Shanahan on Literacy

Exploring qualitative assessment in reading, this podcast discusses the evaluation of comprehension and skepticism towards student self-evaluation. It also delves into the importance of metacognition and strategies for effective student self-evaluation in reading instruction.

This Blast from the Past provides specific explanations of how to teach students to summarize text.

This podcast explores how teachers should organize their classrooms to best teach reading and writing and criticizes some of the more popular approaches to this problem.

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.

The podcast discusses the ongoing debate between teaching comprehension strategies and focusing on student knowledge. It highlights the importance of strategies in reading comprehension and how they complement knowledge. The podcast also emphasizes the significance of teaching reading strategies in lessons, supported by research by the National Reading Panel and Ernst Rothkoff.

Learn how teachers can help students develop reading stamina and divide text for classroom discussion. Discover the impact of text length on comprehension, the importance of consistency in building stamina, strategies for increasing reading demands, and the benefits of providing breaks for improved attention and memory.

This podcast explores the importance of teaching prosody in reading and its relationship to comprehension. It discusses measuring prosody components and categorizing students based on their skills. Strategies for improving prosody include pausing, repeated reading, and phrase reading practice.