What Changed My Mind About How to Teach Reading

This guest essay features Claude Goldenberg, Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University, who shares how his thinking about teaching reading changed through close work with colleagues who held very different views, and how that experience points to a broader lesson about how teachers learn, how assumptions shift, and how practice can improve. It is adapted from a recent podcast episode of Literacy Across Languages. Learn more in his Substack 'We Must End the Reading Wars... Now."

When I went to college, I thought I'd go to law school or something like that. Education was not in my sights. But I found out in college there was a program you could take to get a teaching credential. My roommate told me, you know, before we go to law school, it might be good to get a teaching credential. It won't mess up your schedule. You don't have to take bulletin boards 101 or anything, and it will give you something to do for a year or two before going to law school. I said, okay, that sounds okay. As it turned out, over the remaining years I got more interested in education and less in law.

By the time I graduated from college, my parents were living in San Antonio. And I thought, well, I could go back there and teach because in addition to being interested in education, I spoke Spanish. So I thought that was sort of an additional skill I could bring to the proceedings.

I considered different places, but I always wanted to work with kids who just, you know, don't have the opportunities that I grew up with, and how many of the people in my socio-demographics grew up.

I wanted to teach history, my major in college, but I was offered a job as an eighth grade reading teacher in probably the poorest school district in Texas. Back then I thought, well, the more impossible the assignment, the more I wanted it. The students I’d teach were kids who, in eighth grade, were reading so poorly that the principal said, you can’t have your elective—you’re going to take remedial reading. And he assigned me, a first-year teacher, wet behind the ears and with very little preparation. And I struggled. I mean, it was hard.  I had a lot of “ganas,” you know, a lot of wanting to help. But I realized I just didn’t know that much. I really didn’t have very good teacher preparation. Not to disparage anyone or any program, but I just wasn’t prepared. And so I decided to go back to graduate school and try to learn something—to understand why these kids were arriving in seventh and eighth grade so far behind academically.

I got my doctorate at UCLA and became immersed in education. I was very interested in bilingual education—the education of what we now call English Learners. That interest launched me into reading and reading research for English learners. I decided that I wanted my own classroom. I really was not interested in being an academic, so I didn't seek out an assistant professorship. My only postdoc goal was to teach first grade. I wanted my own classroom, and I was fortunate enough that when I finished my PhD, there was an opening at the school where I did my dissertation research. A first-grade teacher was leaving in the middle of the year, and the superintendent asked, Do you want that? And I said yes—that’s what I want.

So, for the following three and a half years, I taught, struggled, and tried to figure out how to teach reading. I was not very well prepared to teach first-grade reading, even with my freshly minted PhD. This was in the mid-80s during the height of whole language, later balanced literacy, when literature-based reading instruction was the rage. 

And I was caught up in it. I thought, Yeah, this is very progressive—you don’t want kids barking at print, and all those other clichés. So I went in feet first, head first. Long story short, it didn’t quite work out the way I had expected. Kids made very slow progress.

But then my PhD turned out to be good for getting a postdoctoral fellowship that allowed me to do research half time and teach half time. I had to share a classroom with another teacher. This teacher was all about what we now call foundational literacy skills—phonics, letters, sounds, combining them, “las sílabas,” as we say in Spanish, “joining the syllables” after students learn to make them, usually by combining a consonant and a vowel. 

I thought we were going to kill each other, because we were coming at reading from diametrically opposed directions. But we decided to make it work by dividing up the week. She taught the first half; I taught the second. I remember thinking, Okay, she’ll teach her syllables—ma, me, mi, mo, mu—and I’ll come in at the end of the week and do the important stuff, right? The language, the comprehension. 

Well, lo and behold, when I came in at the end of the week—after a few weeks, then a few months—I realized these kids were getting the reading thing. They knew the letters, they knew the sounds, they could “juntar las sílabas.” They could read in a way that, when I had been teaching alone, was tortuous. It just wasn’t working. And now they were reading—and then I could actually do comprehension work with them. We could talk about vocabulary. We could talk about metacognitive skills.  And automaticity and fluency. Combined with what she was doing at the beginning of the week, it was an extremely powerful combination.

Someone later told me, You know, that was an instantiation of Scarborough’s Reading Rope. My partner was doing the word-recognition side—decoding and so on. I was doing the language comprehension side—vocabulary, meaning. And it really was like the Reading Rope—before I had ever even heard of it. Actually, before it was even devised and published.

Almost by accident, I fell into it. In fact, what my partner did mirrored how my own mother had taught me to read. I had gone into my first-grade teaching thinking I had a new, better theory of teaching reading—especially Spanish reading.  I assumed, since written Spanish is so orthographically regular, kids would surely figure out the ma-me-mi-mo-mu thing if given the right contextual scaffolding. There was no need for me to drill and practice letters, sounds, etc.  

But I learned from this teacher, and from two kindergarten teachers who were also colleagues and participated in a study I had conducted (see here or here), that my theory of reading was really upside down, or at least sideways.

I then started digging into the literature, looking into it in a more detailed way that I never had in graduate school. No one ever challenged me. On the contrary, I was supported in my assumptions about meaning from the beginning, whole language and so forth.

I’m glad I went to PhD school. I learned important skills. But it was really in trying to teach first grade for nearly four years that I got a real education about teaching reading, the role of decoding and foundational skills, about comprehension, and about how those things must come and work together. That education was foundational and helped lay the foundation for just about everything I’ve done professionally and academically since.

We talk a lot about research. We do professional development. We talk about brain science, we do all these things—which I fully support. But they very rarely fundamentally change assumptions when those assumptions require rethinking. 

That’s something I’ve been thinking about lately: How do you create experiences that encourage people to examine their beliefs—how those beliefs play out in practice and whether they might unintentionally interfere with shared goals?

Everyone I know wants kids to do well in reading and beyond. There’s no disagreement there. But we hold such fundamentally different ways of thinking about reading instruction. The question is how to challenge those differences when the best evidence available suggests some positions are either not supported by the evidence or at best are incomplete, as mine was? The idea is not to make people dig in further, but to invite reflection on the evidence and the conclusions to be drawn.

I don’t have a very good answer. What changed my thinking wasn’t an article, workshop, professional development, or a research presentation. It was what I saw with my own eyes that was inconsistent with my beliefs, the result of a series of events culminating in an unlikely partnership that, if I’d had my choice, would never have happened—and the students I had in my last two years of trying to teach first-grade reading would have paid the price.

That experience has continued to shape how I think about change in education and raises a larger question: How do we create partnerships and collaborations among teachers that contribute to continuous improvement in instruction and student outcomes? There is so much disagreement within our profession about fundamentals such as teaching reading. At the same time, there is so much evidence that could help us do better but is not widely known or is actively disregarded.  

One way to address this tension is by reflecting on how professionals learn, revise their thinking, and improve practice over time. Scholars of occupations have a useful concept someone recently mentioned to me, “collective autonomy,” to describe one of the defining hallmarks of mature professions. Professionals have agency and control over what they do and how, but that autonomy does not reside with individual practitioners; rather, it is exercised collectively through shared standards, a well-regarded professional knowledge base that guides practice, and peer accountability. Professionals retain judgement over their work, but this judgement is bounded and refined by professional peers and professional associations, rather than by external control (e.g., policy mandates, accountability systems). 

In a mature profession, there is no such thing as being the master of your own domain, or as some have urged teachers, “Close your door and just teach.” Professional autonomy cannot be isolating or divorced from a shared knowledge base; it is exercised with and through colleagues –- especially more experienced peers and mentors – around that body of knowledge. Creating the conditions for this to happen is a, or maybe the, central challenge we face as educators today.