Doug Lemov on Fluency's Impact on Comprehension | Literacy and the Science of Learning

When we read fluently, we recognize words without effort. We also maintain an engaged pace (automaticity) and perceive expression (prosody), all of which support attention and leave working memory free to make meaning from a text. This is a complex achievement, and many students have fractured attention spans. What can educators do to account for interruptions and focus on building fluency, which is key to developing comprehension?Host Doug Lemov looks at the science of how we read and the foundational aspects of literacy that teachers can purposefully support in the classroom. Today’s students are surrounded by digital distractions and struggle to focus with stamina, and many schools have responded by teaching shorter texts. But the change in student attention shows that it is malleable.“What if, rather than reducing the attentional demands of what we read, we tried to build up students’ capacity to focus by carefully attending to the details of how they read?”Doug details how educators can curate an environment where students regularly read attentively, thoughtfully, and deeply for sustained periods of time. They can reintroduce reading time in the classroom, have students read hard-copy books together, and build in social exchanges so students are motivated to interact with one another in thoughtful and sustained ways.Researcher and literacy expert David Paige joins the conversation to explain the importance of sustained attention and fluency as it relates to working memory. In particular, oral reading can be a critical teaching tool, and read-alouds are powerful for students of all ages. When students read with prosody, they don’t just understand the meaning of the words in a passage; words begin to sound like spoken language, and students gain a more engaged internal reading “voice.”“We can change students’ reading habits from the outside in.”This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Our memories grow stronger when we work to retrieve them. That’s why flash cards and pop quizzes are effective: they prompt students to recall and access information from their memory bank. What other instructional tools and techniques help students remember what they’ve learned, and how can teachers put these to use?Host Dylan Wiliam takes a deep dive into four vitally important principles that are rooted in cognitive science and receive far less attention than they deserve: retrieval, spacing or distributed practice, metacognition, and interleaving. These concepts are brought to life by guests Patrice Bain and Zach Groshell, educators who have used them in the classroom and written books on the topic.Bain offers a strong overview of memory-building instructional moves, which she calls “power tools.” They include asking students to think about what they’re learning while jotting notes (metacognition), guiding class discussions that focus on material learned a week and more ago (spacing), and teaching varied aspects of related content in a single study session and requiring students to “switch gears” (interleaving).“Too often as teachers we concentrate on putting information into our heads. What if instead we concentrated on pulling information out?”Groshell identifies some common teaching practices where these principles most readily apply: turn-and-talks, exit tickets, and Do Nows, which he recommends include a mix of current, recent, and past content. He also discusses common study techniques that are less effective, like re-reading notes or highlighting a text, because they draw on a student recognizing something familiar, not accessing knowledge from their memory stores. “Recognition and familiarity are really bad cues compared to: if I can retrieve it, if I can have someone test me on it and I can verbalize it or I can write it down. These are much better signs that I'm learning the material.”This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

How can schools and teachers maximize student learning? To answer this question, we need to understand how the human mind works. What needs to be explicitly taught, how many new things can we remember at a time, and what is the role of background knowledge in easing students’ cognitive loads?Host Dylan Wiliam begins the six-part “Literacy and the Science of Learning” podcast with an accessible overview of cognitive and educational psychology, in conversation with experts Daisy Christodoulou, David Geary, and John Sweller.With Christodoulou, Wiliam talks about the role of schema–the background knowledge and framework that helps us organize and remember new information. They also discuss the importance of “deliberate practice” rather than repetition. For example, the best musicians practice scales, not just sonatas.Geary focuses on the different ways humans learn: while much of our development is instinctual, the sorts of knowledge and skills we learn in school must be explicitly taught. Babies can learn to read faces and speak, but students need to be taught how to decode, for example. Then, Sweller explains the limitations of working memory, which can hold up to seven items at a time for 18 seconds, maximum. How can we balance the need for explicit instruction with the limitations of working memory? By helping students build and access knowledge. This can free them from the “bottleneck” of working memory by transferring brain work to our long-term memory, which sets the stage for new information to be learned:“We can’t really increase the capacity or duration of short-term memory, increasing the capabilities of our students involves increasing the content of long-term memory. This is why knowledge matters. The way to make our students smarter is not to give them practice in thinking, but to give them more to think with.”This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

How is the Science of Reading connected to the Science of Learning? Join hosts Dylan Wiliam, Doug Lemov, and Natalie Wexler as they delve into the links between the two, both in theory and practice, in Season 3 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast. Across six 30-minute episodes, we’ll explore how long-term memory shapes reading comprehension, why reading whole books is better than excerpts on a screen, and how teaching students to write clearly can help them think more clearly, in conversation with researchers and teachers.“We want our students to remember. That’s the goal!”This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.Additional resources:Dylan Wiliam - Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge RevivalDoug Lemov - The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of ReadingNatalie Wexler - Beyond the Science of ReadingProduction by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

This bonus episode is an audio recording of our most popular webinar ever, Writing: An Unsung Hero of Reading Comprehension. It features familiar voices to listeners of Season 1 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast, best-selling author and host Natalie Wexler, as well as StandardsWork’s Chief Program Officer Kristen McQuillan, Doug Lemov (Teach Like a Champion), and Julia Cooper (SchoolKit).Their conversation focuses on why writing should be connected to content learning. How does the act of writing about one’s learning deepen retention of the content? How does it support emerging writers in focusing on their craft? Our guests share practical examples of connected writing instruction when it’s done well, and how to identify when a curriculum is weak in addressing this critical aspect of literacy.You can watch this webinar as a video recording as well as the rest of our webinars on our website. Resources mentioned in this webinar:Slide deck from the live recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f6216Vc9auVNHTqQNKJC9hBF-Fof4uhh/view?usp=sharingKnowledge Matters Review Tool: A Guide for Evaluating K-8 Curriculum: https://knowledgematterscampaign.org/review-toolThe Writing Revolution: https://www.thewritingrevolution.org Reading Reconsidered: https://teachlikeachampion.org/reading-reconsideredSchoolKit Resources: https://schoolkitgroup.com Teach Like a Champion: https://teachlikeachampion.org/?books=teach-like-a-champion-3-0The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—and How to Fix It: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/547653/the-knowledge-gap-by-natalie-wexler/9780735213555/Natalie’s free Substack newsletter: Minding the GapStay in the loop! Sign up for our newsletter to find out about the next webinar.Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Today’s episode is a special bonus—an audio recording of our recent webinar, Knowledge: Why It Matters. We found the conversation so valuable that we wanted to make it accessible in as many ways as possible.In this episode, StandardsWork’s Chief Program Officer Kristen McQuillan and Baltimore City Public Schools teacher Kyair Butts join Dr. Susan Neuman (New York University) and Dr. Margaret “Moddy” McKeown (University of Pittsburgh) to explore how content knowledge plays a critical role in reading comprehension. They also discuss the limitations of approaches that emphasize reading strategies without a strong foundation in knowledge.You can watch this webinar as a video recording as well as the rest of our webinars on our website. Resources mentioned in this webinar:Knowledge Matters Review Tool: A Guide for Evaluating K-8 CurriculumBooks by Dr. McKeownThe Handbook of Early Literacy Research (Neuman, 2003)All About Words (Neuman, 2013)Educating the Other America (Neuman, 2008)Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance (Neuman, 2012)Growing Knowledge Matters. A Lot. (Student Achievement Partners, 2021)The Usefulness of Brief Instruction in Reading Comprehension Strategies (Daniel Willingham, 2014)Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking (The Knowledge Revival, 2025)10 Ways Educators Can Bring Knowledge-Building Into Their Classrooms (ASCD, Knowledge Matters Campaign)Stay in the loop! Sign up for our newsletter to find out about the next webinar.Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Explorers boldly venture into unfamiliar worlds, where confidence, curiosity, knowledge, and persistence are rewarded. When students approach texts like explorers, they bring these same qualities to the task—a mindset cognitive scientists call the “standard of coherence.” Such reading is purposeful, engaging, and expands the reader’s horizons. Reading anywhere, anytime is not just doable. It’s joyful.In this episode, hosts David and Meredith Liben discuss the key ingredients that power persistent reading and support students to apply the “standard of coherence” mindset when they read, including how the standard of coherence and related practices helped students accelerate their literacy development at the Libens’ NYC school.The notion of “coherence” sets a high bar for a reader’s expectations of their abilities and the text. They expect that it will make sense, and if it doesn’t, they will know what to do. With this mindset, students immediately apply practiced strategies to comprehend a text: closely read and reread, account for and explain what they know and don’t know, and use evidence from the text to back up those assertions and ideas. Expert Margaret McKeown talks about the key role comprehension monitoring plays in the process.The Libens then talk with three teachers who have experienced new curriculum and helped students develop the standard of coherence in their classrooms:Fifth-grade teacher Sean Morrisey, who discusses strategies to preview texts and build fluency (spoiler alert: spend time with books, not screens)Patty Collins, a teaching veteran, compares her work as a watercolor painter to how she creatively engages students within the EL Education reading curriculum (which she calls “my medium”)Third-grade teacher Staci McDougall, who discusses how she and her students have grown, by changing classroom practice and building stamina and comprehensionDavid and Meredith also talk about the importance of building stamina to engage with texts. By giving students time to read closely and persist through comprehension strategies, like providing textual evidence, they can become strong and steady readers who can keep focused on complexities over time.For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

Have you ever read something and then realized you didn’t totally understand it? That’s the hallmark of a challenging text, and it’s something students encounter all the time.In this episode, David and Meredith Liben discuss three ways to connect students with sophisticated texts, even if they can’t yet read or comprehend them on their own: juicy sentences, explain your answer, and structured journaling.First, linguist and language scholar Lily Wong Fillmore shares the origin story of her “juicy sentences” strategy, where teachers divide content-rich sentences into “chunks” and help students build vocabulary and knowledge through focused instruction and discussion. The Libens then share personal examples of two other instructional techniques that foster reading comprehension and the metacognition that supports its growth: explaining the answer and structured journaling.Explaining the answer is just that: asking students to answer a question and explain their response using evidence from the text. The magic lies in choosing questions based on a careful pre-read of the text at hand, not a learning standard. Students learn to identify what they do and don’t understand, and then practice returning to the text to re-read. Finally, the Libens discuss structured journaling, where a teacher chooses an important section of the text and students respond to four questions:  What are the most important ideas here? What don't I understand? How does this connect to what we've been discussing in class - or other texts that we've been reading? Do you have any reflection (aka ‘I wonder’) questions? These techniques focus students on the text while also helping them expand their thinking about what they have read. For example, David recalls how a second-grade student wondered why the author of The Tale of Despereaux described certain settings as light and dark, which sparked a class wide discussion about symbolism. The discussion probes connections between these classroom techniques and cognitive science. Rachel Stack, a former teacher at the school the Libens started and now at Great Minds, shares a compelling story about how she worried her students would get tired of explaining their answers, but they never did.For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

How do actual teachers and students “center the text” in reading classrooms? In this episode, David and Meredith Liben get specific with teachers and experts about how read alouds and close reading can connect students of all ages and literacy levels to a text—and to one another.Two ideas animate the discussion. First, theory is not terribly helpful without practice. And second, learning to read is (and should be!) a social experience.First, the Libens explore the power of read alouds with three guests, who share real-life examples of interactive ways to engage students with a variety of needs:Inclusive classrooms: Patty Collins teaches third and fourth graders reading from the 1st to the 99th percentile. She uses several models of read alouds to give all of her students access to grade-level text, including whole-class, mixed and leveled small groups, and audiobook technology.Early learners: Reading and vocabulary expert Margaret McKeown focuses young students on words—not pictures—during read alouds, and avoids leading questions. Teachers can read short passages without showing pictures and ask students “What's going on there?” or “What was that all about?”Multilingual students: Desiree Garcia teaches in a bilingual kindergarten classroom where read alouds have fueled an explosion in her students’ vocabulary in both languages. They are excited to share their own ideas and figure out answers by themselves. Then, the Libens talk through close reading, where students read a passage multiple times and carefully find the connections and structure that move a text forward. This starts with teachers reading the text themselves, finding what Meredith calls the “sticky parts,” leading a focused discussion on why these passages are particularly important.Two guests share their experience with close reading: Kyair Butts, a former Baltimore City teacher of the year, uses close reading to give his middle-school students multiple “at bats” that build knowledge and improve vocabulary. He has students annotate the text to leave tracks of their thinking and see how their thinking evolves. Upper elementary teacher Katie Scotti says close reading is “leveling the playing field” between her higher- and lower-achieving students. Reading a text multiple times, and ensuring all students are familiar with the relevant vocabulary and background knowledge, gives every student the chance to understand and talk about a text, including higher-order ideas. While she was worried her students would be bored by close reading, she’s found just the opposite. Kids love it!Key quote: “Every student has that access to that same text. They might have different levels of questions, they might be doing some noticing and wondering while other students are doing a deeper level of analysis. But they're all experiencing the same characters, the same plot. They’re all experiencing the same reactions. . . and all students deserve to have that experience. Reading is a social experience.” (Scotti) For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, 

When’s the last time you finished a chapter of a book and thought, “Hmmm, what was the main idea?” Competent readers don’t ask themselves this question. They’re too busy focusing on the text itself, not the component strategies that help us understand them. But that’s not how traditional curriculum and instructional practices work. Instead, they teach reading through a strategy-first approach that focuses on skills like making inferences and predictions, not the text itself.In this episode, David and Meredith Liben explore what Meredith calls “the tail wagging the dog” in reading comprehension, including examples from personal experience, insights from research, and stories of how they learned to do things differently. The Libens also highlight the costs of a strategy-first approach: missed opportunities for students to engage deeply with the ideas and implications of a text, and activity prompts that ask kids to check their brains at the door as they complete inauthentic exercises. Two guests join the conversation:Literacy expert Margaret McKeown discusses how strategy-focused instruction  is still all too common in classrooms. It’s tangible–and is doomed to fail.Fifth-grade teacher Sean Morrissey shares his firsthand experience piloting two ELA curriculums - one that centers on novels and read-alouds, and one that uses book excerpts on a common theme and tests on target strategies. The differences are stark. Finally, the conversation turns to a habit of mind the Libens will discuss later in the season: the standards of coherence. This is a habit of mind where a reader expects they will understand a text, and if it doesn’t make sense, they go back and do the mental work needed to make meaning from what they are reading.For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters Podcast website. The research, studies and artifacts mentioned are posted on the Knowledge Matters Campaign curriculum review tool.Key quote: “I want kids to know what a summary is, what an inference is. But I wouldn't say, ‘Hey, kids, today we're gonna learn to do a summary.’ What I would do is: in a discussion, if a student gave a summary of a piece of text, I would say, ‘Very nice, you gave us a good summary of that, and move on.” (McKeown)This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with David and Meredith, you can contact them through their website, readingdoneright.org.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.