Teaching Literacy Podcast

I really appreciate the effort and professionalism that goes into these podcasts. They are clear and have good a good pace. There is a good emphasis on theories and models. They are very accessible and a good effort to translate research to practice. Having listened to a good number of them, I feel like there is an emphasis on meaning-making but only a cursory nod to the importance of developing fluent decoding skills. It seems like the views presented assume that decoding skills are just going to emerge from literacy- rich environments, which is simply not supported by the evidence. There are a number of off-hand comments that minimize the importance of teaching children to read words, which suggests either an inaccurate understanding of the research in this area or a lack of awareness of a huge body of scientific research. It would be beneficial to include some guests and/or perspectives on how our brains learn to decode and the value of explicit instruction in learning the phonological-orthographic relationships in our written code. How about including discussion of orthographic mapping, Share’s self-teaching hypothesis, the interconnections between spelling and reading, the interactions between phonemic awareness and reading development, as well as knowledge about the extensive research by Seidenberg, Moats, Ehri, Rayner, Adams, Hasbrouk, etc. Take a critical look at levelled texts and 3 cueing strategies and encourage teachers to replace them with evidence-based assessment and instructional practices. I hope to see more podcasts and an expanded breadth of ideas and research-based information to help teachers teach literacy better.