1KHO 585: Low Tech and High Text (How to Build Your Child’s Brain with Books and Not Screens) | Doug Lemov, The Science of Reading

Summary

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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast

Episode: 1KHO 585: Low Tech and High Text (How to Build Your Child’s Brain with Books and Not Screens)
Guest: Doug Lemov
Topic: The Science of Reading, Building Literacy and Joy Through Books, Not Screens
Date: September 29, 2025

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Overview

This episode dives deep into the power of building a child’s brain through books and real-life experience rather than screens. Host Ginny Herrich welcomes educator and author Doug Lemov (notable for Teach Like a Champion and the recent Guide to the Science of Reading) for a lively, research-based discussion. Together, they unpack why reading—especially from physical books—builds cognitive capacity, empathy, vocabulary, and lasting enjoyment, while overstimulation by screens and “shortcut” reading techniques pose significant risks to child development.

Lemov and Herrich draw connections between outdoor play, shared reading, the science of how kids learn to read, and how families (as well as schools) can revive joyful and effective literacy habits in an increasingly digital world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Childhood by the Numbers & Why Reading Matters

• Ginny highlights how fleeting childhood is (just under 9.5 million minutes), pressing the urgency to make every moment count for development.
• "Kids are not reading. They're not reading in high school. They're not even being assigned books in high school anymore." (Ginny, 01:39)
• Doug describes an “overwhelming” decline in reading among kids, linked to the ubiquity of screens and distractions.
• Kids, even those who once loved reading, lose themselves less deeply in books when devices are nearby.
• “We are in the midst of a large scale rewiring of the cognitive patterns of our young people...” (Doug, 02:24)
• The gratification from reading and outdoor experiences is slow but deeply rewarding, in contrast to instant but empty digital gratification.
• “No one gets at the end of an evening spending time scrolling... and says, I'm really glad I did that. You're like, I wish I'd read a book. I wish I'd played guitar. I wish I'd gone for a run outside.” (Doug, 06:16)
• Parallels are drawn between the initial “transaction cost” of going outdoors or entering a book, and the lasting rewards each offers.

2. The Importance and Power of Reading Aloud

• Doug underscores reading aloud as the most valuable shared practice for families and classrooms.
• “Reading aloud with your kids is the single most important thing you can do... Right. That's—that builds fluency...” (Doug, 09:02)
• Both Ginny and Doug emphasize that reading aloud shouldn’t stop once a child becomes an independent reader.
• Children’s books often have far more sophisticated vocabulary than even educated adult conversations.

3. Unpacking Reading Fluency—Three Pillars

• Doug introduces the concept of fluency as involving:
  • Accuracy (reading the right word),
  • Automaticity (reading quickly, at the speed of sight),
  • Prosody (reading with appropriate intonation and expressiveness).
• The surprising importance of automaticity and prosody is discussed.
• “For vocabulary...a children's book is far more sophisticated in vocabulary than a speech.” (Ginny, 12:03)
• Most rare words are learned through reading, not speech.

4. Vocabulary: The Foundation of Knowledge and Comprehension

• Doug shares powerful data:
  • Children's books have 31 rare words per 1,000; adult conversation only 17.
  • “No amount of speech, no amount of chatting with smart people will cause the word prosody to emerge into your life. That is the truth about most people’s vocabularies.” (Doug, 11:17)
• Background knowledge—built by reading widely and living full lives—is the single best predictor of comprehension.
• “You almost can't conceive of something unless you have a word for it.” (Doug, 13:24)

5. The Crucial Role of Background Knowledge

• Real-life experiences (like outdoor play, family reading, travel) create mental scaffolding for understanding stories and making inferences.
• Baseball Study: Low-level readers who knew about baseball outperformed high-level readers who didn’t, when reading a baseball passage.
• Example: The Charlotte’s Web “acrobat” passage demonstrates that lack of real-world knowledge derails comprehension.
• “Our students need more to think with.” (Doug, 24:03)
• Feeding kids small bits of knowledge as they read transforms the experience and deepens understanding.

6. Formative Writing—Thinking on Paper

• Doug pushes back against the idea that writing’s utility will vanish with AI and auto-complete tools.
• Formative writing—jotting ideas as they emerge, before forming a set opinion—leads to deeper thinking and memory formation.
• “Writing often generates ideas that authors didn't know they had...” (Ginny, 37:41)
• Handwriting, not typing, better encodes knowledge in memory—Doug recommends notetaking by hand and annotation in real books.

7. Physical Books vs Screens: Why Format Matters

• Physical books are “cognitively privileged”—they slow us down, anchor attention, and encourage annotation.
• “Books are the optimal text format. We are unapologetic about actual books.” (Ginny, 46:15)
• Digital reading (especially on screens with notifications) leads to more shallow, distracted engagement (“the average person on a screen switches tasks every 17 seconds” (Doug, 51:20)).
• The medium is the message: Social media trains shallow processing and hot takes; books teach persistence, complexity, and empathy over time.

8. The Science of How Children Learn to Read—Debunking Flawed Methods

• Many schools in the US (until recently) followed the “three-cueing” method, teaching kids to “guess” words from context or pictures, rather than systematically decoding.
• “With intentional phonics, almost every student is likely to learn to read. Without it, it's a lottery.” (Doug, 56:36)
• The podcast Sold a Story is cited as pivotal in changing US school reading practices by highlighting the science behind reading instruction.

9. Lifelong Impact—Practical Advice for Parents & Teachers

• Repeatedly, the hosts urge parents to:
  • Read aloud at every age
  • Surround kids with print books
  • Allow and encourage annotation and handwriting
  • Limit digital reading/screen time
  • Provide wide experiences for background knowledge
  • Emphasize process (the act of writing/reading) over product
• “The first purpose is the process, not the outcome.” (Doug, 44:37)
• “It's such a gift to understand how the brain works when it's reading. You will never regret slowly reading aloud with your kid back and forth ever again if you understand the science behind it.” (Doug, 56:16)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Declining Reading & Technology:

• “We are in the midst of a large scale rewiring of the cognitive patterns of our young people and ourselves at the same time...”
  —Doug Lemov [02:24]

• “No one gets at the end of an evening... scrolling through videos on their phone and says, I'm really glad I did that.”
  —Doug Lemov [06:16]

On Vocabulary and Book Language:

• “Children’s books have 50% more rare words in them than educated adults use when they’re speaking aloud.”
  —Ginny Herrich [12:23]

• “You almost can’t conceive of something unless you have a word for it.”
  —Doug Lemov [13:24]

On Background Knowledge:

• “Our students need more to think with, and that has to do with reading.”
  —Doug Lemov [24:03]

On Handwriting and Memory:

• “The harder you think about the learning object, the more likely you are to remember it. And so I think that's why writing is so powerful, why handwriting is really important... And why annotation is so important when young people are reading.”
  —Doug Lemov [41:25]

On Stories and Human Evolution:

• “Stories are cognitively privileged...There is no culture on in the world that does not have myths, stories that we tell about who we are and how we became.”
  —Doug Lemov [47:39-48:13]

On the Value of Real Books:

• “Books can provide an antidote, helping our students retrain their attention spans and offering them the reward of deeper, longer lasting pleasure.”
  —Ginny Herrich [52:00]

On Reading Techniques:

• “With intentional phonics, almost every student is likely to learn to read. Without it, it’s a lottery.”
  —Doug Lemov [56:36]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Topic/Segment | |-----------|-----------------------------------------------------------| | 02:24 | Doug on decline in reading & digital distraction | | 06:16 | The deeper, lasting joy of reading and outdoor time | | 09:02 | The importance of reading aloud for fluency | | 12:03 | Sophisticated vocabulary in children's books | | 13:24 | Why vocabulary is central to comprehension | | 23:45 | “Kids need more to think with” & the baseball study | | 31:41 | The role of background knowledge in real reading | | 37:41 | Writing as a thinking tool—even with AI | | 41:25 | Why handwriting and annotation matter | | 46:28 | Books as optimal format, the meaning of “low tech, high text” | | 51:20 | How screens fragment attention; the advantage of print | | 53:11 | Debunking “three-cueing”; phonics as scientific foundation | | 56:36 | The reading “lottery”—phonics vs. guessing | | 58:03 | Reading outdoors as a family tradition |

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Additional Resources and Takeaways

• Recommended Resource:
  • Sold a Story (podcast by Emily Hanford) for insight into recent shifts in reading instruction [53:12]
• Book:
  • Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading by Doug Lemov — for educators, parents, grandparents, and anyone working with children
• Action Steps:
  • Read aloud to kids of all ages
  • Prioritize physical books for independent and group reading
  • Build background knowledge through broad experiences, including nature time
  • Practice annotation, notetaking by hand, and encouraging reflective writing
  • Challenge screen-based shortcuts; embrace the slow, deep process of reading and writing

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Episode Closing

Doug and Ginny close with reflections on the joys of reading outdoors, family literacy traditions, and the life-changing impact of committed, intentional reading practices. Ginny highly recommends the book for parents, homeschoolers, and educators, encouraging group study and discussion as a transformative tool for families and communities alike.

“Take back childhood. Inspire others.”

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For more resources & the book link, visit the episode show notes.

Transcript

[Doug Lemov]

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[Ginny Herrich]

Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Herrich. I am the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I have just read a book I really, really love. You're going to be like, why is she even talking about this on the show? But it is so fantastic. It's called, it looks kind of textbooky. So people, when I've been reading it, I take my books out in public. Doug. People are like, what are you reading?

[Doug Lemov]

It's called super nerdy.

[Ginny Herrich]

No, but it's fantastic. I liked it so much. I learned so much. It's called Guide to the Science of Reading. Translating research to reignite joy and meaning in the classroom or in your home. One of the authors, it's been by three people. Doug Lamav is here. Doug, welcome.

[Doug Lemov]

Hi, Jenny. Thanks for having me on. I'm so excited to talk about reading and maybe even reading in the outdoors.

[Ginny Herrich]

Yes, reading in the outdoors. That counts. People always ask Doug what counts as being outside? And it's like, well, take anything you do inside, outside, and you're going to have all of those extra benefits of the full spectrum sunlight and the surround sound of the nature sound. So take your reading outdoors and you can do that year round with your kids. This is a phenomenal book. It is so needed. You talk in here quite a bit about Dr. Jean Twangy who's been on our show twice. She's like one of my.

[Doug Lemov]

She's bright.

[Ginny Herrich]

Yes. Like favorite people, favorite author. She's this college professor. I just talked to her the other day and she was reiterating that kids are not reading. They're not reading in high school. They're not even being assigned books in high school anymore.

[Doug Lemov]

Shocking.

[Ginny Herrich]

Then they're not being able to read in college. And I have had a lot of conversations, Doug, about a couple of things. First of all, I talked to this man, Dr. Nicholas Carderis. He's an addiction specialist and he's talked to teens or late teens. They don't have any mental imagery. So they'll read a book like Harry Potter and they can't imagine it in their mind because they've not done it. And all the imagination has been done for them through TV and video games. And there are just major ramifications that go along with not reading. So can we start with the situation that we're in and why it matters?

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah, it's a. Thank. It's such a great question. We are in the midst of a large scale rewiring of the cognitive patterns of our young people and ourselves at the same time, by the way, while it's happening, you know, one of the ways, even if your child doesn't have a device yet, sadly, the age of age of first device keeps going down. But, like, they don't see their siblings reading a book. They don't see you reading a book, or you are reading a book or you're reading out on your Kindle. And it's unclear whether you're reading a book or whether you're just scrolling through the Internet. But, like, don't have kids read less and less. The data on this is overwhelming. They read differently. They read distractedly. One of the things that my, My kids are mostly out of school now, but, you know, kind of raised them in the. In the eye of the storm. My son was a huge reader until he got his cell phone. And then the reading behavior started to diminish. And I would, you know, because I love him, I would mandate you have to read from a book three times a week for 45 minutes. And he would diligently take a book that he really, really wanted to read, and he would either lie on the couch or sometimes go out to the patio, by the way, to, you know, reading outside. When he would lie on the couch with the book, he would have his cell phone sitting on his chest. He's lying on his back, right? So just think about the difference between that experience and. Let's say we're reading the same book. I remember him reading like Boys in the Boat. Just a great, you know, great outdoor theme book, right? When I read a similar book when I was that age, you know, you, like, lose yourself in this. You know, a book creates a universe for you, a world, kind of lose yourself in it. It takes some time and some diligence to get into that world. But once you're in that world, it is a, it is a world for you. But for him, reading that book, you know, every five seconds, dude, over at Byron's, when you coming, dude? Check out this video. Dude, that girl in your math class. When are you going to ask? Like, he doesn't lose himself in the world in the same way. His connection, empathy, you know, just like to the book and the characters and is different. And then sadly, sometimes, you know, I'd see him walking out to the patio fully intending, I think, to read because he remembers that he loved reading once, you know, that like when he was younger, you know, he loved it as an important part of his life. He. I don't think most. Most young people want to spend a day scrolling through the Internet, but it's an addiction, right? So you would see him. I would see him walking out to the patio with the book in one hand and the phone in the other, and he'd sit down and he'd open the book and he would glance quickly at his phone, which he thought would be only for a second. And the next thing you know, you know, it's 20 minutes and 40 minutes and the data is overwhelming. The kids do read. It's not just that they don't read outside of school anymore, which I think is really, really challenging. But they don't read books inside of school anymore. They're reading behaviors in school, and it's harder to get kids to read. Teachers are afraid to push them to read books. They think kids won't read books. And so they read very transactional short passages that are a fundamentally different reading experience from some great book that creates a world for you and takes a while. I was reading. Sorry, this is the most long winded. I was reading, reading a novel friend gave to me a couple weeks ago, atonement by Ian McEwen. And for the first 60 pages, I did not. It's not that I didn't like it. I just. It was slow going and I wasn't that into it. And it just was kind of interesting that it just. It takes a while to enter the world that a book creates for you. And so I was kind of like, counting the pages, and I was like, I'm on page 48. I'm on page 49. And then like, suddenly I was on a page 103. And I. Because I kind of started to enter this world, and now I'm like, you know, it's not as much of a slog. It's actually really interesting to me. And then I look down and I'm on page 200 and something. Because I think it's one of the fundamental experiences that reading does for you, which is it takes some time to enter the world. It takes some diligence and some persistence and some patience, and those are great things. And they are ultimately rewarded. And that is A beautiful message for a young person, which is that the most valid, most powerful forms of gratification are not instant. Right? They are often slow and they, you know, they take some time to. I think there's, I know that, you know, we can't, we don't only have to talk about connections to the outdoors, but I do think that there's a similarity to like time spent outdoors, which is like there's a transaction cost and you get out there and it's, you know, it's hot or it's cold and it takes a while and then suddenly you enter this other world and you're very like, it is very gratifying and valuable and you are glad that you did it. No one gets at the end of an evening when they spent scrolling through, you know, videos on their phone, it's like, I'm really glad I did that. You're like, I wish I'd, you know, I wish I'd read a book. I wish I'd played guitar. I wish I'd been, I wish I'd gone for a run outside. I wish that I had gone to the gym. They're more gratifying, but they take some work to get there.

[Ginny Herrich]

And you even write about that in the book. You write what attracts us in the short run. The constant role of new information and novel stimulation is not actually what gives us pleasure in the long run. You talk about the profound enjoyment of reading, which is so interesting in a book about the science of reading. You don't know that you're going to get that. And I have said many times that some of my best parts of adulthood and childhood have been reading, reading Nancy Drew books up to now. I've got favorite favorite authors. It adds so much to your life, let alone the things that you're learning or like you talk about. If you're talking about ramifications, you talk about, you know, well, is this kid going to be able to do their taxes? Are they going to be able to understand different documents? I mean there are long term ramifications, but the actual just enjoyment of reading or the growth that you can experience is a really big deal. So you talk about that and then you talk about this word. I want to read a couple of things. The students are intimidated. This is college professor saying students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and walk away from reading as little as 20 pages with no reading understanding. They're saying we're assigning few and fewer and fewer reading materials. On a good day, maybe 30% of a given class have done the reading public schools, sometimes in the high school, they're never requiring a child to read an entire book cover to cover. So parents need to know this. First of all, you need to know.

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah, for sure. If parents do not know this, I think that, like, the book is. The book is. Yeah. Yes.

[Ginny Herrich]

And you talk so much about text. Having low tech, high text in the classroom. Have that in your home. Low tech, high text. This is great for any parent. I would recommend. This is my. This is my opinion. You would read it with a group of moms and everybody take a chapter because you talk about these seven really important topics. Everybody take a chapter. And you have these like QR codes that you can scan and then you can watch these different things. So there's a. There's a lot of meat there, but it's all important. And so, like, you could divvy it up if you need to or. I read it through and I didn't do a ton of the QR codes just for a time tick. And I still got so much out of it. It was so fascinating. Okay, Doug, there's so much to talk about.

[Doug Lemov]

Can I just say one tiny thing? When you go. The QR codes are the links to videos, by the way of class, actual classroom teachers teaching reading. Just so, like, you can see a model of how they do it, how they're like, you know. A very simple example is reading aloud. It's so powerful. Teachers are often told not to read aloud. But I just say, like, reading aloud with your kids is the single most important thing you can do back and forth. You read to them, they read to you. Right. That's. That builds fluency, which is one of the most overlooked aspects of reading. Maybe we can talk about it later. Reading aloud with my kids is one of the most important experiences in my life as a dad.

[Ginny Herrich]

Well, let's talk about reading out loud because this is a really big deal.

[Doug Lemov]

First of all, I interrupted you, so I apologize.

[Ginny Herrich]

No, this is good. I want to talk about all these things. I just really want to encourage people to read this, though. It's called the Guide to the Science of Reading. And people are going to be like, why does it look like you're reading a textbook? But if you're a mom, if you're a dad, if you're a homeschool family, you are going to learn so much in here about your kids. Now, we waited for reading instruction until our kids were a little bit older. They were seven. And it was not very hard to get them on board with reading. In fact, the youngest one, we didn't have to do any instruction, but she comes from a literate household, and so she constantly has a book with her. Well, you're talking about these unscientific teaching practices that are happening. So parents need to know, like, this little boy, he's five. You know, this is like a situation. I'm sure that's happening everywhere. He's five years old, and they're telling him to guess at the words and to, like, look at the first letter and look at the picture. And you're like, this is flawed. It's not a good way to teach reading. And then the kids are lost, and then they have a resistance to it. You talk about disfluent readers, which. I never heard that phrase before. Okay.

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah.

[Ginny Herrich]

You say far more students are probably disfluent than many educators realize. You got to keep working at it even as they get older and older. But this one, I talk about fluency. Okay. I didn't know any of this. Fluency requires three things. Accuracy. Automacy. Autumn.

[Doug Lemov]

Automaticity.

[Ginny Herrich]

Automaticity, which. This is the whole point.

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah.

[Ginny Herrich]

That you learn vocabulary through reading, not necessarily through speech as much, because you can read it, read it, read it, but not even know how to pronounce it. Because I've got another one.

[Doug Lemov]

I mean, I will tell you, like, I am not. Prosody is what they say. But I wasn't sure whether it was prosody or prosody either, because you never hear this word said aloud. You only see it in text. Right. Think, like, sometimes people are embarrassed when they can't pronounce a word that they know.

[Ginny Herrich]

Yeah.

[Doug Lemov]

It's a beautiful thing. It means you've read it, learned it from reading.

[Ginny Herrich]

Yes.

[Doug Lemov]

Which is where most rare words occur.

[Ginny Herrich]

Yes.

[Doug Lemov]

No amount of speech, no amount of chatting with, you know, smart people will cause the word prosody. Prosody to prosody to emerge into your life. Right. And that is the. That is the truth about most people with vocabularies that come from. They come from reading anyway. So.

[Ginny Herrich]

Wait, I want to talk about that. Okay. Prosody. But then you talk about. Because it almost reminded me of the word episodic. It was like, prosodic.

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah.

[Ginny Herrich]

So I never heard these words, actually.

[Doug Lemov]

Great.

[Ginny Herrich]

Well, automaticity. I've never even said it. That was the first time I've ever said it. I said it wrong. So they need three things to be fluent, which I didn't know. I'm a homeschool mom. I'm a former educator. They have to be Accurate. That would be the only thing you would think about. Can they actually read the word? But they also have to be able to read it quickly, reading at the speed of sight. And then this prosody, which is about your inflection, and you're almost probably having the inflection in your head or if you're able to read out loud. So then when you talk about. Okay, there's so much to talk about when you talk about the vocabulary. This is so important because you people would think a children's book is a waste of time. Like, my kid's 10, my kids 11. I'm not going to read them the gruffalo. Like, we're way past that. But you say for vocabulary and vocabulary is the single most important form of knowledge, but is often taught as if it were a skill, that a children's book is far more sophisticated in vocabulary than a speech. And you actually give numbers. You say a children's book will have 31 rare words per thousand. 31 per thousand, with the median word is the 627th most common. So compare that when you're talking that there's only 17 rare words per thousand, with the median word being the 496th most. Most common. Children's books have 50% more rare words in them than educated adults use when they're speaking aloud. Even preschool books have a higher median word rank than adult conversation. So you say exposure to book language provides opportunities for learning words. Conversation is not a substitute for reading.

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah. So shocking to read that data. It's so interesting. By the way, I want to come back to fluency and prosody, but let's talk about vocabulary, because it's the single most important form of knowledge that you almost can't conceive of something unless you have a word for it. Sometimes I do work with teachers and I'll show them a picture of a bunch of trees. And if you know the word, it's. It's that they're in the tr. In the picture of trees. There's deciduous and coniferous trees. If you know the words deciduous and coniferous, you perceive a pattern. You're like, oh, the deciduous trees and the coniferous trees are like, they're, you know, the what? Deciduous trees are higher. Can they, you know, like you, you see a pattern if you. You don't know the words. You just see a group of trees. You perceive things because you have language for them. And so, you know, vocabulary is massively underestimated in its role in. In understanding and in reading. And as you, You Know, that passage was so powerful to me for me to realize, which is when we write, we write. You know, you speak at 150 words per minute, which is really fast. And so it's hard to use new words or words that are on the edge of your knowledge, at the edge of your understanding, and so you fall back onto very familiar words that you can use very quickly. I'm experiencing this now because I'm trying to learn Spanish. If I have to write an email to, let's say, the desk clerk at a hotel in Spain and say, I'd like a late check in, I can take my time and write slowly and choose words that I couldn't access at 150 words per minute in speech. But if I had to walk up to the desk clerk and use the conditional tense and ask for, no chance for me. This is one of the reasons why even children's books have richer, more interesting, more nuanced vocabulary than speech, because people write them slowly, and they can think about what's the interesting. What's the word I wanted to. What's exactly the word that. What is the best word here, not the fastest word. And so I think that is relevant. Both. It explains why the surprising fact that there's so much rich vocabulary. And this is really important because most of the challenging words you experience in your life, you only experience in print. So the only way to get exposure to them is by reading print. And so if we want our children to be able to read the works of Charles Darwin, the works of Shakespeare, the United States Constitution, they're going to have to have read a lot to be able to do that, and they're going to have to have read problems from older texts. But also, it's important. It tells you how important writing is that I think that's the flip side of this, which is like writing. If I want students, my children, to be able to use words and ideas that they are just on the brink of learning, just internalizing, they have to give them the opportunity to write. So if, let's say I'm a homeschooling mom and I'm reading with my child, and I say something like, wow, what an interesting chapter. Just take 30 seconds to jot down your thoughts. How is Jonas changing in this chapter? Like, what is Jonas anxious about? Go. That gives my child the opportunity to use thoughts that they. That they couldn't put into their speech yet, to use words and ideas that are right on the brink of their understanding. And so, like, there's a beautiful. One of the beautiful videos in the book is actually of a math classroom where the teacher asks the students to write first. And she calls on the student and he says he starts talking about the two lines. They're coincidental. He's almost asking a question. It's clearly the first time in his life that he's used that word. And he uses. It's so important to use technical vocabulary in talking about mathematics. Uses that word because she's let him write first. He wouldn't be able to access that word at 150 words per minute. He can access it at, you know, 15 when, when you're writing. So 1. I think that your point about vocabulary is so important. It also that there's a flip side to it in writing also.

[Ginny Herrich]

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[Annie F. Downs]

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[Ginny Herrich]

Some amazing children's books. Like we still, even with our oldest, like as a family, we're reading Jan Brett.

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah.

[Ginny Herrich]

And they'd be like, okay, that's clearly a children's book. It's like a hardcover kids book, but it's got so much in it, so much vocabulary and they're fairly long. And then you read those as a family. And I have this friend, Sarah McKenzie, she has a book called the Read Aloud Family, one of my favorites. And I learned that from her. Like, you kind of think once your kid can read on their own that you stop reading out loud and, and like, no, don't do that. Because the children's books are more sophisticated in vocabulary. Even the preschool books have 50% more rare words than educated adults use when speaking out loud. Most of the words a student learns in a lifetime will be learned through encountering them. And reading the spoken language is not irrelevant, but the reading helps them to build this vocabulary. And you even had a word in there was so interesting in the examples of salve, S, A, L, V, E. And I didn't know that word until I was pregnant and went to a midwife and she was like, well, what salve will you be using? And I was like, I don't know that word at all. I've never heard of it. How do you spell it? You know, so like it matters to have all these exposures.

[Doug Lemov]

Yep.

[Ginny Herrich]

And you learn them through reading. Okay, so then that connects to the background knowledge. So you say background knowledge. The example is so good. It's so good. Background knowledge is the most important driver of understanding and comprehension. Now I thought this was important because we're trying to play, we're trying to have hands on real life experiences away from screens. And that actually ties in to reading comprehension because then your kid is exposed to a lot of things and they end up having background knowledge. So the example that you give is so good. So this is from Charlotte's Web, which I read for school when I was a kid in elementary. So I think a lot of people have read Charlotte's Web and you give this example, I'm going to read it. So in Charlotte's Web they are talking about being terrific. And I'm trying to find it. Actually I wrote it in my notes. Okay, here it is. So it says this, the book is so great. You're going to learn so much. And it's, it's very clear with these examples so that you know what to do with it. So it says this. People don't decide when they're going to make inferences. The mind makes them happen. You have to already have prior knowledge. So here is the third grade classroom. They're reading Charlotte's Web. Here is the part of the book, but Charlotte, said Wilbur, I'm not terrific. That doesn't make a particle of difference, replied Charlotte. Not a particle. People believe almost anything they see in print. Does anybody know how to spell terrific, I think, said the gander, it's T, double E, double R, double R, double I, double C, C, C, C, C. What kind of an acrobat do you think I am? Said Charlotte in disgust. And then the teacher asks, who knows what an acrobat is? And hardly anybody raises their hand. And one kid says, I think it's like a magician. And you write in this book, if you don't know what an is, you cannot understand what's happening in this passage. You can't understand why Charlotte is disgusted. What kind of an acrobat do you think I am? Because she's intended to, you know, she has to write this word that's really long spelling and super hard and hard to make on the Web. So this is what it says. It says, our kids, this is such a good book. Okay. The big mistake we have made in the United States is to assume. I will get. I'm going to let you talk, Doug. Hold on. And normally I don't quite go so far. I normally I ask more questions, but I just. It's so good.

[Doug Lemov]

I'm honored, honestly.

[Ginny Herrich]

Okay. The big mistake we have made in the United States is to assume that if we want students to be able to think, then our curriculum should give our students lots of practice thinking this is a mistake. What our students need is more to think with, and that has to do with reading.

[Doug Lemov]

It's so fascinating. If you go into a typical late elementary, middle school, English classroom, reading classroom, they will spend an hour on a lesson talking about the seven steps to finding a main idea, or how do you find an inference, but you don't make an inference. The foundational study on this is called the baseball study. You don't make an inference because you understand that there are seven. Usually the seven steps are something like you decide what the passage is mostly about, and then you infer what the author might have been thinking that you weren't thinking about. Like, I can't decide to do that. Inference happens when you have the background knowledge. And in fact, every sentence has ambiguities that a reader has to unpack. The sort of foundational research on this is called the baseball study because they gave a passage about baseball to students to read. And half the kids in the room were high level readers and half the kids were low level readers. But within those groups, they also, like half the kids knew a lot about baseball and half the kids didn't know anything about baseball. So they have, they divided them into groups. They have four groups. They've got the high readers who know a lot about baseball. They've got the high readers who don't know anything about baseball. They've got low readers who know a lot about baseball and they don't. They've got low readers who don't know anything about baseball. The low readers who knew about baseball outperformed the high readers who didn't know anything about baseball by a massive margin on this test. Because here's the first sentence from the passage. Turniac swings and hits a slow bouncing ball towards the shortstop. If you know about baseball, you're imagining this right now. You know where the shortstop is, you know that this is likely to be an out. Haley comes in, fields it and throws to first. But too late. Oh, surprise. I know it's a base hit. If I don't know anything about baseball, I have no idea what's happening right here. Turning act is on first with a single. So any inferences I make, wow, how do you run out that ground ball? Amazing. They only happen because I have background knowledge about baseball and if I don't, then I'm unable to make the inferences. So I give this, this is an example sentence that I give in the book. The wooden box was massive. She placed her bear on the ground. Is going to be hard to carry. I just think this is like, there are so many ambiguities even in a simple set of sentences. The wooden box was massive. She placed her bear on the ground. So first of all, you made the inference. Just hearing that without even realizing, you made an inference that the bear is a teddy bear. Obviously a person would not be carrying a bear. They couldn't. And so then you made another inference, again without realizing. This has to be a child. Who else would be carrying a teddy bear? It'd be super weird for an adult. I mean, maybe, but like it's, it's got to be a child here. So then there's a pronoun. It was going to be hard to carry. Does it refer to the box or to the bear? Could be either one. But first of all, because you know it's a child, you know that it's going to be. It'll be hard for a child to carry a large wooden box, and the large wooden box is heavier. So every time we read texts, there's this. These ambiguities that we have to disambiguate as readers. And the way that we disambiguate them is based on our background knowledge. You have background knowledge about the common weights of things and what, you know, what a bear might mean. And therefore, you were easily able. Without even realizing that you disambiguated this sentence, you were able to do it. But if you don't have background knowledge, then it's really hard to do. The last, I think, example in the book I gave is I spent a lot of time in England. And in England, pudding means the same thing as dessert. So you would, like, order something for pudding. So the sentence for pudding, she allowed herself some cake makes perfect sense if you're English. It means for dessert, she had some. She allowed herself some cake. And suddenly you're thinking about the word allowed. Ooh, why did she, like, allow herself some cake? Was it like a special, you know, indulgence or something? If you live in the US Direct, for pudding, she had some cake. What, like putting. How can you have cake for pudding? That doesn't make any sense. So, again, like, if you have the background knowledge, the vocabulary, you make inferences easily. And if you don't have the background knowledge, you can't make the inference. And that is why this quote from Dylan William that read, which is, we have to give kids more things to think about. We want them to be deeper readers. That is the key. We should not spend an hour talking about with meta conversations about what we're trying to do when we're making an inference that's irrelevant. What we need to do is make sure that kids have background knowledge about the things that they're reading. Just watched a video yesterday of a teacher. She's reading a book about. It's called Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. It takes place. It's about a girl who moves to New York City. It's. It's kind of a biography written in poem, but there's a whole. There's a whole chapter about what it's like when they open up the fire hydrants. They call them the Johnny Pump in New York City in the summer. You know, like, we, many of us maybe have, like, seen images of this or maybe done it ourselves. The class is in Nashville. She. And she, like, realizes that she's like, we don't have Johnny Pumps in Nashville. We don't do this. Here's a picture of Kids playing in front of a fire hydrant in New York City in the summer. What do you notice that? What's similar to your life? Oh, we use a sprinkler, we use a hose. Yes, exactly. That's the, that's the principle of the idea. Now let's read the passage. If you can't picture what they mean by John, you know, that tiny moment of knowledge feeding before they read allows kids to access the whole story and make inferences about like why, what are they doing and why are they doing it. If we don't feed knowledge in beforehand, then they're not learning, they're not picking up, they're not comprehending from the tests that we give them.

[Ginny Herrich]

I was so interesting. You have a chart in here from the baseball study that shows that the low readers who know about baseball understand this passage at a rate of 80%. But a child with a high reading ability who doesn't understand baseball is 52%. So it is a massive difference if you don't have that prior knowledge. So our students need more to think with. And so I think that is motivating to you as a parent or as a teacher. It's like less time with screens. Do more things together, have experiences, read, talk about what you're reading. Because background knowledge is the most important driver of understanding and comprehension. I asked my 9 year old daughter if she knew what an acrobat was. Because I read the thing about Charlotte's Web, she was like, oh, I do, but I don't know if I can really explain it. I think they're in the circus and they'll walk on a tightrope and they do these flips. So she did understand it. It's an interesting thing to know, to ask then as a parent or like you said, to insert tiny bits of knowledge ahead of time if you know something's coming up that they don't have anything to connect with. Super interesting.

[Doug Lemov]

Can I give you a tiny example? This is from my own reading with my, with my daughter. So first of all, this is a small plug for the Little House on the Prairie books which I read like the whole series to of both of my girls and they loved it. And I do think that in some ways, like when this is a, I think series of books are a beautiful thing because you build the background knowledge as you read it. So like by the time we're on, you know, we've read the first two books, you know, my kids know a ton about life on the Prairie in the 1800s. And so like they're just making much more inferences. They're having far more insights, and therefore the book is more interesting to them. So. So it becomes a world to them, in part because of this process of building background knowledge. But this is one scene where they live way out on the prairie, and the mom says to them, go take a bath. It's Wednesday night. And Laura, the narrator, says, on a weeknight, we went and took our baths. And I paused there because to me, I have some background knowledge that's relevant here, which is, on the prairie, you only took a bath on Saturday in preparation to go to church on Sunday. Because taking a bath meant pumping water or going down the creek to bring up water in buckets and filling a tub and then heating the tub on the stove with wood that you either had to chop or go out to the wood pile. They're like, it is a serious endeavor. So the fact that they're taking a bath on a Wednesday night tells me that something major is going to happen when they go into town. And I asked my daughter, like, what do you think is going to happen when they go to town? She's like, I don't know. Maybe they're going to go shopping. Like, because she did not have the background knowledge to pick up this cue, that of how strange it was or how unusual it was to take a bath on a Wednesday night. And so, you know, she's a really good reader and she's really smart. She was not able to make any inferences from that. I just think it's a classic example of life. Like, maybe if I pause there, I'm like, do you remember how, like, taking a bath is really hard? Let's just think for a minute about some of the things they would have had to do to take a bath. They didn't really take baths on Wednesday night. What is that now? Why. You know, why might they be going. Actually, they're going to. Like, they're going to a Christmas ceremony. Right. Like, I think that's a classic example just from reading aloud. How taking tiny moments to feed knowledge to kids as we read allows them to access the things that they're happening. It's a gift, you know?

[Ginny Herrich]

Yeah.

[Doug Lemov]

I think there's a little bit of a belief that the kids have to infer everything. But actually, if you give kids a little seed of information, then they can start to think about it and think about how it applies. There's still lots of critical thinking for them to do and lots of things for them to figure out in the text.

[Ginny Herrich]

I think it's so good because one of the things you talk about is that unrewarding reading experiences multiply. Disfluent readers stop wanting to read or experience reading to not be very meaningful for them, then the gaps between them and their classmates widen. So in the case of Charlotte's Web, where, I mean, it's like a delightful little passage where Charlotte replies, what kind of an acrobat do you think I am? So if in your mind's eye you have that background knowledge, you're thinking of this spider, you know, flipping around to do T, double E, double R, double R, double I, you know, and that's what you get, this mental imagery. And if you don't have it, it changes your enjoyment of the reading. And so, like I said, I mean, this is a fantastic book to read. You read it especially as, like a. As a parent today, because 41% of fourth graders appear to have fluency issues, 65% of students are below proficient. This was in 2019, before COVID Below proficient. 65% of the nation's fourth graders below proficient.

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah.

[Ginny Herrich]

And 41 appear to have fluency issues and probably more as they get older. People just don't know. So these are important things for parents and teachers to know about. It's really interesting. Like, really? I had no idea. I was like, oh, I'm pretty interested in reading. I've talked to Gene Twainy. And I was like, oh, I'm going to be reading this textbook. I was like, wait, no, I really, really like this.

[Doug Lemov]

This.

[Ginny Herrich]

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[Doug Lemov]

Thank you.

[Ginny Herrich]

And so one of the things they talk about with school is cost. So if you can, like, get a copy of the book for your kid, if you're able to do that, let them write in it. I think that that matters. But okay, this is super important because of chat GPT, you talk about using writing to develop readers. So a lot of people are starting to say, does it really matter if kids write? They are not going to need to write an essay. They're not going to need to write an email. The computer is going to do it. But you had this sentence. Writing often generates ideas that authors didn't know they had or cannot explain. The genesis of. You talk about having students think in writing. Can you just reiterate to parents, especially when it's confusing, why writing is still important?

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah, I think this is really. This is a really powerful idea. And I'll just put. I think vocabulary is important, so I'll put a name on this. The idea here is what we call formative writing, which is writing before you know the answer to the question. Most of the writing that students do in school is summative writing, which is like, what is your opinion? Support it with evidence, you know, or what is the answer? Support it with evidence. Use the following process. And I think that's important to be able to do absolutely right. But oftentimes there's another type of writing which is writing that I do when I don't know what I think before I start writing. Why might this be happening? What are some possible reasons where I use the process of writing to discover what I think think? The author Joan Didion says about the writing process. I write to discover what I think. And I find this myself as a writer, I do not know. I did not know where this book was going when I started writing it. It's just like sections would. Things would come to me as I was writing them. And there's something mysterious that I think writers talk all about all the time about in the writing process. That the depth of the thinking you have to do about your words and your word choice and your expression to put it into writing causes ideas to emerge that you weren't sure that you had. Writers talk all the time about the idea of like. Like, they almost feel like they're a conduit, like, thing. You know, things. Things emerge when they're writing. And I think it's a gift to give kids the opportunity to do this. So we talk about formative writing opportunities where, let's say you've just read something and before you talk about it, you say, just take 30 seconds to jot down some. Some initial thoughts. Jot down your first thoughts. What might be happening here? What are some things that you know? Why might they. Why might they be happening? The word might is really important because it implies that I don't have to know the answer before I start writing one. I think that reduces. Lowers the stakes. It makes it easier for a kid who's reluctant to write. I don't know what. I don't know what I think yet. Like, I don't have an opinion. I'm not sure what's right yet. That makes it hard to write and use writing as a thinking tool. But if I use that word, why might it be? What are some possible reasons? And I open my language up like that, suddenly I make it safe to, like, use writing to explore. I love the phrase jot down your first thoughts, and then we'll talk about them. What. What were your first thoughts? Great, let's talk about it. Because it implies that, like, you will have second thoughts, you'll thoughts will develop then they don't have to be perfect right now, but the process of writing about it causes new ideas to emerge and socializes students to think that. That writing is a tool that they can use to discover their own thinking. And hopefully they, you know, like, they will then do things like journaling and reflecting and like, making margin notes. That's a lot of what I think you're doing when you're making margin notes is you're processing it, using writing as a tool to process the book while you're reading it. And I think that's one of the most powerful teaching tools that are. And it just. I think it gets skipped in most schools. You know, we go right to the summit of writing, and we don't give kids enough opportunity to like. It only takes 30. Take 30 seconds to docs on some Possible reasons why Jonas might have had this reaction. Then we'll discuss. Go. Right. And now I can just take my time and use writing the tool to think deeply enough, which is kind of its purpose.

[Ginny Herrich]

Wow, that's huge. Yeah, because I guess I wouldn't have ever. I. I wouldn't have considered that, honestly, you know, I would have fallen in the camp of like, you know, this technology is coming in and the end product can be created with the technology. But it's not about that. It's about using writing as a tool. And writing as a tool in that way that you're talking about helps kids become better readers. So you say you're using writing to develop readers and even handwriting because it's slower.

[Doug Lemov]

Yes.

[Ginny Herrich]

So it gives them an opportunity to like, have permanence and to really have reflection and accountability. So that's fantastic to know about. That's.

[Doug Lemov]

Can I just weigh in one thing? I think this, the advice that I gave my own kids when they went to college, never miss class. Even if you've been out the night before, go to class, read the textbook in hard copy. Like if you can possibly get it. When my kids were in high school, they were the one kid who walked up to the teacher and said, can I have a copy of the textbook? The teacher would usually go, oh, I have one in the back of the room. They would blow the dust off it and give it to my child. But, like, read the text, the copy, for all the reasons that you talked about, which is you remember it better when you read it in hard copy. You remember where it was on the page. You mark it up with annotations. Right. That's really powerful from a reading perspective. And the other thing I told them was take notes by hand in class, in a notebook. Don't bring a laptop to class. And the reason is when you write by hand, you write slower than you can type. When you type, you're basically trying to transcribe what you're hearing. You're trying to get it all down because you can type fast enough to do it. When you write by hand, you have to think hard about what's important here. You have to prioritize things and that the process of thinking hard about things is what encodes them in long term memory, which is another name for learning and handwriting, the hand. And you, when you handwrite, you can also do things like do diagrams and circle things and mark them up to emphasize things. So you have to. You think more deeply about it. Yes. What you're doing right now, you're Showing a beautiful. Like, when you handwrite, you have to think more deeply about it to process. And the psychological name for this concept is desirable difficulty. The harder you think about the learning object, the more likely you are to remember it. And so I think that's why writing is so powerful, why handwriting is really important as opposed to, as opposed to, you know, of typing notes and that kind of thing. And why annotation is so important when young people are reading. Well, when we're all reading. I can't read a book now without having a pencil or a pen in my hand.

[Ginny Herrich]

So good. So important to know because.

[Doug Lemov]

Can I tell you. Can I tell you one of the. Sorry, I keep interrupting you.

[Ginny Herrich]

No, I know. And I have. I'm like, normally I'm not quite so passionate, but I was like, this is so good, and there's so many things I want to talk about, but you.

[Doug Lemov]

Go, I have a friend named Daisy Christidoulou. She's a really thoughtful British writer, and she talks about how these are her reflections on AI and what they mean, what they mean for student writing. And she says, you know, originally the first person who ran a marathon ran a marathon because they had to run a marathon. It was the only way to communicate information. Over 26 is the fastest way to communicate information around over 26 miles. Nobody runs a marathon because they need to for practical reasons now. But a lot more people run marathons. They run marathons now because of the discipline that it creates for you and the. Because the process of running is beneficial, right? So it's gone from a practical thing to a beneficial thing. Her analogy is for, like, you can now use AI to practically, it's the easiest way to solve the problem of writing an idea. You don't, you know, it's. You don't need to run the marathon because it's the fastest way to get it done. You don't have to do it yourself anymore. But the value only increases when you realize that, like, writing it yourself is the way that you think about it and you discover it. And the hard work that you do in writing is. It's actually more value valuable to have students write because you don't need to write. The great advantage will go to the people who can write and who, who use writing as a tool for thinking and who will be the equivalent of, like, far fitter cognitively than you know. By forcing yourself to do the hard thing, you grow your capacity. And the more and more it will be easy for people to not write, the more advantage there will be for the People who can and do. Right. And I just think it's one of the most important gifts you can give to your child is like, keep a journal, write in the margin. Give them opportunities to like. Do not let your child use AI to write if you can possibly avoid it.

[Ginny Herrich]

Because it's not about the end process, it's using it as a tool.

[Doug Lemov]

The first purpose is the process, not the outcome.

[Ginny Herrich]

Yeah. Because it's going to help your kids be better thinkers and be better readers. It really matters. So just to reiterate this book, which is called a guide, the guide to the science. It's called Guide to the Science of Reading. The Teach like. Okay, hold on. The Teach like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, Translating Research to Reignite Joy Meaning in the classroom really is for any adult. Like, if you've got kids in your life, if you're a grandparent, if you're a parent, if you're a teacher, everyone has to know this stuff because our kids are really struggling in this area. I just want to hit quickly. You talked about it earlier because you would have your kids go get the textbook. This is a massive change that has happened in the last couple decades. We home educate. So I did, and I stepped out of the school system in 2008. But I was a. I was a public math. I taught math. A public school math teacher. Up until 2008, people still had textbooks. Well, I speak around the country about home education and I run into these parents who say our kids have no books anymore. Everything is on the screen, even their math. They have to take a picture of what they've done and upload it. Blahbity, blah, blah, blah. They don't even know what a scratch paper is for, like working out their math problems. I'm like, this is wild. I had no idea. So one of the things that you talk about and you say it several times, books, books, books, books, books. Books are the optimal text format. We are unapologetic about actually actual books. You talk about Johann Hari, who talks about how, like, books remind you that the world is complex and we can't just have these little snippets all the time. The medium is the message. People like Neil Postman talk about that too. So it's like, it's not just about the information, it's also about the medium. And on screen, your eyes work different. They bounce all around. So they work differently than they do in a book. And you talk about in schools that they should be low tech, high text. Low tech, high text. And I feel like in our homes, it should be the same thing. Low tech for sure. Talk to us about books as the optimal text format.

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah. Let me start by just picking up that phrase that you pulled out. The medium is the message, the medium. Let's just take social media post, you know, like a post on Twitter. The implicit messages that the world can be understood in 128 character intervals. That a hot take is almost, you know, is almost right. That is almost always right. That like, that's how I process the world that like. And it devolves into a simplistic universe of ideas shallowly encountered, shouted back and forth at people across a void. Right. Gee, that sounds a lot like the American political process. Right. It sounds a lot like society right now. Like a book sends the message that like actually some ideas take a really long time to understand and they take diligent study and it's more complex than it seems like. And a protagonist never thinks at the end of the book what they did at the beginning be what they did at the beginning of the book. And if we want to communicate the idea that ideas are that some parts of the world take time to understand that they're more complex than they seem, that it's not simplistic, the book is the best tool to do that. And so I just think in like this, in an increasingly social media dominated universe, the book is increasingly more important to model for young people. Most young people don't remember a world before social media, so they don't have a recollection of what it was like to have a long slow conversation with your grandfather about a topic or to like to read a book, you know, to like un. To have an idea unfold over a long period of time to understand it. And I just think that that is profoundly important model for how human thinking happens. Also think that books are profoundly important because the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says he uses the word psychological, but I'll use the word cognitive. Stories are cognitively privileged. Stories evolved around before we even could write them. They evolved around campfires during human prehistory when we were in hunter gatherer groups and we would wander around, we'd light a fire at night and we'd sit around the fire and we'd tell stories. And those stories were profoundly important for two reasons. One is they communicated cumulative culture. But if you're a dog, a dog is instinctively understands how to hunt. No one needs to teach a dog how to hunt to survive. If you're a human being, you do not know how to hunt instinctively. Other Human beings have to teach you the cumulative knowledge that we've acquired about how to hunt an antelope. And if you don't learn that, you die. And so the stories first of all were ways that we communicated really important things like how do you hunt and how do you form a group that hunts and what are our roles and how do you build a fire, right? So listening to the content of a story was critical to your survival as a human in a way that, that, you know, was deeply profound. And listening to the stories together was a way that we bonded and connected and you know, and ensured our group. You know, we laughed at the stories and we. There is no culture on in the world that does not have myths, stories that we tell about who we are and how we became into being. And so there was a double selection advantage evolutionarily for people who listen to stories, right? You got information, then you got bonded and connected to the group fruit. And we really only went from being prey to predator when we became group formers. A human being with their big brain and their opposable thumb and all the advantages that we've been given, you know, as a species out on the savannah by themselves is toast and is going to be in some fitter creatures belly by midday because you can't smell your enemies at a mile away and you can't see at night and you're incredibly slow. And even one of those really adorable chimpanzees disease would dust a human being in a fight in a matter of seconds. We're incredibly weak as individuals. We are strong only in the group when we decide that like, you know, rock throwing is one of the most important events in the. In human prehistory. We're the only species on the planet that can attack or defend from a distance using a projectile. So if we form groups and I rely on you and you rely on me, and we can use rocks to drive off alliance lion or hunt a lion, which we could not reliably. You know, it'd be really hard to do that reliably without. Without rocks. So suddenly, like the group formers became the successful ones, right? The. The people who couldn't form groups and couldn't maintain their membership in groups, they died off. And the reason story stories are cognitively privileged because the people who listen to stories formed more effective groups and they learn more of this cumulative culture that was necessary to. Of their survival. So we are, we're built to listen to stories, you know, because it gave us such an evolutionary advantage to Daniel William says if you Give students information. And in one passage, it's couched in a story. And in one passage, it's just couched as, like expository, you know, expository prose. People will remember much more of the story that we. We remember things better and more meaningful when they're couched in a story to us, especially a long form story of how we build a relationship to over time and we connect to the characters. And, you know, we're like reading Little House on the Prairie, and we care about Laura and we know a lot about her, and suddenly her story is meaningful to us. It's why characters appear repeatedly throughout events. And so I just think, like a story, a book is an optimal learning tool. It's an optimal teaching tool because it's not on a screen and you're not distracted. The average person when they're on a screen, switches tasks every 17 seconds. Your attention is constantly distracted. But also because we learn optimally in that long form narrative setting. That is a book.

[Ginny Herrich]

Wow. And like you said, for kids that are growing up today and they don't even have any basis for understanding this because everything is so fast. You talk about how in the history they have, people had stamina. They had different reading stamina.

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah.

[Ginny Herrich]

And they could read for hours at a time and actually was optimal for the book to be longer because they had nothing to do in the evenings or they'd read these long books together, and that was part of their entertainment. And so you write about how kids today find reading to be increasingly too hard, too long and too tedious. That phones have ruptured their attention spans, but that books provide the antidote. Books can provide an antidote, helping our students retrain their attention spans and offering them the reward of deeper, longer lasting pleasure. We are so running out of time. But I just want to briefly touch on. So we're a home educating family, and I've read a lot about reading and waiting. Waiting. That's one of the biggest things. And I don't know if there's good studies, but like in the Waldorf, they wait till the kids are 7 or 8. And I found in our family that that helped tremendously. We didn't start at 5, but even no matter what age you start at, you talk in this book about how we teach, how we teach matters tremendously. And you say teachers are being socialized, which was an interesting wording to me. Teach. You use socializing. Teachers are being socialized to coach students to guess at words rather than systematically teaching them letter sound correspondence so they can sound the words out. Why the heck would we ever do that?

[Doug Lemov]

I mean, this is such a great. So there's a great podcast on this that people should listen to. It's called Sold a Story. It's by Emily Hanford. It came out, it was like the fifth most listened to podcast in the country in 2023. It really is the most important piece of education journalism and writing in the 21st century. Half the states in the country have passed laws about what early reading programs can and cannot look like as a result of this podcast. And the story is that for the last 40 years, early reading programs have been based on this flawed science, this flawed belief that, that you don't have to teach kids letter sound correspondences, that they will acquire reading on their own if you just expose them to print and whole language. And the reason they believe this is because for some kids, it does work that way. Some kids, it's a lottery. Some kids, some kids learn it that way. And some equally smart kids need to be taught the code. The science has been overwhelmingly clear that kids need to be taught the code through systematic synthetic phonics. But you have a bunch of really big, big business, very popular early reading programs that are based on these three flawed assumptions of, you know, three queuing, it's called, which is like guessing at the word, looking at the pictures, thinking about what makes sense.

[Ginny Herrich]

What's it called to cut out for.

[Doug Lemov]

A second called three queuing. There like three ways to cue a student. Three cueing to discover what a word means rather than to actually read the word by. By decoding it.

[Ginny Herrich]

And is that the picture? Is the three cueing the picture, the starting sound.

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah. And like what. And think about what word might make sense. Yeah. Context.

[Ginny Herrich]

But that's so ridiculous because what if book has no pictures?

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah.

[Ginny Herrich]

I don't like it. Just makes zero logical sense.

[Doug Lemov]

And it's worse if the book does have pictures because then you're learning to compensate and you're not learning to read. And this is what happens to kids, which is they produce books that have pictures so you can guess at the word from the picture and then you don't learn to decode. And then you get to be 8 years old or 10 years old and you don't know how to decode complex words or it takes you so long to decode them that you can't think about the meaning of the book because you're thinking so hard about how to sound out that way word. It is now illegal in half the states of the country to use reading programs that have three queuing. Because the response to Emily Hanford's podcast was so dramatic and so forceful because we had allowed ourselves to be. To be comfortable ignoring the reading science. That's where we started this book, which is this sort of. Can we take the lesson from Emily Hanford's book, which is the science that we know about how people learn to read is so profound. Can we apply it to what happens after language acquisition? To the. The rest of your life as a reader for grades three through 12 and on into your adult, interior, adult life? The science is out there and it's really important and it's beautiful and it tells us really powerful things like we should read aloud to our kids constantly. And vocabulary is really important and we just have to make sure that it's. It'd be great. We really want our schools to pay attention to it. But as a parent, you have this opportunity to make reading beautiful and alive and powerful for your kid and give them the gift of being the kid who can sustain their attention in text. Text for 40 minutes at a time. When other kids can only read for 10, you know, can. Can read for half a minute before they're distracted and they have to look at their phone because they need some kind of, you know, like, novel stimulus. It is such a gift to understand how the brain works when it's reading. I promise you that you will never regret slowly reading aloud with your kid back and forth ever again if you understand the science behind it.

[Ginny Herrich]

So good, good, so good. With intentional phonics, almost every student is likely to learn to read without it. It's a lottery. We did a book called teach your child to read in 100 Easy Lessons. We waited until they were seven.

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah, it's great book.

[Ginny Herrich]

Yeah, a fantastic $20. We spent $20. Our first four learned to read using that. Our fifth one, I'd read a book by John Holt called how young children. Well, I don't even know if you're gonna like this. I'm not gonna bring it up. But we read a ton and we decoded together. I didn't have to use for the fifth one. I didn't have to use the program because I'd already done it four times. So, you know, but it's phonics based. And, and what you say is they have to be able to read at the speed of. The speed of sight and that if, if you can read, if you have that speed of sight, you can't not read. Like, if you see a stop sign, your brain just does it. You can't even stop yourself from reading. And so you have to have that ability to do it fast so that you can have all these other benefits. This is fantastic. I don't even know why you do this. We didn't even have time. I'm like, who is this Doug Lamov who writes the Teach Like a Champion, but it is absolutely one of the most crucial things that parents and grandparents and teachers need to be reading today. It is called the Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. I'll put all the links in the show notes very quickly because we're out of time. Can you just give us a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside?

[Doug Lemov]

I'm going to cheat, and I'm going to tell you a favorite memory from my. From parenting, which is I.

[Ginny Herrich]

You can't.

[Doug Lemov]

Okay, okay, okay, okay. No cheating.

[Ginny Herrich]

Parenting. You liked reading outside, though, right?

[Doug Lemov]

Yeah. Well, so I love reading. Reading aloud to my kids outside. A couple of my kids were big soccer players, and so my littlest spent a ton of time on the sidelines at other people's soccer games. And we would, like. We would just bring Little House on the Prairie, and I would read to her, and it was, like, so delightful because, you know, you were talking about context, like the beasts, sunlight and sound of birds. And we'd be reading Little House in the Prairie together. I just think, like, a book is a beautiful outcome. Outdoor activity.

[Ginny Herrich]

Yes.

[Doug Lemov]

To share with your kids.

[Ginny Herrich]

Okay, I'm gonna let it go because we're out of time.

[Doug Lemov]

I'll give you my favorite outdoor memory. Growing. The first time that I hiked, hiked to the top of a mountain by myself, me and my parents, we did a lot of hiking, as with my parents. And then one time we were in Vermont and, you know, I was like, can I do this by myself? And my parents love me enough as I remember that very intensely. It's delightful. So.

[Ginny Herrich]

Wow. Okay. Doug, this has been the best. Thank you so much. I'm so honored. I'm so glad I read it. I loved it. I loved it as more than I could have ever imagined. And it provides so much value. We have only, like, scratched the surface. If the book is like 100, I feel like we talked about 3% of it. There is so much value in this book. Read it as a homeschool group. If you're a homeschool mom, like, assign chapters to everybody and then come back and talk about what you read. And if you're a teacher, you need to know this stuff. Your kids might be disfluent and you don't even know it, you know? And if you're a grandparent, take your kids outside, read them tons of books, help them to learn that knowledge, background knowledge. They have more to think with. Doug, thank you so much for being here.

[Doug Lemov]

Jenny, can I say thank? First of all, thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. Also. I'm just so honored by how, like, carefully you read the book and toured. I'm just, it's an honor as an author to have people take your work so seriously and read it so, so carefully. Honestly, this is like my favorite interview that I've done on the Just like your, your passion for it and your energy thinking about it through a parent lens. It's so. Because parenting is the most important job we'll ever do in our lives. So I just, I really, I enjoyed it and I'm really grateful for it. And if you ever want to have me back, I'd love to. And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds of with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating.

[Ginny Herrich]

It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

[Doug Lemov]

Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.