Summary Teaching, Reading, and Learning: TRL Podcast- Episode 2: Interview with Dr. David Kilpatrick. (Youtube) www.youtube.com
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Laura Stewart Hi. I'm Laura Stewart. Welcome to Teaching, Reading, and Learning, the TRL podcast. The focus of this podcast is to elevate important conversations in the educational community in order to inform and inspire and celebrate contributions to teaching and learning. So when we decided to launch this podcast, you spoke and we listened.
Laura Stewart Our guest today was at the very top of your list of of dream guests, David Kilpatrick. You know, you're gonna love this podcast. Every time I hear David, I learn something new and I know you will too. I think you'll get some additional insight into his work, and we'll explore the power of humility. And maybe we'll talk a little bit of magic too.
Laura Stewart So thanks for tuning in. Enjoy. Our guest today is David Kilpatrick. I think I speak for everyone listening when I say that each time I hear David, I am in awe of his incredible grasp of the research, his insights, and his profound contributions to our collective understanding of the process of learning to read and what that means for instruction. I always really enjoy David and his humor and, of course, his magic, which we might be able to learn a little bit more about today.
Laura Stewart So to give you David's background, doctor David Kilpatrick is a professor of psychology from the State University of New York College at Cortland. He is a New York state certified school psychologist with 28 years of experience in schools, and he has been teaching courses in learning disabilities in educational psychology since 1994. David is a reading researcher and the author of 2 books on reading, essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties, and equipped for reading success. David is also co editor of a third book, reading development and difficulties, Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice. Dave, welcome.
David Kilpatrick Thank you.
Laura Stewart So I thought we would frame our conversation around 3 things. I thought we'd we'd talk a little bit about your origins, because I'm guessing maybe not a lot of people who know your work maybe kind of know your backstory. And then I'd like to really pick your brain about what do you see as some of the current obstacles in reading education and what do you see the future? You know, what do you see, in the future of your work and our collective work around evidence based reading instruction? So if you don't mind, we'll just kind of jump right in.
Laura Stewart Sure. Okay, good. Okay. So let's just kind of go back to what made you decide to go into education and maybe some of the early influences around your work.
David Kilpatrick Well, I never really decided to go into education. My field is psychology. I guess you could say I decided to go into education when I ended up going into a degree program for school psychology, But really I conceptualized it and the program conceptualized it is psychology going into schools. But I still do think of myself as an educator on a certain level. And the strange thing was in my undergraduate days, I never even heard of school psychology.
David Kilpatrick So when I came out of my undergraduate degree, I was thinking of doing more counseling or clinical psychology. I have an uncle who is a clinical psychologist and I talked to him about, I worked for about a year at a psychiatric hospital after I graduated. And as a result of that, what I end up saying to my uncle is my next step, I'd rather deal with a more typical population and kind of catch them earlier. Like you said, well, how about like school psychology? I was like, what's school psychology?
David Kilpatrick So anyway, I ended up pursuing a degree in math and I will tell you though, it wasn't until my 1st semester of my graduate program sitting in a class waiting for the professor to arrive and all of us are chit chatting And there were some school psychologists coming back to get their doctoral degrees. And it was only then that I learned that you get summers off. I didn't go into this knowing it. So school psychology is a very family friendly schedule that you have, yeah, yeah. Which would be year round, I just assumed it was year round, I didn't didn't know any better.
Laura Stewart Yeah. So, so what were some of your, early, like, what was some of your early work in terms of school psychology? Did you start, in the the general vicinity in which you live? Where did you start practicing as a school psychologist?
David Kilpatrick Yeah. So I, yeah, worked locally, and I grew up in Central New York, Syracuse area, Annalaba County, grew up in Liverpool, and so I worked right in this area. Initially, I had a big focus on behavior, behavior issues, and I was noticing right off the bat how many kids we had with reading problems. I didn't really get a lot of background on that. I did have a course by Doctor.
David Kilpatrick Benita Blackman at Syracuse University on teaching disabled kids to read. But when I took it, which was I think during my 2nd year, the summer between my 2nd 3rd year of graduate work, I didn't have a background to absorb it. I left that program knowing that phonics was important. That was it, I mean, I didn't have too many specifics. It was a summer course, you cover a lot in a short amount of time so you forget a lot quickly.
David Kilpatrick But I really didn't, even though I had gotten some exposure to more scientifically based approaches to reading, the absorption rate was very, very low. And so I kept trying to use a lot of classic learning theory, behavioral psychology principles to deal with reading And we were disappointed in the results. So anyway, just by happenstance, I got invited to a presentation in a local school district by Doctor. Phil McGinnis. And he alerted me to the issue of there's a huge scientific enterprise studying reading, both normal reading development and reading difficulties.
David Kilpatrick And at the time I was an adjunct as well as working full time in the schools, I was an adjunct and had access to the research literature. So that's really what got me going.
Laura Stewart Oh, interesting. So were you in an elementary, school setting?
David Kilpatrick Yes.
Laura Stewart Okay. And and so you were you were getting all these children referred for behavior issues?
David Kilpatrick Yeah. But well, behavior issues, and we were responsible for doing evaluations for learning problems as well.
Laura Stewart Okay. And so then you started noticing this connection between reading and some of these behaviors that you were saying?
David Kilpatrick Yeah. It wasn't that simple. It's more probably a better way to put it was when I came home 1 day after doing it for about 8, 10 years and I said to my wife, 80% of what I do has to do with reading problems or ADHD. And so those became my 2 areas of interest. And so yeah, and certainly there's crossover between the 2.
David Kilpatrick But you have plenty of kids with ADHD that are perfectly fine readers and you have plenty of struggling readers that have no behavior problems, but there is a there is a disproportionate overlap.
Laura Stewart Interesting. So, so connect the dots, for me then how you went from, you know, school psychologist, you know, the studies that you took, and then kind of how you ended up researching this field. How how did that actually happen?
David Kilpatrick Well, to my great disadvantage, but maybe in a roundabout way advantage, I didn't come out of a program that focused on reading research per se. Most reading researchers, I guess I could say most reading researchers, they get a graduate degree in a particular discipline. There's no PhD in reading research, right? You're getting it in some branch of psychology, you're getting it in speech pathology, linguistics, neurology, neuroscience, etcetera, or special education, etcetera. So you're getting a degree in 1 of those areas, but in every 1 of those areas, people have niche area Interview and you have people who focus on that.
David Kilpatrick So the idea is that you specialize in graduate school with whatever your professor that you're working with or professors or team that you're working with, And then you go off into teaching university or whatever and you specialize in that area of the research. Well, I never had that in terms of specialization. So I read in a lot of different areas in the reading research that pertain to working with the kids that I was encountering and that the teachers I was working with and parents I was working with, what they were encountering. So that led me to a few different niche areas within the reading research. Reading research is so huge nobody can stay on top of all of it.
David Kilpatrick So people specialize. It's kind of like medicine. Different areas of medicine you specialize. So it was sort of a blessing in disguise that I didn't come most people when they finish their doctoral program, they've already got several publications because they've been part of teams and their name is 1 of several names on a study and that type of thing. I didn't have that as a background.
David Kilpatrick So I came up with a bunch of ideas trying to integrate some of these different areas. The 4 areas that I've spent most of my time in, were areas of phonological processes and elevating. It has to do with phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, phonologic working memory. The other is just the general dyslexia research on why kids struggle. A third area is, this may not, this may sound the same but it's quite different, which is dyslexia intervention.
David Kilpatrick So 1 studies why kids struggle, the other studies what's the best way to do about it, and certainly there's overlap between all 3 of those areas. But the 4th area that really framed it all for me is the area of orthographic learning. And orthographic learning studies how do we remember words the way we do. We remember words very efficiently And how does that happen and why does that happen? So by dumb luck, when I first got exposed to all this reading research, the very first year I encountered Linnea Aries orthographic mapping theory.
David Kilpatrick It didn't even have a name yet, by the way. She did not name that orthographic mapping until a 2014 article. And when you read that 2014 article by her and she gives you a retrospective on the history of its development, you'd think it was called that all the way along, but it wasn't. So she used to, in all of her art research, she would just start right in saying this is how kids learn. She didn't give it a name.
David Kilpatrick Anyway, I originally read that, I read an article that was an independent research study of her theory, because up until that point, the only 1 that studied her theory was her. And so in 1994, in a journal called the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 4 British researchers saw her theory, kicking around in the literature and said, hey, let's test this out independently. And they came up with 3 studies that they included in that 1 report and all 3 studies aligned perfectly with her theory. And that was the first exposure I had. Now reading, when they described her theory, I totally misunderstood it.
David Kilpatrick And most people don't get it the first time through, but it stimulated an interest in that year, Eri and Matsala edited a book in which Eri had a chapter on it, and so it was very current. And then the year before that, Benita Blackman had come out with an edited volume that had a chapter in there by Eri. And after reading those 2, I had my moment. So that was in that very first year after being exposed to this 97, 98 school year. So the next several hundred research articles I read were from within the framework of Aries theory and things fit together very well with a good theory.
David Kilpatrick So anyway, that's the background. So I never specialize. Now, I do specialize because in 2,006, I jumped ship and became full time at the university, or before I was just an adjunct.
Laura Stewart Got
David Kilpatrick it.
Laura Stewart Yeah. So, so go back a little bit. So when you said you you totally misunderstood, what what did you misunderstand, and how did you get clarity?
David Kilpatrick When the researchers of that article, when they described her theory and 1 of the interesting things about Aries' theory is, that article was a rare incidence in where someone other than Airy explains Airy's theory. This sort of dawned on me after a while is the only person that ever explained to Airy was Airy. And I started getting suspicious that some researchers didn't quite understand the theory that well either because normally when you describe someone's theory, you will give a sentence, 2 sentences, a small paragraph inspiring it on behalf of the reader, but people don't do that. They usually say, talk about learning and remembering words. Sight words is the term used.
David Kilpatrick Of course, that's so confusing because teachers use the word sight words 3 different ways, right, and that's that's not good for communication. But what she's talking about are words that are, that we know in our long term memory and it doesn't matter if they're high frequency or low frequency, phonetically regular or irregular, right? Anyway, they're words that are known and familiar. And so when they would talk about sight words, they would simply cite Airy as if they were saying, we don't understand it, but she does, so go read her stuff if you can figure it out. Okay?
David Kilpatrick And so I noticed this pattern. But anyway, the the authors tried to take a shot at explaining it. The funny thing is I just read their explanation like just literally about a month ago. I pulled it back out of mothballs and took a look at it. And I don't think their explanation wasn't really that great.
David Kilpatrick So, yeah, they kinda got it got it, but they didn't totally get it. But anyway, I misunderstood. What I thought they were claiming was that ARIES said is saying that we become so proficient at the letter sound relationships that in a sense, we're we're sort of sounding out every word as we go along super fast. Okay. That's what I thought.
David Kilpatrick I mean, it turned out not to be right. Now I felt vindicated later. There is, there is such a theory and a guy named I don't know how to say properly say, I think it's Ram or Ram, r a m is his first name, his last name is Frost in Israel, Israeli psychologist and researcher, and he came up with something called the strong phonological theory of reading. And in a sense, that's what he proposes. And even though that sounds hard for us to believe, his work was in a top journal, psychology, and he builds a pretty strong case.
David Kilpatrick I think he falls short. I don't think it's it's an adequate explanation, but at least my dumb idea wasn't quite so dumb. But that wasn't what Ari was saying. So that stimulated an interest and I was able to read those and then I had, like I said, the moment understanding what she was what she really was saying.
Laura Stewart Okay. That's fascinating. So then did you did you get to know Laniyah? Did you get to know her personally? And
David Kilpatrick Yes. Yes. I I read. But the funny thing was so I I think I pretty much understood her theory pretty well by the end of the 97, 98 school year, and read a ton of stuff on it. And then over the course of a few years is when it started dawning on me that even a lot of researchers didn't quite understand it.
David Kilpatrick The research, as I said, is so huge. We've got tens of 1,000,000 of dollar grant dollars going into it every year, hundreds and hundreds of research articles that appear here. So it's forgivable if a portion or large portion doesn't understand something going on in particular niche area. But the niche area of orthographic learning itself has subdivisions, niche areas. So you have people that study David Scherer's theory of orthographic elevating, and most of those people don't interact with Ares theory, and the people that study Ares theory don't interact with shares.
David Kilpatrick And then you have a whole another division within it that has to do with computational modeling of how we remember words and that would be Mark Seidenberg or Max Cold Heart and some of the others, which is really hard to understand, okay? And I've read a lot of stuff on that and I have to wag my head, I get the gist of it, but, so anyway, that in itself is a pretty substantive enterprise. So it started dawning on me that people didn't really understand her theory. And I did get to meet her at a conference. The first time I met her was in 2009.
David Kilpatrick And I probably seem like the most socially awkward person in the world that I actually brought this up to her at this conference and said, I think a a lot of people here at this conference don't understand your theory. But keep in mind, the context was toward the end of a very lengthy discussion that we had about her theory. And, anyway, she was a bit startled simply because she cited constantly. Mhmm.
Laura Stewart Yeah. Agree.
David Kilpatrick But then I asked her that question again in 2013 and she said, I think you're right, okay? So I think I put the idea in the back of her mind. And here's what made me suspicious. Number 1 is nobody explained her theory but her. Number 2, central to her theory is that we have to be able to pull apart words into their individual phonemes, okay?
David Kilpatrick If we have a word in my long term memory, I'd have to be able to pull them apart into individual phonemes to connect strings of letters to that in my long term memory. So the idea of phonemic awareness of phonemic segmentation, I'm always reluctant to use the word segmentation because people think of segmentation tasks and those are some of our weakest phonological tasks that in terms of corresponding or correlating with reading. So we're talking about a skill, something we're doing between our ears, not something we're doing verbally with someone, you know, with a teacher. So this ability, so I'm gonna say parse or analyze to pull apart the oral word into individual components. We've known since the late 60s that that was important.
David Kilpatrick And what really fascinated me is reading literally hundreds of articles that cover this issue of phonological processes when they would talk about why it is phonemic awareness was central to elevating, their their explanations are kind of interesting. So traditionally, phonological awareness, we talk about analysis, pulling words apart, spoken words apart, and then synthesis, which is hearing individual sounds and putting them together. That's blending. And of course, you need to blend to sound out an unfamiliar word, right? Because you're, you know, c cat, cat, that's blend.
David Kilpatrick But the other direction is pulling apart. You hear a word and can you pull it apart? So whenever they talked about the importance of phonemic awareness, I was already familiar with Aries theory. So I would my antenna my antenna would go up. I'd zoom right in, I'd slow right down and say, let's see what their explanation is for why phonemic awareness is so important.
David Kilpatrick And it shocked me that these researchers almost universally within within the field, they would get very vague. What they might say is, well, clearly blending helps with sounding out unfamiliar words, and they'd say, but the the analysis part, pulling words apart, that helps with spelling and probably helps develop the alphabetic principle. And I was like, I felt like Hermione Granger in the front row going, I know the answer, I know the answer, how come how come they don't know the answer? And so it was dawning on me, wait a minute, if they really understood Aries' theory, they would have specifically said the importance of the phonemic analysis is to help map words into long term memory. So that's what made me those 2 things, nobody explaining your theory but her, and the fact that they didn't make the connection to the central phenomenon within their theory is to be able to pull apart words, got me suspicious.
David Kilpatrick And so I could be wrong, I haven't asked her that question recently, but at least in 2013, she said she was convinced that people didn't really have a clear understanding of that.
Laura Stewart That's so that's so David, that is so fascinating. So, so first of all, a couple of things. You know, as you're talking, I'm just thinking about, again, how you're able to pull together all of these ideas, you know you know, Aerie and Cher and all these other ideas, and bring clarity to that, and that whole the clarity around sight words and the clarity around orthographic learning. Do you think that's why your work has struck such a deep chord? Is it you've brought some clarity to that, or is there another reason that you think your work has such just been so
David Kilpatrick first thing, well, the the Essentials book that came out in 2015, it's in a series that's aimed at school psychologists, And if you look inside the cover, you'll see maybe 50 or 60 books already in that series. So by the time they got to me, they were scraping the bottom of the barrels, you know?
Laura Stewart I don't know about that.
David Kilpatrick Anyway, so when that, now I never really sought that out, but here's the bizarre thing. I never pursued any of this, none of this, honestly. What happened was, as I was developing this understanding, because I was looking, I wasn't just focusing on reading, when I was working in elementary school and I was an adjunct, and I was teaching courses and learning disabilities and children with disability and things like that, educational psychology. I was pursuing research on reading, writing and math. So I wanted to know not just reading, but also reading, word reading, reading contributions.
David Kilpatrick I read stuff in that area. I read stuff on math. I read stuff on writing. And I tried to bring that back to my work in the schools. But you can only do so much at each of those levels because those are big areas too.
David Kilpatrick And then when I went to, in 2,000 fall of 2,006 became full time, I had to specialize. So I tell people that I'm up on the state of the art in math and writing as of 2,005. So I'm only 15 years behind on that research, okay? But I am working on a project and I'm delving back into those as well. But anyway, so what happened was the angle I started taking, I came up with a concept that I call intervention oriented assessment.
David Kilpatrick So in the school psychology field, I won't get sidetracked by this, but in the school psychology field, we are in a very difficult position. We have to make a diagnosis of a learning disability based upon 1 of 3 different approaches, none of which has adequate validity to it, okay? And so, what I was looking at, 1 view, which actually in New York state, we no longer can do this and states can't require schools to do it. But the classic approach was to show a discrepancy between IQ and PM. Major, major problems with that.
David Kilpatrick It's been replaced with an idea of a discrepancy with age or state level educational. So mainly, basically low achievement is 1, but it's also been replaced with 2 other options. 1 is using response to Interview. And using response to intervention, the idea is that if a child gets the ideal instruction in the classroom that has been shown to help kids that are at risk readers and they're still struggling, And then if you pull them aside and do what we now call tier 2, but you're using approaches in this tier educational general and instruction that is a very high quality that shows that we can really make a difference and you're still not doing well and struggling, then you have a learning disability. Now that of the 3 options we have, that is the most valid approach if you're doing all the right things in tier 1 and tier 2, but we have little evidence that's happening.
David Kilpatrick So how can you possibly use that approach to diagnosing a learning disability when in tier 1, they used approaches that we know don't work well with kids at risk and in tier 2, we use methods that we know don't work well. So anyway, so school psychologists are in a tough spot with that. The RTI approach kinda works backward from principles of learning theory and behavioral psychology. And then the 3rd alternative, patterns of strengths and weaknesses, works backwards from classic IQ type stuff where they'll say, we'll try to make a guess as to what something on an IQ test might tell us about reading, writing or math without really a lot of research to support. So the intervention oriented assessment works in a completely different way.
David Kilpatrick It says, what research do we have on reading and writing and math, and how that develops, and what are the skills, linguistic skills, cognitive skills, academic skills we need for that, and then works backward from that to say, why is this child struggling? You know, you've probably heard me use this before, I use an analogy of like basketball. You can determine how good someone is at basketball by breaking it down. How good are they at dribbling, passing, shooting, playing defense, etcetera. And in the same way, there are components that go into reading, inspiring, and math.
David Kilpatrick And we know what those are. But they're not on the IQ test. Now granted there are some aspects of the IQ test, but 1 of the things that we've done in the school psychology field unfortunately, is we would infer that without looking at the research. So for example, I remember inspiring this from time to time, they'd say, well, think about it, reading is kinda sequential. So let's do, let's look at sequential tests.
David Kilpatrick Let's look at tasks that are sequential in nature. Here's how they don't correlate with reading hardly at all, okay? But people infer that and then they try to make judgments based on that. Anyway, so that's what I was doing for a number of years. So I happened to be at a New York Association of School Psychologist Conference and I was sitting in on a presentation by Dawn Flanagan.
David Kilpatrick Now she kinda comes from that 3rd category of patterns of strengths and weaknesses but her view is a bit different because it's taking, in my estimation, a big step away from just trying to figure out, you know, hey, here's some sequencing test on the site test, maybe that's telling us something. In her approach, you have to demonstrate a difficulty in a skill area that has been shown by research in reading, writing, and math to actually make, you know, have an impact.
Laura Stewart It matters.
David Kilpatrick So anyway, that struck a chord with me. You know, I don't know enough about the whole approach to, you know, say if it's good or bad, but at least that particular element struck a chord with me. So we had a nice conversation afterwards. And I handed her an earlier edition of the equip book. I mean, the equip book has a long history by the way, the 2016 copyright really had been around for 14 years before that.
David Kilpatrick But anyway, I handed her an earlier version of it, we had a discussion and, you know, you hand someone at a conference something, it goes on a pile and never to be seen again, right, and recycle at the end of the year. Well, for some reason, she read the 4th chapter about orthographic mapping and she was very fascinated with it. So she contacted me and said, hey, we're we're editing a book, you know, 1 of those books where each chapter is written by a different person, and we'd like you to write a chapter about this in the book. I'm like, sure, right? So I did, and the 3 editors of the book liked it and went into a book that came out in 2014.
David Kilpatrick And then with a further discussion with Doctor. Flanagan, she said, hey, I don't know if she suggested, I suggested or whatever. But in the course of the conversation, she was talking about how important this was for school psychologists to know. And the thought came up of maybe adding a whole book on this to that series. And so she recommended me to the editors and I sent in an outline and they approved it.
David Kilpatrick So it wasn't like, I wanna write a book. Yeah. How would you do that? Do you get an agent? Do you
Laura Stewart That is so Interview. Kind of just,
David Kilpatrick I don't wanna say passive because I obviously put a lot of work into it but it wasn't something that I originally envisioned or sought after.
Laura Stewart I think that's so fascinating because there's such a there's such a need for that work, and the need presented itself. And you came along and filled that need, really. And I and I do, yeah, and I do think that has just I just think that has struck a chord with so many teachers because in many ways, this whole your whole explanation of how orthographic mapping works has answered so many questions people have about how children develop as readers. Don't you think?
David Kilpatrick Well, yeah. I mean, that's the power of a good theory. You know, Ari hit on this back in the late '70s and she started doing studies of it in the '80s and those studies supported, but there were gaps and holes in the way she designed her studies. And then those British researchers came along. They weren't the only ones, but they were the first ones to independently study her theory and then several others afterwards.
David Kilpatrick Now here's an interesting thing. Both Airy's theory and Scherer's theory, you'd be hard pressed to find many studies on them in the last 10 years. Because what happens is people do a series of studies. If you do a series of studies, particularly by independent individuals, they're all pointing in the same direction and none of the studies are contrary. They more or less say, okay, this seems to be pretty much it and they move on to other things.
Laura Stewart Other things, yeah.
David Kilpatrick But what's interesting about both of them is that many studies that aren't directly testing out their theories are providing lots of indirect support. In other words, they weren't studying their theory but the findings are very consistent with that. And you know that happens in medicine, right? Who's studying the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer? Okay, that's been pretty well established, they've moved on, right?
David Kilpatrick So anyway, the ARIES theory was so on target that so many different things in the research literature kinda fell into place when you look at it through that lens.
Laura Stewart Interesting. So so what do you think what do you think people most get wrong about the work that you're putting out there?
David Kilpatrick I think it, you know, again, I think ARIES orthographic mapping theory is a little tough to grasp. I know, I think a lot of people that have a phonics background kind of default to phonics and they don't understand the other part of it. I mean, there's 2 levels of word reading, the ability to sound out of an unfamiliar word and then the second is the ability to efficiently remember words. And Aries theory is really about the second 1 of those even though it builds on the foundation of the first. But if you have the foundation of the first, you don't automatically have have the second.
David Kilpatrick I know that's very abstract, but, so you can be good at sounding out words because you got good training in it, a good phonetic program, but if you have limited phonemic skills, limited ability to pull that apart like ARIES says we're doing, then you're not going to be good at remembering words. You're going to be sounding out and by the way, that's what dyslexia is in the regular, phonetically regular languages like Spanish and Italian, etc. Those dyslexics have very good accuracy at reading the words because what happens essentially, for us to master the code, you're talking about 20 months, right? About 2 years at least. By the end of 2nd grade, most kids if they have at least the basic contributions in the code, they pretty much have it down.
David Kilpatrick There's always some refining that can go on after that. Well, in countries like Spain and Italy, they got it down in the first like 4 months of 1st grade, right? Because there's just aren't all the irregularities, they're on all the unusual patterns and things like that. But the dyslexic in those countries, they may not get it down till the end of 1st grade or sometime early 2nd grade. It may take them longer to get it down because of their phonological issues, but they eventually get it down and now they can sound out any words, so they don't have a problem with accuracy.
David Kilpatrick So they're able to do that first level of word reading, not the second. They don't have sufficient phonemic skills to be good at accessing the words, you know, and and scoring them in long term memory.
Laura Stewart Yeah. So so on a real practical level, would you say that many teachers who are teaching phonics, and the kids still haven't developed that ability to really have automatic access to words, that you're bringing orthographic mapping to the forefront and advanced or pro advanced phonemic proficiency has really been a key for those teachers?
David Kilpatrick Yeah, because the phonemic proficiency drives the process. Here's the thing, this is a question I've been posing now for maybe about a year, is to ask people, this is what you call an axiom. An axiom is something that you don't actually have to prove, it's just more you take it as a truth. And I haven't had anybody contradict this yet, okay, out of thousands of people I've presented this to. But think about if we have, if you have say 50,000 words stored in your long term memory that jump out at you instantaneously, you know, what percentage of those, and some of those you encountered in 2nd grade, some you encountered in 5th grade, some in 8th grade, some in college, and some just a short time ago because you came across the new word that, you know, that you hadn't seen before.
David Kilpatrick What percentage of those words upon first encounter did you put some conscious effort into remembering for the next time? And if you're like most people, you're gonna say somewhere between 0 and 1%. That's not how orthographic learning occurs. Orthographic learning occurs automatically in the background. You come across a new word.
David Kilpatrick Again, as an adult, when you're an 8th grader or whatever, you don't stop and go, oh my gosh, a new word, let me go get the flashcards or let me cover it up and try it over and over again. No. Once you've determined the word, you move on. You're reading for comprehension. So this process of connecting the phonemes to the graphemes and storing it in long term memory is automatic, unconscious, and going on behind the scenes.
David Kilpatrick So so think about this, if the process of storing words is automatic, then any skill that goes into that process has to be automatic. So the phonemic proficiency concept naturally emerges from that. There's really no way around it. There's no way to say that to store a word efficiently, you need to have instantaneous unconscious access where your phonemic awareness is slow. It doesn't follow.
David Kilpatrick So so the phonemic proficiency is essential and universally absent among kids that are poor readers.
Laura Stewart Mhmm. Mhmm. Absolutely. And I I think this what you're bringing to to light here is this whole idea that it goes or it goes underground. You know, the process goes underground.
Laura Stewart So how do we help get kids from that conscious level of decoding to this underground automatic level? Yeah.
David Kilpatrick Right. Well, they need this they need the skills to do that. And and to back up, I just I think it's important to point out the contrast between orthographic learning, which is the ability to remember words. You know, Cher's theory shows us that 1 to 4 encounters from kids from 2nd grade on, for we adults, it's really 1 or 2 encounters. How different is that from when you had to learn your math facts?
David Kilpatrick You need to drum them in over and over again, very conscious, when you had to learn your biology terms in 9th grade. It's very different kind of learning and so orthographic learning is just really amazing. Number 1, it happens automatically in the background. Number 2, once we learn it, we never forget. I bet if we quizzed you on all your biology terms and your French or Spanish words that you learned in high school or college, you'd forget a bunch, right?
Laura Stewart Now you're like, I don't know. And you
David Kilpatrick might not be able to come up with all the state capitals or whatever. Of course, the state capital thing doesn't work well in Canada or Australia because they have fewer states and provinces. But anyway, it's a easier task for them. But the point is, those types of learning are different. That's called semantic memory and we're talking about orthographic memory.
David Kilpatrick And so it's a pretty amazing type thing. We, so we learn it very quickly, automatically behind the scenes, we don't ever forget, We have this huge storage of words, 20, 30, 40, 50, 80,000 words depending on how much reading you're doing in a lifetime. And so it's a pretty amazing process. So getting back to your question, the skills have to be automatic. So go back to example of basketball.
David Kilpatrick Do you think someone is going to be able to, as they say in basketball, drive the lane, avoid the defenders and go out and put a layup. If they haven't mastered dribbling to the point where they don't have to think about it
Laura Stewart Right. Right.
David Kilpatrick No. That dribbling has to be automatic in order for them to accomplish that. And so the same is true if the child doesn't have automaticity in terms of informing words because then we have come up with some alternative explanation for remembering words and we've never come up with anything even close to an explanation that fits the data that we have. Mhmm.
Laura Stewart So do you think that, this whole idea of memorizing sight words on flashcards is really because we equated that with learning state capitals or math facts or vocabulary.
David Kilpatrick That's 1 of the problems with applying learning theory to, learning theory, think of behavioral psychology, Skinner, Watson, all these others, it has a lot to commend itself, don't get me wrong. Because with learning theory, you're gonna learn your math facts way better if you use learning theory than just intuition, right? But that's a certain type of learning, it's called paired associate learning. So paired associate learning means that, you know, you've paired 2 things together so in the presence of 1, the other's automatically activated. I look over here and I see a lamp, I say lamp, automatic, I don't have to think about that, paired associate learning.
David Kilpatrick But orthographic learning doesn't work like that. Parent associate learning can take many to, think of kids learning letters of the alphabet, that's parent associate learning. Learning theory is very useful for teaching kids letter names and letter sounds. There's no question about it. But once they've learned the letter names and letter sounds, in terms of remembering words, learning theory has very little to offer.
David Kilpatrick And in fact, it'll it'll make it harder because, you know, with parent associate learning, it's gonna take kids dozens to hundreds of exposures to to letter names and letter sounds for it to become automatic. And when we use flashcards of whole words that way, it's 1 thing if we're using flashcards with the letter b and the letter t and the letter l and we want them to learn those letter names or sounds, that's great, okay? But when we put them together in a flashcard and expect them to learn as is, as if we're showing them those others, we're making it harder. So orthographic learning takes 1 to 4 exposures, but we're using an approach that typically takes dozens to 100 of exposures while making it harder. Mhmm.
David Kilpatrick The assumption is that it's some sort of visual memory process.
Laura Stewart Exactly. And I'm not gonna
David Kilpatrick go through that now because Yeah.
Laura Stewart I understand. I don't
David Kilpatrick have a website. I don't put up videos what other people have, and all you need to do is Google and you'll hear all the reasons why it's not visual memory even though that's our intuition.
Laura Stewart Yeah. It's interesting you mentioned that because I think that Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.
David Kilpatrick Flash cards are a great tool. It's just a matter how we use them. So if you prep children, so if you have an irregular word and you prep them before you even show them the word and you accentuate the sounds in the word and then you talk about, say if the word is yacht, right? I mean, that's 1 of the toughest words. Now you're not gonna do with 1st graders, but you might do it with 2nd or 3rd graders, right?
David Kilpatrick Depending on if it works its way into a story or something. And so you say, what, here's the word, the word we're gonna learn today is yacht, and it's 1 of our tricky words. Don't call it a sight word, okay, because that's confusing.
Laura Stewart Yeah, no, that's too informing,
David Kilpatrick yeah. So you say, this is 1 of our tricky words. Mhmm. Irregular words, call it which 1. And you say, okay, you have a word yacht.
David Kilpatrick What's the first sound here in yacht? And someone may go, why? And you're like, no, no, no, not letter, sound, what sound? You know, and they go, ye. Right, okay, what's the last sound you heard in the word yacht?
David Kilpatrick And they go, they go, right, that's right. What do you hear in the middle of, yacht? And they go, ah, and you're like, right, okay. So you've pulled apart the spoken word for them and then you say to them, okay, what letter do you think the, that's gonna make the sound in you? And they say Y and you say good, you write it on the board.
David Kilpatrick And you say, what, letter do you think is gonna make that sound in you? And they say t and you say great, you write it there. And you say what letter usually says, and they say, oh, and you're like great, but that's not how we spell you. Here is why this is 1 of our tricky words. Watch.
David Kilpatrick Isn't this strange? And you write a c h, okay, in the middle and you say, that's not how we normally say, ah, is it? That's why it's a tricky word. This 1 we have to learn. And now going to, and then let's all read it, yacht, let's all spell yacht, right?
David Kilpatrick So you all spell yacht and they get the pattern. And now that has earned its place in a stack of flashcards because you've already prepped the memory system, you've given them, shelves to store that, you know, sequence of letters in relation to the sounds, you've pointed out the irregularities, you've done the elaboration. Now using flashcards after having done that I think is a great tool. But without doing that, you're making it really hard by accident. Nobody's doing it on
Laura Stewart understand how important it is for children to be able to, you know, phoneme, grapheme, map, and then by drawing attention to that irregular part, kids are gonna be more tuned into that. Right? As opposed to just, trying to memorize a whole configuration of a word. Now I want to go back to something you said earlier too about, you know, assuming that somehow this is visual memory. You know, I think about when I came up as a teacher, I do think 1 of the predominant ideas is that reading was a visual process.
Laura Stewart And I think, you know, 1 1 thing that your work has really elevated for us is that understanding that it indeed, you know, is not. And I I think that's really important. So thank you for that.
David Kilpatrick Well, I think it's easy to I mean, I assume that. I assume that to learn about Aerie's work. And I think it's easy to confuse visual input with visual storage or visual memory. So the input is obviously visual, but that's not how storage works. Very, very different part of the brain even is shown to activate in functional MRI studies.
David Kilpatrick It's a visual memory task and an orthographic task.
Laura Stewart Whole different thing. Yeah. So so let me ask you this. How far when I think about us as an educational community and our understanding of the process of learning to read and our understanding of how instruction needs to to, you know, guide that process, How far how far do you think we've come since some of your early work, and, what gets in our way? You know, what what gets in our way of continuing to grow in the field?
David Kilpatrick Well, I think it's come a long way. I mean, I know that my opinion might be biased here, but I I think a lot has happened since the reading league was founded. And it's become very popular very quickly. It's got a journal that directly communicates between researchers and teachers, and as opposed to And the coaching that they're doing, the website, professional development, lots of great stuff along those lines. But there are others as well, and I think that you know, people, you know, Educational Dyslexia Association, they've been around a long time and they've had some great stuff, but I think people are more learning about them and all the advantages they have to offer.
David Kilpatrick And then, and you have like, Plane Talk Conference. I know that's been around a few years, but, so there are more and more opportunities, it seems like, in the last 5 years or more. Maybe I'm more aware of it. Sometimes you get a new vehicle and suddenly you notice all other similar vehicles like that you didn't notice before. I don't know.
David Kilpatrick I didn't I didn't see much movement going on in in the context that I worked in prior to that. So I think we're moving in the right direction and to some degree, you know, the Emily Hanford podcast, I mean, just wonderful. Taking the wraps off of kind of the big secret in education is that there are 4 different classic approaches to teaching reading depending on your focus. You focus on individual, you know, letters and graphemes, that's gonna be your phonic approach. Chunks of words, that's gonna be your word family approach, whole words, that's the whole word approach, and sentences and paragraphs, that's your balanced literacy approach.
David Kilpatrick And of those 4, the 1 that comes out with the weakest results time and time again is the 1 that we use most commonly in schools and she's taking the wraps off that and people need to know that, the general public needs to know this. And I appreciate that, that you know so much of what she's doing. So I think the stuff she's doing, the reading league and a bunch of these other organizations to coding dyslexia, of all these, you might wanna tweak this little thing or that little thing that they're doing but they're still part of the same type of push that's going in the right direction. Now, I think the problem is that if you haven't been, if you're very invested in an approach that's very different from that, you don't just go, okay, all right, I'm gonna just throw away my first 30 years of my work and I'll jump. And there are some people that do.
David Kilpatrick I apologize if you heard me say this before, but 1 of the important features of science, people don't think of this, but 1 of the most important features of science is a virtue, humility. Because in the science, you say I have this idea and I'm creating an experiment to find out if it really is accurate or true description of whatever you're studying. And you have to have the humility to go, I was wrong. I have to go back and revise. So people that are trained in a more scientific mentality more or less have to have that kind of dose of humility or it doesn't work, the whole enterprise doesn't work.
David Kilpatrick So I think we need that. We need a recognition to say, let me test some of my own ideas. It's 1 of the most important elements of critical, you hear people talk about critical thinking, but I don't usually see much of it going on. I don't know, have you watched, have you been following the election? Okay, critical thinking doesn't happen in politics.
David Kilpatrick It's all about persuasion and that's part of the problem is that people then take the persuasion approach. I've been doing this for a long time, it makes sense to me, and now my goal is to persuade you. And 1 of the best ways to persuade someone is to show them how bad and how wrong the other view is. And social science, this idea when you see politicians, they spend so much of their time telling you how horrible the world will be if we have this other politician in here, right? The reason is that works, Okay?
David Kilpatrick They're not doing a coincidental. It's not because they're inherently evil people, okay? It's because that works and all their advisors show them that. And so 1 of the best ways to defend your view if you're not into taking scientific approaches is to try to come up with ways to villainize that, and that's happened, which is unfortunate. So I think there's kind of, there's an investment, I had 2 different summer workshops, where I had a person come up to me during a break or lunch or something and said, you know what, I'm going into my final year of teaching and this is all new to me and this is so elevating, I'm so looking forward to this year.
David Kilpatrick And I was like, that's the attitude we need to take. That's the attitude we need to take. Instead of looking back at, oh man, did I do this all wrong? No, that's so unproductive.
Laura Stewart Yeah. It I totally agree. You know, it's interesting. I was speaking to another guest and we were talking about the power of curiosity. Right?
Laura Stewart If we can if we can maintain that curiosity, and as you said, with humility, that teacher who's been teaching for 30 years and is excited, that's that's that mindset that allows her to just keep going and and be curious about something that might make a difference for more kids. Yeah, that's a powerful thing.
David Kilpatrick I was inspired by a resource teacher. She's since passed away. Actually, she was 1 of the 2 people I dedicated the book, the essentials book to. I was always inspired by, she was like 20 years older than me, so she had been at it for a long time when I arrived on the scene. And I couldn't believe how even though she was very good at what she did and she seemed to get pretty good results, always, always trying to come up with a better way.
David Kilpatrick Never, never satisfied with the results, always looking for better ways and moving ahead and not feeling like I have to hold on to this particular approach and that's hard. We humans have a very natural tendency to
Laura Stewart Yeah. Well, I think I think that's true. We kinda wanna protect our turf, but I think that you're making just an excellent point here about, you know, our curiosity, our continuing to grow. That's what this is really all about. Yeah.
Laura Stewart So tell us what you're working on now. You mentioned writing. You mentioned math. What what are you working on right now?
David Kilpatrick Well, I probably shouldn't say because it might never happen.
Laura Stewart Okay.
David Kilpatrick Okay. But What I love to do is write a book on intervention oriented assessment and basically to show a different angle to show why it could be beneficial. The whole point of Interview oriented assessment isn't to say, yes, this kid qualifies as having a learning disability or no, this kid does not qualify. It's not about that. It's about why is this child struggling?
David Kilpatrick And that why is going to help us, take an approach to helping them. You know, if you say, why is this kid a lousy basketball player? Well, he's actually a really good shooter, but he can't move or pass, then you know what to work on. So that's really what it's, it is really geared towards school psychologists, speech pathologists, reading evaluators, math evaluators, I would really cover all 3 of them. And I have been doing some of the groundwork to prepare for that.
David Kilpatrick But whether that ends up happening, I don't know.
Laura Stewart Yeah. Well, I hope so because that's I mean, it seems like that's a real space where, we really have a need for that, and I really hope you do that, David. Thank you. So, I can't I can't let you go, without asking you. Is a totally different topic, but how did you get into magic, and, what's next with that?
David Kilpatrick Oh, yeah. Well, I first got exposed to magic by attending Cub Scout pack meetings and Blue and Gold dinners as a kid and they always seemed to have a magician come in. And so my brother got out of the back of Boys Life Magazine, which is the scouting book, he he sent for a catalog of magic tricks and he never got into it. But I was 11 years old, I was homesick 1 day and, you know, his bed was there and there was like a desk in between and then and then mine or whatever, and I was sitting on the desk and I'm sitting there sick and I started reading through this catalog. I'm going, way cool.
David Kilpatrick So my interest started at age 11. I did my first public shows at age 13 and I dropped out of it for a few years and later high school and college and I got back into it in grad school. So I've probably done about 2,500 shows over the years. And in the future, I did lots of birthday parties, okay? This was like our second income for many years back in the 90s and early 2000s.
David Kilpatrick But, so yeah, I think I'm not gonna be doing birthday parties so much anymore, but more bigger venues. I've done those too. I actually did informing in front of 3,000 people 1 time. That's the most I've ever done, yeah. So so yeah.
David Kilpatrick That's
Laura Stewart That's awesome.
David Kilpatrick That's really great. Working with that, and that that'll I'll keep doing as long as I can. Sure. Yeah.
Laura Stewart And, you know, that's and see, look at what happens, you know, with a curious little boy homesick from school. You know? Look what happened from there. Right? So so, Dave, what are the hopes that you have for the work that you've done?
David Kilpatrick Interestingly, I'm trying to convince, I'm trying to convince fellow researchers, to pursue this issue of phonemic proficiency because it's a new concept in the literature. I thought I came up with it, okay, only to find I did. Okay? There was a there was an article back in 97, was the first 1 that I could identify. They didn't use the term phonemic proficiency, But what they did is they took an item level measurement of the speed with which individuals are inspiring.
David Kilpatrick And they found that out of 15 different reading related issues with college students that struggled in reading, the phonemic proficiency was the biggest distinguishing factor among those. That was back
Laura Stewart in 'ninety 7. 'ninety 7.
David Kilpatrick Yeah, yeah, okay. I didn't come up with the concept separately until 2002 where I had been giving the untimed version of it, McGinnis' version of Rosner and Simon, what eventually became the past. I was giving it and like the 4th 4th, 5th, and 6th grade struggling readers. And I'd say, you get to some hard items like, you know, say, sky. And I'll say sky and change the to hole.
David Kilpatrick And they think and they think and they think. You know, some couldn't get it but some got it after 4 or 5 seconds. I was like, okay. And I gave them I gave them a 1. And I go back to the table and I'd say, don't have they they don't have phonological learners problems.
David Kilpatrick I got them all right. Okay? And, and then I screened a whole class of 3rd graders at the request of a teacher. She just wanted to know. I gave them that.
David Kilpatrick I gave them the test of word reading efficiency. I couldn't believe now this school did almost no phonics teaching and definitely no phonological awareness training. So these kids, I get to the harder items and I'd be like, say Sky Sky. Now say it again instead of say, well, Si. I'm like, woah.
David Kilpatrick Where'd that come from? So I'm like, wait a minute. How come these 3rd graders that are on target for learning to read are coming back instantaneously? They only been exposed to this starting back with the easier items. They never had done this type of task before.
David Kilpatrick They start out with baseball, I don't say base, 5 minutes before this, right? And so this really caught my interest and so I started doing a few studies. And then I found out there's some other studies and 1 of the biggest studies was from, 2010, which I could kick myself. I was at the stage with the Essentials book where they said you can make any changes like typos, but you can't do anything that goes on to the next page. And I see this study that lays it all out so nicely from 2010.
David Kilpatrick So I was only able to squeeze it into some references here and there, but if I have the opportunity for an updated edition, which they want, but I don't I can't find the time for that, is, I would be able to spend more time on it. It was 1400 kids from 1st grade to to 5th to 4th 6th grade. From 1st to 5th grade, 1400 kids, over 200 kids at each grade level. And they showed they did what I'm trying to do. They did phoneme deletion.
David Kilpatrick I do deletion and substitution, but they did phoneme deletion and they did a per item timing. And they showed that the correlation remained strong right up through 6th grade. Normally, the way we do things with segmentation, as I said, the most popular approach, the correlation with reading drops off the map after 1st grade. So people fall, you know, assume that phonemic awareness isn't important after 1st grade and that's not right. But something even better than that study with 1400 kids is the new Wechsler individual achievement test 4th edition.
David Kilpatrick They have the phonemic proficiency subtest on there and they have 4 elevating, word reading subtest on the new WIAT, Basically timed and untimed real word reading and nonsense word reading. So that comes up to 4, you know, each of them. And the phonemic proficiency, which is basically a norm version of the past, it came out strongly correlated with all those word reading tasks throughout the entire age range from kindergarten right through adulthood and we just haven't seen that before. So adding that proficiency thing so what that's saying is you're in 8th grade. If you respond instantly to those items, you throw more words on those subtests than kids that don't respond as quickly.
David Kilpatrick Now 1 reaction that I got was, well, but that's just correlational information. You know, how do you know that the kids that became good readers just happen to refine those skills as a so the phonemic proficiency is a byproduct of, you know, becoming a good reader. There's a flaw in that logic. Okay? And the flaw is this, based on if Aries theory is true, then you need to be able to pull apart those phonemes.
David Kilpatrick And to do it quickly and efficiently, to be a good reader, because a good reader only means 1 to 4 exposures and they do it, think about what we said earlier, behind the scenes automatically. So to be a good reader, you have to be able to pull apart the phonemes behind the scenes automatically. So you can't say that the phonemic proficiency is the side effect of a process that requires phonemic proficiency. Makes no sense. So so the that correlation on that test, which is very strong, 0.5 to 0.6 or higher, is telling us the strength of the causal relationship between phonemic proficiency and reading.
David Kilpatrick And so those that develop the phonemic skills much higher, even in 8th grade, 12th grade, adulthood, the norms go up to age 50. Those that have more proficient access for the phonemes have have can read more words on the word reading subtests. Yeah.
Laura Stewart It's so fascinating. You know, I've heard I've heard you speak multiple times, David, and every time I have the opportunity to hear you speak, I learn so much. And I know that all of our listeners today really share that. So thank you so much for all of this. What, what a rich discussion this has been and and really shedding light on things that I think are just so important for us in educational community.
Laura Stewart So thank you.
David Kilpatrick Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me.
Laura Stewart And I can't let you go without some rapid fire, closing questions. Okay. Are you ready?
David Kilpatrick Yeah.
Laura Stewart Alright. Who was your favorite teacher growing up and why?
David Kilpatrick Probably mister Benzing in social studies, 11th grade, because I I thought he presented information very well, and he was he was funny and he was very personable. And he really seemed to like being with us.
Laura Stewart Aw, that's cool. Okay. And what is your favorite book or 1 of your favorite books either as a child or as an adult?
David Kilpatrick That is so hard. I don't even wanna tell you how many books I have. I would say what I'll use this as an community, because it is 1 of my favorites, to tell people about. If you ever get your hands on it, it's called The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson. Elliot Aronson, The Social Animal.
David Kilpatrick You can get an old copy and get it cheap for $3. You don't have to get the most current 1. And it is an eye opener in terms of and it'll it will help people understand why people are resistant to, say, the research on reading, etcetera. And it'll help with a whole bunch of other things. All this issue about racism is gonna be clear, exactly clear about what leads to that.
David Kilpatrick Just so many things, it's basically the psychology of the normal. Why we normal people behave the way they do, we do, even if sometimes it's not such so good. Okay? So and even good stuff, altruism. Why are some people altruistic?
Laura Stewart So So Insight Into Us.
David Kilpatrick Great book. Also handled by Elliot Aronson.
Laura Stewart Very good. Okay. What are you reading right now?
David Kilpatrick Philosophy of Science. In the little Oxford University Press
Laura Stewart Another light read by David Kimball.
David Kilpatrick Yeah. Well, no, this is kind of. Oxford University Press has a whole series they call Very Short Contributions, and they're all about a 100, 120 to 150 pages. They're actually small, little small books and they cover all kinds of topics in science and things like that. You name it, they've probably got a 100 different topics.
David Kilpatrick And so and I have I have 2 others that I'm working on. I'm rereading Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which we need right now in reading. We need a revolution in terms of how people look at it. That's kinda what he talks about. Mhmm.
Laura Stewart Oh, very cool. Okay. What do you have on your desk that symbolizes you or is dear to you?
David Kilpatrick I got a little magic trick sitting right here.
Laura Stewart What is it?
David Kilpatrick Oh, I said I got a little magic trick sitting right here. Actually, I have as as you said, it's dear to me. Right here, this is a paperweight. American Airlines. It was on my dad's desk.
David Kilpatrick He worked for the 30, 40 years for American Airlines. And so
Laura Stewart Very cool, very cool. Something from your dad. Okay, and last question, what are your greatest hopes for today's children?
David Kilpatrick I think that every kid gets a fair shot. You know? We let me put it this way. The vast majority of struggling readers can become decent readers and even our absolute, not all kids are gonna become great readers, even if we do all the best things that we can do. But even our worst readers can become functional readers.
David Kilpatrick They may not be top notch readers, but they can become educational. And so every kid should get a fair fair shot in that regard.
Laura Stewart Great. Yes. Totally agreed. Thank you so much for all of this, David. I really appreciate that you could join us today.
David Kilpatrick Sure.
Laura Stewart And my best to you, and thank you for for saying all those nice things about the reading league. I know that you were with it right from the start, and we just appreciate your your support. Always, always. So thank you so much, David. Okay.
David Kilpatrick Thanks for having
Laura Stewart me. Right. Whoo. My brain is full. Thank you, Dave, for all you bring to us as educators.
Laura Stewart And thank you all for listening today. You know, we at the Reading League are committed to bringing you, important conversations like this, as well as resources to help you on your journey and in your practice. So if you haven't already checked us out, please do www.thereadingleague. Org. Check out our knowledge page, our professional development, our YouTube channel with lots of great videos.
Laura Stewart And we also encourage you to join us, and join our Facebook community where you can really interact with other educators on their journeys as well. So thanks again for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you again.