never considered that reading research might be plagued by bad science.

Though I tried to shake it off, Dr. Washington’s words stuck with me.

Last month

I recently attended a conference at which reading researchers present their findings to one another (The Society for the Scientific Study of Reading).

I found sessions of interest, spent time with people whom I admire, and cheered on researchers from a lab that has been partnering with my school.

I also experienced a bit of an existential crisis.

In too many sessions, researchers announced the results of studies that bore no clear connection to the classroom. During a presentation about how people’s pupils dilate while reading nonsense words, a thought circled in my mind:

Should I even be here?

That question spiraled out to encompass my presence at the conference, and even my own role in the science of reading.

My confidence shaky, I began to prioritize sessions in which researchers presented about their partnerships with teachers. They were excited about their work but the projects typically resulted in minimal or even no quantifiable gains for students.

I was quickly losing my rosy-hued vision of reading science.

Revising my perspective on reading research…

Now

I keep coming back to a conversation I had with Nicole Patton-Terry, a researcher to whom I confessed my disillusionment. I wish I had a transcript of what she said, but I’ll do my best to write what I remember:

“A colleague [Beth Tipton] and I have been discussing how you teachers are like engineers because the work you do has to hold up in the real world. You are accountable to the end user. If what you do doesn’t work, society can see it.

We, researchers, are the physicists. We run our controlled studies, carefully excluding the things that might limit our ability to discover something new. And then we say, ‘Here. Look. It worked for us. You take it and implement it.’

But all those variables that we controlled for? They exist in the real world, and so when you try to pick up our work, you don’t get the same results we did. 

And then we say, ‘Well, it worked for us. The problem must be in the way you implemented it.’ And we blame you or the systems within you work for your lack of fidelity.

But what if the problem is actually us because we aren’t working in the real world? And what if you are right that our physics doesn’t hold up when we send it out to you, the engineers?

All these years, teachers have been blamed for low reading rates. And we [researchers] have been off the hook because the research we do works… in our context. And if it doesn’t, we have the luxury of going back to the lab to learn more. But you don’t.

What if we’ve been wrong about how to go about this research the whole time? What if instead of blaming you, we start with you, your questions, your context, and the fundamental assumption that you, the user, are always right?”

I ran this analogy by the most physicist-y of reading scientists I could find at the conference.

That sounds exactly right to me. It’s an example of ‘The Last Mile’.

Where can we go, together?

I thought that reading researchers had the answers that teachers needed. Now I see that teachers have the questions and knowledge of the real-world that reading researchers need to be of service to society.

There are some researchers already engaged in research to practice partnerships and, at the conference I recently attended, they shared some of what they’ve learned:

• “Feasibility research is not the norm, but it should be.”
• “Teacher-delivered intervention studies are harder to run, but as researchers, we always learn from the teachers’ experience.”
• “Running this study in schools helped us to understand how the intervention works in real conditions.”
• “Working on a smaller scale with teachers allows for adjustment before scaling up.”

And they shared what they want to learn:

• “We need to learn how to make curriculum adoptions work for schools, not just publishers.”
• “We had difficulty recruiting and retaining a diverse sample that would fully represent less privileged groups. We need to figure that out.”
• “Our next line of study is learning how to translate the findings into classroom instruction.”

Research to practice partnerships like these are headed in the right direction, but the work will be slow-going unless we all put our minds to it.

I have to believe that we can, together, focus the science of reading on making a difference to teachers and our students.

A Big Bang Theory clip to help with the analogy of physicists and engineers