Sounds harmless, right? Except more than one exhausted and depressed mom has told me how much energy they devote to narrating every moment with their infant. And I’ve never been able to convince them that it’s ok to relax a little and enjoy their baby.

Do you have a morphology program you like? I feel that is a bit of a weak point for RS. Right now I borrow a bit from the last few UFLI lessons.

In comparison to other interventions that would give them a better shot at catching up more quickly, or at all.

I use Reading Simplified. I would like to see more experimental studies on speech to print - that 2017 EBLI study worries me, though it does look like they had implementation issues, and many tutoring programs never subject themselves to that kind of scrutiny in the first place.

I am not arguing that anyone should sue over OG. But it feels like this paper has not moved practice and policy the way it should if folks who identify with the science of reading are really interested in following the evidence. This approach has had a century to prove itself.

My metric is an educationally meaningful, statistically significant, positive effect in a meta-analysis. Here's a comparable study on Direct Instruction: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3...

The full text of the OG paper is here: files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1...

Families are often told that OG is the gold standard, but this paper, for example, suggests it is not. Students who do not progress, when other more effective approaches exist, experience harm. And families often pay a lot, over many years. What do you think? journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Im sure you’re right, but that does seem to be shifting. The low floor/high ceiling thing now in vogue in some circles seems to be coming from Building Thinking Classrooms, which I feel some concern about based on this critique: open.substack.com/pub/pershmai...

That all looks very reasonable. Has someone checked whether the students learn the math from those problems, though? One way to explain the pattern you’ve noted is that inquiry based methods take longer and don’t work as well. So, more hours, worse results.

That sounds sensible. On the instructional strategy I asked about, though… I feel worried about the proliferation of understudied inquiry-based routines for math, because I work with the casualties of balanced literacy. I really hope my fears are unfounded. Thanks for sharing your study!

This makes a strong case for detracking with better differentiated instruction. I guess I wonder about the most efficient way to provide the second part. By “this pedagogy” do you mean low floor/high ceiling questions, inquiry based methods in general, or something else?

“Low floor, high ceiling” sounds like a great way to spend a lot more time than other countries on math instruction without teaching as much material. Is there evidence for any of this?

Teaching phonics to “mastery”, such that the planned scope and sequence is infeasible, and students finish first grade without even learning consonant digraphs, let alone vowel teams. While continuing to send home levelled readers, because of course.

Teaching the half of the UFLI lesson that is on the slides because teachers don’t know there is a manual or don’t have one. 🫠 That means no encoding steps. You know, the ones that really work.